AGRICULTURAL DEPRESSION.
N a cheery and sensible speech at Blackpool, the Home Secretary on Tuesday expressed the opinion that the picture painted of the depression in agriculture by the Royal Commission, whose Report on that subject has lately been issued, errs by excess of gloom. We are glad that he thinks so, and, thinking so, has said so, for he is a shrewd, level-headed public man, and it is always helpful to people struggling with adversity to know that com- petent and sympathetic observers think that sursum corda Is the right and reasonable motto for them. Still, it must be acknowledged that the general effect of the Royal Com- mission's Report is to produce the conviction that consider- able depression in Agriculture is very general, and that over a large part of the country it has reached a crushing intensity. The most severely afflicted area consists broadly of the arable counties, which are those lying in the eastern half of the island, from, and including' the East Riding of Yorkshire southwards. Essex has long been notorious for the extent of the lands within its borders which have fallen to an almost nominal value, and even passed out of cultivation, and the present Report does not in any degree modify the prevalent impressions with regard to that unfortunate county. But the statements made, or accepted, by the Commissioners in regard to many other amble counties, are almost equally gloomy. They quote the evidence of one of their number, Mr. Everitt, as typical of much testimony they received with regard to Suffolk. There, according to Mr. Everitt, farmers who had no other resources than their farms were "steadily going into bankruptcy and ruin." In Norfolk, according to that well-known and much respected agriculturist, Mr. C. S. Read, the condition of farmers, except on a tract of deep friable land in the north-east corner of the ,county, is "verging on absolute ruin and wholesale bankruptcy." Rents have fallen in Suffolk on an average about 50 per cent., and apparently not much less in Norfolk, though perhaps from 35 to 40 per cent. would be the average for the farms in the larger proportion of that county's area. Similar reductions of rent are reported in regard to Cambridgeshire. The southern part of that county has suffered most. The position there, according to Mr. Wilson Fox, Assistant-Commissioner, "is most deplorable, and on the south-western side the effects of the depression upon the land are such that con- siderable tracts of it are, for all practical purposes, worth- less." The same Assistant-Commissioner quotes, and apparently regards as fairly typical, examples of recent sales in different parts of Lincolnshire of farms on various soils, showing that "even on moderate-sized or small farms tire loss is frequently over 60 per cent., and in some cases more ; " and there are several instances in which the fall in capital-value is as much as 80 per cent. It is not necessary to multiply quotations under this head in regard to other largely arable counties. "There, according to the Report, the effects of the de- pression have manifested themselves in a, similar way." Or, as Mr. Pringle, Assistant-Commissioner, puts it, "the anticipations which overwhelm the mind in Essex were seldom far distant, when going about the corn- growing parts of Bedfordshire, Huntingdonshire, and Northamptonshire."
Not much imagination or knowledge of agricultural England is needed to enable any reader to frame for him- self some not altogether inadequate conception of the human meaning of the facts summarised in the brief extracts we have made from the Royal Commissioners' Final Report. They mean not only the constant presence of blackest care in tens of thousands of households which twenty or thirty years ago were apparently prosperous and free from anxiety, not only actual ruin and despair to great numbers of good citizens, but to a very large extent the disintegration and collapse of the whole social fabric in the rural districts concerned. Nothing could appear more lamentable. The chief explanation is so simple that no Royal Commission was required to discover it. It is not bad seasons, for since 1882 the seasons have been, on the whole, quite respectable. Tt is the tide, always flowing and never ebbing, of im ports from abroad, which has lowered corn to prices which are not remunerative. During the last twenty years the average annual gross imports of wheat have grown by 70 per cent. During the same period the price of wheat in the English market has fallen about 50 per cent. There seems, therefore, to be good reason to suppose that many of the foreign competitors of the British farmer have been undercutting one another and making very poor profits. But that fact affords but little consolation to the farmer here, who has ceased so widely to find what was his best crop of old a paying one, that the acreage under wheat has declined by more than half from 1873-75, when it stood at 3,671,704, to 1,794,612, at which it was returned for the years 1893-95. There was a recovery of nearly 280,000 in the acreage under wheat last year, but the Commissioners are not able to regard the circumstances of 1896 as pointing to any permanent improvement in the prospects of agri- culture, in view of the general course of events over the preceding twenty years. In the case of meat, although there has been a great increase during the same period of imports from abroad, there has not been, apparently, any actual displacement of home produce. The external supply seems to have met a demand for cheap meat which the home producers had either not detected or not seen their way to meeting ; and though the fall in prices of meat has been very considerable, the depression which it has induced in the grazing districts of the western, west midland, and north-west parts of England has not on the whole been nearly so severe as that suffered in the mainly arable counties. Dairying, as well as stock-raising, is of course largely practised in the grazing counties, and notwithstanding complaints of foreign competition, dairying is clearly, wherever it exists, an element of strength in British agriculture, and might become much more so. Still brighter spots in an agricultural map of England are furnished by those districts where market-gardening can be practised within convenient range of large towns or industrial villages.
The gloomiest thing about the Royal Commissioners' Report is its recognition that such remedies as it suggests are either only palliatives, or at least measures which must take a considerable time to come into very effective opera- tion. Yet we are truly glad that good sense kept the Commissioners from imagining that there were royal roads in any direction out of the great difficulties in which the agricultural interest is involved. It would have been cruel kindness to the farmers to suggest that Parlia- ment ought to consider the imposition of protective duties upon a food-supply which, in the case of bread-stuffs, amounts now to 75 per cent. of the total consumption of the country. Equally cruel kindness, in our opinion, would it have been to accept any of the schemes put forward by theorists who would fain remodel the agri- cultural system of Great Britain on the lines of Mr. Gladstone's Irish Land-laws. Few points come out more clearly in the present Report than the necessity of doing nothing to dissever the proprietor class from that active interest in the land which in this country they have always manifested, and which they have continued to manifest with remarkable liberality during recent bad times. Nothing is more certain than that any legislation in the direction of "fixity of tenure" and "fair rents" fixed by a tribunal, would be fatal to the continuance of that interest. It is to be hoped, however, that the practical improvements which the Commissioners recom- mend in the Agricultural Holdings Acts (England and Scotland), 1883, will be taken up by Parliament, and for the most part embodied in an Act which will come into opera- tion not later than next Easter. No time ought to be lost in providing such ameliorations as can be effected by legisla- tion, slight as they may be, in the condition of the agricultural industry, which, as it is set forth in the present Report, cannot fail to command universal sym- pathy. Nor ought those ameliorations to stop at the removal of discouragements to enterprise which still linger in the British law of landlord and tenant. The fact that the possession of the blessings of cheap food for our rapidly growing population necessarily involves severe present hardships for the agricultural interest, undoubtedly emphasises the claim, often made in these columns, for an early removal of the grave injustice of the system under which agriculture is subjected to rating burdens such as are imposed on no manufacturing industry. It is evident from the tone of the Commissioners that they would have strongly recommended interference by Parliament to prevent the continuance of the inequitable and unpatriotic preferences which have been given by railway companies to foreign produce in their rates of carriage, but that within the last two years—very possibly with a view to avert such recom- mendations—many of the principal companies have intro- duced revised scales of charges. The Report advises that a fair trial should be given to these new scales, and also points out that it is very important that farmers should, on their part, exert themselves both for the better packing of their parcels of produce, and, by way of co-operation, for the bringing together of larger loads for the railways to carry,—a work in which the railway companies them- selves might play an important part. The development of individual enterprise and co-operation among farmers, specially in connection with dairying, and the production I of fruit, vegetables, and poultry ; diffusion among them of sound instruction and counsel, based on scientific knowledge, by authorities of a type calculated to win their confidence ; and the multiplication of technical agricultural schools and agricultural departments in con- nection with University Colleges,—it is on such lines as these that, in view of the Royal Commissioners' Report, there seems hest ground to hope for gradual agricultural improvement. County Councils have done a good deal on some of these lines, and may do much more, with the money at their disposal for aiding technical instruction. They may soon have other opportunities of working, more indirectly, but very really, for the same end. For on the importance of the early training of the minds of young farmers the present Report justly lays great stress, and, in our judgment, furnishes thereby a most powerful reinforcement, though none was needed, to the case for an early grappling by Parliament, more or less on the lines judiciously indicated by Mr. Bryce's Commission, with the problem of national secondary education.
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