The Duke of Bedford on Wednesday made a long speech
to his tenantry at Thorney Abbey, Cambridgeshire, which is full of curious statistics. He declares that although his family have in the last eighty years spent £1,598,000 in improving and maintaining this one estate, and now derive from it an average rent of 24s. an acre, the accounts last year showed a total loss of £445 10s. This, too, is not due to local causes, for the Bedford estates round Woburn and in Bucks produced a deficit of £6,320. The cause is not bad cultivation either, for Thorney yields thirty-six bushels to the acre, or three times the usual American and Russian average, and double even the Roumanian, which is the next best. The cause, in fact, is the fall in prices. This cannot be remedied, for Free- trade cannot be abandoned, nor is there any real hope in sub- division. The farmers at Thorney would not, under present prices buy their farms even for the value of the buildings. There remains the taxation on the land, and the Duke's theory is that arable land in England is not a gift of Nature but a manufactured article, the result of ages of manuring and costly cultivation, and it should only be taxed like the raw materials of any other manufacture. It is now specially taxed, and it is to the removal of this injustice that he would have the agricultural interest address itself. That is sound enough, though we suspect that a manufacturer would say that the Duke has not tried the experiment of working his estates with an eye to profit alone. His Grace, by the way, ex- aggerates our dependence on America in the event of a Russian war. With a rise of 10a. a quarter India and the Argentine Republic would send us all we need.
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