The Elections are drawing near; and it is time, for
it is clear that the ideas of candidates are becoming exhausted. Speech after speech is a repetition of the last speech, sometimes with- out a new statement or even an illustration. It is all right, we suppose, for nails are clinched by hammering; but it is becoming a trifle tedious. Even Mr. Chamberlain at Birmingham on Monday, among his own electors and intimate friends, was, for readers outside Birmingham, a little dull. There was some chaff of local opponents which amused his audience ; but the one salient point of his speech was that it was nonsense to talk of buying land at fifty years' purchase, when it was selling everywhere at twenty-five years'. That is one way of putting it; but not the most accurate way. Counting only the bare price and the rent, land can be obtained at that rats; but there is more to be counted than these. There are outgoings which will be as compulsory on Councils as on all other landlords, which, in most places, reduce the net rental almost to the figure given by Lord Salisbury. Does Mr. Chamberlain know anywhere a rural estate which will be sold to yield 4 per cent. clear upon the rental-4 per cent., we mean, obtainable in sovereigns like the interest on, say, Victoria Bonds ? He has only to name it, and the seller will have no lack of purchasers. Notoriously, much land does not yield more than 2 per cent., and that is fifty years' purchase, as Lord Salisbury said. The point in itself is not important; but it is important if there is to be a statute rate, or even a customary rate, for the compulsory transfers of which the area is to be so much enlarged.
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