Church of England opinions, and a very high idea of
his own rights as landlord. Mr. Burton owns, among other property, the parish of Bag-Ederby, and has, we imagine from the general tenor of the story, refused permission to the Wesleyans to establish a chapel in his village. At all events, the mem- bers of that communion were accustomed recently to meet for worship in a cottage, and Mr. Langhorne Burton, hearing of this, stopped the services, by threatening if they were continued to evict the tenant. The Wesleyan Superintendent of the district, Mr. M'Aulay, therefore, wrote to the landlord a civil letter of remonstrance, asking that service might be continued, point- ing out that such conduct must diminish the esteem in which a landowner was held, and ending with the remark, intended no doubt to save Mr. Burton trouble, that if he heard nothing further to the contrary, he should think his request granted, that is, he should continue the services in the cottage. Mr. Burton, however, was offended at this assumption as too "off- hand," and not only requested Mr. M'Aulay to do nothing until he heard further from himself, but added :—" The result of such a step on your part would probably be the removal from Bag- Enderby of all the members of your body, who are of little value to me as tenants." "I wish to have as tenants none —the italics are his own—" but thorough Church people, and cansider myself quite at liberty to choose such as I like, with- out being dictated to by anybody." He winds up by saying, "Reasons apart from this for my interdict of your meetings, I do not feel called upon to enter into with you. I also for- bear to remark upon your seeming disposition to dictate to me my duty as landlord. Your letter I have placed in my Rector's hands, and beg to state in conclusion that I will write to you again, should occasion require it." Mr. M'Aulay failing, as he thinks, to get redress from the landlord, appeals through the correspondence to the public.
What interests us in this extraordinary letter is not exactly what interests our contemporaries. They seem to think Mr. Langhorne Burton an exceptionally tyrannical person, who ought to be pelted with sarcasms and hard words, until he learns how to treat his fellow-creatures with decent fairness. Mr. Burton is probably, on the contrary, judging from the evidence of his letter, a very decent, narrow-minded squire, with an outrageous idea, no doubt, of his own rights and consequence in the world, but with a sincerely conscientious desire to keep his parish right, which he acts upon even when his action renders it certain that he will incur annoyance and opprobrium. There are plenty of such men, and we do not know, though we wish their minds a little broader and their consciences a little better-guided, that we are free to wish them fewer. What interests us is not Mr. Burton's wrong-headed view of his duty, but the clear revelation he makes of his own view of his position,—a view entertained, as we believe, by the majority of his class, and one main cause of all the agrarian difficulties in Great Britain. The dealers in land and their customers in this country can never get into open market, because of the pride of the one set and the want of union among the other. Mr. Burton cannot get it out of his mind that he has some relation to his tenants, some responsibility for them, some rightful power over them, other than that involved in the fact that he trades with them for land. They are his tenants, and therefore owe him not only rent, but obedience, and obedience so perfect as to extend even to spiritual things. He would think it perfectly monstrous to send a letter to a neighbouring squire forbidding him to have family prayers, or to propagate Anglican or other doctrines, but thinks it perfectly fair to write such a letter to a tenant of his own, and indeed a moral duty to do it. He is the landlord, the head of the household of Bag-Enderby, and a tenant who will not come to the prayers which the landlord approves is guilty of a breach of household discipline, and must, if he is obstinate and will remain perverse, go else- where. Mr. Burton can no more have half-a-dozen kinds of worship going on in his estate than in his house, and thinks his rights and his duties exactly the same in both cases. He regards his tenants as in some sense his servants,—persons whom he has brought around him for their good and his own, whom he is to guide with authority, and who owe him obedience, at all events as to the maintenance of all the usages of his house. In extreme eases, no doubt, he would waive his right. We know nothing of Mr. Burton, but his name and acreage, as recorded in" Domesday Book," but judge him from his letter to be, as we have said, a conscientious man of narrow mind, who would not for the world compel a Catholic or a Jew to attend church, or evict a Catholic. tenant for suffering a priest to administer extreme unction, because he would feel such oppression to be beyond his rights,—even over servants or children. But Anglicans and Wesleyans alike being Protestants, and salvation not being imperilled, he cannot see why he, as landlord, should not en- force his own ecclesiastical usages on all his dependants. Why should they object to such decent and proper practices ? The fact that his tenants pay him rent makes no difference to him. Of course they pay him rent. Rent is one of the conditions upon which he does them the favour of letting them on to his land,—land which is his, and on which therefore they have no rights, except what he confers. Are servants, or even guests, to enter his house and set him at defiance ?
We believe that state of mind, which seems to dwellers in cities to involve a semi-lunatic absurdity, in which they can hardly believe, not only to be common, but to be, in one form or another, all but universal among English landlords not forced into different views by incessant contact with the world. They do not often, it is true, betray it about religious questions. The idea that a man's religion is his own business, and that he must be permitted to worship God as he sees fit, has been forced into the heads of most squires, partly by the movement of the age, partly by dogged resistance from below, and partly, we are bound to add, by good counsel from the clergy, who of late years have become far more tolerant than the landowners; but the same spirit comes out in other ways. There is scarcely a landlord in England who thinks he has no right of interference while rent is paid ; who is not every week guilty of interferences which in any other position would be considered gross impertinences ; who does not conceive himself to have rights of remonstrance, or rebuke, or direct command on matters which have nothing to do with the fact of tenancy. A landlord would hardly bear with a tenant who farmed well, paid his rent to the day by letter, and otherwise ignored his landlord utterly. Yet why not ? The farmer owes no obedience to a man because he hires a house or trading plant of him. The favour—if there is a favour—is done to the landlord, who is the dealer, and the tenant the customer. Neither is bound, if he does not choose, to make the other's acquaintance ; and as for responsibility, the re- sponsibility to and for neighbours is in no way increased or altered by the fact of tenancy. No Christian can shake off all responsibility for those around him, but it is not affected by the fact that his neighbour pays him rent, unless that rent is derived from evil practices. The landlords, how- ever, cannot see that, and their view, though perfectly honest, is one of the first causes of the depression of which their advo- cates complain. They will not endure the commercial relation, and yet they want commercial profits. Take Mr. Burton's case. He, we do not doubt, complains, like everybody else, of the badness of the times, the poverty of tenants, the difficulty of getting rents, and then he strikes out of his market all Wesleyan tenants at a swoop. No Wesleyan will willingly, after his letter to the Superintendent, take land of Mr. Burton. Another landlord strikes out all tenants who worry about game ; and a second, all tenants who will not vote as he does ; and a third, all tenants who are "uppish ;" and all landlords all tenants who want to cultivate as they like, and to snub the agent if he interferes with their cultivation. And so the game goes on, till the landlord, instead of entering an open market with all who want farms for customers, is driven, as it were, to hunt for tenants with a lantern, and rents sink, and owners are ready to ask the Legislature to prevent "a social revolu- tion,"—that is, a drop in rents. Mr. Langhorne Burton is, no doubt, an extreme case, because his pet form of interference is one upon which most Englishmen will not yield ; but his view is only that of his class, who find in interferences an enjoy- ment, a sense of daily and habitual power, which almost com- pensates them for the non-receipt of rent. They do not want to stop prayer-meetings, but they do want to stop whatever they have a mind to stop, whenever they please. They want, in short, to be paid in power ; and they are paid in power, and very little else. Our contemporaries need not be too hard upon Mr. Burton. We should say his letter, blazed abroad as it has been, would produce a decrease in demand for holdings under him quite equal to a very heavy self-inflicted Income-tax.
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