THE OLD WHIGS AND THE LAND LAWS.
TWO very curious, and it may prove very important, facts came out in the debate of Friday week on agricul- tural depression,—a debate which, for all who care about the question, was one of singular interest. Better speeches than Mr. Brassey's, Mr. Bright's, and Lord Hartington's have seldom been delivered, Mr. Brassey's is a mine of information ; Mr. Bright seemed animated with all his old fire, and poured out denunciations of the land laws and prophecies of the day when there shall be a million owners of the soil in Britain with an eloquence which, in a House of Landlords, created something like consternation ; while Lord Hartington made ad- missions, while praying for the widest extension of inquiry, many of which, as we shall show, have the importance of political facts. The two points, however, which distinguished the debate were the partial decay of the old faith in Free- trade, and the rapid decay in the old landlord antagonism to a radical reform in the land laws. The speech of Mr. Chaplin, in moving for a Royal Commission, which no one answered from his own side, was an unmistakably Protectionist speech. He kept on saying that he would only recommend inquiry ; but his whole argument was an assumption that the answer to inquiry would be the necessity of Protection. After drawing the strongest picture of the depression of farming, which in some localities, he contended, would not be relieved by the remission of the whole rent, farming being a loss even to the freeholder, he repudiated all the suggestions of the Farmers' Alliance, and declared that the "sole causes of the present de- pression in agriculture were bad seasons, and bad prices for the articles produced." Clearly, as man cannot alter the seasons, the remedy, in Mr. Chaplin's mind, was to alter prices, which can only be done by taxing imported food ; and indeed, a few minutes after he admitted this, avowing that in cases which he could imagine, the impositipn of such a tax would be "a necessity and a duty." Cheap food, he asserted, "purchased at the expense of our own cultivation would be the most costly commodity, and in the end, the most ruinous that we could possess." If "pre- sent prices eontinae, agriculture in England would not be of long duration ; " and if agriculture was in danger of ceasing, then Protection became a visible necessity. This is the old argument of Protection, and of all its consistent advocates, in- chiding M. Tillers, who always asserted that there was a pay- ing price for corn ; that the peasant must have his paying price ; and that, therefore, imported corn must not be sold below that price. The only difference is that Mr. Chaplin would fix, as a "paying price," a price that would yield rent to the landlord, as well as a profit to the farmer. The logical conclu- sion to his speech, as Lord Hartington told him, would have been the motion accepted by the farmers at Romford,—that foreign corn should be taxed whenever corn was selling below 458.; and though he did not conclude with such a proposal, it is the one he obviously wished to make. That, of 'course, is not strange. The existence of a Protectionist is no more singular than the existence of a man who believes the earth is fiat; but what is strange is the sort of acquiescence he obtained on his own side. No Tory told him flatly that he was asking impossibilities ; that cheap food was the one grand blessing for the body of the people ; that it was a gain, not a loss, to the community ; that there was no more possibility of taxing food than there was of putting a poll-tax upon all Lincoln- shire men, to be distributed among Lincolnshire squires. His speech was treated not as a folly scarcely deserving dis- cussion, but as a temperate exposition of a grievance,—the want of profit in a particular trade, for which Protection might not be the remedy, but which obviously must have a remedy somewhere. No one stated point-blank that it was no more the business of the State to make land-owning profitable than to make coal-mining or candle-making profitable, still less that the unprofitableness of land-owning might be a great relief to the country at large, which benefits not by the height of rentals, but by the cheapness of food. Above all, nobody re- called the old times of Protection, when England was covered with local insurrections, and there was danger of a social war against landlords, and the hardest of gatemen, Sir James Graham, declared he would never be Home Secretary again. The whole subject Wag treated as if Protection were not an absurdity, but one among many alternatives which must be considered, before the present system of English agriculture could be allowed to break down. We do not suppose that Parliament has in any way modified its decision on Free-trade, still less that household suffrage will ever listen to proposals for wilfully making bread dear ; but still there is evidence that faith in Free-trade has grown weaker,—has sunk from a conviction as solid as the belief in arithmetic, into an opinion.
Another faith has decayed, too, however, and one at least as strong,—and that is, the belief in the perfection, not to say the sanctity, of the British system of tenure. If Lord Hartington expressed the general feeling of the Whigs, his speech contains the doom of the Land-laws ; and even if it does not, it is a most important event. For years past, it has been well understood that all Liberals outside the Whigs were willing or eager to alter the Land- laws, to make land as saleable as Consols, and to give the cultivator certain rights against the owner, and that the only reason for not making this revolution a first article in their programme was the reluctance of the Whig aristocracy to agree. They were supposed to value the social system above progress, and to hold, as their fathers did, that the social system was dependent on primogeniture, settlement, absolute proprietorship, the accumulation of land in few hands, and the rest of the conditions appertaining to our existing tenure. Lord Hartington, however, is by birth and training a Whig of Whigs, the head of the connection as well as of the Liberal party, the heir of a great landowner and of a great "Revolution family," and his speech was from end to end a suggestion that the English land-system had broken down, and must be radically reformed. "If," he said," the case of my honour- able friend [Mr. Chaplin] be true, or if he can prove it before a Royal Commission, then the remedy mnst be looked for elsewhere than in the quarter he has indicated; and if he can prove his case, it is nothing more or less than this,—that the land-system of this country, under existing conditions, has broken down. My honourable friend has not proved that the land will go out of cultivation, or that the cultivation of the soil is impossible. All that he has proved, or attempted to prove, is that, under exceptional circumstances, it is not profitable ; and that the land will not now support, as it has hitherto supported, the three classes of farmer, landlord, and agricultural labourer." Lord Har- tington then described the sacrosanct land-system of England, the system which Whigs were supposed to worship, as "a system under which the land is divided into large estates, and where the proprietors, though wealthy men, are often not complete masters of their own property, and not able to deal with it as they may desire. It is a system under which the cultivation of the soil is carried on by a class of men who are not the owners of the soil, and not the actual cultivators of the soil ; and under which the actual cultivators of the soil are never, and can never hope to become, its owners. It is a system under which the land is cultivated by men who have this one claim upon it,—that in ease of old age or absolute destitution, they should be supported without expense and almost without labour on the land. Such is the land-system of this country, and, as I have said, it is one which prevails in no other country in the world." Has the Spectator, has Mr. Bright even, ever said anything more radical about the tenure than is contained in that short paragraph? Lord Hartington, however, was even more definite than this. He declared openly, plainly, in so many words, that "one of the blots on our system is our system of the entail and settlement ocland,"—and he survived the utterance. That is to say, he went beyond the Farmers' Alliancee and condemned straightforwardly the system upon which, and the order of society it produces, our whole tenure depends. Without primogeniture and settlement—that is, without a system intended to keep the aristocracy wealthy, and bind them to the existing tenure—the Land-laws would have no raison d' etre, and would, within five years, perish of universal contempt and hostility. Without settlement, Land Transfer would be easy, and Lord Hartington suggested that it was "unwise" to prevent the existence of small properties by making it so expensive. Primogeniture and entail and difficulties of transfer being condemned, it remained to do something for the tenant, and Lord Hartington openly declared that he would make the Agricultural Holdings Act compulsory, and that he considered the Law of Distraint —that last grand legal privilege of the landlord plass—as "a question of the ordinary law of debtor and creditor," which, in the belief of many, "acts detrimentally both on landlord and tenant," and which should be the subject at least of careful investigation. This is all that reasonable land reformers have ever demanded. It is more than they ever hoped to obtain, without an agitation as vigorous as that which broke down the, Corn-laws. And it is all offered, not by Mr. Bright, or Mr. Chamberlain, or any politician bidding for support, but by the leader of the Liberal party himself, tho head of the Whig aristocracy, who, many men believed, would upon this subject break away from their usual following, and declare that they were Liberals only as to laws, and not as regards the order of society.
We do not wish in the least to exaggerate the meaning of Lord Hartington's speech. We do not question that he is still in favour of free contract, or doubt that he prefers governing his tenants to leaving them alone as if they were London leaseholders, or forget that he spoke just before a General Election. But after making all those allowances, just notice what an advance this question has made. It is literally true, that if the country would only throw out this Ministry, which has tried to do nothing for any one except the Sultan, and has failed in doing that, the Liberal Government might in 1880 propose a thorough reform of the Land-laws, and be in entire consistency with its own promises, and professions, and admis- sions as to the best course to be pursued. They may not be eager, or even in earnest, to advance, but they at least are not pledged or oven disposed to resist, and if urged, cannot help moving along the line which they themselves have indicated as the one which the country should ultimately follow. They can no longer plead that the Party is divided, that there is danger, if the question is pressed, of a territorial alli- ance, in which both Conservatives and Whigs might join ; that it would be better to wait for a more convenient occasion. Their own leader, and he the leader of the Conservative sec- tion, has condemned primogeniture and settlement and ob- structions to transfer, has promised that compensation for im- provements shall be compulsory, and has hinted unmistakably that he doubts the wisdom of the law of distraint. The theory is given up, and if we only remember that Lord Hart- ington has said but little that Lord Derby, most conservative of men as regards property, had not said before him, we may be sure the practice will follow. Well might Mr. Bright tell Mr. Chaplin that, in demanding an inquiry into the condition of Agriculture, and its causes, he had let the waters loose
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