LAND STERILIZATION.
MR. ASQUITH'S speech at the National Liberal Club represents the formal endorsement by the Cabinet of the land campaign which Mr. Lloyd George has worked up and already expounded in a series of speeches through- out the country. The cold and precise exposition by the head of the Government of a number of definite reforms is of far more weight than all the rhetoric which Mr. Lloyd George has so profusely poured out. We now know exactly where we are. The Government, embarrassed by the unpopularity of their Irish policy, are out to catch votes, and have spread their net as wide as possible in the hope of bringing within its meshes every type of discon- tented elector. They have also very astutely so framed their policy as to suggest that it is undertaken with purely philanthropic motives in order to redress admitted griev- ances and to add to the prosperity of the country. At the outset, however, doubt is cast on these professions by the fact that even Mr. Asquith, who is better informed than his more vivacious colleague, apparently has not taken the trouble to compare agricultural conditions in England with those prevailing in other countries. He opened his remarks by saying that there were certain facts beyond dispute, and he specified the steady decline in the numbers of our rural population, the inadequate develop- ment of the full resources of the soil, and the congestion of population in urban centres. It is upon these three facts that he bases the necessity for a great scheme of revolutionary changes. Yet if he had troubled to inquire he would have been able to ascertain that exactly similar facts are to be found in almost every country in the world. In France, where the land system is totally different from our own, the rural population is rapidly declining, and the urban centres are at least as congested as ours. Simultaneously it is undoubtedly true that the resources of the soil are not so well developed in France as they are in England. The same phenomena are to be found in Germany, and even in new countries like the United States. But a better and closer parallel is the case of Ireland. In Ireland Liberal land legislation has had the fullest scope, yet the purely rural population of Ireland was, until quite recently, declining in spite of the favourable conditions now prevailing for agriculture, and recent revelations have shown that the slums of Dublin are at least as bad as, and probably worse than, those of any town in Great Britain. Therefore to assume that by means of such land reforms as Mr. Asquith now proposes the evils of rural depopulation and urban overcrowding can be swept away is the trick of a politician, not the judgment of a statesman.
That proposals such as Mr. Asquith makes should come from a Liberal Cabinet is one of the curious paradoxes of our present political situation. The Liberals, until com- paratively recent times, were the champions of personal liberty, and confirmed believers in the faith that the pro- gress of a. nation depended on leaving individuals free to develop the resources of the country in pursuit of their own profit. This theory of national progress is now apparently altogether abandoned by the Liberal Party. Instead we are invited to go back to the primitive con- ception of the omnipotent State regulating every action of the individual in the supposed interests of the com- munity. The experience of the world has shown that this method of conducting industry means stagnation and not progress. It used to be said in the eighteenth century that the best manure for the land was human brains ; the omnipresent State control which Mr. Asquith proposes instead of fertilizing the land would sterilize it. Mr. Asquith made a great point of ,the judicial character of the Land Commissioners who are to be appointed. They are not to be subject to political control; they are to act with the independence of judges. This sounds plausible as a forecast, but in practice one knows that the Cabinet, which will have the appointment of the Commissioners, will take care to do in England what it has already done in Scotland, and appoint men of its own way of thinking, who can be relied upon to give effect to the Socialist pro- gramme. Moreover, any such body of Commissioners must be assisted, as the Irish Land Commissioners are, by a vast tribe of employees, so that what in effect will be created will be an entirely new bureaucracy, and it is needless to emphasize the point that every bureaucracy works upon traditional principles, that it hates innovation, and insists upon curtailing the liberty of the subject by a multitude of regulations generally drawn up by persons with no practical experience.
This body will, in effect, assume control over the whole of the land of England, rural as well as urban. The power of the landlord to get rid of a bad tenant will be dependent upon the approval of the Land Commissioners. The success of the farmer in making a good bargain for rent may be upset by a decision of the Commissioners declaring the land to be under-rented. This at any rate is a fair assumption from Mr. Asquith's admission that a large portion of the land of England is now under- rented, and that it will be the duty of the Commissioners to act fairly and in a judicial spirit. If so, they must have power to raise as well as to lower rents. Whether the question of wages is to be dealt with by the same body or by a subordinate authority is not quite clear. Mr. Asquith has now pledged himself to the principle of a minimum wage for agriculture. How that principle is to be applied in detail he does not explain. That in some parts of England remote from industrial influences agricul- tural wages have been maintained by custom at a waste- fully low level is, we think, probable, but it is notorious that the extension of emigration and the improved prospects of agriculture are together forcing up wages throughout the kingdom. In addition there is a grow- ing pressure of public opinion in favour of raising wages where they are obviously too low. Instead of these forces, which, taken together, are adequate to deal with the evil, and are dealing with it, it is proposed to set up a tribunal which must by the nature of the case act on hard-and-fast lines, and may do immense mischief in the hope of doing some good. It is certain that if the kind of minimum wage which Mr. Asquith indicated is estab- lished by law, scores and hundreds of labourers who are now not worth that figure will be dismissed to make room for younger men. At the same time, men now regularly employed year in, year out, will be taken on by the week or the day, or even the hour, and discharged directly their work is done.
An equally fundamental objection lies in the way of any scheme for the judicial fixing of rent. Mr. Asquith was careful to say that he did not propose to follow the Irish precedent, because that was unsuited to the English character, but it is difficult to see wherein his scheme differs from the principle of judicial rents embodied in the Irish Land Act of 1881. If Judicial Commissioners are to be able to hear appeals from farmers who want their rents reduced or who want to resist a proposed increase of rent, in effect they will be fixing a judicial rent. That can be done once, but it cannot be done twice. It is quite possible for the State to say that Mr. Jones, the farmer, who has been paying £50 a year, shall for the future only pay £40 a year. That would be a gain to him and a loss to his landlord, but this transaction implies the necessity, which Mr. Asquith recognizes, of giving the tenant security of tenure. It would be useless to tell Mr. Jones that he can have the farm at £40 a year if the land- lord can immediately get rid of him and put in somebody he likes better at the same figure. The judicial rent must involve the right to sell the tenant's interest. This is what has happened in Ireland, and what must happen if the principle of judicial rents is adopted in England. The result will be that a few tenants will be paying a judicial rent plus a non-judicial price for the tenant's interest. In other words, they will be paying the market rent and not the judicial rent. Already in Ireland many tenants have sold their tenant right for a larger price than the freehold of the farm will command, so that the sitting tenant is, in effect, burdened with two rents. In England it would happen even more often, because English farmers are more in the habit of moving about the country. But Mr. Asquith is not content with trying, as many politicians before him have tried, to upset the law of supply and demand with regard to wages and rents. He also proposes to endow the State with apparently unlimited powers to acquire land and use it for alleged public pur- poses. That the present system of acquiring land for public purposes is in many ways unsatisfactory may be readily admitted. A municipality generally has to pay an extravagant price for land which it is compelled to buy, but this is not due to any particular vice of the landowner ; it is due to the universal practice which runs through all classes of the community of looking upon the State, whether represented by the central or by the local Government, as a mulch cow which can be milked indefinitely for the benefit of the individual. Wage-earners employed by the State expect to receive higher wages or better conditions of employment than persons employed by private individuals.
Professional men doing business for the State put up their fees to a figure which they themselves would admit to be extravagant if demanded from a private person. The landowner only follows the custom of the country. Persons of all classes have to be employed in increasing numbers with every new development of State activity, and therefore such little sums as might perhaps be saved by a better system for the public acquisition of land will be swallowed up ten times over by the horde of hangers-on who will be collected round the State.
This consideration specially applies to the plan of building cottages by the direct action of the State. As far as can be gathered, this proposal has only been made as a sop to the vanity of the Board of Agriculture. Mr. Asquith's excuse for making it was that cottages were not being built as fast as required. Of course they are not, for the very good reason that the speculative builder is deterred from investing his capital in cottage buildings, first by the terror of the Lloyd Georgian land taxes, and secondly by the subsidized competition of local authorities. Wherever the local authorities build one cottage they prevent the building of ten. They cannot afford to build the ten themselves, and therefore there is a shortage. Exactly the same series of events will occur when the State meddles with the problem.
Very similar considerations apply to another point on which Mr. Asquith laid stress—namely, afforestation. How a man of Mr. Asquith's intellectual ability can have brought himself to endorse this silly fad it is difficult to understand. Afforestation is one of the most risky of enterprises. It can rarely be made to pay, and then only by such extreme care and economy as a private owner will exercise in his own interest. If the State is to undertake afforestation on any considerable scale, there will be a steady leakage of public funds for no public advantage whatsoever. The only tree that the State can ever plant with success is the Upas-tree, which destroys everything that comes within the shadow of its branches. But of Upas plantations we have already more than enough.
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