MR. TREVELYAN ON THE LAND LAWS.
WITH the freedom of speech that is now conceded to Cabinet Ministers, it becomes important to reckon-up and tabulate their individual utterances. It is only in this way that we can hope to forecast what kind of measures are coming out of the Government pigeon-holes. Everyone is agreed that a Land Bill will be included in the legislation of 1886. That prediction has ceased to be interesting, because it has ceased to be doubtful. But what sort of a Land Bill is it to be ? Is it to be animated by the old Liberalism or the new ? Will its object be to leave the land—its sale, its cultivation, its subdivision—to be governed by natural laws ; or will it aim at making the occupier a costly exotic, looking to the State to buy his land, and to the State to find the money for tilling and stocking it? Will the incidents of land under the new order of things be less like those of other kinds of property, or more like them ? Is the small proprietor to be treated like a rickety child, nursed and petted into a precarious and unhealthy life ; or is he to be left to himself, to profit as he best can by the influences to which he is naturally subject ? To put it shortly, is it to be Mr. Goichen's Bill or Mr. Chamberlain's. In the old days there would have been no occasion to ask this question. A Cabinet Minister would not have spoken in the tone adopted by the President of the Board of Trade unless he had actually seen the draft of the Bill. There is no need to assure ourselves that Mr. Chamberlain has not imposed this severe restraint upon himself. What he has been saying about the land is obviously meant not to recommend to the electors a Bill already on the stocks, but rather to ascertain beforehand what manner of Bill the electors would like to see on the stocks. As to any clear conception of what his own words mean, or of the results which would follow from giving effect to them, we greatly doubt whether Mr. Chamberlain is to be credited with anything of the sort. His imagination, vivid as it may be, does not really adorn the Statute-book of the future with anything in the nature of " An Act to assess the Ransoms to be Paid by the Propertied Classes." But a Minister who can talk about ransom and natural rights might easily be led, if he were surrounded by colleagues like-minded with himself, into a very haphazard sort of legislation. The want of knowledge which serves as an excuse for the author of a bad Bill may yet be the cause that the Bill is so bad. Consequently it is of great moment to know whether on the Land Question Mr. Chamberlain is or is not surrounded by colleagues like-minded with himself. When the day comes for drafting the Bill, will a majority of the Cabinet be for drafting it on Mr. Chamberlain's lines ? This is an inquiry which gives an interest to every speech from a Cabinet Minister in which the Land Question is referred to. It does not need that the Minister should say in so many words that he disagrees with Mr. Chamberlain. To do this would be to carry yet further a method of taking the public into his confidence which has already been pushed quite far enough. We do not want to know what a Minister thinks of Mr. Chamberlain's land theories ; that he may hardly be able to tell us without some departure from the politeness so convenient among colleagues. But we do want to know what his own theories about land are, because it is obvious that if a majority of the Cabinet hold quite different views from those held by Mr. Chambeilain, it is their views, rather than Mr. Chamberlain's, that stand the best chance of being incorporated into the Government measure.
This week there have been several straws in the air, which seem to indicate that the current of Cabinet opinion is not going with Mr. Chamberlain, but here we shall only mention one—Mr. Trevelyan's speech at Manchester on Tuesday. Mr. Trevelyan, like Mr. Chamberlain, has a constructive mind. With him the extension and rearrangement of the Electorate is a means, not an end. He looks to it to give measures upon which the Liberal party has long been agreed " the impulse and momentum for which they have been waiting." The Franchise Act is to be the mother of a whole brood of just and beneficial laws. So far, Mr. Trevelyan and Mr. Chamberlain are agreed. Are they equally agreed upon the basis on which these laws must rest, if they are to be just and useful ? Mr. Trevelyan is, at least, as plain-spoken on this head as Mr. Chamberlain ; but though the sound is equally certain, the note is altogether different. " Private property is the right of the individual who possesses it ; and if it becomes necessary for the public advantage to interfere with his holding of it or enjoying it, the public is bound to give him fair compensation." So far, Mr. Chamberlain would, perhaps, travel in the same coach with Mr. Trevelyan. At least, he has not, so far as we remember, denied that private property is the right of the individual who possesses it. His line has rather been to take out land from the category of private property, to treat it as something of a different nature from private property, and so to deny that the principles by which the possession of property is regulated, really apply to it. Mr. Trevelyan knows nothing of any such distinction. It is, he says," on the security of this doctrine "—the doctrine that private property is the right of the individual who possesses it—" that the landlord holds his land, the fundholder his stocks, the shipowner his fleet, the manufacturer his mill and plant, the working-man the house he has acquired through a Building Society." In all these cases the exercise of the right is qualified by another Liberal principle which says that property shall not be held so as to oppress or injure other men, and inasmuch as some kinds of property give more opportunity than others for inflicting oppression or injury, the scope of State interference in regard to them will be proportionately greater. But when a principle is established subject to a qualification, the qualification does not derogate from the principle, except in the particular matter with which it has to do. The owner of a ship and the owner of a canoe have precisely the same right to their possessions, though the law forbids overloading in the one case, and takes no notice of it in the other. The essential identity of land with all other kinds of property is the key-note of Mr. Trevelyan's speech. Like other properties, it must be held so as not to be injurious to the common welfare. Like other properties it is, subject to this solitary exception, " the right of the individual who possesses it." If it becomes " necessary for the public advantage to interfere with his holding of it or enjoying it," the public is bound to give the landlord, equally with any other owner, fair compensation.
Mr. Trevelyan was not content, however, with laying down general principles. He defined with the utmost precision the object at which the coming Land Bill ought to aim. That object is to make land pass from hand to hand as easily as gasshares or railway-shares. Mr. Trevelyan does not wish to dictate whose the hands shall be into which it shall pass. The decision of this problem he prefers to leave to the operation of that natural law which' in the long-run is always tending to find a buyer for every seller and a seller for every buyer. But whether land passes into the possession of those large proprietors who can do their duty by it, or into that of the small occupier, who, wishing to own the soil he tills, has the money to buy it and the capital to cultivate it, it must, if Mr. Trevelyan is to be satisfied, be transferred at no oppressive or prohibitive cost. There Mr. Trevelyan stops, and it will be seen that he has not gone a step beyond the point to which the Liberal Party, as a whole, have long been anxious to see reform carried. He ends just where Mr. Goachen ends ; and this, it will be remembered, is just where Mr. Chamberlain begins. There is not a reference in his speech to the new Radical doctrine that the State, instead of being content with removing obstruction to the breaking-up of large estates and the growth of small estates, must itself be the destroyer of the one and the creator of the other. Mr. Trevelyan's Land Bill, and Mr. Chamberlain's Land Bill, contemplate an essentially different order of things ; and though Mr. Chamberlain may quite consistently assent to the measure sketched by his colleague, it is impossible that Mr. Trevelyan, unless his convictions are revolutionised, should ever assent to Mr. Chamberlain's.
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