A word must be said as to the Report of
the Land Inquiry Committee published on Wednesday. Mr. Lloyd George's invective about turnip-eating pheasants and peasant-eating landlords, and his tawdry rhetoric about making the glens of the Highlands bloom once more with smiling crofters is silly enough, but we are by no means sure that the pompous fatuities of the report are not even sillier. Taking the speech and the report together, we may say, as Lord Brougham once said of a speech he was criticizing : "It contains things both new and true, but unfortunately the things which are true are not new, and the things which are new are not true." Apply that test to the speech and the report, and it will be found that the only indis- putable statements are statements that have been admitted on all sides during the last hundred years, while the new proposals are so crude and so unworkable that if Parliament were ever mad enough to apply them to the land they would bring the industry of agriculture to utter ruin within a very few years.
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