THE ATTRACTIVENESS OF LAND.*
THE great ambition of an Englishman is to possess a bit of land. Of this there can be no doubt; it is nothing less than a passion, and reveals itself in the most unexpected places and after the most surprising fashions. One would not compare the man who buys land but to sell it with those to whom it has descended from some ancient forbear, or to whom land- scape is a perpetual feast and the life of the land an untiring interest ; but the origin of this land-hunger is the same in all cases, however various it may have be- come. It is the sense of security, of freedom, of serenity, of something that does not change, of something that is firm, that will be here to-morrow, and will not be taken away from under our feet ; of something that is outside our care, and yet ours, that seems, as it were, to support itself and us and the animals that grow and live and eat as we do. Fifty-seven people evidently feel all this and express it in fifty-seven different ways, by regarding the attraction of land from every point of view. They do not all agree—even those who write on the same branch of their subject—to say nothing of those who differ on material and artistic grounds from each other. He who would be useful would throw his whole heart into his farm, and farm as highly as his means or his common- sense allow him, while the artistic agriculturist curses the man who poisons " God's creatures lest he should lose a dozen grains of worthless wheat." He must be classed, must this industrious farmer, with the "tribe of butchers," whose • Land : its Attractions and Riches. By Fifty-seven Authors. Edited by 0. F. Dowsett. London : Dowsett and Co.
occupation certainly jars on the artistic temperament. The energy displayed by these people is intensely irritating; it seems to break up the solemn serenity of the country. The one with his uncouth machines, his brand-new barns, and his silos, shocks the sense of the quiet picturesque ; and the other dealing death right and left scares all things animate out of their wits with hideous noises and rude tramplings in the most sacred haunts. All this we allow, yet there is not so much antagonism between the " butcher" and the Dreamer really. The " butcher," generally called a sportsman, has often an unsurpassed knowledge of Nature, and he is almost forced to find pleasure in a multitude of things that help in his craft, and becomes himself an artist, an artist of the highest and most subtle order, too, because he combines landscape scenes with animal associations in the most exquisite proportions. And in these days what has—or should we not say what has not P—the sportsman done to preserve the loveliest and most characteristic features of English scenery,—the woods, the marsh land, the copses and spinnies, the streams, and innumer- able other natural features that either protect life or make it endurable for wild creatures ? A moor has been tunnelled under, lest the grouse should be disturbed, a touching, if un- necessary, instance of sporting solicitude. What has not the sportsman done for farming ? How our old friend would grumble if he bad no rabbits, no shooting to let for a few pounds. The landlord, too, is surely thankful for the rents that sportsmen pay without a murmur, and which enable him to cultivate land otherwise fated to become impoverished. What helps to bind classes together but the one " touch of nature," the love of sport, a link that holds both, despite alien tastes and sympathies, as striking a characteristic o f the English character as the love of land ?
But let us descend from the general to the particular, and consider the experiments now being made in Small Holdings and Allotments. Mr. W. J. Harris gives a most helpful and interesting account of the working of the Halwill Manor Estate. This was poor land, and mach of it was untouched for long periods, being treated as a summer run for cattle. The investor, Mr. Harris, was tempted at first to do what at that time was generally done by landlords, consolidate farms, pull down old cottages, and, in fact, generally reduce the available population and labour on the land. Several farms fell in soon after Mr. Harris's purchase of the estate ; but he was " converted" by observing that, where the landlord or the farming tenant had allowed the cottagers to cultivate the land immediately round them, the value of the land had been doubled by the labourer without, indeed, any guarantee of permanent residence. Instead of destroying, the new land- lord built and repaired, and having farms on his hands, was enabled to cut off certain fields and allot them to cottagers. Small farms grew up, and the larger ones were reduced ; thus land was let that otherwise would not have been, moorland enclosures, for instance, and it was on these that the value of the system made itself at once apparent. Land not valued at more than 5s. per acre in its rough state became, when meadow-land, worth from 30s. to 50s., and as the cottages were in demand the population increased, and farmers, knowing that labour could always be obtained, took the large farms, reduced though they were. Wages have risen from 10s. and 11.s. to 12s. and 14e. per week. Mr. Harris says he made the mistake of working his vacant farms with bailiffs, thinking, as the land was in low condition, he might do it better than a tenant. But, as he says, it is the labourer who knows best, and who succeeds, provided he has not more land than he can manage. One of these small holders now has fifty acres, and gives occasional employment. One secret of the small farmer's success is that one man works on his farm for no wages at all, and that is the farmer himself. The small farmers help each other, and they seldom let a crop stand too late or get behindhand, as is the fashion with some misguided men, who under-man their large farms, and depend on outside labour for chronic emergencies. The harm that a large landowner can do by farming meanly is incalculable. We have in our minds at this moment a person who owns many thousand acres of land, and who has perhaps half-a- dozen farms of two hundred acres on his hands now. Let us take one of these, the rent of which is £40. It used to grow capital wheat, and would now. A field of five acres grew in the wet summer of last year the finest wheat, in the opinion of a Canadian, he had ever seen, and this year another field promises some beautiful grain. Yet this farm, naturally poor land, gets poorer and poorer. A labourer says there are not half the horses and half the men on the estate there were seven years ago. "It used to grow wonderful corn," said the man (he was cutting oats with a sickle at the time), and he pointed to the opposite side of the valley, a series of pasture fields which annually produce wretched crops of thistles and hay. " This would grow corn," said the man, and he bent back an armful of the straw to show its coarseness. The landlord in question is a. rich man, and his land does not compare favourably with the thirty acres of a small farmer who finds it pays to grow wheat at ls. a gallon. If he, why not the other? The one has made his fortune in Colonial produce, but he has less common- sense than the tradesmen, who nearly always make farming pay, and the small farmers, who are better paymasters into the bargain.
Points which are much discussed in Land : Its Attractions and Riches are the rating of ground-rents, the transfer of land, and the subdivision of large estates. The editor puts down in black and white what the real meaning of taxing ground-values is. The owner of a park, instead of paying rates on its value as a park at £5 per acre, should, according to the taxation of the ground-values agitator, pay rates on its value as building land at £40 an acre, assessed at its capital value. So that the owner of the park in question should, for his 100 acres, under the rating proposed (lid. in the £), pay for the privilege of having a residential park £1,041 13s. 4d. These proposals answer themselves, and have, furthermore, this important fault, that they would cause much suffering to many whose wealth is not a thorn in the side of the restless Radical.
Mr. Auberon Herbert's article is one of the most readable in the book. It is expressed with his usual forcible vigour, and his argument, though it would necessitate the remodelling of an ancient and time-honoured procedure, undoubtedly attacks one of the most complicated and wearisome—one might almost say, vicious—methods in land-tenure. Now, to Mr. Herbert, the fact that a dead man should continue to have the disposal of his property for years, perhaps a hundred years, creating reversions and remainders, is an anomaly, and a bad one. A man, he claims, may have the immediate dis- posal of his land at death, but no further. A learned Judge has said : " The dead have no rights, the dead have no wrongs." This may be justice, but it does not seem to many as com- plete as when land is devised in a certain orderly succession protected by law. Of course this raises the whole question of succession and remaindership. But would the limiting of remaindership to one generation simplify the transfer of land so very much ? After all, what is chiefly wanted is easier and less expensive transfer.
One thing we note with pleasure before leaving this com- posite volume, and that is the wide interest farming has become. Every one is concerned about it now, and innu- merable experiments are being tried, particularly in small holdings, which require time only to prove successful. As to the larger aspects of farming, its palmy days are almost certain to return. The enormous production of wheat in Australia and America, and the consequent ruinous fall in prices, greatly assisted by corn " rings " and " corners," has so hampered and checked the growth of wheat, that certain bread-consuming countries in a year or two are likely to realise that they cannot export wheat,—if, indeed, they can meet their own demand. English wheat may some day yet fetch sixty shillings a quarter.
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