HOW TO RUIN AGRICULTURE.
[To THZ EDITOR OP THE "SPECTATOR."] Sra,—Mr. Macpherson (Spectator, October 25th) claims that there are nearly three million acres of land suited for agri- cultural purposes devoted instead to sport in the Highlands of Scotland. Others of at least equal authority declare that this statement is wholly incorrect, and that the land under deer forest could not be profitably cultivated. The question is one of such vast importance—ethical as well as economic— to the nation at large that it is surely worth while to get at the truth, and the only solution seems to be the appointment of a Commission or publics tribunal to receive evidence as to facts. Probably it would be well for the evidence to be given on oath and for the court to have power to subpoena as well as to protect witnesses. We have, of course, had Royal Com- missions before on the land question, or branches of it, bob what we need is one which will give us evidence, right up to date, of the condition of things as they are to-day in the countryside both of England and Scotland. Radicals hate and fear the result of a public inquiry, nominally because it would hang up the question, really because it would hang up Mr. Lloyd George. Why trouble any further, they say ; we have got all the evidence we desire from our special band of private detectives, and anything more is superfluous. Good, from the prosecutor's point of view, but what about the defendants ? What would Mr. Lloyd George say if a client of his were condemned unheard because the judge had heard all the evidence of the other side in camera?
I for one strongly object to being condemned without hearing before an open and impartial tribunal. Justice is one and indivisible, and the principles of its application are exactly the same whether I am prosecuting one of Mr. Lloyd George's private clients, or whether he, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, is prosecuting me. Further, I think that even Mr. Macpherson will admit that the harshness, or even cruelty, of some Scottish landlords a hundred and twenty years ago, is no reason why, without cause shown in open court, I should be deprived of the value, or of any portion of it, of the land which I have bought with good English money in Yorkshire and Suffolk, and on which, as its recognized owner, I pay heavy taxes every year. Burke says that it is the indirect effects of legislation which are often the most important, and, in the same way, the unintended results of demagogy are often the most lasting and the most marked. Mr. Lloyd George forgets that the principles upon which his agitation are founded are at least as applicable to Asia and Africa as to Great Britain. The incitements to public plunder which he thinks he is giving merely to his party he is really giving to mankind, for in these days of instantaneous communication and universal unrest it is not a city nor a county nor a king- dom which is his audience, but the whole wide world.
Those who take the trouble to talk to educated men of colour or to study the literature in which they express their hopes and sorrows must be aware of the bitterness with which they regard past injustice and present humiliation. The plains of Asia, the prairies of America, and the sands of Africa are, in their eyes, red with the blood of natives "rightly struggling to be free" from the oppression of a foreign yoke. Every word that Mr. Lloyd George utters to the submerged tenth in England is applicable with fiftyfold force to the nations perdues of Asia, of America, of Africa- From the days when Pizarro murdered the Inca Atahualpa to those when the German Emperor urged his soldiers in China to slay and spare not, the man of colour has ever been the victim of cruelty and scorn. Nor is this all. Saddest of human spectacles is that of the dying races, physically unable to bear the burden imposed upon them by the white man's lust, who, with the image of God blurred and distorted, crawl shamefully to their doom. Prescription and force—these are the powers by which the world is governed. Without force to support it, prescription cannot prevail, and without prescrip- tion force becomes mere brutality. When Mr. Lloyd George flouts prescription and denies validity to titles given by centuries of possession, he thinks he is merely injuring English landlords, while really be is putting a most potent weapon into the hands of the disinherited races of the world. The British landowner may not always be very sympathetic or very wise, but he is an angel of light compared with the official and the concessionnaire who dispose of such limitless wealth in the coloured continents, and govern with a rod of iron so many millions of Asiatic and African mankind.—I am,
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