WHAT IS A LANDLORD?
TEEfive or six thousand gentlemen who constitute the ,Ilandlords " of Great Britain must as a body be worthy people. If they were not, they never could have impressed the popular mind with such an idea of the inherent merit of landlordism. All other kinds of capitalists, factory-owners, owners of mines, metal-founders, ship-owners, or money- dealers, are regarded with a sort of grudge, and any special applause bestowed upon them merely for condescending to exist would be considered not a little absurd ; but landlords as a caste never lack defenders. To judge from the arguments in their favour, put forward in all honesty and simplicity by really competent thinkers, a stranger might imagine that a resident landlord of decent character and average kindliness was a beneficent being, who poured from a bottomless cornu- copia unexpected and unearned blessings upon all around. He is always giving, and never getting. He alone among man- kind is a benefactor because he invests in a very secure stock at very low interest, and he alone escapes the odium which attaches in every other branch of enterprise to the useful function of the money-lender. If he knows his business, brings his farms up to a high level of cultivation, chooses good tenants, and does not tyrannize over them too much, he is described as a sort of Providence, as a man whose mere existence is equivalent to an improvement in the climate, a positive cause of new fertility. So universal is the feeling, that landlords themselves are not ashamed to express it ; nobody thinks it vain for them to boast of their achievements, and we should be thought very rude for smiling at a letter like that we insert to-day from Mr. Brinsley Marlay. Yet if Mr. Green wrote to us to say the same thing,—that he had expended so many thousands in improving his ships and secur- ing better sailors, everybody would ridicule him for vanity and presumption. Lord Digby, writes Mr. Marlay, with a sort of gasp of admiration, has expended £40,000 in the improve- ment of his estate, and surely that is good for the country.
Clearly it is ; but why is it better than the expenditure of a similar sum lent by an ordinary banker at similar interest to the farmers? Is it not conceivable that they would employ it as wisely as the landlord? It is quite true they could not get the money so cheaply, because they could not give such perfect security as the landlord enjoys, and cheap capital is good for agriculture ; but then, let us acknowledge that it is the cheapness of capital which we are admiring. People seem wholly unable to see that the real use of a landlord is to be a sagacious money-lender, a man willing to lend money at low interest for the improvement of the soil. What else does he do as landlord which he could not do simply as a rich and cultivated man ? If he is equal to his position, he leads society, and keeps up, it may be, a high standard of life and civilization, an occupation which is extremely beneficial for the variety and colour it imparts to country life, and extremely injurious for the flunkeyism and servility it breeds ; but he could do all that as a rich and decorated person of high culture, and do it better, because the sense of mastery is inconsistent with the very highest refinement. The most perfect gentleman is never so gentlemanly as when among his equals. Landlordism has nothing of necessity to do with high refinement, which is, for instance, much more frequent in cities, where landlordism is powerless, and not very much to do with high cultivation. It is true that in the present con- dition of Great Britain, or rather of England, the landlord is very often a better agriculturist than his tenantry, takes wider views, and will wait longer for a return upon his money; but the main reason for that is the reluctance of men of ability and capital to assume the position to which the existence of great landlords and the deference they exact reduces tenant-farmers. If land were purchaseable in Eng- land, or procurable in considerable blocks on payment of quit- rents, its cultivation would attract a very much higher class of mind than is now the case, and we may be permitted to doubt whether ten University men cultivating 1,000 acres apiece would, not do more both for agriculture and for civilization than, the single owner of 10,000 acres, who is too far removed from the people to exercise any but the most indirect influence upon their ways. We get our landlords at the price- of extinguishing the true agricultural middle-class, the men, who, being possessed of education and refinement, would farm their own land in considerable blocks. The class is springing up again in some places, notably in Northumberland and the Lothians ; but the inevitable conditions of its rise are long leases, slight interference, social respect for tenants, all of which involve distinct limitations upon the influence of land- lordism. It is often said that the landlord protects the labourer against the farmer, and primci facie that ought to be true ; but as a matter of fact, after centuries of landlordism, the British labourer is one of the worst paid, worst housed, and worst educated beings in the world. If he has been protected, the protection has been so insufficient that it is probable he- would have done better with permission to protect himself, and quite certain that he could not have done worse. The- landlord is kinder than the farmer, but his interest in cheap labour is as great, and neutralizes his kindness.
But every landlord will argue who reads this paper, "My possession of land surely helps to make my leadership effective. As a rich man, I might argue with the farmers for ever, or- even show them on a home farm what to do, and still I should have comparatively little influence with them. As owner I have a reserved power of making them do right, which is surely useful." Certainly it is ; but we• pay a tremendous price for this beneficial influence in the extinction of yeomanry intelligent enough to do the work for themselves—for exam- ple, if property were divided at death, we should in two gene- rations have Cokes and Chaplins farming their own land after passing through the Universities—and the utility of the power depends in no slight degree on circumstances. We quite admit that in a country like England, where society, though artificial, is very solid, where there is a genuine " solidarite" between landowner and farmer, where farming is but one among a hundred open careers, and where the culture of the soil, though the pleasantest, is, taking all things into. account, the least remunerative of occupations, the strong and definite leadership which a good landlord may claim is a great addition to his value as an agricultural money- lender ; so great an addition that we should be indisposed to- advocate any change other than the abolition of all laws im- peding the sale of land ; but then the good is not the result of landlordism by itself, but of the influences which temper its operation, influences of which we have still omitted the
strongest,—the extreme moderation in the use of power which generations of free and contented political life have engrained in the character of English gentlemen. No Con- tinental farmer will bear a landlord invested with the English form of landlord power, because no Continental would believe that power could be exercised in so self-restrained a manner as this power certainly is in England. But to make the system work, the limitations on the power are more useful, more profitable, more indispensable than the power itself ; and the limitations in many countries, and notably in Ireland, do not exist. The Irish landlord, as a rule, is not a sagacious money-lender. The Irish landlord, as a rule, is not a better agriculturist than his tenant when possessed of a lease. The Irish landlord, as a rule, is not only not an efficient leader of his people, but one who prevents their action, exciting by his isolation in race and creed suspicions fatal to any coherence in agricultural society, suspicions so deep and immovable that society resembles a sand-heap rather than a structure. The beat landlord, if a " Saxon " Protestant, cannot really lead a population of Celtic Catholics. He does not think as they do, does not want their ends, but other ends,—better, it may be, but still entirely different. The better he is, the more he wants his people to spend life in " getting-on " and becoming "comfortable," ends which, unfortunately, are not the ideals either of Catholics or of Celts. And finally, the landlord in Ireland does not, as a rule, use power with such moderation as to inspire trust. He holds that the use of power is to be used, just as the Frenchman does. Consequently, we believe that the landlord in Ireland, even when good, is, as a rule, a nuisance, an impediment to civilization, and if he could be abolished without injustice such abolition would be wise. He cannot be so abolished entirely, but we repeat once more, though without hope, that fixity of tenure, with revisals of value every fourteen years and compensation for the involuntary concession of rights hitherto secured by law, would abolish him without injustice, and in so doing leave the road clear for Irish civilization to take its natural course, which tends, we believe, towards equality modified rather by the influences of culture and of Catholicism than by the passionate thirst of wealth. Our belief is that, the landlord away, the struggle for power in Ireland would lie between the priest and the professor, that the professor, as in every other Celtic country, would surely but slowly win, and that a contented and educated though poor Ireland would be a better country than an Ireland rich as the Lothians, but seething with insurrection.
We have assumed throughout this paper, in order to meet the extreme case, that the landlord under fixity of tenure would disappear ; that he would, in fact, retire to the cities or the Continent, but we by no means believe that such would be the case. On the contrary, we conceive that the cause of the social quarrel being extinguished, the owner of the quit- rent would resume his natural position as the leader of society, the man most looked up to by his neighbours for his independ- ence, his cultivation, and his power of devoting himself to the administration of the country. The mass of landlords in Ireland do not make the improvements, and consequently would not lose that "source of occupation," and. surely there would be interests left in Ireland even when that of evicting tenants had disappeared. Italian gentlemen manage to live, and live in the country, though their power of eviction is so limited, and when inclined they lead their neighbours as easily as ever they did in the old feudal time. No doubt the personnel of the quit-rent owners would gradually be changed, Englishmen selling to Irishmen and Protestants to Catholics ; but the class of men with wealth and leisure would exist, and only be more sympathetic with the people than it was before. In many parts of France no candi- date can stand against a member of the old families, though he has no rights of eviction, nor do we perceive that the pro- prietors of London are socially powerless, because they limit themselves to the exaction of a quit-rent revised once in every thirty-five years. It may, no doubt, be said that the change would in itself be evil, because the Saxon Protestant is necessarily a better leader than the Catholic Celt ; but is not that a mere repetition of the old, old story,--the source of all the miseries of Ireland—that the Irish are an inferior race, which can be civilized only by processes that would barbarize any other, which cannot be trusted alone for one minute, but must be kept in order by a garrison, if not of soldiers, then of Anglican proprietors ? That idea is intelligible, but then, is not that idea the very idea which Britain has concluded to give up ?
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