THE RURAL REVOLUTION.
Q 0 far from thinking that too much has been said about the fall in the value of arable land in England, we only wonder that so little notice has been taken of it in Parliament. It is eating Peers and Members to the bone. The fall may be far more serious in its ultimate effect than the cattle- plague, but—owing, we suppose, to a hope that it is tem- porary—it has not produced half the political consternation. Mr. Oaird, in his striking speech of Tuesday, told the public many of the broader facts,—how in eleven counties owners and farmers have lost more than has been lost in the whole of Ireland ; how in one district of one southern county the farm- ing stock of 100 farms, covering 55,000 acres, has been adver- tised for sale at once ; how hundreds of acres of clay-land in the neighbourhood of great towns have been entirely deserted ; how, on every great estate, six, eight, or ten farms have been thrown on the landlord's hands ; and how everywhere on the corn-lands the difficulty is to keep good tenants on any terms ; and even Mr. Caird's account hardly contains the whole truth. The suffering inflicted by the suspension in the sale- able value of small properties was not within his subject. The landlords have, by great efforts, hidden many of the facts from themselver, as well as from the public. Some have made large temporary remissions. Some have accepted the necessity of turning farmers with a sort of surly cheerfulness, as of men who are a little alarmed, but find some compensation in the chance of showing how much better they know their business than the experts do. There never was acountrygentlemanyet who did not believe he could farm better than his tenants, and a good many of them are trying, with results which they will discover from their bank accounts next year. The extent of the direct loss, therefore, is still concealed, and so is that of the fall in value. Nobody sells who can help it, the second class of squires in particular, the men with from 1,500 to 3,000 acres holding on with desperate tenacity, living on the Continent and in health-resorts, or in London, in a sort of seclusion, cutting down expenses, stopping improvements, overdrawing their accounts, doing anything rather than recog- nise the fact that the gross profit of their lands is reduced by 30 per cent, and their value by 25 per cent., and their own net incomes, after the unchangeable charges are paid, by very nearly one-half, as we show below. They fight bravely, most of them, and this time they have whined very little, not half so much as the tradesmen have whined at the Stores ; and their pluck has helped to hide up the hard facts, which are that in the corn countries landed incomes have gone down one-third, that the saleable value of good land has been im- paired by a fourth, and of bad land by a per-tentage not yet settled, but much heavier, and that solvent tenants have be- comevery independent indeed, something a little morethan free. If this state of affairs continues, and all scientific evidence shows that it will continue, the English in America being able permanently to undersell the English in Britain, the political consequences are pretty clear. The farmers will vote as they like, and they and the landlords together will insist on tenant- right and the enfranchisement of the soil. The farmers will not bear their insecurity, and the limited owners will not endure their fetters, and the tenure now feudal will be made rational, almost without opposition. So recently as Mr. Cobden's time, the change seemed hopeless ; but the hour has arrived, and when great landlords and hard economists like Lord Derby talk of Encumbered Estates Acts, and writers like Professor Aldis suggest that rent may yet cease, land yielding nothing beyond its cultivator's keep, and Farmers' Alliances insist on the Ulster custom, we may feel assured that it is not from the House of Lords that serious resistance will come. Peers need bank balances too much. But it is not of that change, but of the social change, that we want to speak to-day. That change must be great, and it is interesting as well as useful to try to think out what direction it will probably take.
We question if the big estates will disappear, as many men believe, or be very seriously diminished in number. They give, and they will continue to give, great social consequence. The man who owns ten thousand acres in a block and lives on them will, no doubt, have an immensely reduced rental, and a greatly reduced direct power in the way of arbitrary eviction ; but he will still have the best house, and the only park, and the woods, and the waters, and the un- used land, and the prestige of ownership, and a heavy vote in the transfer, of his arable farms from one tenant to another, and the means of granting many favours, and the reserved right, if he likes to waste a little money in compensations, of making himself excessively unpleasant to individuals. The holders of long leases never desire quarrels with the land- lord, and the new tenantry will hardly be more independent than the long leaseholders ; while the little value of each tenant, from his rent being so low, will in many ways release the landlord from dependence on him. A rich owner may feel a farm of £900 a year being thrown up, and yet be comparatively careless when it only pays £300. Social dignity is greatly valued in England, so valued that we shall not be ridiculous if we bring our argument to a crucial and absurdly extreme test. It would be worth the while of any millionaire with two millions to give one for Knowsley, or Longleat, or Dalkeith Palace, or Floors Castle, with the lands attached, even if the lands did not return one shilling per annum interest on the money. We conceive, therefore, that the great owners will hold on, whatever the fall, sell out- lying or city properties, look out for money in marriages, save cash as they have never done yet, and gradually adjust themselves to the idea that their lands, like their parks, are very dignified, but not very profitable, pro- perties. We do not find men in the North Riding or in the Highlands selling great acreages because they yield only a few sixpences an acre. There are able and experienced men, we know, who think differently, and hold that the day of great estates is over ; but we doubt it, unless the prescriptive rules of English social rank alter, or the people at last inter- fere with the liberty of bequest, a change of opinion of which we see, as yet, no sign. The right of settlement will go long before the right of will-making, for settlement is a self-denial, and will-making is not. What the great owners desire to keep the millionaires will desire to have, the new wealth will make as many estates as gradually die out, and our grand- children may hear the Mr. Bright of that day thundering against over-lords who keep cultivators out of properties which to themselves yield nothing. Sutherlandshire does not yield 9d. an acre all round, but the Duke feels all the bigger for Sutherlandshire, and probably would not sell it, when the law enables him, for any price whatever. It is the smaller owners who will sell, and the smaller investors who will be reluctant to buy. The smaller owners want income. There is too much real misery in the world for us to be plaintive over the squire with 3,000 acres, but still he is not just now a happy man in his mind. He has been receiving, according to the broad average shown by "Domesday Book," £3,000 a year, and paying in dower, rent-charges for sisters, insurances for daughters, and " keeping-up " expenses, £1,000 a year. These charges are not altered by the fall in rents—indeed, the last of them slightly increases, as rural wtges rise—and with a fall in rents of only 33 per cent., which has already occurred on the large farms, he receives only £2,000, and has still to pay £1,000 per annum. His income, though not his rent-roll, is cloven in two. So it might be if he were in business, and he
has no claim, while paupers die of the cold and great ladies of cancer, to any particular commiseration ; but, being a landlord, he inherits a house suddenly too big for him, and a park to let which is a confession of insolvency, and all manner of obligatory expenses which he must stop, every stoppage diminishing at once his rank and his popularity. He will sell, and the man who succeeds him will give anything demanded for the " residential " estate, and nothing for the farms, which return inadequate interest, and are too few to give a new man sooial consequence. The second-class squires, we conceive, will go as soon as ever they can, receding, if they are wise, to the great colonies, where squirearchy is still possible, though under new conditions ; and the third class will either go too, and disappear altogether, or become farmers on their own land, anxious for large crops, but not thinking of interest any more. Such a revolution as that would completely change the character of English county life, transferring all rural political power from the squires to the farmers and freeholders— who would purchasebits of the sold estates to work themselves— and to the professional men ; checked, or rather influenced, by a few great owners, who would themselves soon feel the loneli- ness of their position, and the necessity of not becoming marks for popular dislike or envy. Whether the change would be for good or evil, we do not know, small freeholders attracting us by their independence, and repelling us by their sordidness, immobility, and distrust of culture. We only say the change will be very great, and the conditions being granted, appears to be inevitable. The conditions assumed may be all wrong, the operation of economic laws being liable to numberless in- terruptions ; for example, we can conceive of a great reduction in the cost of producing English corn, owing to a supersession of labour by some new and easily-managed motor, a reduction akin to the reduction in the cost of producing stockings ; but the conditions granted, the way of escape is not visible. And the conditions are those which the most experienced experts believe to exist, and which every landlord in England is at this moment puzzling over, with more than half a conviction that for him the pleasant days, the days when shillings did not signify, are finally passed away. Ask any of them just now whether they would rather receive a legacy in money, or in that " safest of all varieties of property," a bit of land.
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