AN ENGLISH FARMER'S "SECURITY."
LORD BURGHLEY'S speech at Exeter has been consi- derably ridiculed, and yet it contained much that was both valuable and significant. His lordship does not only represent the average British landlord, who has got into a rage because his tenants are tired of letting him live on their capital. To do him justice, we must allow that he also gives frank and free- tongued expression to what most of them think, but are afraid to say. The talk about agricultural distress being due to the farmer's dis- inclination to turn his wife into a kitchen drudge and his daughter into a dairy-maid may appear very silly. But it is, after all, an idea that lies latent in the minds of probably three-fourths of Lord Burghley's class. Another idea of theirs finds clear expression in his lordship's speech, and it is this : The best " security " a farmer can have for his capital is not a lease, or the guarantee of a Tenant-Right Act, but a friendly, in- formal, unwritten understanding with his landlord. Nothing, in Lord Burghley's opinion, would be more calamitous than that "the sympathetic combination existing between landlord and tenant should become a purely commercial one, and that the charitable feeling which had shown itself so often lately be- tween landlord and tenant in their straitened circumstances
should be done away with." That any large class of capitalists in "straitened circumstances" should be dependent on " charity " for the conduct of their business, ought to suggest a doubt as to the soundness of the system on which they work. However, it is possible that Lord Burghley does not mean to call it an exercise of "charity," but of common-sense, when a landlord reduces rents by ten per cent, as soon as he sees that his tenants, so far from having any money to pay the abated tenth, most likely have to borrow the cash wherewith they pay the remaining nine-tenths. But the interesting thing about Lord Burghley's theory that the "sympathetic combination" between landlord and tenant gives the latter a better security for his capital than a purely commercial or legalised relation, is that we are in a position this week to illustrate its working by a curious story of "Tenant-wrong." At Kirbymoorside, in North Yorkshire, a mournful company of substantial farmers met the other day for the purpose of giving a complimentary dinner and a testimonial to one of their number, whose connection with the neighbourhood has been rudely and suddenly severed. From the report of the speeches in the local paper a tolerably clear narrative of this gentleman's ease may be drawn up. Mr. Richard Foxton appears to have occupied the farm of Welburn, near Kirby- moorside, for thirty-three years. It has been the home of his family and forbears for three centuries, in the course of which it has become for the Fostons a treasure-house of sacred memories. Like a true Northern farmer, Mr. Foxton has always "done his duty honestly by the land." In fact, so skilful and enterprising has he been in his business, that his eviction is bewailed on account of the loss which the district will suffer by being deprived of the good example and high standard of farming he set before his neighbours. During his occupancy, he has "drained seventy acres of land ; re- claimed thirty acres of bog, by making an outlet of 700 yards to drain it 8 ft. 6 in. deep ; built almost an entirely new farmstead, a new wing to the dwelling-house, and other offices ; converted an old fold-yard in front of the dwelling- house into a garden ; covered thirty perches with turf or sod, made artificial mounds, run quickwood fencing, planted 443 fruit-trees, fifteen filbert-trees, and seventy-eight shrubs and other flowering trees," doing, at the same time, all the team and hand-labour required in making these improvements.
The post-prandial speaker from whose address we take this statement, in enumerating Mr. Foxton's merits, added the following :—" By thus investing a large capital in a farm of 241 acres, and bringing it into a very high state of cultivation, he (Mr. Foxton) had produced in beef and mutton, on an average, for the past three years, commencing May 8th, 1876, and ended January 28th, 1879, 133 pounds per acre, realising £3,523 17s. 2d., or £4 17s. 10id an acre, leaving 250 fleeces of wool to add. His last year's corn account was as follows :-25-k acres of wheat, 1254 quarters, sold at 45s. ; 32 acres of barley, 154 quarters, sold at 42s., and 45 quarters of tail-corn ground up for feeding stuff ; 10 acres of oats, 79i quarters, sold at ls. per stone, tail-corn being used on the farm ; 9 acres of barley, damaged by ground-game, only yielded 28 quarters, kept for seed and home use ; 11 acres of oats, 99 quarters, kept for own feeding,—averaging about £11 per acre for the whole 87 acres.' Taking into account the fertilisation inherent in the soil, Mr. Foxton's outlay in bettering it cannot have been under £3,000, and his landlord, it was asserted at the meeting, had notoriously netted more than that sum out of Mr. Foxton's improvements. In fact, the skill and enterprise, not to mention the capital, which Mr. Foxton put into his land enabled its owner to sell it for £7,000 more than he would have got for it had Mr. Foxton given it up in the same condition he found it in. And what reward has Mr. Foxton received for his labour ? Instant notice to quit, when his landlord, who had fallen into difficulties, had sold the place. Nor is this an exceptional case. The chair-
man of the dinner-party that met in honour of Mr. Foxton said he, too, had, at the end of a thirty-three years' tenancy, been treated in the same way. He, however, did not feel the blow so keenly, because, unlike Mr. Foxton, he had another house to go to, and his family had no ancestral connection with the holding.
Now, the point about this plain unvarnished story, taken from the columns of an obscure country newspaper,—a story the like of which may be culled every day from the unread rural press,--is obvious enough. It is a typical illustration of the kind of security which a British farmer enjoys through that senti- mental or "sympathetic combination," that "good and neigh-.
boarly understanding" which, we are told, usually existabetween landlord and tenant, and is far more effective in securing tenant- right than any Act of Parliament could be. The odd thing is that Mr. Foxton had not to deal with a bad landlord, but a landlord whose family had retained his family on the land since the days of Elizabeth, and who had himself no wish to evict ; so that if such cruel wrong and heartbreaking family saffering can be inflicted under "a sympathetic com- bination " with a good landlord, we leave it to our readers to estimate what a tenant-farmer's life must be under a bad one. The owner of Mr. Foxton's farm would probably, following the wholesome and kindly traditions of his family, never have evicted him or confiscated his improvements, if he could have helped himself. In him, apparently, the unconscious instinct of rural England in establishing that non-legalised but practi- cal fixity of tenure which prevails on most of the old-fashioned estates, not as a matter of law, but of custom and good- will, was strong. He seems to have been one of those, generous gentlemen who are proud to see their farms occupied by the same families generation after generation,—in fact, to have had on his estate practically working the very system of fixity of tenure, a proposal to legalise which would probably have thrilled him with horror. But misfortune seems to have come upon him. His estates were "thrown into Chancery," and when there, the "good understanding," the "sentimental combination" between landlord and tenant, on the faith of which Mr. Foxton had dug his brains and his money into Wells= Farm, were simply laughed at. The holding was sold, with its improvements, to the highest bidder, who simply seized everything he could. As the new owner did not propose to occupy the farm himself, but to let it, Mr. Foxton, supposing he would have been accepted as tenant, had, of course, to choose between eviction and paying a higher rent on account of his own improvements. Moreover, not only would he have had to submit to be taxed on his own capital, which his new landlord absorbed, but he had no guarantee that in a few years the process would not be repeated. In a word, Mr. Foxton's case proves what security based on "a sympathetic combina- tion" between landlord and tenant means. It means that whenever the landlord pleases, or whenever he is in difficul- ties, he is to confiscate the capital sunk by the tenant in Yu soil, and not content with that, to make the tenant pay a yearly tax on account of this confiscation. The tenant is to get no return on sunk capital, but is every few years to pay; in the shape of increased rent, for the , luxury of being deprived of it, When we say that Mr. Foxton's is not an isolated cases—sthat, in feet, he farmed under the same condi- tions as fetter three-fourths of the farmers in England, --s-we are able, to do justice to those eminent Conservative statesmen who go about just now tailing the farmers that they have the remedy for depression in their own hands. That remedy is,—to put more capital into the land! Unfortu- nately, the farmer has no more capital to waste. It has mostly all gone into the land already, i.e., into the pockets of the landowners, by processes which Mr. Foxton's case strikingly illustrates.
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