MR. CHAPLIN'S GREAT BILL.
TOTE did not think it was in Mr. Chaplin, and hereby apologise to him for an injustice done him in thought. The Bill on Small Holdings which he introduced on Monday, and which, as Minister of Agriculture, he must have had a large share in framing, is a thoroughly states- manlike effort to carry out safely a great, though it may prove an infructuous, experiment. The position of the Government was this. The great body of labouring voters in the counties have recently become possessed of the idea, reasonable in some places, unreasonable in others, that they are unfairly kept from the ownership of land ; that if they could buy it in patches and by reasonable instalments, they could by degrees improve their position till it became one of comparative independence. They are, now they move about so much more, feeling their comparative " slavery " to the cottage-owner in a completely new way. " There are no rungs to our ladder," they say—we heard the sentence ourselves in Somerset—and they are, more- over, convinced of something which may be pure vanity, but is not unnatural vanity, that they understand " the land " better than the big farmers do, and can get more out of it. There is much more self-esteem among the labourers than the gentlefolk usually think, and it is increasing fast. They cry, therefore, to the State to make the acquisition of land a little easier to them ; and the State, as a whole, is not unwilling. The Tories like the labourers in their own way .very much, and are, moreover, convinced that pickets are very useful in campaigning, that landed property will never be quite safe till its owners can throw a numerical vote which cannot be disregarded. The Liberals, again, think that what people wish for they ought to have, and believe that the wages paid for agricultural labour are in the Southern and Eastern Counties too low to be con- sistent with modern civilisation,—an accurate idea, though it solves none of the many difficulties. Both parties, therefore, are willing to try the experiment, and at the same time both are a little uncertain about it, and a little afraid of either landing the Treasury in unendurable expenses, or of introducing a new tenure, the Irish tenure, which would not suit either our social arrangements, or the peculiar ambitions of our people, who, unlike the Irish, are little moved by imaginative fears. The Government, therefore, has taken, in a cautious and yet bold way, a middle course. It has limited the experiment, in the first instance, to ten millions sterling, the valueof a penny rate all over rural Britain, capitalised at 38 per cent. ; but -within that limit allows County Councils, the only popular bodies as yet created, and the only bodies with high credit, to borrow money from the Treasury, and buy land. This land they are to resell to applicants who agree to certain terms, or even, in certain cases, to let out on ten- year agreements. The terms are, briefly, one-fourth down and three-fourths by instalments in fifty years, the owner, however, having the right of paying off all instalments by a lump payment whenever he pleases. If he hires, there are more restrictions, some of them a trifle pernickety ; but, substantially, the man who wishes to be a tenant, can be a tenant up to ten acres, on condition of cultivation, residence, and abstinence from sub-letting. That is to say, under the Bill, anybody who means work can buy a patch of land not less than an acre, or more than fifty acres, at market price, or hire a patch not exceeding ten acres, with option of purchase, and begin cultivation at once in his own way. So he can now in theory, but so he cannot in fact, for two reasons,—one, that the seller wants money down, and the buyer desires to pay by instalments ; and the other, that sellers hate the worry, and the legal troubles, and the haggling incidental to selling land in little pieces. Who is going to have his title looked. at in order to sell five acres ? The Government plan solves those difficulties, and makes it certain that a man, when the system is once at work, can buy a small holding or hire a patch without asking any favour of squire or farmer or gombeen-man, a personage who exists here as well as in Ireland, though we do not give him a specific name. The rungs in the ladder are provided, and whether the people will go up depends entirely upon the people themselves. We do not think they in any great masses, for reasons we shall state ; but a large number will, and that will be a good thing, and teach us all whether the experiment is in itself sound or not. In every parish there are a few men who want land, with very rough "buildings " on it, intending to continue living elsewhere ; in every parish there will be a demand for " freehold allotments," two-acre patches to be bought " out-and- out ;" and in every parish the rural artisans, wheel- wright, blacksmith, shoemaker, thatcher, machine-tender, and carpenter, will leap at the chance of what to them will be " accommodation-land." There have been a hundred thousand allotments let since the Allotment Act was passed, and the applications for holdings may well be half as numerous again, or, say, ten per parish. That will be success ; for this is not to be a great revolutionary measure, like the Irish Land Act, changing a whole population from tenants at will into perpetual leaseholders, but a great experiment intended as much to teach statesmen as to benefit labourers, capable of enormous expansion, but capable also of being silently abandoned whenever the demand has been satisfied, or is so reduced that it is unreasonable for the County Council to trouble itself and the community by an attempt to comply with it, and so lose ratepayers' money. We have no objection to the conditions, beyond the fact that every restriction always thwarts somebody who knows his own business best ; and none to the plan itself, which, if it succeeded, would greatly solidify English society, and give a fair chance, though not a brilliant one, to the single class left stranded by the march of civilisation, the actual tillers of the soil. But we must express a doubt whether the total result will greatly affect rural society, or greatly gratify those who desire, with Lord Salisbury and every- body who understands where the rock-bed of democracy should be formed, to seat five hundred thousand small freeholders on the soil. Experience is against the Bill ; for if small holdings were so much desired, small holders would not have died out to such a regrettable degree as is admitted on all hands to be the case. Classes are like everything else ; when they are wanted, they exist ; just as perpetual tenants did in France (vide De Tocqueville), generations before the National Assembly put all real property into a melting-pot. It may be that the class is needed again, owing, as Mr. Chaplin evidently thinks, to a rising discontent among labourers ; but there is no proof of that, no evidence, as in Ireland and Illinois, of a disposition to buy fifty-acre farms, even if they have to be mortgaged next minute. The national character is against the Bill, the ambitious or energetic or greedy Englishman not caring for petty farms, but preferring to seek a town or a Colony, where, if he slaves, and saves, and keeps his eyes open, there are opportunities, as he thinks, of limitless advance towards pecuniary comfort, which, and not free- holder's dignity, is his secret ideal. The aspiring lads of the country-side are not asking to sit under their own vines and fig-trees, but in shops and mines, and " pre-empted lots," where one may earn sovereigns instead of shillings, and where, if they roll-in quick, heat, anxiety, over- toil, even sharp risk to life or health, do not signify one straw. " Man alive," said a missionary in Antigua to a favourite Negro pupil, " don't go to Panama ; you'll be suffocated by the air, and poisoned by the water, and what will you get ? " "It is all true, Sir ; I blow how bad it is," was the reply ; " but I'd take a contract in hell for a dollar a day." The Englishman expresses himself, fortunately, in soberer language, but his governing impulse is very closely akin to that Negro's. And lastly, the Bill is at variance, how much we shall see as the experiment works out, with one of our social conditions. There is a class even among our labourers which has saved money, and would save it if it were working in slavery in the Soudan ' • but it is a very minute one, and. for all other labourers the patch or the holding will be a costly possession to acquire. Suppose the skilled ploughman wants twenty acres. That repre- sents £500, or with a decent cottage, a good shed, a pig- sty°, and a well or share of a well, £750, without drainage or storing places against a rise in price. A fourth of that is £187 108., and where is a labourer to get that sum ? He could borrow it possibly, but he could only give a second mortgage, the County Council holding the first, and the terms of the " respectable tradesman," a small builder usually, who will lend. the money will be very high, and will include, unless human nature alters, an over-charge for every brick and board deposited on the holding, and a, monopoly of repairs. The " fourth " to be paid down will do for the experimental stage, and will sift the applicants for holdings, so as to get just the men who would save money anywhere ; but it will be an impassable bar to the majority of cottagers, and will, at an easily reached point, either arrest the scheme altogether, or create a demand on the Legislature, not to be resisted, for its relaxation. There will be other difficulties, too, about buildings, for English County Councillors are not Irishmen ; and if the owners of holdings are content, even for a time, with squalor—squalor is horrid, but squalor is cheap —they will declare that the whole country-side has been barbarised by the Small Holdings Act. They may compromise by giving up their absurd prejudice against wood—as if England were colder than Switzerland or Norway—but they will try to stick to the tradition of comfort, and the tradition will land them in an expendi- ture at which the true "Hodge," shaking his head and declaring that " the gentry mean well, but are such great fools," will regretfully retire. Altogether, we are not dis- posed to hope too much from the Bill, but it will greatly benefit a worthy class, the picked few of the men who can dig ; it will excite an extraordinary amount of hope ; and it will teach us all a great many things we ought to know and do not. As to the fate of the Bill, we have no manner of doubt. In brief, it provides ten millions to help the labourer to a brighter lot, and there are not ten county Members either in England or Scotland who, if they seek re-election, will venture either to defeat or delay it. The danger is rather that Mr. Chaplin's proposal will be capped, not by that silly project of compulsion, which cannot be carried even in the Commons, and would be of no use if it were carried except to worry the squires, but by an amendment sweeping away the sifting clause in the Bill. If Sir W. Harcourt moves an amendment reducing the payment " down " from one-fourth to one-tenth, avowedly that the lower-class labourer may have a chance, the Government will have to accept it, or be defeated by a majority such as they have not seen yet. That is what always comes of competition in bribing ; but still, the Ministry have, so far as their power extends, done their duty alike to labourer and taxpayer, and done it ex- ceedingly well. The risk is not great, and if the chance of success is not great either, still to succeed would be to revolutionise for the better the whole of our rural life.
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