TOPICS OF THE DAY.
A SECOND-CLASS JACK CADE. " FIDDLEDEE, my dear, fiddledee," was Dr. Johnson's comment to the young lady who addressed him in a highfalutin speech. Our first impulse is to confine ourselves to the same comment on Mr. Lloyd George's Limehouse speech. Second thoughts, however, remind us that, in Wordsworth's phrase, "a seemly deference should be paid to power." After all, Mr. Lloyd George holds, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, the second place in a British Cabinet, and therefore wo are bound to treat his speech seriously. We will try our best to do so. The most salient thing about it after its rather empty rhetoric and threadbare invective is that it is a Jack Cade speech, and Jack Cades never did, and never will, make much impression on the people of England. We have had plenty of them in our history, and shall have plenty more, but they always end in one of two ways. They either come to grief and are merged in the population or they live to become Tory statesmen. We all remember how Mr. Chamberlain in 1884 made almost as violent and quite as eloquent a speech against property. He declared that the wealthy were to be held to ransom, and employed the usual device of the British Radical orator when be cannot think of anything else to say : " When in doubt, abuse Dukes." It was Mr. Chamberlain who said of the Peers, " They toil not, neither do they spin," and who con- trasted them with the horny-handed sons of toil like himself ! For that speech Lord Salisbury described him as Jack Cade, and reminded him that be would get his head broken after the manner of Jack Cades in the past. Yet Mr. Chamberlain sat for many years in a Conservative Ministry, the trusted friend and colleague of Lord Salisbury, and is now understood to be specially anxious that the Peers should appeal to the people against Mr. Lloyd George and his schemes. Very probably Mr. Lloyd George will go the way of Mr. Chamberlain, and curiously enough, like Mr. Chamberlain, he is believed to have considerable leanings towards Tariff Reform. In any case, Mr. Lloyd George's demagogy does not frighten us.
There was not a very great amount of argument or statement of principle in Mr. Lloyd George's speech, but such argument as there was meant one thing and one thing only. It was an attack on private property in general, but especially on private property in land. If we accept Mr. Lloyd George's premisses, the exercise of proprietary rights in regard to laud is nothing short of robbery, and landowners, whether great or small, are parasites and blackmailers. We shall show presently that Mr. Lloyd George did not even take the trouble to state justly or correctly the particular instances of tyranny by the landlords whom he held up to the hatred, ridicule, and contempt of his countrymen. For the moment, however, we desire to say something as to the question of whether the recognition of property in land is good or bad for the community,—the only test for a political or social institution. We believe it to be good, and that the institution of private property in land and other things is, as Bastiat pointed out, one of the pillars which sustain human liberty and human progress. Without private property, indeed, liberty and progress are impossible. As our readers doubtless know, Mr. Asquith recently supplied an admirable preface to a selection from Bastiat's works. We cannot, then, be accused by the bulk of Liberals of quoting from a worthless source if we quote Bastiat in support of our contention. If the authority of Bastiat is good enough to support Free-trade, it is good enough to demolish Mr. Lloyd George's angry rhetoric. Not long ago we quoted a passage from " Harmonies Econoniiques," in which Bastiat disposes of the argument that there is a special " unearned increment " in the case of land. The passage is so good that it is worth quoting a second time :— • ` There is no kind of work from banking to manual labour which does not present the same phenomenon [i.e., of unearned increment]. There is no occupation the remuneration of which is not increased by the sole fact of the amelioration of the sur-
roundings in which it is carried on The lawyer, the doctor, the teacher, the artist, the poet, are better paid for equal
work as the town and the nation to which they belong increase, in prosperity, as the taste or need for their services extends, and as
the public asks for these services more, and is at the same time better disposed and better able to pay them at a higher rate."
We should like to put another admirable passage from.- Bastiat side by side with this, a passage in which the great economist defends the institution of private property in land against its assailants :— " Wken you hear a man declaiming against the social order, against the appropriation of the soil, against rent, against machinery, lead him into the middle of a primitive forest and in sight of a pestilential morass. Say to him, ' I wish to free you from the yoke of which you complain,—I wish to withdraw you from the atrocious struggles of anarchical competition, from the antagonism of interests, from the selfishness of wealth, from the oppression of property, from the crushing rivalry of machinery, from the stifling atmosphere of society. Here is land exactly like that the first clearers had to encounter. Take as much of it as you please—take it by tens, by hundreds of acres. Cultivate it yourself. All that you can make it produce is yours. I make but one condition, that you will not have recourse to that society of which you represent yourself as the victim."
Could the arguments against the ridiculous doctrine of prairie-value be better put ?
We must now say a word or two about Mr. Lloyd George's specific cases. The case of Mr. Gorringe and the Duke of Westminster has been so completely answered by the Times in its issue of Thursday—Mr. Lloyd George's answer contains no adequate justification of his charges— that we will say no more about it except to express the hope that the Duke of Westminster will after all take legal pro- ceedings against the Chancellor of the Exchequer. If ever a man was held up to the " hatred, ridicule, and contempt" of his countrymen, it is the Duke of Westminster ; and it seems to us eminently right that Mr. Lloyd George should be called upon to justify his words. The Richmond case, where the landowner was. also denounced by the Chancellor of the Exchequer for harsh dealing and unfairness, has also been answered by a Richmond resident, who in his letter to the Times of Thursday points out that the landlord, instead of exercising the complete rights of property as he might have done, and as owners of other forms of property would certainly have done, acted with special fairness and considera- tion, and by no means exacted the full market value of his property. The case of the Duke of Northumberland— Mr. Lloyd George's atmosphere is nothing if not ducal— may, however, be fitly answered here, because it was cited by Mr. Hemmerde, K.C., in a correspondence in the Spectator last autumn, and was then shown to be the merest mare's- nest. Here are Mr. Lloyd George's words :—" Take the very well-known case of the Duke of Northumberland, when a County Council wanted to buy a small plot of land as a site for a school to train the children who in due course would become the men labouring on his property. The rent was quite an insignificant thing; his contribution to the rates—I forget—I think on the basis of 30s. an acre. What did he demand for it for a school ? £900 an acre."
Now what are the real facts ?—facts placed on record not only in our columns, but in the Parliamentary Reports, for the sale of the school site by the Duke of Northumberland; was made the subject of a question in the House of Commons just a year ago. It then appeared that the price paid by the Education Committee of the Northumberland County Council was fixed not by the Duke, but by arbitration,—a reasonable way of fixing the price for land wanted for public purposes, but one which absolutely precludes the accusation that the landlord has asked too much. Under such procedure, neither he nor his agents have any power to fix a price. An impartial authority settles the price over their heads, and tells the landlord what is the sum he must take, and the public body what is the sum they must pay. What happened in the Northumberland case was this : The Education Com- mittee desired a particular piece of land for a school. The Duke, in effect, told them that if they insisted on taking that piece they would probably find the transaction an expensive one, as it would interfere with a scheme of land develop- ment which was just coming into operation. Unless we are mistaken, the Duke went on to offer them land else- where for the school. The Education Committee, for reasons of their own, decided, however, that the site they had chosen, and no other, would suit their purpose. Accordingly they informed the Duke of Northumberland that they should exercise their compulsory powers of purchase. The Duke in such a case had nothing to do 'but to bow to the will of a superior authority. The matter was taken out of his hands then :and there. All 124k:did do, or could do, was to let the question go to an invartial,arhitrater, whop without any reference to, or communication from, the Duke, decided that if. the County Council wanted the laud they must pay for it at the rate of about £900 an acre. Yet with these facts made public, first, in the House of Comtnone in the summer of 1908, and again in our columns on. November 21st, 1908, the Chancellor of the Exchequer has the hardihood to declare that the Duke of Northumberland " demanded" the price in question. As we have shown, lie did nothing of the kind. He simply did what any one, Duke or peasant, was obliged to do iu the circumstances,—let the Committee take the land and the arbitrator fix the price. If anybody is to be attacked in the matter it is the arbitrator and not the Dnke. In view of these facts—facts which could have been discovered by Mr. Lloyd George with the greatest ease, for he had only to look at Hansard or the files of the Spectator—it is difficult to find words with which to express our indignation and disgust. What possible justification has a Cabinet Minister of Mr. Lloyd George's rank for using his position to attack a private individual in this way ? Here is the rhetorical demagogue at his worst. He is. utterly reckless of his facts or of the risk of doing injustice as long as he can make what is at the moment a good platform point. We say deliberately that the Duke of Northumberland had as good a right to accept £900 an acre for the laud in question as Mr. Lloyd George' had a right to take his fees while he was practising as a solicitor or has to draw his salary as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Suppose Mr. Lloyd George, in his capacity of solicitor, had been allowed certain fees and expenses by the taxing-master in a case where costs had been given in his"client's favour. Would he not have regarded it as an act, not only of very bad taste, but of gross injustice and malignant insult, if the Duke of Northumberland bad held Whim up' to public odium because of the monstrously high charges which he demanded, when, as a matter of fact, those charges had been fixed, not by him, but by an impartial tribunal? ' In the same way would not Mr. Lloyd George hold it to be exceedingly offensive and unjust on our part if we suggested that he was acting the part of a bloodsucker, shark, and blackmailer because he charged the unfortunate taxpayers of this country £5,000 a year for his services as Chancellor of the Exchequer when they were not worth .2500 ? Unquestionably he would have a right to treat any person making such a statement with contempt, and to appeal to the support of all deceut men. Well, we are old-fashioned 'enough to think that what is fair in the case of a practising solicitor or Minister of the Crown is fair also in the case of a Duke. This inverted snobbery about Dukes and aristocrats fills us, indeed, with nothing but disgust.
We might fill another three columns with examples of Mr. Lloyd George's recklessness and unfairness, but what we have given must suffice. The truth is, Mr. Lloyd George is only Jack Cade redivivus, and a rather second- rate Jack Cade at that.
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