THE VALUE OF LAND.
THERE are many questions about which pessimism is only intermittent—questions which are alternately in the sun and the shadow. English land, however, knows no such occasional opportunities for optimism. It is always at its worst ; and in regard to it no one can ever say, "Well, at any rate, things are not as bad as they were three or four years ago." Whatever the standard chosen, the comparison is unfavourable to the status quo, and the declarations that things have reached bottom only end in the discovery of, beneath the lowest depth, a lower depth still. For example, no one last year, in his gloomiest moments, thought of a drought that would for six months suspend vegetable growths almost as completely as a hard frost. Yet that was what happened this spring and summer. No doubt the effects of the drought will not last for ever. Admit a dead loss of many millions—not an unreasonable estimate of the deficiency in the hay crop which made lucky farmers " save " a quarter of their usual stock—to the agricultural industry, and the drought of 1893 may be banished to the limbo of extraordinary occurrences. But even with the drought neglected, the prospects and present condition of agriculture are black enough. Up till 1880, the landowners were a rich class, and therefore, even when values fell, they were able to hold on and not show the shrinkage. It was as when a big smash occurs in some largely and well-held stock. For a time the price does not fall, for the owners will not admit the loss, and refuse to sell except at something like the old prices. Hence persons, who, for some reason or other, want to purchase, have to buy at what may be called an artificial rate. Ultimately, however, these non-natural conditions break down, and the crash, when it comes, is all the more severe.
These are reasons for thinking that this is what is now going to happen in the case of English land. The ability of landowners to hold on is coming to an end, and the inevitable crash, the assimilation of purchase-prices to the profits or lack of profits from land, is about to take place. Some significant facts in regard to this are given in an article in the Pall Mall Gazette of last Tuesday. The writer tells us that he has been seeking land in which to invest certain charitable funds, and that the result of his se.3irch has been to show the terrible condition of English alEculture. He tells us that "one landlord (from Cam- bridgeshire), in despair of selling, offered a twenty-five years lease of six hundred acres free, and only subject to the condition that they should be kept in cultivation." It was admitted that this offer was made because rent was unobtainable, and the owner had been losing at the rate of £2 an acre as the result of his own farming. "A few days ago," continues the writer in the Pall Mall Gazette, "two hundred acres were sold in Essex at .26 an acre ; when sold on a previous occasion they brought £7,000, and some were present at the sale who knew that £4,000 had at one time been raised on their security. A farm of similar size is now in the market, for which the owner asks only the cost-price of the farm-buildings. The vendors of a farm in Suffolk came down from £5,000 to a fifth of that amount, though they considered the first price to involve a sacrifice.' In other words, the price of land is dropping to the value of Central American or Peruvian stock. To show why people are in many cases ready to virtually give away their land the example of a Suffolk owner may be quoted. He farmed his own estate of two thousand acres, and till within the last few years at a profit. "He is a- noted agriculturist, but for the last few years has found him- self on an average about £500 out of pocket annually. The land, as it happens, is tithe-free ; it pays no rent, it yields no interest on capital." Who can wonder that, under circumstances like these, it is a case of sellers but no buyers, and that some three million acres are going out of cultivation, and being left to the thorn and the thistle ?
Like the character in the old play, one feels inclined to ask, "Is this the end, Sir ? " and to expect the answer, "Oh, no, there is no end. The end is death and mad. nese." One has hardly the heart to give any better answer, so often has one prophesied smooth things for the land- owner, and so often has the better time coming never come at all. At the same time, one set of facts does remain, which cannot be read in any but a consola- tory form for the English landowner. The population returns are increasing, and this means that every year more and more people are wanting to live in England. But people cannot live without land, and twenty-seven million people cannot stand on nothing. While, then, the demand for land to cultivate may decline, the demand for land to live on must increase. But, it may be said, "This demand is a drop in the ocean. It merely means a few more acres round the big towns." Possibly that is so now.; but there is no reason to suppose that the desire for crowding into the towns is permanent or necessary. It may very well be that the contrary tendency will set in, and that not only the new, i.e., the coming population, but a portion of the old urban population, may desire to spread itself over the country. If this happens, the de- mand for houses and gardens, and the local market the houses create, will have a great effect in helping the land- owner. The decentralising effect of improved railway communication is already apparent, and if we actually get increased speed, the problem of Jiving in the country and working in town will be solved for the working as well as for the middle class. At present, living for the labourer is, on the whole, a little cheaper in the towns than in the country,—i.e., he gets in the town a better return for his labour. If, however, that were to change, and he were able to get more by living in the country, we should soonlear of the growth of the village and the depopulation of the East-end and of the poor quarters of the great towns. It is not only boredom that drives the mass of the emigrants from the country into the towns, but also the hope of a better return for their labour; and if the economic conditions were to change, we should at once hear more of the attractiveness of the village. At heart, indeed, we fancy that the Anglo-Saxon remains what Tacitus described the German—a person by nature inclined to live in a detached dwelling, and not in a crowded community. Yet another thing may bring help to the landlord. If coal, iron, and seamen's and shipbuilders' wages were all to rise—a by no means unlikely event—freights must rise too. But if freights rise, so must the price of corn. A change, then, in the balance of prices and wages in the shipbuilding trade might easily produce conditions which would once again make agriculture profitable in England. Some sort of improvement will also be pro- duced when the five or six million acres of heath-land and down, taken into cultivation during the famine prices caused by the Corn-laws, have relapsed into wilderness. The struggle to keep this land in cultivation has, we believe, been an important element in the depression. The good land has been made to pay for the cultivation of the bad. When, however, the landlords have made up their minds to cut this loss, and to let the heather and the bramble repossess the enclosures of the twenties and thirties, and have abandoned the Oxmoor and Thornaby Waste in spite of all the money laid out on draining or " stubbing " them, they will find that the residuum of "old closes" and meadows will still pay. Of course this abandonment of four or five million acres will not be a pleasant process, but that it is bound to come we cannot help believing. Some of it will become sheep-down again, some may be planted, and the rest can—perhaps most profitably of all —be used for game-farming. Meantime, for the exist- ing landlords, the prospect is black enough. They are the poorest section of the community, and yet they are still believed to be the proper class on which to heap all new burdens.
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