MR BRIGHT ON THE LAND LAWS.

Globe, Volume XXIV, Issue 2477, 15 March 1882, Page 4

MR BRIGHT ON THE LAND LAWS.

In the course of a speech delivered at Birmingham recently Mr Bright said—Among the farmers and among professional man everywhere there is a sense at this moment that the land question must be dealt with, and that in dealing honestly with it, while the great interests of the great body of the people will be served the true interest of the holders of land will also be served. We want two things only, the first that land may be Sought and sold aa freely as other property. You go into a shop and buy anything over the counter, and there is not even a memorandum. You pay the money; yon take away your purchase. You go to a fair or a market and you buy a horse or a farmer buys a beast. The traneaotion has, perhaps, no matter for examination more than a few minntes, and, in many oases, there is not even so much as a receipt given. If yon go to the Liverpool Exchange or the Manchester Exchange you find there tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds being bought and sold in a single day. A man makes a note in bis note book and there is an end of it. How comes it that yon cannot buy a piece of land without some intricate arrangements, without paper or parchment statements that you can hardly read and have not the hope of being able to understand ? It is the commonest thing in the world. 1 have done it twice myself the lost three or four years in taking a deed drawn np by an intimate personal friend of mine. He did it according to the best mode of his art, and then I had to ask him to put down on a single piece of paper what the deed contained, because I could not possibly understand it. Now I have to look at that sheet of paper. It has about as much in it as you put in a letter. I have to look at that to see what this deed means, because I am perfectly certain that unless I went through a very minute legal education, which I am not disposed to do at my time of life, 1 should never understand it. Well, now, what you want is to get rid of all that. It does not exist in other countries.' It does not exist in the United States, or Canada, or the Australian colonies, or in France, and why should it exist in this country ? The lawyers, you know,, are a very powerful party to do battle with. But even they will come to see that it will be better for them to have a change. Then we want another thing besides free buying and selling. Long after a man is dead the dead hand has hold of the estate, and directs what shall bs done with it and what shall not be done with it. So perfectly monstrous and intolerable a law you would suppose could not have lasted for any length of time, and yet it has lasted in this country for a good number of years, some generations, and has produced an amount of evil which none of us ever can imagine. I believe that our agricultural population, our labouring population in agriculture, would have been infinitely better off than they have been in onr existing system. And so would have been, I think, our landowners, who would not, as they are now, be crippling, mortgaging, and embarrassing, and causing all kinds of difficulties, and afraid of the influx of American corn and cattle, afraid of the cloud that obstructs the sunlight. If this state of things had not existed 1 believe they would have been free men, and their interest is as direct as the interest of the public in the entire abolition of this system. 1 am of opinion that when the Government comes to deal with this question, the wise course will be to deal with it— I take Lord Darby’s words—in a large and thorough reform of it. It is a question of some difficulty, and it will want a good deal of legal examination in dealing with. Bat my own hope, if the Government does before long bring forward any broad measure of this kind, is that the general feeling of the country will be entirely for it, and that the country gentlemen themselves, the great squires, and great proprietors will feel that at last there is coming a day of liberation even for them and their families.