THE BRITISH LAND QUESTION.

Patea Mail, 2 June 1882, Page 2 (Supplement)

THE BRITISH LAND QUESTION.

The working of the Irish Land Act is being watched with something like consternation by the “ landed interest ” on this side of St. George’s Channel This is not unnatural, for “ fair rent ” is unquestionably a threatening portent in the landlord firmament. The aristocracy of England and Scotland cower under it, and all manner of excuses are being invented by them and for them with the object of showing that they have nothing in common with their rack-renting brethren in Ireland, and that they ought therefore to be allowed to remain pretty much as they are. It is quite clear that Lord Hartington’s notions of land law reform are of a most rudimentary if not inappreciable kind. He is still seemingly pottering away with the Agricultural Holdings Act, which he thinks susceptible of a little tinkering. Mr. Goschen has the same view-point and about as limited a range of vision. Mr. Eawcett is somewhat more enlightened, but beyond the “Eree Trade” idea he cannot be got to budge. He will not recognise that the land is a natural monopoly in which every man, woman and child is born a shareholder —with equal and indefeasible rights. Lastly, we have Mr. James Caird, at the Statistical Society, doing his best to discover reasons for maintaining the “ three profits ” system in England. Mr. Caird, needless to say, knows the facts connected with British agriculture as few men do. Indeed, we would not err in saying that as an authority on agriculture pure and simple he has no living superior. Yet it is pretty patent that, so far as the social and political aspects of the land question are concerned, Mr. Caird is hut a blind leader of the blind.

The president of the Statistical Society substantially maintained two propositions—the one positive, the other negative. The agricultural depression, resulting in a loss of 120 millions sterling, he laid at the door of the sun, which has of late been neglecting his duties most shamefully. He made light of the American competition, which he seemed hardly to regard as an important factor in the problem. And, what was still more surprising, he succeeded in demonstrating to his own satisfaction that the landlord, instead of being “ the heaviest burden on the land,” is really a generous benefactor. According to him, all we have to do is to deal in a more or less gingerly manner with the question of the devolution of real estate, and of the compensation to be paid to tenants for improvements, and then wait for the return of sunshine. Mr. Caird’s conception of a landlord as an opulent philanthropist who advances endless capital to his tenants at 3 per cent, is so ludicrously a figment of the imagination that it would be a mere work of supererogation to demolish it. Between one-ha]f and two-thirds of the soil of Great Britain is under mortgage, and many of the mortgagors are practically in hiding on the Continent, eluding their creditors as best they may. And this in spite of the fact which Mr. Caird- has himself pointed out —viz., that between the year 1857 - and 1875 the landlords had the value of their land increased by the amazing , sum of £331,000,000, at a cost to /themselves of only £60,000,000. What Mr. Caird set himself to do was to find a justification for what Mr. Gladston had designated “ the existing social order.” He will not contemplate the destruction of that order, and he accordingly set himself to manipulate his facts to suit its exigencies. In the process, the facts become meaningless, and the whole subject a mass of unintelligibility and confusion.

Our Hartingtons, onr Goschens, and our Cairds have yet many things to learn in respect of this land question. They have to learn that it is above everything else a people’s question, and not a mere affair of adjustment between landlords and tenants. They must recognise that tho State is the true landlord, and that whoever comes between the State and the actual cultivator is an interloper and a supernumerary. If Mr. Caird had started with the proposition that tho “ three-profits system ” is doomed to destruction, his facts would then have become luminous, and we should have gladly hailed him as a man of real “ light and leading ” in the working out of the most difficult social and

economic problem of the day. As it is, he has failed egregiously, notwithstanding the admiring approval of so many of our daily contemporaries. Like too many other public instructors, Mr. Caird does not so much lack “light and leading.” The land question cannot be solved without courage of the highest order, and that virtue was never scarcer than at present. — Weelely Dispatch.