were put much more frequently than at present. In the last days of the
first Gladstone Administration and the earliest of the second Government
of Mr. Disraeli, Liberals were looking for other worlds to conquer; and
many of them, not venturing upon such bold courses on the land question
as have since been adopted by even moderate politicians, fastened their
attention upon the waste lands and the game laws. No great results came
from the movement; other and more striking questions forced themselves
to the front; and we are almost as far from a legislative settlement of
the two just mentioned as in the days of a more restricted suffrage.
This is the more surprising because the points named are of practical
importance to the agricultural labourer, and the agricultural labourer
now holds the balance of political power. But it is not likely that this
state of quietude upon two such burning topics will long continue, for
the country voter is certain soon to profit by the example of his
brethren in the towns, and to demand that his representatives shall
attend to those concerns immediately affecting his interests.
And first as to the question of waste lands. Town-bred theorists who
have never walked over a mile of moorland are apt sometimes to talk as
if all the uncultivated land in the country was in that condition
because of the wicked will of those who own it, and to argue that, if
only an Act of Parliament could be secured, the waste lands would
blossom like the rose. They have the same touching faith in the efficacy
of legislation as had Lord Palmerston when he put aside some difficulty
with the exclamation, "Give me an Act of Parliament, and the thing will
be done." But facts are often too strong for legislation, however well
intentioned and skilfully devised, and those about much of our waste
land come within the list.
A large portion of uncultivated land is mountain and moor, the greater
part of which it would be impossible to make productive at any price,
and the remainder could not be turned to account under a sum which would
never make a profitable return. Those who think it an easy matter to
cultivate waste land should visit that portion of Dartmoor which is
dominated by the convict establishment. There they would see many an
acre reclaimed, but, if they were told the cost in money and labour,
they would be convinced that, were it not for penal purposes, both money
and labour might be put to better use elsewhere. And if it be argued
that the State should step in and advance all that is required to
cultivate such waste as can by any possibility be brought under the
plough, it must be asked why the taxpayer (for in this connection the
State and the taxpayer are one and the same) should add to his burdens
for so small a return.
But there is, without doubt, a large amount of land in this country
which now produces nothing, and which could be made to produce a deal.
That which is absorbed by huge private parks, scattered up and down the
kingdom, forms a great portion of this; and though, for reasons which
are mainly sentimental, one would not wish to see all such private parks
turned into sheep-walks or turnip-fields, there is the consideration
that property--and peculiarly property in land--has its duties as well
as its rights, and that those who wish to derive pleasure from the
contemplation of large spaces of cultivable but not cultivated land, and
in this way prevent such from being of any direct value to the
community, ought to pay for the privilege. The rating of property of
this kind at the present moment is ridiculously low; it should at least
be made as high as if the land were devoted to some distinctly useful
end.
As with parks, so with sporting lands. The rating of the latter is
utterly inadequate; and although it maybe true that much of the land,
especially in England, devoted to sporting purposes, is of little value
for anything else, it is equally true that a great deal of it,
particularly in Scotland, is fit for cultivation, and that tenants have
been cleared from it to make room for deer and grouse. In all cases
where the land would have value if cultivated, the owner ought to be
made pay as if that value were obtained, seeing that for his own
pleasure he is depriving the community of the chance of obtaining
increased food. It would be too drastic a measure to adopt the Chinese
method of hanging proprietors who did not till cultivable land; but many
a landowner, if made to feel his duty through his pocket, would do that
duty rather than pay.
From the question of sporting lands to that of the game laws is a very
short step. It may be that we have heard less of the latter during the
last few years, because the Hares and Rabbits Act, passed by the second
Gladstone Government in the first flush of its power, has done much to
reconcile the tenant-farmers to the present state of things, by removing
the grievance they most keenly felt.
The Act referred to provides (to quote Mr. Sydney Buxton's summary)
"that every occupier of land shall have an inalienable right to kill the
ground game (hares and rabbits) concurrently with any other person who
may be entitled to kill it on the same land; that the ground game may
only be killed by the occupier himself or by persons duly authorized by
him in writing; that the use of firearms is confined to himself and one
other, and they may only be used during the day; that those authorized
to kill the game in other ways (poison and traps, except in
rabbit-holes, are prohibited) must be resident members of his household,
persons in his ordinary service, and any one other person whom he
employs for reward to kill the game; that tenants on lease do not come
under the provisions of the Act until the termination of their lease."
This was such a concession to the tenant-farmers that it is little
wonder that those of them who had groaned under the ground game should
have felt generally satisfied with it; and although a wail has been
going up from certain sportsmen that if the Act be not speedily amended
the hare will become as extinct as the mastodon, it is not the least
likely to be altered in the direction they wish. If amended at all, it
will be so as to bring winged game within its provisions.
No one acquainted with rural life can doubt that the game laws, as at
present administered, are a fruitful source of demoralization and crime.
They demoralize all round, for they pollute the seat of justice by
allowing such game preservers as are county magistrates to wreak
vengeance upon all who transgress upon their pleasures; they lower the
moral standard of the gamekeepers, whose miserable employment turns them
into spies of a peculiarly unpleasing description; they make the rural
police a standing army for the preservation of game; and they consign to
gaol many a man who, but for these laws, would be honest and free.
Such as would see justice most openly travestied should sit in a country
police court and hear game cases tried. Let them notice the ostentatious
fashion in which some magistrate, while a summons in which his game is
concerned is being heard, will (as is carefully noted in the local
papers) "withdraw from the bench" by taking his chair a foot back from
his fellows and friends. Let them hear evidence upon which no man
charged with any other offence would ever be convicted. Let them see the
vindictive sentences that are passed. And then let them go home and
think over the fashion in which that which is nicknamed "justice" is
administered to any man unlucky enough to have offended a gamekeeper or
a policeman, and to be charged as a poacher.
In the good old hanging days, a man was sentenced to death in a western
county for sheep-stealing. The sentence was the usual one, but other
sheep-stealers had been let off the capital penalty for so many years
that it was greatly to the astonishment of the district that this one
was hanged. Then people began to think, and, remembering that he had the
reputation of being a clever poacher, they saw that he had been paid off
for the new and the old. It is much the same in the rural districts
to-day. In game cases the presumption of the English law courts that a
man shall be held to be innocent until he is proved guilty is
systematically reversed. The unsupported word of a gamekeeper is
considered to be worth that of half-a-dozen ordinary men; and it is not
uncommon for a defendant convicted of some offence, totally unconnected
with the game laws, to have his penalty increased because the
superintendent of police has whispered to the justices' clerk, and the
clerk to the magistrates, the fatal word "poacher." Those who live in a
town can scarcely conceive the open fashion in which justice is degraded
by the county magistrates when the game is in question. But, if any
would bring it home to themselves--and the strongest words are too faint
to picture the reality--let them go to some rural court, where the
justices do not imagine that the light of public opinion can be brought
to bear upon them, and see how poachers are tried.
If it were only because of the widespread demoralization they cause, the
game laws ought to be repealed. They are avowedly kept up for the
benefit of the class which does little or no work, and they fill the
prisons at our expense to preserve a sport in which we have no share and
no wish to share. And, if they are to be retained on the statute book at
all, their administration should, at the very least, be taken from those
who are practically prosecutor, jury, and judge in one, and placed in
impartial hands.
XIX.--OUGHT LEASEHOLDS TO BE ENFRANCHISED?
The proposal to enfranchise leaseholds--that is, to enable a
leaseholder, upon paying a fair price, to claim that his tenure be
turned into freehold--is a comparatively new one in the field of
practical politics; but it has come to the front so rapidly that it is
already far nearer solution than others which have agitated the public
mind for many years. The grievance had for a long time been felt, and in
some parts of the kingdom sorely felt; but a ready remedy had not
suggested itself, and the subject slept.
The grievance is this--that the present system of leases for lives or
for a term of years causes frequent loss to the leaseholder and much
injury to the community, benefiting only the owner of the soil. The
remedy would be to empower a leaseholder to demand from the ground
landlord that the land shall be transferred to him upon payment of its
fair value, as appraised by some public tribunal.
And first as to the results which flow from the present state of things.
These vary with the circumstances, and some of the circumstances demand
study. Leases, broadly speaking, are of two kinds--those which are
granted on lives and those which are for a specified term of years. Of
the two, the former are the more objectionable, as they frequently work
gross injustice. A lease is granted which shall expire at the death of
the third of three persons named in the deed. Under that lease a man
builds a house; the first life expires, and the leaseholder has to pay a
fine--or, as it is called, a heriot--of a specified sum; the second
dies, and another fine has to be paid; and when the third passes away,
the property and all upon it revert to the landlord. Is it not easy to
see that no particular chapter of accidents is required to terminate any
three given lives within a comparatively short period, while, if an
epidemic occurred, ground landlords everywhere would reap a rich harvest
from the ready falling in of leases for lives?
One instance out of thousands may be quoted of how the system works. "A
piece of land which let for L2 an acre as an agricultural rent was let
for building purposes at L9 an acre, and divided into eleven plots. On
one of these a poor man built a cottage, at a cost of L60, on a ground
rent of 16s. 6d. The term was for three lives and one in reversion. The
charge for the lease was L5. On the expiration of each of the three
lives L1 was payable as a fine or heriot, and L10 was to be paid on
nominating the life in reversion. All the four lives expired in
twenty-eight years. The landlord thereupon took possession of the house.
He had thus received in twenty-eight years, besides the annual ground
rent, the following sums:--L5 for the lease, L10 for nomination of life
in reversion, L3 as heriot on the expiration of the three lives--in all
L18; and, in addition, the house built at the expense of the victim,
which he sold for L58."
The reply may be made, "But, granting that leases for lives often have
cruel results, is not the remedy in the hands of those who want leases?
Why do they take those for lives?" For this reason--that in some parts
of the country it is the only way by which a building plot can be
obtained, and that, as long as the possibility of securing so good a
bargain is legalized, so long will the more unscrupulous among the
landlords force an intending tenant to accept that or nothing.
Leases for long terms of years do not as readily lend themselves to the
chance of legal robbery, but they have their own ill effects. Houses are
built in flimsy fashion upon the express idea that they are intended to
last only the specified term; and during the expiring years of the
lease, repairs are grudged, and the dwellings rendered unhealthy to the
occupier and unsafe to the passers-by. If a man has a house which is
erected upon leasehold land, and therein builds up, by his own skill
and industry, a good business, he is absolutely at the mercy of the
ground landlord when the lease expires. The rent is raised because of
the success his own faculties have secured, onerous conditions in the
way of repairs are imposed, and what can he do? "If you don't like it,
you can leave it," is the landlord's reply; but there is many a business
which does not bear transplanting, and if the tenant be on a large
estate it might happen that, if he did not accede to the owner's terms,
he would have to move to a far-distant part of the town, or even--as at
Devonport and Huddersfield among other places--out of the town
altogether, and that would mean ruin. And thus he is practically
compelled to struggle on in order to increase the wealth of the
landlord, who has done nothing, at the expense of himself, who has done
all.
And this is not always the worst, for in many cases landlords for
various reasons will not renew at any price, and the tenant has perforce
to go the moment his lease expires. A certain Whig duke--and, of course,
a zealous defender of "the rights of property"--conceived the idea, upon
coming into his estates some years ago, that a village stood too near
his park gates. Not brooking that herdsmen and traders should stand
between the wind and his nobility, he directed that, as leases fell in,
the tenants should be cleared out, graciously, however, offering them
other plots some three miles away. And the tenants had to leave the
homes in which they had been born and where their parents had lived
before them, and to see them tumble down in utter ruin, in order that so
mighty a person as a duke should not be shocked by the sight of the
common herd. It was one of the thousand cases in life where a man had a
right to do that which it was not right for him to perform.
Another fashion in which grievous injustice to the leaseholder can be
done is frequently illustrated. It has happened, and happened very
recently, that a ground landlord has granted leases for a term of years;
that, upon the strength of these agreements, houses have been built; and
that upon the landlord's decease it has been discovered by some skilful
lawyer that the dead man had had no power, under an entail or
settlement, to grant such leases; whereupon the heir has invoked the law
to cancel the whole, and has seized everything upon the land. This is
legal, but is it commonly honest?
In other ways the leasehold system is an injury not only to individuals
but to the community. A west country town, where all the land is held by
one man, has been crippled in every attempt to expand and improve by the
impossibility of obtaining a freehold plot. What person in his senses
would erect a substantial factory or a large concern of any kind upon a
comparatively short lease? Men embark upon such enterprises in order
that, as year follows year, their property may become more valuable, not
that year by year it may become less so by the growing nearness of the
time when it will pass to the landlord, who has never contributed a
penny or a thought to the success of the concern, the building
containing which, at the expiration of the lease, he can call his own.
For all these unfairnesses to individuals, hindrances to trade, and
injuries to the community, is proposed the remedy stated--that a
leaseholder who has twenty (or, as some suggest, ten or fifteen) years
to run, shall be empowered to demand that his land be made freehold upon
the payment of its value, as assessed by some specified tribunal.
The first objection is that this would be an undue interference with
"the rights of property." But it has already been laid down by
Parliament that such "rights" can be set aside in the public interest
upon the payment of fair compensation; and what has been done in regard
to the making of railways can be done respecting the building or the
preserving of houses. The existing system is an injury to the community;
and as the price to be paid for its abolition, whether wholly or in
part, would be assessed by a tribunal constituted by Parliament, the
landlords would have no more reason to complain than they now have when
compelled to sell a portion of their property to a railway company.
The next plea is that it would interfere with "freedom of contract."
Upon the general question of what that freedom is, how far it now
exists, and in how large a degree the State has a right to interfere
with it, one need not speak, for in this matter of leases Parliament
has already stepped in to "interfere with freedom of contract." It
having been found that some landlords were accustomed to insert in
leases oppressive provisions for forfeiture in certain conditions, the
Legislature empowered the courts to lift from the leaseholders covenants
which unduly burdened them. And if a precedent is asked for the
particular remedy proposed, the Acts enabling any copyholder to
enfranchise his holding should be consulted.
If it be said that, should such a power be granted by law, no one
possessing land would let on a long lease, it may be answered that this
would be no great evil, seeing how the leasehold system has worked. But
as landowners will want in the future as in the past to let or to sell,
and as it is not to be supposed that any man will take a lease of less
than twenty years and build upon the land, the owners will accommodate
themselves to circumstances, and dispose of their property as best they
can.
Owners in other countries do so, and why not here? Such a leasehold
system as that of England is practically unknown elsewhere. In France,
it is true, something of the kind exists, but we seek for it in vain in
Germany and Austria, in Russia and Switzerland, or in Spain and
Portugal; while in Italy, where no leases for over thirty years are
permitted, a tenant can convert his property into freehold by redeeming
the rent.
The supporters of leasehold enfranchisement, therefore, have on their
side not only the practical evils of the present system, but
parliamentary precedent and continental custom. These should suffice to
persuade all who study the matter that the time for a change has come,
and that the way in which that change is proposed to be effected is just
and equitable.
XX.--WHOSE SHOULD BE THE UNEARNED INCREMENT?
There is a school of politicians which reply to all such proposals as
have been sketched for practical land reform: "They do not go far
enough, for they would merely transfer the unearned increment from the
present freeholders to the present leaseholders, and we want it
transferred to the community." This "unearned increment" is a matter of
which we are likely to hear a deal in the immediate future, for since
John Mill stated the theory it has been much talked of, and to-day more
than ever. It is sometimes contended, in fact, that, supposing all the
projected reforms carried and in full and untrammeled action, "the
absorption of the unearned increment by private individuals would
perpetuate an evil which would swallow up whatever good those reforms
might have a tendency to bring about."
What then is the theory upon which so much may depend? It cannot be
better stated than in the words of Mill:--"Suppose that there is a kind
of income which constantly tends to increase, without any exertion or
sacrifice on the part of the owners: those owners constituting a class
in the community, whom the natural course of things progressively
enriches, consistently with complete passiveness on their own part. In
such a case it would be no violation of the principles on which private
property is grounded, if the State should appropriate this increase of
wealth, or part of it, as it arises. This would not properly be taking
anything from anybody; it would merely be applying an accession of
wealth, created by circumstances, to the benefit of society, instead of
allowing it to become an unearned appendage to the riches of a
particular class. Now this is actually the case with rent."
When Mill's "Principles of Political Economy" was published, this theory
of the State absorbing, in whole or in part, the "unearned increment" of
the land, was regarded by many as so utopian that it was put aside with
a scoff, and was thought to have been settled with a sneer. But it has
struck deep root into many a Radical mind, and those who believe in it
ask it to be shown how it is either dishonest as a theory or would be
impossible in practice.
There need be no attempt to do either, for Mill himself made an
important restriction in his definition of what should be done which
relieves it from the stigma of dishonesty or impracticability. He
believed that "it would be no violation of the principles on which
private property is grounded, if the State should appropriate this
increase of wealth, _or part of it_, as it arises." It may be agreed
that the State could fairly appropriate a part of this increment, and
this might be done by means of taxation. But that is a very different
matter from taking the whole.
One who argues in favour of the latter plan, submits this
contention:--"The area of a county, for purposes of illustration, may be
taken as a fixed quantity. Now, the demand for land will increase, and
as a corollary the price of land will rise, exactly in proportion to the
increase of population. This additional value is not brought about by
either independent industry, ingenuity, or the outlay of capital on the
part of any private individual: it is a growth entirely due to the
increase of the community: it is of enormous value, is extracted from
the dire necessities of the whole population, and goes into the pockets
of private individuals who have never done anything to create it."
But does the illustration hold good whether applied to such a limited
area as a county or to the country at large? It is not the case that the
demand for land increases and its price rises exactly in proportion to
population; and it is as little the case that its increased value, if
any, is "extracted from the dire necessities of the whole population."
For while the number of our inhabitants is increasing, the value of such
land as ministers directly to their wants in the provision of food and
clothing is decreasing. If all the bread that is eaten, beef that is
killed, and wool that is worn, were raised within these shores, there
would be a semblance of truth in the illustration; but we have left the
days when we lived on our own produce far behind, and the British farmer
would only be too happy if the picture thus presented were even
approximately like reality.