LETTERS ON THE LAND QUESTION. 513 



It is not only a question of the townsman ; it is also a question of 

 co-operative and trade-union societies, who also would learn to 

 put their investments in land, perhaps producing for themselves, 

 and offering in many cases opportunities of country life to their 

 members who needed rest and change. Unless we persist in follies 

 upon follies in the shape of legislative interferences ; of expensive 

 machinery to provide the people with land machinery that will 

 defeat its own object, for it must be paid for out of the rates, and 

 will therefore increase the burdens on land ; of forced agricultural 

 agreements between landlord and tenant that tend to stereotype 

 all farms in their present size ; of State-hired allotments that, as 

 in the case of our benighted dealings with Ireland, must tend to 

 weaken the desire for ownership, the land of this country, now 

 thrown upon the market at prices so far below its real value, in- 

 dustriously acquired and held in firm, unalterable fee-simple, will 

 prove the greatest blessing to all classes of our working people. 

 All that is wanted is to keep land free free alike from Radical 

 messing and Tory messing, and leave it what it naturally is until 

 spoiled by that blessed politician whose eternal finger finds its way 

 into every pie the sweetest reward for a man's labor and the 

 most powerful incentive to undergo those labors. If you wish to 

 develop all the virile virtues of our English country folk, and to 

 place before them a worthy goal for their life-efforts, sweep away 

 every obstruction and make it easy for them to gain their own 

 home, held neither at the will of the land-owner nor of that worse 

 modern creation the changing majority inside Parliament. 



I notice that Mr. Spencer still allows himself to think of that 

 ogre, the land-owner, who might clear a district if so minded. 

 That is true ; but may I submit to him that it is equally true of a 

 majority, and in one sense more true ? A parliamentary majority 

 which once considered itself lord and master of the soil might 

 play any prank under high heaven that once occurred to it. It 

 would be quite likely to turn a perpetuity into a thirty years' ten- 

 ure, or a thirty years' tenure into a fifteen years' tenure, or to 

 revolutionize every home in England in deference to the last 

 notion that had got uppermost in its infallible head. Moreover, 

 it should be seen that once the spirit of individualism begins to 

 get hold of our people, the action of the landlord who cleared the 

 estate would serve to redouble the efforts of the people to become 

 absolute owners of their property. Unconsciously he would be 

 the instrument of a good greater than the harm he had caused. 

 We have not yet sufficiently profited by Mr. Spencer's teaching to 

 recognize the enormous stimulus for good which there is in every 

 form of evil when once we are fairly on the track of fighting it 

 with the true self-helpful remedies. "What delays and impedes 

 the human race is far less the evil that abounds than the false 



vol. xxxvi. 33 



