24. 



hausted improvemeots. Ho is an exceptionally lucky man if Lc 

 does not lose his capital as well as his rent. But what is he to 

 do? If he does not let or cultivate his glebe he must cithei- 

 i-esign or starve. In some cases an incumbent was saved from 

 this last fate by a subscription among his neighbours. But 

 such generous interpositions are necessarily rare. 



There is every reason to believe that the year 1S8G will prove 

 the most disastrous of the series of ruinous seasons. The country 

 has hot yet appreciated the full extent of the mischief of the 

 pi'olonged agricultural depression. Many farmers are holding 

 on in hope of a turn, with exhausted capital, employing less and 

 less labour, unable to prevent their land from becoming year by 

 year more foul and poverty-stricken. If the turning-point is 

 not yet reached, if farmers have not yet touched bottom, more 

 and more land will be thrown up, or heavier reductions of rent 

 will be required. Mr. C. S. Eead's gloomy prognostication seems 

 entirely warranted by facts, that if tenant-farmers continue to 

 lose at the rate at which they have recently lost, there will not 

 in the next ten years be one tenant-farmer left in the country. 

 The bare existence of most of the glebeowners is bound up with 

 the revived prosperity of tenant-farmers. 



Sometimes the income of livings has been so reduced that it 

 has entirely disappeared ; it is swallowed up by charges for the 

 repayment of loans and other outgoings. Sometimes rents have 

 altogether ceased because incumbents have allowed their glebes 

 to fall out of cultivation sooner than face the loss which they 

 would inevitably incur as farmers. In two cases even the land 

 itself has gone, and the benefice has been wholly disendowed. 

 In Bedfordshire a land improvement company was compelled 

 to foreclose its mortgage and sell the glebe in order to recover 

 its money. Similarly in Cambridgeshire the glebes of the 

 benefice were charged with a loan advanced for drainage and 

 farm buildings. Eents fell ; arrears of the annual payments 

 accumulated ; finally, the company, or its assignee, sold the 

 land in order to repay its loan. At this moment on a 

 glebe in Lincolnshire a similar crisis is approaching. The 

 glebe consists of 374 acres. The old rental was 080Z. It is 

 subject to a charge of 223/. to a land improvement company. 

 The land is unlet ; all the payments are in arrear ; and there is, 

 ajiparently, no alternative but the sale of the whole or part of 

 the glebe. Under suCiJ circumstances it is not surprising that 

 in many parishes it is difficult to provide for the spiritual needs 

 of the people, or that many glebeowners do not obtain bread 

 and cheese from their benefices, or that the description given in 

 my first letter holds good in its entirety of some clerical 

 landlords. All that was said respecting the almost absolute 

 charges which fall upon clerical titheowncrs applies with equal 

 force to glebeowners. They are obliged to occupy houses built 



