Chapter IX 

 SECURITY FOR OUTLAY 



The Bible promise to the just is : " Thou shalt eat the labour ot 

 thy hands ; ah, well is thee, and happy shalt thou be." 



However, the standing complaint levelled against our land system 

 — testified, quite recently, by the evidence of farmer witnesses 

 before the Royal Commission — is that our cultivators, no matter 

 whether their holdings be large or small, do not enjoy that promised 

 blessing. The more we insist upon tenant holdings for our small 

 cultivators, the more attention will be due to this question, as 

 affecting their class, as well as that of larger farmers. 



The general complaint recorded about insecurity of tenure has 

 received a telling confirmation by the notices sent out by the Board 

 of Agriculture to the pioneers of small holdings husbandry, to whom 

 holdings were let before the War, that they must now either pay a 

 higher rent than that bargained for or give up their holdings, no 

 matter what labour or money they may have put into them. That 

 certainly is not an encouragement to good farming, and the small 

 holdings movement, so threatened at what still is only its start, 

 is not likely, with such a sword of Damocles hanging over it, to 

 produce the effects hoped for from it. Caveat conductor ! 



The admitted interest of the nation is that the " labour of the 

 cultivator's ' hands ' " put into the land should be ample, in 

 order that there may be also ample production, plenty of food 

 for the people, or else a heavy yield of saleable produce wherewith 

 to purchase food. But how can farmers or small cultivators be 

 expected to put either labour or money — the one is as necessary 

 as the other — into their land, if they cannot make sure of a certain 

 and full return ? We are, in truth, urging them to use their land 

 at the very time that we rigidly tie up their hands, so as necessarily 

 to produce inaction. 



But why is it that our cultivators cannot be sure that they will 

 reap all that they have sown ? Simply because, in the first place, 

 they are, as tenants, not free to cultivate as they please, being tied 

 down by covenants ; in the second, because under the conditions 

 imposed by others they are subject to a termination of their lease 

 — by sale — long before their economic sowing may have borne fruit 



