DISTRIBUTION OF LAND 159 



tress has gradually increased in intensity, till it has ruined 

 hundreds of landlords and tenant farmers. The stress of 

 foreign competition falls with increasing force upon rents 

 as the screw continues to tighten. With every turn of 

 the screw the pressure becomes more intolerable for those 

 landowners who are required to meet fixed charges from 

 dwindling revenues. Their sufierings are none the less 

 real because they are unexpressed. At a low estimate 

 land has depreciated in letting value 35 per cent. ; and a 

 competent authority, Lord Derby, has computed the aggre- 

 gate loss of the landlords at 300 millions sterling. The 

 sufferings of tenant farmers rise more rapidly to the 

 surface because the land is, as a rule, their only source of 

 income. The last report of the Royal Agricultural 

 Benevolent Institution affords significant proof of the 

 reality of the distress. Upwards of 400 farmers, who had 

 recently cultivated holdings varying from 100 to 1,000 

 acres, were applicants for relief. The same ruin now 

 attacks the agricultural labourer. As the area of corn 

 cultivation contracts, and land grows grass instead of 

 grain, the economical transition means the destitution, if 

 not the starvation, of thousands. 



The facts are patent, but they do not necessarily 

 result from any defect in the existing tenure or cultivar 

 tion of the land. Their causes must be sought elsewhere. 

 In the past, 'large landlords and large farmers won for 

 England, directly or indirectly, the first place both in 

 manufacture and agriculture. Nor is it only yesterday 

 that they did good service to the State. Our system 

 admits abuses and lacks elasticity ; but capitalist landlords 

 have proved the saviours, not the ruin, of farming. It is 

 this class which to-day has saved England from the horrors 

 which accompany distress in Ireland, and English land- 



