WHAT MIGHT BE AND WHAT IS 263 



live upon the proceeds of his great estate, figuratively 

 he would starve. Yet, if that sound, heavy-land, 

 corn-growing property of 16,000 acres lay in Den- 

 mark, I am as certain as I can be of anything that 

 it would produce a good many thousands a year 

 in net profit, and that its present population would 

 be doubled or trebled. Why ? The reader of these 

 pages may be able to answer the question. 



Except in the fenlands it is the same story almost 

 everywhere in East Anglia, for such rises in rent as 

 there may have been in the last few years scarcely 

 counterbalance the ever-growing outgoings. I know 

 it myself. Personally I have to do with a small 

 property, most of which I cannot farm because it is 

 so scattered. 



This land is totally unencumbered, and some 

 thousands of pounds have been spent upon the build- 

 ings during the past five-and-twenty years. Yet the 

 net receipts steadily dwindle, in some years when the 

 repair- bill is heavy, almost to vanishing-point, and, the 

 alleged "boom" notwithstanding, to sell purely agri- 

 cultural East Anglian land in these markets is im- 

 practicable at a reasonable price. Whatever may be 

 the reason, if those acres of land were situate in Den- 

 mark their produce in cash would be very different. 

 As it is they now bring in about, if not less than, one- 

 third of what they did forty years ago. 



Considered as a financial investment, the holding 

 of landed property in many parts of England has 

 become but an empty farce ; from a business point of 

 view our system seems a failure. The land, at any 

 rate under the present methods of culture, carrying 

 its present fixed burdens and at the present prices 

 of produce, can rarely return three clear living profits 



