POSITION OF LANDOWNERS 397 



be contended that, either from poverty, from want of leisure, or 

 from disinclination, they have, as a class, ceased to bear the burden of 

 political life, or undergo the irksome drudgery of local administration. 

 Instances may be urged to prove that their local influence has 

 dwindled to a vanishing point. Where individual members of the 

 class retain it, they exercise it as men rather than as landowners. 

 Yet the weight which such men possess in their own districts 

 suggests that the leadership is still open to those who care to earn 

 it. Even in agricultural matters, the lead has to a great extent 

 passed out of their hands. Up to 1889, all the improvements in 

 English farming which at one time had gained for this country an 

 undisputed supremacy in the art and practice of agriculture were 

 effected by private capital, by individual enterprise, by personal 

 initiation. Landlords were the pioneers of improvement. Now the 

 State, for good or for evil, itself undertakes much of the control 

 and expenditure which formerly fell to the landowning class. This 

 transference of responsibility from private persons to the public 

 department of the Board of Agriculture has undoubtedly borne 

 excellent fruit. No one denies its advantages. That is not the 

 point. Its establishment may be construed as an important reversal 

 of an old ideal, an acknowledgment by landlords of their partial 

 defeat, a tacit admission of the fact that our existing land-system 

 can no longer supply from its own resources the capital and direction 

 required for the organisation of the industry. 1 Private property in 

 land is not so exceptional in its nature as to make its tenure 

 legally assailable. But the moral title-deeds by which some of it is 

 held are not, historically, without a flaw ; and no prescriptive rights, 

 according to the modern reading of an ancient maxim, can be 

 acquired against the People. The possession of land has for hun- 

 dreds of years been honourably associated with the unpaid discharge 

 of laborious public duties. If this association of service with 

 privilege should be in any way weakened, the danger arising from 

 the isolated position of landowners would be magnified, because 

 substance and colour would be given to the allegation that land- 

 owners are a parasitic growth which should be eradicated in the 

 interests of national progress. 



It is alleged that, as a class, landowners are more ready than they 

 once were to stand aloof from the strenuous political life of the 



1 See this danger pointed out in the author's article on " An Agricultural 

 Department" in the Nineteenth Century for April, 1889. 



