Land Problems and National Welfare 



social conditions of the country with many of 

 the intelligent artisans with whom I came in 

 contact ; and, though none of them had a 

 specific dislike for the individual landowner, I 

 found they were all very much against the 

 present system of landlordism, and felt it wrong 

 that so much of the land of England should 

 be in the hands of so few men. 



There are only about 5,000 large landowners 

 (of over 1,000 acres), and yet this handful of men 

 owns about one half the land of Great Britain ! 

 And although in official blue books about 

 1,000,000 landowners are recorded, the greater 

 part of these are men who own a town lot or 

 two, and so do not count as landowners in the 

 rural sense of the word. In Germany there are 

 5,000,000 landowners, and in France about the 

 same number. 



Taking present circumstances into considera- 

 tion, I am convinced that the only way in which 

 landowners can now maintain themselves as a 

 class is by actively identifying their interests 

 with those of the agricultural industry. From 

 this time forward landowners should sink their 

 own class interests for the welfare of the industry 

 — as many in fact do — so that Socialists and 

 extreme Radicals may be given no opportunity 

 of asserting that property owners are pursuing 

 a merely selfish policy. Landlords should so 

 manage their estates that politicians and the 



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