258 LAND REFORM 



up for sale absolutely and must be sold. If there was 

 anything like compulsion in the Bill, he for one would 

 not support it. If they looked at the newspapers, they 

 could not fail to see that there was a great deal of 

 agricultural land coming into the market every day. 

 Seeing that the Bill in question was drawn on the 

 lines of the Irish Land Bill, and that the State could 

 borrow money more cheaply than the individual, he 

 thought that they ought not to throw cold water upon 

 an effort to make it easy for tenants to buy their hold- 

 ings. He believed the Bill was desirable for many 

 reasons, because anybody who happened to know the 

 price of a farm which was sold, and the rent which 

 was being paid by the tenant, would see that under 

 the Bill the tenant would generally be able to buy for 

 something like 25 per cent less as annuity than he 

 was paying as rent. That was an element that ought 

 not to be lost sight of. The objections which he had 

 heard to the Bill were two. One was that those per- 

 sons who had approved of the Bill had overlooked the 

 cost of repairs. He thought that it could not fail to be 

 known to every practical man in the room that when a 

 man did his own repairs he could do them very much 

 more to the occupier's personal liking and convenience. 

 Another objection was that it was absurd to imagine 

 that landowners got more than 2-| or 2f per cent on 

 their capital. He thought that that objection was 

 erroneous, for it was based on the estimated value of 

 land twenty-five years ago. In almost every instance 

 that he had seen of agricultural land coming into the 

 market, the land was being sold to-day to pay 4 per 

 cent, and if the tenant could borrow money at 2f per 

 cent he would be in a better position than before." 



Professor Long (British Dairy Farmers' Associa- 

 tion), in seconding the amendment, said : — 



" What did the Bill propose? It gave the option to 

 the tenant, which he could accept or refuse, of agree- 



