264 LAND REFORM 



men and others, who wished to create an estate and 

 were glad to tempt the poor farmer, often encumbered 

 with debts and mortgages incurred in the bringing up 

 of his family, to relieve himself of all present anxiety 

 by selling his land for a good round sum of ready 

 money." 



The writer laments the disappearance of these men, 

 "driven out by the baleful power of wealth," but adds 

 that in the remaining statesmen much of the old quality 

 remains. " The old stuff survives, and one wishes 

 that this conservative element of our race might return 

 to the land," etc.^ 



The provisions of the Land Purchase Bill would 

 prevent untoward transactions of this kind. The 

 object of the Bill is not only to get the soil of the 

 country as far as possible into the hands of occupying 

 owners, large and small, but to make these ownerships 

 permanent, and as they increase in number to become 

 an important, and ultimately the most important, factor 

 in our rural life.^ 



On this point — Free Trade in Land — it is impos- 

 sible to admire too much the foresight and patriotism 



^ "The Statesmen of West Cumberland" (G. W. Kitchin, the present 

 Dean of Durham), "Northern Counties Magazine," Vol. II, 1901. 



The following extract from a letter received 'by the present writer 

 some years ago from a firm of surveyors in Westmoreland, bears on this 

 point : " Economic law has swept away the aboriginal ' statesmen,' whose 

 acres have been absorbed by the wealthy. One Estate of ^15,000 a year 

 has been so aggregated by such purchases entirely within my own memory 

 in the last fifty years ; in many cases forty years' purchase, in some fifty, 

 having been paid. In fact, land got to be a luxury which only the wealthy 

 could afford to buy." 



* On the Continent many legal and other means exist for benefiting 

 occupying owners which would not apply to tenants. Land banks are 

 established which offer protection to the proprietors from professional 

 money-lenders. Country bankers help these men, whom they know, in 

 ways that they would not think of doing with yearly tenants who may be 

 here to-day and gone to-morrow. 



