82 THE FUTURE OF OUR AGRICULTURE. 



best among their own class and go on farming badly, and 

 if our villages become more and more depleted of their 

 once ample population of sturdy, intelligent labourers, who 

 leave only the dregs of their class behind — we shall have to 

 bear in mind that they are but the wave-driven " bubbles " 

 of the Greek sage, not self-generated, but produced by a 

 force stronger than themselves, that is, by the system under 

 which they have been born, and have grown and worked, 

 and which has formed the habits which in their turn have 

 moulded their character. Our system, as Lord Beaconsfield 

 made it a boast on its behalf, used to yield " three livings." 

 In Mr. Prothero's words, that system " has broken down." ^ 

 The system practised elsewhere — since recently also in 

 Ireland — yields only one. But that one evidently is worth 

 more in practice now than our " three " of past times. It 

 takes, as Dr. Johnson ill-naturedly put it to Oliver Gold- 

 smith, " two hundred and forty pennies to make one sove- 

 reign." There is no one surely to deny that Ireland does 

 all the better now for having only one living to be yielded 

 by the land. The other two meant distress and want. 



The first supposed " living " of Lord Beaconsfield's boast 

 is, of course, that of the landlord, who owns the soil and 

 lets it cheaply — as Mr. A. D. TIall suggests, quoting some 

 Lothian authorities of the first order in support of his thesis, 

 in many enough cases too cheaply, so as to make things too 

 easy for the tenant who, under such circumstances, sees 

 no object in exerting himself while the " living " comes to 

 him of its own accord. Lord Townshend and Coke, when 

 raising their rents, drew a logical conclusion from that. 

 In a good-humoured way Mr. Hall takes landlords to task 

 for not " taking the lead " in a movement for agricultural 

 revival. Landlords have as a class, or let us rather say 

 as an institution, failings enough to answer for, in all con- 

 science ; and as an old Farmers' Alliance man, a member 

 whilom of the Executive of that body in my own county, 

 I am not likely to underrate their shortcomings. But how 

 can we expect them to " take the lead " when we are daily 

 encroaching upon that which alone enables them to take 

 1 " English Farming, Past and Present," p. 401. 



