A FULT. REWARD FOR THE TILLER. 375 



to do anything else but what he actually did, that is, take 

 all that was possible out of his life tenancy for the benefit 

 of his daughters, who were naturally nearer to his heart 

 than his heir-in-tail, and leave the estate to take care of 

 itself. A considerable estate in Sussex, now highly de- 

 veloped, was during the life of its last owner left with all 

 its splendid opportunities for improvement unused — it is 

 now a popular seaside place — avowedly because the owner 

 preferred, as his agent owned to me, to take all revenue 

 accruing out of it for himself. Whatever he might have 

 laid out in improvements would have come out of his purse, 

 to enrich his heir. These cases are not singular or excep- 

 tional. Our land system distinctly invites landowners to 

 be bad managers of their estates. We could not — except 

 in a case of extreme emergency, such as is not likely to 

 occur — dispossess such owners. But we have the right, 

 and one would think also the duty, as a Nation to see that, 

 once the estates are entrusted to such men's keeping under 

 protecting laws of the land, the interest of the estate and 

 of the Nation is not neglected so as to condemn us, when 

 the emergency comes, to meatless days and bread rations, 

 if not worse. That will cost less than the bonus that we 

 are asked to pay on tariff-protected corn. 



There are other points on which our land system affects 

 us prejudicially — in a way to react seriously, among other 

 things, upon our production of food. It has made dealing 

 in land needlessly troublesome and costly. It helps to 

 leave our rural labourers houseless. It renders access to 

 the land difficult for small folk, whom it is a gross mistake 

 to suppose to be indifferent to the acquisition of agricultural 

 holdings — as Mr. Prothero's experiment on the Duke of 

 Bedford's Maulden estate has proved. It is the barriers 

 which our land system has erected and which interested 

 parties have studiously strengthened, which keep them off. 

 Indeed the feeling of dissatisfaction with this anachronistic 

 relic of old times — which was serviceable, like a boy's frock 

 to a child, in the Nation's infancy, but which has long 

 since been outgrown — has during late years spread far and 

 wide. 



