10 OUR ENGLISH LAND MUDDLE. 



the social questions which are interlinked with 

 landowning. He has been brought up to love 

 landlords or to hate them. The stranger can 

 look on without these prejudices ; and if he is 

 willing to search out the facts, as far as he can, 

 with industry, and consider them with fairness, 

 he may perhaps offer criticisms of some value. 



The proviso as to searching out facts would 

 seem to be supererogatory. That surely is a 

 necessary condition of any inquiry. But not 

 so in dealing with the question of the land. 

 That pontifical instinct regarding the land to 

 which I have already referred has no narrow 

 limits set to the range of its infallible decrees 

 by local boundaries. I have known an Aus- 

 tralian who had discovered the whole secret of 

 dealing with the land problem in England on a 

 journey from Southampton to Waterloo. It 

 was — I give practically his complete scheme — 

 " Sweep away those absurd hedges and ditches, 

 plot the land out into fields with a 300 acres 

 minimum, introduce up-to-date machinery, and 

 put a decent tariff on foreign agricultural prod- 

 ucts." If it were only as easy as all that ! 



But— I must rush the fence and get over this 



