74 OUR ENGLISH LAND MUDDLE. 



" Now a further consideration has gone 

 to strengthen the views I then expressed. 

 At that time we were talking a great deal 

 of the case of the farmer who finds his 

 farm and the estate upon which his farm 

 is situated sold over his head. The new 

 owner may want the land for himself, and 

 the farmer has to go. That in our view is 

 a very real hardship. The man has com- 

 mitted no fault. He knows the land, and 

 can probably treat it better than any one 

 else, and yet he finds himself suddenly dis- 

 possessed in what must seem to him a very 

 arbitrary fashion indeed. We were strongly 

 of opinion that in all those cases the sitting 

 tenant ought to be given the utmost facilities 

 by the Government for acquiring the owner- 

 ship of his holding. You may say that 

 these are very rare cases, and can only 

 happen now and again. That is only partly 

 true, because, as we all know, at this moment 

 the tendency on the part of the landowners 

 to put their land in the market has become 

 very marked indeed, and I think we can 

 without very much ingenuity conjecture 



