II 



A NEW LAND POLICY i 



PLEA FOR A REVOLUTION 



Lord Selborne, President of the Board of Agri- 

 culture, speaking at the first of a series of lectures 

 by Mr. Christopher Turnor, at the London School of 

 Economics, on " The Land and the Empire," said that 

 after the war the whole attitude of Parliament towards 

 agriculture would have to be changed. The land 

 question must be considered solely from the point of 

 view of the security of the nation and national defence. 

 In the course of his speech Lord Selborne said that 

 when the Anti-Corn Law League was a great political 

 institution the Tories, headed by Mr. Disraeli, pro- 

 phesied that Free Trade would be the ruin of agricul- 

 ture. Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright always denied that 

 statement. For more than a generation they were 

 absolutely right ; but it was no exaggeration to say 

 that in 1880 a catastrophe fell upon British agriculture. 

 From 1880 to 1900 was a time of dire distress for all 

 connected with the cultivation of the soil. Our political 

 economists had not studied that period carefully enough. 

 Thousands of farmers were absolutely ruined during it. 

 The services of the landowner during that period had 

 not been anything like properly acknowledged, because, 

 had it not been for the landowner, the agricultural de- 

 pression would have been greater still and many more 

 acres would have fallen out of cultivation. The landlord 



1 Times Report, March 11, 1916. 

 137 



