466 History of the English Landed Interest. 



improvements liad been taken unfair advantage of at the 

 termination of tlie agreement. In these later times of mineral 

 and other artificial manuring, expensive drainage operations, 

 and high farming, a one-sided yearly agreement might work 

 serious havoc with a steady tenant's hard-earned savings, and 

 a quarrel with his landlord over the game or some other trivial 

 circumstance, might sever him for ever from the just fruits 

 of a capital almost entirely buried in the soil. The hai^dships 

 of all this were not so palpable to outsiders as they were after 

 that wonderful run of agricultural prosperity which set in 

 from 1850 and lasted twenty years. Thus when in 184:5 

 Lord Portman attempted to obtain from Parliament a legal 

 recognition of the farmer's claims to unexhausted improve- 

 ments the time was not ripe and the laudable effort was un- 

 successful. But when competition for vacant farms once 

 more brought into existence the conditions of Ricardo's theory 

 of rent ; when land again appeared to become the monopoly 

 of its proprietor, that Adam Smith had imagined it to be, 

 and when landlords could afford to be arbitrary if so inclined, 

 the occasion which we have maintained alone justifies the 

 legislature to interfere with freedom of contract arose. The 

 flow of public wealth was capable of being obstructed by 

 the want of confidence engendered in the minds of farmers 

 by the loss of their profits on improvements. So just thirty 

 years after Lord Portman's futile attempt the Government 

 took the matter in hand, and first by introducing the optional 

 Act of 1875 cautioned the landlords against the practice of 

 withholding their off-going tenants' just dues, and afterwards 

 by the compulsory statute of 1883 further admonished them 

 that their powers in this direction were henceforth limited. 



The motives and actions of statesmen are not always so just 

 and their interference with private interests is sometimes 

 based on less sound principles than in the example above. 

 For instance, at times we find the Executive asserting this 

 prerogative of interference under conditions which strongly 

 savour of class favouritism, at others it is hard to see where 

 an}'- public benefit could be derived from its intervention, 

 though that may have been its ostensible object in acting. 



