532 History of the English Landed Interest. 



bined undertaking, but on closer scrutiny this is not so. Tlie 

 landlord stakes his capital on the ingenuity and industry of 

 his tenant, and in the event of failure, has to make good the 

 deficiency. The farmer, whom we have shown to have been 

 chary of laying out capital when a tenth of his increased profits 

 could be claimed by the titheowner, would be much more so, 

 when one-half is thus absorbed by the landlord. We need not 

 therefore be surprised to learn that history records nothing 

 but failure whenever it affords us glimpses of the metayer 

 system. 



For these reasons this economy has never found favour in 

 England, but the principle of lowering the rent with the 

 decrease of the occupier's ability to pay, and raising it 

 when the reverse circumstance occurs, has been attempted 

 again and again. In the days when Mr. Bacon wrote his 

 Treatifie on NorfolJc Agriculture^ the fate of the Corn Laws 

 trembled in the balance, and in the uncertainty thus gener- 

 ated in the minds of corn husbandmen, a sliding-scale rent 

 was being advocated. More than one English landlord then 

 introduced, and now maintains, on his estate a partly fixed, 

 partly variable rent, which fluctuates according to the prices 

 of the corn markets. 



Such a policy, if extended so as to embrace a co-operative 

 system of labour remuneration, would put a stop to that miser- 

 able condition of affairs which allows any agitator fro"^ the 

 days of Ket to those of Arch to separate, and then dictate to, 

 the three classes connected with the soil. At present a hostile 

 group of farmers has adopted the programme of the three F.'s, 

 demanding the free sale of improvements. Land Courts for 

 adjusting fair rents, and increased fixity of tenure. A second 

 and more formidable combination has been formed out of the 

 ranks of labour. Harvest strikes are likely to become as 

 frequent as were incendiary fires during the earlier portion 

 of the century. The ploughman and the herd are constantly 

 glutted with the food of discontent by the agency of the 

 Radical van. The squire, the parson, and the farmer have 

 come to be regarded as oppressors instead of protectors, and 

 the old policy of divide et inipera is being practised with as 



