DECLINE OF LANDOWNING FARMERS 217 



were told twenty-five years ago that the best thing that they could 

 do was to buy their farms, and they did so, but they had not 

 enough cash, and they had to mortgage their farms. They have 

 gone to the wall worse by far than the common tenant farmers. 

 There are a good many of our old and most respected yeomen who 

 have disappeared within the last few years. I feel confident that they 

 will almost all of them go unless there is a change for the better." ^ 



Speaking of Suffolk, Mr. Everett of the commission said, " We 

 had a great many yeomen farmers and in the intense competition 

 for land in the good times, a great many men took that course of 

 making themselves, as they thought, independent ; they bought 

 land and mortgaged it, and I should think three-quarters of that 

 class of men are now stripped of every penny they had." ^ 



During the " good times " the farmers of Wiltshire saved 

 money and many of them were able to purchase farms, but as in 

 other places, they borrowed money and their investment proved 

 disastrous. One witness cited four instances within his own 

 knowledge of farmers who bought their farms about 1875. Of 

 these, two had come to grief and absconded, a third had lost his 

 farm, which was in the hands of the mortgagee, while the fourth 

 was still holding his land.^ 



In speaking of the condition of landowning farmers in general, 

 the final report of the royal commission states that "As a rule 

 their properties, whether inherited or purchased by the present 

 proprietors, are charged with mortgages, and the mortgagee makes 

 no remission of the interest due to him. In consequence of the 

 shrinkage in the value of land, the interest on the mortgage has* 

 become in many cases a burden which the owner has been unable 

 to bear, and frequently where the yeoman farmer has succeeded 

 in paying the interest due from him it has been a heavier rent 

 than he would have paid to a landlord." ^ 



In 1900 over twenty-one million (21,286,632) acres, or 86.1 

 per cent of all the land under crops and grasses in England, was 



1 Read, Parliamentary Papers, 1897, C.-8540, 113. 



2 Parliamentary Papers, 1897, C.-8540, 113. 



8 Raw, Parliamentary Papers, 1895, C.-7624, 28. 

 * Parliamentary Papers, 1897, C.-S540, 113. 



