270 BEITAIN FOn THE DRITON 



Now, what is required here, so that every acre could be 

 utilised to the fullest possible cxteut, is that these mighty 

 tracts of souie of the uiost fertile laud iu the world should be 

 owned literally by millions of occupying proprietors who would 

 work their very lives into the furrows of their fields, rather than 

 they should remain in the keeping of a handful of meu who, as 

 history teaches us, are incapable of converting the tremendous 

 potentialities of agriculture into a mighty, living, moving force. 



Landowners Weighed and Found Wanting 



British landowners might retort, " Abolish Free-trade, give 

 British agriculture the same chance it has on the Continent, 

 and it will soon flourisli again," but history refutes such a 

 statement. The fact is, British agriculture never has flourished. 

 Under the old Corn Laws it had its ups and downs, which is 

 the utmost that can be said for it. With corn at 606\ a quarter 

 and over, it paid farmers to grow wheat, but with low prices 

 they were rained. A few prosperous "farmers' years" and 

 landlords put up rents, and so the farmer was compelled to 

 make his profit out of a sorely stricken, half-starving people on 

 the one hand, or be ruined by reasonably low prices for his 

 produce on the other. 



The landlord was the dominant factor in those days, and 

 the history of the period covering the Napoleonic Wars, up to 

 the repeal of the Corn Laws, shows how he exercised his great 

 powers. Abolish Free-trade, put British agriculture in precisely 

 the same position it enjoys in every State in Europe — save 

 only ivitli the single exeeption of Land Tenures — and it will fail 

 in the future as it has iu the past, for the simple reason that 

 insecurity of tenure would bar its success. If the law permits 

 a man to make two pounds where he has been making one, the 

 landlord would as surely put up his rents and make his extra 

 pound to-day as he did in the years that are past, and this 

 single fact would prove fatal to British agriculture. 



Even Fixed Eents unsuitable 



Perpetual fixed rents might help the situation to some 

 extent, but to this system there are considerable objections. 

 The landlord, in the first place, could hardly look for a scale of 

 rents which must obviously be based upon present rental values 

 (and they are low enough in all conscience) that would yield a 

 fair return on his patrimony, and this very naturally would not 

 satisfy him. The tenant would still be — a tenant, and in this fact 

 lies the root of the evil. No man who has a perpetual tenancy 



