386 BRITAIN FOR THE BRITON 



Land Tenures : Their Impoktance to the Nation. 



Few people realise the euormoiis importance of suiting land 

 tenures to the national life, nor do they realise how intimately 

 so apparently remote a question affects their own individual 

 entities. Without suitable land tenures the land will most 

 likely remain untilled and unproductive. If the land of a 

 civilised country remains unproductive, trouble and widespread 

 loss ensues, and every chapter of this and other cognate works, 

 shows how this loss runs along the highways and byways of life 

 and affects every person in that unfortunate country ; hence, 

 every individual is more or less affected by the system of land 

 tenures obtaining in his own country. 



You cannot make bread without flour, nor can you have 

 successful and progressive agriculture without suitable land 

 tenures. The thing is impossible. The British land tenures 

 are a jumble of incongruities — a relic of feudalism, slightly 

 tempered with pallid landlordism, tinkered by Cobden, patched 

 up by Manchester, and maintained in thek- naked uselessness by 

 the fatuous indifference, or, rather, the ignorance of the people. 

 They are as useless to the British agriculturists as the flour 

 would be to the baker without the oven ; and until the common- 

 sense of the country is aroused to the necessities of the case, 

 and a reasonable up-to-date system of working the land industry 

 be demanded and set up as a permanent national institution, 

 the troubles of the people, and that widespread destitution and 

 unemployment which result from neglected agriculture, will, 

 and must continue. Education in this matter will alone save the 

 position, and it is to be earnestly hoped that the Press and other 

 instructors will never cease in their efforts till every man in the 

 country realises that suitable land tenures, whereunder every 

 acre of available land in the country will be brought under 

 cultivation, and worked in the interests of, and for the good of 

 the people, will be established on a firm durable basis. 



The only remaining point that need be referred to here, and 

 one that should never be lost sight of for a single instant by 

 the people of this country, is that upon which most of the 

 questions considered in these pages revolve, namely — 



Free-trade : Its Fundamental Errors. 



The first fundamental error of the reformers of sixty years 

 ago was in detaching this country from among the congeries of 

 nations and setting it apart as an entity requiring a separate 



