322 HISTORY OF AGRICULTURE 



rents, such as the tenants can easily pay. Also the landlord 

 can make large reductions of rent in years of exceptional 

 distress.^ Rents are generally collected three months after 

 they are due, a considerable concession ; and even then arrears 

 are numerous, for any reasonable excuse for being behind with 

 the rent is generously listened to. It is owing to forbearance 

 in this and other matters that the relations between landlord 

 and tenant are generally excellent. Where are the best farm 

 buildings, where the best cottages, where does the owner carry 

 on a home farm often for the assistance of the tenant by 

 letting him have the use of entire horses, well-bred bulls, and 

 rams, if not on the larger estates ? The restrictions in leases, 

 so much decried of late years, were nearly always in the 

 interest of good farming, and their abolition will lead to the 

 deterioration of many a holding. 



Bacon said, 'Where men of great wealth do stoop to 

 husbandry, it multiplieth riches exceedingly,' and wiser words 

 were never uttered. Yet these are the men who are singled 

 out for attack by agitators, who are only listened to because 

 the greater number of modern Englishmen are ignorant of the 

 land and everything connected with it. At a time when 

 rents have dwindled, in some cases almost to vanishing point, 

 taxation has increased, and confiscatory schemes and meddle- 

 some restrictions have frightened away capital from the land. 

 Many of the landlords of England would clearly gain by 

 casting off the burden of their heavily weighted property, but 

 they nearly all stick nobly to their duty, and hope for that 

 restoration of confidence in the sanctity of property and of 

 respect for freedom of contract which would do so much 

 towards the rehabilitation of what is still the greatest and most 

 important industry in the country. 



^ Shaw Lefevre, Agrarian Tenures, p. 19. 



