RESULTS IN DIFFERENT DISTRICTS 3 



there can be no reasonable doubt from the mass of 

 evidence before us that taking the country as a whole 

 the land is, in many districts, not farmed so well as 

 twenty years ago, that its productive power has been 

 lessened, and that, in some parts of the country, much 

 of the land has virtually passed out of cultivation 

 altogether, in the sense understood for a generation 

 back. 



One of the points which merits closest attention in 

 the results of the economic struggle we are tracing is, 

 that, while agriculturists have had an uphill fight 

 everywhere, which has left few unscathed, the results of 

 the struggle have been so disproportionate in different 

 parts of Great Britain. Taking rent as one of the 

 measures of depression, on the excellently managed 

 estates of the Duke of Richmond, there has been a fall 

 of 37 per cent, on the Goodwood property, while on his 

 Scotch property, in spite of heavy occasional remissions, 

 land values have not seriously fallen. Lord Aberdeen, 

 on his Haddo estate, stands where he did about ten 

 years ago, and his agent could relet farms at a lo per 

 cent, advance. Lord Wantage, in Northamptonshire, 

 gets only hal£ the net receipts he did ten years ago, 

 and Eut a third of what he got in 1875. The con- 

 trast is still more striking when we find on cold clay 

 land a Yorkshire farmer, near a moderately big town, 

 can keep going and pay a rent of 36s an acre, and all / 



the successive increases of local rating in addition, \ 



while on hundreds of farms, with a soil not wholly i 



dissimilar, in Essex, a rent of from los down to is J 



an acre has not meant a livelihood, within an hour by S 



rail of thQ largest concentrated population in the whole 

 world. 



The north, on the whole, has been and still is far 

 better off than the south. This may be roughly illus- 

 trated by the net rental of the agricultural portion of the 

 Crown lands. In the northern counties of England, 

 21,503 acres are let, a rent of ;^26,747, with only £470 of 

 remissions, and none of the land is in hand ; while in 

 the southern and midland counties ^^"8191 has to be 



