UNDERSTATES TENANTS LOSSES 33 1 



position of farmers (and the Report of the Majority admits 

 that the accounts may be taken as representing " conditions 

 more favourable than the average,") they show that the 

 position at best is that, while some are making a little 

 more than nothing, some also are making less than nothing. 



The tables of the Memorandum purport to put the 

 position in a better light. 



But the comparatively favourable result thus set forth, 

 showing an average profit of 25-66 per cent, of the gross 

 rent over twenty years, is arrived at by including the four 

 years before 1879, which in most parts of the country were 

 years of extreme prosperity. Such a calculation is worthless 

 and misleading as a measure of the " effects of the depression 

 on the occupiers of land," and I am surprised that it should 

 have been put forward at all. 



This calculation is further vitiated by the fact that the 

 number of accounts for the years 1879 to 1881 inclusive, 

 when the most sweeping disasters occurred after the bad 

 seasons, is very small. If the number of accounts had 

 been as large as that for the period 1890-93, the amount of 

 losses which would probably have been recorded would have 

 swamped the accounts for the remainder of the period to 

 1894, and made the resulting average widely different from 

 what Mr Little has obtained. 



Taking the whole of the English tenant farmer accounts, 

 which are sufficiently precise, and taking the averages for 

 these accounts for all the periods they cover, it appears 

 that the average annual rents over the 38,941 acres involved 

 amount to ;^39o30, and the average net profit over the 

 whole of the accounts has amounted to only ;^852. The 

 ratio, therefore, of the average net profit over the whole 

 area is only 2' 15 per cent, of the average annual rent, 

 whereas the figures obtained from Mr Little's tables show 

 a ratio of 25"66 per cent. 



But if the calculation is confined to the last five years, 

 the tables of rents and profit and loss handed in by Mr 

 Lambert show a still more striking contradiction to the 

 figures arrived at by Mr Little's revision of the accounts.'^ 



Mr Pringle, in his report on the South Midlands, gives 

 the profit and loss account for eleven farms, over periods 

 ranging from four up to thirteen years, and covering an 



' Appendix IV to Final Report. 



