550 KEPORX— 1887. 



depression ; it is tbe natural effect of natural causes — the subsidence of 

 the tidal wave of an abnormal activity. The country is not really poorer 

 because such land ceases to be prolific : its temporary fertility was de- 

 ceptive ; its owner is poorer only in the sense in which the owner of 

 exhausted minerals is poorer, — he has spent his soil, but he is economically 

 richer, because the undue prosperity has enabled him to derive for a time 

 a bigger return than the land really possessed, and could therefore have 

 yielded under normal conditions. 



Fourtli. — While it is veiy dangerous to pi'ognosticate in such times as 

 the present, there is, I think, a convergence of indication that the 

 relation of labour to land is likely to become more intimate and direct, 

 and the singular tendency which society is exhibiting to revert to 

 original types favours the suggestion. If only the richer, or rather 

 richest, land, favourably situated, will yield return for cultivation, it is 

 evident that such land will yield the greatest return to the most diligent 

 cultivator. If the great bulk of our land is, as Sir James Caird anti- 

 cipates, to become pasture, it is plain that a system of farming requiriug 

 little labour, much capital, and great technical skill and superintendence, 

 will gradually become, as of old, the function of the large proprietors ; 

 and we shall have a number of small proprietors tilling their own lands 

 near towns, or under conditions favourable to such culture, and the 

 larger proprietors occupying, as they did three centuries ago, large tracts 

 of jjasture and owning large herds and flocks, tended by a few skilful 

 wage-earners, whose exertioiis will probably be stimulated by some 

 participation in the profit. But such revolutions are always slow; and 

 in the complicated economy of modern life, with all its multitudinous 

 influences, the realisation of the most skilful prophecy is apt to be baffled 

 by causes which are beyond the ken even of vaticination : all that the 

 most qualified student can do is to denote the direction in which the 

 causes he can discern, if allowed free scope, necessarily tend. It is need- 

 less to point out here the extreme folly of those who contemplate the 

 beneficial' occupation of remote or sterile land by small cultivators ; 

 the inevitable result of that would be to extend unduly and artificially 

 the area of cultivation — to impoverish the cultivators of those miserable 

 holdings — and to make them the very means of raising the rents of the 

 more fertile land. 



Fifth. — The varied purposes and attractions of land give it now, as 

 they have always done, a high value relatively to other investments. It 

 is proved to be susceptible to the same economic and commercial princi- 

 ples as other commodities, and already there are indications that the low 

 value to which it has fallen is producing the usual effect of bringing 

 purchasers into the market who would never have been attracted before. 

 I am convinced that the cause why this tendency has been slow to 

 develop is the fear which prevails of future legislation inequitable to land. 

 This fear is, I think, unfounded ; the rowdy politicians of the platform 

 produce a noise which is only the reverberation of their own vociferation. 

 The real tendency of public opinion is decidedly in the opposite direction : 

 the impudent proposals of the early agricultural agitators, which tended 

 to impoverish landlords only that the big tenants might be enriched, 

 have sunk into merited oblivion.' The measures now before the public, 



' Exempli (iratla : Fixity of tenure, that the cxistiw/ tenants might become 

 copyholders and lairds; Judicial rents, that the existing tenants might be inde- 



