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justification for what is called " the compensation for disturb- 

 ance " section of the Agriculture Act just passed. These 

 provisions, however, w T ill certainly not tend to arrest the 

 process of selling land. For the reasons I have given very 

 few agricultural landowners will henceforth be able to afford 

 or, if they can afford, will care any longer to own land which 

 they do not farm themselves. 



The future of English agriculture I believe rests with the 

 men w T ho, whether on a small, moderate, or large scale, farm 

 the land which they themselves own, and I believe that in thq 

 long run that is a surer economic basis for agriculture than 

 the unbusinesslike partnership which I have endeavoured to 

 describe. The returns from good farming will enable the 

 owner-occupier to do justice to his land both as owner and 

 as occupier, and to receive a reasonable commercial return for 

 his capital; but to do this the farming must be good farming. 

 The whole standard of farming throughout England must be 

 lifted on to a higher plane than that on which it stands to-day. 

 Not only bad, but indifferent, farming must disappear. The 

 owner-occupier must educate his son so that he will know how 

 to manage and farm his land properly and get the most out of it. 

 His life's work will bring him into closer contact than ever 

 with the agricultural labourer, and he will more and more 

 appreciate the fact that that labourer, always really a skilled 

 man, must necessarily become more skilled owing to the 

 increasing use of machinery, and he will understand that low 

 wages are an economic blunder as well as a social misfortune. 

 He must, however, as firmly as courteously exact a full, 

 honest day's labour for those wages, or he will not be able to 

 live or give employment to anyone. The existence of 

 occupying ownerships of every size throughout the length and 

 breadth of England alongside the corresponding tenancies, 

 which will necessarily long persist, will provide the most 

 capable of those labourers with exactly that ladder of possible 

 advancement which they have so much needed. 



But there will always be owner-occupiers who are not able 

 to devote the whole of their own time to their land, and those 

 men will require the assistance of managers or bailiffs. It 

 was one of the tragedies of the bad times in the 'eighties and 

 'nineties of the last century that, when landowners had land 

 thrown on their hands which they had themselves to farm, 

 they did not know where to look for a competent manager or 

 bailiff, and they did not know how to pay a competent man 



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