Charles Alan Fyffe

“ But there is another answer; and that is, Why must the agricultural labourer always have twelve hours' work a day when other working people have eight or ten? It is said, because the farmer cannot afford to pay him his wages for less than twelve hours' work. Why? We come back to the real mainspring of the whole concern: because the farmer has agreed to pay too much in rent. The reason why the labourer has to work twelve hours a day is because the farmer undertakes that the landlord shall have, say, thirty shillings an acre. ”

“ But there is nothing to prevent a landlord who is able to pay his compensation from either turning a tenant out at the expiry of his holding, or demanding an exorbitant rent for letting him stay on. To place agriculture on a fair footing it appears to me that the landlord must be treated as a sort of sleeping-partner, who has supplied part of the capital of the concern, and has, in addition, by putting the tenant in possession of the land, contributed something analogous to the goodwill of a business, or saved the tenant the trouble of emigrating. ”

“ If there are trustees with power of sale, the purchase-money goes to the trustees, and if there are no such trustees then the tenant has to go to the Court of Chancery to get them appointed. The Act of 1882 was in fact a piece of tinkering, intended to bolster up the existing system by mitigating some of its worst effects instead of reforming it altogether. Of course the object of Settlements is to keep family estates unbroken. That is, the land is treated as an instrument for maintaining family dignity, instead of being treated as a source of national comfort and well-being. ”

“ One difficulty at present is that you cannot get labourers to take lots. I am speaking of counties like Northamptonshire, where the labourer is at his worst. "How can a man cultivate a bit of land for himself," a Northamptonshire labourer said to me, in reply to an offer of some land, "when he has to be at his work at six in the morning and to stay till six at night?" The answer to this is, that in Yorkshire labourers do have land of their own, and do somehow manage to get it cultivated, whatever may be their hours of work with the farmers. ”

“ Of course there are some foolish people who tell the farmer that he ought to get a duty put upon foreign wheat to keep up prices. These are the worst enemies the farmer has; and the first thing that the agriculturist or the land-reformer ought to get into his head is that wheat will very possibly never again be grown in this country at a profit. A certain quantity of it must of course be grown for straw, and for supplying flour to the farm, but the money which the farmer is to make must be made out of something else. ”

“ Trades will of course gather together; but perhaps one cause of the huge contrast between town and country is that for a long time promoters of industry had a rooted and well-grounded idea that on the estates of ordinary large proprietors it would have been perfectly useless for them to try to gain a footing. At the present moment there is no doubt a large quantity of land in the market and sites can be bought cheap; but it is difficult to draw employers of labour away from the large towns, and to induce them to start their works in new places. ”

“ And here I leave the labourer, assuming that when he has got his holding he is not to be turned out without due reason. But the labourer is by no means the only person whom we have to do with in the village. On the contrary, those who have actually worked at the business of giving people land know that it is just the labourer who is the slowest to take it, and that almost every kind of small tradesman or craftsman in the village is more ready to take land and more apt to turn it to good account than the labourer. ”

“ Again, in the Worcestershire village of Astwood Bank, where nail-making is carried on, about sixty acres just outside the village are held almost entirely by people who are not agricultural labourers. It is indeed this class of people whom the land-reformer must desire above all others to encourage; for they bring to the land the intelligence that comes from business-pursuits and they make an enormous deal more out of the same acreage than any farmer will make. ”

“ There what remains of the rent is spent, instead of being spent, as it ought to be, among the tenants and upon the land.
Now as to the remedies proposed with regard to Primogeniture and Settlements, it seems reasonable that if a man dies without a will his landed property should be divided, just as his money would be divided, among his children equally. And although few landowners do as a matter of fact die without making their will, yet the alteration of the law would probably produce some effect through the alteration it would make in the ideas of the lawyers. ”

“ The right of the village to take up land for small holdings should therefore not be confined to the benefit of the labourer, but should be used for people of every occupation; and the more of them that will take land, and the larger the area of land that they will take, the better. The rent, owing to expenses of collection and also to preliminary expenses of fencing and other matters, must necessarily be somewhat higher per acre than the farmer's rent; but there is no excuse for the gross overcharging that is often practised by people who do let out such pieces of ground. ”

“ Anyone wanting a house must go either to one of these ground-landlords or to some builder to whom they have let the land. Whether you build your own house or buy one of the builder's houses, you get a lease of 20, 40, or perhaps even 90 years, on payment to the ground-landlord of an annual ground-rent, which is probably from ten to a hundred times as much as the agricultural rental of the site. The value of the land has increased through the industry of the people, not usually through the merit of the landlord ”

“ Though a million acres have been turned into grass, there is no increase in the number of cattle. The meaning of this is, that the farmer's capital is gone, and that he has not the means of getting a sufficiency of stock even when the land is laid down in grass. This is only one of a multitude of facts all pointing in the same direction, facts familiar to everyone who goes about among farmers, and who sees how much their way of life has changed during the last few years. The money is not there to conduct the business as it ought to be conducted ”