Harry Lyndsay Manby

“ The poor landowners, who, amid torrents of abuse from every side, have had to bear the brunt of the late agricultural depression, will breathe again for a while, and when the further attack does come, I trust that this wise and moderate measure of true Conservative statesmanship will have taught the people as well as the landowners, to range themselves on the side of a party which has most identified itself with the real welfare of the land and the great interests connected with it. ”

“ With regard to the law of primogeniture, again. one would think, to hear the wild abuse that is heaped upon it, that it was a law by which all the younger children of a landowner were necessarily disinherited, and the whole estate vested in the eldest son. It is, in reality, nothing of the kind; the simple meaning of the word is, that when a man dies without a will, the law presumes an intention on his part to benefit his eldest son at the expense of his younger children. ”

“ Shaw Lefevre. "Make everything a fee simple, and let land be as easily transferable as consols," says Mr. Bright. Surely the remedies, or the first two of them (for until Mr. Bright is ingenious enough to invent a method by which a man can take his land to market with him in his pocket, we need not waste much time over the feasibility of his proposition) , are worse than the disease. Abolish life estates, and you take away the power of a man to give a life estate to his widow or daughter, or to provide against the extravagance of a thriftless son. ”

“ As Conservatives, who have learnt to distrust loud professions and large promises however brilliant and ingenious for the regeneration of mankind, who do not believe that the Saturnian age will return again if entail and settlement are abolished, we can hail this measure as a wise reform, and, as Conservatives, too, we may justly congratulate ourselves, that it is a Conservative measure, instituted by a Conservative ex-chancellor, and passed through the House chiefly by the exertions of Conservatives, that has alone redeemed the last session from the charge of utter barrenness. ”

“ Doubtless, in some cases, a life tenant comes into possession with the estate already heavily burdened with a jointure for his mother, and portions for his younger brothers and sisters, with a large place to keep up, and no spare capital to spend upon the land. Moreover, in some cases, owing to the powers of sale being vested in trustees, and the difficulty of obtaining their consent, or to the necessity of having to apply to the Court, because of the absence of such powers, there are obstacles in the way of selling any part of the estate, so as to pay off the charges upon it. ”

“ There are causes obvious enough in England which will always keep land clear. Land is a luxury; but its dearness is not due to the law of settlement, but to the deep-seated desire among the wealthy commercial classes to become the owners of land, and gain with it that position which the ownership of land alone confers. It Peasant proprietors is vain to talk about establishing a peasant proprietary in England. ”

“ Tenants for life are also enabled to grant ordinary agricultural leases for 21 years, and with the consent of the Court, mining or building leases for longer terms. There is also now power, under various Acts of Parliament, for tenants for life to borrow moneys for improvements, under the sanction of the Inclosure Commissioners, to be repaid by a sinking fund, charged upon the estate. It will thus be seen that at the moment when a settlement is made, the land may he said to he in the possession of persons who together make an absolute owner, and who can sell or dispose of it as they think fit. ”

“ If, on the other hand, is meant by feudal tenure what may be more properly called the spirit of feudalism, that spirit of close personal attachment and loyalty which happily still exists between many of the great landowners and their tenantry, I, for one, see in it an element of the highest importance to the welfare of the farming interest. ”

“ Simply this: that, putting aside the one or two cases where estates have been strictly entailed by the State upon families. as a reward for public services, there is no estate tail in England which cannot, the moment the owner of it is of age and sui juris, be turned into a fee simple by the simple process of enrolling a deed in the Chancery Division; and as the law disallows the tying up of estates for more than a life or lives in being and 21 years afterwards, it is practically impossible that the system of entail can keep land inalienable for more than a generation. ”

“ In the first place it is important to observe that, in treating of what we may call generically the tenure of land, it is impossible, in an ancient country like our own, to deal with the question as an abstract one. ”

“ The aristocracy and landed gentry are not so short-sighted as to fail to see that the possession of ancestral estates enhances the dignity of their titles and position, and gives them much of their influence and weight in the country, and that while they may slightly increase their income by selling their estates, they will be reducing themselves to the level of the nouveaux riches who have amassed gigantic fortunes in trade. ”

“ But it is the few cases, which undoubtedly do exist, where the life tenant is idle or dissolute, or hampered by "the eternal want of pence," that our reformers pitch upon, and arguing from the single to the universal, condemn the whole system, and will be satisfied with nothing less than improving it altogether off the face of the earth. ”

“ I do not agree with those who think that the selling powers of the Act will be very largely or generally used, or that the convertibility of realty into personalty will cause land to be looked on as an ordinary investment, and deprive it of its present artificial and sentimental value. ”

“ Current Objections to Land Laws. One never takes up a book or pamphlet on the subject without finding it full of loose invectives against feudal tenure, primogeniture, the law of entail and settlement, and the consequent complexity of titles and difficulties in the conveyance and free trade in land. ”

“ The difficulty, indeed, of late years, has been not to find sellers but purchasers of the land, and it is not to be supposed that even if you were to take away every check, and make every landowner an absolute owner, he would at once rush into the market and sell his property. ”

“ No argument can be cited in favour of such a proposition, which would not equally justify State confiscation of the continually increasing value of the stock of a railway or canal company. Each owes its increased value, not so much to the exertion of its owners as to the increasing wants and demands of the people. ”

“ But in any case, to discuss these in all their bearings, is to open questions of social ethics, too wide to be entered upon here, and I shall confine myself to the two first objections which, in my mind, the State is alone concerned to see to.
First Objection.
Real Question. No doubt the system of settlement does, as it is designed to do, place a check upon the sale of estates; but the question is, is there any difficulty in fact, in buying land in England? There is no need of statistics to show that there is none; the daily papers are sufficient evidence of that. ”

“ The well known aphorism, that property has its duties as well as its rights, is still conscientiously carried out in practice by the majority of the great proprietors, and any thing which would tend to weaken or impair this feeling would only be productive of disaster and ruin to the hopes of agriculture. ”

“ Now, putting aside the cases where the presumption is a correct one in fact, the instances in which an intestacy happens, when a man dies possessed of considerable property, are very few indeed. No doubt sometimes an unintentional injustice is caused, and I am not going here to justify the law. ”

“ Its advocates do not seem to have stopped to consider, quite apart from the immorality involved in such a wholesale confiscation, how they propose to prevent the inevitable operation of the law of supply and demand, without putting a stop to the very thing they wish to encourage, viz., the free alienation of land ”

“ Take away this power, and in how many cases should we see great estates squandered by spendthrifts too young to have learnt that the position they hold is one they should keep as a trust for their posterity? ”