Part 9

After spurning for many years the Liberal demand for the abolition of the custom of primogeniture--by which the land of a man dying without a will passes to the eldest son, to the exclusion of the rest of the family--the Tories in 1887 themselves proposed it; and in the House of Lords only one peer had sufficient courage to stand up in defence of a custom which the whole peerage had sworn by until that time. It puzzles any one not a peer to understand how a distinctly dishonest practice could have existed so long, save for the utterly inadequate reason that its tendency was to prevent large estates from being broken up, and that there were those who imagined that large estates were a benefit to the country. In actual working, however, it did not affect the largest estates but the smallest, and primogeniture was thus a question touching much more closely those of moderate means than the possessors of great wealth. A large holder of land is an exceedingly unlikely person to die without a will; a small holder frequently does so, with the result of much injustice to and suffering among his family.

A practical instance is worth a hundred theories upon a point like this, and here are some such which have come under my own notice within the past few months. A man possessed of a small landed property died intestate; his daughter, who had ministered to his wants for years, was left penniless, the whole of the property going to the eldest son. Another similarly circumstanced, whose stay and comfort during his old age had likewise been a daughter, shrank, with the foolish obstinacy of the superstitious, from making a will; his friends, recognizing that, if he failed in this obvious duty, the daughter would be thrown without a penny on the world, while the eldest son, who for various reasons had not the least claim upon his father, would take everything, besought the old man to act reasonably; and almost at the last moment he did. In a third case, a fisherman, who for eighteen years had been paying for a piece of land through a building society, was drowned in a squall; and his savings, designed for the support of himself and his wife, were swept straight into the pocket of his eldest son. Now in all these instances, had the money been invested in houses, ships, consols--in fact, anything but land--it would, in case of no will being made, have been divided among the whole family in fair proportion. The accident of it being put into land caused wrong and suffering in two cases, and wrong and suffering were very narrowly avoided in the third. The abolition of primogeniture, therefore, is much more needed by the working and the middle classes than by the rich, whose lawyers very seldom allow them to die without a will.

The law of entail is on its last legs, as well as the custom of primogeniture, and the Tories, by Lord Cairns' Settled Land Act, and a subsequent amending measure, have practically admitted that it is doomed. Entail affects the community by giving power to a man to fetter his land with a multitude of restrictions for an indefinite period; it makes the nominal owner only in reality a life tenant; and by cramping him upon the one side with conditions which may have become out of date, and tempting him on the other to limit his expenditure on that which is not wholly his own, the development of the land is impeded, and the progress of agriculture hampered by force of law. Entail, like primogeniture, has been defended on the ground that it tends to keep large estates intact; but it is now so generally believed that a more widespread diffusion of land is desirable, that it is only necessary here to state the argument.

A more widespread diffusion of the land will not, however, be attained unless the process of transfer is at once cheapened and simplified. The lawyers reap too much advantage from the present system, and many a man refrains from buying a plot he would like because the cost of transfer unduly raises the price. If it were provided that all estates should be registered and their boundaries clearly defined, there would be no more difficulty and expense in transferring a piece of land than is now involved in selling a ship. In these days buyer and seller are parted by parchments; and many who would like a plot, but who do not see why they should pay, because of the lawyers, ten, or fifteen, or twenty per cent. more than its value, put their money into concerns in which meddlesomeness created by Act of Parliament does not mingle.

Simpler and cheaper transfer would be a step towards the more general ownership of land by those who till it. Let all artificial aids to the holding together large estates by power of Parliament be abolished, let transfer be cheapened and simplified, and then let him who likes buy. Free trade in land is what we ask, and when it is attained land will be able to be dealt with the same as any other commodity, and those who want a piece can have it by paying for it.

But although it may not be desirable for the State to interfere in England for the creation of a peasant proprietary, it is needful that Parliament should do something tangible in the direction of securing allotments for the labourers. Upon that point, as upon primogeniture and entail, the Tories profess to be converted; but as their Allotments Bill of 1887 appears in practice to be a sham, it is necessary that such amendments should be introduced as may render it a reality.

XVIII.--SHOULD WASTE LANDS BE TILLED AND THE GAME LAWS ABOLISHED?

A dozen or fourteen years ago the questions attempted now to be answered were put much more frequently than at present. In the last days of the first Gladstone Administration and the earliest of the second Government of Mr. Disraeli, Liberals were looking for other worlds to conquer; and many of them, not venturing upon such bold courses on the land question as have since been adopted by even moderate politicians, fastened their attention upon the waste lands and the game laws. No great results came from the movement; other and more striking questions forced themselves to the front; and we are almost as far from a legislative settlement of the two just mentioned as in the days of a more restricted suffrage.

This is the more surprising because the points named are of practical importance to the agricultural labourer, and the agricultural labourer now holds the balance of political power. But it is not likely that this state of quietude upon two such burning topics will long continue, for the country voter is certain soon to profit by the example of his brethren in the towns, and to demand that his representatives shall attend to those concerns immediately affecting his interests.

And first as to the question of waste lands. Town-bred theorists who have never walked over a mile of moorland are apt sometimes to talk as if all the uncultivated land in the country was in that condition because of the wicked will of those who own it, and to argue that, if only an Act of Parliament could be secured, the waste lands would blossom like the rose. They have the same touching faith in the efficacy of legislation as had Lord Palmerston when he put aside some difficulty with the exclamation, "Give me an Act of Parliament, and the thing will be done." But facts are often too strong for legislation, however well intentioned and skilfully devised, and those about much of our waste land come within the list.

A large portion of uncultivated land is mountain and moor, the greater part of which it would be impossible to make productive at any price, and the remainder could not be turned to account under a sum which would never make a profitable return. Those who think it an easy matter to cultivate waste land should visit that portion of Dartmoor which is dominated by the convict establishment. There they would see many an acre reclaimed, but, if they were told the cost in money and labour, they would be convinced that, were it not for penal purposes, both money and labour might be put to better use elsewhere. And if it be argued that the State should step in and advance all that is required to cultivate such waste as can by any possibility be brought under the plough, it must be asked why the taxpayer (for in this connection the State and the taxpayer are one and the same) should add to his burdens for so small a return.

But there is, without doubt, a large amount of land in this country which now produces nothing, and which could be made to produce a deal. That which is absorbed by huge private parks, scattered up and down the kingdom, forms a great portion of this; and though, for reasons which are mainly sentimental, one would not wish to see all such private parks turned into sheep-walks or turnip-fields, there is the consideration that property--and peculiarly property in land--has its duties as well as its rights, and that those who wish to derive pleasure from the contemplation of large spaces of cultivable but not cultivated land, and in this way prevent such from being of any direct value to the community, ought to pay for the privilege. The rating of property of this kind at the present moment is ridiculously low; it should at least be made as high as if the land were devoted to some distinctly useful end.

As with parks, so with sporting lands. The rating of the latter is utterly inadequate; and although it maybe true that much of the land, especially in England, devoted to sporting purposes, is of little value for anything else, it is equally true that a great deal of it, particularly in Scotland, is fit for cultivation, and that tenants have been cleared from it to make room for deer and grouse. In all cases where the land would have value if cultivated, the owner ought to be made pay as if that value were obtained, seeing that for his own pleasure he is depriving the community of the chance of obtaining increased food. It would be too drastic a measure to adopt the Chinese method of hanging proprietors who did not till cultivable land; but many a landowner, if made to feel his duty through his pocket, would do that duty rather than pay.

From the question of sporting lands to that of the game laws is a very short step. It may be that we have heard less of the latter during the last few years, because the Hares and Rabbits Act, passed by the second Gladstone Government in the first flush of its power, has done much to reconcile the tenant-farmers to the present state of things, by removing the grievance they most keenly felt.

The Act referred to provides (to quote Mr. Sydney Buxton's summary) "that every occupier of land shall have an inalienable right to kill the ground game (hares and rabbits) concurrently with any other person who may be entitled to kill it on the same land; that the ground game may only be killed by the occupier himself or by persons duly authorized by him in writing; that the use of firearms is confined to himself and one other, and they may only be used during the day; that those authorized to kill the game in other ways (poison and traps, except in rabbit-holes, are prohibited) must be resident members of his household, persons in his ordinary service, and any one other person whom he employs for reward to kill the game; that tenants on lease do not come under the provisions of the Act until the termination of their lease."

This was such a concession to the tenant-farmers that it is little wonder that those of them who had groaned under the ground game should have felt generally satisfied with it; and although a wail has been going up from certain sportsmen that if the Act be not speedily amended the hare will become as extinct as the mastodon, it is not the least likely to be altered in the direction they wish. If amended at all, it will be so as to bring winged game within its provisions.

No one acquainted with rural life can doubt that the game laws, as at present administered, are a fruitful source of demoralization and crime. They demoralize all round, for they pollute the seat of justice by allowing such game preservers as are county magistrates to wreak vengeance upon all who transgress upon their pleasures; they lower the moral standard of the gamekeepers, whose miserable employment turns them into spies of a peculiarly unpleasing description; they make the rural police a standing army for the preservation of game; and they consign to gaol many a man who, but for these laws, would be honest and free.

Such as would see justice most openly travestied should sit in a country police court and hear game cases tried. Let them notice the ostentatious fashion in which some magistrate, while a summons in which his game is concerned is being heard, will (as is carefully noted in the local papers) "withdraw from the bench" by taking his chair a foot back from his fellows and friends. Let them hear evidence upon which no man charged with any other offence would ever be convicted. Let them see the vindictive sentences that are passed. And then let them go home and think over the fashion in which that which is nicknamed "justice" is administered to any man unlucky enough to have offended a gamekeeper or a policeman, and to be charged as a poacher.

In the good old hanging days, a man was sentenced to death in a western county for sheep-stealing. The sentence was the usual one, but other sheep-stealers had been let off the capital penalty for so many years that it was greatly to the astonishment of the district that this one was hanged. Then people began to think, and, remembering that he had the reputation of being a clever poacher, they saw that he had been paid off for the new and the old. It is much the same in the rural districts to-day. In game cases the presumption of the English law courts that a man shall be held to be innocent until he is proved guilty is systematically reversed. The unsupported word of a gamekeeper is considered to be worth that of half-a-dozen ordinary men; and it is not uncommon for a defendant convicted of some offence, totally unconnected with the game laws, to have his penalty increased because the superintendent of police has whispered to the justices' clerk, and the clerk to the magistrates, the fatal word "poacher." Those who live in a town can scarcely conceive the open fashion in which justice is degraded by the county magistrates when the game is in question. But, if any would bring it home to themselves--and the strongest words are too faint to picture the reality--let them go to some rural court, where the justices do not imagine that the light of public opinion can be brought to bear upon them, and see how poachers are tried.

If it were only because of the widespread demoralization they cause, the game laws ought to be repealed. They are avowedly kept up for the benefit of the class which does little or no work, and they fill the prisons at our expense to preserve a sport in which we have no share and no wish to share. And, if they are to be retained on the statute book at all, their administration should, at the very least, be taken from those who are practically prosecutor, jury, and judge in one, and placed in impartial hands.

XIX.--OUGHT LEASEHOLDS TO BE ENFRANCHISED?

The proposal to enfranchise leaseholds--that is, to enable a leaseholder, upon paying a fair price, to claim that his tenure be turned into freehold--is a comparatively new one in the field of practical politics; but it has come to the front so rapidly that it is already far nearer solution than others which have agitated the public mind for many years. The grievance had for a long time been felt, and in some parts of the kingdom sorely felt; but a ready remedy had not suggested itself, and the subject slept.

The grievance is this--that the present system of leases for lives or for a term of years causes frequent loss to the leaseholder and much injury to the community, benefiting only the owner of the soil. The remedy would be to empower a leaseholder to demand from the ground landlord that the land shall be transferred to him upon payment of its fair value, as appraised by some public tribunal.

And first as to the results which flow from the present state of things. These vary with the circumstances, and some of the circumstances demand study. Leases, broadly speaking, are of two kinds--those which are granted on lives and those which are for a specified term of years. Of the two, the former are the more objectionable, as they frequently work gross injustice. A lease is granted which shall expire at the death of the third of three persons named in the deed. Under that lease a man builds a house; the first life expires, and the leaseholder has to pay a fine--or, as it is called, a heriot--of a specified sum; the second dies, and another fine has to be paid; and when the third passes away, the property and all upon it revert to the landlord. Is it not easy to see that no particular chapter of accidents is required to terminate any three given lives within a comparatively short period, while, if an epidemic occurred, ground landlords everywhere would reap a rich harvest from the ready falling in of leases for lives?

One instance out of thousands may be quoted of how the system works. "A piece of land which let for L2 an acre as an agricultural rent was let for building purposes at L9 an acre, and divided into eleven plots. On one of these a poor man built a cottage, at a cost of L60, on a ground rent of 16s. 6d. The term was for three lives and one in reversion. The charge for the lease was L5. On the expiration of each of the three lives L1 was payable as a fine or heriot, and L10 was to be paid on nominating the life in reversion. All the four lives expired in twenty-eight years. The landlord thereupon took possession of the house. He had thus received in twenty-eight years, besides the annual ground rent, the following sums:--L5 for the lease, L10 for nomination of life in reversion, L3 as heriot on the expiration of the three lives--in all L18; and, in addition, the house built at the expense of the victim, which he sold for L58."

The reply may be made, "But, granting that leases for lives often have cruel results, is not the remedy in the hands of those who want leases? Why do they take those for lives?" For this reason--that in some parts of the country it is the only way by which a building plot can be obtained, and that, as long as the possibility of securing so good a bargain is legalized, so long will the more unscrupulous among the landlords force an intending tenant to accept that or nothing.

Leases for long terms of years do not as readily lend themselves to the chance of legal robbery, but they have their own ill effects. Houses are built in flimsy fashion upon the express idea that they are intended to last only the specified term; and during the expiring years of the lease, repairs are grudged, and the dwellings rendered unhealthy to the occupier and unsafe to the passers-by. If a man has a house which is erected upon leasehold land, and therein builds up, by his own skill and industry, a good business, he is absolutely at the mercy of the ground landlord when the lease expires. The rent is raised because of the success his own faculties have secured, onerous conditions in the way of repairs are imposed, and what can he do? "If you don't like it, you can leave it," is the landlord's reply; but there is many a business which does not bear transplanting, and if the tenant be on a large estate it might happen that, if he did not accede to the owner's terms, he would have to move to a far-distant part of the town, or even--as at Devonport and Huddersfield among other places--out of the town altogether, and that would mean ruin. And thus he is practically compelled to struggle on in order to increase the wealth of the landlord, who has done nothing, at the expense of himself, who has done all.

And this is not always the worst, for in many cases landlords for various reasons will not renew at any price, and the tenant has perforce to go the moment his lease expires. A certain Whig duke--and, of course, a zealous defender of "the rights of property"--conceived the idea, upon coming into his estates some years ago, that a village stood too near his park gates. Not brooking that herdsmen and traders should stand between the wind and his nobility, he directed that, as leases fell in, the tenants should be cleared out, graciously, however, offering them other plots some three miles away. And the tenants had to leave the homes in which they had been born and where their parents had lived before them, and to see them tumble down in utter ruin, in order that so mighty a person as a duke should not be shocked by the sight of the common herd. It was one of the thousand cases in life where a man had a right to do that which it was not right for him to perform.

Another fashion in which grievous injustice to the leaseholder can be done is frequently illustrated. It has happened, and happened very recently, that a ground landlord has granted leases for a term of years; that, upon the strength of these agreements, houses have been built; and that upon the landlord's decease it has been discovered by some skilful lawyer that the dead man had had no power, under an entail or settlement, to grant such leases; whereupon the heir has invoked the law to cancel the whole, and has seized everything upon the land. This is legal, but is it commonly honest?

In other ways the leasehold system is an injury not only to individuals but to the community. A west country town, where all the land is held by one man, has been crippled in every attempt to expand and improve by the impossibility of obtaining a freehold plot. What person in his senses would erect a substantial factory or a large concern of any kind upon a comparatively short lease? Men embark upon such enterprises in order that, as year follows year, their property may become more valuable, not that year by year it may become less so by the growing nearness of the time when it will pass to the landlord, who has never contributed a penny or a thought to the success of the concern, the building containing which, at the expiration of the lease, he can call his own.

For all these unfairnesses to individuals, hindrances to trade, and injuries to the community, is proposed the remedy stated--that a leaseholder who has twenty (or, as some suggest, ten or fifteen) years to run, shall be empowered to demand that his land be made freehold upon the payment of its value, as assessed by some specified tribunal.

The first objection is that this would be an undue interference with "the rights of property." But it has already been laid down by Parliament that such "rights" can be set aside in the public interest upon the payment of fair compensation; and what has been done in regard to the making of railways can be done respecting the building or the preserving of houses. The existing system is an injury to the community; and as the price to be paid for its abolition, whether wholly or in part, would be assessed by a tribunal constituted by Parliament, the landlords would have no more reason to complain than they now have when compelled to sell a portion of their property to a railway company.