rules of good husbandry, and in two of these cases the certificate was not granted. Generally speaking, the standard of cultivation is lowest on the holdings let to County Councils or Parish Councils to provide small holdings or allotments. Rents were raised by agreement with the tenants after the war, and have not been reduced applications for allowances in special cases have been dealt with on their merits. If competition for vacant farms is a fair test, the tenants are not dissatisfied. Since the war there has been one case of bankruptcy. At the moment one holding on the estate is giving cause for anxiety, and this one-no doubt by some unkind coincidence-is farmed by a Dane. But this is very different from the picture of rural England to-day suggested by the Report of the Liberal Land Committee.

It is not proposed here to attempt any detailed criticism of a policy which has already attracted hostile comment from more authoritative sources. But for the present purpose it may be safely said that neither the proposals of Mr Orwin and Colonel Peel, nor those of the Committee, are likely to commend themselves to the agricultural community. Most tenant farmers only wish to remain tenant farmers. Where this has not been possible, most of those who have bought their farms have done so reluctantly. The last thing that any of them are likely to desire is to hold their farms under Government officials or a County Agricultural Authority. And as the industry cannot possibly be carried on without the present farming class, their views on such proposals are entitled to serious consideration. Administration of farms by Government or Local Government officials is not an untried experiment. In recent years probably every County Council in England and Wales has acquired and administered land for the provision of small holdings, and it has been stated that since the war nearly 50 per cent. of the capital involved in the experiment has been lost. It is urged that for the settlement of ex-soldiers on the land loss was inevitable; but when the policy was adopted a loss of 50 per cent. formed no part of the official programme.

Proposals to abolish agricultural landlords as such are open to criticism upon other than economic grounds.

A generous tribute has been paid to the part played by the landowner in the social well-being of the countryside. Industrial strife in the agricultural industry, one of the largest industries in the country, is almost unknown. This is attributed rightly to the fact that a potent cause of social unrest is the segregation of classes, and that in agriculture this is now averted by the co-partnership of landlord, tenant, and labourer. It is suggested by the advocates of State purchase that the landlord, freed from the anxieties of land, would continue to play his part under the new régime, and to apply himself to local administration and the needs of local society. But with the best intentions in the world-he could not do so. He owes his present position in the rural community to the fact that he owns land and shares all its vicissitudes with farmers and labourers: this is the essential link between them. If he is merely a well-to-do man living in the country, he may be described in the village as 'a very nice gentleman,' but the bases of a mutual understanding between himself and his neighbours no longer exist.

There is another aspect of the results of the disappearance of the landowner as such. The writer has drawn attention in a previous article to a truism which is often overlooked-that agriculture can absorb and employ economically a great deal of low-grade labour, which is practically unemployable elsewhere. The reason is that it matters little if certain simple agricultural work is done slowly, so long as it is done conscientiously and correctly. And for the well-to-do, country life and the obligations of a landowner afford an occupation and sphere of usefulness for which no adequate substitute could be found. So long as a wealthy class exists-and there is every indication that it will continue to existthe ownership of land, whether it be regarded merely as a luxury, or the lowest yielding form of gilt-edged investment, can provide at least a respectable background for its activities. But it can do far more than this. It can provide those whose lives are devoted to public life or industry with the necessary relaxation, and on retirement with a field for useful endeavour in which they can still perform valuable service. It can ensure the best environment for the upbringing of their sons, before

they too leave the countryside to play their part in the world. It is recorded that the earliest ambition of Warren Hastings was to repurchase the family estate of Daylesford, and that in his declining years he devoted his time and money to his farms there. A century later Cecil Rhodes purchased a property in Suffolk and recorded in his will, 'I humbly believe that one of the secrets of England's strength has been the existence of a class, termed the country landlords, who devote their efforts to the maintenance of those on their own property.'

If the replacement of the landowner by the State is undesirable on economic and social grounds, the time has not come to say that it is inevitable. Mr Orwin and Colonel Peel have prefaced their proposals with a careful analysis of the distribution of ownership to-day. In round figures, there are 30,000,000 acres of cultivated land in England and Wales. Less than one-twentieth is owned by public or quasi-public bodies-the Crown, the Duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall, the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, Universities, Colleges, Schools, Hospitals, and County Councils. One-quarter is now in the hands of owner-occupiers, whose numbers have almost exactly doubled since the war. This fact is cited as the strongest evidence of the breakdown of the old system. But presumably many of these owner-occupiers are also landlords, who occupy only a portion of their estates, and the admirable practice of keeping a farm or farms in hand is steadily increasing. Many of the estates sold have in fact been outlying estates, belonging to 'pluralist' owners, who took advantage of the temporary land boom to sell outlying or distant estates with which they had no close personal connexion. A tendency must not be mistaken for revolution-particularly a tendency which manifests itself in a period of abnormal conditions. Within this period-between 1920 and 1922-the average price of agricultural commodities dropped by 120 points, whereas in the twenty years of the so-called agricultural depression, between 1873 and 1893, they only dropped by 50 points. In these circumstances it is not surprising that changes in the ownership of land are recorded.

Happily there are indications that prices are now more or less stabilised: there have been fewer startling fluctuations within the past three years. And to the

ordinary observer the general conditions of the countryside remain much what they were. In the district best known to the writer, an area roughly twenty miles in length and breadth, two of the principal estates (one of them comprising 9000 acres) have come under the hammer, and the farms are now in the hands of owner-occupiers. But at least twenty-five other estates remain in the hands of private owners, and-what is more remarkable-most of them are resident owners. In some cases land has been bought by new-comers whose wealth is derived from other sources. No doubt a similar state of things would be reported from other counties. In the history of the countryside this sort of displacement is nothing new-it occurred after the Norman Conquest, after the Wars of the Roses, and again in the 18th century-but the continuity of land tenure remained unbroken.

It is sometimes said that, apart from the burdens on an agricultural property, the restrictions upon ownership imposed by successive Agricultural Holdings Acts are such that there is no longer any inducement for a landowner to retain or acquire more land than he intends to occupy himself. It is now almost impossible to terminate an agricultural tenancy, except for bad farming or on the death of the tenant, without paying the equivalent of at least a year's rent as compensation for unreasonable disturbance': this is often described as the beginning of dual ownership. It is open to the landlord or the tenant to demand an arbitration as to the proper rent to be paid for the holding: this is said to foreshadow a Rent Court. If a landlord of the socalled Golden Age of British Agriculture, which followed the Napoleonic Wars, were to return to see how the family estates were faring to-day, he would no doubt be shocked to find that he could no longer prescribe a system of cropping for his tenants; that they were entitled to sell their hay and straw, and to kill rabbits or hares; that he must compensate them for damage done to their crops by game; that he could not give notice to quit to an undesirable tenant-a drunkard or a profligate-without compensating him for unreasonable disturbance; and that any tenant on the estate could require him to carry out, or render himself liable to

compensation for various improvements, and either to submit to the decision of an arbitrator with regard to a fair rent for the holding, or render himself liable to payment of a year's rent as compensation should the tenant elect to leave.

But it will occur to his grandson, the present owner of the family estates, that the net result of these legal enactments compels him to do no more than he was already prepared to do, as a fair-minded landlord who moved with the times. In some respects he gains, for the obligations of a tenant are now legally defined, as well as those of the landlord. The tenant whose only idea of meeting his difficulties is to demand a reduction of rent can properly be referred to the panel arbitrator, and the landlord need not feel under the same obligation to endure an incompetent tenant because his grandfather was a good fellow. He will certainly discover that most of his tenants are surprisingly indifferent to the benefits conferred on them by legislation, and are prepared to meet him in any difficulty in the same spirit of mutual forbearance that obtained before the days of Agricultural Holdings Acts. Perhaps the ownership of land no longer carries the prestige which it did a century ago, but it still creates a relationship of special value between the landowner and his country neighbours. And though figures are frequently cited to prove that land under modern conditions can scarcely be regarded as a 3 per cent. investment, many have discovered to their cost that a higher yield is not infrequently the prelude to a loss of capital. The real obstacle to the survival of the landowner as such is the increase of taxation, particularly of the death duties. In a recent letter to the Times,' Mr Francis Acland has instanced an estate upon which the probate duty in 1879 would have been about 2000l. In 1899, on a change of ownership, the duties actually paid were about 30,000l., increased on another change in 1919 to 130,000l. on a considerably diminished estate. Lord Aberdeen, in his book, 'We Twa,' states that, when he succeeded to the Haddo Estate in 1870, the total imperial and local taxation was 8007.: in 1919 on the same estate it was 19,000Z.

Despite these startling figures, the fact remains that people continue to own estates, and-even more sur