THE ENGLISH LAND QUESTION, 1870.

THE land systems of England and Ireland, though closely analogous in many respects, as regards both history and structure, present, nevertheless, some features of striking dissimilarity. The prominent Irish land question is one relating to agricultural tenure; though it is so because the system in its entirety has prevented not only the diffusion of landed property, but also the rise of manufactures, commerce, and other non-agricultural employments. In England, on the other hand, notwithstanding monstrous defects in the system of tenure, the prominent land question is one relating to the labourer, not to the farmer, and to the labourer in the town as well as in the country. The chief causes of this difference are-first, the violent conversion of the bulk of the English population into mere labourers long ago; and, secondly, the existence of great cities and various non-agricultural employments, created by mineral wealth, and a superior commercial situation, but confined to par ticular spots by the accumulation of land in unproductive hands, by the uncertainty of the law and of titles, and by the scantiness and poverty of the rural population on which country towns depend for a market. An immense immigration into a few great

cities has accordingly been the movement in England corresponding to emigration from Ireland; and no less than 5,153,157 persons, by official estimate, will, in the middle of the present year be gathered into seven large towns-London, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffield, and Bristol; 3,214,707, or one-sixth of the total population, being concentrated in London alone. A twofold mischief has thus been produced by the English land system-in the wretched and hopeless condition of the agricultural labourer on one hand, and the precarious employment and crowded dwellings of the working-classes in large towns on the other.

There is no lack of considerable writers and politicians to assure us that this situation is the natural result of commerce and economic laws; but, alarming as it is, it would be much more so, were such a conclusion generally held; since no reforms could then be looked for, either to diminish the existing misery, or to avert the future catastrophe it threatens; and, in fact, the situation must actually become worse with every forward step in industrial progress, if that conclusion be well founded.

It is, therefore, no matter of mere theoretical or historical interest to ascertain its actual causes; although, even from that point of view, it engages the profound attention of economists on the Continent, struck by the contrast which the distribution of both land and population in England presents to what is found in every other part of the civilised world. 'England,' says a distinguished Englishman on the

*

Continent, referring particularly to the researches of a German economist, is the only Teutonic community, we believe we might say the only civilised community, in which the bulk of the land under cultivation is not in the hands of small proprietors; clearly, therefore, England represents the exception and not the rule.'+ It would surely be strange if the exception were the result, as Mr. Buckle asserted, of the general march of affairs; and if industry and commerce, which are peopling the rest of the world with landowners, had, as a more recent writer expresses it, 'severed the people of England from the land.' § The present author presumes to affirm that the exceptional situation of England, in place of being the natural consequence

* See the work hereafter cited of Herr Erwin Nasse, Professor of Political Economy in the University of Bonn, on 'Inclosures of Commons in England.'

+ 'Systems of Land Tenure.' Germany. By R. B. D. Morier, p. 322. The history of the decay of that once most important class, the English yeomanry, is an interesting subject, and one for which I have collected considerable materials; at present, I will only say that its decline was first distinctly perceptible in the latter half of the seventeenth century, and was consummated by the rapidly increasing power of the commercial and manufacturing classes, early in the eighteenth century.... Some writers regret this almost total destruction of the yeoman freeholders, overlooking the fact that they are disappearing, not in consequence of any violent revolution or stretch of arbitrary power, but simply by the general march of affairs; society doing away with what it no longer requires.'-Buckle's History of Civilization in England, i. 569. § I shall now proceed to trace historically what the economic causes were which have severed the people from the land.

'It is the commercial and not the feudal spirit which in England has worked against peasant properties. Wipe out the commercial element from English history, and you wipe out those causes which have worked against peasant proprietorship in England. But for the commercial element, the feudal system in England would probably have remained in full force as in other countries, and the English peasants have become peasant proprietors.'-The Land Question, by Frederic Seebohm. Fortnightly Review,' February, 1870.

of commerce and industry, is the product of a violent and unnatural history on the one hand, and of laws existing at this day most adverse to both commerce and industry on the other.

The history of the revolution by which that result has been brought about is so copious and minute that many volumes might be filled with it, though only its principal steps can be presented here. As may be inferred from the two passages just cited,* it has unseated two ancient classes of small landholders, the peasantry and the yeomanry, as, for brevity, we may name the two rural classes below the landed gentry. The encroachment, too, on the domains of both began at the same time and in the same manner, and has been prosecuted to its consummation in a great measure by a similar process. Each, however, of the two classes has had also its own special history of extinction; and while the poorer class, the peasantry, have never been suffered to recover, even for a generation, the ground from which they have been driven century after century, there was in the case of the wealthier class of yeomanry, along with their dispossession, an opposite movement, which down to the last hundred years continued to recruit their numbers.

Briefly enumerated, the chief causes by which the peasantry-the really most important class-have been dispossessed of their ancient proprietary rights and beneficial interests in the soil are the following:

(1.) Confiscation of their ancient rights of common,

* See the last two notes.

which were not only in themselves of great value, but most important for the help they gave towards the maintenance of their separate lands.

(2.) Confiscation to a large extent of their separate lands themselves, by a long course of violence,

fraud, and chicane, in addition to forfeitures resulting from deprivation of their rights of

common.

(3.) The destruction of country towns and villages, and the loss, in consequence, of local markets

for the produce of peasant farms and gardens. (4.) The construction of a legal system based on the principle of inalienability from the feudal line, in the interest of great landed families, and incompatible with either the continuance of the ancient or the rise of a new class of peasant landholders.

(5.) The loss, with their lands and territorial rights, of all political power and independence on the part of the peasantry; and, by consequence, the establishment and maintenance by the great proprietors of laws most adverse to their interests.

(6.) Lastly, the administration by the great landowners of their own estates in such a manner

as to impoverish the peasantry still further, and to sever their last remaining connection with the soil.

These different causes have necessarily been mentioned in succession, but in reality they have often