Our farm-labourers, as a rule, know nothing of gardening, and few of them can command L10 capital. I have sometimes looked round to select a picked man, and wondered whether, if I put him in a selected five-acre plot near a town, and also lent him the L200 or so capital requisite to give him a chance, this picked agricultural labourer would succeed; bill to pay

The plan, now frequently put forward, that Government is to employ all men out of work to reclaim and bring into cultivation waste lands, is liable to additional objections Governmen

If Government reclaims land that private persons cannot reclaim with profit, we may be sure that Government will suffer a considerable loss. This must be provided out of taxes: are the promoters of reclamation of wastes by Government prepared for this?

The wastes of England are the only land left the public. Elsewhere the public can only walk along a pavement or a high road. The good land is all pretty well in cultivation; and the best of what is left can give but a moderate profit on reclamation, while its enclosure, under Act of Parliament, deprives the public of it for ever. Hence Professor H. Fawcett, throughout his parliamentary career, put his veto with great success on all enclosure schemes. It is possible that there might be a profit on the enclosure of Epping Forest: who will now support that reclamation

The safe general principle, whether in the sale of horses, the letting of houses, or the letting of land, is that Government should not interfere; or, to speak more correctly, Government interference should only interfere to prevent restrictive covenants and to ensure Free Trade, so that every article (land included) may pass without restraint into the hands of the man to whom it is worth most.

The greater the individual profit the greater the national profit. Under a section headed "Law," below, I will say something about the removal of entail, etc.--a dry but important branch of the question. The National Property Rate, with the aid of sycophants, would remove many obstructions

There has been much controversy and several Parliamentary Acts concerning the regulation of bargains between landlord and tenant. How a tenant or a landlord can be injured in such a bargain is impossible to understand, except in so far as a man is injured who gives L30 for a horse worth only L20. Will Parliament interfere to protect such horse-purchasers? The matter has been obscured by omitting to notice that a tenant with a long lease at a fixed rent possesses a share (often the larger share) of the "landlord interest," in the language of political economy.

As a simple example: A tenant took, say in 1850, a Scotch farm on a Scotch lease absolute of nineteen years, at L500 a year. Within two or three years of his so taking it the rise in wool, potatoes, and other things, caused the value of the farm to rise to L600 a year, and this increased value lasted the whole of his lease and some time after. Now, treating the increase of value of L100 a year as permanent (as it was very soon regarded both by landlord and tenant), it is clear that this L100 a year for the period of the lease (say seventeen years to run) went to the tenant, not to the landlord; and the first seventeen years of an annuity in fee is worth more than all the rest.

It is evident that on a seven years' (absolute) lease the tenant would similarly get a good share (not the larger share) in all the improvement in value that occurred during his lease. Up to ten or twelve years ago the value of land had been rising very steadily in the South of England for near half a century. Rents were pushed up very generally at the termination of every lease, though noblemen, great county gentlemen, the Church, and the Universities, as a rule, never raised the rent on an old tenant; but they could raise the rent all the more by a jump when a new man came in. During all these years the tenant-farmers complained rarely of their leases, though they were often subject to covenant nuisances about cropping, selling off the farm, game, and incoming for the new tenant.

But during the last ten years the process is reversed. A farmer took a farm for L500 a year for seven years in the south of England, and before the lease had run half out the farm was not worth L400 (and in many cases not L300). Here the tenant suffered a heavy loss. When in former years he got a gain he never proposed to allow his landlord 15 per cent extra rent. But now that the drop in value of such farms has taken place, and probably will not proceed further, a tenant who takes a new lease requires no Act of Parliament to protect him: he can protect himself. By the date the Abolition of the Game Laws (a wrong but intelligible phrase) was carried, the farmers in the South of England were in a position not to take any benefit under that Act, but to covenant for all the game and sporting on their farms for themselves.

So as to the Act regulating the leases between tenant and landlord, where they chose to avail themselves of it, the tenant now can generally get more favourable terms outside the provisions of the Act. Farms are so down, tenants so scarce, that landlords have to give way on all minor points. Wherever Government interference operates at all, it is almost sure to operate harmfully. Consider for a moment the case of "incoming." Formerly, by the "custom of the country" south of London, the incoming tenant paid for two years' dressing for the corn crops, north of London he paid the outgoing tenant only for one year's dressing, by the custom of the country too.

The question practically only amounted to increasing by 5 per cent the capital necessary to take the farm south of London. Now what can be gained by Government interference in such a matter as this, in which each farmer and land-agent was in general in favour of the "custom" he had grown up under?

A prevalent idea is that the land is not highly farmed enough, and that the land of England might be made to yield much more, and that Government is to cause this to be done. It is most unfortunate to raise this theory at the moment when land is "down," i.e. when produce is cheap, labour expensive. Every farmer knows that the only way to meet these conditions is to farm "lower."

In a south country farm the farmer will sow much less corn, and try to keep more sheep. In the Western States of America, where produce is very cheap, labour very dear, the "lowness" of the farming is always abused by the English traveller (who thus shows that he knows nothing about either farming or political economy). A farmer, twenty-five years ago, took a very large and fine corn farm: it had been worked on the five-course system, i.e. three white crops in five years; the farmer made a careful calculation whether a four-course husbandry, i.e. two white crops in four years, would not be more profitable; it appeared to come to exactly the same thing. At this juncture a rise of a shilling a week in wages took place;

this gave a clear advantage to the four-course, and the farm was at once worked round to the four course shift. In this simple case a small rise in wages brought about a considerable diminution in gross produce, while the loss to the farmer was small. The remarks in this section have been directed to the case, common in the South of England, where there has been within the last twelve years a fall of rent from 25 to 50 per cent. In pasture farms, in rich land, and in potato farms (wherein you can keep one-sixth the land in potatoes), the fall in rent has been much less--sometimes inappreciable.