1876-1880.

Number.Amount.
1. Compulsory sales of real property in rural districts.2513563,000l. averaging 224l. per sale.
2. Do. of personal property.5136134,000l. ditto 26l. per sale.
3. Distraints for arrears of taxes, &c.—1,089,000l.

But since real property is of comparatively low value in Norway, and personal property limited mostly to the veriest necessities of life, it is not so much the total of the amounts realized by forced sales, or the sums for which 'executions' and 'distraints' were effected, that give the measure of the depressed condition of the yeomen farmers, as the great and steady increase that took place between 1876 and 1880 in the number of those operations. Thus, while the number of forced sales of real property in towns, as well as in rural districts, was 424 in 1876, it had grown to 1378 in 1880. It is therefore not surprising to find in the Reports of the Prefects from which we have so largely drawn our figures that 'the means of meeting liabilities and of paying taxes at the proper time have grown more feeble, and recourse to legal enforcement of pecuniary claims has consequently become more frequent.' 'The condition of this Province' (Kristiansamt) 'is all the worse from a pretty widespread misuse of credit during the previous period' (1871-75). In another province (N. Bergen) we find that the depression in 1879 and 1880 'compelled those who had claims to enforce them rigorously. Mortgages, distraints, sales, &c., have therefore increased, and there has been an exceptionally, large number of suits before the Courts of Mutual Agreement. 'The value of agricultural produce has fallen, owing to a great extent to a scarcity of money and to great competition from a desire to convert as much produce as possible into money.' In the northern province of Tromsö 'merchants have suffered from the impoverishment of their customers' (mostly fishermen as well as landowners), 'and have caused them to be made bankrupts. Credit has been misused on a large scale. Its facility induces the population to live beyond its means. It also encourages traders to set up in business and get customers with ease, without having capital or means of their own. The one misuse reacts on the other. All products are sunk considerably in value, and this fall is even greater in the case of real estate.'

The latter statement is not generally applicable to the remaining provinces, for we find that while the average value of the 'skylddaler,' or unit of assessment, was 153l.,[17] according to prices paid for land in 1871-1875, it has risen to about 180l. in 1876-1880, thus confuting Mr. Laing's theory, that the peculiar succession of property would tend to keep land at a low value. It would not, however, be right to conclude from these figures that landed property has, on the whole, increased of late years in value, despite the general indebtedness of its owners. Land in the vicinity of towns and railways must naturally become more and more valuable, and the relatively much higher prices paid for such land have no doubt had the effect of raising the total average deduced from sales of every description of landed property. It may also be assumed that the demand for land is artificially increased by the facility with which it may be purchased, since at least one-half of the purchase money generally remains on mortgage, in addition to other encumbrances. At the same time, the financial institutions, to which so large a proportion of the real property in Norway is mortgaged, are interested in maintaining its value, and attain their object by abstaining from offering at any one period too many defaulting properties for sale; and it may also be suspected that the statistics of forced sales represent only cases in which no compromise could be effected, or in which it was expedient or possible to have recourse to the ultimate means of recovery without sensibly deteriorating locally the value of landed property. Cases are, in fact, not infrequent in which the mortgagees find themselves compelled to retain the property of the defaulter, and either to place it in the hands of caretakers, with the hope of future realization on more favourable terms, or to sell it in small lots as opportunity occurs. In any case, the full and exact effect of the pawning of all the landed property of the country at a time when its agriculture has to compete with American cereals, its timber industry with supplies from America and the Baltic, and its wooden ships with iron steamers transporting cargoes at an almost nominal freight, is not yet to be found in statistical records.

The indisputable fact remains that, notwithstanding the existence of a system of land tenure which, according to Mr. Laing, was so perfect between 1834 and 1836 as to render its adoption in this country, and especially in Ireland, highly desirable, the yeomen farmers of Norway—framers of their own laws and absolute masters of their own destinies—are not only at present suffering from the commercial and agricultural depression that obtains in other countries of Europe, in which the social state is more or less differently constituted, but also find themselves, in face of that depression, with exceptionally heavy burdens on their backs in the form of pecuniary indebtedness at a rate of interest which mere agriculture, under the most favourable circumstances, cannot possibly afford to pay.

This heavy indebtedness has not, as a rule, been incurred for productive purposes, such as drainage, improved methods of agriculture, the increase of stock, &c.; and although the use of simple agricultural machinery is somewhat on the increase in Norway, yet agriculture remains very much in the same primitive condition in which it was found by Mr. Laing.[18] The Prefects attribute this backwardness to want of skill on the part of the proprietors (Romsdal), to the poverty of the soil, to the dearness of agricultural labour, and generally to the unremunerative results of husbandry since the depreciation of the value of its products. In a letter addressed last year to the 'Morgenblad,' the leading Journal at Christiania, by a native authority on the subject of agriculture, it is urged that the landed proprietors of Norway have 'for some years past been going down hill;' the hopes of improving the condition of agriculture, entertained about thirty years ago, when efforts were first commenced in that direction, being now entirely dissipated.

'It is painful,' he says 'to see how the forests are decreasing and how land once under cultivation is lying unused. When asked the reason, the proprietors reply that the prices of corn and other agricultural products are so low and the wages of labour so high, owing to emigration, that they have not the means to cultivate a large portion of the land, and could derive no advantage from it even if the means were available.'

The yeomen farmers, being therefore in a distressed condition, and their children and best hands forced to leave their homes in order to cultivate the fruitful soil of America, to the growing detriment of those who remain to till the soil of Norway—those farmers, he points out with great force of argument, must have the same protection which is accorded to the industrial classes, if agriculture is to be saved from final ruin. In fact, this remarkable letter points to an agitation in favour of the imposition of a 'fiscal duty,'[19] on corn, food of all kind, cattle, dairy produce, &c.; and supports this conclusion with the argument used by Prince Bismarck on the second reading of his recent Corn Duties Bill:

'The trade of the Baltic will suffer nothing from protective duties. As regards agriculture, I am opposed to all legislation against the subdivision of land ... but if you want to have small occupiers of land, you must vote for duties on corn.'

Account must at the same time be taken of the heavy and increasing charges that fall on landed property for the administration of rural districts in Norway. While the inhabitants of the rural communities contribute towards the support of the Central Administration only in the form of Customs and Excise duties, stamps, succession duties, and contributions towards the construction of highways, the burthen of local administration, justice, police, prisons, the Church, public instruction, poor relief, sanitary service, parochial roads, posting stations, interest on communal loans, &c., falls on their landed property. This self-assessed and self-imposed burthen has naturally been growing more heavy, from year to year, under the exigencies of modern progress. Thus, while the total communal expenditure in 1853 was 167,000l., it had risen to 497,000l. in 1880, or 197-1/2 per cent. About one half of the requisite resources is derived from a tax on the cadastral value of real property; the remaining half is raised by a tax on capital and income. In 1880 the communal impositions on land represented a taxation of about 6s. 7d. per head of the rural population. That the whole of the communal expenditure is not covered by taxation is apparent from the fact, that in the same year the rural districts had increased the amount of their total debts to about half a million sterling, from 312,000l. in 1874.

In this respect it is certainly significant to discover that Poor Relief, organized by a law passed in 1863, is the largest item of communal expenditure, being indeed very little less than half of the total annual liabilities of the rural districts, in a country in which, in the halcyon days of Mr. Laing, only the infirm were supported for a few days at a time by the yeomen farmers. He appears to have attributed this to the absence of collieries, the introduction of coal as fuel having, he argues, been coëval in England with the imposition of a rate for the poor, deprived by that industry of the work of chopping up firewood which gave so much employment to idle hands in Norway. However that might be, in 1880 and 1881 the number of persons in receipt of relief or maintained in hospital, at the charge of rural communities alone, was respectively 109,688 and about 114,000, or in both years a little over 7 per cent. of the total rural population. Inclusive of urban districts the same totals amounted in those years to 81 and 83 per 1000, or above 8 per cent. of the population of the kingdom, the cost of support having been about 3s. 10d. per head of the entire population, which contributed 2s. 9d. per head in special taxation for that object, and the balance in an indirect manner, apparently by housing paupers, &c.

These paupers include cotters and labourers, as well as the ruined among the smaller yeomen. Farmers who had previously been able to employ labour, 'no longer find their advantage in it,' and consequently—

'even able-bodied workmen (in Hedemarken) were compelled to seek relief from the Poor Fund when their families were large. The smaller farmers and the labourers are in the worst plight, since the falling off in the timber trade has made them feel the want of the usual steady demand for labour at high wages.' Further: 'it has become very difficult for the least affluent and for labourers to gain a livelihood in the prevailing money and timber crisis.... The depression must for a long time be felt by many.

We need only point out that, in the United Kingdom, the percentage of persons in receipt of relief during the year 1881 was 3 per cent. in England and Wales, 2.6 per cent. in Scotland, and 11 per cent. in Ireland,[20] involving an expenditure at the rate respectively of 6s. 3d., 4s. 6d., and 3s. 9d. per head of population.

Obviously, the relatively greater cost of relieving the poor in Great Britain is due to the more expensive character of the support afforded, and to the very heavy sums paid for salaries and other establishment charges; but it is unquestionably a damaging fact against the system of land tenure in Norway, that the pauperism by which it is in the present day accompanied, with a strong tendency to increase, is equalled only by the state of things in Ireland, which certain legislators now desire to remedy by the creation of peasant proprietors.

The relative state of matters in Great Britain and in Norway has therefore greatly changed since Mr. Laing wrote:

'The distribution of the wealth and employment of a country has much more to do, than the amount, with the well-being and condition of the people. The wealth and employment of the British nation far exceed those of any other nation; yet in no country is so large a proportion of the inhabitants sunk in pauperism and wretchedness.'

An increasing rate of pauperism is one of the symptoms of agricultural distress in Norway, but the strong tide of emigration from rural and urban districts marks with equal force the depression and congestion from which the country is suffering in the same degree as the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Aided by improved and cheapened means of transport, the number of emigrants from Norway ranged between 20,212 in 1880 and 22,167 in 1883, giving an average of 1.3 to 1.5 per cent. of the total population, the contingent of the rural districts being about 70 per cent. of the total number. As in the case of pauperism, the corresponding rate of emigration from Ireland, namely 1.5 per cent., exhibits a remarkable similarity, and affords another convincing proof that peasant proprietorship is no panacea for rustic indigence.

Those who have not studied the present economic condition of the yeoman farmer and agricultural labourer in Norway, or who have not taken into consideration the change that has come over the entire country, and the ambition, as distinguished from previous apathy, which education and communication with an outer world, no longer closed to them, has awakened among the classes with which we are dealing, are inclined to attribute a good part of this emigrating tendency to the influence and the material assistance of those who have gone before. Indisputably, the Norwegian emigrant, by his persevering labour and steady conduct, rarely fails to succeed in Wisconsin and other States, in which he is always a welcome settler; and consequently he soon finds himself able to transmit money for the purpose of enabling his brothers and sisters, and not seldom his father and mother, to join him. No State or other aid is afforded for such purposes to Norwegians, although it is occasionally the case, that the hard cash with which the emigrant leaves his home is derived from the proceeds of a loan raised by the head of his family for the purpose of buying out co-heirs under the Odels ret, adding thereby, as we have already shown, to the indebtedness with which the land is burdened. Others, also, maintain that many young men emigrate from Norway in order to avoid military conscription, which, although milder there in its demands than in most other European countries where that system exists, undoubtedly diminishes the quantity and deteriorates the quality of agricultural labour. The strongest incentive to emigration, however, is the desire to escape from the misery and penury which accompany in Norway, as in every other part of Europe, the condition of a small landowner, cotter, or labourer who is unable to find regular employment on adjoining estates that can be kept going, if nothing more, with the aid of scientific knowledge, machinery and capital.

There is, however, yet another proof of the prevalent material malaise in Norway, particularly among its rural classes, and strangely enough it bears the same character as that which has brought the 'three acres and a cow' and Irish land bills, past and expected, into such prominent relief in our country of lack-lands, namely political agitation. Whatever may be its merits or demerits on this side of the North Sea, our readers will scarcely be prepared to learn that a corresponding ferment has been engendered of late years on the opposite shores. We are told this by the Prefect of South Trondhjem, one of the most important provinces of a country where, in the days of Mr. Laing, there was a dead-level of contentment, where the widest form of home-rule has been in operation since the early part of the present century, and where the Crown Administration has all that time been more pure, blameless and efficient than in any other country on the Continent of Europe. His significant words are:

'As everywhere else in Norway, particularly in rural districts, politicians (i. e. agitators) are here taking more and more hold over the minds of the people. Political unrest increases, and immature and extreme opinions are being advanced more than is desirable. The quiet, temperate, but progressive development to which Norway had previously been accustomed, and with which the great bulk of the nation had been well content, is in danger of being replaced by a progress in fits and starts, accompanied by leaps in the dark.'

No less painful and suggestive is it to find, in the Report from the Prefect of Hedemarken, that 'the Christian earnestness of the people has suffered under the influence of the many misleading writings and tendencies which have in recent times found their way into every stratum of society.' As at home, so in Norway, the question of Church Disestablishment, with all its consequences, is approaching within measurable distance of practical solution.[21]

Supported by official publications, we have now described the present condition of the yeomen farmers of Norway, and from the facts and figures we have marshalled, the following replies may confidently be given to the Socialistic theories and conclusions of Mr. Laing:

1. Notwithstanding, or rather in part owing to, the existence of the Allodial Right [which has proved in its results to be an exaggerated form of primogeniture involving a greater multiplication of encumbrances even than exists under the system of land tenure in the United Kingdom], an excessive subdivision of the land has occurred and is still proceeding in Norway, to the prejudice of estates which in 1836, and even later, afforded moderate ease and contentment to their owners, and relatively well remunerated labour to the workman and the cotter.

2. The dead-level of comfortable subsistence, attributed by Mr. Laing to the parcelling-out of land into small estates, has been converted, by the influence of irresistible economic laws, into one of general distress and discontent among the rural classes.

3. The rates of pauperism and emigration prove that the agrarian population has not, as prophesied by Mr. Laing, kept 'within the bounds of possible modern existence.'

4. The taxation of landed property, for local purposes, has greatly increased, particularly under the head of Poor Relief; and

5. The distressed condition of the yeoman farmer in Norway is strongly attested by his heavy and growing indebtedness. He may now, in fact, be classed with the proverbially derided Fife laird, owning 'A wee bit of land, a great lump of debt, and a dookit.'[22]

Such being the result of our enquiries into the economic condition of the great bulk of the yeoman farmers of Norway, the ideal fabric reared by Mr. Laing at a time when the Norse old world was still asleep, falls utterly to the ground, and there remains but one of his statements that we can with any advantage submit to the earnest attention of our readers, namely, that 'A single fact brought home from such a country is worth a volume of speculations.' We go further and say, that facts in relation to the question of land tenure collected in any other part of Europe are of equally inestimable value; and they have already been supplied in great abundance from Belgium, France, Germany, Italy and Switzerland.[23] Nothing can truly be more fatal to the successful solution of such intricate problems than the relief of the agricultural distress of England and Scotland, or the satisfaction of the alleged earth-hunger of the Celtic population of Ireland, than to initiate legislation on the hypothesis that circumstances alter cases, and that our own country can with impunity be withdrawn from the operation of economic laws that have asserted their supremacy throughout the entire Continent of Europe.

As history repeats itself, so are the laws of civilized development both general and inexorable. Even in the extreme case of Russia, it has been proved, in an article we published a few years ago,[24] that a heavy and ruinous price has been paid for the emancipation of the serfs on a Socialistic and partly Communistic basis, and on the erroneous assumption, that the continued existence of the 'Mir' (the ancient village community even of India) was an institution indigenous to the country itself, and therefore worthy of being perpetuated by legislation. Millions of a rural population, freed from personal servitude, were chained anew to the land by the indebtedness incurred in the expropriation of the lords of the soil. The allotments, averaging ten acres, parcelled out among them in 1861, were estimated to be sufficiently large and productive to provide not only for their support, but also, firstly, for the payment of the 'redemption dues' with which the allotted lands were charged for a limited period of years at an average rate of only 1s. 9d. per acre, and secondly, for the punctual payment of the moderate poll-tax, which the exigencies of the State required them to contribute. Those expectations began to vanish soon after they had been formed, and at the present time we see the previously rich agricultural plains of Russia, abandoned, as they almost wholly are, to the slovenly husbandry of a rude and greatly demoralized peasantry, deteriorating from year to year in the quality of their produce, and thereby opposing less and less impediment to the successful competition of other corn-growing countries.[25] The great fall that has taken place in the value of Russian cereals is apparent from the fact that, notwithstanding the depreciation of the paper currency of the country to the extent of about 25 per cent. since the serfs were emancipated (and nearly 37 per cent. from the par value of the standard rouble), the corn-grower in Russia actually receives for his produce, in paper money, some 40 per cent, less than he obtained for it when the currency was less debased.

Despair, and the absence of that restraint which education, and the moral elevation inseparable from it, are establishing in other European countries, have driven the rural inhabitants of entire districts, and even provinces, into habits of drunkenness stronger and more general than those which existed before the autocratic creation of 'peasant proprietors' in Russia.

Among the earliest measures adopted in Russia during the present reign was that of a reduction and partial remission of the 'redemption dues,' which, on the 1st of January, 1885, represented the interest and sinking fund on nearly 113 millions sterling,[26] expended by the Government in the partial expropriation of the now ruined landlords of the country.[27]

During the year 1884, alone, those reductions and remissions inflicted a loss of 1,135,000l.[28] on the Imperial Treasury. The most recent measure of alleviation has been the total abolition of the poll-tax[29] (to be completed by the end of the present year); and, consequently, the State-contribution of at least 85 per cent. of the population of Russia is being limited to the excise duty on drink, an item of revenue with which the Imperial Government cannot possibly dispense, since it brings in a sum more than adequate for the maintenance of the imposing military forces of the Empire.

Simultaneously, 'Peasant Land Banks' have been established by the State in order to facilitate the purchase of still more land by the ex-serfs. The Minister of Finance was authorized in 1882 to issue annually for that purpose a sum of 500,000l. in bonds, bearing 5-1/2 per cent. interest. But, by the 1st of January, 1886, these banks had already advanced over three millions sterling to 785 Communes, 1576 'partnerships,' and 359 individual peasants, representing an aggregate number of 112,765 householders. On loans for 24-1/2 years the interest and sinking fund, payable by the borrowers, amount to 8-1/2 per cent., and on those for 34-1/2 years, to 7-1/2 per cent., the lands purchased by such means remaining inalienable until the extinction of the mortgages, except with the consent of the mortgagees, i. e. the banks. The effects of this new departure in the direction of providing small landed proprietors with State funds, will no doubt soon be apparent.

Whether, therefore, we examine the experience of a civilized, orderly, home-ruled country like Norway, with a steady, laborious, and, we may almost say, abstemious, population in many respects akin to our own, or that of a State still at an immensely distant stage of social development,—and under a very different form of Government,—the salient results of bolstering up, by means of State loans, or of artificially creating, equally at the cost of the State, a numerous body of small landed proprietors, have been strikingly identical in regard to the ultimate economic condition of the agrarian classes.

Insisting, as we do, on the strength of the facts we have adduced, that, in old Europe, the operation of economic laws affecting land tenure, admits of no exceptions or extenuating circumstances in favour of their violation, it appears impossible, without presumptuous sophistry or political dishonesty, to resist the conclusion, that the infringement of those laws in any part of the United Kingdom could only terminate, infallibly and speedily, in damage to the State, after ruin to the individual.