Practical Politics; or, the Liberalism of To-day

by Alfred Farthing Robbins

XVII.—DO THE LAND LAWS NEED REFORM?

Immediately the question of the land is touched, a whole host of opponents to progress are roused to fierce and continuous action, though, as all politicians in these days affect a belief in the necessity for land reform, the question appears at first to be more one of degree than of principle. But, at the very outset, it is necessary to face the fact that there is an active propaganda going on which denies that any reform, even the most sweeping, will be of avail, and asserts that it is the very existence of private property in land which must be done away with.

In what is termed “Land Nationalization” a very dangerous fallacy exists. The first thing to be asked of any one who advocates it is to define the term. It is vague; it is high-sounding; but what does it mean? If it means that the State is to take into its keeping all the land without compensating the present holders, it proposes robbery; if it means that the process is to be accompanied by compensation, it would entail jobbery. There are thousands who, by working hard, have saved sufficient to buy a small plot on which to erect a house. Is that plot to be seized by the State without payment? And if fair payment be given, and the taint of theft thus removed, does a single soul imagine that a Government department would be able to manage the land better than it is managed at present? Are our Government departments such models of efficiency and economy that such a belief can be entertained for a moment? What may fairly be demanded of all advocates of the nationalization or municipalization of the land is that they shall clearly show that the process would be honest in itself, just to the present holders, and likely to benefit the whole community. Unless they can do all these things, generalities are of no avail.

The land, it is sometimes urged, has been stolen from the people; but it cannot have been stolen from those who never directly possessed it: and, whatever may be said of the manner in which the large properties were secured centuries ago, much of the land has changed hands so often that most, at least, of the present holders have fairly paid for it. There is an old legal doctrine that the title of that which is bought in open market cannot afterwards be called in question, and that applies to the present case. And when we are told that there cannot exist private property in land because that commodity is a gift of God to all, is it not the fact that, in an old country like ours, land is worth little except it be highly cultivated; that the labour, the manure, and the seed are private property without the shadow of a doubt; and that it is these we largely have to pay for when agricultural commodities are bought? Upon the same ground it is sometimes contended that we should have our water free because it falls from the heavens; but nature did not provide reservoirs, or lay mains, or bring the pipes into our houses; and for the sake of obtaining water easily we must pay for the labour and appliances used in collecting and distributing it. And the value of these illustrations, both as to land and to water, is to teach an avoidance of sounding generalities and a resolve to look at all questions in a practical light.

Recognizing, therefore, that private property in land has existed, is existing, and is not likely to be abolished, the duty of progressive politicians is to see how the laws affecting it can be so modified as to benefit a considerably larger portion of the community than at present. And three of the points which have been most discussed, and which now are nearest settlement, are the custom of primogeniture, the law of entail, and the enactments relating to transfer.

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.