The answer is simple. His capital has been filched from him surely, but not always slowly, by a tremendous increase in his rent. The landlords of the eighteenth century made the English farmer the foremost agriculturist in the world, but their successors of the nineteenth have ruined him by their extortions.... In 1799 we find land paying nearly 20s. an acre.... By 1850 it had risen to 38s. 6d.... £2 an acre was not an uncommon rent for land a few years ago, the average increase of English rents being no less than 26½ per cent. between 1854 and 1879.... The result has been that the average capital per acre now employed in agriculture is only about £4 or £5, instead of at least £10, as it ought to be.
If the rents were as high as £2 an acre when our poor farmers were struggling to make both ends meet, it is little wonder they failed. A rent of £2 an acre means a land tax of more than 11s. a quarter on wheat. The price of wheat in the market at present is about 25s. a quarter. A rent charge of 21s. per acre would amount to more than £10,000,000 on the 9,000,000 we should need to grow all our wheat. A rent charge of £2 an acre would amount to £18,000,000. That would be a heavy sum for our farmers to lift before they went to market.
Moreover, agriculture has been neglected because all the mechanical and chemical skill, and all the capital and energy of man, have been thrown into the struggle for trade profits and manufacturing pre-eminence. We want a few Faradays, Watts, Stephensons, and Cobdens to devote their genius and industry to the great food question. Once let the public interest and the public genius be concentrated upon the agriculture of England, and we shall soon get silenced the croakers who talk about the impossibility of the country feeding her people.
But is it true that under fair conditions wheat can be brought from the other side of the world and sold here at a price with which we cannot compete? Prince Kropotkin thinks not. He says the French can produce their food more cheaply than they can buy it; and if the French can do this, why cannot we?
But in case it should be thought that I am prejudiced in favour of Prince Kropotkin's book or against the factory system, I will here print a quotation from a criticism of the book which appeared in the Times newspaper, which paper can hardly be suspected of any leanings towards Prince Kropotkin, or of any eagerness to acknowledge that the present industrial system possesses "acknowledged evils."
Seriously, Prince Kropotkin has a great deal to say for his theories.... He has the genuine scientific temper, and nobody can say that he does not extend his observations widely enough, for he seems to have been everywhere and to have read everything.... Perhaps his chief fault is that he does not allow sufficiently for the ingrained conservatism of human nature and for the tenacity of vested interests. But that is no reason why people should not read his book, which will certainly set them thinking, and may lead a few of them to try, by practical experiments, to lessen some of the acknowledged evils of the present industrial system.
Just notice what the Tory Times says about "the tenacity of vested interests" and the "acknowledged evils of the present industrial system." It is a great deal for the Times to say.
But what about the meat?
Prince Kropotkin deals as satisfactorily with the question of meat-growing as with that of growing wheat, and his conclusion is this—
Our means of obtaining from the soil whatever we want, under any climate and upon any soil, have lately improved at such a rate that we cannot foresee yet what is the limit of productivity of a few acres of land. The limit vanishes in proportion to our better study of the subject, and every year makes it vanish farther and farther from our sight.