Representative British Orations Volume 3 (of 4) / With Introductions and Explanatory Notes

by Unknown

But you will say, capital would be invested if it could be done with profit. I admit it; that is the question I want you to inquire into. How is it that in a country where there is a plethora of capital, where every other business and pursuit is overflowing with money, where you have men going to France for railways and to Pennsylvania for bonds, embarking in schemes for connecting the Atlantic with the Pacific by canals, railways in the valley of the Mississippi, and sending their money to the bottom of the Mexican mines; while you have a country rich and overflowing, ready to take investments in every corner of the globe; how is it, I say, that this capital does not find its employment in the most attractive of all forms—upon the soil of this country? The cause is notorious—it is admitted by your highest authorities; the reason is, there is not security for capital in land. Capital shrinks instinctively from insecurity of tenure; and you have not in England that security which would warrant men of capital investing their money in the soil.

Now, is it not a matter worthy of consideration, how far this insecurity of tenure is bound up with that protective system of which you are so enamoured? Suppose it can be shown that there is a vicious circle; that you have made politics of Corn Laws, and that you want voters to maintain them; that you very erroneously think that the Corn Laws are your great mine of wealth, and, therefore, you must have a dependent tenantry, that you may have their votes at elections to maintain this law in Parliament. Well, if you will have dependent voters, you cannot have men of spirit and capital. Then your policy reacts upon you. If you have not men of skill and capital, you cannot have improvements and employment for your laborers. Then comes round that vicious termination of the circle—you have pauperism, poor-rates, county-rates, and all the other evils of which you are now speaking and complaining.[11] * * *

Now, sir, not only does the want of security prevent capital flowing into the farming business, but it actually deters from the improvement of the land those who are already in the occupation of it. There are many men, tenants of your land, who could improve their farms if they had a sufficient security, and they have either capital themselves or their friends could supply it; but with the absence of leases, and the want of security, you are actually deterring them from laying out their money on your land. They keep every thing the same from year to year. You know that it is impossible to farm your estates properly unless a tenant has an investment for more than one year. A man ought to be able to begin a farm with at least eight years before him, before he expects to see a return for the whole of the outlay of his money. You are, therefore, keeping your tenants-at-will at a yearly kind of cultivation, and you are preventing them carrying on their businesses in a proper way. Not only do you prevent the laying out of capital upon your land, and disable the farmers from cultivating it, but your policy tends to make them servile and dependent; so that they are actually disinclined to improvement, afraid to let you see that they can improve, because they are apprehensive that you will pounce upon them for an increase of rent. I see the honorable member for Lincolnshire opposite, and he rather smiled at the expression when I said that the state of dependence of the farmers was such that they were actually afraid to appear to be improving their land. Now that honorable gentleman, the member for Lincolnshire [Mr. Christopher], upon the motion made last year for agricultural statistics, by my honorable friend, the member for Manchester [Mr. Milner Gibson], made the following statement:

“It is most desirable for the farmer to know the actual quantity of corn grown in this country, as such knowledge would insure steadiness of prices, which was infinitely more valuable to the agriculturist than fluctuating prices. But to ascertain this there was extreme difficulty. They could not leave it to the farmer to make a return of the quantity which he produced, for it was not for his interest to do so. If in any one or two years he produced four quarters per acre on land which had previously grown but three, he might fear that his landlord would say: ‘Your land is more productive than I imagined, and I must therefore raise your rent.’ The interest of the farmers, therefore, would be to underrate, and to furnish low returns.”

Now, I ask honorable gentlemen here, the landed gentry of England, what a state of things is that when, upon their own testimony respecting the farming capitalists in this country, they dare not appear to have a good horse—they dare not appear to be growing more than four quarters instead of three? [Mr. Christopher: Hear!] The honorable member cheers, but I am quoting from his own authority. I say this condition of things, indicated by these two quotations, brings the tenant-farmers—if they are such as these gentlemen describe them to be,—it brings them down to a very low point of servility. In Egypt Mehemet Ali takes the utmost grain of corn from his people, who bury it beneath their hearthstones in their cottages, and will suffer the bastinado rather than tell how much corn they grow. Our tenants are not afraid of the bastinado, but they are terrified at the rise of rent. This is the state of things amongst the tenant-farmers, farming without leases.[12] In England leases are the exception, and not the rule. But even where you have leases in England—where you have leases or agreements—I doubt whether they are not in many cases worse tenures than where there is no lease at all; the clauses being of such an obsolete and preposterous character as to defy any man to carry on the business of farming under them profitably.

Now, I do not know why we should not in this country have leases for land upon similar terms to the leases of manufactories, or any “plant” or premises. I do not think that farming will ever be carried on as it ought to be until you have leases drawn up in the same way as a man takes a manufactory, and pays perhaps a £1,000 a year for it. I know people who pay £4,000 a year for manufactories to carry on their business, and at fair rents. There is an honorable gentleman near me who pays more than £4,000 a year for the rent of his manufactory. What covenants do you think he has in his lease? What would he think if it stated how many revolutions there should be in a minute of the spindles, or if they prescribed the construction of the straps or the gearing of the machinery? Why, he takes his manufactory with a schedule of its present state—bricks, mortar, and machinery—and when the lease is over, he must leave it in the same state, or else pay a compensation for the dilapidation. [The Chancellor of the Exchequer: Hear! hear!] The right honorable gentleman, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, cheers that statement. I want to ask his opinion respecting a similar lease for a farm. I am rather disposed to think that the Anti-Corn-Law Leaguers will very likely form a joint-stock association, having none but free traders in the body, that we may purchase an estate and have a model farm; taking care that it shall be in one of the rural counties, one of the most purely agricultural parts of the country, where we think there is the greatest need of improvement—perhaps in Buckinghamshire,—and there shall be a model farm, homestead, and cottages; and I may tell the noble Lord, the member for Newark, that we shall have a model garden, and we will not make any boast about it. But the great object will be to have a model lease. We will have as the farmer a man of intelligence and capital.

I am not so unreasonable as to tell you that you ought to let your land to men who have not a competent capital, or are not sufficiently intelligent; but I say, select such a man as that, let him know his business and have a sufficient capital, and you cannot give him too wide a scope. We will find such a man, and will let him our farm; there shall be a lease precisely such as that upon which my honorable friend takes his factory. There shall be no clause inserted in it to dictate to him how he shall cultivate his farm; he shall do what he likes with the old pasture. If he can make more by ploughing it up he shall do so; if he can grow white crops every year—which I know there are people doing at this moment in more places than one in this country,—or if he can make any other improvement or discovery, he shall be free to do so. We will let him the land, with a schedule of the state of tillage and the condition of the homestead, and all we will bind him to will be this: “You shall leave the land as good as when you entered upon it. If it be in an inferior state it shall be valued again, and you shall compensate us; but if it be in an improved state it shall be valued, and we, the landlords, will compensate you.” We will give possession of every thing upon the land, whether it be wild or tame animals; he shall have the absolute control. Take as stringent precautions as you please to compel the punctual payment of the rent; take the right of re-entry as summarily as you like if the rent be not duly paid; but let the payment of rent duly be the sole test as to the well-doing of the tenant; and so long as he can pay the rent, and do it promptly, that is the only criterion you need have that the farmer is doing well; and if he is a man of capital, you have the strongest possible security that he will not waste your property while he has possession of it.

Now, sir, I have mentioned a deficiency of capital as being the primary want among farmers. I have stated the want of security in leases as the cause of the want of capital; but you may still say: “You have not connected this with the Corn Laws and the protective system.” I will read the opinion of an honorable gentleman who sits upon this side of the House; it is in a published letter of Mr. Hayter, who, I know, is himself an ardent supporter of agriculture. He says:

“The more I see of and practise agriculture, the more firmly am I convinced that the whole unemployed labor of the country could, under a better system of husbandry, be advantageously put into operation; and, moreover, that the Corn Laws have been one of the principal causes of the present system of bad farming and consequent pauperism. Nothing short of their entire removal will ever induce the average farmer to rely upon any thing else than the legislature for the payment of his rent; his belief being that all rent is paid by corn, and nothing else than corn, and that the legislature can, by enacting Corn Laws, create a price which will make his rent easy. The day of their [the Corn Laws’] entire abolition ought to be a day of jubilee and rejoicing to every man interested in land.”

Now, sir, I do not stop to connect the cause and effect in this matter, and inquire whether your Corn Laws or your protective system have caused the want of leases and capital. I do not stop to make good my proof, and for this reason, that you have adopted a system of legislation in this House by which you profess to make the farming trade prosperous. I show you, after thirty years’ trial, what is the depressed condition of the agriculturists; I prove to you what is the impoverished state of farmers, and also of laborers, and you will not contest any one of those propositions. I say it is enough, having had thirty years’ trial of your specific with no better results than these, for me to ask you to go into committee to see if something better cannot be devised. I am going to contend that free trade in grain would be more advantageous to farmers—and with them I include laborers—than restriction; to oblige the honorable member for Norfolk, I will take with them also the landlords; and I contend that free trade in corn and grain of every kind would be more beneficial to them than to any other class of the community. I should have contended the same before the passing of the late tariff, but now I am prepared to do so with tenfold more force. What has the right honorable baronet [Sir R. Peel] done? He has passed a law to admit fat cattle at a nominal duty. Some foreign fat cattle were selling in Smithfield the other day at about 15l. or 16l. per head, paying only about seven and one half per cent. duty; but he has not admitted the raw material out of which these fat cattle are made. Mr. Huskisson did not act in this manner when he commenced his plan of free trade.[13] He began by admitting the raw material of manufactures before he admitted the manufactured article; but in your case you have commenced at precisely the opposite end, and have allowed free trade in cattle instead of that upon which they are fattened. I say give free trade in that grain which goes to make the cattle. I contend that by this protective system the farmers throughout the country are more injured than any other class in the community. I would take, for instance, the article of clover-seed. The honorable member for North Northamptonshire put a question the other night to the right honorable baronet at the head of the government. He looked so exceedingly alarmed that I wondered what the subject was which created the apprehension. He asked the right honorable baronet whether he was going to admit clover-seed into this country. I believe clover-seed is to be excluded from the schedule of free importation. Now, I ask for whose benefit is this exception made? I ask the honorable gentleman, the member for North Northamptonshire, whether those whom he represents, the farmers of that district of the county, are, in a large majority of instances, sellers of clover-seed? I will undertake to say they are not. How many counties in England are there which are benefited by the protection of clover-seed? I will take the whole of Scotland. If there be any Scotch members present, I ask them whether they do not in their country import the clover-seed from England? They do not grow it. I undertake to say that there are not ten counties in the United Kingdom which are interested in the importation of clover-seed out of their own borders. Neither have they any of this article in Ireland. But yet we have clover-seed excluded from the farmers, although they are not interested as a body in its protection at all.