'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: