ment” is one of the very rarest things which valuers have to deal with in the Cotswolds, whilst dilapidations of every kind are an almost certain source of claim when a tenant is leaving, and are seldom or never valued at a sufficient price.
Now having been a tenant farmer myself and had to consider all these points from a tenant farmer’s point of view, I think I can understand them better than many Members of Parliament seem to do; and I have come to the conclusion that any attempts by legislation to encourage tenants to do what is really owner’s work will be a failure, except in dis¬ tricts where agriculture is, from some exceptional combination of cir¬ cumstances, more permanently profitable than it is wherever I have tried it. Fixity of tenure or anything approaching it is a mere chimera as long as agriculture remains one of the most speculative and hazardous occu¬ pations a man can embark on. It cannot be reasonable to give every man who takes a farm and who may be (now generally is) a stranger to the district, knowing far less of what a farm really wants than the owner, power to spend money on ideas which lie may really think will be profit¬ able but often turn out exactly the reverse. If a man is so much in advance of average tenant farmers that he cannot put up with the average equip¬ ment of a farm, and cannot persuade the landlord to spend what lie thinks necessary, he had much better change his landlord or buy his own land. The scarcity of really capable, honest and businesslike farmers having sufficient capital to stock and work their land properly is now far less than that of the landowners who would he delighted to meet with them and do everything in reason to keep them.
But there is a very large proportion of land in England, perhaps the largest proportion, which is not good enough to attract such men even if they had it for nothing, and owners of such land must put up with a class of tenants who are not desirous of making improvements which they cannot exhaust quickly. On most of the land I have had to do with it is a work of many years really to improve either arable or pasture land to an extent which leaves it permanently better for a successor, and any tenant who has two years’ notice to quit, as most of them now insist on having, can easily take out a good deal of what he has put in. If his land¬ lord is foolish enough so to treat him that it is worth his while to do it, he has only himself to blame; but such eases are very rare in practice though not in theory, and a landowner who once gets the name of dealing harshly or unfairly with his tenants will soon find himself without any who are worth having.
The modern race of tenant farmers are a very curious set of men to deal with, and require a great deal of tact to keep on good terms with. Few of those who occupy moderate or poor land arc men of business habits and still fewer believe in improvements or high farming. Why should they ? I do not believe in it myself on poor or middling class land. When I began farming I was taught to believe that the better you did your land, the bigger crops you grew and the more stock you kept, the better farmer you were; but I have long ago discovered that this is not the case under modern conditions, When I farmed so, I lost money steadily; now that I only plough a little of my best land and try in every way to
