Mr. Robert Elliott, now President of the Incorporated Law Society and a most able man in his profession.
I am confident that a great many of the misfortunes which have over¬ taken the landowners and tenant farmers of England during the last twenty years might have been, to some extent at least, avoided if they had been brought up with a better knowledge of their own business, and taught when young to look into the details of the management of their property themselves. However able their agents may be, and however honest, their interest and inclination must always be on the side of expenditure, which no doubt they believe will prove profitable, but which recent experience shows is very often the reverse. The numerous statements and accounts which have been given in evidence and printed in the reports of the Commission on Agriculture, and on other occasions, will prove that those landowners who have spent their income most freely on so- called improvements have rarely reaped any adequate reward.
That most remarkable book which the Duke of Bedford has published, The History of a Great Agricultural Estate, will show that however magni¬ ficent may have been his policy and that of his ancestors, however much they may have deserved, as they certainly do, to be looked on as bene¬ factors to their tenants and the country, this system is ruinous to anyone who has not other sources of income. Philanthropy it may be, but it is not business; and yet this sort of thing is going on all over England in a smaller way on hundreds or thousands of estates. How long it will last is a problem I cannot attempt to solve, but though it has averted a state of things which even the most advanced Radical cannot look forward to with complacency, it has not made and will not make the farmers of England either contented or prosperous.
I am inclined to think that the tendency of modern agriculture will be towards the subdivision of farms into small holdings only where the land is really good enough to justify the outlay on new buildings, and situated neai enough to towns to make the produce saleable in a small way. What¬ ever co-operation may do in Denmark to make the disposal of the produce of small farms more easy, it seems in England to be checked by many influences which do not prevail in other countries. Notwithstanding all the preaching and all the writing from those who are not landowners and who have not looked enough below the surface to see that small cultivators abroad are not the paragons of prosperity and virtue they are often supposed to be, small holdings do not increase, and indeed hardly exist in those districts where my own property lies; and the few really small farmers that remain are mostly living a harder life and making less by it than they would do if they were willing to work for others instead of for themselves.
Whether the economy, both in the production and disposal of grain and stock in large quantities which very large farms have, will tend towards their extension and to the formation of agricultural companies, is more doubtful. Farmers seem more unwilling and more unable to combine than any other class. Bona fide co-operation between the landowner and the labourer would be no doubt the best solution of the many diffi¬ culties which surround us, but, though several attempts have been made
