ask, why are the small properties added to the large, and why, when a large estate is for sale, is it not found advantageous to sell it in small lots, say of ten to fifty acres? Mr. Froude would reply: 'Because the small capitalists are those who seek the highest rate of interest, and an investment in land produces the lowest or next to the lowest.' But this is a wild theory; it is not a fact. In every country in the world, the class of smallest investors is contented with the lowest interest. In Great Britain, being, for the reasons I have stated and will further explain, divorced from the soil, the class finds this in the Post Office Savings Banks, which return only 2 per cent. But here, partly in consequence of their extrusion from landownership, the largest class is not a saving class. Outside this kingdom the savings of the multitude are invested in the land and in public funds. The debt of France is held by 4,000,000, that of England by 250,000, persons; and a like proportion holds in regard to the land. The first demand of the small investor is never high interest; that form of folly belongs to the upper classes. His want is security, and the consequence is that at this moment an amount nearly equal to one year's revenue of the United Kingdom is held by savings banks, for a return less than the average received by the landowners of this country. The number of small proprietors is dwindling every year because there is no addition. And why is there no addition? The answer is very simple. It is not, as we have seen, because of the smallness of the return from land; it is obviously because the small capitalist cannot afford, and will not consent, to encounter a certain delay in the business, and an uncertain risk in the cost, of purchase. The only man who goes free of care in this respect into the Auction Mart is the large buyer upon whose purchase the cost can amount only to a very small percentage. Say that a man, by years of selfdenial and careful thrift, has saved 500l., and the idea, so delightful to the minds of most men, of purchasing a small property upon which to spend his loving labour and the remainder of his life, presents itself to his imagination. In this country, and in this country only, the thought is chilled and checked because he has no assurance that the cost of purchase may not amount to a fourth or even a third of his store; and if the purchase-money exceed his possessions, and he wishes to raise a further sum by way of mortgage, that process, to be repeated perhaps at the end of three years, may involve him in a lifelong charge for legal costs equal to the amount of the mortgagee's interest. He abandons, with a shudder, the coveted land to the men of ten and twenty thousand acres, and possibly his store of gold (for these small investors of the lower middle class may be thus imprudent) is transformed into the baseless fabric of a Turkish bond, not because he loves the Turk, and not because he hankers after a promise of 9 per cent., but because he is driven to the Stock Exchange by terror of the cost of law, and if he must buy a paper

promise to pay he likes to have a high figure. Many of us know in our personal experience the truth of this. Many could mention cases in which this cost amounted to one-third of the purchase-money. I bought a small leasehold property lately. I thought the lawyer's account would not be more than 15l.-I had no assurance it would not be 150l. It was 35l. If that property had been in South Australia, the transaction would have occupied hours instead of weeks, would have cost me fewer shillings than it cost pounds sterling; and the charge would have been one which I could have calculated exactly beforehand. Can anyone fail to see what would be the consequence if a system like that which works so well in our colonies were established in this country? The purchaser, who always magnifies the uncertain cost of law, would then be prepared to add considerably to his bidding. There could be no objection to a part of that increase of value going to the landowner, but some of it should find its way to the purse of the State. Of course, to establish such a system of registration of title would be more difficult here than in any of our colonies, but no competent authority doubts that it could be done, or that in this island we should gain advantages as great as those which are being enjoyed by the people of the larger island of Australia. The benefits actually realised in South Australia are thus described by Sir Robert Torrens, the author of the measure:

15

1. Titles being indefeasible, proprietors may invest capital in land secure against risk of deprivation and the no less harassing contingeney of a Chancery suit; mortgagees, having also no further occasion to look to validity of title, may confine their attention to the adequacy of the security. 2. A saving amounting on the average to 90 per cent., or 188. in the pound sterling, has been effected in the cost of transfers and other dealings, irrespective of the contingent liability to further expenses resulting from suits at law and in equity, the grounds of which are cut off by the alteration of tenure. 3. The procedure is so simple as to be readily comprehended, so that men of ordinary education may transact their own business. 4. Dealings in land are transacted as expeditiously as dealings in merchandise or cattle, fifteen minutes being the average time occupied in filling up the forms and completing a transaction.

Compared with our restrictive system, this sounds like an announcement of the millennium. The English Law Reform Association declared twenty years ago that it has been estimated by persons of experience and authority in such matters that a cheap, simple, expeditious, and accurate system of transfers of land would add four or five years' purchase to the marketable value of land.' 16 From whence would this increase flow? Not from the pockets of the rich, for they are not hindered in the acquisition of land by fear of the cost of conveyance by deed. It would come from the class of whom Mr. Froude and the maintainers of the present feudal system say 15 The South Australian System of Registration of Title. By Robert R. Torrens. Adelaide, 1859.

that they cannot afford to own land. The first fallacy is thus exposed. The highest price is never obtained where land is purchased as a luxury by the rich, but always where it is most suitably divided for industrial occupation. This is as true of Old Broad Street compared with Belgrave Square, as it is of the county of Bucks compared with Flanders, France, or Switzerland. There has been an approach to the system of free trade in land in the offer of the Church lands of Ireland to the tenants. And what has been the consequence? Four thousand sales have been effected at unusually high rates, and a small proprietary is being thus established on those lands. A man who can buy twenty acres of land, worth 308. per acre in the hands of a great proprietor, and returning at that rent 3 per cent. upon the outlay, will commonly, by such diligent and unremitting labour as the magic of property can alone call forth, make that land worth 908. an acre in a few years. His investment will then be paying 9 per cent. upon the purchase-money. Ownership produces on the part of the occupier labour which a leaseholder or yearly tenant would never give. It would be easy to point to many cases in which tenant farmers, men of superior energy, would have been in a far better position had their capital been first employed in securing ownership. Take the case of Mr. Hope, of Fenton-Barns, as one of many. At any time he could have obtained two-thirds of the purchase-money of any breadth of land at 4 per cent. The 50 per cent. increase in the value of that farm, which was obtained by his landlord when he quitted it, would have been his own. There can be no doubt such men would be far richer at their death, could they be owners as well as farming occupiers of the soil, even though they were restricted to a third of the area over which their tenancy extends. The price of land in this country is low compared with what it would fetch if, by the establishment of free trade in land, the occupying farmer were brought in as a competitor. Land which would be worth 60l. an acre in this island fetches 100l. in the Channel Islands, and nearly 150l. in Switzerland. In England, 30s. an acre would be thought a fair, and indeed rather a high, rent for middling land; it is only inferior land that in Jersey and Guernsey, where the average sizes of farms are respectively eleven and sixteen acres, will not let for at least 41., while in Switzerland the average rent is 6l. an acre.' 17

I think I have now demonstrated that the present distribution of land in England is not the result of economic laws. The distribution of land where the unrestricted action of economic laws is permitted will tend towards those who will give the highest price for it, and as a rule those are they in whose possession it can be made most productive. And the primary reason why, under a system of free trade in land, there would be a wholesome tendency to the restoration of

Peasant Proprietors. By W. T. Thornton, C.B. (Macmillan.)

that valuable but now almost extinct class, the small proprietors, is because in their hands an increase of produce, the possibility of which landlords like Lord Derby fully admit, but cannot obtain, might most surely be accomplished. We shall see this more clearly in regarding the second fallacy, which may be thus expressed: 'That the agricultural production of England is larger than that of other countries because the farms are larger.' This fallacy is constantly in the mouths of those who uphold the English land-system. There is no lawyer of greater authority than the Lord Chancellor, and when he undertook in 1854 the defence of primogeniture, he believed he had reached firm ground in the argument that primogeniture is favourable to agriculture because it tends to large estates, and large estates tend to large farms. How is it that this belief, which I shall prove to be erroneous, has become rooted in the minds of British statesmen, even of some who I have no doubt endeavour to keep their intelligence open to the reception of truth upon this great question? A too ready acceptance of statistics is in many cases the cause of error. When the lesson of statistics runs in the direction of national self-esteem or the interest of a governing class, it is hard to throw over the favourable witness. And official figures do undoubtedly show that the produce of wheat per acre in England is much greater than that of any other country. Herr Block, a Prussian official, compiled a table which was promulgated by his government after the great German war of 1866, and which, through the action of our Foreign Office, has been widely circulated in England.18 No well-informed person believes that it is strictly accurate, especially with regard to the production of France; but its general indication is no doubt trustworthy. We may certainly accept as true the result that the United Kingdom has the smallest proportion of the population engaged in agriculture and the largest production of wheat per acre. The following is Herr Block's table:

18 Part I. Reports from H. M. Representatives respecting the Tenure of Land in the several Countries of Europe. 1869,

But how do these figures bear upon the question of small farms? They have been accepted by some politicians without scrutiny. Mr. W. R. Greg flourished them over my head in rejoinder to the answer I gave his terrific observations in the character of Cassandra. Referring to the above figures, he thought Mr. Arnold would be surprised to find that the average annual produce of wheat in Belgium is 20 per cent. below that of England.' 19 He seemed to think there was no appeal from Herr Block's table. This is how the matter is put by politicians such as Mr. Greg:- Farms are large in England. Farms are small in France and Belgium. The produce of wheat in England as compared with those countries is as 40 to 14 and 19. Therefore large farms are better than small, and therefore, whatever changes may be made in our land-laws, provided there is free trade, there will be a constant tendency to increase the size of farms. Q.E.D.' Thus Mr. Froude and Mr. Greg, with perhaps three-fourths of Parliament in full agreement.

But let us try to put the matter more accurately. England is a country of large farms; therefore the only proper comparison of English agriculture with that of any other country would be where large farms prevail. By comparing large with large, and small with small, we obtain a just comparison; we see more clearly what are the essential differences of agriculture in the several States. Perhaps no possible error is greater than to suppose that the system of one country can be adopted in all its features in another country by a mere act of legislative authority. But, as a rule, the size of farms does follow the tendency of legislation. The self-denial, the careful thrift, the scrupulous frugality of the Flemish, the French, or the Swiss peasant could not be imparted to the English poor by any statute of Parliament. These must grow from seed, they cannot be transplanted. But these domestic virtues, which have become exotics by the maintenance of the feudal system in this island, would surely spring up again when the law favoured the possession by the comparatively poor of that form of investment in which alone their confidence in property can take root and become established. The rude comparison made upon the face of Herr Block's table conceals the real facts, which I maintain are these:-1. That the soil of the United Kingdom is well adapted for the varied forms of agriculture, and has a greater natural fertility than the north and centre of Europe. 2. That the large farms of England produce more than the large farms of the Continent; but (3) that the greatest produce of grain of all sorts, as well as of meat, is gathered from small farms, from the land of peasant-proprietors; and (4) that rent and saleable value are relatively highest upon peasant-properties. From which I shall argue that if we had free trade in land in England, even though we main

19 Cassandra's Rejoinder.' Contemporary Review, November 1874.