BRITISH LAND PROBLEM.

Lyttelton Times, Volume CXVI, Issue 16805, 15 March 1915, Page 6

BRITISH LAND PROBLEM.

Snt Rider Haggard, according to a London cablegram, tliat if the Cost of farm labour increases he will be obliged to dispose of his dairy farm. To colonial fanners who know something of the relative cost of country labour in England and in New Zealand, and who are able to pay their hands a reasonable wage and comply with stringent conditions as to production and send their produce lialf-way round the world to find ar market, and with all this make a comfortable living, Sir Rider Haggard’s lament must seem ridiculous. The British farmer has the greatest market of the world at his doors, and if he cannot sell his milk and butter and cheese and his grain products at a profit, and particularly in the present times of high prices, the fault can scarcely be laid at the door of the unfortunate farm labourer, whose, wages at the best do not nearly approach those of the agricultural and dairying hands in Australia and New Zealand. The trouble must lie deeper than that, and Sir Rider Haggard makes a more sensible remark when he suggests an immediate and competent investigation of the whole land problem. If. fanning is really in the unsatisfactory condition in the Old Country that Sir Riider Haggard describes, the fault must lie with the had old feudal system of land tenure that persists throughout the British Islands. The tenant farmer starts with a big handicap, tangled as he is in the meshes of the land monopolist’s net. The interests of sport invariably receive more consideration than those of agricultural progress. A nation that suffers millions of its good acres to remain in the hands of a few aristocratic families, and carefully locked up by the laws of entail and other precautions, can scarcely wonder that the farming industry languishes and that the young men and women crowd into the towns. In : tbo ee/e) ms tlia farm labourer has a

fair fighting chance; he often obtains a farm of his own, and tho conditions of country life are so favourable that there is little inducement for the young people to forsake them. But the tenant fanner and the farm labourer in England are equally loaded down by tho antiquated conditions and restrictions under which they vainly struggle, and until the existing land system undergoes a thorough and unmerciful overhaul it seems hopeless to expect the .British agricultural industry to flourish as. it should.