Untitled

New Zealand Herald, Volume XVI, Issue 5370, 1 February 1879, Page 4

As might be cxpected, the distress in England is not confined to the manufacturing districts. It has seized on the agricultural also. The farmers are in trouble, and they and their labourers are at issue on the subject of wages. Despondency is widespread, and it is affirmod by the Land jlgents' Record that notices of leaving farms from tenants to thenlandlords have been more numerous within the last three months—and even in the most prosperous counties—than in any corresponding period during the last forty or fifty years. On the Duke of Newcastle's Nottinghamshire estates alone hia agent re-

oeivod twenty auch notices. In another j part of the country the strain is so severe I that the Duke of Norfolk has remitted 25 per cent, in the rent of h.13 tenants. Kent and Sussex were always among the best | of the fanning counties, but now things are so bad there that farmers are trying a reduction of wages, and the labourers have refused the lowered scale. Large public meetings have been lield upon the land subject in London, as well as in* the provinces ! There is no doubt that a bad land system —exceptional even in Europe in the present day—is at the source of all this misfortune, now so acute periodically. Population is too great in England, but the over-crowding is not in the rural parts, which are far les3 populated than, for example, those of Flanders and other quarters of the Netherlands, where distress is never heard of. In point of fact, while the census at large swells from year to year, that for many agricultural counties sliewa an absolute decline. It i 3 by the towns that this great annual increase of inhabitants is made up, and by manufacturing districts like the Staffordshire Potteries, which are so closely packed a3 to approach the character of vast towns. London now contains four millions of people. Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow, Birmingham, Leeds, and a score of other places have also enormous populations. What is the industrial condition of those towns and of the dist icts outside them which live by manufacture 1 At the opening meeting of the Statistical Society Mr. Shaw-Le-fevre, M.P., said: —

It must, [ fear, ba admitted that the trade of this country, or at least some of its most important brunches, are in a veiy depressed condition ; that large numbers of merchants and manufacturers are making no profit; that wages in these trades have fallen to a very low point; that large bodies of men in the manufacturing districts are working short time ; and, if we are to believe many authorities, the prospects of the future were never more gloomy. Our foreign trade is desertinp us; we are feeding on our resources and gradually reducing them, and the balance of trade against us grows larger every year.

These vast accumulations of people in towns were once described as " wens on the neck of England," and the truth of the saying is becoming more publicly apparent. A great proportion of their industry is, of necessity, merely speculative, dependent on the fluctuations of foreign markets, terribly influenced by the accidents of war abroad or new foreign competition, and by uncertainty in the supply of raw material as well as in the demand for wrought goods. It is not a sound state of things which renders such precarious industry the mainstay of a nation. Manufacture should be a supplement to agriculture, and not be substituted for it as the chief national reliance. Many now begin to ask themselves, how is it, where the con-

ditions of Nature are so favourable, aud the skill of the husbandman so advanced, that the soil doe 3 not support more people, and produce more general prosperity and happiness ? The soil in England was never so well cultivated, and never produced so much wealth, but, nevertheless, it does not make the labourer flourish who tills it, nor the farmer who pays for it an exorbitant rent. The public see, not only in the same realm with themselves, but within the circuit of the British Islands, the universal wellbeing caused by the peasant proprietary system in the Channel Islands (Jersey, Guernsey, &e.), and they naturally inquire, i 3 an opposite system the reason why peasant-distress should be rife in Kent, "the garden of England," in Somerset's smiling Vale of Taunton, in Worcestershire's rich Vale of Evesham 1 They observe that though the skill of the Lothian, or Norfolk, or Ayrshire farmer is proverbial, as is also that of the Flemish one, the wealth thereby raised goes under the British land arrangement into the hands of a few, while on the Belgian it is divided among the many. We aro told that one result of the present calamity " will be the increased prominence of the land question," and we hear from another quarter that " a repetition of such distress would raise that very troublesome land agitation in England from which she has hitherto managed to so completely escape" ; indeed, it is only wonderful that it has lain dormant so long. Many years ago attention to it was pressed upon the public in the columns of the JFedmiiuiter lleview, by the late John Stuart Mill, and Mr. Fawcett, M.P. ; and it was occasionally dealt with 011 the platform b>- Mr. Bright. The landed interest is so strong in the old country that there could be no very sanguine hopes of immediate success ; but the necessity for land reform has now become more pressing, and the subject will scarcely fall into abeyance again. Over far the greater part of the European continent the land system 11 #w is either that of a peasant proprietary, or, as in some pirts of Italy, a partnership between the landlord and cultivator. A gentleman of fortune in Suffolk, a Mr. Gurdon, tried 011 one of his estates this latter system— a co-operative experiment with a number of his labourers, —aud the result, when we last heard of it, some years ago, was said to bo satisfactory and gratifying to all parties. In England, in modern times, the tendency, unfortunately, has been to accumulate land in a few hands, instead of distributing it among many ; and the old, numerous, and serviceable class of small proprietors—yeomen and copyholders—has been almost entirely swallowed up.