Landlords of Britain.

Timaru Herald, Volume XIIC, Issue 14074, 4 December 1909, Page 2 (Supplement)

Landlords of Britain.

Owners of Back Yards Many, but <n Broad Acres Ft v.. (By Harold Spender.)

Mr. Balfour attempted to revive hi the House of Commons the other day a good old fable about the tem.-e of land in the United Kingdom. K is that the land is really divided amoi-.g a. very large proportion of the population. The idea of Great Britain being a land of few large owners is. accordng to this theory, a fiction of the fiadical Press. Whenever you listen to a Tory speech on this subiect. voti will hear it strenuously affirmed that the land of England is really divided among a million persons. The intelligent foreigner who has travelled through our country, and seen our large parks and stretching farms, will be a little surprised. lie will go awav puzzled and troubled in heart. And" that is the object of the statement.

Now the real truth of the matter is perfectly simple. It is the fact that -there are nearly a million owners of land in England. That is perfectly troe. But still it is also true that the land of England is in very few hands. What is the solution of that puzzler Whv simplr this—that the few possess the" broad acres and the many possess the backyards. In a certain sense, of course, .John Smith, of T-ceds, who owns a backyard of a quarter of an acre, is a landowner ■quite as much as the duke who owns 100,000 acres. Well, it is by putting John Smith and the duke in the same schedule that the Tories arrive at their conclusion. A good joke, isn't it? HOW IT ORIGINATED.

The storv of the matter is very interesting. The "Million Landowners Fable" has a basis. Let us admit that at, once. It has its basis in the exhaustive return of owners of land which was pnt together by the Local Government Board lietween the years 1873 and 1875. That return was ordered on.the motion of Lord Derby in 1873. Its object was to out a stop to the wicked Radical talk about England being in the hands of a few landowners. The collection of the facts took more than two years, and gave the - Loral Government Board no end of trouble. That brought them to 1873, when a Tory Government had taken the place of "the Liberal Government of 1873. The result was that the return was issued without any attempt at all at classification in the matter of size of estates. It was simply an exhaustive lis; of even.- man. woman and child wh.n owned the smallest or the largest p;ir'-h of land.

Tb" re-ult v.-:> t«t bring the owners of -' ::i :!>■ I 'ed Kingdom up to the ligtir, :"_' 0. But the ' :al Government Board could not quite leave the matter at that. They were forced to nut in some •raiding distinction. So in the preface to the five volnnies the Government Board inserted the following sumwary distinguishing the owners of more than one acre from those of less:— Owners of less than one acre 703.000 Owners of more than one acre 260,000

Making a total of ... 972.000 THE TIPPER TEN" THOUSAND. This simple table threw a great deal of light on the figures. It showed that out of the scheduled million some 71K),000 were in possession of backyards as against some 250,000 in possession of the broad acres. But the matter was not allowed to rest there. As soon as the five ponderous volumes of this report were issued, the wicked Radicals, guided by the land reformers of that day—including men like Sir Arthur Arnold—began to analyse the returns. In other words, they began to do the work which ought to have been done by the Government. They took these gigantic lists of owners and began to summarise them under certain heads. Let us see what this analysis revealed—especially as there has not been very much change in the ownership of the United Kingdom since 1875. Heirs have succeeded to their fathers, but thanks to the laws of entail and primogeniture, things are very much what they were. The area of the United Kingdom contains nearly 78,000,000 acres of land and water. Of that space over ■ 52,000,000 acres were shown by this return to be in the hands of men who owned more than 1,000 acres each. It is still worth while giving the figures relating to owners of over 1,000 acres:— No. of Acres such owners, thev own. v England and Wales 5,408 18.693,528 Scotland 1.758 17,584,828 Ireland 3,745 15,802,739 10,911 52,083,095 Thus, it is still true, in spite of that imposing figure which Tory orators have never forgotten, that the bulk of the land is owned by very fewpeople. The "backyarders" are numerous, but they do not count for very mnch. When Mr Balfour twitted Mr Lloyd George the other day with his estimate of assessments under Schedule A he thought he had got hold of a very valuable point. If the Treasury admit over 3 million landowners, why, then, what becomes of the usual Radical argument ?

But it turns out that- most of these Schedule A assessments will be assessments of back gardens and backvards. The solid fact remains that 10.000 jwople own five-sevenths of the land «>f the United Kingdom. Thus the theory that England is in the hands of the small owner is shown to lie a fiction. PEERS OWN A THIRD.

But there was another interesting fact discovered by these wicked Radical investigators. It was that a very large proportion «f the owners were peers of the United Kingdom. Thov found on examining the Dcrbv return that out »f the 18.01)0.000 acres of cultivated land in the United Kingdom no less than 15.3fH).000 acres were lield by 525 peers. This was exclusive of their possessions in forests and woods, in roads and rivers, or in London. In other words-these 525 peers then held one-third of the cultivated land of the United Kingdom. If we add 5,000.000 acres for the jKissessions unrcckoned in the return then the landed properties of those 525 peers come up to 20,000.000 acrrs. By the same process they discovered that the average of each peer's landed estate worked out at 38,000 acres. The amount varied very much in accordance with the position in the pcrace. and it is a very extraordinary thing how the different orders of the British aristocracy have managed to keep their estates in almost precise proportion to their rank in the peerage. The landed possessions scaled down in the following order :

Dnkes 112.000 acres each Marquesses ... '47.500 Earls 30,000 Viscounts .... 15.000 ~ Barons 14,000

It will be seen that the "noor but honest dukes" still head the list at ;i considerable distance in the fight for the land. All this is very interesting. And has it not some bearing on the claim now being put forward that the 'Lords should decide the fate of the Budget? Is it not rather difficult to believe, in view of these facts, that the Lords can put forward a claim to be impartial judges in this matter?