MR LLOYD GEORGE is an artist in failure. He has touched nothing that he has not bungled. His famous land - taxes are still a heavy burden to the country, and it is not likely that the burden will ever be lessened. If they were devised merely as an instrument of revenge, then he might boast of their success; as "refreshing fruit" they are a bitter disappointment, even to the devout: if it costs a sovereign to gather three-andsixpennyworth of apples, it is wiser to let them rot upon the tree. The Insurance Act has fared no better than the People's Budget. The firstclass hotels, which were useful once in collecting votes, are built, like a dreamer's castle, in the air. The working classes find themselves numbered like convicts, and bound in the heavy shackles of bureaucracy. And they are never a penny better for the gross indignity. The spirit of failure, moreover, pursues Mr Lloyd George in small things as in great. The blue-eyed shepherd, of whom as oratorical capital he hoped so much, was presently discovered to be a fraud, and even in the management of his gambles upon the Stock Exchange, Mr George, the guardian of our national finances, has displayed a pitiful lack of skill. It is, then, in perfect conson

ance with the practice of modern politics that Mr George, having scaled the topmost heights of failure, should be asked by a unanimous Cabinet to wreak his vengeance upon the land.

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Something must be done to rally the stalwarts. There are hundreds of wire-pullers hungering and thirsting after plunder. Besides, though they do not confess it openly, our Ministers are sorely perplexed and divided about Ireland. They can neither close their eyes to the gravity of the situation in Ulster, nor can they easily bear the weight of Mr Redmond, who sits astride their backs. Obviously there must be a diversion or two. while Mr Winston Churchill throws the honour of England into the pot, and makes a proposal which he knows will not be considered. But what does it matter that he bleats in piteous remonstrance to the European Powers not to build any more ships, so long as by doing so he attaches to the coalition a rabble of voters who clamour for peace at any price? And as for Mr George, he must justify his forgiveness by "a land campaign," — an ominous expression, which plainly means that if in the rough and tumble the land gets the worst of it, so much the better for the Radical Party.

The speeches which Mr George delivered at Bedford and at Swindon differed not from other exhibitions of the same spleen. Not merely are Mr George's statements demonstrably inaccurate, he creates about him wherever he goes an atmosphere of suspicion and ill-will. He would persuade the voters that the decline in agriculture is entirely due to the incompetence or the villany of the landlord. He might know perfectly well, if he would, that the landlords of England have for many years worked in whole-hearted sympathy with their tenants. They have remitted rent in bad seasons; they have repaired their tenants' buildings, and helped them to stock their farms. Unlike the alkalimerchants and cocoa - manufacturers, whose devotion to Liberal principles is notorious, they have been content with a meagre two per cent on their invested capital. But these virtues are nothing to Mr George. He hints darkly at unearned increments, as though the Stock Exchange, where you buy to-day that you may sell at a profit the day after to-morrow, were the only legitimate avenue of investment. He gives no credit for the far higher morality which exists on the land. He insinuates that landlords turn men out of their farms because they "vote Liberal." Men are not perfect, not even landlords, and politics may perchance here and there have influenced the policy of a landowner. But

one side has not a monopoly of good or evil. There are Radical as well as Tory landlords, and would Lord Beauchamp, Mr George's chairman, himself an owner of broad acres, put his hand on his heart and declare that he had never heard of a

tenant turned out or labourer dismissed because his politics did not agree with the politics of his Radical landlord?

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Another prejudice subtly created by Mr George is the prejudice of sport. Landlordism can, says he, create a wilderness. So can a manufacturer if he choose to shut his works and pocket his loss. But a landlord does not create wilderness unless he can help it, for the same reason which persuades the manufacturer to keep his works open: he hopes, like other men, for an honest return for his money. But Mr George, having endowed landlords with more than their share of original sin, wishes his audience to believe that they are fools also, who maintain wildernesses for the mere fun of the thing. "If any one doubts it," says Mr George, "he has simply to take his next holiday in the Highlands of Scotland, where he will find millions of acres which formerly maintained the sturdiest, most gallant men under the sun & desert. Whilst their sons were maintaining the glory of Britons on Continental fields, their parents were having their cottages burnt down and being driven away homeless. Go to

at any rate, possessed the virtue of candour. Their motive was not concealed. They wished to abolish the Corn Laws in the interest of their own, the manufacturing, class. The move

ment was a middle class movement. What Mr Cobden wanted above all things was low wages, and he thought that he could most easily attain them by the importation of foreign corn and the ruin of English tillage. He cared not if land were thrown out of cultivation, and he was sure that, were it thrown out, the poor would have no cause for alarm. The whole country is alarmed to-day, and until a patriotic Government takes the steps necessary for the protection of agriculture, the alarm will be continued. That the change will come is certain. We can only hope that it will not come too late, when a dead country-side makes salvation impossible.

To show that the decline in agriculture is not the fault of a class, but the act of a politician, let us take a parallel instance suppose the Government, in response to popular clamour, had rendered the manufacture of cotton-stuffs in Lancashire unprofitable by law. Would it be justified if, in face of an impoverished population, it declared that the poverty was due wholly and solely to the landlords of Manchester? That is a fair parallel to Mr George's process of argument. He admits that since 1846 agriculture in England has become a lost trade. He sees that grass has made a general

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conquest of this island. would not deny that in the quest of cheapness we have helped foreign countries to break up their virgin soil, and have flooded our own markets with foreign corn and meat, with foreign butter and eggs. But neither he nor any other politician will apply to the disease the only sure and sound remedy-Protection. So he looks about him for false aids, and, like other quacks in search of a cure, he recklessly confuses causes and symptoms. The agricultural labourer, says he, must have a better house and higher wages. Then, he declares, all will be well. But poor cottages and little money are but the symptoms, not the cause, of the disease. And they will disappear only when the disease is attacked in a loyal and statesmanlike manner.

Meanwhile a vast deal of nonsense has been talked about rural housing. When Mr George says that we house the agricultural labourers "in the worst dwellings" he is guilty of his usual exaggeration. In some districts there is a lack of cottages; in others there are cottages which would be all the better for repair. But if we take a large survey, we must admit that on the whole the workers in the country are well and cheaply housed. There are hundreds of decent cottages all over England, with three rooms and a garden, which may be had for five or six pounds a-year. We are not all Cabinet Ministers, and the desires of all classes must be checked

by their purses. upon the workers in large cities that the hardship of bad housing falls most heavily. The overcrowding which may be seen in towns is unknown in the country. There is no labourer who has not a cottage for himself and his family, with all the amenity that a separate dwelling implies. He is not forced, as thousands are forced in thickly populated districts, to share with his wife and children a single room. By all means let us do all that we can to supply the labourer of the countryside with the cottage which he desires. But we shall not deal with the question more sanely and happily, if at the outset we befog our judgment with ridiculous exaggerations.

After all, better houses will come only with better wages. The charity of the State does not go so far as to propose free cottages for all who ask them. The labourer will improve the conditions of his life when he can afford to improve them, and not before. And that time will come only when England resumes the task, which the eager greed of the manufacturers compelled her to abandon, of feeding herself. In the meantime, the proposal to fix a minimum wage is but another attempt to pick up votes by dangerous promises. No demagogue can make one shilling do the work of two, and the only result that a forced minimum wage could have would be to drive still more of our labourers into the towns or across the sea. The

higher wages bill will dismiss the least efficient of his men in self-defence, and hundreds of unemployed will live to ourse the unthinking and interested benevolence of our Radical quacks.

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Mr George, then, having indulged his facile taste for superlatives, having plastered with praises the agricultural labourer, whose ruin has been ensured by sixty years of Cobdenism, proceeds to thicken the cloud of prejudice. "I would pay the labourer even before I paid the parson," he says to a shrieking chorus of "rub it in." There is no priority of payment, and the country parsons of England have little enough margin of wealth to attract the greedy. They are worth plundering. Mr George might remember that the minister least worth his salary is the demagogue, whose glib tongue forces him into the Cabinet, and permits him, without any previous training, to meddle in the finances of the country. Yet his insinuation was warranted to fortify the jealousy of the Nonconformists, and no doubt served its purpose. Of insinuation, indeed, Mr George gave his audiences as much as they could carry away; of practical suggestion he gave them nothing. murmured something about the monopoly of the land, and boasted how much he had done for patents. He hinted at land-courts, and promised to increase the band of "secondrate industrious officials," who now like locusts de

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