Then beware how you choose such a time for heroic legislation. At such a time sleep may end in lethargy, but tickling must kill.

Not all grievances are radical; some are merely symptomatic. Nay, some may indicate that Mother Nature has gone her own way to work, and taken the cure of a deep-seated mischief into her own hands. Your young practitioner who whips out his lancet whenever a patient shows him a pimple is a dangerous man to turn into

your nursery.

II. But is it true that land monopoly is on the increase, and the land of the country is getting into fewer and fewer hands?

The history of every nation that has ever emerged from barbarism to the higher life of law, system, and empire has been the history of a process whereby the ownership of landed property has passed from the possession of the many to that of the few. Prophets may denounce their woe as loudly as they please against 'them that join house to house and lay field to field till there be no place.' Fiery optimists with Utopian dreams may come forward with all sorts of schemes for nationalising the land and limiting the acreage that any man. may own. Literary country gentlemen with a taste for philanthropy may pathetically deplore that the wide domains of the monied men have been the ruin of the country; but the son of Amoz at Jerusalem, and Gracchus 500 years after him at Rome, and Pliny 300 years after him simply testified to the fact that eternal laws go on from age to age, working themselves out by the agency of the instincts or the follies, the sins or the aspirations, the greed or the needs of the children of men.2

Almost within reach of my hand as I write there are lying the original conveyances of land in a single Norfolk parish, more than 600 in number, the most modern of which belongs to the end of the fifteenth, the oldest to the beginning of the thirteenth century. In that long series of documents, so carefully preserved, I have the history of less than 1,500 acres during less than 300 years. It is an eloquent record, which needs only to be read, of how, under conditions by no means abnormal and circumstances in no way extraordinary, the tiny patches of land that were distributed among a hundred owners in the days of King John came gradually but steadily into fewer and fewer hands, the holdings becoming larger and larger as the generations passed, the Little ones then, as now, as always, being swallowed up by the larger capitalists, till these in their turn became the Little ones, and they too had to go. It is a great law of the universe. It always has gone on; it always will. And who are we that we are going to set ourselves against it

· ἔμελλον λέγειν ὡς οὐδείς ποτε ἀνθρώπων οὐδὲν νομοθετεῖ, τύχαι δὲ καὶ ξυμφοραὶ παντοῖαι πίπτουσαι παντοίως νομοθετοῦσι τὰ πάντα ἡμῖν (Plato, Lans, iv. 709), I was going to say that no human being ever does make laws about anything, but all sorts of accidents and circumstances, occurring in all sorts of ways, make our laws for us at all times.'

and say this shall not be? Who are we that we are going to stop the clock or drive back the shadow on the dial of Ahaz?

It is quite conceivable that a condition of affairs should grow up in any country which is prejudicial to the welfare of the community and fraught with peril to the moral and physical stamina of the people. Then it becomes the duty of the statesman to deal with it; but if so let him deal with it in statesmanlike fashion, not empirically, not hastily, not at the cry of a dominant faction, still less at the dictation of a demagogue. Or it may be that what is denounced as essentially evil is the natural and inevitable outcome of great economic laws, and yet affected by the influence of other laws and circumstances more or less abnormal, and of the nature of disturbances capable of being modified in this way or in that. Are you going to make war upon the things that are, in ignorant disregard of how they came to be as they are? That experiment has been tried before now, and it has always failed most signally. Confiscation of large estates was proposed in Italy 2,000 years ago and more. Rome again and again 'nationalised' large tracts of land, and again and again made provision for the poor to occupy it. It always came to the same thing. It was only a question of time when the capitalist should buy up the needy occupier. The Little ones dropped out by the help of the law or in spite of it. Philanthropists of the Gracchus type persuade themselves that they have discovered the supremely desirable, and obstinately resolve that that must be the practicable, blind to the melancholy truth that the loftier your ideal the further it must be from the attainable.

And yet when we have recognised to the full the existence of a law which tends towards the absorption of small properties into large ones, let us take comfort in the fact, just now too much overlooked, that there is another law which is its correlative, or rather its direct opposite. The psalmist sings of the everlasting hills, and we talk of the solid earth; they are but figures of rhetoric the one and the other. Upheaval and subsidence are for ever at work, not over the same portions of the earth's crust at the same time, but moving as the tides move

With kingly pauses of reluctant pride

And semblance of return.

There is a period in the development of a nation's life during which what we may call the process of consolidation goes on without a break; the tide is rising. But there is a point beyond which it cannot go. Then peradventure another process comes into operation, the process of disintegration. Only once in history as far as I can remember has the former process gone on unchecked till all the land of a country fell into the hands of a single proprietor. Once we are told it did so when that great administrator from the loins of Israel 'bought all the land of Egypt for Pharaoh ; for the Egyptians sold every man his field because the famine prevailed over them: so the

6

land became Pharaoh's.' Long after Pharaoh's time things were travelling fast in the same direction in at least one Roman province; Pliny tells us that half the province of Africa was owned by six landlords, whereupon Nero, being of opinion that something must be done,' promptly slew the six. We are not told what became of their estates; I doubt if they were cut up into allotments.3 Surely, surely we are a long way off from this kind of thing.

The other process is in the ascendant now. Even rich men tell you that they can no longer afford to buy small properties, because small men will have them. Nay, the largest properties, when at all near a town, are, to the dismay of the sentimental, cut up into 'desirable sites' or bought for cash by building societies. It is said that these associations own land and houses to the value of many millions. What does this mean but that there are tens of thousands among the working classes who by this agency alone in esse or in posse have risen to be owners of the soil? It may be answered that the great bulk of these are townsmen or artisans. What then? Are not townsmen and artisans the people,' just as much as the peasantry? But it is a mistake to assume that even in the country districts the number of landowners is diminishing at anything like the speed which some believe. Nay, there are some influences at work which make in exactly an opposite direction, and some prospect of landed property coming back to the conditions of, say, a century ago. Certainly the mania for ring fences is not what it was; as certainly the motive for giving way to it and the opportunity of indulging in it is very much on the decline. Our mansions grow, our landed estates do not. There are many reasons why it should be so on which others may dwell. There is one very strong reason. Public opinion is against those who might wish to be monopolists of land. And public opinion is now a force which travels with an immensely greater momentum, with immensely greater velocity, and with immensely more direct impact than it did in our fathers' days. There was a time when legislators sometimes controlled public opinion, sometimes defied it, sometimes even outraged it. Once its speech was inarticulate, incoherent, mere noise, or at best clamour. Now its voice is as the voice of many waters, and it makes itself heard through that mighty engine which moves the world-the printing press. Under the spell of that tremendous force abuses have a tendency to die and injustice and tyranny to slink away and hide themselves. Let some glaring wrong or abomination be only exposed, let the great body of the people be persuaded that it is a wrong or an abomination, and it will vanish in some mysterious way without

* See Pliny, H. N. xviii. § 35.

'See Toynbee's chapter on The Decay of the Yeomanry.' Oh! why was he snatched from us when we needed him so much? Shown to us for a very little while-'such splendid purpose in his eyes!' A star of promise that we looked to and hoped.

waiting for an Act of Parliament to get rid of it. In a thousand instances, great and small, public opinion proves stronger than law— bestirs itself more rapidly, visits more surely, smites more promptly, punishes more sternly.

But public opinion is sometimes slow to inform itself. Sometimes it has happened that it has grown loudest in its demand for the sweeping away of an abuse just when that abuse has ceased to exist, the authors of it having taken warning in time. Lo! when the outcry has become most vociferous there has been no abuse to remove. Are you quite sure that all your denunciation of the land hunger has not come a day after the fair? Are you quite sure that this passionate hankering has not greatly abated among the high and has come to be fiercest among the low? If so you may be doing an enormous wrong to the Little ones by stimulating a craving which the wealthier classes have begun to see may easily grow into a madness. But it is the fact that we need to have established. Ten years ago the number of owners of land in England and Wales whose holding was under 100 acres was something under a million. Has their number increased or declined?

Whatever doubt, however, may exist as to whether or not the tendency to increase the area of ownership of land by capitalists is still going on, no man who has studied the subject thoughtfully can have any doubt that the tendency to increase the size of the holdings of tenant farmers has decidedly declined. Large undertakings demand not only large capital to make them remunerative, but they require something else which is very much more rare, and that is administrative ability. In a cotton mill or a coal mine, in a shipbuilding yard or any large workshop, there is, and there must be, a very elaborate discipline. The great army of workers is easily overlooked; there is subordination and gradation from the lowest to the highest. In a factory or a workshop you may easily supervise a thousand operatives in an hour and detect at a glance where things are going wrong. It is very different in our agricultural operations. Given a tract of 2,000 acres in its most compact form, and you have a parallelogram of three miles long by one mile wide. Assume that this tract employs one man to every twenty acres, and you have a hundred men dotted over this area, working in twos and threes, and working at half a dozen different kinds of labour. The problem how to get the most out of your labourers and the utmost out of your land is an immeasurably more complex one than can ever present itself to a manufacturer whose hands are all at work in the same yard or under a single roof. It is a problem so full of difficulty and requiring so much tact, delicacy of treatment, foresight, decision, and versatility as to demand an amount and a quality of brain-power that must needs be granted to few. Moreover discipline among the agricultural labourers is something of which they have only the faintest

conception. Subordination to one of their own class they resent with the fiercest jealousy and submit to with the utmost reluctance. When, some years ago, the fashion of large farms was at its height, and the supply of labour began to run short, some enterprising men started the gang system, and something like an initiation in the direction of organising industrial armies of agricultural labourers was made. Of course it was clumsily carried out; what early experiments are not where the counters are men and women? But some believe very firmly that it was a move in the right direction. Unhappily— perhaps in its early stage inevitably-it was found that great moral evils were inseparable from the methods adopted, and sentimental philanthropists-all honour to their motives!-made desperate war upon the gangs and forced the Legislature to interfere. The gangs were to all intents and purposes made an end of. That was a serious check to the operations of large farmers, who were thrown back upon the old methods of furnishing themselves with labour-that is, at the cost of the utmost possible waste of the employers' time. Only the few -the very few—when the great crisis came were intellectually qualified to deal with the new conditions which they had to face, and the result has been that in Norfolk the larger farmers as a rule suffered most, not only from want of capital, not only from personal extravagance, not only from any one or many of the faults with which they have been only too recklessly credited, but from a want of the necessary brain power and administrative ability. It is easy to drive a gig, not difficult to guide a pair; but when it comes to managing a fourin-hand it is not everybody who can do that through Oxford Street, and fewer still who could avoid a catastrophe in driving a coach and six from Whitechapel to Hyde Park Corner.

Meanwhile much mischief may have been done-has been done-by sacrificing small occupiers and the consolidation of many small farms into one large one; but for landlords to reverse their policy is at the present time by no means easy. A flank march, they tell us, is a movement always attended with risk and rarely to be made without sacrifice.

III. One more popular delusion-for it is a delusion-remains to be dealt with. Few things are more firmly believed, few assertions more unhesitatingly repeated, than that the agricultural labourer is peculiarly unhappy in having no career. If you mean that not every agricultural labourer has any reasonable prospect of rising to be a farmer and employer of labourers under him, and not every labourer is at all likely to rise in the social scale and leave off a richer man than his father, then I should wish to be informed what class has a career. But if you mean that there is a dreadful law, of universal prevalence, which makes it impossible for any peasant to rise above the condition in which he was born, and which some express by saying 'Once a labourer always a labourer,' then I affirm unhesitatingly