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Show 1 Uye BRITISH CRISIS XIIL THE BURDENSOME LAND LAWS. By FREDERIC J. HASKIN. best land of England Is thus entailed and thoe who own It have for gen-erations gen-erations Imposed themselves upon the people aa the "governing class." To Interfere with or to abrogate the light thus to transmit landed property prop-erty undivided from generation to generation yet unborn, la construed as an attack upon the institution of private property. Jast such an attack at-tack was made, however, in the British Brit-ish colony f Virginia and it was eminently successful Even if it did destroy to a certain extent the rights of private property. It prevented pre-vented in the United State the formation for-mation of a Land Trust such as now feeds upon the heart of England. If In England land was divided on the death of the owner among his children It Is probable that within fifty years the two thousand owners of half the land of England would bo Increased to fifty thousand, and In a century the land would be so divided as to make Impossible that coherence coher-ence requisite to monopoly. In some LONDON, July 17. Englishmen, secure se-cure in their anug complacency, look across the Atlantic and pity the poor Americans engaged In a titanic struggle strug-gle with the trusts, and pharisaically give thanks they are not as the rest of men. But as a matter of fact a third of the people of England are hungry because of the extortions of a trust more powerful and more wicked wick-ed than all of the American monopolies monopo-lies together. The land trust Is the curse of England, Eng-land, since It controls not only practically prac-tically all of the land, but also because be-cause that control has the approval of law and custom, because that trust has a permanent majority In the upper up-per chamber of parliament, and because, be-cause, owning the land it controls all of the products of the land. This trust Is not organized on the New Jersey holding company principle, but It Is none the less a compact and effective ef-fective organization. It haa no president presi-dent and no board of directors, but it Is none the leas susceptible to the control of the captains of privilege, and it is bound together by the strictest strict-est of gentlemen's agreements Jn an eternal community of Interests. To utter a word In derogation of that trust Is to breathe treason against the state and against all organized civilization, in the estimation of conservative con-servative Britons. Even the miserable miser-able tenant peasant regards the proposition pro-position to cut up bis lordship's estate es-tate as a monstrous crime. But all Britons arc not conservative. conserva-tive. The liberal party, now in power In tbo commons, has determined to attack this gigantic land monopoly, and If possible, to ameliorate its evils. An American observer could not but sympathize with the ardor of tbo radical hosts who. In the recent campaign, sang as a rallying song, to the tune of "Marching Through Georgia," these words: Sound a blast for freedom, boys, and send It far and wide! March along to victory, for God Is on our side! While the voice of Nature thunders o'er the rising tide "God made the land for the people!" The Land! The Land! 'Twas God who gave, the Land! The Land! The Land! The ground on which we stand! Why should wo be beggars with the ballot In our hand? "God gave the land to the people!" It Is true that some good Americana Ameri-cana might have been 6hocked to see the portrait of their compatriot, Hen-i parts of the United 6tates one begins to hear murmurlngs against the practice prac-tice of buying: and holding large estates es-tates by absentee landlord, but because be-cause of the American land laws these large estates cannot be entailed, en-tailed, and therefore soon will break up of their own weight. In England land rarely Is sold. It Is let to tenants by the year; It Is leased, for long or short terms; Its use Is disposed of In many ways, but there is seldom an outright pale. Sustaining Sus-taining the natural prejudice against parting with land, the law makes the transfer of ownership so difficult and expensive aa to discourage any general gen-eral trading in land. Parliament time and time again has refused to require the registry of deeds, so that the title to land always Is difficult to trace. Where sales are made, the tracing of the title and the expense of transfer averages 10 per cent of the value' of the land, and In many Instances two or three times that amount. Not only Is the peasant farmer forced to pay tribute to this all-embracing Trust, but the Industries also al-so are compelled to contribute largely large-ly to Its coffers. For example, take the Rhondda Valley, a coal mining region of South Wales. Sixty years ago the valley had omiy fc. thousand people; now Its population is 125,000. The same landlords, with perhaps a minor exception or two, who owned the land then, own It now. Then they received practically nothing from rents: now they receive Jl 50.000 a year from ground rents and more than $1,000,000 a year from royalties, on the basis of twelve cents a ton for the coal taken out The operators of the coal mines pay all of the taxes, which amount to $220,000 a year When coal was discovered there, the landlords refused absolutely to sell and thus they have, been reaping, for ( many years past,-an annual harvest of nearly a million and a quarter dollars dol-lars a year, without paying a cent of taxes, without taking any risks, without with-out exercising any, business Ingenuity In-genuity or any talent of direction. They simply own tho land and collect col-lect the money. In one Instance In South Wales a mining company which makes a profit of $15,000 a year, pays $60,000 a year rent and royalty to the landlords and $17,500 a year in taxes. If ever there was a Trust In the United States which absorbed that much of any particular par-ticular melon, none of the muck-rakers muck-rakers has as yet discovered IL The first real movement In hostility to the I .and Trust was the Lloyd-George Lloyd-George Budget, which Imposed certain cer-tain taxes which would make the ownership of Idle land so burdensome as to compel Its sale or return to agricultural uses. But even that would not affect to any considerable degree the farm lands now under cultivation. ry George, on the back of the song book, but It Is possible that even they would think more of a certain plan of progress If they had been brought face to face with a certain variety of poverty. .j The burden of the land trust In England falls heavily upon both city and country dweller, but for the purposes pur-poses of illustration It will suffice to consider the situation In the rural districts. England and Wales, with a total population of about thirty-two million, have eight million people living liv-ing In the country. The land cultivated culti-vated by these eight million peoplo produces considerably more than docs any similar acreage In the United States, showing that the farmers are thrifty and industrious husbandmen. Of the eight million, about sixty-one thousand own the farms which they till. All of tho rest of tho land, approximately ap-proximately twenty-five million acres, is owned by about forty thousand landlords, and tho greater part ia owned by fewer than five thousand landlords, many of them being peers and members of the house of lords. Iu other words, 99.2 per cent of the farmers of England are tenants. If that conditions prevailed In the United Unit-ed States there might be song books there with Henry George's picture on the back-When back-When the further fact that these tenants pay all of the taxes on this land and that the owners pay none whatever, Is taken Into consideration, then one can form somo idea of how onerous Is the burden of renta which these tenant farmers must pay to support sup-port the idle landlords in that particular par-ticular style of luxury attaching to "English country llfo." In the time of Queen Elizabeth cottagers cot-tagers were compelled to own at least four acres of land to support each house. At the end of the seventeenth century there were 700.000 land holding hold-ing peasants In England. At the beginning be-ginning of the nineteenth century there were more than twice as many lad-owning farmers as there are today, to-day, and there was a vast amount of "common land" which was used and enjoyed by the community In general. In the first half of tho nineteenth century, cen-tury, when 150 land owners returned from rotten boroughs a majority of the house of commons, this common land was "enclosed." and became private pri-vate property, the most of It going to enlarge the estates of the peers and otbr gentry. in the last half century there has been no disposition to subdivide estates. es-tates. On the contrary most of the changes made have been in the direction direc-tion of further Increasing Individual holdings and of retiring agricultural Isnd from cultivation. The situation has been growing worse steadily from year to year, and is, of course, responsible re-sponsible for that "agricultural d-pre8lon," d-pre8lon," so much deplored by British Brit-ish statesmen and publicists. The bulwark of the Land Trust is the law of entail with the principle of primogeniture. Tho law of entail makes It possible to settle land upon a child unborn, and ooerates to en-able en-able owners to transmit landed estates es-tates unbroken and undivided to future fu-ture generations. As the land descends des-cends to the oldest son, the division and diversion of the 'and Is prevented. pre-vented. Thin law has succeeded In establishing the Land Trust almost Impregnable, since near'.y all of tho |
