DISTRIBUTION OF LAND IN ENGLAND 25 First, then, as to land.* In England about half of the land is owned by one hundred and fifty persons. In Scotland half is owned by some seventy-five persons, while thirty-five own half of Ireland. Taking all Great Britain together, about four fifths of the profitable soil is owned by seven thousand individuals, and the other fifth by about one hundred thousand.+ All the land of the United Kingdom amounts to about 77,000,000 acres ; of these some 46,000,000 are under cultivation, and the remainder is unproductive. Yet Great Britain imports half of her grain, while about one twentieth of her popu lation are paupers. Were the great parks which are now kept for purposes of luxury or mere ostentation, and the vast uncultivated wastes which now only preserve game or serve as sheep pastures, divided up among little proprietors who would make every rood of ground available, England would hear much less of her labor question. As it is, however, everything for centuries has tended in the opposite direction. First stands the law of primogeniture, under which, in case of intestacy, all the real estate goes to the oldest "The fact is," says a writer in the British Quarterly Review, "that the mode in which property, and especially land, is distributed has the chief influence in determining the political and social character of the people." Again he remarks: "Indeed, it may almost be said that land and aristocracy are in England convertible terms." British Quarterly Review, April, 1886, p. 279. "Free Land," by Arthur Arnold (1880), cited Gneist's "History of the English Constitution," transl. London, 1886, ii. 376; also "France and Hereditary Monarchy," by John Bigelow, 1871, p. 53. "Our National Resources, and How they are Wasted," William Hoyle, pp. 40, 42; "Home Politics," Daniel Grant, p. 8, quoted by Bigelow, pp. 31-35; "In Darkest England," by William Booth. male heir, thus building up great families. Next stands the system relating to the transfer of land among the living, which clogs its alienation and renders its purchase by the poor almost impossible. Every American knows how simple is our system of recording deeds and mortgages. Under it, in ordinary cases, any man of average intelligence can search his own title and make out his own conveyance, or can have it done in the country for about five dollars; for, unless a deed or mortgage is recorded in the proper office of the county, it is of no avail against the later bona-fide instrument of an innocent party duly put on record. In England, except in some small sections of the country where this system has been lately introduced, nothing of this kind exists. All title-deeds are kept by the owner; and unless a careful examination is made by a lawyer, there is no security for a purchaser whatever. In no other civilized country of the world do sales and mortgages of land habitually take so long a time to transact, and nowhere else are the charges in the case of small properties so great.* Time and time again, from the days of Cromwell down, the attempt has been made to introduce the recording system which prevails in the United States and in most of the countries of the Continent, but always without success. Parliamentary committees have recommended it, upon the ground that it would give increased security, and facilitate, by cheapening, the transfer of land. But there lay potent reasons for its rejection. The large proprietors, representing the aristocratic element of society, have desired that the mode of acquir * Westminster Review, July, 1886, p. 80. The lowest legal charge is about thirty dollars. ENCLOSURE OF ENGLISH COMMON LANDS 27 ing land should be neither easy nor cheap. Land is for aristocrats, and not for the common people. The result is that the great class of yeomen, the men who in bygone centuries gave England her greatness, has almost entirely disappeared.* In its place has grown up a race of peasants, well-nigh the most ignorant and brutalized among the so-called civilized peoples of the globe. Not content with refusing to sell land to the poor, and making its transfer difficult and expensive, the ruling classes have gone one step further. Formerly a large part of the soil of England was owned in common, each village or community holding its great tract open to all the inhabitants for purposes of pasturage. But since the beginning of the last century, 9,000,000 acres of these common lands, more than one eighth of the whole soil of Great Britain, have been taken possession of by private individuals and enclosed under acts of Parliament. It was in reference to this wholesale robbery of the poor that the well-known lines were written: "The law locks up the man or woman Who steals the goose from off the common, Who steals the common off the goose." In view of these facts, we can appreciate the words of one of England's keenest observers in speaking of the kaleidoscopic constitutions of France: "It does not require any special clearness of vision to perceive that so far from having closed the era of great changes, Great Britain and Ireland have only entered on it." + * "Pauperism, its Causes and Remedies," Prof. Fawcett, p. 208. + Prof. Thorold Rogers, Time, March, 1890. Philip Gilbert Hamerton, Atlantic Monthly, Sept., 1886, p. 322. One of these days England may awake to reap the whirlwind. She is now the only Teutonic nation, and perhaps the only civilized society in existence, in which the bulk of the land under cultivation is not owned by small proprietors.* To her laboring classes she is giving not land, but the spelling-book and the ballot. Speaking of the arms of a slave state, which represented a negro asleep upon a cotton bale, Wendell Phillips once asked, "But what will the people do when the negro wakes up?" Our cousins across the sea can take a similar question to heart. From time to time the English public are aroused to an appreciation of the filth and misery which pervade the dwellings of their poor. Then men rush into print with their various nostrums, emigration, vast schemes of private benevolence, new models for cottages, and the like; but it seldom occurs to any of them to suggest a change in their land laws by which the poor man might own his dwelling. Nothing, however, is so conducive to the self-respect, without which all sanitary regulations are powerless, as the possession of one's habitation.+ Turn now from England to America, and what a dif See also Gneist, "Hist. of English Constitution," ii. 452. Matthew Arnold says of the nobility and the property question: "One would wish, if one sets about wishing, for the extinction of titles after the death of the holders, and for the dispersion of property by a stringent law of bequest."-Nineteenth Century, Feb., 1885, p. 234. * British Quarterly Review, April, 1886. "The large domains are growing larger; the great estates are absorbing the small freeholds. In 1786, the soil of England was owned by 250,000 corporations and proprietors."--Emerson's "English Traits," p. 184. A century earlier the number of those who farmed their own land was greater than the number of those who farmed the land of others. Macaulay, vol. i. chap. iii. DISTRIBUTION OF LAND IN AMERICA 29 ferent picture is presented! The census of 1880 shows that the farms in the United States number over four millions, of which only about twenty-five thousand contain more than a thousand acres. Of the whole number nearly three fourths are worked by the owners, and of the remainder, the larger part are worked on shares. In 1850, before slavery was abolished, the farms numbered only about a million and a half, and they averaged two hundred and three acres each. In 1880, the average had sunk to one hundred and thirty-four acres, so that while the amount of cultivated land is largely on the increase, the process of subdivision is still more rapid. Practical experience here, as well as elsewhere, shows that small tracts of land are worked more economically than large ones, and are most productive when cultivated by the owner. The above figures take no account of mere city or village lots for building purposes. The number of these is very large, for, as the American knows, the laborer, except in the large cities, usually owns his own dwelling, and thus is a proprietor of the soil. The ownership of land always makes a man conservative. When it is generally divided, as in the United States, and where, under a liberal Homestead Law, any one can obtain a farm by actually putting it under cultivation, there will be found little room for theories of spoliation.* * The census of 1890 shows only about 73,000 paupers in the poorhouses of the United States, out of a population of over 62,000,000, a relative decrease since 1880. About 6000 of those are colored, and of the whites three fifths are foreign-born or of foreign parentage. Of the poor permanently supported in their own houses or in private families, only some 24,000 are given, but in this case the returns do not pretend to even approximate correctness. Census Bulletin No. 90, July 8, 1891. |