Chapter VI: The Land Laws

The abolition of the Statute of Uses by Lord Birkenhead will be an accomplished fact on the 1st January, 1926. Copyhold and other picturesque tenures of the middle ages are to be abolished, the law of real property is to be assimilated to the law of personal property, women are to be put on an equality with men as regards the laws of descent, and primogeniture is to be abolished. This is all, no doubt, very sensible, but also depressing for anyone who likes to feel a certain sense of continuity with the past. It also precipitates the coming conflict between the Collectivist confiscation of land and the ideal of small or peasant proprietorship. The land laws of the future will, of course, depend on which party gains the day.

The consistent hostility of all ministries to agriculture is due to the fact that Free Trade is now one of the regular ruts of British finance, and even the peasant proprietor of France or Denmark would not flourish without a certain amount of consideration from the State. Should the voters of Great Britain swallow all the nonsense preached by the followers of Henry George and Lloyd George in regard to land monopoly, the ruin of agricultural prosperity and of the lovely landscapes of Great Britain may confidently be anticipated; but should the wide distribution of land among smallholders continue under the _ægis_ of public favour, we may see the legal encouragement of freehold tenure on Canadian or American lines and even of the tenant being able to buy out his landlord on fair terms. It is curious that New Zealand, which adopted State Socialism on a large scale in the nineties, is now mainly governed by individualistic business men and land-owning farmers.

The big landlords play into the hands of Collectivists by allowing their agents to do as they like. I, for instance, twenty years ago bought a long lease of a house in St. John’s Wood, which will expire just when I do not want to leave my happy home. I have a delightful garden shaded by poplars and beeches which will probably be covered one day by a block of untenanted flats. I want if possible to secure my position and am quite ready to pay any fair price for the freehold or for an extension of the lease. The Eyre Estate (my landlord) will not even condescend to answer a letter of inquiry, and my experience is by no means unique. No one is more disposed to be friendly with big landlords than I am, for some of them are profitable clients; but my own experience of the Eyre Estate impels me and many others to welcome any law which will make the tenant less of a worm in the eyes of his landlord.

The old system of entail and strict settlement will presumably continue for some years with the aid of money derived from industrial magnates and American heiresses. The conveyancers of Lincoln’s Inn may be trusted to preserve institutions in defiance of legislation just as they abolished, for all practical purposes, the right of dower in the eighteenth century. The principal question is whether there will be sufficient money or inclination to support the old system in order to prevent places like Chatsworth and Warwick Castle from being converted into public schools or lunatic asylums. If there is, then the lawyers will be equal to the occasion, and already many big estates are preserved from destruction by being turned into limited or (preferably) unlimited companies.

Legal change depends on financial upheavals and human desires. The desire to found a family and to buy a big estate is deeply ingrained in Great Britain. The old aristocracy may go and a new aristocracy may arise. But it may well be doubted if any new race of landowners will, under the new conditions of being mulcted at every turn during life and after death, be able to do for the countryside what the old type of Squire did for his tenants――especially in times of agricultural depression――or show anything like the same personal interest in the cultivation of the land.

The best development which is at all likely to occur is the growth of an agricultural system on Danish lines, and this would certainly simplify the land laws.