CHAPTER LXXIII.

FIRST PRINCIPLES OF A LANDLORD'S DUTY:

BY WILLIAM WOOD, Solicitor.

IN attempting to carry out the duty which the Editor of this volume has assigned to me, of writing a short chapter on this subject, it is obvious that a few of the more prominent of a landlord's duties only can be delineated, and that in broad outline. This is not the place for the introduction of politics or debatable matters, and lest any reader should fancy that he detects any political heresies, let me say at the outset that I write from the standpoint of modern conservatism. The duties of a landlord are not easy. To produce a thoroughly competent and enlightened landlord requires the expenditure of time and pains. Common sense is an indispensable equipment, but as Archbishop Whately somewhere says, Everybody thinks that the affairs of the world can be managed by common sense, always excepting the particular business with which the thinker is conversant. For instance, many a sailor thinks that common sense will suffice for all things in the world except the sailing of ships.

The first question for a landlord to settle is this, Does he possess land for commercial purposes only to get a percentage for capital invested, or is his avocation akin to that of the professions,-in short, is he essentially a shopkeeper or a gentleman? A great writer

has pointed out the essential difference between the professions rightly considered and mere traders. Officers do not enter upon a fine calculation as to what duties are the commercial equivalent of their pay. The better class of men, at any rate the professions, constantly do professional work where to suggest that the pay is a full equivalent would be an insult.

"Landlords," writes a practical landlord, who well knows what he is writing about, "are great benefactors or the reverse. No one has so much power of doing good as they have, and many of them do a great deal of good."

A landlord's duties are partly indicated by the fact that he is necessarily brought into personal relations with those from whom his income is derived; in this respect he is unlike the owner of consols or Stock Exchange investments. I remember a person who kept a conscience, and whom I was advising about an investment, objecting to an investment in land on the ground that he might not be able to afford to do justice to the claims of tenants and others with whom he might be brought in contact. And he was acting on right principles. I am certain that it is not sufficiently recognised how great a benefactor a good landlord (as such) is compared with the owner (as such) of a corresponding value of property in consols; and good landlords, instead of being worried by socialistic legislation, should have a free hand so that capitalists who are prepared to do their duty as landlords should not be scared off and induced to invest on the Stock Exchange.

Bad landlords are the enemy of landlords, and do more harm to their order than all the effusions of revolutionary demagogues put together. It will be unnecessary to reiterate this platitude when landlords of the better type cease to screen the black sheep.

A landlord of the right kind will, of course, make a

fair bargain with his tenants. It is humiliating that as late as 1882 the Duke of Richmond's Commission had to report that tenants did not get fair compensation for unexhausted improvements, and I know full well the rankling sense of injustice that this sometimes occasioned. And though an attempt has been made by the Agricultural Holdings Act of 1883 to remedy this evil, there are pitfalls under that Act into which tenants not infrequently fall, as lawyers versed in the subject know full well.

Old precedents of farm agreements are iniquitous if rigorously pressed against a tenant. It is to be feared that some advisers still go on copying old forms which ought to have been burnt ages ago-forms which leave out all reasonable protection for a tenant, and which were the product of the misapplied energy of a succession of draftsmen in Lincoln's Inn, intent on making the landlord safe against every emergency, and which left the tenant to the mercy of the landlord. The Duke of Richmond's Commission emphasised the necessity for the abolition of such forms, which, as the Commission said, have ceased to be used on well managed estates, and which were framed at a period when the conditions of agriculture were different from those now present.

How are landlords going to deal with the claims of the labouring classes on their estates? Every dictate of right and prudence urges the imperative necessity of those claims being boldly and voluntarily dealt with before it is too late. If landlords do not do their duty, history will have to record another lesson which ought to have been sufficiently taught once for all by the French Revolution. The landlord ought to be the leader of the village. Fair play is not yet extinct in poor Hodge. Is it unfair of him to say: Give me a small allotment

near home on reasonable terms? No sensible landlord will wait for the exercise of compulsory powers, with their train of friction and irritability. Is it unfair of Hodge to say again: Give me a cottage with bedroom accommodation, where a family can be brought up decently, and with drains and repairs as weli seen to as those of the squire's stables?

No right-minded landlord will unduly insist on the monopoly which the possession of a whole parish conveys. As a moderate churchman, I may be forgiven for deploring the unwisdom of some landlords in doing what they miscall keeping out Dissent. Let the village blacksmith, who wants a "Little Bethel" in which to sing Dr. Watts's hymns and listen to a village Bunyan, by all means have a site for his conventicle. The Duke of Westminster has set an example in this respect worthy

of imitation.

But I must close, and I will do so by advising landlords who want to know what to do to imitate the best examples of their order. Lord Tollemache has shown what can be done, and how it can be done. I have not touched on the landlord's duties as to the village public-house; but the public spirit of the Marquis of Northampton in suppressing public-houses in Clerkenwell

the public spirit of Lord Wantage in showing how the cure of village drinking, by a reformed public-house, lies in the landlord's hands, is worthy of imitation. Landlords are on their trial-they are at the parting of the ways. Shall their answer to the village be, "Our fathers chastised you with whips, and we will chastise you with scorpions," or will they listen to counsels of prudence which point out the path of duty, which is the path of safety? WILLIAM WOOD.

CHAPTER LXXIV.

DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES OF LANDLORDS.

BY HENRY EVERSHED,

The well-known Author of various articles, papers, and pamphlets on Agricultural Crops, Stock, etc., in the "Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society of England," the Agricultural Newspapers, Reviews, etc.

THE bulk of the land in the United Kingdom is farmed by tenant occupiers, of whom there are, in Great Britain. alone, not less than five hundred and fifty thousand, and the present movement in favour of small farms is increasing the number. The landowners are the capitalists to whom the soil belongs, with all that lies beneath it as well as all the buildings and permanent works upon it. Nothing need be said here of the general duties of the landowning class as magistrates and men of influence in their respective neighbourhoods. It will suffice to speak of them as administrators of the largest capital owned by any class of the community, and as controlling, to a large extent, the fortunes and the welfare of the whole of the farming class beneath them, including the labourers, who are, by virtue of their numbers, the most important. It is sometimes said that the interests of landlord and tenant are identical, and in a certain sense that may be so. Good and wise landlords are careful to secure the permanence of their tenantry. On the other hand, by far the larger portion of their land is let in yearly holdings and not on lease, and when a landlord gives sudden notice to quit,