Page:Landholding in England.djvu/191

 first enclosing the common where they used to feed their cows and their asses.

Things went on in this direction until enlightened men thought that small holdings were the ruin of the nation, and enormous farms its wealth. We all came to look on land as something from which a man got rent. We talked about small farming not "paying," meaning that it did not pay rent—as though rent were the sole end of corn. So towns were more and more overcrowded, and villages made emptier and emptier, and landlords restricted the number of houses in villages, because the man with no land of his own to till, and not needed for other men's lands, was an encumbrance. Then came machinery, and the factories of the days before the Reform Bill, when little children of seven were set to do the work of men, and a man was dismissed if he took his child away; and the children slept as they worked, and spoiled the work, and were beaten; and one in ten of them was crippled or deformed. What fortune amassed by a manufacturer can make up to the State for such a physical ruin of the next generation? We all believe that many terrible abuses existed in the past, and we know that these abuses have long since come to an end. But all that this knowledge does for most of us is to encourage us to believe that all is right now. Unfortunately, it is not so. An abuse may be swept away only for a worse abuse to come in its place. We forget, when we condemn the feudal system, that it was at any rate a system of reciprocal rights and duties. The feudal lord exacted "aids" from his tenants, but the occasion and the amount of those aids were strictly defined. The modern landlord does not demand "aids"—he raises the rent. The modern landlord's power is practically absolute; the law does not limit it. In most cases, an English landlord treats his larger tenants well. If he did not, he might find his farms standing empty. But he is restrained by his own interest, not by the law. A feudal lord was restrained by the general interest.

The feudal lord was not allowed to play tricks with his tenants, because our ancestors believed that the commonweal would have suffered. But our first thought is not the commonweal, but a man's right to Mo what he will "with his own." Now land, by its very nature, can never be a man's "own" in the sense in which his hat, his coat, his