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Home , Common land, Land reform, Law of rent

Donald Winch Access to : and preservation in nineteenth- century England

A presentation given at the 75th Anniversary Conference of the Economic History Society in Glasgow as part of the sessions on ‘Morality, Markets and Policy’, Saturday, March 31, 2001

I

My starting point in making some observations on an impossibly large topic will have to be a simple assertion. If one could conduct a canvas of opinion during the second half of the nineteenth-century on the deprivations and injustices associated with industrialization and urbanization, loss of access to land for purposes of work or leisure would come high on the lists of a large segment of the British public. There are also good grounds for thinking that the canvas would reveal this sentiment to have become more strident during the last two decades of the century. To students of the history of land reform agitation in England during this period, these assertions will appear commonplace; they underlie the activities of what can now be seen as a linked sequence of pressure groups dedicated to the removal of the actual and perceived deficiencies of the English system of . Instead of linked sequence one could also speak of a relay race combined with some features of the game of leap-frog – a mixed image that may provide a clue both as to momentum and to the failure to reach the finishing line in good order. While abolition of and entail had remained staple elements on the agenda of reformers since the late eighteenth century, by the end of the nineteenth the campaign reached much further into the sanctum of private in land. Radicals of the Cobden- Bright variety who espoused the cause of ‘free trade’ in land saw themselves as carrying the crusade against landed monopoly and aristocratic privilege to its logical conclusion by making the regulations surrounding the transfer of land conform to the priorities of a middle-class world of unrestricted commerce. From the late 1860s onward they found themselves being overtaken on their left by organisations such as the Land Tenure Reform

1 Association, the Land Nationalisation Society, and the various Land Restoration Leagues formed in the wake of ’s speaking tours and his book on (1880). These associations were variously dedicated to the creation of proprietorships and the curtailment of private landownership, wholly or in part, through nationalisation, municipalisation, and/or based on the legitimacy of communal appropriation of the ‘unearned increment’ in rental incomes and urban site values. Weaving between these competing groups were the activities of the Commons Preservation Society designed to prevent urban landowners from infringing rights of access to in and around . Some of these ideas found their way into ’s ‘unauthorised programme’ in 1885, and into the manifestos of the Liberal and Labour parties during the decades that span the turn of the century. From a party political perspective they can be seen as attempts to address the perceived needs of the new electorate created by the Second and Third Reform Acts, which added urban and rural working-class males to the middle-class electorate originally addressed by Cobdenites. In any written version of this communication a footnote would now be inserted directing attention to a distinguished body of secondary literature on this topic.1 Taking this literature as read, how does it relate to the theme of these sessions on ‘Morality, Markets and Policy’, bearing in mind the article on ‘Moral Choice and Economic Change’ that our organiser, Barry Supple, has given us as a starting point? The conviction that one of the most important, even tragic, consequences of economic change was rural depopulation and the progressive exclusion of the working classes from the benefits of landownership might appear to be part of a familiar lament based on a form of Virgilian nostalgia to which the British have been held to be peculiarly prone. Oliver Goldsmith’s ‘Deserted Village’ in the eighteenth century and William Wordsworth passim in the nineteenth were merely the leading poetic spokesmen for this mood. Some aspects of land reform are undoubtedly susceptible to such

1 For general treatments, in addition to the specific works cited in later footnotes, see M. Beer, A History of British , G Bell, London, 1929, Vol. II, pp. 237-45; H M. Lynd, England in the 1880s, New York, 1945; R. Harrison, Before the Socialists; Studies in Labour and Politics, 1861-1881, Routledge, London, 1965; D. E. Martin, ‘Land Reform’ in P. Hollis (ed), Pressure from Without in Early Victorian England, 1974; and R. Douglas, Land, People and Politics; A History of the Land Question in the United Kingdom, 1878-1952, 1976.

2 ‘pastoral’ or ‘romantic’ interpretations. But the feature on which I shall be focussing concerns the way in which the movement obtained leadership and support from a couple of generations of members of the professional middle classes, many of them priding themselves on being serious students of Britain’s economic history -- the kind of men who were accustomed to analysing contemporary institutions and policies in the languages of .2 Plural usage here is required, first, to take account of the way in which the secular and deductive approach of emerging orthodoxy, chiefly associated with Ricardo and his followers, never established complete hegemony in public debate, even during its heyday.3 And secondly, because orthodox methods of analysis increasingly came under attack from historicists and inductivists from the 1860s onwards, despite the continued authoritative status of ’s Principles of Political Economy (1848-71). Especially when confronting the problems raised by land tenure, agrarian economic history, the new form of evolutionary historical jurisprudence associated with Henry Maine, and comparative studies of land tenure furnished evidence that could be used to support or deny conclusions derived from a narrower form of economic analysis.4 Without suggesting that political economy in its increasingly mixed forms during the third quarter of the century was univocal, especially when it came to framing policies, one thing can be taken for granted: its exponents cannot be accused, as many of the spokesmen for radical, Chartist, and romantic agrarian alternatives can, of being hostile towards the self- interest principle, competition, and in general. Moreover, since support for

2 I have spoken of men because all those with whom I shall be concerned here were men. But there were some prominent women involved, notably John Stuart Mill’s step-daughter, Helen Taylor, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, and Octavia Hill, with Hill’s interest emerging as a byproduct of her concern with the urban housing problem; see Octavia Hill, Homes of the London Poor, 1875, Cass reprint, 1970. 3 For Christian versions of political economy see Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1785-1865, Oxford, 1988; and for the Malthusian variant D. Winch, Riches and Poverty; An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750-1834, Cambridge, 1996. Part III. For a persistent conservative and protectionist challenge to orthodoxy see Anna Gambles. Protection and Politics; Conservative Economic Discourse, 1815-52, Royal Historical Society, The Boydell Press, 1999. 4 On the ways in which Maine and his Continental sources, chiefly von Maurer and Nasse, became embroiled in land reform politics see J. W. Burrow, ‘”The Village Community” and the Uses of History in Late Nineteenth-Century England’ in N. McKendrick (ed), Historical Perspectives; Studies in English Thought and Society in honour of J. H. Plumb, London: Europa Publications, 1974, pp. 255-84. See also C. Dewey, ‘Images of the Village Community: A Study in Anglo-Indian Ideology’, Modern Asian Studies, 6, 3, 1972, 291-328; ‘Particular Polities: Political Economy and the Historical Method’ in S. Collini, D. Winch, and J. Burrow, That Noble Science of Politics , Cambridge, 1983. [[/ 247-75; and A. Diamond (ed), The Victorian Achievment of Sir Henry Maine, Cambridge, 1991.

3 free trade was an issue on which most economists, if not economic historians, were univocal, their views on land reform had to recognize the global economic implications of any policy solutions they advocated. That such exponents of land reform could come to the conclusion that improving access to land was a practical goal worth pursuing through legislation and state intervention raises issues that go beyond rural preservation and conservation, the kinds of things we associate with the founding of bodies like the National Trust in 1895. Again, while my cast of land reformers was not entirely immune to such ideas, and has been found seriously wanting in qualities of hard-headedness on other grounds, what distinguished them was an obligation to show that their objectives conformed with political, economic, and administrative realities. To this one could add the fact that use of the state as an instrumentality was not the first recourse for a generation or two that had learned from domestic and foreign example the dangers of bureaucratic inefficiency, corruption, and special interest pleading. Any solutions proposed had to bear in mind such experience and be economically viable as well as desirable on other grounds. To avoid another kind of confusion, it has to be added that hard-headedness does not imply moral neutrality. Quite the reverse in fact, though a modicum of professional distance came with the academicization of and economic history at the end of the century. Campaigns against the English system of land on whatever economic grounds were permeated by those powerful moral and political undercurrents which were fed by the well-known successes of the territorial aristocracy in retaining its position in local and national affairs, despite repeal of the and the passage of three reform bills. Indeed, Harold Perkin, the historian who has probably done most to draw attention to the new professional middle classes as a social and political force in nineteenth-century Britain, identified them as being more likely ‘to see politics in moral terms rather than those of economic interest.’5 This clearly does not apply to those professions such as land surveying and the branches of law that stood to lose most from changes in the ways in

5 See ‘Land Reform and in Victorian Britain’ in J. Butt and I. F. Clarke (eds), The Victorians and Social Protest, David and Charles, Archon Books, 1973, pp. 196-7; and The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780-1880, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1969, Chapter 7, section 4.

4 which landed property was registered and transacted.6 For others, however, freedom from the constraints posed by obvious economic interests of their own, until the state offered opportunities for employment in bureaucratic roles at least, meant that judgments based on moral criteria assumed a larger role. No student of Victorian politico-economic debate is likely to underestimate the breadth and depth of this moral dimension.7 But the question on which I wish to focus is the relationship between economic hard-headedness and those issues which a later, more profession-conscious generation of economists was apt to describe – sometimes innocently, sometimes with depreciating intent -- as the ‘non-economic’ arguments. In terms that, for once, combine fashionable correctness with responsiveness to the concerns of the period, I am interested in what would now be described as the cultural and institutional context within which economic arguments about the impact of economic change were debated.

II

At this point we confront another commonplace. Although significant residues of the nineteenth-century campaigns can be found in twentieth-century party programmes and legislation, the nineteenth-century record of achievement pathetically short of its original aspirations, especially when the longevity and extent of the effort involved is taken into account. F. M. L. Thompson ranked it alongside republicanism, teetotalism and disestablishmentarianism in this respect, while conceding that ‘it was a movement worthy of more than such cranky associates’.8 Judged by statistics of rural depopulation, the failure of the owner-occupied sector of farming to grow significantly, and the stubborn concentration of land ownership in England (more so in Scotland), the problems addressed were real enough. Yet in becoming a standard element in Liberal and programmes these problems acquired an emblematic, sometimes merely a strategic status, especially in the post-1884

6 On the surveyors see F. M. L. Thompson, Chartered Surveyors; The Growth of a Profession, London: Routledge, 1968; and on the role of solicitors in obstructing land reform see A. Offer, Property and Politics, 1870-1914; Landowners, Law, Ideology and Urban Development in England, Cambridge University Press, 1981. 7 For two contrasting studies that reveal the character of the moral dimension see S. Collini, Public Moralists; Political Thought and Intellectual in Britain, 1850-1930, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991; and G. R. Searle, Morality and the Market in Victorian Britain, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. 8 ‘Land and Politics in England in the Nineteenth Century, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 1964, p. 23.

5 era of ‘democratic’ politics. They were sufficiently serious emblems, however, to provoke Conservative anxieties and counter-proposals, as well as the formation of organisations such as the Liberty and Property Defence League which brought together those who believed that they posed a serious threat to private property in general.9 With the possible exception of Ireland, the changes in the agrarian order that actually took place owed little to the efforts of land reformers. Attempts to substitute owner occupation for tenancy, and peasant proprietorships for wage labour, came to little when measured against the impact of persistent market forces, especially those released by prolonged agricultural depression after 1873. Rent rolls fell, and if depression did not make agricultural land completely unsalable, it certainly allowed defenders of landed property to reverse the logic of their critics by pointing to the possibility of an ‘unearned decrement’. A. J. Balfour, speaking in 1885, in the hostile atmosphere of the Industrial Remuneration Conference, thought that depression allowed the tenure of land to be addressed in ‘a spirit of scientific impartiality’. It may have been in this spirit that he likened the efforts of land reformers who wanted to halt the downward pressure on urban wage and employment levels caused by rural migration to attempts ‘to drain the German Ocean by cutting a few gaps in a Lincolnshire sea-wall’.10 Impartial or not, Balfour was justified in drawing attention to the gap between diagnosis and the likely results of the remedies proposed. In this respect his remark could be inscribed on the tombs of several of the nineteenth-century land reform campaigns. Some convincing hypotheses, political and economic, have been advanced to explain why so little came from so much effort. My concern, however, is more with the intellectual character and momentum of land reform than with its economic or legislative outcomes. And for once, when addressing an audience of economic historians, it is not necessary to apologize for beginning at least with the leading spokesmen for economic orthodoxy.

9 For a work that gives prominence to land reform as one of the main threats to which Conservatives were responding see Matthew Fforde, Conservatism and Collectivism, 1886-1914, Edinburgh University Press, 1990. See also N. Soldon, ‘Laissez-Faire as Dogma: The Liberty and Property Defence League, 1882-1914’ in K. D.Brown (ed), Essays in Anti-Labour History, 1974, pp. 208-33; and E. Bristow, ‘The Liberty and Property Defence League and Individualism, 1882-1914, Historical Journal, 18, 1975, 761-89. 10 See Industrial Remuneration Conference; Report of the Proceedings and Papers read in Prince’s Hall, Piccadilly under the Presidency of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, London: Cassell, 1885, p. 347.

6 Balfour’s perceptive survey of the reasons why land rather than was the focus of popular discontent in Britain, and why in consequence town versus country issues had dominated British politics for so long, adduced the following important consideration: ‘To this tendency, produced by party politics, a powerful impulse has been given by the language of theoretical economists. For, according to economic terminology, the products of industry are divided into rent, interest, and wages; the recipients of these three portions being respectively the landlord, the capitalist, and the labourer. And, according to economic theory, the landlord’s share was received by him in exchange for an instrument of production, which, however acquired, was not the result of his or of any human industry, and for one which had besides a constant tendency to increase in value, as society advanced, without any expenditure or exertion on his part. He neither made its original, nor earned its subsequent value. Economic theory, in Balfour’s opinion, had thereby

‘…accidentally given scientific form to any floating jealousy there may be, or rather must be, of a species of wealth, which, from obvious causes, constantly tends to appear larger than it is, and which influences the imagination to a degree out of all proportion to its magnitude, as compared with that of riches accumulated in other and less obvious forms.’11

With the opposite intent, Richard Cobden had made much the same point two decades earlier in a speech often cited in the reform literature:

‘If I were five-and-twenty or thirty, instead of, unhappily, twice that number of years, I would have a League for free trade in Land, just as we have a League for free trade in Corn. You will find just the same authority in for the one as for the other; and if it were only taken up as it must be taken up to succeed, not as a political, revolutionary, Radical, Chartist notion, but taken up on politico-economic grounds, the agitation would be sure to succeed.’12

Cobden’s decision to appeal to Smith’s authority may have had some strategic elements (as we shall see, it overlooks Smith’s more controversial followers), but it was not an arbitrary choice. contains some forthright judgements on primogeniture and entail treated as feudal residues that continued to restrict agricultural development,

11 Industrial Remuneration Conference., p. 339. 12 Speech delivered November 23, 1864.

7 particularly in Scotland.13 Thomas Paine could draw as much ammunition from the work as he could from a more traditional radical source, the story of the Norman Yoke. Smith had a soft spot for the English yeomanry and his remarks on the superiority of owner-occupation in were to be regularly recycled in the land reform literature.14 But it was two of Smith’s earliest followers, Robert Malthus and , who were to supply the economic theory summarized by Balfour. They helped to form nineteenth- century opinion on land questions by launching theories that treated as a unique form of income, and land as a of production with marked peculiarities that differentiated it from capital and labour. Moreover, in making the central problem of political economy the need to find ways of accommodating Malthusian pressures under conditions in which agriculture was believed to suffer from the law of diminishing returns, they focussed on rising rents as one of the main consequence of economic growth. This basic model conformed with pre- and post-1815 economic conditions and was tailored to the peculiarities of the English tripartite system of land tenure, according to which landowners received contractual rents paid by capitalistic tenant farmers in search of , employing wage labour in the process. Another assumption too obvious to be articulated was that concentration of landownership counter-posed the interests of a rich few against the many, a problem of wealth and income distribution that was compounded by the political dominance of the landed interest and imperfections in the market for land. At the end of the century the assumption could be voiced in the form of a convincing retrospective hypothesis: land nationalisation would not have found political favour in a less dynamic economy where any rise in land values was divided among a large number of owner-occupiers.15 Ricardo in particular, especially when his conclusions were fortified by the radical logic of James and John Stuart Mill, left a legacy of argumentation that supports Balfour’s case

13 Wealth of Nations, Glasgow edition, III.ii.6; IV.ii.b.19. 14 ‘Those laws and customs so favourable to the yeomanry, have perhaps contributed more to the present grandeur of England than all their boasted regulations of commerce taken together’. Ibid., III.ii.14. 15 As Balfour said of Continental socialists: ‘It is neither their interest nor their inclination to attack private property in land; not their interest, because such an attack would inevitably array against them the whole body of peasant owners…; not their inclination, because it is the capitalist and shopkeeper, not the landowner, who is the special object of their dislike’; see Industrial Remuneration Conference, pp. 337-8. See also the conclusion of the articles by F. C. Montague on ‘increment, the unearned’ and ‘land nationalisation’ in R. H. I. Palgrave (ed), Dictionary of Political Economy, London: Macmillan, 1896.

8 while casting doubt on the ‘accidental’ nature he imputed to the connection with economic theory. The younger Mill acted as the link between the early Ricardian-inspired attacks on the landowning interest during the post-1815 Corn Law debates and the revival of land-reforming campaigns from the 1860s onwards. He played a prominent (he thought decisive) role in the parliamentary debates that led up to the Irish Land Act of 1870, and did little to calm the fears of those who believed that any meddling with ‘free contract’ by granting fixed tenure and fair rents in Ireland would have consequences for English landowners.16 Mill, after all, had drawn up the programme of the Land Tenure Reform Association in 1869, a programme that went well beyond the case for removing obstacles to the sale of land.17 It included state purchase of land for the purposes of subdivision, the construction of on , reclamation of waste land for the same purpose, and the formation of agrarian to reap the advantages of scale. In an effort to retain the support of working-class reformers seeking outright nationalisation, the programme also included the proposal for a on the unearned increment, an idea that can be traced back to James Mill, and one that led to the son’s name being dropped from the Cobden Club Committee.18 The other clauses in the programme incorporated the aims of another pressure group that proved far more successful; the Commons Preservation Society founded in 1865, with Mill’s disciple, Henry Fawcett, playing a major part. They insisted that waste , and those requiring an Act of Parliament to enclose them, should be permanently reserved for national purposes, leaving the less fertile land around cities to be ‘retained in a state of wild natural beauty, for the general enjoyment

16 On his contribution to the Irish Land Act see Autobiography in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, thirty-three volumes, Toronto, 1965-91, vol I, p.[206]. Hereafter cited as CW. 17 For a detailed study of Mill’s role see David Martin, John Stuart Mill and the Land Question, University of Hull, 1981. 18 Louis Mallet was responsible for J. S. Mill’s name being dropped on the grounds that useful free-trade reforms were being sacrificed in the interests of what he described as , adding that ‘between Feudalists and Communists, there is no chance for Freedom.’ As cited in Clive J. Dewey, ‘The Rehabilitation of the Peasant Proprietor in Nineteenth- Century Economic Thought’, History of Political Economy, 6, 1, 1974, p. 38. The full extent of Mallet’s dislike for Mill and Cairnes’s position on land was not revealed until his son edited his father’s Free Exchange; Papers on Political and Economical Subjects, including Chapters on the Law of Value and Unearned Increment, London, 1891. The Cobden Club later found itself divided when some of its members adopted the more radical positions on land reform and of what became known as ‘new liberalism’ towards the end of the century. On this see A. Howe, Free Trade and Liberal England, 1846-1946, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1997, pp. 136-141, 192-4.

9 of the community, and encouragement in all classes of healthful rural tastes, and of the higher order of pleasures’.19 At this point, then, we can observe the confluence of what is now described as ‘romantic ecology’, with its pervasive Wordsworthian overtones, and those arguments that make Mill a precursor of twentieth-century forms of neo-Malthusian eco-criticism and an exponent of the zero-growth economy.20 Close readers of his Principles would not have been surprised by any of the clauses in the Land Tenure Reform Association’s programme. The chapters questioning the absolute right to landed property, and the enthusiastic survey of the merits of peasant proprietorship throughout Europe, summarized a burgeoning literature and provided a rallying point for a new generation of reformers that included, alongside Fawcett, such figures as William Thornton, John Elliot Cairnes, and Thomas Cliffe Leslie.21 All this ensured Mill a prominent place in the litany of politico-economic experts incanted by later land reformers. Mill also played a more direct, though hardly intentional, role in passing the baton to a new generation when he recruited Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of the theory of natural selection in biology, to the cause of the Land Tenure Reform Association. Wallace was responsible for inclusion of a clause that incorporated preservation of ‘all natural objects or artificial constructions attached to the , which are of historical, scientific or artistic interest’. More significantly, he carried the fight into the last quarter of the century by means of his own Land Nationalisation Society formed in 1881. Wallace in turn passed the baton to Henry George, while attempting later to distinguish his own reforms from those advocated by the Georgeite Land Restoration Leagues.22 The spectacular success of George’s campaign

19 See ‘Land Tenure Reform’ in Essays in Economics and Society in CW, vol V, pp. 689-95. Fawcett’s part in the Commons Preservation Society is covered by L. Stephen, Life of Henry Fawcett, London, 1885,Chapter VII. For another contemporary account see G. Shaw Lefevre, English Commons and : The Story of the Battle during the last Thirty Years for Public Rights over the Commons and Forests of England and Wales, Cassell, London, 1894. 20 See J. Bate, Romantic Ecology; Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition, Routledge, London, 1991. For Mill’s environmentalist credentials see D. Winch, ‘Thinking Green, Nineteenth-Century Style, John Stuart Mill and ’ in M. Bevir and F. Trentmann (eds), Markets in Hisorical Contexts; Ideas and Politics in the Modern World, Cambridge University Press, 2004. 21 For a study of this group see J. Lipkes, Politics, Religion and Classical Political Economy in Britiain: John Stuart Mill and His Followers, London: Macmillan, 1999. 22 See A. R. Wallace, Land : Its Necessity and its Aims, London, 1882. Two unpublished dissertations deal with the activities of the Wallace and George associations; see A. J. Peacock, ‘Land Reform 1880-1919: A Study of

10 is the most striking evidence of the popular appeal of land reform at the close of the century, though the foundations had been well and truly laid by the native radical tradition before his arrival from the United States.23 Even those who were committed to a broader view of the nature of exploitation in capitalist society, the Social Democratic Federation, were forced to engage with George, with some of them, notably William Morris, expressing admiration for his impact on opinion.24 George made converts among the early Fabians, Bernard Shaw in particular. Having decided to do without the benefit of ’s analysis, the Fabians granted a large space in their programme for the , land reform, and the taxation of unearned incomes.25 As Sidney Webb proudly noted in retrospect: ‘Tested by a whole generation of further experience and criticism, I conclude that, in 1889, we knew our Political

Economy, and that our Political Economy was sound’.26 By the end of the century, then, long-established conceptions of the equal right of all men to the fruits of the earth, and ideas of the historic injury inflicted by , were now expressed as much in the languages of utilitarianism and political economy as in the more fundamentalist language of rights and injustices. The heady intermixture of economic theory, historical and empirical study of land tenure arrangements, and rural nostalgia was sufficiently entrenched to constitute a problem for the emerging generation of academic economists. They had to engage with a large body of literature -- some of it reaching a mass audience -- that either condemned the science of which they were the newest guardians, or claimed that its founding fathers had provided support for radical conclusions on matters of land reform and taxation. In both respects, professional pride plus a regard for the superior qualities of post-marginalist modes of analysis required them to distinguish popular fallacies and enthusiasms from sound economic inferences.

III the Activities of the English Land Restoration League and the Land Nationalisation Society’, MA thesis, University of Southampton, 1961; and S. B. Ward, ‘Land Reform in England, 1880-1914’, PhD thesis, University of Reading, 1976. 23 See J. Saville, ‘Henry George and the British ’, Science and Society, XXIV, 1960, 321-33. For a similar comment by a contemporary see J. A. Hobson, ‘The Influence of Henry George in England’, Fortnightly Review, 68, December 1897, pp. 835-44. 24 W. Morris, ‘Henry George’, Justice, April 5, 1884. 25 See A. M. McBriar, Fabian Socialism and English Politics, 1884-1918, Cambridge, 1966, Chapter II. 26 Preface to Fabian Essays, 1920.

11 Those whom we now call neo-classical economists were almost bound to provide a more sceptical interpretation of the merits of land reform. This was certainly the case with Alfred Marshall, who overcame his scruples about engagement in public controversy by joining the attack on the economics of George and Wallace, while confining more measured discussion of the implications of the rent doctrine to his Principles of Economics (1890).27 Instead of considering in detail how the neo-classicists went about their task, however, I want to pose a more direct question: to what extent was the earlier generation of land-reforming political economists guilty of economic naïveté when endorsing petite culture, and on what grounds were they prepared to sacrifice economic advantage to social and political benefit? A convenient way of stating the issues can be found in an article on Fabian economics by George Stigler, a doughty representative of Chicago-style neo-classicism, who posed the following shrewd question: ‘How could one seriously make a heavy indictment of private property in land when free trade had made wheat – and land – cheap? Late Victorian England was an odd place to offer heavy criticism of .’ 28 Stigler’s conclusion, in brief, was that the land problem was essentially the creation of intellectuals, who, when faced with emotive issues, were unable to think straight about economics and measure economic magnitudes accurately. To this criticism can be added another expressed by Balfour, echoing Marshall’s criticisms a few years earlier:

‘Whatever be the merits of a system of small holdings, and whatever the demerits of a system of large ones, it cannot be maintained, in face of the fact that England grows nearly twice as much wheat per acre as France, and more than twice as much as Germany and Russia, that the first is favourable, the second unfavourable, to a large gross production of . And what is true of gross, is manifestly still more true of net production.’29

In a later neo-classical terminology, Balfour was asking why, if you are already on the frontier marked out by the production-possibilities curve, you would wish to opt for a position within

27 See ‘Three Lectures on Progress and Poverty’ given in 1883, as reprinted in Journal of Law and Economics, 12, 1969 and now contained in Collected Works of Alfred Marshall edited by P. Groenewegen in eight volumes, Overstone Press, Bristol, 1997, vol. I, pp.161-203. See also ‘On Rent’ in vol. 2, pp. 489-507, Marshall’s reply to the criticisms of the Duke of Argyll, The Unseen Foundations of Society; An Examination of the Fallacies and Failures of Economic Science due to Neglected Elements, John Murray, London, 1893. 28 ‘Bernard Shaw, Sidney Webb, and the Theory of Fabian Socialism’ as reprinted in Essays in the History of Economics, Chicago: Chicago University Press, p. 275. 29 Industrial Remuneration Conference, p. 349.

12 the space marked out by the curve? He assumed that ‘in old and settled countries it is usually more profitable to farm and pay rent for much land, than to own and cultivate little.’ Or, as Marshall put it: ‘It requires as much capital to buy twenty acres as it does to farm a hundred.’

30 Rich landlords who were willing to take a low rate of return on their capital, possibly for status reasons, performed a useful function, leaving the tenant farmer to employ his more limited capital and greater agricultural skills to best account. It was not necessary to be in possession of marginal productivity theories to appreciate such arguments. For example, take Ricardo’s blunt answer to Malthus’s argument that free trade in corn would entail loss of employment and income from earlier investment in agriculture:

‘We might just as fairly have been told, when the steam-engine, or Mr. Arkwright’s cotton machine, was brought to perfection, that it would be wrong to adopt the use of them, because the value of the old clumsy machinery would be lost to us.’31

Such views enabled Ricardo to predict that the resulting shift of capital and labour into commerce and manufacturing would constitute a gain to every class except landowners, thereby heightening the radical diagnosis of the inherent conflict between the interests of rent-receivers and those of the rest of society. But a case for repeal of the Corn Laws that drew attention to artificially-sustained rental incomes did not carry with it the implication that English tenurial arrangements were incompatible with the most efficient available methods in agriculture -- though entails were often thought to be responsible for under-investment by short-sighted and impoverished inheritors belonging to overly long-sighted families. Ricardo not only assumed the existence of the English arrangements throughout the Principles, but relied on the existence of competitive market forces to generate the conclusions of his ‘strong case’. As a Whig, Malthus may have been more tender-hearted towards the landowning classes, more sensitive to frictions and the social costs of economic change, but he was perfectly

30 Collected Works, vol. I, p. 185. 31 Essay on Profits in The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo edited by P. Sraffa, Cambridge University Press for the Royal Economic Society, eleven volumes, 1952-1973, vol. IV, p. 33.

13 capable of understanding Ricardo’s logic. Indeed, he had been the first to employ it when faced with those who believed that pauperism could be removed by adoption of the ‘cow system’. He was particularly surprised to find Arthur Young, the most outspoken advocate of enclosure in Britain and a much-cited critic of inefficient peasant forms of agriculture in

France, advocating the cow system during the grain scarcity of 1800.32 The outcome of such a system, Malthus argued, would be ‘the most cruel and fatal blow to the happiness of the lower classes of people in this country, that they had ever received.’33 Hence too his warnings about the dangers of excessive subdivision of agrarian in post-revolutionary France, a diagnosis that was later to be dramatically underlined by Irish problems. Ireland showed what could happen when the facility of potato culture made population increase independent of the price of food and the demand for labour.34 The cow system in England would encourage marriage in the same way that Malthus alleged was true of the unreformed Poor Law, though with the added drawback that it lacked the restraining effect associated with the ‘laudable repugnance to the receiving of parish relief’. Malthus would only support the cow system as a supplement to reform of the Poor Laws, and then only if the acquisition of land was the result of ‘personal exertions’. Since peasant agriculture was vulnerable to crop failure, landownership could never become the ‘principal dependence’ of the poor. The cottager’s prospects would be better served if he retained his status as labourer earning an adequate wage income to support a modest family. One of Malthus’s most persistent tasks in defending his population principle was to emphasize the difference between gross and net agricultural product when weighing the merits of solutions to population pressure, with China (later Ireland) serving as the example of a ‘forced’ population dependent on agriculture dedicated solely to maintaining gross product.

32 Young maintained that scarcity could be avoided if ‘every country labourer in the kingdom’ who had three or more children, could own ‘half an acre of land for potatoes [as an alternative to wheat], and grass enough to feed one or two cows’. See The Question of Scarcity Plainly Stated, 1800. 33 See T. R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population edited by Patricia James, Cambridge University Press for the Royal Economic Society, two volumes, 1989, vol. II, Chapter XI. 34 See T. R. Malthus, Principles of Political Economy edited by J. M. Pullen, Cambridge University Press for the Royal Economic Society, two volumes, 1989, vol I, pp. 232-52, 396, 393-401.

14 John Ramsay McCulloch was, if anything, a more determined defender of the existing system of land tenure. Like Malthus, he was in favour of primogeniture on economic and political grounds. He also advocated fixed-term leases because they provided tenant farmers with an incentive to invest; and recommended setting rents at competitive levels because that would require occupiers ‘either [to] exert themselves or go to the wall.’ The worst aspect of existing English practice, in McCulloch’s opinion, was that ‘tenants who do not fall behind their neighbours are treated nearly as well as those who go ’. When judged by these market criteria it followed that the peasant systems of tenure to be found throughout Europe, including those like Prussia that had benefitted from the Stein-Hardenberg reforms, were guilty of allowing ‘slovenly’ agricultural practices: they retarded mechanization and did not provide scope for economies of scale. 35 When faced with Irish problems, McCulloch not only attacked all forms of ‘tenant right’, but managed to mount a daring economic defence of the innocuity of absentee landlordism.36 It follows, almosta fortiori, that he was firmly opposed to James Mill’s proposals for taxing the unearned increment. Indeed, Ricardo, who was probably the first to be made privy to the proposals was also unwilling to give them his support. He agreed that rent could properly be subject to special taxation under Asiatic conditions, but was not convinced that such a policy was practicable or desirable in a developed economy in which a market in land values was fully established.37 Reference to Asiatic conditions recalls the fact that James Mill was responsible for applying Ricardo’s theory of rent to the Indian land revenue question. Exaggerating somewhat, one could say that Mill père et fils, in their daily occupation as servants of the East India Company, were engaged in administering a system that required them to act as the owners of the ultimate to land, exacting neither more nor less than pure rent from the ryot or peasant cultivator for the ‘original and indestructible powers of the soil’. They became life-long opponents of the pro-landlord prejudices of those who sought to create, by means

35 See J. R. McCulloch, A Treatise on the Succession to Property Vacant by Death, London, 1848; see also D. P. O’Brien, J. R. McCulloch; A Study in Classic Economics, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1970, pp. 288-9. 36 See A Treatise on the Letting and Occupancy of Land as reprinted in Treatises and Essay on Subjects Connected with Economical Policy, Adam and Charles Black, Edinburgh, 1853. Quotation on p. 168. 37 For James Mill’s proposals and Ricardo’s criticisms of them see Elements of Political Economy as reprinted in D. Winch (ed), James Mill; Selected Economic Writings, Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1966, pp. 197-200, 338-42.

15 of ‘permanent settlement’, an Indian landowning class along English lines.38 It was partly across Indian territory that John Stuart Mill advanced on the Irish problem of tenant right.39 Nor was he alone in this: George Campbell, Chief Commissioner of the Central Provinces of India, did so in less extreme fashion in a pamphlet on The Irish Land (1869) that was to prove helpful to Gladstone when preparing his 1870 and 1881 Irish Land Bills. An uncertain combination of Indian and Irish experience, with a strong dash of Francophilia, helped to shift Mill’s inherited anti-landlord views decisively in favour of peasant proprietorship in the 1840s, thereby overturning the original classical remedy for

Ireland, namely the imposition of the English system of capitalist farming.40 Transmutation of the Irish cottar into a day-labourer was ‘rather a scheme for the improvement of Irish agriculture, than of the condition of the Irish people. .[It] has no charm for infusing forethought, frugality, or self-restraint, into a people devoid of them’.41 English ideas and prejudices were not applicable to Indian and Irish problems, to societies where competition merely had destructive effects on the peasantry, and where different customs dictated different solutions. The same prevented Mill from adopting what might be described as the Burkean position: English customs and peculiarities were too deeply infected by landlordism to be defensible. This was not a mode of thought that came naturally to Mill, which makes his willingness to appropriate Wordsworth’s sentimental defence of the Lakeland ‘statesmen’ and Maine’s arguments on village communities all the more remarkable

– or perhaps one should say, all the more opportunistic.42 At this point other considerations connected with Mill’s idealism and neo-Malthusian ecological concerns must be brought into the picture. These were revealed in a pessimistic economic diagnosis of the future for the labouring classes under the existing system of

38 For the classic study of this episode see E. Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959. 39 For the connections and disjunctions between thinking on Ireland and India see R. D. C. Black, ‘Economic Policy in Ireland and India in the Time of J. S. Mill’, Economic History Review, XXI, 1968, 321-36 now reprinted in Economic Theory and Policy in Context; The Selected Essays of R. D. Collison Black, Edward Elgar, Aldershot, 1993, pp.18-33. 40 For Mill’s part in achieving this shift see R. D. C. Black, Economic Thought and the Irish Question, 1817-1870, Cambridge, 1960, Chapter 2. 41 Principles in CW, vol II, p. 326. 42 On the Lakeland statesmen see Principles in CW, p. 253. On Maine see Mill’s enthusiastic review of Village Communities in Writings on India in CW, vol ??, pp. 215-28.

16 wage labour, where any increase in numbers faced the prospect of rising food costs. Peasant proprietorships in agriculture and manufacturing enterprises were the ultimate solution to this dilemma. Unlike his mentors Mill had come to the conclusion that further economic growth in a mature industrial society, such as he perceived England to be at the century’s mid-point, was no longer the best means of raising living standards. Nor was he happy with the prospect of a society permanently dedicated to a competitive scramble for material wealth. With firm control having been established over population growth by means of delayed marriage and contraception, aided, if necessary, by emigration, it would be preferable to embrace a state of affairs in which population remained stable and any net capital formation was directed towards reduced physical toil and improvements in the quality of life.43 A large part of Mill’s case for peasant proprietorship was based on the increased prudence in population matters that he observed in France. With such prudence came reduced risk of the Irish problem of sub-division of properties, together with all the other benefits deriving from the productive ‘magic’ of ownership. One could say, therefore, that Mill’s idealistic eye was as much focussed on an improved future for wage-earners in a virtuous stationary state as on the realities of maintaining a domestic agricultural system capable of producing food by least-cost methods. Repeal of the Corn Laws had reduced the priority attached to this problem, and Mill had formally announced that preserving sources of capital accumulation in

Britain was no longer a problem.44 Alternatively, one could conclude that whatever economic benefits England derived from ‘high farming’ were being purchased at too high a social cost in the form of exclusion from roles that allowed scope for non-dependency and self- development. Mill’s late followers did not remain faithful to him in all these particulars, but he certainly succeeded in setting the moral tone of their contributions to land reform. But it is important not to exaggerate the extent to which Mill’s antagonisms and future projections affected his capacity for hard-headed analysis and regard for practical

43 See especially Principles in CW, vol III, pp. 754-6. 44 See Principles, CW, vol. III, Book IV, Chapter IV.

17 realities. The intemperate language and radical proposals contained in England and Ireland (1868) were not reflected in his parliamentary speeches on the Irish Land Bill. Nor was he entirely unequivocal in his Irish recommendations in all editions of the Principles. But in the late 1860s preservation of the Anglo-Irish Union in the face of the twin threat posed by English insularity and indifference on the one side, and Fenian outrage on the other, suggested the need to frighten the English public into accepting Gladstone’s more moderate measures.45 And while Mill advocated state purchase and disposal of land, and government- appointed commissions to value land for the purpose of fixing rents in Ireland and assessing the unearned increment in England, he was opposed to all schemes that did not entail giving landowners full compensation at current market prices. Confidence in the Ricardian prediction of rising land values made this seem like a good bargain for the state. In resisting the demands for land nationalisation within the Land Tenure Reform Association, Mill did so on familiar grounds: state management was unfit for the task.46 The administration of commons and waste lands was as much as could be expected from the state for the moment. 47

IV

In casting doubt on Mill’s attempt to construct a scheme of social reform ‘on the somewhat frail foundation of a peasant proprietory’, Balfour thought Mill had overreacted to the defects of English land tenure, many of which had been removed in the interim. How could it be claimed, in the abstract, that any one system of tenure was preferable:

45 A large literature now surrounds this subject. See E. D. Steele, Irish Land and British Politics; Tenant-Right and Nationality, 1865-1870, Cambridge, 1974, Chapter II; idem, ‘J. S. Mill and the Irish Question: The Principles of Political Economy, 1848-1865’, Historical Journal, XIII, 1970, 216-36; idem, ‘J. S. Mill and the Irish Question: Reform and the Integrity of Empire’, Historical Journal, XIII, 1970, 419-42; L. Zastoupil, ‘Moral Government: J. S. Mill on Ireland’, Historical Journal, XXVI, 1983, 707-17; and B. L. Kinzer, ‘J. S. Mill and Irish Land: A Reassessment’, Historical Journal, XXVII, 1984, 111-27. See also the chapter on Ireland in B. L. Kinzer, A. P. Robson, and J. M. Robson (eds), A Moralist In and Out of Parliament 1865-1868, Toronto, 1992. 46 Fawcett did not favour taxation of the unearned increment and became a major opponent of land nationalisation; see ‘The Nationalisation of Land’, Fortnightly Review, December 1, 1872, pp.627-43. For another admirer of Mill who carried on the fight against Henry George see A. Toynbee, Progress and Poverty; A Criticism of Mr. Henry George, Kegan Paul, London, 1883. 47 ‘… I do not know that it may not be reserved for us in the future; but at present I decidedly do not think it expedient. I have so poor an opinion of State management, or municipal management either, that I am afraid many years would elapse before the revenue realized for the State would be sufficient to pay the indemnity which would justly be claimed by the dispossessed proprietors.’ See speech on Land Tenure Reform, 15 May, 1871 as reprinted in Public and Parliamentary Speeches, CW, vol. ??, p. 419.and

18 ‘…before judgment is passed with respect to any given country, reference must be made, not merely to general considerations, which apply to it in common with other countries, but to the peculiarities of its soil and climate, to the distances of its markets, to the aptitudes of its people, their usages, and the character of their agriculture.’48

Mill was vulnerable to such criticisms. His version of historical and cultural relativism did not apply to England. He had minimized the less favourable results of peasant proprietorship abroad and did not pay much attention to the problems of converting English agricultural labourers into farmers on their own account, requiring access to capital in order to do so effectively. The kind of supplementary role played by allotments, of a kind that even the most status-quo minded commentators would have accepted, fell far short of Mill’s hopes. Mill and his followers certainly succeeded in altering an Irish perception of political economy as a landlord science, but they did not convince a succeeding generation of more hard-headed economists that the case for peasant proprietorship in England had been established, outside the realm of market gardening at least. With the benefits of free trade in foodstuffs arriving now in the form of cheap wheat from the Middle West, and the advent of refrigerated shipping, only ‘high farming’ could compete, where this entailed a larger acreage per farm than the advocates of peasant proprietorship envisaged. It also entailed exacerbation of those features of British society that Wallace and George deplored and attributed to private landowning -- further rural depopulation, emigration to the United States and the ‘new’ colonies of Australasia and Canada, and the growth of towns and cities. Cutting a few gaps in the Lincolnshire sea-wall would not reverse this process. Rural labour was being pushed into the towns by depression and mechanization rather than by the greed of status-seeking landowners. It was also being pulled there by cheaper transport, the spread of education, and rising consumer expectations. This meant too that the best hope for wage- earners (when suitably equipped by education to appreciate the virtues of thrift and the need to avoid alcoholic excess) came from higher wages and steady employment – a return to Malthus’s priorities against a background in which pauperism had chiefly become an urban phenomenon. The new advocates of the cow system, like Chamberlain’s lieutenant, Jesse

48 Industrial Remuneration Conference, p. 342.

19 Collings, could still extol the virtues of owner-occupation and rural life generally, but only in tandem with protectionism, the fate of which was settled, temporarily, by the defeat of

Tariff Reform in 1906.49 If there is a moral to this story it does not lie in any summary of the brute facts of agrarian economic life at the end of the century. After all, if anything the case for land reform was spurred on by depression and survived agricultural revival. It was not going to be killed off by anything as cerebral as the opinions of people like Balfour and Marshall. The jealousies about which Balfour had complained retained their force during and after the First World War, though Lloyd George was thwarted by that event from introducing his own ambitious programme of land reform. But within the loose-knit yet hard-headed community I have been considering, there was less disposition to emphasize the radical conclusions that could be drawn from classical forms of political economy and more awareness of living in a different world. Any campaign directed solely at the monopolistic properties of landowning, especially when accompanied by ‘single-tax’ proposals, was bound to raise the question of discriminatory treatment, plus fears that if land became the first it would not be the last form of property to come under attack. In what respects did land differ from other forms of capital? In a society that was no longer dependent on domestic agriculture to meet most of its demand for food and raw materials, how did agriculture differ in essentials from other forms of capitalistic enterprise? If it was accepted that there were economies of scale in manufacturing, how did the trend towards larger farm size differ in its rationale from the increasing size of industrial enterprises? On such matters the marginal productivity approach did have an effect on the way in which economists approached the questions. Since I cannot deal with this at the end of an over- long presentation, let me illustrate the change of perspective with two brief examples, both of which centre on Marshall, the representative figure for the 1890s. It was a sign of a more pervasive shift in perspective when Marshall, supported by other economist-witnesses before the Royal Commission on Local Taxation in 1897, made

49 See J.Collings, Land Reform, Occupying Ownership, Peasant Proprietary and Rural Education, Longmans Green, New York, 1906

20 the simple opening announcement that ‘taxes are paid by persons, not things’; and that in consequence the inquiry should not relate to ‘the distribution of the burden of taxation between different kinds of property, but to the distribution of the burden between different classes of person with special reference to their interests in different kinds of property’.50 My second example involves a contrast with the entire classical approach adopted by Ricardo and his followers, up to and including Mill and Cairnes. For these two generations of political economists, the clue to rising wages could be found almost exclusively in what happened to food prices. Marshall, having announced the temporary suspension of the law of diminishing returns in agriculture, having declared that rent was ‘simply the chief species of a large genus of economic phenomena’, and after taking full account of the similarities between the various when interpreted in the light of the theory of marginal productivity, was able to argue that in a modern economy the wage-earner had an equally important stake in what happened, say, to the price of steel.51

50 See Official Papers by Alfred Marshall, Macmillan for the Royal Economic Society, London, 1926, p.334. 51 For temporary suspension see ‘Social Possibilities of Economic Chivalry’ in A. C. Pigou (ed), Memorials of Alfred Marshall, Macmillan, London, 1925, p. 326. The other conclusions are a distillation of the conclusions of Principles, Book VI on the distribution of the national income, but see especially Chapters IX and X on rent and land tenure respectively and Chapters XI and XII on distribution of the national product.

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