stimulus can do no good. Not only will it indirectly penalise advances in other directions which are conceivably better and might prove themselves so with a fair field and no favour, but the electrical industry itself would be rather hindered than helped if an inelastic government control of its growth stereotyped plant and processes at a time when history is being made in the technique of coal utilisation.

In the electrical industry itself, while there is no doubt felt as to the future natural growth of electrical supply, there is a shaking of heads as to the probable result of hot-house methods. A thoughtful letter from Mr. C. N. Hefford, Manager of the Leeds Electricity Department, published in the Yorkshire Post of the 23rd May of this year, illuminates this position from inside knowledge. The key-note is sounded in the following passage, and relates particularly to the lack of foundation for such prophecy as came from Mr. Baldwin, that the proposed government assistance would introduce an era of greatly cheapened electricity.

It is

The artificial development of large stations beyond the natural economic demand would tend to stereotype existing methods and might, therefore, easily retard rather than advance ultimate progress. unreasonable to assert that electricity must be capable of generation at the same price in all countries.

So far as the great industrial centres of this country are concerned, there is not a great deal to hope for in improved generating economy with our present knowledge, which, after all, must form the basis of any government suggestion. Certain broad principles of economical generation have been ascertained, and in general these can be attained with existing legislation. . . . Electricity has not only to be generated, but to be transmitted, and scientific progress has enabled large quantities of electricity to be transmitted economically over long distances. This fact is not waiting for any government scheme. All the great power companies and many large municipalities are already experiencing its possibilities, and existing legislation provides for its extended use, but transmission costs money, and balance-sheets dealing with alternative methods of supply should always be considered. . . . Some point is made of the comparatively small figure indicating the use of electricity per individual in this country, and the suggestion is that this is entirely due to the prohibitive cost. Nothing of the sort. It is mainly due to the cheap rate at which competitive alternatives can be purchased, and the present high cost of many electrical appliances. With one or two notable exceptions it is hardly too much to say that a free supply of power to our large industrial concerns would have a very small effect on the cost of production.

Mr. D. Milne Watson, speaking as President of the Society of British Gas Industries only two days earlier, emphasised the unwisdom of exaggerating the effect on unemployment and high costs of production which might be expected from the application of the government proposals for the subsidising of electricity. To quote from his address :

The belief that the development and increased supplies of electricity will remove unemployment in other industries in this country is entirely fallacious. There is no greater depression at the present time than on the north-east coast, where there are the largest super-stations in this country, belonging to an electricity undertaking probably as up-to-date and efficient as any in the world, supplying cheap electricity over 1,400 square miles of industrial area. Although the mining, steel, shipbuilding, and other industries have availed themselves of this cheap electric supply, it cannot lift them out of the abyss of depression in which they find themselves; it represents too small a proportion of their total working costs. In shipbuilding, marine engineering, locomotive building, and iron foundries, the cost of electricity represents under 1 per cent. of the total working costs; so that any reduced price of current cannot materially affect the present abnormal conditions.

We are, it is to be hoped, determined to make the best possible use of our coal supplies by the most economical generation of heat, power and light, with regard to the recovery of by-products and the minimising of atmospheric pollution. Electricity and gas offer partial solutions, each with a wide applicability, of the problem presented, and work in many directions is proceeding, by way of scientific research and large scale operations, in the endeavour to make the solution more complete. What will emerge in the future will depend on the interplay of the economic forces so called into operation. There is an insistent demand for economical methods, and presumably it will be met by processes which prove their right in practice to the title. For the government to attempt the determination of the course of this evolution by the exclusive monetary endowment of one method is plainly unwise.

JOHN W. COBB

OUR CHANGING LAND SYSTEM

1. Land Tenure and Unemployment. By FRANK GEARY, B.Sc. George Allen and Unwin. 1925.

2.

The Land and its People. By The LORD ERNLE. Hutchinson. 1925. 3, The Tenure of Agricultural Land. By C. S. ORWIN and W. R. PEEL. Cambridge University Press. 1925.

4. England on the Eve of the Industrial Revolution. By L. W. MOFFIT, Ph.D. P. S. King & Son. 1925.

THE English land system, like the English constitution, is the

The

product of political and social evolution. Revolutionary change has been covered by formal continuity, and things which are radically altered have retained their original names. The manor of the twelfth century was essentially unlike that of the twentieth century, but its external structure, in a large measure, survives. A different soul inhabits the same body. metamorphosis has been so gradual that the process at any given time has been almost imperceptible. Each succeeding generation has believed its position to be static, and it is only in retrospect that movement can be discerned. It is evident, on a survey of the past, that development has been progressive and persistent, and it is worth while to attempt to distinguish the direction in which it is proceeding at the present time.

The manor, as it emerged after the Norman Conquest, was an administrative and agricultural unit, self-contained, selfsufficient and self-governing. "Every medieval village," as Lord Ernle observes," was a small world to itself." Guarding himself, as every writer on the subject must do, against the risk of generalisation" few general statements can be made to which exceptions may not be found "-he gives in a chapter on country villages a detailed historical description of a typical manor, East Hendred in Berkshire. In the Down country the isolation of a village community was less complete than in those districts where forest and marsh interposed almost impassable obstacles to communication, but nevertheless it neither had, nor desired, intercourse with other "worlds." It consumed the food it grew, and if this was insufficient it went short. Except salt and iron it bought little and that little by barter.

The group of persons who were gathered within the bounds of rural manors were, in the most literal sense of the word and to a peculiar degree, communities. Externally cut off from the outside world, their dwellings not scattered but huddled together, they were united in a singularly close relationship. Their farming, on which all depended for daily food, was their common enterprise. Each individual took the produce of his own holding, but the whole body of partners cultivated the ploughland collectively. The arable lots lay in strips intermixed with those of their neighbours; they co-operated in their labours for the Lord of the Manor; they grazed the pastures in common; they shared the meadows, often by lot; when the hay and corn were cleared, their combined flocks and herds roamed over the land together.

In the tithings, in which all were enrolled, the members were responsible for the behaviour of one another. In the Manor Courts the tenants gathered, many of them, when documentary evidence begins, still distinguished only by such local identifications as Richard atte Lane, John le Longe, Peter le Fraunk, Thomas atte Grene, Roger atte Wode, William atte Watere, meeting as judges, jurors, suitors or witnesses, to assist in the regulation of their economic and social life.

The government of the community was in form despotic; the lord of the manor was theoretically an autocrat. In the twelfth century the tenants of the manor were absolutely at his will and mercy. They were bound to the land; their live stock could be distrained to meet his debts; they were compelled to render any service he demanded; they were subject to his arbitrary taxation; they could neither marry their daughters nor apprentice their sons without his consent.

Even in its sternest form, however, there was an element of reciprocity in the relationship. In return for service the tenant received protection. The lord had his rights, but he also had his responsibilities. Nor were his rights so absolute in fact as in form. The Norman baron, claiming his title to the land by conquest, might recognise no limit to his power, but the subjects of his arbitrary will were inheritors of the traditions of a thousand years and descendants of a race to whom freedom was an instinct. The land is the most intractable of servants. It will patiently endure much ill-treatment, but in the end it will impose its own conditions on those who try to control it. The sons of the soil take after their Mother Earth. Holding "Saint Use and Wont " in greater veneration than any mortal lord, they persistently and tirelessly pressed, generation after generation, towards liberty. The manor court became, not only the administrative centre, but

also the bulwark of the rights of the tenants, where “the custom of the manor " could be established even against the will of the lord. By its record of rents and services the indefinite obligations of the tenants were gradually reduced to specific terms. When the rents in money, produce and labour were fixed and determinate their commutation became easy and the transition from personal servitude to contractual tenancy on a financial basis was facilitated.

The process was greatly accelerated by the catastrophe of the Black Death which suddenly swept the manorial system into the clutches of the law of supply and demand in its grimmest form. The supply of labour for the land was drastically and dreadfully reduced. Lord Ernle cites the case of the manor of Banstead in Surrey. Numbers of the tenants were swept away by the Plague, and their vacant holdings could not be re-let on the old terms. The holdings either remained void, or were let on lease and the labour services lost. Fifteen years after the Black Death the manorial records show that seventeen holdings were vacant at Banstead. To supplement the depleted staff, labour had to be hired and wages paid in cash. Money was obtained by the commutation into cash payments of a number of services, such as those of malting the lord's barley, carting his timber, hoeing his corn, or doing the winter or spring ploughing. The form that the transaction took illustrates the tenacity of the legal theory of serfdom. "The labour of the men belongs to the lord; they buy from him, and he sells to them, the use of their own muscles." Tenacity of theory and flexibility of practice are characteristic of the land system throughout the centuries.

The relaxation of the old tenures was a long stride on the path towards personal freedom. It had other consequences. It was an advance from collectivism to individualism. The community, in which each man had his assigned place and his fixed functions, began to break up. Freedom introduced competition. The forceful and enterprising men began to lay field to field; the weak and thriftless lost their hold on the land. At Saleby, in Lincolnshire, the manorial accounts at the end of the fifteenth century show that while, in the aggregate, the fixed money rents were practically the same as at the end of the thirteenth century, they were paid by half the number of tenants. The holdings were larger, the tenants fewer.