December 31/80

    My dear Anna,

         . . . He says that if a general move were made in the fens to stamp out the weeds (which would require an immense expenditure of money in wages), "very different results would be obtained from what we now see." No doubt they would. But what then? The landlord would raise the rent, and the farmers would have spent their capital without remuneration. Nothing but a security against the rise of rent can encourage the farmers to make sacrifices. He justly says . . . that fruit might be more profitable. But if a farmer plant a fruit tree, it becomes his landlord's property at once, though it may need thirteen or thirty years to come to its fullest value. . . . The writer treats a lowering of rent as out of the question. Yet from 1847 up to about 1876 it was constantly rising. Now, forsooth! to go back is impossible!!! And why, because recent buyers have bought at so high a price that they only get three per cent. They are to be protected from losing, and that, though many have bought at a fancy price to indulge other tastes than properly agricultural. Mr. Pennington* told me he had farms under his own management and despaired of not losing by them, unless he could drive down the need of paying wages. This is what the farmers find. Up to 1875 rents kept rising, and wages rose too, yet prices rising, the peasants were not much better off. In 1873 the peasants claimed more still, and the farmers could not give it. They are ground between two millstones—higher rents and higher wages. This seems to me a fundamental refutation of the peculiarly English system. Fixity of rent is the first necessity. The landlord must not pocket the fruit of the tenants' labour.

    "*An old friend of Newman's" (Sieveking, fn., p. 220).