302
ENGLISH LEASES.
seems to have been in existence for a hundred years. You tie them down by the most absurd restrictions; you do not give men credit for being able to discover any improvement next year and the year after, but you go upon the assumption that men are not able to improve, and you do your best to prevent them doing so. (Hear.) Now, I do not know why we should not in this country have leases for land upon similar terms to the leases of manufactories, or any 'plant' or premises. I do not think that farming will ever be carried on as it ought to be until yon bare leases drawn in the same way as a man takes a manufactory, and pays perhaps £1,000 a-year for it. I know people who pay £4,000 a year for manufactories to carry ou their business, and at fair rents There is an honourable gentleman near me who pays more than £4,000 a-year for the rent of his manufactory. What covenants do you think he has in his lease? What would be think if it stated how many revolutions there should be in a minute of the spindles, or if they prescribed the construction of the straps or the gearing of his machinery. Why, he takes his manufactory with a schedule of its present state—bricks, mortar, and machinery—and when the lease is over, he must leave it in the same state, or else pay a compensation for the dilapidation. (Hear, hear.) The right honourable gentleman the Chancellor of the Exchequer cheers that statement. I want to ask his opinion respecting a similar lease for a farm. I am rather disposed to think that the Anti-Corn-Law leaguers will very likely form a joint stock association, and have none but free-traders in the body, that we may purchase a joint-stock estate, and have a model-farm ('hear, hear,' and laughter); taking care that it shall be in one of the rural counties, one of the most purely agricultural parts of the country, where we think there is the greatest need of improvement—perhaps in Buckinghamshire (laughter); and there shall be a model farm, homestead, and cottages; and I may tell the noble lord the member for Newark, that we shall have a model garden, and we will not make any boast or outcry about it. But the great object will be w have a model lease. (Cheers and laughter.) We will have as the farmer a man of intelligence and capital. I am not so unreasonable as to tell you that you ought to lot your land to men who have not a competent capital, or are not sufficiently intelligent; but I say, select such a man as that; let him know his business and have sufficient capital, and you cannot give him 400 wide a scope. We will find such a man, and we will let him our farm; there shall be a lease precisely such us that upon high my honourable friend takes his factory. There shall be no single clause inserted in it to dictate to him how he shall cultivate his farm; he shall do what he likes with the old pasture. If he can make more by ploughing it up he shall do so; if he can grow while crops every year—which I know there are people doing at this
