The Royal Agricultural Commission, in a report made a number of years ago (1897), could suggest no remedy, and believed matters must grow worse.  A leading English journal,[3] in commenting on the report, said, “The sad and sober fact is that the English farmer’s occupation is gone, or nearly gone, never to return.”

[3] The Bristol Times and Mirror, August 5, 1897.

The continued agricultural depression ruined many tillers of the soil, and drove the rural population more and more into the already overcrowded towns.  There they bid against the laboring men for work, and so reduced wages to the lowest point.  If they failed to get work, they became an added burden on the poor rates, and taxes rose accordingly.

Should no remedy be found, and should land in England continue to go out of cultivation, it is difficult to see how the majority of proprietors can resist the temptation to break up and sell their estates.  The tendency of an important act of Parliament (1894) is believed by many to work in the same direction.[1] It imposes an inheritance tax on the heirs to landed property, which they find it hard to meet, especially when their tenants have abandoned their farms rather than try to pay the rent.

[1] The Consolidated Death Duties Act.

To-day a few thousand wealthy families hold the title deeds to a large part of the soil on which more than forty millions live.  Generally speaking, the rent they demand does not seem to be excessive.[2] It is an open question whether England would be the gainer if, as in France, the land should be cut up into small holdings, worked by men without capital, and hence without power to make improvements.

[2] This is the opinion of the Royal Commission; but Gibbins’s “Industry in England” (1896), p. 441, takes the opposite view.

618.  The Colonial Expansion of England.

Meanwhile, whether from an economic point of view England is gaining or losing at home, there can be no question as to her colonial expansion.  A glance at the accompanying maps of the world (see double map opposite and map facing p. 420) in 1837 and in 1911 shows the marvelous territorial growth of the British Empire.

When Victoria was crowned it had an area of less than three million square miles; to-day it has over eleven million, or more than one fifth of the entire land surface of the globe.  England added to her dominions, on the average, more than one hundred and forty-five thousand square miles of territory every year of Victoria’s reign.

Canada’s wonderful growth in population and wealth is but one example.  Australia began its career (1837) as a penal colony with a few shiploads of convicts; now it is a prosperous, powerful, and loyal patr of the Empire (S545).  Later than the middle of the nineteenth century, New Zealand was a mission field where cannibalism still existed (1857); now it is one of the leaders in English civilization.