RESTORING THE LAND TO THE PEOPLE
Restoring the Land to the People BEFORE the great war broke out, the campaign of the British Chancellor of the Exchequer Lloyd-George to break up the huge idle estates of England so that they may...
...Whereupon his critics amused themselves with calculating how many millions it would cost to accommodate all these people and what would happen when the 18,000 amateur sportsmen with their 18,000 guns and the 2000 golf players and their 2000 caddies were turned loose in this nationalized deer forest The accompanying cartoon from Punch throws an interesting side light upon the Lloyd-George campaign against the land barons who are holding tremendous tracts in idleness...
...This famous incident Mr...
...An advertisement in the London Times announced that the Duke of Sutherland was offering for sale the northern portions of his Scotch estates, amounting to 307,230 acres, "with their grouse moors, deer forests and valuable fishings...
...Lloyd George has made much of in his speeches in favor of land reform, for instance: "A Highland deer-forest is a place where formerly thousands of people made a living by cultivating the soil— thousands of the most robust and gallant people these islands have ever seen...
...a head per week...
...Those who doubt this statement have merely got to take their next holiday in the Highlands of Scotland, and there they "will find millions of acres which formerly maintained the sturdiest, the most gallant race under the sun, a desert, in order that these millions of acres may be consigned entirely to sport...
...On the same little island, however, one man can offer for sale as a mere fraction of his holdings nearly 400,000 acres...
...The opponents of Lloyd George defend the Sutherland clearances on the ground that the crofters were better off on the coast than on the highlands and that the land was not and is not suited to agriculture...
...You pull down their houses, you burn them...
...Restoring the Land to the People BEFORE the great war broke out, the campaign of the British Chancellor of the Exchequer Lloyd-George to break up the huge idle estates of England so that they may be turned into many small farms appeared to be getting results...
...The great Sutherland deer forest was created in 1814 when the first Duke of Sutherland forcibly ejected with great barbarity 15,000 peasants from their holdings and colonized them on the coast...
...To this Lloyd George retorted that if the land proved to be good only for sport he would lay out 200 golf courses and open the shooting to 18,000 workingmen at 2s...
...This announcement was quite as effective as any of Lloyd-George's speeches in drawing attention to the fact that in England and Wales the average density of population is 618 to the square mile, yet in many parts it is impossible for the small farmer to get land at any price...
...You turn them all out —every man of them...
...What happens when you make a deer-forest...
Vol. 6 • November 1914 • No. 45
