raging in its seas. The circumstances must be held sufficient to justify interference, and the real question must be whether interference should take the shape of persuasion or of command. Mr. Canning's dread of Russian growth made him eager to persuade, but it is at least debatable whether that growth could not have been better counteracted by a more authoritative attitude. The doubtful element in the combination was the sincerity and seriousness of the Greek determination to be free. Here it must be admitted there was ample ground for the scepticism of a Western statesman. The war was apparently waged with an unfaltering intention of purpose, yet it is difficult to say in what quarter absolute reliance could be placed. If the peasantry of the Morea were pertinacious, the peasants of Northern Greece seemed often too ready to acquiesce in the restoration of Turkish authority, if not to desire it, whilst the leaders in all parts of Greece showed no more coherence in the pursuit of national aims, and no more fidelity to one another, than we can recognise in the petty chieftains of Highland clans each fighting on his own account, and for his own hand. Yet it may be urged that Rob Roy McGregor had in him the elements of a patriot, and we should err if we could not detect in the confused records of the Greek rebellion some filaments of patriotism running through them. From our present standpoint, we can easily believe that all that has since developed in the making of the Greek nation should have been recognised as existing in germ and in promise seventy years since. But whilst enthusiasts believed it, and may be held to have proved themselves right, the responsible director of a nation's fortunes may have wanted larger assurance to support practical action. If Mr. Canning had not sufficient reliance on reviving Greece to feel himself justified in overawing Turkey, he cannot be condemned. As it was, he stands out from his colleagues and his party, from those who went before him and those who came after him, by his courage and resolution. His intervention in Portugal was not supported by his successors. In the East they practically abandoned his policy when they made no effort to occupy the position he would have taken after Navarino. It may be doubted whether they would have been fired with the indignation which led him to muster the naval forces in the Mediterranean the moment he heard of the policy of Ibrahim. The idea of control was abandoned. They made no effort to check Russia, nor to influence the Sultan. They waited for a future the course of which they did not attempt to shape, and if we may hesitate now to say that Mr. Canning completely grappled with the situation as he found it, the vigour of his action is resplendent beside the inaction which followed. LEONARD COURTNEY. LAND AND LODGING-HOUSES (A COLLOQUY WITH THE duke of bedford) 'MR. BROADHURST is a very good sort of a man, who has not written a very bad book upon a very important subject.' In these guarded terms, Sydney Smith begins one of his pleasantest reviews; and, if for Mr. Broadhurst' we substitute 'the Duke of Bedford,' we may honestly apply the eulogy to The Story of a Great Agricultural Estate.1 The book which Mr. Broadhurst wrote, and which Sydney Smith reviewed, was called Advice to Young Ladies on the Improvement of the Mind; and the Duke of Bedford's book might be not inaptly styled Advice to Middle-aged Gentlemen on the Improvement of the Land. The title of this paper is derived from a phrase of my lamented cousin Hastings, ninth Duke of Bedford and father of the present Duke. I think that he would have shared the fate of our acephalous ancestor sooner than take the general public into his confidence and exhibit his account-book and ledger to the admiring world; and my friend Mr. Escott would, I fancy, confirm this view from his experience when he was writing his chapter about land in England: its People, Polity, and Pursuits. But, without entering into what Dr. Whewell called the 'disgusting details' of his income, Duke Hastings, when surveying the profound depression under which neighbouring landowners laboured, would pleasantly observe, ' And I, too, should be in a very tight place, only that I luckily own a few lodging-houses in Bloomsbury.' Land-its burdens, its sorrows, the outlay which it entails, the disastrous position in which it places its owner-this is the burden of the present Duke of Bedford's Doleful song, Steaming up, a lamentation and an ancient tale of wrong, Land plus Lodging-Houses is my more cheerful theme. He tempers the wind to the shorn duke;' and I shall endeavour to rouse the drooping spirits of my excellent kinsman by pointing out that, in spite London, John Murray, 1897. of bad seasons and Sir William Harcourt, he yet has no cause for despair as long as his 86,000 acres of agricultural land are balanced by the 'few lodging-houses in Bloomsbury' of which his father used to speak so feelingly. In working towards this end, I shall offer a few remarks on the most important points which the book contains, and then on some that it omits; and throughout the process I shall assume the book is actually written by the Duke-not merely compiled by agents and stewards, led-captains and polite-letter writers, and then sent out into the world with the Duke of Bedford's name on the title-page. The origin of the book is not a little curious. It seems to have grown out of a speech delivered at a Unionist meeting. Outsiders have often speculated about the topics discussed at Unionist' meetings, and wondered whether they were strictly relevant to the question of the Union. This book solves the doubt, and makes it perfectly certain that they are not; unless, indeed, we use the word 'Union' in its popular sense as a synonym for 'Workhouse '-that bourne to which the Duke of Bedford's possessions seem to be hurrying him. On the eventful day which gave birth to this book, the 13th of May, 1896 (for I love to be particular on great occasions), the Duke presided at a Unionist meeting at Thorney, and he tells us that, as his tenants and labourers were present, he took the opportunity to review the history of his estate at Thorney for eighty years, and to show that local and imperial taxation had increased, that rent had disappeared, and that the ownership of Thorney and Woburn now entailed upon their possessor a heavy loss. This was in itself a rather formidable programme for a village meeting, but he further attempted to show' a great deal more that went to illustrate his unhappy and impecunious position, and there can be little doubt that the dewdrop of sensibility twinkled in the eyes of the struggling farmers and laborious ploughmen who listened to this tale of woe. If, in addition to these more emotional themes, the Duke treated his hearers to the forty pages of closely packed statistics which I think his book contains, there is no wonder that his speech, as he himself naïvely remarks, 'attracted widespread attention.' The 'friends on whose judgment the Duke relies' thought that these lordly lamentations ought to have a wider circulation than that afforded by a village in the Fens. So they besought him to put his tears, not into a bottle, but into a book. And he gave them their heart's desire in the volume which lies before me. The introductory chapter may be summed up very briefly. It might have been written by Dizzy's Lord St. Aldegonde. 'He was opposed to all privilege, and indeed to all orders of men except dukes, who were a necessity. He was also strongly in favour of the equal division of all property except land. Liberty depended on land, and the greater the landowners, the greater the liberty of a country. He would hold forth on this topic even with energy, amazed at any one differing from him. "As if a fellow could have too much land."' But in one respect the excellent St. Aldegonde was happier than the Duke of Bedford, who so closely copies his method of argument. He lived before the Finance Act of 1894. The Duke is possessed by a terror of Sir William Harcourt which amounts almost to a superstition. The burly presence of the rapacious ex-Chancellor haunts his dreams. 'It is now too late' to undo the effects of that awful Budget; the ominous prospect of confiscation looms over our financial legislation,' and, projecting his gaze into a futurity which I hope is very distant, the Duke sees his son (at. suæ 8) paying 65,000l. succession-duty on an inheritance which is a source of annual deficit.' From these distempered visions it is a relief to turn to the second chapter, which is simply historical. I confess that I cannot regard with unmixed complacency the method by which the founder of our family obtained his wealth. It may be true that it was necessary, in the interests of the community, to dissolve the religious houses, but the bestowal of their lands on the courtiers of Henry the Eighth was a transaction which even those who profit by it can scarcely praise; and, as Burke truly says, The grants to the House of Russell were so enormous as not only to outrage economy, but even to stagger credibility. The Duke of Bedford is the leviathan among all the creatures of the Crown.' Deduct from the Duke's acreage the lands of Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire, of Thorney Abbey in Cambridgeshire, and of Tavistock Abbey in Devonshire; reduce him to our modest patrimony of Kingston Russell, and to Cheneys which came by a marriage, and you will have relieved the present owner of nearly all that burden under which he groans. But though I cannot glory in the method by which my ancestors acquired their land, I can share the Duke's pride in the way in which they managed it. My grandfather the sixth Duke, when he wrote a catalogue of the enamel portraits at Woburn Abbey, aptly prefaced it with the lines, Et te, repetentem exempla tuorum, Et pater Eneas et avunculus excitet Hector. My uncle Lord Russell, when people praised his pedigree, used to say: They who on famous ancestry enlarge Produce their debt instead of their discharge. The reclamation of the Bedford Level was a splendid work of public utility, and the share borne in it by the Earl of Bedford was VOL. XLII-Nc. 247 гр an ancestral performance on which any Russell may look back with pride. John, fourth Duke of Bedford, the favourite object of Junius's satire, seems to have divided his time almost equally between political and agricultural manoeuvring. His diaries to the very end of his life are full of marking out bridges, letting farms, and felling timberat Streatham, of all unlikely places, a property long since alienated. His grandson and successor, Francis, fifth Duke, was not only a leader of the popular cause in politics but a pioneer in all agricultural reforms. He was, however, the only spendthrift that ever owned the estates, and his early death was a blessing to the property. His successor, my grandfather, whom some people can still remember, was known in his own family as Farmer John,' and his letters, preserved by his sons, bear testimony to his genuine love of farming and all that pertains to it. But it is my uncle, the seventh Duke, who died in 1861, whose memory should be held in special reverence, for he abolished the filthy hovels which had served as labourers' cottages, and introduced the plan of cottage construction which, with its successive improvements, has been the glory of the Bedford estates from that day to this. This splendid reform elicited a characteristic compliment from Charles Kingsley in the preface to Yeast, and a not less characteristic gibe from Lord Beaconsfield in Lothair: "I am much in favour of improved dwellings for the poor," said the Duchess, "but then you must take care that your dwellings are cottages, and not villas, like my cousin's, the Duke of Luton." It is bare justice to say that Duke Hastings, both after he succeeded to the estate, and while he was administering it for his predecessor, maintained this high tradition, and the book before us shows that it has suffered no deterioration under his sons.2 When speaking thus enthusiastically of the cottages on the Bedford estate, I have been thinking of their bearing on comfort, health, and decency. But there is another side to the picture. Let Mr. Froude draw it in his inimitable style. He is speaking of Cheneys, the pretty village in Buckinghamshire where my ancestors are buried, but the description would apply just as well to Woburn or Thorney: 'No signs are to be found of competition, of the march of intellect, of emancipation, of the divine right of each man and woman to do what is good in their own eyes, of the blessed liberty which the House of Russell has been so busy in setting forward. The inhabitants. . . live under authority. The voice of the Russells has been the voice of the emancipator; the hand has been the hand of the ruling noble.' 3 2 It is a filial joy to me to recall the destruction of a certain group of insanitary dwellings near Woburn, and the substitution of excellent cottages, effected by my uncle, the seventh Duke, at the instance of his sister-in-law, the late Lady Charles Russell. Short Studies on Great Subjects, vol. iv. p. 489. |