The remedy for land difficulties and various ills, that has been so often proposed, namely the State ownership of the land, is by no means promising. The greatest objection that can be flung at a landlord is that he is an absentee. No amount of agency, no excellence in the subordinate, is thought to compensate for the personal interest, the personal influence and care, of a good conscientious landlord spending his life among his tenants. Yet the State ownership would be worse than any absentee landlord. The agent would be that of an impersonal government, and responsible to nobody so long as he fulfilled a certain set of hard rules. He would have no personality more or less pliable behind him, but would blindly carry out the general dictates of a Parliament or a Revenue office, which neither knew nor cared about any personal exceptions or local details. We all know the ways of the Inland Revenue already; the extortions which have to be tediously reclaimed at a greater cost of time than the refunded money is worth; the starving of the Post Office in order to wring a profit of 50 per cent. on the whole correspondence of the country; the various illegal demands which have had to be resisted by legal trial, and appeal over appeal, at a ruinous cost to those who will not be cheated; we see in France and Italy the atrophy of a railway system which is ruled by government officials. And yet unobservant enthusiasts wish that every field should be under some petty official tied by red tape, and every farmer bound by laws and regulations which could never be applied to even a small district without individual hardship. The townsman cannot be allowed to play political experiments with the largest industry of England, of which he is profoundly ignorant: it must rest with the farmer only, to decide if he prefer to be under the Inland Revenue or under his landlord. It is notorious that government lands are administered more wastefully and less remuneratively than any private property; and it would be ruinous to tie up the whole country to such administration. It is useless to say that these are mere abuses which must be rectified. Let them be rectified in the minor scale first, before the system can be applied in the major scale. There is no kind of government in the world that would not ruin this country if it introduced State ownership. Human nature does not allow of it, and only ignorance of human nature could propose it.