Perhaps the greatest evil of Acts for the enclosure of waste in the past, was that they prevented such gradual reclamation and enclosure by peasant cultivators. At the present day the vital objection applies to enclosure of waste by any method that the area of such free open spaces is already sufficiently curtailed, that every remaining acre is becoming continually more precious, so that while public-spirited people fight for their preservation in remote places, in the neighbourhood of towns, citizens tax themselves to add to their area.
The enclosure of arable common fields, and of all the commonable lands of whole parishes within what I have called the Parliamentary Enclosure Belt, is of immeasurably greater historical importance. The ethics of such enclosure has been the subject of fierce debate for centuries; now the process is practically complete, and it is possible to apraise its results.
We have observed that with regard to the immediate results, capable of being contemporaneously verified, there is no real controversy between the disputants; it is on the inferences to be drawn as to the more ultimate results on the nation as a whole, and in the judgment pronounced upon the desirability of such results, that the dispute turned. The more candid disputants on either side admit the vital points in their opponents’ case: thus, for example, no opponent of enclosure denies that it tended to raise rents; and, on the other hand, it was the greatest advocate of enclosure who declared that “By nineteen out of twenty Enclosure Acts the poor are injured.”
The increase of rent was, of course, the motive of enclosure; and though there were exceptional cases in which the results were very disappointing to the promoters, as a rule the increase of rent was very great. Arthur Young gives the full financial details of twenty-three Acts for the enclosure of open field parishes in Lincolnshire.[108] The total rents before enclosure amounted to £15,504; on an average they were nearly doubled, the increase of rent obtained being £14,256, and the expenditure necessary to obtain this result was £48,217. Assuming that the money was borrowed at 6 per cent., there remained to the landowners a net profit of £11,363. These results were no doubt something above the average, but they were not exceptional. In Long Sutton the rent was raised from an average of 5_s._ per acre to between 30_s._ and 50_s._ per acre.[109]