TLS signed “Yours sincerely, Winston S. Churchill,” four pages, 7.5 x 9.5, Board of Trade letterhead, August 13, 1909. Lengthy letter to British statesman David Lloyd George, with a handwritten salutation, "My dear Lloyd George," marked "Private." In part: "I have been turning over in my mind the question we touched upon yesterday, about allowing landowners the option of paying Death Duties in land. The more I think about it the more it appeals to my sense of justice and to my notions of policy. It may be in the public interest, and certainly it is in the public mood, that great estates should be broken up; but it cannot be in anybody's interest that they should merely be encumbered. The reduction, pairing off, or division of large landed properties may easily be attended with an increase of population and prosperity in the district affected. But to have great landed estates strictly entailed, drifting about in a sort of waterlogged condition, only kept afloat by grinding economies and starvation of development, must be attended in this country, as in Ireland, with severe evils to the rural population. That population is indeed deprived of any benefits resulting from either system of land tenure. They do not get the support and stimulation of the old system; they do not have the freedom and enterprise of the new…At the outside I should judge that one-seventh part of the Death Duties on agricultural properties might be paid in land—that is to say 1% of the total…Please consider this; and after we have had a talk I think I will bring it up in the Cabinet." In fine condition, with a single filing hole to the left side of each page. A significant and desirable piece of correspondence between British statesmen.
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