Derelict

“ And that night he gave the derelict some clothes and boots, and next morning set him to a pleasanter job, and promised him work for the harvest, and the derelict felt that however curt and gruff the farmer might seem his bark was much worse than his bite. And he never forgot that he had saved him from starvation. But the derelict's times were not all good. Country folk have an inborn dislike of strangers, and the regular workers on the farm resented the intrusion of this man, who came from nowhere in particular and had certainly been a tramp. ”

“ Land gained gradually and slowly by dereliction belongs to the owner of the adjoining land, but in the case of sudden or considerable dereliction the land belongs to the Crown. This technical use of the term “dereliction” is to be distinguished from the more general modern sense, dereliction or abandonment of duty, which implies a culpable failure or neglect in moral or legal obligation. ”

“ Dunham, 38 Fed. 503, that the disposition of wrecks and derelicts is usually a fair index of the degree of civilization of the people within whose domains such property is found. In primitive societies, wrecks are treated as the plunder of the finder, or lord of the soil, since title depends on possession and the owner's rights disappear when his goods are separated from him. ”

“ Rapid clouds have drunk the last pale beam of even:
Away! the gathering winds will call the darkness soon,
And profoundest midnight shroud the serene lights of heaven.
Pause not! the time is past! Every voice cries, 'Away!'
Tempt not with one last tear thy friend's ungentle mood:
Thy lover's eye, so glazed and cold, dares not entreat thy stay:
Duty and dereliction guide thee back to solitude.
Away, away! to thy sad and silent home;
Pour bitter tears on its desolated hearth;
Watch the dim shades as like ghosts they go and come,
And complicate strange webs of melancholy mirth. ”

“ So injurious is the existence of this quantity of wild land, in the midst or in the neighbourhood of settlement, that numerous cases have occurred in which a settler, after several years' residence upon his property, and having expended, in money and labour, from £.20 to £.50 in clearing part of it and building his house, has been driven to abandon the farm, and to sell it for one-third or even one-fourth of the sum that he had expended upon it. I have myself bought farms which have been abandoned in this way for the merest trifle. ”

“ These old surveys, taken from the pick of the land, were already nearly all occupied by unsuspecting and peaceful settlers, and thus their titles were demolished, and the choice was placed before them either to buy their land over at a double price or to vacate it, with their families and personal belongings, immediately. Land locators sprang up by hundreds. The country was held up and searched for “vacancies” at the point of a compass. Hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of splendid acres were wrested from their innocent purchasers and holders. ”

“ The lord of the manor comes first and tells the cottagers that their houses and lands belong to him; that he will no longer submit to such encroachments; and will take them into his possession. This frightens the poor people, knowing themselves unable to assert their rights. The next step, a country attorney sends them notice to quit. This generally effects all they desire. To prevent immediate ruin they beg hard for leases, and obtain them readily, and at an easy rate ; which draws others in to follow the example. However, when the first lease is expired, they are always raised to rack-rent. ”

“ The disintegration of the large feudal estates operated to increase the number of landowners, and the abolition of the restraints by which landowners endeavoured to compel labourers to remain on their estates also contributed to draw away attention from the essential injustice involved in private property in land. ”

“ No one who has not toiled through the details of each village can conceive the extent of alienation of property or the misery attendant on the depopulation of villages, the ruin of estates, and the disruption of society which have prevailed in this unhappy country. ”

“ Are there not rather many estates that serve as striking instances of the failure of the system? Are there not acres upon acres of land which might be yielding great abundance, real wealth for the nation, which are either badly managed, neglected, left as waste, or kept82 for sporting purposes? There is no need to mention the building land which is often held up by them until the efforts of the local community have increased the value sufficiently to yield them a substantial increment, because this is a source of income and not an object on which they spend money. ”

“ The interest accruing from the funded property or the rent of the lands at certain periods was to be employed to purchase other estates, other parks and manors in the neighbourhood or farther off, so that the prospect of the future demesne that was to devolve at some distant time to the unborn lord of acres, swelled and enlarged itself, like a sea, circle without circle, vista beyond vista, till the imagination was staggered, and the mind exhausted. ”

“ The Irish and the politicians who wanted the Irish vote have shown the world how to destroy property in land. Believe me, that example will be followed. It was an evil day for the holders of Property when the Government interfered between the landlord and his tenant. That example will bear fruit elsewhere. We shall see everywhere the owners of the land turned out and their places taken by those who work the land. The next step is from land to houses. Why not with houses as with land? Since a beginning has been made, it must be carried on. ”

“ The landlord naturally yields to this pressure ... “and it is in this manner that the labourers have been dispossessed of their cow-pastures in various parts of the midland counties. The moment the farmer obtains his wish, he takes every particle of the land to himself, and relets the house to the labourer, who by this means is rendered miserable, the poors rate increased, the value of the estate to the landlord diminished, and the house suffered to go to decay.... ”

“ More than once had I seen the values of all city property, improved and unimproved, apparently disappear;—lots without purchasers, and houses without tenants, the community so poor and panic-stricken that real estate became the merest drug. ”

“ But owners of land would not evince any such deficiency, if once34 they felt that they would be ruined, and their families also, if they were not governed by the same rules of prudence which other men must observe, and which necessarily enter into the proper management of all other descriptions of property. The present difficulties of sale of land, and the consequent protection afforded to entailed properties, are the chief reasons why so many persons of the class of proprietors are in difficulties. ”

“ A spectral poor-law sits by our waysides, wrapped up in death-flannels of the English cut, and shakes its skinny hand at the mansion-houses of our landlords,––vision beyond comparison more direfully portentous than the apparition seen by the lone shepherd of Strathcarron. But in the Highlands, at least, it is merely the landlord of the new and improved state of things––the landlord of widespread clearings and stringent removal-summonses––that it threatens. ”

“ Under a hard one, the tenant revenges himself upon the land, and runs away with the rent. I would raise my rents to the present price of all commodities: for if we should let our lands, as other men have done before us, now other wares daily go on in price, we should fall backward in our estates. ”

“ They may be created in a moment of political excitement, as by the Freehold Land Societies in England; they may be created through the feeling of alienation and want of confidence between landlord and tenant, as in Ireland; but, until our laws respecting the mortgaging, sale, and transmission of landed property, be framed with the object and purpose of allowing of the existence of peasant properties, their permanent existence is impossible. ”

“ The slums and the wretched dwellings now occupied by the working classes, the miserable, uncomfortable, jerry built "villas" occupied by the lower middle classes and by "business" people, will be left empty and valueless upon the hands of their rack-renting landlords, who will very soon voluntarily offer to hand them, and the ground they stand upon, to the State on those terms accorded to the other property owners, namely, in return for a pension. ”

“ The occasional day's wages for labor spent on the land converted was now withdrawn, and the pasturage for the little flock was cut down. The practical effect of even [Pg 94/250] the most innocent-looking enclosures, then, must have been to deprive the poorer families of the means of livelihood, even though they were not evicted from their worthless holdings. Enclosures and depopulation were inseparably linked in the minds of contemporaries, even when the greatest care was taken by the enclosing authorities to safeguard the rights of the tenants. ”

“ He has lost the power of disposing of his farms in the open market, of regulating the terms and conditions on which he lets them, of removing a tenant whom he considers unsuitable, of taking the land back into his own hands when the specified term of a tenancy had expired, of availing himself of the enhanced value which a war or a period of great prosperity, or some other exceptional circumstance, may have given to his property. ”

“ Drove out to Drumlane, where are the ruins of a large church and abbey and round tower. The driver, a Catholic, talked a little, guardedly, of the high rents. A broken-down looking man, who opened the iron gates for us into the ruins, complained heavily of the rents. He was only a laborer himself, the farmer he worked for was paying fifty-five shillings an acre for part of his farm and L3 for the rest. The land on which I looked was rented at L3. My only wonder is that the lands thus rented pay the rent alone without supporting in any manner the tillers of the soil. ”

“ It is mere rushy land, not worth ten shillings an acre, and of no account to a rich man, but to the half-starved peasant of these parts even that much grass is a perfect treasure-trove.
'Under these circumstances the tenants of the two nearest cabins on either side of the field have been accustomed by tacit agreement to look upon this strip as their own property. Each took the county line as the boundary or marin of his claim, and each mowed his own half. But the one that came first generally encroached a little, and stole as much of his neighbor's grass as he thought he could with safety. ”

“ Hence, an imitation of the high, extended, castellated mansions of England, or the Continent, although in miniature, are altogether unsuited to the American farmer or planter, whose lands, instead of increasing in his family, are continually subject to division, or to sale in mass, on his own demise; and when the estate is encumbered with unnecessarily 25 large and expensive buildings, they become an absolute drawback to its value in either event. ”

“ Many were stampeded into buying worthless acres which they did not want, in the fear that if they delayed there would be nothing left to buy. Fake real-estate schemes—colonies, ten-acre orchard tracts, hen farms, orange groves, prune plantations—flourished over the width and length of a continent, and promoters reaped a harvest. ”

“ They are dangerous and hard to maintain. A house on one would be uninhabitable with the dust. We do not seek the neighborliness of the road, but retire as far as we can to the back of our lot, with our telephone and newspaper. The old house on the bend now stands deserted. From country estates dimly seen in their remote privacy of trees and gardens, the stone highway leads to other estates equally remote and scornful of publicity. Between them the motors rush. The old house is dusty and falling into ruin, and every passing car kicks up some bit of crushed stone into its tangled dooryard. ”

“ They have been erected on lives, or by squatters, and the landlords have no power over them. I know a certain village which is nearly all ruinous; but there all the ruinous cottages are held on lives. It is quite true that the landowner [225] can force the holder of the tenure to put it in repair, but he is reluctant to put on the screw of the law, and he argues, "The houses were built to last three lives—no more. ”

“ Thus far the farmer, who so far as the evils of subdivision or subletting are concerned is at one with the great landed proprietor, who, thanks to the recklessness of his predecessors, sees his efforts to improve his property paralysed, and his own personal honour and reputation endangered by the acts of the leaseholders or fee-farm, renters over whom he has no power whatever. ”

“ The Residency is a fine large building in an advanced stage of decomposition; the glorious vegetation around it--cotton-trees, caoutchouc-figs, and magnificent oleanders--making the pile look grimmer and grislier. And here we realised, to the fullest extent, how thoroughly ruined is the hapless settlement. The annual income is about 24,500l., the expenditure is 20,000l. in round numbers, and the economies are said to reach 25,000l. ”

“ As a rule people used land as holdings, and those were rigidly classified as villein or free tenements. The interesting point to be noticed is that, without any formal break, leasing land for life and for term of years is seen to be rapidly spreading from the end of the 13th century, and numberless small tenancies are created in the 14th century which break up the disposition of the holdings. ”

“ It is insisted by the respondents that, by reason of this crossing, this land, with the a rehouse thereon, is rendered less available and less valuable for the purposes for which it was constructed and used. ”

“ Now, mark the rent for which this land had been let by the landlord in 1750.—Five Shillings an acre. Are we to believe that the family of this assignee had themselves so far improved their holding with buildings, fences, and so forth, as to have it made worth twenty-one shillings an acre before they sub-let it, contrary to their stipulation? We scarcely think so. ”