Landholding

“ This is, of course, an extreme case ; but the system is the same in all cases—the ground landlord, who benefits most at least cost to himself, is the most protected by the law. which ensures that at every expiration and every transfer he shall find himself enriched by other men's labour, and the expenditure of other men's money, and the exercise of other men's abilities. ”

“ Things went on in this direction until enlightened men thought that small holdings were the ruin of the nation, and enormous farms its wealth. We all came to look on land as something from which a man got rent. We talked about small farming not "paying," meaning that it did not pay rent—as though rent were the sole end of corn. So towns were more and more overcrowded, and villages made emptier and emptier, and landlords restricted the number of houses in villages, because the man with no land of his own to till, and not needed for other men's lands, was an encumbrance. ”

“ They want to increase the number of small landowners—men who will literally live on the fruits of their toil, and not merely produce something for their master to sell. At present, the land has to bear three charges—it must "pay" the labourer, the farmer and the landlord. We shall never approach the land question with comprehension until we learn to look upon the cultivation of land as intended in the first place to produce Food. ”

“ It is that of a large estate where the whole of one, and oftener of several, adjoining parishes are included in it; where there is no other landowner within the ring fence; where the village itself belongs to the same owner as the agricultural land ; where all the people of the district—farmers, tradesmen, labourers—are dependent, directly or indirectly, on the one landowner, the farmers holding their land from him, generally on a yearly tenancy, the labourers hiring their cottages weekly or yearly either from the landowner or from the farmer ”

“ It provides that no person shall have more than one farm, and enacts:
"For remedy, it is ordered and enacted that no manner of person, of what estate, degree, or condition soever, shall take any farm more than one, whereof the yearly rent shall not exceed ten marks; and if any several leases afore this time have been made to any person or persons of divers and sundry farmholds whereof the yearly value shall exceed that sum, then the said person or persons shall choose one farm, hold at his pleasure, and the remnant of the leases shall be void." ”

“ Rent is usually the labor or the fruits of the labor of the occupant. In some cases it is income derived from the labors of others. A broad distinction exists between the rent of land, which is a portion of the fruits or its equivalent in money, and that of improvements and houses, which is an exchange of the labor of the occupant given as payment for that employed in effecting improvements or erecting houses. ”

“ Potatoes, turnips, and such tubers, are only obtained by disturbing the freehold. This maxim was at one time so strained that it applied to fixtures, but recent legislation and modern discussions have limited the rights of the landlord class and been favorable to the occupier, and I look forward to such alterations in our laws as will secure to the man who expends his labor or earnings in improvements, an estate IN PERPETUO therein, as I think no length of user of that which is a man's own—his labor or earnings—should hand over his representative improvements to any other person. ”

“ But "it is a common custom with covetous landlords, to let their housing so decay that the farmer shall be fain for a small reward or none at all, to give up his lease; that they taking the ground to their own hands, may turn all to pasture ”

“ While philanthropists, moralists, and economists were asking why there was so much poverty, and how it could be removed, and were arguing with each other as to whether there was or was not plenty of work waiting somewhere or other for everybody willing to work, the landlords were preparing to take away still more of the lands which once belonged to the people. ”

“ Next to tenancy at will, we rank money rents as the great bar to improvement in English agriculture. To the conversion of money unto corn rents the Scotch farmers attributed their superior condition, and ability to continue improvements on their farms even during the trying times 1833-35. ”

“ A man who wished to give land to the Church, but was prevented by Mortmain, would alienate the land to B and C, who agreed to pose before the law as new tenants, but really allowed the "use and profits" of the land to go to the Church. ”

“ Over and above the capital of the farmer and all its profits, they regularly occasion the reproduction of the rent of the landlord. This rent may be considered as the produce of those powers of nature, the use of which the landlord lends to the farmer. It is greater or smaller according to the supposed extent of those powers, or in other words, according to the supposed natural or improved fertility of the land. It is the work of nature which remains, after deducting or compensating every thing which can be regarded as the work of man. ”

“ Rent, considered as the price paid for the use of land, is naturally the highest which the tenant can afford to pay in the actual circumstances of the land. In adjusting the terms of the lease, the landlord endeavours to leave him no greater share of the produce than what is sufficient to keep up the stock from which he furnishes the seed, pays the labour, and purchases and maintains the cattle and other instruments of husbandry, together with the ordinary profits of farming stock in the neighbourhood. ”

“ For what is no one’s property is no one’s pride. The landlord gives the land, and the capital, or cheptel—which comprises the stock and barns, etc.; an inventory of these is taken when a tenant enters into possession, and he is compelled to keep them in repair. On his side, the peasant gives his work. And the harvest is divided, either in kind—grain, wine, olives, cattle, at the time of their maturity—or more often in money, when the peasant brings to his landlord half of the profits after the fair or market at which he has sold the produce. ”

“ These buildings are as distinct a thing from the farm as the stock or the timber on it; and what is paid for them can no more be called rent of land, than a payment for cattle would be, if it were the custom that the landlord should stock the farm for the tenant. The buildings, like the cattle, are not land, but capital, regularly consumed and reproduced ”

“ It is assumed that, if wages or profits fell below the points, which, on a comparison of the advantages and drawbacks, pecuniary and other, of farming and other occupations, are considered to be normal in the farming industry, some labourers and farmers would seek some more advantageous employment, and that, if they rose above, some fresh competitors would enter the ranks of agriculture. It is assumed that landlord and tenant are actuated by competitive considerations alone, the one trying to obtain the highest and the other the lowest rent. ”

“ But in agriculture a landlord has only to inquire who can give the highest rent, having the largest capital, subject by the strictest penalties of law to the conditions of a lease dictated by the most scientific agriculturists under penalties fixed by the most cautious conveyancers. By this mode of procedure, recommended by the most liberal economists of our age,—barring those still more liberal who deny that property in land is any property at all,—by this mode of procedure, I say, a landlord does his duty to his country. ”

“ He must as a laborer have acquired money enough to become a farm tenant and as a tenant have obtained sufficient capital to make a reasonable payment on the purchase price of the farm. This gradual rise of a farm laborer to farm ownership through farm tenancy is being witnessed all over the States to which I have referred. Mortgage assists, as on the frontier, in helping the men with small capital to control farms worth more than their resources over and above their liabilities. ”

“ But put the value of the house into a farm, or even the half of it—the farm would have a dwelling-house upon it, in which my family would find as good a shelter, while the land, if cultivated as industriously as I had always cultivated business, would belie the flood of evidence I had been studying for many years, if it failed to yield to my efforts the returns which it was manifestly returning to others. We could live contentedly on a thousand dollars a year, and here we should have no landlord to pay. ”

“ There remain the following alternatives: land may be rented for a fixed sum of 66 money per acre, to be paid when the crops are sold, or for a fixed quantity of produce, so many bushels of corn or so many pounds of cotton being paid for every acre; or, more commonly, land may be rented on some form of share tenancy by which the risk as well as the profit is shared by both tenant and landowner. ”

“ Then, in that case, the rent must be reduced, not 30, but 90 per cent; for upon this condition alone can the agricultural labourer and the tenant-farmer be left uninjured. We defy Sir James Graham, or any Free-trade philosopher, to escape from this conclusion. The existing case may be illustrated in another way. Land at 40s. per acre should produce three rents, while inferior land, at 20s. per acre, as every competent judge will allow, should produce four rents. A farm of 200 acres, at 40s., gives a rent of L.400, and should produce a gross revenue of L.1200. ”

“ Land is held either in fee-simple, or let by the Crown to tenants on what may almost be considered perpetual leases. The rent is calculated partly on the number of acres occupied, partly on the head of cattle the farm is fit to support, and is paid in kind, either in fish or farm produce. Tenants in easy circumstances generally employ two or three labourers, who—in addition to their board and lodging—receive from ten to twelve dollars a year of wages. ”

“ Taught by past experience, no landlord is now willing, without the assurance of an adequate rent, to alienate his property for any considerable length of time; and without lease of acre endurance, no tenant is disposed to embark his capital and skill in the adventure of cultivation. In Grain, as a measure of value, a medium has, at length, been found, which, while it preserves the just rights of the one, secures a return for the honest industry of the other. ”

“ A farmer, in making his present contract for rent, does not concern himself with the past history of the causes of the fertility or situation of the land, but with its present advantages, and he makes no attempt to draw the distinction between the earned and the unearned. And, in the future, he and his landlord may allow the nominal rent to remain unaltered in spite of increased prosperity or intensified depression in agriculture, in consideration simply of lessened expenditure or added liberality in the matter of improvements. ”

“ What percentage can a man get for his money if he let land to farmers, and what security will he have for his income? Those are the considerations, and those only, which bear upon the question. As well as I could learn details on the subject,—as to which no accurate information can be obtained because the arrangement is not sufficiently general to produce it,—a landlord may let cleared and enclosed land, worth for sale in the market about £6 an acre, for 10s. ”

“ The landlord may, of course, not choose to exact a rent as high as this; and as a matter of fact, in a country like Great Britain landlords often content themselves with less. The traditions associated with the ownership of agricultural land, and with the relations between landlord and tenant serve to soften the edge of economic law, and to subject the rents which are actually fixed to the control in no small measure of the general sense of what is fair or customary. In such cases the landlord makes the farmer a present, for the time being, of part of the economic rent. ”

“ No landed proprietor, as we think, ought to charge more for the land on which cottages are built than he would receive for it from a farmer, if let as part of a farm; and no more rent ought to be charged for the cost of building the cottage and enclosing the garden than the same sum would yield if invested in land, or, at all events, not more than can be obtained by government securities. ”

“ In fact, partly from the cheapness of land, and partly from an innate love of independence, few agricultural estates in the whole country have at any time been held on lease for a stipulated rent. The tenants and occupiers are almost universally the proprietors of the soil in fee simple. ”

“ Very often the landlord's share of the small crop will not really compensate him for 69 the depreciated value of his property, for land rented without supervision is likely to decrease in fertility and to bring in meager returns.
A more successful arrangement between the two extremes is often seen in sections where the population is largely white and land is held in smaller tracts. Here a white farmer who owns more land than he or his sons can cultivate marks off a tract for a tenant, white or black, who may be said to work with his landlord. ”

“ The farmers of the least fertile land must secure for the sale of its produce in the market a price sufficient to cover their expenses of production; and the farmers of the more fertile land, obtaining the same price and incurring less expense, have a surplus in hand, which competition for the enjoyment of their position compels them to transfer to the landlords as rent. This surplus will vary according to the extent to which the fertility of their land exceeds in each case that of the least fertile land, the produce of which must be forthcoming to meet the demand. ”