Landlordism

“ How are the jointures of the widows, the interest of mortgages, and the other charges on the land, to be made good, when the change of prices has absorbed nearly the whole profit of cultivation? If they are recovered, what is to remain to the landlord? How are the home manufacturers, and the numerous class of shopkeepers in towns, and, above all, in the metropolis, who are supported by their expenditure, to be maintained? It is very easy to say the fall of rents is a landlord's question, and the mass of the people have no interest in it. ”

“ Thirty years ago, Professor Thorold Rogers defined the position of the landlord: "Every permanent improvement of the soil, every railway and road, every bettering of the general condition of society, every facility given for production, every stimulus supplied to consumption, raises rent. The landowner sleeps, but thrives. He alone, among all the recipients in the distribution of products, owes everything to the labour of others, but contributes nothing of his own. ”

“ Then, and always before, the practice of the landlord was—to lease large tracts at an easy rent to the most solvent person he could find, or to set in copartnership, (that is, by creating a joint tenancy in all the inhabitants of any particular town-land, making the rich accountable for the debt of the poor.) His only object was to secure his income; so that was accomplished, he cared little for the welfare of the inhabitants, or the cultivation of the estate. ”

“ Let us suppose two farms, the one leased for five years, and the other for ever: Which tenant is most independent of the political influence of his landlord, to say nothing of the impossibility of controlling votes in this way in America, from a variety of causes? Certainly he who has a lease for ever. He is just as independent of his landlord, as his landlord can be of him, with the exception that he has rent to pay. In the latter case, he is precisely like any other debtor—like the poor man who contracts debts with the same store-keeper for a series of years. ”

“ In the long suburban roads about London, where rows of exactly similar houses stretch for miles countrywards, the rent changes at every few thousand yards by exactly the amount saved or incurred annually in travelling to and from the householder’s place of business. The seeker after lodgings, hesitating between Bloomsbury and Tottenham, finds every advantage of situation skimmed off by the landlord with scientific precision. As lease after lease falls in, houses, shops, goodwills of businesses which are the fruits of the labor of lifetimes, fall into the maw of the ground landlord. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Now it is the Duke of ... who is being denounced as a harsh and cruel head landlord, because his agent takes somewhat abrupt measures for pulling down a tenement house whose middleman lessee has absconded, and which is becoming a nuisance through the neglect or misconduct of the lodgers. Anon it is all the fault of the middleman lessee, who is painted in the blackest of colours as a bloated, grasping, selfish capitalist, wringing sixty or seventy per cent out of the sweat and tears of the poor. ”

“ The date at which this step was made, and the thoroughness with which it was carried out, depended very much upon the character and needs of the landlord, as well as upon local circumstances affecting the condition of the soil and the degree of poverty suffered by the tenants. The tendency for landlords to lose patience [Pg 88/244] with the process which was gradually eliminating the poorer men and concentrating their land in the hands of the more prosperous is not characteristic of any one century. ”

“ The real sages of this country, in founding its institutions, no more thought of getting rid of the landlords of the country, than the Church thought of getting rid of its bishops. The first knew that the gradations of property were an inevitable incident of civilization; that it would not be wise, if it were possible, to prevent the affluent from making large investments in the soil; and that this could not be done in practice, without leaving the relation of landlord and tenant. ”

“ Leaving details aside, and the minute instructions on the true mode of skirmishing with the myrmidons of the law, the idea of using the very rent claimed by the landlord as a provision for feeding the struggle against him is in itself perfection—a real masterpiece of strategy. An artist can only feel the warmest admiration for such a combination of everything [267] that is most pleasant to the heart of the agrarian warrior and most deadly to the landlord’s cause. ”

“ Then one can’t bear to trouble him, yet why should we replace his tiles and chimney-pots, and sink our money in his drains, or why should we replace his hideous grates with our charming ones, or his worn-out kitchener with our new and superior ‘Eagle’ range? Yet, if we do not have these things done we are wretched and unhealthy too, and a good landlord is always willing to improve his property, if we are willing to pay him a proportionate interest on whatever capital he may lay out. ”

“ The landlord is supposed to keep the houses of his tenants and employés in order, and is expected to contribute to the support of the poor and afflicted, to build a church and keep it in order, and to exercise a patriarchal protection over everybody who lives on his estates, but this is only theoretical in too many cases. The practice of a majority of the landlords is to squeeze every cent they can get out of their tenants and squander it in pleasure and dissipation. ”

“ Well, first we can tackle the landlord, who, if he have money at all: and an impecunious landlord is a deadly and desperate thing to possess, and should be most carefully avoided: will be glad to do as we want for an extra rent at the rate of 5 per cent on whatever outlay he can make. We should get him to build out a servant’s sitting-room, and enlarge the pantry and scullery, and to put above the erection a servant’s bath and lavatory arrangement. ”

“ We wish we could enlarge them, we wish that Building Acts had prevented landlords thus covering with rent-producing rooms the gardens or larger yards which once existed at the back of high houses; and we are alive to the duty of trying to obviate, as soon as may be, this want of space, to any degree to which it may yet be possible. But there is a way in which some compensation for this evil may be provided, which appears only to have begun lately to dawn upon the perception of men. ”

“ The rent of the landlord is a value which, in ordinary cases, it is continually producing over and above replacing, in the most complete manner, the whole consumption, the whole expense laid out upon the employment and maintenance both of the workmen and of their employer.
Artificers, manufacturers, and merchants, can augment the revenue and wealth of their society by parsimony only; or, as it is expressed in this system, by privation, that is, by depriving themselves of a part of the funds destined for their own subsistence. They annually reproduce nothing but those funds. ”

“ Living conditions are ribald and ridiculous. Rents are high and sleeping quarters at a premium. Landlords profiteer and accept bribes, putting out one tenant in order to house another willing to pay more rent. Tenants, in turn, sublet and profiteer on roomers. People rent a five-room apartment, originally planned for a small family, and crowd two over-sized families into it. Others lease or buy a private house and partition off spacious front and back [Pg 13] rooms into two or three parts. ”

“ Instead of leasing his acres from an isolated proprietor, the farmer would lease them from the nation. Instead of paying his rent to the agent of Sir John or his Grace, he would pay it to an agent or deputy agent of the community. Stewards would be public officials instead of private ones, and tenancy the only land tenure. A state of things so ordered would be in perfect harmony with the moral law. Under it all men would be equally landlords, all men would be alike free to become tenants. ”

“ I am clearly of opinion that there should, be a maximum value on all land, beyond which, unless for special purposes—such, for instance, as building—no landlord ought to be permitted to go. This would prevent an incredible amount of rack-renting and oppression on the one hand; and of poverty, revenge, and bloodshed on the other. ”

“ That is to say, out of six or seven hundred thousand families, living exclusively upon the product of the [160] soil, more than two-thirds must get their sustenance from a wretched bit of ground, estimated by the owner himself at a value of £4 to £8 a year!
To state such an economical paradox is to denounce it. Where there is nothing, the landlord, like the king, loses his rights. The situation, then, would already be strangely anomalous, even if the respective titles of landlord and tenant were of the clearest and most transparent kind. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The landlord is not to be a philanthropist, willing to sacrifice himself for the good of others; he is to be an intelligent capitalist, putting in his money purely as an investment, and philanthropic only to the degree of being satisfied with six per cent returns, of hiring a janitor to be on hand day and night, of being his own agent, or keeping a sharp lookout on the one he may have to employ, and of urging his wife to collect the rents. ”

“ In this sense, Charlie Wah Loo, with his washtub and irons, is his own beloved helpmate.
Briefly, I am a landlord. But do not hate me, gentle reader, for I am of that mild, reticent, and reluctant kind to whom even collecting the rent, to say nothing of raising it, is more a pain than a pleasure. There are such landlords, products of evolution, inheritance, and a civilization necessarily based on barter. Our anxious desire is to exact no more than a “fair rent” ”

“ 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.... ”

“ As property became secure, and landlords felt that the power of the State would protect them in all the rights of property, every vestige of these feudal tenures was abolished, and the relation between landlord and tenant has thus become purely commercial. A landlord offers his land to any one who is willing to take it; he is anxious to receive the highest rent he can obtain. What are the principles which regulate the rent which may thus be paid? ”

“ But, good landlord or bad landlord, no man can ever again hold that countryside at his pleasure, cowering under the threat of eviction. Rent is fixed by a court, and while a man pays his rent he is irremovable. And within a short period every man will be paying, not rent, but instalments of purchase for the land which he and his predecessors have worked—which in nine cases out of ten they have reclaimed from bog and barren moor. ”

“ Nor was it necessary that each son should hold land, or advantageous that each should live on his "little potato garden" without further exertion of mind or body.
'There was a continual struggle between landlord and tenant upon the question of long and short leases. . . . The offer of immediate high rent, or of fines to be paid down directly, tempted the landlord's extravagance, or supplied his present necessities, at the expense of his future interests. . . . Many have let for ninety-nine years ”

“ In a great many instances, the tenant might compromise with the landlord in such a way as to bring about this “modern improvement.” And a comparatively few instances, showing a certain per centage of increased production per acre to the former, and a little additional rentage to the latter, would suffice to give the innovation an impulse that would sweep away half the hedges of the country, and deface that picture which so many generations have loved to such enthusiasm of admiration. ”

“ This landlord was a tradesman in a small way of business—not a cruel man, except in so far as variableness of dealing is cruelty; but he was a man without capital to spend on improvements, and lost an immense percentage of his rent by bad debts. I went over the houses with him the last day he collected his rents there, that he might introduce me to the people as the owner of the property. He took a man with him, whom, as he confided to me, he wished to pass off upon the people as a broker. ”