SECURITY FOR OUTLAY 227 



" robber " cultivation is in America generally recognised. If our 

 tenant-at-will farming has not, in this country, produced actually 

 as bad cases as those quoted, it has done quite enough mischief, and 

 its economic defects have, naturally enough, not failed to impress 

 themselves upon the minds of farmers, though they appear to have 

 made little impression beyond that comparatively restricted circle. 

 However, in view of the discovery made, new proposals have been 

 put forward again and again, aimed at mitigating the mischief, not, 

 indeed, by the means most naturally suggesting themselves — of 

 lengthening the term — but by the adoption of safeguards designed 

 to protect an improving tenant's interest by imposing liabilities upon 

 the landlord, which to the latter appear wholly unreasonable, and 

 have, consequently, been rejected. The attempt made is, indeed, 

 hopeless, as hopeless as that of squaring the circle. The proper 

 safeguard for the improving tenant's interest is length of lease, 

 which obviously cannot be contracted for on the basis of rent 

 variable according to good and bad seasons, the only practical test 

 of which — that is, a good or bad yield — is manifestly liable to abuse. 

 Variable rent is the principle of metayage, which is rightly being 

 more and more replaced by fixed renting ; it is found an obstacle 

 to an advance in farming. Now, in metayage, be it observed, what 

 justifies a variable rent, so to call it, is the invariable provision that 

 it is the landlord who directs the business, and in any case draws 

 the main profit, the metayer acting under his orders — acting practi- 

 cally as a labourer at piecework. 



As regards the recovery of outlay and compensation for improve- 

 ments, that has not been adequately safeguarded in the past, partly 

 because the question was then not sufficiently understood — and even 

 the claimants for safeguards themselves did not quite know how 

 to formulate their claims — and partly because the obstacles of 

 traditional landlords' privileges stood hinderingly in the way. At 

 the time when, in 1872, I brought out, in the Agricultural Economist, 

 a coloured table showing graphically merely the then computed 

 manurial value of feeding stuffs, after passing through the animal, 

 and a similarly graphical "Chemistry of Manures, Feeding-stuffs 

 and Farm Crops," to show what would in ordinary circumstam 

 be taken out of the soil by various crops in the shape of valuable 

 constituents, and how such tax upon the soil might be replaced, as 

 something of a guide in the matter, the entire question might be said 

 to have been, generally speaking, still an untouched problem. \\ hen. 

 in 1875, Mr. Disraeli brought in his Agricultural Holdings Bill a 

 supposed great boon to the tenantry, views were still exceedingly 



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