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THE POPULAR EDUCATOR. 



The British colonists and the people of the United States 

 have been laudably anxious to obviate the admitted evils of a 

 system, which, inviting settlers and supplying them with land 

 at a nominal price, tends to make society little else than an 

 aggregate of small farmers. They have endowed education 

 munificently. Nothing which these new governments and 

 societies have done is more generous and patriotic than the 

 sacrifices which they have made for the establishment of schools, 

 colleges, and universities, for the development of scientific 

 knowledge and mental culture. With less wisdom, but very often 

 with the best intentions, they have tried to naturalise manu- 

 factures ; for they have given protection to such persons as 

 are willing to engage in these callings, by laying import duties 

 on foreign or British goods, and by this means confer on the 

 colonial manufacturer the doubtful benefit of a monopoly price. 

 The manufactures of every country do possess a certain advan- 

 tage in the facts, that imported commodities are burdened with 

 the cost of carriage, and that their sale is to be made in a 

 market which a distant producer will be able to anticipate less 

 fully than a home producer can ; and consequently any legal 

 protection is generally superfluous, and is quite certain to be 

 mischievous. 



But it is not only in newly-settled countries that the occu- 

 pier is also the owner. Such a tenure prevails in the vast 

 communities of India and China. It is general in Europe, where 

 land is very much distributed. The French code, which com- 

 pels the distribution of an estate, or its price, among the children 

 of a deceased parent, only affirmed emphatically and universally 

 a custom which was general in France before the revolution. 

 These occupiers, called " peasant-proprietors" by English econo- 

 mists, are general from Sweden to Spain, from North- Western 

 France to South-Eastern Russia. Rent, in the sense of a 

 bargain periodically made between owner and occupier for the 

 occupation of agricultural land, is practically unknown in these 

 regions. The small farmer cultivates his plot of land, reaps, or 

 gathers, or digs his produce, and having sustained himself and 

 his family from his crops, carries the overplus to market. 



In the south of France, and in the greater part of Italy, a 

 curious kind of tenure prevails. Its origin is very ancient, for 

 it is found as far back as the days of the Roman republic. The 

 landowner enters into a perpetual partnership with the occu- 

 pier, finding him laud, seed, and sometimes stock, while the 

 occupier gives his labour. The proceeds of the farm are then 

 divided into moieties. Sometimes the landowner gets half the 

 produce, occasionally more, rarely less. This kind of tenancy 

 is called metairie, the tenant a mdtayer. 



The Irish cottier or small farmer differs from the English 

 farmer only in degree, and by the circumstance that he is far 

 more helpless in the hands of his landlord than an English 

 farmer ever is or can be. Ireland has never had, except in one 

 locality, any manufactures. Her population is almost entirely 

 engaged in agriculture. By a series of most injurious statutes, 

 the trade of Ireland was at one time systematically crippled. 

 By a series of most oppressive laws the Irish Catholic was 

 depressed and degraded ; but the people multiplied. The 

 unfortunate facility with which the potato could be cultivated 

 in the rich moist soil of the country, and the general adoption 

 of this root as an article of food, stimulated the growth of 

 population. The increasing numbers of the people drove the 

 price of land which might be cultivated to a famine height, and 

 the landowners took advantage of the demand to exact the 

 utmost which the people could give. The tenure, too, was pre- 

 carious, i.e., from year to year. Nothing shows more clearly 

 how absolutely the Irish peasant was dependent on the caprice 

 or forbearance of the landowner than the fact that all improve- 

 ments of the soil were done by the tenant. The cottier built 

 his hut, such as it was, fenced his land, drained it when neces- 

 sary, at his own charges. Everybody knows what the conse- 

 quences were. Famine came, disaffection, agrarian outrage, 

 rebellion ; for unless there is some partnership in expense be- 

 tween landlord and tenant, a precarious tenure is sure to excite 

 the deepest disaffection. At last, and not before it was needed, 

 a remedy has "been found. 



As a matter of fact, and historically, the origin of rent is to 

 be found in the power which owners of land had of levying 

 a tax on those who were obliged to occupy it. If the whole 

 soil of Australia and the United States had been parcelled out 

 among a number of favoured parsons, aa was indeed done under 



many of the Crown grants made to the original settlers in 

 America, such grantees would have been able, and were able, to 

 levy a tax on those who wished to till the soil. Such an ex- 

 pedient was adopted, for example, by the representatives of 

 Penn, of Lord Baltimore, and notably by certain persons in 

 New York, who within a few years ago accepted a compromise, in 

 lieu of certain vast reversionary rights which they claimed from 

 others who held under them by lease. So again, in the empire 

 of India, rent is a tax payable to Government, and in no sense 

 proportionate to that value of the holding which will be deter- 

 mined by competition. In short, the area in which rent ia 

 determined on ordinary principles of business is a narrow one, 

 being almost limited, in fact, to the British islands. 



It is ordinarily said, that such rents as we are familiar with 

 are payments made for using the natural powers of the soil, and 

 that differences in rent are due to the different degrees of fer- 

 tility which different plots of ground possess. This statement 

 is in general correct, as applied to agricultural land, though it 

 is not even here strictly accurate. For example : a field in the 

 neighbourhood of a town, capable of being employed as a market- 

 garden, will ordinarily let at the rate of twenty to thirty pounds 

 an acre, while land of the same quality, and therefore equally 

 capable of producing the same kind of crop, will let for not 

 more than a tenth of this rent, if it be ten miles from a town. 

 Here, then, unless we strain the word "fertility" to a sense which 

 cannot be said to be natural to it, two plots of agricultural land, 

 whose fertility is equal, vary enormously in annual value. The 

 difference does not consist in the fact that the highly-rented 

 land is worked at a cheaper rate of wages, for, as a rule, wages 

 are higher in towns than they are in country places. The 

 difference consists in two particulars : first, the price of land 

 which is near a town can be better or more highly manured 

 than that which is at a distance ; and next, the market for pro- 

 duce is near, regular, and, to the cultivator, lucrative. But it 

 is absurd to call this proximity to a market fertility, or to say 

 that the demand of a dense population is equivalent to increased 

 productiveness. The fact is, rent is as much derived from the 

 exigencies of the public as it is from the powers of land. 



The case is still more marked when we come to deal with the 

 rent of building-land. In a country village this rent is at 

 zero, the site of a house being worth no more than an equal 

 area of the land which surrounds it. But in a town the case is 

 far different. The site of the office in which this lesson is 

 printed is, quantity for quantity, worth ten thousand times as 

 nmch as, or even more than, the richest agricultural soil in 

 England. But the convenience of a central locality, in which 

 great business transactions may be most easily carried on, ia 

 very different from fertility ; and this word could not, except by 

 a very violent figure of speech, be ascribed to the qualities which 

 confer so prodigious a value on the site of a factory in the 

 metropolis. This value is derived from the extensive demand 

 which exists in such localities, and the comparatively scanty 

 supply of such convenient places. It is said that the most 

 precious piece of ground in the world is the site of the Globe 

 Insurance Office in Cornhill. A little reflection will show what 

 are the circumstances which give so transcendaut a value to 

 this bit of land. 



We shall now be able to arrive at a clear notion of what rent 

 is. When competition between the owners and occupiers of 

 land is free and unrestricted, rent is all the difference between 

 the value and the cost of that which is produced. I must, how- 

 ever, expound this definition a little more fully. 



My reader will see that the first condition of economical rent 

 is free competition. Anything which limits the quantity which 

 those who would rent or buy can procure, tends to disturb the 

 price of occupation or purchase. It does not follow that it will 

 always raise it. If a person owns an estate which he can let 

 for grazing purposes only, when it is peculiarly fitted for be- 

 coming arable, his rent will be less than it would be if he 

 were left free to use his own discretion. Still more, if an owner 

 be debarred by will or settlement from letting land for building 

 purposes, as the late Sir Thomas Wilson was, his possible rout 

 will be materially curtailed. But, on the other hand, anything 

 which puts the intending occupier into the power of the land- 

 owner, raises rent artificially against the former. This is seen 

 most notably, when all the land available for building in a par- 

 ticular site is the property of some great landowner or great 

 corporation. Here the proprietor may exact as great a sum as 



