The Mismanagement of Landed Property. 371 



have been more or less marketable commodities, their value 

 being reckoned at fourteen years' purchase, and their possessors 

 being allowed to do pretty much what they liked with them, 

 so long as they paid their dues and did not trouble their 

 landlords about repairs. 



A third and less common form of lease is mentioned by the 

 Hants correspondent to the Board, namely, for one life, the 

 objection to which was that when the tenant became advanced 

 in years he ceased to lay out capital in necessary repairs or 

 improvements, and this writer suggests as a remedy that such 

 leases should be prolonged seven years beyond the death of the 

 sitting tenant, presumably to enable the landlord to foresee 

 and guard against the danger of having a ruined holding re- 

 turned on his hands. It was perfectly clear to every one 

 interested in the land that at no time in the history of the 

 national agriculture was there greater room for improvement. 

 The newly enclosed lands were undergoing a transition stage 

 from the obsolete husbandry practised by the villein to the 

 scientific process adopted by the leaseholder. Every newly 

 hedged holding was the theatre of experiment ; every dis- 

 trict had its peculiar system of cropping, and every farmer 

 prided himself upon his own special management. 



But the new tillages required improvements of a permanent 

 and expensive nature. " Before a farm can be put in proper 

 order," writes the correspondent from the East Riding, " a 

 considerable time must elapse and much money must be ex- 

 pended. The fruits of improvements are not gained all at 

 once, and a number of years are required to accomplish the 

 best digested plan." This, he goes on to say, was especially the 

 case whenever an improving farmer entered upon an exhausted 

 holding. "Without a long lease the tenant might have been in- 

 terrupted in the midst of his career by receiving a six months' 

 notice to quit. " The farmer who sits without a lease has 

 scarcely the privilege of thinking and acting for himself," says 

 another writer in the same county, and he goes on to prove 

 his statement by citing a case where the tenants of a northern 

 estate got notice to quit their holdings because they had 

 turned methodists. Thus we may well believe Arthur Young 



