Later Agrarian Legislation. 465 



economy which created a class of farmers who were such 

 adepts at cheating that they would migrate from holding 

 to holding, subsisting mainly on what they pillaged their 

 temporary landlords out of the inventory. Nor did it, Caird 

 maintained, conduce to superior husbandry, in fact all the best 

 farmers of his acquaintance were opposed to the system. It 

 absorbed too much of that capital which the tenant especially 

 needed at the time of entry, and therefore in those districts 

 where it did not exist Caird imagined that he found a higher 

 system of agriculture. It was, too, a possible cause of ruinous 

 embarrassment to the landlord, for his tenants might combine 

 and threaten him with the alternative of having all his 

 farms in hand and some five years' rental in the form of 

 tenant-right to pay, unless he complied with their unreason- 

 able demands. As a substitute therefore, Caird suggested that 

 the landlord should buy up the tenant-right and introduce the 

 lease system, entirely omitting the one palpable objection to 

 such an arrangement, viz., the almost certain recourse of the 

 tenant towards the termination of his tenancy to an exhaus- 

 tive system of husbandry which no lease, however stringent, 

 has ever been able to adequately restrain.^ 



Landlords, however, as soon as drainage and other expensive 

 improvements came into fashion, began to see that there must 

 be some limit to the system of tenant-right. A tenant might 

 blunder over an expensive drainage undertaking, and on 

 quitting the holding come upon his landlord for the costs 

 of the " itnexhausted improvement." So the country gentry 

 began to substitute compensatory clauses in their yearly 

 agreements, and thereby contract out of the Tenant- Right 

 System.^ Then ensued instaiices in many counties, particu- 

 larly those in the north and west, where the tenant's unassisted 



' Caird's English Agriculture, passim. 



* The unprofessional reader will not confuse the terms Tenant-Eight 

 and Good Will, though thej' were never kept quite distinct hy the farmers. 

 The former included emblements and every other unexhausted improve- 

 ment, while the latter signihed, besides all these, some mysterious power 

 of bequest which the outgoer possessed, and for which it was well worth 

 the incomer's while to paj'. It is not yet extinct, as I myself can bear 

 witness this j'ear of gi'ace and agricultural depression 1893. 



n, H H 



