Commercial Fruit Growing 9 



Nothing can afford clearer evidence of the closeness of the land 

 monopoly than the one-sided character of the agreements and leases for 

 the letting of agricultural land which have come down to us from the past, 

 breathing the spirit of overlord ship and assuming the servility of feudal 

 times. Reading through one of these leases produces a feeling of strangu- 

 lation, as if one were being bound round by cord upon cord, from foot to 

 head, until only fingers enough were left free to count rent. Such wilder- 

 nesses of redundant verbiage, such forests of irrelevant details one wonders 

 who would ever have wasted the ink or the time to write it all, until we 

 learn that the poor tenant had to pay all the cost, and the more skins of 

 parchment the lawyer could cover with writing the greater the fee he was 

 permitted to exact. 



Happily the majority of English landlords have always been better 

 than their own agreements, and the old-time farmer who signed his lease 

 without reading it was depending on the sporting instincts of his landlord, 

 who would know how to appreciate a good tenant, and was generally fairly 

 dealt with. But the spirit of modern commercialism, for good or bad, has 

 invaded the sacred precincts. The last vestiges of vassalage are dying out, 

 and the market gardener who signs, with his eyes open, a contract of 

 tenancy which does not secure him reasonable conditions under which to 

 invest his capital, and exercise his skill, must not expect a kind providence, 

 landlord or other, to deliver him from the consequences of his own folly. 

 A curious state of things has been induced by the success which has 

 attended the efforts of market gardeners to secure by legislation their 

 right to the benefit of improvements effected by them in their holdings. 



Previous to the passing of the Market Gardeners' Compensation Act, 

 in 1895, many a market gardener found at the expiration of his tenancy 

 the benefit of his most valuable improvements pocketed by his landlord. 

 If he desired to renew the tenancy he must pay additional rent on his own 

 improvements, or quit and allow the landlord to reap the harvest from 

 another tenant; surely a divorce between legal claim and moral right 

 as wide as can well be imagined, and a condition inconceivable in any 

 other commercial relation except where land comes in! 



By the Market Gardeners' Compensation Act, which came into force 

 on 1 January, 1896, valuable provisions establishing the right of the 

 tenant to the value of his own improvements first found their way to the 

 statute book. So far as market gardens existing at the passing of the Act 

 were concerned, it provided that where the cultivation of such holdings as 

 market gardens was within the knowledge of the landlord, and he had not 

 expressed dissent in writing previous to the execution of the improvements, 

 then the provisions of the Act should apply as if it had been agreed in 

 writing after the commencement of the Act that the holding should be let 

 or treated as a market garden. This placed the cultivators of market 

 gardens at the passing of the Act in an exceptionally strong position; 

 because Section 3 (3) lifted the following improvements, so far as market 

 gardens were concerned, out of Schedule I of the Agricultural Holdings 



