Book IV. COVENANTS OF LEASES. 701 



three times; and for whatever quantity of corn the parties had agreed, the money pay- 

 ments would be equal to the average price of fourteen years of the lease itself, and of the 

 seven years preceding it ; and the price of the last seven years of the old lease, would de- 

 termine the rent during the first seven years of the new one. 



4329. The landlord and tenant could not suffer, it has been thought, either from bad 

 seasons or any change in the value of the currency, should such a lease as this be extended 

 to several periods of twenty-one years. The quantity of corn to be taken as rent, is the 

 only point that would require to be settled at the commencement of each of those periods; 

 and though tliis would no doubt be greater or less, according to the state of the lands at 

 the time, yet it may be expected, that in the twenty-one years preceding, all the tenant's 

 judicious expenditure had been fully replaced. Instead of the twofold difficulty in fixing 

 a rent for a long lease, arising from uncertainty as to the quantity of produce, which must 

 depend on the state of improvement, and still more perhaps from the variations in the 

 price of that produce, the latter objection is entirely removed by this plan ; and in all cases 

 where land is already brought to a high degree of fertility, the question about the quan- 

 tity of produce may likewise be dispensed with. 



4330. If the corn rent plan he applied to leases of nineteen or twenty-one years, the inconve- 

 nience resulting from uncertainty as to the amourft of rent, as well as other difficulties which 

 must necessarily attend it, would be as great perhaps as any advantages which it holds out 

 to either of the parties. If it be said that a rent, determined by a seven year's average, 

 could not suddenly nor materially alter, this is at once to admit the inutility of the con- 

 trivance. The first thing which must strike every practical man is, that corn is not the only 

 produce of a farm, and in most parts of Britain, perhaps not the principal source from 

 which rent is paid; and there is no authentic record of the prices of butcher meat, wool, 

 cheese, butter, and other articles in every county to refer to, as there is of corn. This is 

 not the place to inquire whether the price of corn regulates the price of all the other pro- 

 ducts of land, in a country whose statute books are full of duties, bounties, drawbacks, 

 &c. to say nothing of its internal regulations; but it is sufficiently evident, that if corn 

 does possess this power, its price operates too slowly on that of other products to serve as a 

 just criterion for determining rent on a lease of this duration. Besides, in the progress 

 of agriculture, new species or varieties of the cerealia themselves are established even in 

 so short a period as twenty-one years, the prices of which may be very different from 

 that of the corn specified in the lease. What security for a full rent, for instance, would 

 it give to a landlord, to make the rent payable according to the price of barley, when 

 the tenant might find it more for his interest to cultivate some of the varieties of summer 

 wheat, lately brought from the continent ? or, according to the price of a particular va- 

 riety of oats, wlien, within a i'ew years, we have seen all the old varieties superseded 

 throughout extensive districts, by the introduction of a new one, the potatoe-oat, which 

 may not be more permanent than those that preceded it ? There can be no impropriety, 

 indeed, in adopting this plan, for ascertaining the rent of land kept always in tillage ; but 

 it would be idle to expect any important benefits from it, during such a lease as we have 

 mentioned. 



433 1 . 21ie corn rent plan, in the case of much longer leases, will no doubt diminish the evils 

 which we think are inseparable from them, but it cannot possibly reach some of the most 

 considerable Its utmost effect is to secure to the landholder a rent which shall in all time 

 to come be an adequate rent, according to the state of the lands and the mode of culti- 

 vation known at the date of the lease. But it can make no provision tiiat will apply to 

 the enlargement of the gross produce from the future improvement of the lands them- 

 selves, or of the disposable produce from the invention of machinery and other plans for 

 encouraging labor. And the objections just stated, in reference to a lease of twenty-one 

 years, evidently apply much more forcibly to one of two or three times that length. 

 Old corn-rents, though much higher at present than old money-rents, are seldom or never 

 o high as the rents could now be paid on a lease of twenty-one years. But, independent 

 of these considerations, which more immediately bear upon the interests of the parties 

 themselves, one insuperable objection to all such leases is, that they partake too much of 

 the nature of entails, and depart too far from tliat commercial character which is most fa- 

 vorable to the investment of capital, and consequently to the greatest increase of land 

 produce. 



4332. -4 lease for a term of years is not, in all cases, a sufficient encouragement to spirited 

 cultivation: its covenants in respect to the management of the lands may be injudicious ; 

 the tenant may be so strictly confined to a particular mode of culture, or a particular 

 course of crops, as not to be able to avail himself of the beneficial discoveries which a pro- 

 gressive state of agriculture never fails to introduce. Or, on the other hand, though this 

 is much more rare, the tenant may be left so entirely at liberty, that either the necessity of 

 his circumstances, during the currency of the lease, or his interest towards its expiration, 

 may lead him to exhaust the soil, instead of rendering it more productive. When a lease 

 therefore is eitlier redundant or deficient in this respect; where it either permits the lands to 



