THE LA IV OF SETTLEMENT OF LAND. 287 



France ought to furnish plenty of such cases, since 

 there owners in fee abound. The readiness with 

 which owners in France mortgage their land in 

 order to buy more, even at undue prices, is notorious, 

 and so are the evil consequences of the debts thus 

 incurred ; but we have never heard they were willing 

 to sell part of their land to improve the rest, or even 

 to mortgage it for that purpose. Thus everything 

 points to the same conclusion — that other causes, not 

 the fact of the land being held by tenants for life 

 instead of by owners in fee, produce a readiness or 

 unreadiness to spend money on improvements. 



It has been said that borrowing money from Land 

 Improvement Companies ends often in a heavy 

 burden without a corresponding return for the outlay. 

 But this is no fault of the mode of raising the money, 

 the fault is in the way in wliich it has been laid out. 

 If the money had been raised by seUing part of the 

 land or by mortgage, and laid out in the same way, 

 the loss would have been just the same. 



No doubt much money is badly laid out on what 

 are called improvements m land. The business of 

 landowning is well understood by few. It is very 

 easy to be led into unprofitable or half-profitable im- 

 provements, and if money is laid out on these it can- 

 not pay, in whatever way it may have been raised. 



The half-feudal idea of the relation between land- 

 lord and tenant tends to keep up such unprofitable 

 outlay. Improvements are asked for and expected 



