XII 

 LAND TENURE AND LAND POLICY 



Introduction 



Ever since the time when Lot's herdsmen quarreled with the herds- 

 men of Abraham for possession of the most favored portions of the 

 plain of Jordan and, doubtless, long before that men have striven 

 endlessly over the right to use land and to enjoy its benefits. The 

 Gracchi found the land problem acute in Latium, but were unable to 

 effect a solution of it. The feudal tenure of the Middle Ages was but 

 a makeshift adjustment, suitable to the days of political turmoils. 

 For a brief time it seemed that, in America, our ideals of liberty and 

 equality were to attain, by the grace of free land, to a tolerably close 

 approximation of economic as well as political democracy. But the 

 early passing of the public domain which was supposed to be prac- 

 tically inexhaustible forces our generation to turn from the illusory 

 hopes of yesterday to the stern necessity of making our rent usages 

 and land laws such as shall secure the most effective utilization of a 

 productive agency strictly limited in supply. 



This "most effective utilization" means not merely tillage prac- 

 tices which are technically correct as applied to the land itself, but 

 also such adjustments of the relations of human contract involved 

 as shall secure the largest measure of co-operation on the part of 

 labor and capital, and most intelligent direction of the whole pro- 

 ductive process. The readings in Section A serve to indicate how 

 intimate a relation maintains between the forms of tenure and the 

 quality of agriculture. Another phase of the same matter might be 

 illustrated by pointing out the minimum amount of agricultural 

 utilization which is made of landed estates in England and of the 

 country places of many American millionaires. 



But, granted a satisfactory result in terms of production, what 

 of the_terms upon which this product shall be divided? It is not 

 merely the formal question of rent, as discussed in our previous 

 chapter, because most landlord-tenant relations involve the use of 

 capital of various forms and the furnishing of supervision or even of 

 labor by the one whom we speak of as only a landlord. The situation 



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