XIV PREFACE 



land, has probably amounted to an aggregate loss of not 

 less than iJ" i ,000,000,000, or nearly the freehold value of 

 the land itself 



So, too, most of the economic collapse of farming 

 should be intelligible enough, when it is seen from the 

 evidence that these diminished returns from the land, 

 have, under our present system of tenure, been so 

 unequally divided, that in many cases during the 

 depression, the landlords' share in rent, instead of 

 being double the tenants' profit, as is assumed in 

 Income Tax assessment, has been from seven to as 

 much as fifty times the share of the tenant. 



Agriculture has been the weaker to resist the strain 

 of hard times, because of the short-sighted policy of the 

 owner who has in general pushed the loss from himself 

 to his tenant as long as he could. 



Again, the evidence of this Commission has thrown a 

 flood of light over the defects and perversions of the 

 law, and the fallacies — wilful or unconscious — which have 

 led to the economic robbery of the men who should be 

 rewarded for enriching their landlords as well as them- 

 selves. Instead of a clear line being drawn between 

 the money interests of each party in the current value 

 of the holding, as equity demands, the greater the 

 investment of the improving tenant, the more surely 

 he has been creating a fixity of tenure in his landlord's 

 favour and not his own, and is compelled to go on 

 paying a rent which merges his interest wholly in the 

 landlord's. 



In view of the uniform evidence on these points from 

 the ablest and most experienced farming witnesses, 

 the assumption of the Majority Report that things must 

 be all right, because there has been and is absolute 

 freedom of contract, is as indefensible as their assump- 



