RENTING ON IMPROVEMENTS ID/ 



he will take advantage of the fact. At least that has 

 largely been done in Scotland." 



The inclusion of the value of tenants' improvements 

 in the rent demanded for farms is necessarily part of 

 the same subject. Withholding such a reduction from 

 the full rent of a farm as will leave the tenant a fair 

 return from his outlay is clearly appropriating the 

 tenant's improvements just as effectually as a direct 

 raising of the rent upon those improvements would be. 



This grievance is complained of by many witnesses, 

 both in the form of raising the rent on tenants' im- 

 provements—now relatively infrequent — and in the 

 form of refusing the reduction which would protect the 

 tenant's interest. 



The best type of tenant has been the man who has 

 treated his "land as his bank ; as a rule, when he makes 

 money he puts it into his land, thinking he is going to 

 get it out again." Or, as Mr Punchard puts it : " In the 

 old times when they made any profit they spent it on the 

 farm in improving it, and so they gradually got their 

 farms up to a higher condition." 



This is exactly the type of tenant who most needed 

 protection in the view of Sir James Caird, urged in 

 1883,^ and this is exactly the type of tenant that, 

 according to the uniform tenour of the evidence, has 

 had, in this worst stage of depression, no security 

 whatever, except the spontaneous goodwill of those 

 landlords who understand and sympathise with their 

 claims, and are themselves in a position to give them 

 full protection. 



Mr Sheldon gives the case of an old tenant in Derby- 

 shire, who doubled the carrying capacity of his dairy 

 and stock farm by repeated applications of bones and 

 other rfianures during thirty years, with the result that 

 his rent was raised in spite of promises that it should not 

 be raised. 



Mr Forster, who had by heavy outlay raised his farm 

 to a high state of cultivation, complains that he could 

 not get the return he was entitled to. That is why I 

 ' Letter to the Times, May 17, 1883. 



