1 66 AGRICULTURAL DEPRESSION 



express condition that tenants should forego compensa- 

 tion for improvements at the end of the lease. ^ 



Such a condition would possibly be held to be illegal, 

 but in any case, it is transparently unjust that, in an 

 ordinary lease which is not drawn up as an " improving 

 lease," a tenant should thus be compelled to pay himself 

 for the reduction made indispensable by the fall in 

 prices. 



Technical breaches of such covenants, whether legal 

 or illegal, are used as a pretext to increase counter- 

 claims, or to hold over the tenant the dread of large and 

 indefinite liabilities. Mr Davidson has given two or 

 three decisions to the effect that a rent receipt, handed to 

 the tenant subsequent to any such alleged breach of 

 covenant, should be held to bar claims for damages. 

 But it is doubtful whether such a decision would be 

 supported in the English courts. 



It is complained in Essex that landlords and agents 

 make no objection to breaches until the moment for a 

 claim for improvements arrives, when they base their 

 counterclaim upon what they tacitly acquiesced in. It 

 is urged that in such cases the right to include such 

 items should be held to have been abandoned. The 

 penalties attached in covenants to cross cropping 

 (ranging from ;^io to ;^50 an acre for ploughing up 

 pasture, and from ;^5 to ;^20 an acre for repeating a 

 corn crop oftener than once in four years, from £s to 

 ;^io for lopping trees, etc.), would entirely annihilate 

 any claim for improvements, and farmers are frightened 

 out of claiming, even when the landlord has suffered no 

 damage. 



English valuers differ on this point. Two leading 

 Suffolk valuers hold, the one, that a landlord who has 

 knowingly let things go, can claim nothing, the other, 

 that the claim is good unless the breach of covenant has 

 been formally condoned. 



In Lincolnshire, some valuers take Mr Davidson's 

 view, and hold that under a yearly tenancy dilapidations 

 should not be allowed for more than one year. The 

 ' Ballingall, 54,183-6 ; Speir, Ayrshire, p. 10; 46,914. 



