'Hie Tenant's Compensation Act, 1890. 
877 
allow compensation for the consumption of corn and other feeding 
stuffs grown upon the holding ; and suggestions have been made that 
it should be amended by specifying in a schedule the matters upon 
which landlords should be allowed to make counter-claims, and by 
allowing corn and other feeding stuffs which have been produced on 
the farm and consumed by stock upon it, to be, within proper limits, 
subjects for compensation. But, as yet, no amendment in either of 
these directions has been made. 
An Act, the short title of which heads this note, was, however, 
passed in the last session of Parliament, which, by way of amend- 
ing the Agricultural Holdings Act, in fact amends the law of land- 
lord and tenant, and remedies what was previously a severe hardship 
on tenant-farmers, though one which was seldom felt, and the risk 
of which was, for the most part, known to lawyers rather than to 
farmers. The hardship was this : — If the farm was mortgaged when 
the farmer became tenant, and the mortgagee did not consent to the 
lease or agreement for the tenancy, he was not bound by it, but was 
entitled to treat the tenant as a mere trespasser, or, in other words, 
to disregard the tenancy, and, if necessary, to turn the farmer out 
of the farm without any notice. This was the law prior to January 1, 
1882, but by the Conveyancing Act of 1881, which commenced on 
that day, (amongst other leases) an agricultural lease for any term not 
exceeding twenty-one years, or an agreement for such a lease, made by 
a mortgagor on and after that day was made good and binding on the 
mortgagee. Power was, however, given by that Act to exclude the 
operation of this provision, and in practice it was not infrequently 
excluded, and the old law remained in operation. It followed of 
course that, as there was no contract between the tenant and the 
mortgagee, the mortgagee, on the one hand, had no remedy against 
the tenant under the covenants or agreements in the contract of 
tenancy, and, on the other hand, the tenant had no remedy or claim 
against the mortgagee. The latter was not, in fact, the tenant's 
landlord, and therefore the tenant had no right against him for com- 
pensation for improvements under the Agricultural Holdings Act. 
In practice, as I have just said, this position was not felt to be a 
hardship, because, so long as the interest on the mortgage money was 
duly paid by the landlord (the mortgagor) to the mortgagee, it was 
immaterial to the latter whether the land was let or not, and even 
if the interest fell into arrear, the mortgagee, as a rule, was glad to 
receive the rent from the tenant and pay himself his interest out of 
it. By accepting the rent from the tenant he, in effect, adopted the 
contract of tenancy, and placed himself in the position of landlord, and, 
while reaping the benefits, rendered himself liable to the obligations 
incident to that position, among which latter is the obligation to pay 
compensation under the Holdings Act of 1883. 
Some two or three years ago, however, a case arose in Yorkshire 
in which this usual practice appears not to have been adopted by 
the mortgagee of a farm, the landlord of which had let it to a tenant 
after he had mortgaged it, and which tenancy was not binding on 
the mortgagee, The landlord became bankrupt, and the mortgagee 
