deferring to local customs, and overriding and modifying the strict terms of a contract? The whole state of feeling and all the current language in reference to this subject implies a deeply-felt conviction that the exigencies of this relation are not, even in England and Scotland, satisfactorily met by mere commercial motives, but that public opinion and custom, custom in some instances enforced by law, are needed to supplement and qualify the mere commercial rule. In England and Scotland the interposition of these agencies to qualify the action of competition in transactions of which land is the subject is more or less masked; in almost all other fully-peopled countries it is open and undisguised. In Asia the land has never, as a general rule, been given up to private speculation: it has remained in the hands of the State; and the condition of the agricultural population has accordingly varied with the greater or less degree of enlightenment or of sound moral feeling on the part of the rulers. Over Europe, wherever the land is not owned by the cultivators, custom or law very generally regulates or largely modifies the relations of landlord and tenant. The position of the cultivators is one not determined by contract, but, to a large extent, resting on status. In fact it would be intolerable were it otherwise; for nowhere in Europe, England and Scotland excepted, has an approximation ever been made towards a state of society in which are fulfilled the conditions that alone render tolerable the commercial treatment of land —in which the cultivators are capitalists, and a practical alternative to rural occupation exists for large masses of the people. The soil is over the greater portion of the inhabited globe cultivated by very humble men, with very little disposable wealth, and whose career is practically marked out for them by irresistible circumstances as tillers of the ground. In a contest between vast bodies of people so circumstanced and the owners of the soil-between the purchasers without reserve, constantly increasing in numbers, of an indispensable commodity, and the monopolist dealers in that commodity, the negotiation could have but one issue-that of transferring to the owners of the soil the whole produce, minus what was sufficient to maintain in the lowest state of existence the race of cultivators. This is what has happened wherever the owners of the soil, discarding all considerations but those dictated by self-interest, have really availed themselves of the full strength of their position. It is what has happened under rapacious governments in Asia; it is what has happened under rapacious landlords in Ireland; it is the inevitable result which cannot but happen in the great majority of all societies now existing on earth where land is given up to be dealt with on commercial principles unqualified by public opinion, custom, or law.

It seems to me that I have made out my case, and shown that the incidents attaching to land, not only separate it economically from

wealth in other forms, not only therefore rebut à priori objections to special land legislation founded on assumed economic analogies, but -regard being had to the conditions of industrial society actually prevailing in the world-furnish positive reasons for this course: for setting limits, where public opinion and custom are not efficacious for the purpose-for setting limits by law to the free action of competition in dealing with this commodity. So far as to the general principle. I turn now to consider its application to Ireland.

The discussions on the Irish question, whatever differences of opinion they may have disclosed, have at least made one point clear: no settlement of Irish land can be effectual which still leaves with landlords the power of indefinitely raising rent. I think it may be said that amongst those who know the country, and have seriously grappled with the problem, there is a very general agreement upon this point. The end may be approached by different paths and realised in different forms. Compulsory leases, recognition and extension of tenant-right, simple fixity of tenure, are amongst the modes; arbitration courts, the opinion of official experts, the prices of produce, have been suggested as the methods of procedure; but in whatever manner, through whatever machinery, the plans that really promise to be effectual involve at bottom the principle of depriving landlords of the power of raising rent-the principle, therefore, of imposing on the State the obligation of saying what a "fair rent" is. It is very evident that this must be so-that the landlord, with the power still left him of raising his rent at will, could easily defeat the most stringent provisions of the most apparently drastic land code. Of what avail to the cultivator would be a right of occupancy if the landlord can attach to that right impossible conditions? Of what advantage the right of selling the goodwill of his farm, if the rent can be raised at the landlord's discretion against the incoming tenant? Where would be the gain from leases if the limits of the rent are not known? The regulation of rent is thus of the very essence of the case; it is felt to be so by all who have really grasped the problem; and yet it will be found that this topic has in general been kept rather carefully in the background. The reason for this hesitancy it is not difficult to guess. Few Englishmen can hear without something of a cold tremor a proposal to fix rent by law. And yet the consequences are perhaps unfortunate. For all the reserve, it is felt that the efficacy of the several competing schemes really depends in the last resort upon this condition. Omne ignotum pro mirifico. Imagination magnifies the difficulty which is kept so carefully out of sight. Conscious that it lies behind, people hesitate to venture into what they expect will prove an economic cul-de-sac; or, if they must choose, the danger is they

will choose the scheme, not which is most efficacious, nor even which is least revolutionary, but which best contrives to veil this terrible bugbear. Now, if the fixing of rent by State authority be really indispensable to an effective settlement of this question, it is surely well that the fact be frankly accepted. I have already shown that Political Economy furnishes no presumption against the propriety of this course. Let us now see if it cannot practically help the solution.

According to some who pass for authorities, Political Economy has very little to say upon this subject. The worth of land is so much. money as 'twill bring; and to seek a criterion for rent-nay, to attempt to conceive rent at all-other than as it is determined by the market, is in the opinion of these wise persons a hopeless, if not an absurd undertaking. Had they reflected that what they pronounce to be an impossibility is, in point of fact, performed by not a few landlords in Ireland-by every landlord there who does not let his lands on the admittedly ruinous principle of competition—they might have seen reason to distrust the accuracy of scientific knowledge which led to conclusions so flagrantly at variance with fact. Unless, however, in what I have said above on the doctrine of rent I have very grossly misrepresented economic teaching, Political Economy is involved in no such conflict with fact as the view in question would imply. On the contrary, it recognises in the returnsfrom land the existence of an element-that which I have designated "economic rent "—which is no other than the "fair valuation rent"

of good landlords."1 It not only recognises this element, but can state the conditions determining its amount and the laws of its growth. The "fair valuation rent" of the popular platform admits, in short, of being reduced to strictly scientific expression. The only point really debatable is as to the means of practically determining the entity in question in given cases. But, as I have just said, the thing is in fact done every day, with sufficient accuracy for practical purposes, by those who manage Irish estates; and that can scarcely be an insoluble problem which scores of landlords and land-agents solve every year.

In approaching the practical problem, there are two parts that will need to be kept distinct-the first starting of the new system, and the keeping it going after it has been started. Over and above the determination of a fair rent, the former will involve much the more serious practical difficulty of appraising tenants' past improvements. Some able writers have expressed themselves as if this latter difficulty might be evaded by permitting to occupiers the sale of their good-will. This would, no doubt, be so, were the question of rent once settled; but with this still open, the value of the occu

(1) The "fair valuation rent" plus the returns on permanent improvements of the soil, as will presently be more particularly explained post, p. 54.

pation right would be uncertain, while the settlement of the rent plainly cannot take place till the abatement in consideration of tenants' improvements are known. Thus the necessity of an independent valuation of tenants' improvements, wherever landlord and tenant cannot themselves come to an agreement, is inherent in the case. Questions of this kind, involving, as they often will, disputes about minute details, can obviously only be satisfactorily dealt with by authorities adjudicating in the localities, and taking evidence in disputed cases from competent persons who have inspected the farms. Complicated and delicate questions no doubt they will be, demanding from those to whom the settlement is entrusted no small amount of patience, sagacity, and firmness; but questions not less complicated and delicate have already been unravelled by Englishmen in India; and it is hard to see why the same qualities of mind which have threaded their way through the mazes of Hindu customary law to results of order and substantial justice should not be equal to dealing with the problem, analogous, but less complicated, and less remote from English modes of thought, presented by Irish land.

These will be the initiatory difficulties; but these once surmounted, past improvements once ascertained, existing rents once adjusted to existing circumstances, there is no reason that the future. working of the status principle should not be brought under general rules, and reduced to a system. Confining our attention to rent, with which alone I am at present concerned, the problem, as I conceive it, will then lie in such an adjustment of this element from time to time as shall satisfy and reconcile the two following conditions:-1, to secure to the cultivators, so long as they fulfil the conditions of their tenure, the due reward of their industry; and, 2, to do substantial justice to the reasonable expectations of those who, on the faith of Acts of Parliament and the past policy of the country, have embarked their fortunes in Irish land.

And here we must endeavour to attain to some definite conception of what constitutes the due reward of the industry of the cultivator. I have already stated what I conceive to be the economic basis of property-the right of the producer to the thing he has produced. Accepting this as our principle, the point to be determined will be the amount of the produce which is properly referrible to the industry of the cultivator. To bring the question to a clear issue, I will take an extreme, but not absolutely impossible, case: I will suppose a farm which owes nothing of any kind to the landlord's outlay, on which the whole capital, fixed and circulating, in buildings, fences, manure, and wages, has been advanced by the cultivator; and I will suppose, further, that the soil of this farm is of the worst quality compatible with profitable cultivation. These

conditions being supposed, how much of the wealth produced from the farm represents the due reward of the cultivator's exertions ? I answer, the whole; and for this reason, that less than the whole would, according to the terms of the hypothesis, leave the cultivator without that ordinary remuneration which the conditions of industrial production in the country permit: without therefore such an adequate motive for his industry, as cultivator of the soil, as in a healthy condition of society would exist. In short, my imaginary farm represents the possible case in which, in conformity with Ricardo's theory, land under a régime of capitalist farmers would yield no rent. Passing from this peculiar case, I will vary the hypothesis by supposing the farm to be no longer entirely composed of the worst cultivable land, but to be, we will say, of average natural fertility, while the other conditions remain as before; the entire capital and labour being supplied by the farmer. Under such circumstances and still recognising the principle that the producer is entitled to what he produces,-how far will the tenant's claim to the produce extend? Many people would say, on my principle, to the whole, and would regard the result as a reductio ad absurdum of the principle. But I hold this conclusion to be unwarrantable.

In a society constituted according to the principles of modern industrial civilisation, in which each member enjoys the general advantages arising from separation of employment and exchange, we are bound, I think, in estimating the effect of a man's labour, to distinguish the value from the commodity. In a state of patriarchal isolation the goods which the labour of a family produces are wholly unaffected by anything which other people do, and therefore rightly belong in absolute property to the family. But when the producer is a member of an industrial society, the commodity he makes may acquire a value-a power of commanding the labour and goods of other people-not by reason of what he has done, but through an importance given to his industrial function by the circumstances of society. Social circumstances may cause what he produces to bear a higher value than his labour would naturally give it, were others free to take advantage of the situation which society has permitted him to occupy. He may, in short, be the monopolist of a favoured situation, in the advantages arising from which, as they are no part of the fruit of his toil, he can, on the principle on which we proceed, have no right to property. Such advantages, so far as they are peculiar to the situation, are not properly the result of his labours, but of the social circumstances which have made the situation specially advantageous, and, on the principle we have recognised, would belong not to him, but to society at large. Now the case I have put will be found to fall within this reasoning. The corn and roots and grass which constitute the agricultural