Property Letting Articles

If landlords encroach on either of these principles, or insist, on immediately participating in the advantages of improvements effected by their tenants, they will certainly prevent their being undertaken. The influence of tithe in discouraging outlays, when it is commuted for a fixed money rent, is hardly perceptible; but, Wherever it is exacted in kind, or fluctuates with the produce, it is equally powerful and prejudicial. Now, if such is the undoubted effect of a tax of a tenth, how prodigiously would its operation be increased was it three, four, or five times that amount, and rigidly exacted? And it is plain, that if rents were fluctuating quantities, forming a certain proportion, as a fourth, a third, or a half of the produce of farms, they would be, to all intents and purposes, identical in their operation on farmers and on agriculture with a tax of 25, 33, or 50 per cent. Had such a mode of fixing the rent of land been generally adopted in Great Britain, it may be doubted whether agriculture would have been, at this moment, more improved than in the reign of James I. or Charles I. Besides the influence of this method of letting in checking improvement and reducing agriculture to a mere system of routine, it is almost sure to lead to perjury and fraud.

Rents which depend on proportions of produce, necessarily vary from year to year with the variations in the latter; and unless the Landlord or his agent look very carefully after the proceedings of his tenants, he is sure to be cheated. Indeed it is hardly possible for him, do what he will, to obviate fraud. The tendency of this system is thus, in fact, twofold : first, to extinguish every germ of agricultural improvement ; and, second, to imbue the agriculturists with some of the worst vices ; leading them to found their hopes of advancement not so much on the exercise of their industry, as on their schemes to defraud the landlords.