Suppose you're a young farmer, and you don't own the land you farm on. What
percentage of your gross income do you think the landlord deserves for her
effort? What percentage of your net income do you think the landlord deserves
for his effort? If a retired farmer can't charge someone else for the use of
his land, how is he/she to live in retirement? What about the landless farmer's
retirement?
As for rack-rent, which is simply a rent fixed at
short intervals by competition, that is in the United States even a
more common way of letting land than in Ireland. In our cities the
majority of our people live in houses rented from month to month or
year to year for the highest price the landlord thinks he can get.
The usual term, in the newer States, at least, for the letting of
agricultural land is from season to season. And that the rent of land
in the United States comes, on the whole, more closely to the
standard of rack, or full competition rent, there can be, I think,
little doubt. That the land of Ireland is, as the apologists for
landlordism say, largely under-rented (that is, not rented for the
full amount the landlord might get with free competition) is probably
true. Miss C. G. O'Brien, in a recent article in the Nineteenth
Century, states that the tenant-farmers generally get for such
patches as they sub-let to their laborers twice the rent they pay the
landlords. And we hear incidentally of many "good landlords," i.e.,
landlords not in the habit of pushing their tenants for as much as
they might get by rigorously demanding all that any one would
give. ...
... Human nature is about the same the world over, and the
Irish Landlords as a class are no better nor worse than would be
other men under like conditions. An aristocracy such as that of
Ireland has its virtues as well as its vices, and is influenced by
sentiments which do not enter into mere business
transactions – sentiments which must often modify and soften the
calculations of cold self-interest. But
with us the letting of land
is as much a business matter as the buying or selling of wheat or of
stocks. An American would not think he was showing his goodness by
renting his land for low rates, any more than he would think he was
showing his goodness by selling wheat for less than the market price,
or stocks for less than the quotations. So in those districts of
France and Belgium where the land is most sub-divided, the peasant
proprietors, says M. de Laveleye, boast to one another of the high
rents they get, just as they boast of the high prices they get for
pigs or for poultry.
The best measure of rent is, of
course, its proportion to the
produce. The only estimate of Irish rent as a proportion of
which I
know is that of Buckle, who puts it at one-fourth of the produce. In
this country I am inclined to think one-fourth would generally be
considered a moderate rent. Even in California there is considerable
land rented for one-third the crop, and some that rents for one-half
the crop; while, according to a writer in the Atlantic Monthly, the
common rent in that great wheat-growing section of the New Northwest
now being opened up is one-half the crop!
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