THE SITTING TENANT. B UT for the success of Mr. Balfour's
amendment, we should say that the Agricultural Holdings Bill was moving on fast. Two clauses in as many days, when in one of them is embodied the two main principles of the measure, is excellent progress. But then Mr. Balfour's amendment may be thought to strike at one of these main principles, and, in that case, the progress of the Bill may yet be delayed by efforts made to get the recent decision of the House reversed or modified. Still, it is something that the question of the sitting tenant has been got out of the way, and the successive divisions of Tuesday night have at all events accomplished this. The strength of the Farmers' Alliance has been fairly ganged, and it is quite clear that in the existing House of Commons its strength is to Bit still. On the whole, we are a little surprised that the sitting tenant was not able to make a better fight. There is a superficial equity about his claims which we should have expected to win more sympathy than was actually forthcoming. When once it has been admitted that a tenant who has made improvencents is entitled to claim compensation for them when he quits his holding, why should not he be equally entitled to claim com- pensation if his rent is raised in consideration of them ? In the one case, no doubt, he leaves so much of his capital behind him, and if he gets no compensation, it is altogether lost to him. But in the other case, this same capital may conceivably be made to yield him no profit. Sup- posing, for example, his rent is £100 a year, and he has laid out £1,000 upon the land. He is out of pocket by the in- terest which he has either to pay if he borrowed the money, or to forego if he has taken it out of other investments, but he hopes to recoup himself for this by the increased value of the farm. The landlord, however, is equally aware of this in- creased value, and at once raises the rent in proportion. Con- sequently, the tenant is worse off than he would have been if he had made no improvements. In that case, he would have kept or not have borrowed his £1,000, and have gone on paying his old rent. As it is, he has spent his £1,000, and has to pay a higher rent into the bargain. How can it be just to leave him without protection against such a con- tingency?
To this we answer, first, that the Bill does in a great measure protect him ; and next, that so far as it does not, he could only be protected at the cost of an entire revolution in a land system which, on the whole, works well, and which only a very small minority of those who work it wish to upset. The power of the landlord to raise the rent on a sitting tenant's improvements will, if this Bill becomes law, be limited to a very narrow margin. The sitting tenant can always hold over the landlord the threat of becoming an out-going tenant. Con- sequently, whenever the landlord thinks of raising the rent on a tenant's improvements, he may in ordinary times be sure of getting the higher rent he asks, but in all probability he will only get it after he has paid the value of the improvements. When he has done that, he can let the farm to a new tenant, or he can make a fresh bargain with the former tenant. If he attempts to get the rent he would charge a new tenant out of the sitting tenant, with- out recouping him for the money he has spent on the land, he will lay himself open to the answer,—" Pay me the value of my improvements, and look out for another tenant. It will answer my purpose better to go away with my money in my pocket and find a land:ord who will deal fairly by me, than to May with a landlord who would, if he could, make an improv- ing tenant pay twice over for his own improvements." No doubt there is a margin within which this argument will not hold water. Though no landlord will be inclined to risk the annoy- ance of losing a good tenant, and having to pay money down into the bargain, there may be some who will try to raise a sitting tenant's rent not by the full value, nor anything near the full value of the improvements he has made, but by just so much as he thinks the tenant will be disposed to pay, rather than incur the cost and trouble of moving. They will not, that is to say, turn the rent which was £100 into £150, but they will make it £105, or £110. But even this will be attended with some risk, for the tenant may choose to leave rather than pay even this much in addition to what he pays already, and even if he does not leave, he will certainly not pay a higher rent, all told, than he calculates he can pay and make a profit. Consequently, the injustice against which Parliament has been vainly asked to protect him will, under this Bill, be very small, and only be committed in exceptional cases.
If for the sake of remedying even this the Government had accepted the amendment moved by Mr. Borlase, they would have committed themselves to the impracticable task of giving the English tenant the same security as they have given the Irish tenant, without importing the special machinery by which in Ireland this end has been attained. How is the sitting tenant to be protected against a rise of rent, unless a tribunal is created to determine what was a fair rent for the farm before the improvement was made ? If im- provements effected by the tenant were the only ground on which rent is ever raised, such a tribunal would not be required ; but who is to say, when the rent of a farm is raised, whether the rise is due to a general rise of rent in the district, or to an accidental increase in the productive capabilities of the soil, or to the opening of a new market in the neighbour- hood, or to some other circumstance quite unconnected with any improvements made by the sitting tenant ?
Before a demand for a higher rent can safely be put down to this last cause, the probabilities of its being due to one or more of the other causes must be carefully weighed. In point of fact, a judicial rent must first be fixed which shall take all these circumstances into account, and it is only of any excess over and above this judicial rent that the Judge will be able to say with any certainty that it is rent charged on the tenant's improvements, and so need not be paid until the landlord has recouped him for what he has done. It will not be enough, however, that the rent has thus been fixed, unless there is some prohibition against allowing it to be raised for a certain number of years. A judicial rent which only held good for the year in which it was fixed, would be no protection whatever to a sitting tenant. He would merely be secured against a rise of rent for twelve months, and after that time he would be in the same position that he is in now. Thus we are led irresistibly to the second of the distinctive features of the Irish Land Act. The establishment of a judicial rent would be one such feature ; the definition of a period within which a land. lord should be forbidden either to raise an improving tenant'a rent, or to give him notice to quit, would be another. After that, it would certainly seem hard to forbid a tenant from dis- posing of the right thus created ; and the third feature, free sale, would follow in the wake of the two others. The result of introducing this system was very well described by Sir Thomas Acland on Wednesday. It would be to "put an end for ever to that which has been the great foundation of the prosperity of English agriculture,—the system under which fair-minded landlords with intelligent agents had pursued, for a century at least, the policy of engaging good tenants, treat. ing them liberally, and letting them make a fair and re- munerative profit on their farms, with the expectation that twenty years afterwards the land would be worth more money." The advocates of the sitting tenant—the sitting tenants them- selves do not seem to care much about the matter—must make out a much stronger case than anything we have yet had from them, before it will seem good policy to exchange this state of things for that which, under wholly different circumstances, has been set up in Ireland.
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