"Political economists generally, and English political economists above others, are accustomed to lay almost exclusive stressupon the first of these agencies; to exaggerate the effect of competition, and take into little account the other, andconflicting principle.They are apt to express themselves as if they thought that competition actually does, in all cases,whatever it can be shewn to be the tendency of competition to do.This is partly intelligible, if we consider that only throughthe principle of competition has political economy any pretension to the character of a science.So far as rents, profits,wages, prices, are determined by competition, laws may be assigned for them."And this applies especially to the tenure of land, (p.285):
"The relations, more especially, between the landowner and the cultivator, and the payments made by the latter to theformer, are, in all states of society but the most modern, determined by the usage of the country.Never until late times havethe conditions of the occupancy of land been (as a general rule) an affair of competition.The occupier for the time has verycommonly been considered to have a right to retain his holding, while he fulfils the customary requirements; and has thusbecome, in a certain sense, a co-proprietor of the soil.Even where the holder has not acquired this fixity of tenure, the termsof occupation have often been fixed and invariable.
"In India, for example, and other Asiatic communities similarly constituted, the ryots, or peasant-farmers, are not regardedas tenants at will, or even as tenants by virtue of a lease.In most villages there are indeed some ryots on this precariousfooting, consisting of those, or the descendants of those, who have settled in the place at a known and comparatively recentperiod: but all who are looked upon as descendants or representatives of the original inhabitants, are thought entitled toretain their land, as long as they pay the customary rents.What these customary rents are, or ought to be, has indeed, inmost cases, become a matter of obscurity; usurpation, tyranny, and foreign conquest having to a great degree obliterated theevidences of them.But when an old and purely Hindoo principality falls under the dominion of the British Government, orthe management of its officers, and when the details of the revenue system come to be in quired into, it is often found thatalthough the demands of the great landholder, the State, have been swelled by fiscal rapacity until all limit is practically lostsight of, it has yet been thought necessary to have a distinct name and a separate pretext for each increase of exaction; sothat the demand has sometimes come to consist of thirty or forty different items, in addition to the nominal rent.Thiscircuitous mode of increasing the payments assuredly would not have been resorted to, if there had been an acknowledgedright in the landlord to increase the rent.Its adoption is a proof that there was once an effective limitation, a real customaryrent; and that the understood right of the ryot to the land, so long as he paid rent according to custom, was at some time orother more than nominal.The British Government of India always simplifies the tenure by consolidating the variousassessments into one, thus making the rent nominally as well as really an arbitrary thing, or at least a matter of specificagreement: but it scrupulously respects the right of the ryot to the land, though it seldom leaves him much more than a baresubsistence.
"In modern Europe the cultivators have gradually emerged from a state of personal slavery.The barbarian conquerors of theWestern empire found that the easiest mode of managing their conquests would be to leave the land in the hands in whichthey found it, and to save themselves a labour so uncongenial as the superintendence of troops of slaves, by allowing theslaves to retain in a certain degree the control of their own actions, under an obligation to furnish the lord with provisionsand labour.A common expedient was to assign to the serf, for his exclusive use, as much land as was thought sufficient forhis support, and to make him work on the other lands of his lord whenever required.By degrees these indefinite obligationswere transformed into a definite one, of supplying a fixed quantity of provisions or a fixed quantity of labour: and as thelords, in time, became inclined to employ their income in the purchase of luxuries rather than in the maintenance of retainers,the payments in kind were commuted for payments in money.Each concession, at first voluntary, and revocable at pleasure,gradually acquired the force of custom, and was at last recognised and enforced by the tribunals.In.this manner the serfsprogressively rose into a free tenantry, who held their land in perpetuity on fixed conditions.The conditions were sometimesvery onerous, and the people very miserable.But their obligations were determined by the usage or law of the country, andnot by competition.
"Where the cultivators had never been, strictly speaking, in personal bondage, or after they had ceased to be so, theexigencies of a poor and little advanced society gave rise to another arrangement, which in some parts of Europe, evenhighly improved parts, has been found sufficiently advantageous to be continued to the present day.I speak of the métayersystem.Under this, the land is divided, in small farms, among single families, the landlord generally supplying the stockwhich the agricultural system of the country is considered to require, and receiving, in lieu of rent and profit, a fixedproportion of the produce.This proportion, which is generally paid in kind, is usually, (as is implied in the words métayer,mezzaiuolo, and medietarius,) one-half.There are places, however, such as the rich volcanic soil of the Province of Naples.
where the landlord takes two-thirds, and yet the cultivator by means of an excellent agriculture contrives to live.Butwhether the proportion is two-thirds or one-half, it is a fixed proportion; not variable from farm to farm, or from tenant totenant.The custom of the country is the universal rule; nobody thinks of raising or lowering rents, or of letting land on otherthan the customary conditions.Competition, as a regulator of rent, has no existence."
