Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/484

468 had bought from proprietors 843,981 acres of land, and had sold 679,832 acres at an average price of $1.59 per acre. The usual Government terms of sale were one fifth cash, and the remainder payable in ten equal annual installments, with interest at six per cent. On December 31, 1882, the last date up to which statements regarding arrears were published, it was shown that by purchasers who had made no payments whatever during terms varying from three to fifteen years, $200,648 was due in arrears to the Government. A pretty general feeling seemed to prevail among them that new concessions would be granted delinquents, who as a class were numerous enough to make the authorities charged with collection very lenient indeed to put it mildly.

In quieting disturbances and placing real estate in the hands of its occupiers and users, the Land Transfer Act did unquestionable good. In the passage and administration of the act a favoring of the tenants and ex-tenants is most manifest. Before sales to tenants began there was a classification of lands according to value, and tenants usually bought at prices somewhat below cost, and occasionally at prices much below cost. Tenants in buying properties which they had cultivated were freed from all arrears of rent due to the date of acquisition by Government. Improvements of all kinds which they had effected on their lands had been, and continued to be, their property; as such these improvements, houses, barns, fences, and what not, had entered into no calculation of the Government's when buying and selling.

Since the act went into operation a good many tenant-purchasers have sold out their holdings, and, considering the value of their improvements, usually at a marked advance on the purchase price, bearing out to some extent the complaints of the original proprietors that too little had been paid them. It is difficult to arrive at the truth of this much-disputed matter; a fair approximation alone is possible. Wilderness lands bought some years ago from the Government, and still unimproved, sell at a considerable premium. Cultivated farms do not as a rule realize so handsome an advance, and in their prices is to be considered the very variable element of value—tenants' improvements. It is generally thought in the island that something more than the mere sentiment of ownership as distinguished from tenancy was sought to be gratified by the land agitation. For twenty years before 1875 a suffrage practically universal was enjoyed by the island. A voting majority had it in their power to modify the tenure of property in their own interest, and they exercised it through their parliamentary representatives. To-day the effect of a habit of mind acquired in the years during which concession after concession was made to tenants is still plain. Arrears due the Government go on accumulating, it would seem, with the expectation that in the future they may be wiped off the slate. The tenants when they became purchasers had decidedly good bargains; they would certainly not have agitated as they did