Page:The Complete Works of Henry George Volume 3.djvu/38

 30 THE LAND QUESTION.

3d. To establish tribunals of arbitrament which shall decide upon appeal the rent to be paid.

4th. To have the State buy out the landlords and sell again on time to the tenants.

The first of these propositions is good in itself. To make the transfer of land easy would be to remove obsta- cles which prevent its passing into the hands of those who would make the most out of it. But, so far as this will have any effect at all, it will not be toward giving the Irish tenants more merciful landlords ; nor yet will it be to the diffusion of landed property. Those who think so shut their eyes to the fact that the tendency of the time is to concentration.

As for the propositions which look in various forms to the establishment of tenant-right, it is to be observed that, in so far as they go beyond giving the tenant surety for his improvements, they merely carve out of the estate of the landlord an estate for the tenant. Even if the pro- posal to empower the courts, in cases of dispute, to decide what is a fair rent were to amount to anything (and the Land Leaguers say it would not), the fixing of a lower rent as the share of the landlord would merely enable the tenant to charge a higher price to his successor. What- ever might thus be done for present agricultural tenants would be of no use to future tenants, and nothing what- ever would be done for the masses of the people. In fact, that the effect would be to increase rent in the aggregate there can be no doubt. Whatever modification might be made in the landlord's demands, the sum which the out- going tenant would ask would be very certain to be all he could possibly get, so that rent in the aggregate, instead of being diminished, would be screwed up to the full competition or rack-rent standard.

What seem to be considered the most radical proposi- tions yet made are those for the creation of a " peasant

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