Page:The Ethics of Urban Leaseholds.djvu/18

12 been advanced in their own sphere to some position of command. They are invited to become leaseholders; and, stepping confidently and with eagerness into the stream of speculation, frequently from sheer inexperience, and before they are aware, they lose their footing and are carried downward by the stream, perhaps just floating for a while, but almost sure to be at length submerged. The process has a hardening effect, and many a London speculator has, not merely once or twice, compounded with his creditors. The bankruptcies and 'compromises' by one generation of the speculating builders about London are, it has been said, more numerous than the men themselves. We seldom hear of speculating builders who have been remarkably successful, but occasionally, after lives of care and scampish work, they make, perhaps by some mere accident, what they esteem a fortune; or more probably they sink in middle age, exhausted, out of sight below the lowest level even of a leasehold tenure. Would that their works might follow them!

Of course, considering the ill repute and risks of speculating leasehold work, few prudent men of capital will seriously engage in it. The business, therefore, is almost entirely left to needy men, who, as they build, immediately charge the carcasses with mortgages and loans, involving costly and unnecessary deeds. Thus it occurs that speculating builders are so grievously oppressed by law. Besides, in modern leases, there is now a customary clause, requiring that all demises, under-leases, and assignments, which include the mortgages and charges, shall be registered and copied by the freeholder's solicitor, who is to receive on each occasion some two guineas as his fee. New houses frequently remain for twenty years or more negotiable and encumbered ere they settle down into the hands of individual proprietors; and by the fees and costs on a suburban leasehold the solicitor may make, for years, an income greater than the freeholder's gross rental.

With the speculating builders should be classed their