Page:The Ethics of Urban Leaseholds.djvu/42

36 therefore, the great public has the paramount command. These estates of corporate bodies, livery companies, hospitals, commissioners and charities, and all church property, should be sold, with preference for the leaseholder, and the proceeds properly invested in the funds. The transfer would be an immense relief to governing committees, with a corresponding saving of administrative costs, and, as we have shown, a marvellous financial gain; the property would be more profitably used by individual freeholders, the amount of personal efficient interest in the land would be increased five hundred-fold, and in an equal ratio would be the increased care for beneficial public works, and the experienced intellectual power to achieve them.

It may be said in passing that these 'charity' estates are quite miscalled; they are not, for the most part, the result of 'love,' but of excessive fear. The 'pious' donors made their legacies by way of expiation for, perhaps, their lifelong want of charity; and the result is a continuance of the evil thus compounded for. The constant public work of charity has been forestalled and superseded by a vicious eleemosynary system, and it thus occurs that, notwithstanding, or by reason of its wealth, the great metropolis of England has become a pauper warren for improvident and ill-conditioned people.

When the enforced proprietary change has been in operation for a year or two, the public will appreciate their happy liberation from the incubus of law and middlemen, and public spirit will revive. The great proprietors throughout London will then see that their own interests and those of the community are quite concurrent, and their damage also; and that the cost of agencies and law, and the depreciated value of their property as leasehold, fall most heavily upon themselves; and seeing this they will, after some little self-assertion, of their own accord perhaps, apply the simple remedy.

There then would be a sound constituency of freeholders, possessing the intelligence, and interest, and will to scheme