Page:The Ethics of Urban Leaseholds.djvu/52

46 to understand the fabric of his house. To go beyond, and be a virtuoso in the arts of Italy and Greece, when everything is barbarous at home, is an absurd neglect of opportunity. In popular domestic architecture with a systematic freehold tenure, art, constantly employed in combination with utility would be enduring, dignified, and reticent. Men's intellects when occupied about such work would be ennobled, and the house itself would every year be so improved as to command the higher price spontaneously offered for judicious and artistic work, superior to fashion.

On the other hand the leasehold system is, in art, in policy, and in all things that affect the character of men, an obvious injury and failure; and it must ere long be superseded. The substantial tenure that will take its place is nothing new or complex, but the earliest, the simplest, and most dignified on record. Abraham, although a stranger, would not 'take' Machpelah even as a gift, he bought it as a burial-place, and David equally repudiated an uncertain tenure. Our fine medieval buildings were on freehold land, and art has wholly perished from the scene of leasehold tenure. If we return to unsophisticated freeholds art will certainly revive; each householder will seek to make his home more beautiful and excellent, and by this exercise of noble care he will obtain a corresponding increment of honour and of self-respect.

Nothing whatever has been said, or can be said, in rational defence of leasehold tenure. It is a custom wholly destitute of merit, and without beneficence. It is alike injurious to the freeholder, and to those who build, and buy, and rent the houses, and inhabit them. It degrades the moral tone and spirit of the people, it prevents municipal reform, it is a constant and increasing injury to the workmen and the poor, and in poetic building art the whole of London is its pattern card. Is, then, the system worth preserving?

The lawyers may be first appealed to for a merciful reply. Their antiquated and unkindly artifices have bewitched house