Page:The Ethics of Urban Leaseholds.djvu/9



EASEHOLDS are eviscerated freeholds stuffed with law; a process first contrived when legal subtlety was perfectly matured, but social science and political economy were yet unknown. Property in land was then a corpus vile for the lawyers, who regarded it as a peculiar subject for their cleverest devices. Its superior productive capabilities were little cared for; agriculture made no cognizable progress, but no method for encumbering the land with trammels and complexities of law was, seemingly, neglected. The result appears in almost every acre of the soil, in almost every building on the land; but the bad influence of leasehold tenure is most evident in metropolitan and urban buildings, and on those who are in any way connected with them, whether freeholders of building land and their lessees, or builders, tenants, occupiers, we may even add beholders of our modern leasehold houses.

The freeholder, for whose behoof the system was invented, has a claim for special pity. He may possibly have been a blissful, unsophisticated, pastoral proprietor, but, in an evil hour, his men of business tell him that his quiet fields have been developed into building land; and then his misery begins. He seems to see before him the potentiality of wealth without exertion. He is called, by reason of this building land, a man of property; and hearing, and of course believing