Page:The Land Question.djvu/11

11 solicitors making profits out of the sale of each house, to say nothing of the profits made by the bank and the loan-company. Of course somebody must pay for all this, and that somebody is the purchaser; that is, instead of simply buying a bit of land from its owner and building a house, or buying a house built by the ground-landlord, I am compelled to pay a price sufficiently high to remunerate, besides the builder and the vendor's solicitor, three extra solicitors, a bank, and a money-lending Company; and when all this is done I am unable to make any alteration in the house without begging leave, and every penny that I spend upon it in improvements will be taken away from my representatives at the end of the lease, and become the ground-landlord's property. This seems hard enough; but how much more hard and inequitable is the case of the manufacturer or the tradesman whose industry has really given value to the spot he occupies. He may have been working at a loss during all the earlier years of his lease, or at any rate giving up the best years of his life to the development of his business from small beginnings; and then, when it has begun to be remunerative and to recoup him for his efforts, in comes the landlord and appropriates all the increased value given to the premises. The remedy as between tenant and landlord seems simple enough, namely, that proposed by Mr. Broadhurst's Bill, empowering every tenant with more than 20 years' lease unexpired to acquire, on equitable terms, the fee simple of his holding. The landlord would get what his reversionary interest is fairly worth; and the tenant, if he made the place more valuable by his industry, would get the fruits of his labour. And if it be said that good neighbourhoods would be spoilt by people introducing unpleasant businesses when they got the property in their own hands, that objection could be easily remedied by making the ownership of each tenant subject to the same stipulations against nuisances or annoyances which existed in his lease, and giving to other occupants of the estate the same power of enforcing those provisions which originally belonged to the ground-landlord.

But I think that the Leasehold Enfranchisement Bill does not go far enough. It would only secure existing leaseholders from confiscation or extortion when their leases are up; it would not