ownership of agricultural land, and
with the relations between landlord and tenant serve to soften the
edge of economic law, and to subject the rents which are actually
fixed to the control in no small measure of the general sense of what
is fair or customary. In such cases the landlord makes the farmer a
present, for the time being, of part of the economic rent. On the
other hand, as Irish agrarian history well illustrates, the landlord
may sometimes expropriate under the name of rent, permanent
improvements which are due to the labors or the expenditure of the
tenant. This is, of course, particularly likely to happen, whenever it
is the custom to leave to the tenant the obligation of providing the
capital equipment of the farm, which in Great Britain is, for the most
part, the recognized duty of the owner. Again, in the case of urban
land in the South of England, expropriations of this kind are an
essential and well-understood feature of the leasehold system. The
owner grants a lease for a long period of time, usually ninety-nine
years, for a ground rent, which is notoriously below the true economic
rent of the land, subject to the condition that the leaseholder must
erect upon the land and keep in good repair certain buildings, which
on expiry of the lease will become the property of the ground
owner. Here the nominal ground rent is only part of the total rent
which is really paid; the ultimate transference of the buildings
representing often the more important part. There is, in fact, a great
variety of systems of land tenure, some of which are highly complex,
the respective merits of which vary greatly, and which constitute a
most important problem for statesmen and legislators. Considerations
of this kind in no way diminish the importance of the general analysis
of rent, which we are pursuing in the present chapter. Rather they
make it the more important, because we cannot properly weigh the
merits of any system of land tenure, until we have grasped clearly the
principles governing the rent of land in the purest form. But
certainly we must never forget that the rent we are discussing may
differ very greatly from, though it will vitally influence, the money
payments which are called rent in actual life. It is the pure economic
rent, the rent which represents the _full_ annual payment which it
would be worth paying to obtain the use of the land alone, which will
measure, as we have said, the differential advantage of