Suppose you're a young farmer, and you don't own the
land you farm on. What percentage of your gross income do
you think the landlord deserves for her effort? What
percentage of your net income do you think the landlord
deserves for his effort? If a retired farmer can't charge
someone else for the use of his land, how is he/she to
live in retirement? What about the landless farmer's
retirement?
As for rack-rent, which is simply a rent fixed at
short intervals by competition, that is in the United
States even a more common way of letting land than in
Ireland. In our cities the majority of our people live in
houses rented from month to month or year to year for the
highest price the landlord thinks he can get. The usual
term, in the newer States, at least, for the letting of
agricultural land is from season to season. And that the
rent of land in the United States comes, on the whole,
more closely to the standard of rack, or full competition rent,
there can be, I think, little doubt. That the land of
Ireland is, as the apologists for landlordism say,
largely under-rented (that is, not rented for the full
amount the landlord might get with free competition) is
probably true. Miss C. G. O'Brien, in a recent article in
the Nineteenth Century, states that the tenant-farmers
generally get for such patches as they sub-let to their
laborers twice the rent they pay the landlords. And we
hear incidentally of many "good landlords," i.e.,
landlords not in the habit of pushing their tenants for
as much as they might get by rigorously demanding all
that any one would give. ...
... Human nature is about the same the world over, and
the Irish Landlords as a class are no better nor worse
than would be other men under like conditions. An
aristocracy such as that of Ireland has its virtues as
well as its vices, and is influenced by sentiments which
do not enter into mere business transactions –
sentiments which must often modify and soften the
calculations of cold self-interest. But
with us the letting of land is as much a business matter
as the buying or selling of wheat or of stocks. An
American would not think he was showing his goodness by
renting his land for low rates, any more than he would
think he was showing his goodness by selling wheat for
less than the market price, or stocks for less than the
quotations. So in those districts of France and
Belgium where the land is most sub-divided, the peasant
proprietors, says M. de Laveleye, boast to one another of
the high rents they get, just as they boast of the high
prices they get for pigs or for poultry.
The best measure of rent is, of
course, its proportion to the produce. The only
estimate of Irish rent as a proportion of which I know is
that of Buckle, who puts it at one-fourth of the produce.
In this country I am inclined to think
one-fourth would generally be considered a moderate rent.
Even in California there is considerable land rented for
one-third the crop, and some that rents for one-half the
crop; while, according to a writer in the
Atlantic Monthly, the common rent
in that great wheat-growing section of the New Northwest
now being opened up is one-half the crop! ... read
the whole article