Chapter 35

PER CONTRA; LAND RENTALS.

"If no interest should be charged on money, then no rents should be collected."

The early Christian apologists for usury, who felt it imperative to explain why it was permitted and practiced among Christians, found few arguments. They all agreed that the letter and spirit of the Scriptures forbade lending to the poor, upon interest. They also found it impossible to show from reason the right of money to an increase, but as money can readily be changed into other forms of property, as lands, they reversed the arguments; beginning with the assumed premise that it is right to charge rental for lands, and as money may represent lands, it is therefore right, they say, to charge interest on money.

"It seems as lawful for a man to receive interest for money, which another takes pains with, improves, but runs the hazard in trade, as it is to receive rent for our land, which another takes pains with, improves, but runs the hazard of in husbandry."

True logic would have led them to reason forward from the truth they had determined; that there is no valid reason justifying interest on money. Resting on this truth, and then discovering that money may represent lands, the necessary conclusion must be, that land rentals are without justice. Reversing the order of their argument, they assumed a false premise, and from it attempted to prove true the very proposition they had found to be false.

There is the usury of lands as well as of "money or victuals."

Forty years ago the Omaha Indians went across the river and cut some fine grass growing on open land, and carried it to their reservation. The owner of the land, living in a distant state, learning of this, claimed pay of the Indians and brought suit against them before the agent to recover it. The Indians admitted that they had cut and taken the grass; they also admitted its value. Their defense was that this man had no right superior to theirs. This was a natural growth that had cost him no labor, and they had not injured the land. Their speaker said, "If the man had dug the land and planted it in corn and hoed and tended the corn, the corn would have been his; but the Great Spirit made the grass grow and this man gave it no labor nor care; the buffalo or the cattle could eat it. Have we not the rights of the cattle? This man has no right to it."

The agent decided against them and compelled them to pay the man. They were much dissatisfied and felt they were unjustly treated and oppressed, because they had to pay that which the man had never earned. The red men were not versed in legal statutes nor educated in the tutelage of usury, but it can not be denied that they interpreted very accurately the law written in the reason and conscience: that no man has any especial claim to that which he has not earned.

The convictions of white men, and their method of compelling absentee owners to pay for the increase in value of their lands, came under the writer's observation in a new settlement near the Indians' reservation. He found three poor families in a district. They had little land and extremely plain homes, but there was a good school-house and a good school and an expensive bridge had been built across a stream to enable one of the families to reach it. Enquiring how they could afford to erect such improvements and support such a school, they replied that the lands all around them were owned by absentees, speculators in the east, who were holding the lands for the advance in value, which they, in their struggling poverty, should make by the improvement of the country, when they would gather in an "unearned increment." They said they had the power to levy taxes for bridges and for schools and they had determined to make the absentees in this way compensate them, in part, for the increment they were earning for them.

The conviction of right and justice in the white settler did not differ from the innate and untutored argument of the Indian. The Indians felt oppressed because they were compelled to pay the man for what that man had never earned. The white settlers determined to thwart the purpose of the absentee owners to gain an increment from their sacrifice and labor.

The landlord has a right to all that he has produced. When he has cleared away the forest or broken up the land; when he has planted the vineyard and builded the winepress, he has a right to let this out to husbandmen to gather the fruits of his preparation and planting and to share with them in the proportion each has contributed to the production, but to hold all that he himself has produced and yet claim a part of the product of another, is usury. A farmer retires from his farm because no longer able or willing to continue its cultivation. He has an undisputed right to a full reward for all his own labor, and for all he has purchased from others that he leaves in the farm. There must be a compensation for the transformation of the wilderness into a farm at the first, for the fertility that may have been added to the soil, for the orchards, vineyards, houses, barns and every improvement he may have made and left on the farm. He has an undisputed right to all the labor remaining in the farm. If he sells he expects compensation for all this.

But if he sells, he must begin at once to consume its price, unless he becomes a usurer and is supported by the interest. If he does not sell, but retains his farm, he must also begin at once to consume the farm.

For him to demand of his tenant that the farm shall remain as valuable as when he left it, the soil not permitted to become less fertile, the buildings to be kept from decay and restored when destroyed, the orchards to be kept vigorous and young by the planting of new trees and vines; in short, the farm to be preserved in full value and yet pay a rental, is usury in land.

The preservation of a farm or land and its restoration to the owner unimpaired after a term of years involves far more than persons not informed suppose. It seems to them unreasonable to farm a field and only return the unimpaired field to the owner.

While land is stable and possibly the most easily preserved of all forms of property, at least a thief cannot carry it away, yet the preservation of land involves great care and risk.

The taking of any crop from any land reduces its fertility. On the virgin, western fertile lands the farmers laughed at the thought that they should ever need to return fertilizers, but it was only a few years until they yearned for the fertility they had extravagantly wasted. Buildings inevitably decay and they may be destroyed by fire or storm. Orchards may be overturned by a cyclone or be destroyed by blight or by the thousand enemies of the various varieties of fruit trees. The land may be injured by washing that may require years to repair. A single storm has destroyed fields in this way that never can be restored. Noxious weeds take possession of land that can only be eradicated by infinite pains. In this state certain weeds are declared outlaws and must be destroyed by the farmer for the protection of his neighbors. The farmer in this locality must have an alert eye for Canada thistles and oxeye daisy. It often causes more labor to eradicate them than the land is worth on which they are growing.

If the annual renter was required to give bond for the return of the farm unimpaired, returning that which the crops and time must consume and destroy, taking all risks of every character upon himself, a thoughtful man, though poor and needing the opportunity, would hesitate. It might involve him in an obligation he could not discharge in his whole life through conditions and providences over which he has no control.

Practically in this country the owner renting a farm from year to year does consume it. It begins at once to decline in fertility, the improvements begin to fall into decay, weeds take possession, washes occur and are not repaired, and in a few years the half of the value is gone. The owner is fortunate if he has received in rentals sufficient to restore its former value.

Under a system of perpetual tenantry the case is different. If the fertility declines it is the tenant's loss. The improvements are his and may be sold as one could sell ordinary farm tools, but not to be removed. If they are impaired or destroyed it does not affect the annual rental.

The landed proprietor in city or country, who has permanent tenants, who are required to make every improvement and keep up perfectly the fertility, and who pay an annual rental, is in the same class as those who are receiving annual interest. The landlord practically holds a perpetual mortgage, and the rental is the interest or increase exacted generation after generation.

The debtor working under a mortgage is cheered by the hope that he may be able, some day, to lift it, but the perpetual tenant on entailed lands knows that he is doomed to hopeless tenantry. He can never own the land and he is in the power of the landlord, who is often oppressive.

Calvin, in his letter of apology for usury of money, speaks of the injustice of the landlords in requiring a rental for "some barren farm" and of the "harsher" conditions imposed upon the tenants. Indeed his whole argument, when summed up, is, that the usury of lands is more cruel and oppressive than the usury of money.

While it is not yet true in America, yet considering the landlordships of Ireland and Great Britain and the older countries, with their unremitted exactions, grinding the life out of their tenants for a mere subsistence, it is likely that the race is today suffering more from the injustice and oppression of usury of land than from the usury of money.

The land question is too large for one short chapter or for one small book. It requires more and deeper study than the subject has ever yet received. The ownership of lands cannot be absolute; it must be limited by the rights of those who live upon them, but the limitations have never yet been clearly defined. If a man has a right to live he must have a right to a place to live. If a child has a right to be born it must have a right to a place to be born. It cannot be that the mass of our race only touch the earth by the sufferance of those who claim to own it.

The unprecedented rapidity of the development of this country is owing more to its wise and beneficent land laws than to anything else. They are not perfect but the most favorable to the landless that the world has ever known. No landlordism, no binding up lands by entail to make it forever impossible to gain a title to a portion of the soil, but our land laws, wisely devised, gave hope of a home to the homeless everywhere. The result was that our people from the eastern part of our own country, and the landless from across the seas, swarmed over the mountains and filled the Ohio valley and pushed on to the great Mississippi and Missouri valleys, and in three generations have transformed this waste into happy homes. The possession of land, of a home, ennobles the character, produces a patriotic love of this country and stimulates devotion to her institutions. The landless foreigner who makes here a home of his own is unwavering in his loyalty to the country of his adoption. Those foreigners, who do not fall in love with our institutions and do not become assimilated with our people, are tenants here as they were before they came here. They are not attached to our soil; they do not secure homes of their own and are therefore restless and a menace.

A dangerous tendency has been developing throughout our whole land in these later years. The usury of lands is on the increase. Tenantry is becoming more common on the farms in the country, while the mass of our city populations are living in rented houses or flats or crowded tenements.

The yearning for a home of one's own is deeply imbedded in human nature. To be denied the privilege of living in one's own house is one of the greatest trials of a life. This tendency to tenantry is not because our people have come to care less for a home of their own, but the conditions are not such as to make a purchase of a home profitable; the interest on the purchase price is greater than the usury of the land or rental. The natural and desirable state is for every family to own and occupy their home, and those conditions should be encouraged which make it unprofitable for any one to own real property he does not himself occupy, and which make it easy and profitable for every family to own their own home.

When all lands are owned by those who occupy them, the prophet Micah's picture of the millennial dawn will be realized. Every man shall sit under his own vine and under his own fig tree and no one shall molest him or make him afraid, by demanding a rental or by serving a writ of ejectment.