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.