15 SECTION II. On Peasant Rents: on their Separation into Labor, Metayer, Ryot, and Cottier Rents. Book 1. Chap. i. Peasant WHILE the laborer is confined to the culture of the soil on his own account, because it is in that manner alone that he can obtain access to the wages on which he is to subsist, the form and amount of the Rents he pays are determined by a direct contract sion. こ between himself and the proprietor. The provisions of these contracts are influenced sometimes by the laws, and almost always by the long established usages, of the countries in which they are made. The main object in all is, to secure a revenue to the proprietors with the least practicable amount of trouble or risk on their part. Though governed in common by some important principles, the variety in the minuter details of this class of Rents is of course almost infinite. But men will be driven in similar situations to very similar expedients, and the general mass of peasant rents may be separated into four great divisions, comprising 1st, Labor Rents, 2dly, Metayer Rents, 3dly, Ryot Rents (borrowing the last term from the country in which we are most familiar with them, India). These three will be found occupying in contiguous masses the breadth of the old world, from the Canary Islands to the shores of China and the Pacific, and deciding, each in its own sphere, not merely the economical relations of the landlords and BOOK 1. tenants, but the political and social condition of the mass of the people. Chap. i. Peasant Rents, division. To these must be added a fourth division, that of Cottier Rents, or Rents paid by a laborer extracting his own wages from the land, but paying his rent in money, as in Ireland and part of Scotland. This class is small, but peculiarly interesting to Englishmen, from the fact of its prevalence in the sister island, and from the influence it has exercised, and seems likely for some time yet to exercise, over the progress and circumstances of the Irish people. CHAP. II. SECT. I. Labor Rents, or Serf Rents. BOOK I. Chap. ii. Labor or THE landed proprietors of rude nations usually dislike, and are unfit for, the task of superintending labor, and if they can rely, through the receipt of produce rents, on a supply of necessaries suited to Serf Rents. their purposes, they uniformly throw upon the peasant the whole business of cultivation. But their being able to do this in security supposes in the tenants themselves, some skill, and habits of voluntary and regular labor: they must be trust-worthy too, to a certain extent. There is, however, a point in the progress of civilization, below which the body of the people do not possess these qualifications: when, though driven to agriculture by their numbers, they still possess many of the qualities of the savage; and are not yet ripe for the regular payment of produce or money rents; because their ignorance, their impatience of toil, and their improvidence, would expose the proprietor to considerable danger of starvation, if he depended on their punctuality for the support of himself, and his household. However averse to the employment, the proprietors may be, they must in this stage of society, take B Sect. 1. Labor or BOOK I. some share in the burthen of conducting cultivation. Chap. ii. They may contrive, however, to get rid of the task of raising food for the laborers, who are the instruments of that cultivation. They usually set aside for their use a portion of the estate, and leave them to extract their own subsistence from it, at their own risk. They exact as a rent for the land thus abandoned, a certain quantity of labor, to be used upon the remaining portion of the estate, which is retained in the hands of the proprietor. Such is the expedient which seems generally to have suggested itself to the owners of the soil, while the laborers have been in this state of half civilization, and while no capitalists yet existed. In the Society Islands, the chiefs allot to their tenants about sixty acres of land each. The rent paid for these consists of work done for a certain number of days at the call of the chief on his own demesne farm'. They are perhaps the rudest people among whom this mode of occupying and cultivating the soil can be observed; and it is instructive to remark among these Islanders of the Antipodes, the necessities of their position giving birth to a system, which was once nearly universal in Europe, and which still prevails over the larger portion of it. Arrangements somewhat similar to these exist in some of our West Indian Islands, between the negroes and the owners of the estates to which they belong. 1 Appendix III. But the people by whom labor rents w blished on the widest scale, and were comm to the vast countries in which they did, principally prevail, were the nations of Easter rope, the inhabitants of the deserts of Germany, and the wastes beyond the Vistula. Some of the tribes, who invaded the lower empire, had begun to resort partially to agriculture for subsistence before the period of their irruption, and it is probable that this system was even then not unknown to them; but however this may have been, they certainly established it most extensively throughout their conquests in Western Europe; and when their own fastnesses, the wastes from which they had migrated, became more regularly peopled and settled, this was the mode of cultivating the land, which universally prevailed there. It prevails there still. In their conquests westward of the Rhine, it took for a time strong hold of the habits of the people to whom they introduced it, has left deep traces in their laws, and yet lingers in particular spots; but from this portion of Europe, the peculiar circumstances of some nations, and the advance of civilization in all, have repelled the system, which has given place to other forms of the relation between proprietors and tenants. In the countries eastward of the Rhine it is still found paramount; not wholly unbroken, and shewing every where symptoms of gradual or approaching change, but fashioning still the frame of society, and exercising a predominant influence over the industry and fortunes of all ranks of people. or or Serf Rents. |