took possession of those houses? What are we to say of laws which allow the validity of such a contract? The Jew money-lender who exacts 60 per cent, from the spendthrift heir is an honourable man compared with a landlord who takes a house because a month's rent is owing to him. This trumpery debt gives him the right to cancel a lease, and take possession for himself of a house built with his debtor's money. "Unearned increment" is the increase in the value of a site from external circumstances, and not from the exertions of the ground-owner of that site. Such external circumstances may be said to be almost invariably connected with increase of population, and this increase of population is always due to the exertions, not of the ground-owner, but of the occupier of the site.
Reckoning the "unearned increment" of London as, on an average of 20 years, £304,634,[1] it amounted during the 17 years from 1870 to 1886 (both years included), to £6,092,680. This increase, created by the industry and enterprise of the community, ought to benefit the community. At present it benefits the ground landlord. It takes place in all large towns. We can see what the industry and enterprise of a community means, if we read the evidence of Captain Richard O'Sullivan before the Select Committee on Town Holdings, in 1886.[2] He said: "Queenstown in the course of a century has grown by the sheer industry and enterprise of its inhabitants from a barren rock into a property valued at £21,000 a year, a value for a lump sum equivalent to half-a-million pounds. None of it has been created by the landlord, yet he tries to confiscate it. Nearly eight miles of roads and streets, with their flagged footways, main sewers, private drainage, crossings, channels, etc., costing at least £30,000, have been paid for out of the pockets of the people, and on the expiration of the leases the landlord confiscates them also.
- ↑ Mr Webb's calculation, based on the returns. The £6,092,680 is the "spontaneous increate" of the rental of London between the valuations of 1870 and 1886, £22,142,706 and £37,027,516.
- ↑ This was part of a larger Commission on the Housing of the Poor. The Commission sat from 1886 to 1889. Captain O'Sullivan had been Chairman of the Queenstown Commissioners for twenty years. He was sent to give evidence before the Select Committee, by the whole town, "without any distinction of class or creed."—See Reports, 1886, xii. 367 (213, Session 1).
