to devise schemes such as this of making a house and the land on which it is built return at the end of ninety- nine years to the ground landlord. This device, framed by the conveyancing counsel of the great landowners, is eagerly seized on by tradesmen, who invest their savings in land for building, and have been heard to declare the delight with which they would step in at the end of ninety-nine years and take away the house from the children of the man who built it or bought it from the builder of it. To any one who has not got saddled with the vampire notion that ninety-nine years' leases are part of the original scheme of Creation, it is at once a monstrous absurdity and intolerable injustice that, when a man builds a house on another man's land, for the use of which he pays a yearly ground-rent representing at the date of the lease not merely the full annual value of the land on which the house is built, but double, sometimes treble[1] its annual value, the person to
- ↑ A case came to my knowledge only yesterday where land, the annual value of which was £6, was let for building a house at a ground rent of twenty guineas. The gentleman who built the house for himself at a cost of £2000, on a ninety-nine years' lease, built a house that would last more than double ninety-nine years. Consequently the ground-
