cent, securities, they will in ninety years amount to six and thirty thousand pounds (£36,000), seven times the value of the so much-prized house property reversion. Or if all the current income were employed judiciously in trade, at only ten per cent, net profit on mere annual returns, the 'reversion' would amount to upwards of a million (£1,195,200). The freeholders' reversion, then, is very dear; the man who sells his freehold is the wise financier; and trusts prohibiting a sale are hindrances to wealth.
But when two-thirds, or thereabouts, of ninety years has passed, and the slow, gradual increment of fortune comes, how seldom and how little do the owners find themselves the better for their long-expected good. In almost every case the property has been negotiated or encumbered, turned to some account by way of fines or premiums or mortgages, or any of the methods that the law provides for eating up the land. Besides, after some ninety years or more of use and of exposure houses will show age and wear. They were not built to last beyond the term, nor yet designed for comfortable human occupation; but, for the most part, they were planned to suit the fashion and the folly of the day. The fashions having changed, the houses lose their character for style; they are old fashioned, and are accounted quite inferior. Whole neighbourhoods become neglected, and forsaken by the well-to-do; and, notwitstanding lawyers and surveyors, sink into a hopeless state of squalour and dilapidation. They are then called 'rookeries.' Thus in every period of its course, in its preparation and its consequences, leasehold tenure is a noxious system, and the transmutation of the freehold is in every way an injury to the proprietor.
But building speculators are, like leasing freeholders, the victims and results, if they are also agents, of the leasehold system. These poor men are seldom destitute of merit; they are probably indifferent workmen, who, by force of character and exceptional capacity for supervision and control, have
