Rents, payable of course to the State, were to be one-tenth of the produce. Now rents cannot with any justice be settled that way. The farmer who farms poor land should be as well off and get as good a return for his labour as he who farms rich land. Under ordinary competition things turn out that way. All farmers in theory, and approximately in practice, receive the same return for labour and capital applied to land, and the margin goes to the landlord as rent.
Ruskin’s system is known as the metayer system, only that half, not one-tenth of, the profits usually go to the landlord. It is an old-fashioned, primitive, and uneconomic system, and is used in Italy, Portugal, on the Danube, in Russia, and over about one-seventh of France. At the time of the French Revolution, Arthur Young found seven-eighths of France managed in this way. It is suited for small holdings; but it discourages intensive culture, for it would be no use for a metayer tenant to spend £1 in increasing his product by £2, if half of the £2 went to the landlord. Ruskin liked it because it made a friendly co-operation between landlord and tenant. There was never any clash of interests, and the tenant was never under real hardship. It is morally a much more attractive plan. It bars any keen competition between tenants and it leads to permanency of tenure.
Throughout Ruskin’s proposals for reform we shall nearly always find in each something fanciful and dainty, but impracticable--a sort of pretty decoration tacked on in gaiety of heart, in the spirit of Gothic ornamentation. But if we knock off his little pinnacles, and deny ourselves the glow of his stained glass windows, we shall generally find a commodious and serviceable erection of constructive reform left. In fact, he turns out to have been on the main stream of progress, though pleading all the time that he was harking back to a happier past. His agricultural and business proposals contained fruitful elements, appearing ahead of their time; events from many sides have proved how illuminating his suggestions were.
Ruskin, as we have noted, would limit all incomes at the top by slicing off the superfluity and giving a title instead. In occult ways, unfortunately, peerages and baronetcies and knighthoods do come about by the sacrifice of cash; and in more open and creditable form the graduated income tax, the super-tax, and the steeply rising death duties are partial measures in the same direction.