cultivators themselves, be outside the bounds of practical realisation. The alternative employments may exist, and yet want of ability or intelligence may debar the cultivators from availing themselves of the opportunities thus presented. This, also, has been asserted to be the case with regard to large districts in Ireland; and the position of some classes of small urban tenants has been represented as similar. Mr. Sidney Webb, in his evidence before the Town Holdings Committee, recently described[1] 'certain localities' of London as 'economically equivalent to Connaughts,' because the tenants were compelled by an 'inability to move,' and the 'absolute necessity of being near their occupation,' 'to pay much more than anything which could reasonably be called the economic rent.' So far as these tenants are forced to live in certain districts in order to prosecute their special industry, they may be said to resemble those Irish tenants, who are represented as having no alternative employment to agriculture; and, so far as they are compelled by their want of industrial capacity to follow certain trades, they resemble the Irish tenants, to whom the alternative employments, which exist, are said to be practically closed. In any event they appear to share with them this common characteristic, that they are not independent, intelligent agents, able to make the best bargain in the best market.
The failure of competitive influences to be present in their fulness has of late been prominently urged both in connection with the taxation of ground-rents in urban districts and the payment of tithe on agricultural land; and the recent public discussion of these questions has also brought into notice some nice theoretical points. It has been argued, on the one hand, that the real incidence of local rates, like that of tithe, falls on the landlord, although it may nominally be borne by the tenant, because they are considerations which enter into the calculation of the tenant when he makes his bargain with the landlord for the occupancy of his farm or house. They are part of the expenses connected with the occupancy, and rent is the surplus remaining when these expenses, including the profits of the tenant, have been defrayed. But, on the other hand, it is obvious that, so far as competition fails to be operative, this theory of incidence is not fulfilled either in the case of tithe or that of urban rates. It may, however, be laid down as a more general rule that the farmer is sufficiently alive to competitive considerations to have regard to the amount of the tithe when he concludes his bargain for rent;
- ↑ Report 1890, Q. 59.
