The Landlord.

My Dear Mr. Blatchford,

Y

OU are hard on the landlord. Just put yourself in his place. Perhaps you are there already for all that I know. If so, you know it is not the bed of roses it looks to us working men who come and go without anxiety. You know something of the worry that turns the hair grey. It is not all an affair of collecting of rents. This is the smoothest part of the business, and not very smooth either if I am to judge from a turn I once had for a brother of mine. Many people cannot pay their rents. Of course you can sell them up, but then look here, what a misery, which ever way. You have either to go without the money, which you want for the mortgagee perhaps, which is bad, or you have to make yourself feel cruel by putting in a bailiff, or threatening to do it, which, I reckon, is almost worse. You are either worried with anxiety about your own payments, or you are made to feel a monster in putting the screw on people that are not able to meet theirs.

I would not be a landlord if I could help it, Mr. Blatchford. There is not much danger, perhaps, still one never knows what may happen. It would not be good news to me to hear that some uncle had died and left me twenty working men's houses. I pity the landlords. I am much obliged to them for the trouble they take to give us houses. I always gladly pay my rent.

You know it is not only what I say, but there is the constant wear of things, and property getting out of order, frightening the landlord with constant expense. Tenants are always finding out something wants doing. It is a tap, or a door latch, or a crack in the wall, or a burst cistern, or the wall paper peeling off, or a fence getting broken by the boys, or the wall copings getting broken.

There seems no end to it. And there is no calculating of it. If you have rates to pay, or interest on a mortgage, you know what you have to find, but this endless dribble, dribble, mounts up till all the money the tenants pay you in rent is gone and more, and you seem to have all the trouble for nothing. Of course you are considered a respectable man, and people touch their hats to you, but what is that with the constant fear of hearing of some broken water-spout or burst pipes? And all the time you have to find ground rent and the interest on the mortgage (for all property seems to be put up on mortgage), and then likely the man that put up the property has compounded for the rates, and so you have a big rate bill to pay every six months. It makes you sick. You are afraid to be too hard on the tenants for fear they will shift to other houses and leave your's empty. So that when they want the gas putting in, or a new sink bottom for the scullery, you are tormented between the new costs they want to put you to and the new loss by their removal into the next street where there are plenty of houses to let. Perhaps, for a time you get everything comfortably fixed, and things go smoothly, and you think it is nice after all to have "property, property, prop-" when there comes a great gale, and down go a dozen chimney pots and 200 or 300 slates; or perhaps a terrible rain floods the cellars. The tenants are at you in no time, and there you are. What are you to do? You groan out that you really cannot do any more, and you make up your mind that you really won't, but let things take their course. But in a few days the inspector calls on you. He has been round looking at the cellars or the roof, and he tells you you will have to put the drains right, and if you don't, he will have to have it done for you at your expense.

They take

I really look upon the landlords as benefactors. a great anxiety on their shoulders of which we working men get the benefit. The handling of a big property is like carrying a big plank—a little this way or that, either from the wind or the push of a passer by, is liable to send you over. You can carry a pound of tea sweetly, especially if you are taking home a present to your missus, but carrying a hundredweight of timber on your shoulder— that is another affair. And so to get a steady small income that has no trouble and no risk is very well, but when you have a large outgo that you never know the exact amount of, and that gets bigger and bigger if you don't watch it closely, the getting of a

large income to meet it is not the pleasure it seems. The man sweats under his timber, and the landlord sweats under his burdens. He never knows what belongs to him, and he never can be at perfect peace. If he goes a holiday with his wife and children, he keeps thinking of some water-rate or builder's bill and the interest he is scarcely able to meet. His face gets into a grim set. He cannot afford to be good natured. His soul is steeped in vinegar and he improves the wrong road. And then, the like of you, Mr. Blatchford, set the working men on at them as if they were rolling in wealth, and worse, as if they were robbers. It is too bad.

I say, Mr. Blatchford, you should not be so hard on the landlords. I look upon them almost as public martyrs. They give us working folks all the comfort of houses to live in without any of the worry and anxiety. Of course we pay rent, but what is that? I am glad to pay it, as I say. It is a small amount and it is fixed; we know what we have to find and we have no anxiety about it; and we are masters in another man's house all the time we pay our rent.

You speak against the rich. I am not going to deny but that there is a good deal of truth in what you say, but then I look at this would not the poor like to be rich? And when the poor become rich, do they not behave just like the folks that are already rich? Mr. Blatchford, I have known poor folks get well off, and I am sure they were not a bit better than the rich folks. Nay, some of them turned out much worse. What's the use of talking, then, in the way you do? You are very clever, but somehow it seems to me you want a little common sense mixing with the cleverness.

66

You say in your eighth letter that the rich have no right to their riches. You say that no man has a right to anything that he has not produced by his own unaided faculties. I have knocked over this argument in my last letter. If my definition is correct, (that a right" is a title recognized by the law of God or man, and which the said law is prepared to secure and defend a man in the exercise of), then the rich undoubtedly have a right to their riches till the law takes it away. The law of man recognizes it, and so does the law of God for the time being.

You give us Mr. Bounderby, one of those unhappy landlords, with his row of houses, bringing in a rental of £400 a year, and the Duke of Plaza Toro, with his rent roll of £30,000. You say the £400 a year paid by Mr. Bounderby's tenants is money that the

tenants have earned, and that Mr. Bounderby has no right to take. Mr. Blatchford, where is your sense? Does Mr. Bounderby give them no equivalent for the money? He does, in fact, give them a most important equivalent. He gives them the right to use his houses for their own private and exclusive purposes for a whole year. How important a privilege this is will be felt by those who have ever known the desolateness of having no roof over their heads. Castaway and weary, they long for shelter and habitation, and would pay more readily for it almost than for food. They feel it is cheaply obtained at the rent asked for it. They could have no house at all if they had to put it up for themselves. They have neither the money to get the materials, nor the means of obtaining the money. Now if the tenants receive such a valuable equivalent for the rental they pay, where is the injustice in Mr. Bounderby receiving it? He has provided the houses by spending money, and by the exercise of skill and arrangement. He has brought the building materials together. He has created the property—but for him it would never have existed. On your own principle, therefore, he is entitled to possess it and reap any advantages springing from the use of it.

You say he did not build the houses with his own hands, nor make the bricks or timbers of which they are composed. The work, you say, has been done by other men. Yes, but Mr. Bounderby paid them wages for what they did. If he had paid no money for the bricks and timber, and no wages for the putting of them together, or if by any process he claimed the whole of the benefit of the work when done, your objection would have force. But he does not do so. He gives a share of the benefit to the men who put the buildings together. Their share would, perhaps, be £4,000, while Mr. Bounderby's share would only be the annual £400 he gets for rent.

Now if the workmen who received the £4,000 were entitled to receive the money as wages for their part of the work, is Mr. Bounderby not entitled to receive his share of the benefit for the part he has contributed? For Mr. Bounderby has contributed a very essential part, without which all the other parts would have been of no use. He has provided the materials for the bricklayers and joiners to use, and he has contributed a large amount of care, superintendence, skill, and arrangement. The houses are the result. You would deny Mr. Bounderby his share of the co-operation, while fully consenting to the labourers having their share. Mr. Blatchford,

this is not fair. as the third.

Give the first monkey his bite of the apple as well He has to sustain the weight of the other two, and

hang longer on the branch.

If

But you say he is not to have it, because Mr. Bounderby did not make the timber and the bricks. If this is just, then the workmen ought to have no wages, for they did not make the strength by which they lifted the timber and the bricks into their places. the workmen are entitled to wages for lifting the bricks and timbers into their places, though they did not make the muscles that enable them to do this, Mr. Bounderby is entitled to something for the labour and anxiety of arranging to have the bricks and timbers brought to the place for the workmen to lift, and yet you would send him about his business with nothing, although he has contributed to the creation of the property. This is inconsistent with your own principles.

But then you say that the money by which Mr. Bounderby has provided the building materials was never earned by his own personal industry, and therefore he had no right to it. I have already answered this. Even allowing your principle, for the sake of argument, why should the wages of labour be limited to the contraction of the muscles? Why is the brain to be excluded from the process of production? You cannot exclude it. It is the chief "factor." Take away the brain, and the muscles might go on contracting for ever, without leading to any beneficial result.

Mr. Blatchford, your philosophy is too shallow. You do not give a place to all the facts, nor formulate a defensible principle of right. A man has a right to whatever law recognizes his title to. There is no other ground of right. You may think the law wrong, and your thought may be right, but still your thought is a matter of opinion, and you know, as they say, one man's opinion is as good as another. You should not dogmatise on abstractions; you should not attempt the reformation of society on the strength of a mere notion of your own of how things ought to be. Your ideas may be very plausible, they may be ingenious, they may be true, they may be good, but they are not binding. It is not like the action of gravitation or oxygen, which is independent of all theory. It is a notion merely, which may be a good notion or a bad notion, which might work, or not work, but which cannot be laid down as binding on the strength of Mr. Blatchford's assertion that it is the right thing.