• LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
THE BUDGET LAND CLAUSES.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."] Si,—What does Mr. Harold Spender mean by his quotation in your last issue from Adam Smith If a man gets a ground-rent, he pays Income-tax on it now. What more ought he to do ? "A London Leaseholder" seems hard to satisfy. If his father did not want to take a lease sixty years ago, he need not have done it. He seems to have agreed on a rent and on terms, and now his von complains. Will the "Leaseholder" be good enough to tell us what the value of the freehold was sixty years ago, and, by compound interest less the rentals paid, we can learn the real position ? If it was not a good bargain, he could have thrown up the lease after seven years. What compensa- tion did the tenant get? These believers in seizing the property ot. men who have invested their savings in freehold land seem to ignore every penny of interest that must run against the money invested in land. In Scotland and in London people seem to prefer leasing land to buying it out-and-out. Surely it is a matter of arrange- ment. There are hundreds of thousands of acres of land to be bought out-and-out at any price from 25 upwards, and yet, because it catches votes to do it, every man who possesses land is to be robbed. The only reason why a man who possesses iron- works, or cattle, or machinery is not to be robbed in the same way by this Budget is because too many votes would be lost
The small land-dealer will simply be ruined, and the building trade will follow. It seems to be forgotten that when a man buys land for building he gets practically no rent for it while it is in promss of developing, and he is not to have lost interest allowed when his "unearned increment" comes to be estimated! It is absolute injuatice.—I am, Sir, &c., J. E. E.
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