; if you will pay
60_l_. a-year for a given number of years, which any of the
actuaries of the insurance offices or any good arithmetician may soon
calculate,--if you will pay 60_l_. for your rent, instead of
50_l_., it may be for perhaps twenty years,--at the end of that
time the farm will be yours, without any further payment.
I want you to understand how this is. If the farmer paid ten pounds a-
year more than he now pays, towards buying his farm, and if the
1,000_l_. the Government would pay for the farm would not cost the
Government more than 35_l_., the difference between 35_l_. and
60_l_. being 25_l_., would be the sum which that farmer, in
his rent, would be paying to the Commission, that is, to the Government,
for the redemption of his farm. Thus, at the end of a very few years,
the farmer would possess his own farm, having a perfect security in the
meantime. Nobody could turn him out if he paid his rent, and nobody
could rob him for any improvement he made on his land. The next morning
after he made that agreement, he would explain it to his wife and to his
big boy, who had perhaps been idling about for a long time, and there
would not be a stone on the land that would not be removed, not a weed
that he would not pull up, not a particle of manure that he would not
save; everything would be done with a zeal and an enthusiasm which he
had never known before; and by the time the few years had run on when
the farm should become his without any further purchase, he would have
turned a dilapidated, miserable little farm into a garden for himself
and family.
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