of the capital which would be necessary to yield an interest equal to the price just calculated. The estimated capitalization was considered the value of the land in question. The assessment of land throughout the country was completed in 1881. As to the tax itself, its rate was fixed at three per cent. of the official value, and later reduced to two and a half per cent. It would be difficult to overestimate the benefit that accrued to the farmer under the new law. He passed at once from the position of a tenant to that of an absolute owner, his former lord being at the same time recompensed by the state with public bonds for the fiefs he had surrendered. Thus the emancipation of the cultivator from the feudal bondage of land, which still has a considerable hold upon some of the former feudal communities in Europe, was in Japan definite and final. Nor did the new owner find himself under such restrictions as had existed under the feudal régime, either in the alienation of his estate or in its utilization to the best advantage by raising upon it whatever crop he liked. In return, his due to the state was only a sum, no longer arbitrary or in kind, but fixed and in money, which, as has been pointed out by some writers, was no more than one and one-fourth per cent. of the market value of the land, or equal to a rent assessed on the basis of an eighty-year purchase, which is less than a quarter of the ordinary tenant's rent.[2] Add to this the important consideration that between the time when the land tax law went into effect and the year 1898 the price of rice rose nearly threefold, so that the real burden of the tax lessened correspondingly by two-thirds. The market value of land, also, had increased, even as early as 1888, on the average of five or sixfold. If it be said that the farmer's quota in the expenditures of the local government had in the meantime considerably increased, there still remains the fact that the increase was hardly commensurate with the growth of cultivated area and general land value and the rise in both quantity and price of the crops.