Still, after making due allowance for all these faults, I cannot quite understand how his guilt is sufficiently proven to warrant his continued persecution and gradual extermination, by enactment after enactment for his ruin, should he chance to escape assassination. A snake or a rat could not be hunted down with greater venom. I must say that, in spite of his crimes, he is an object of pity. Perhaps an analysis of his villainy may help me to understand the heinousness of his crime; let us apply, therefore, to the political economist for the character of the rent, the instrument with which he commits his crime--what does he say?[66] “Rent does not affect the price of agricultural produce.”[67] “Whoever does pay rent gets back its full value in extra advantage, and the rent which he pays does not place him in a worse position than, but only in the same position as, his fellow-producer who pays no rent, but whose instrument is one of inferior efficiency.”[68] “Rent is reached by bargaining between the landlord and tenant; bargaining founded on the practical elements existing in the business. Profit must satisfy the tenant, or he will not take the farm; and on the other hand, if he claim an unduly low rent, he will find a rival competitor stepping into the farm house.... The position of an in-coming tenant is that of a man who is buying a business for sale (for whether he purchases the farm outright in order to cultivate it, or hires it, makes no difference in the nature of the transaction). He is buying a specific business in a given locality, as any man might do in a manufacturing town, and his motive is _profit_. This consideration governs the whole of the negotiation between the landowner and himself ... upon the terms of an annual payment of the means of _profit_ which he seeks to acquire.”[69] Yes! This appears to me to be just and business-like; the tenant hires the land for the profit he expects to get out of it, and his rent is a simple debt. Proceed:-- “To refuse to pay debt violently is to _steal_, and to permit stealing is not only to dissolve, but to demoralize, society.”[70] “When a portion of wealth passes out of the hands of him who has acquired it, without his consent, and without compensation, to him who has not created it ... plunder is perpetrated.”[71] “Law is common force organized to prevent injustice.”[71] “If the law itself performs the action it ought to repress, plunder is still perpetrated under aggravated circumstances.”[71] “To place the position itself of a landlord in an invidious light, as a man who exacts from the labours of others that for which he has neither toiled nor spun, is a most unwarrantable process of argumentation.”[70] “It would be impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this:--the conversion of law into an instrument of plunder.”[71]