PEI Property History Pt. 9
This is an article that appeared in Popular Science in August of 1886 and discusses the problems with land ownership on PEI.
Rhetoric, in so far as it prophesied a wonderful impetus to the island when leaseholds gave place to freeholds, has somewhat missed fulfillment. Unthrifty farmers were not born again to thriftiness by the act of 1875. The money-lender has taken the place of the of the landlord with a good many of them. His terms are not so easy, nor his methods so gentle, and already about a fourth of the farms of the island are mortgaged at rates of interest averaging about seven and a half per cent. A single solicitor in Charlottetown has stowed in vault mortgages to the amount of a half million dollars, held chiefly by widows and orphans, whose claims, unlike those of the wealthy proprietors, are exigent and must be promptly met.
The lesson from history of land proprietorship in Prince Edward Island is applicable to a wider field that the little Canadian province. It marks unwisdom of governments in granting large tracts to corporations or individuals on nominal terms. With the lapse of years, if holdings are retained by their original grantees, the rise in the value is enormous, and a community which has chiefly created that value resents the levy of “unearned increment.” The agitation in Prince Edward Island also illustrates how the wide franchises of democracy modify the violence of combats concerning questioned of property. Even though the mistakes of the Old World be sometimes repeated in the New, though unwarrantable privileges be created or acquired, the people possess a power in the ballot-box which renders unnecessary those appeals to the cartridge-box which so often accompany transatlantic agitation. Perhaps, when English Hodge awakens to his new influence as a voter, laws partly of his making may take the color of his interests, and English landed property may be further shorn of privilege. Beyond that may also be exerted the sinister influence against contract to which law-makers with little property, or none, are ever strongly tempted.
