time be required to produce the same quantity of wheat as another, our forefathers wisely fixed upon that commodity which approaches the nearest to what we should consider the standard of value, and which influences the prices of all commodities. The value of wheat rents has been at various times, established at certain rates in money, and according to the last valuation in 1797, the price of froment de rente assignable was fixed at 50 sols the cabot, equivalent to 20 livres per quarter; and a cabot of froment de rente fonciere was valued at 54 sols the cabot, or 21 livres 12 sols the quarter. These are the rates according to which they are now paid. Supposing therefore an estate to be valued at 10,000 livres, the annual interest of this sum, at five per cent, being 500 livres, the estate is said to be worth twenty five quarters. In the purchase of landed estates, or of houses, there is generally only one fourth part of the amount paid down; the other three fourths remain as rents.

Rent, distraining for.-By the common law of the island, it is competent to distrain any effects whatever that may be found on the premises for payment of Rent; not only for that which is due and in arrear,but for that which is accruing due: formerly sequestration was allowed for the whole of the unexpired term of a lease, but of late, the Court has sanctioned a preference for only one year in advance. If there should be any danger of the sequestrated effects being carried off the premises, the officer making the distress, may put them under lock and seal, or remove them to a place of safety. A similar custom lately prevailed in the Isle of Man, and also in Scotland, but by a recent statute, 1 Vict. 23, sequestration in the latter country is now allowed only for rent already due, and the effects cannot be removed from off the premises.

Rent, giving for ever to, is much used in the island, and such rents are accounted the best sort of estate a man can have. A man that has either house or land which he wishes to dispose of, gives it; that is to say, lets it, or more properly sells it to another to hold to him and his heirs, for ever, paying yearly so many quarters, or bushels of wheat rent as they can agree for; to which payment he that takes binds himself and his heirs for ever. Sometimes he that has occasion to take up money on his estate, sells so many quarters, and charges his whole estate with the payment for ever.

Rent Charges.-The system of rent charges is very complicated, seldom intelligible to strangers; and few natives, except professional men are acquainted with it. It offers the means of investing small sums in the purchase of real property

without the inconvenience of its being liable to be paid off like a mortgage. The debtor of rents on the other hand, instead of being obliged to wait till he has accumulated a sum sufficient to pay off his mortgage, say £500, may disencumber himself gradually of the debt, by buying and assigning to his creditor small sums of rent, as low as £8, or £10 at a time. The Jersey freeholder has the further advantage of being independent of the rentholder, as long as he can pay him his rent. On the other hand, an English mortgagee may call in his mortgage at anytime to the great inconvenience and even distress of the mortgagor. It is evident that a person thus situated, even when he offers the best security, is neither so favourably nor so independently situated,as the humblestJersey rent payer. Again, rents being a real property, cannot be so easily squandered away as chattels by improvident individuals; and as they follow the provisons of the Norman law of inheritance, they cannot be transferred from one person to another by unjust or capricous wills. When a person buys an estate, those rents are a substitute for an English mortgage. The buyer, if he can. not pay for the whole, remains charged with rents, the amount of which can only be ascertained from the Public Register, so that any one having dealings with him may always know, whether, and as far as real property is concerned, he has to do with a man of good substance or not. This is technically called bis guarantee. By law a man must pay off one fourth of the purchase of real property either in money or rents, and he may remain charged with the other three-fourths. This evidently facilitates the disposal of real property by extending the sphere of competition, and enabling many to become freeholders, who could not be such under a different order of things. Most of the freeholds in Jersey are more or less encumbered with rents; but if the owner is an industrious man, he pays his rents yearly, gradually diminishes their quantity, and instead of being liable to be turned out of his farm as in England, he may think himself as good as the first gentleman in the land. All transactions in rents are registered in an office for that purpose. Bonds may also be registered on a special application to the Royal Court. All those have a preference over simple contract debts in bankruptcies and have a right to be paid in full according as they are ancient in date. Rents are generally bought at 20 years purchase, or 5 per cent interest. They are seldom paid in kind, or rather, every quarter of wheat rent was in consequence of the then existing abuses, commuted in 1797 into a yearly payment of sixteen shillings and eight-pence. The rents due to the King and a few other

privileged rents form an exception, and are still paid according to the price of corn. Some of the rents are fonciere, or ground rents, that is, That the owner cannot assign or buy them off, without mutual consent, so that the incumbrance on the estate is perpetual. They are worth 1s. 4d. a quarter, a year more than the assignable rents, and sell generally at 25 years' purchase. All these rents are brought into the market, and vary more or less, in price, according to the demand, or the goodness of the guarantee; not unlike the transactions on the Stock Exchange. The system of these corn rents is very ancient, and on the whole is well calculated for this Island.-[Durell.] Rent Charges, abuses of.-There are disadvantages annexed to Rent charges, the first of which is, that these rents may be split into mere fractions, and that to collect 100 a year, you may have to go to as many, or more renters, on different parts of the island, and in case of bad payers, one must have recourse to a legal process, which though cheap and summary, yet causes some delay and expense, and till lately obliged one to attend the Court in person or by an Agent. Nor can the debtor be sued out of Term. Add to this that forbearance aggravates the evil, that an embarrassed freeholder, will only pay the most pressing, and that after having run his rents one with another 4 or 5 years in arrear, he becomes a bankrupt by cession, (cessio bonorum) so that after having subsisted during that time at the expence of the renters, such an individual leaves his estate encumbered with from 20 to 25 per cent more than he owed when he first became insolvent. The law expenses attendant on the bankruptcy, or the conducting of the Décret as it is called, depreciated the estate still further till a very heavy loss is realized by the several mortgagees. There are also some nefarious practices attendant on rents some of which I may barely mention. A. buys an estate from B. worth £300 in rents, but as he cannot clear off one fourth of the purchase money, or £75, a deed is executed whereby the estate is nominally sold for £400, the fourth of which is cleared off by a fictitious sum of good and lawful money of the country. The property thus remains in fact charged with rents to its full value, so that on the least reserve or depreciation, the owner inevitably becomes a bankrupt. This is what called in derision, a contract in the air, (contrat en l'air). A. has got an estate already deeply incumbered, but wishing to raise money, he applies to some unprincipled person or other, and who having no property himself, can offer no additional security; to whom he conveys it for more than it is worth, say for £500, what is worth but £400. He then goes into the market

and sells rents on the mock purchaser, perhaps a mere man of straw, who after the job has been completed, resigns his bargain to the first seller, who thus becomes chargeable with all the rents he has created. But he cannot hold out long under such an accumulating pressure of debt, he becomes a bankrupt, and the purchasers of rent who had but this delusive security, inevitably lose their property. Again : A. has debts on rents or on bonds; he does not owe to the amount of his freehold, but on the whole, he is insolvent. Wishing to favour one of his creditors B, he conveys him a part of his freehold in payment of a simple contract Bond, which enables this worthy ereditor B. to be paid in full, when his brother creditors may not perhaps receive half a crown in the pound. The only precaution that the parties have to take is to have those deeds executed unknown to the other creditors, and at least ten days before any act of bankruptcy is committed, as otherwise those deeds would be cancelled. And this is a poor remedy indeed against an experienced sharper! Again: A. sells a piece of ground for building, and a good house is raised upon it in due time. From the timber merchant to the glazier, the credulity of all trades is put in requisition to furnish supplies on credit. The builder sell rents on the house in the mean time, till after having spent their produce he too becomes a bankrupt, the renters, or the seller of the land, being registered debts, take to the house, and the tradesmen who had in fact furnished the means of building it, lose the whole of their claims, and have no other consolation left to them, than that of having added one good house more to embellish the town of St. Helier. Again A man applies to the Court to have his wife's estate separated from his own, (separation quant aux biens), whereby the lady recovers all the rights of a single woman. The husband's chattels in some cases soon disappear, and as to the real property, the greatest part is conveyed to the wife: enough being just left, to prevent the Court from refusing to make him a bankrupt. I should remark that all freeholders have an undoubted right to renounce or make their cessio bonorum, while others who are not freeholders, are entirely subject to the discretion of the Court, who if not satisfied with their honesty, may suffer them to remain for years in prison. All deeds ought to be executed in public before the Bailiff and two Jurats. In case of the illness of either of the parties, those deeds were at first on payment of a small fee allowed to be executed in private. In time that grew into an abuse, and most people who either disliked the publicity of that ceremony, or a long attendance in Court, had recourse to that indulgence. The

next step was that when any individual thought it prudent to conceal his own transactions from his creditors, he naturally had recourse to this very convenient expedient. Hence arose a fruitful source of fraudulent bankruptcies! The only way to prevent this abuse would be to abolish the private execution of deeds except in cases of real and well attested illness. The remedy which the law affords now to the creditor, is that when he suspects any deed affecting his interest is about to be executed by his debtor, he may lodge an inhibition with the Bailiff, which prevents the debtor from selling any real property, till the question has been tried before the Royal Court. There are however inconveniences in allowing registered debts to have a preference in all cases.-A. has an estate worth £2000 incumbered with £200 worth of rents, and £1000 of personal debts, but being desirous of disinheriting his family and cheating his creditors, he executes a sham bond that he has borrowed £2000 from B. The bond is then registered in due form in the Royal Court where it may be forgotten, till A departs this life, when B's debt has the preference, as under those circumstances of insolvency,, the lawful creditors are obliged to abandon their claims! These nefarious abuses are mentioned, not only to guard the unsuspecting stranger against them, but in the hope, that the exposure of such blots on the character of the country, and on the integrity of those unprincipled praction. ers, who lend their assistance to such proceedings, may in time he effectually removed. These are some of the most glaring and nefarious practices connected with rent transactions; but it is unnecessary to enter into further details on that subject. When it begins to be whispered that any man's affairs are embarrassed, all his freehold property becomes nearly unsaleable, for the obvious reason that in the case of an approaching bankruptcy, the last purchasers would lose their rents by being the first to be ejected. It is indeed an evil sign of the times when property is advertised week after week, and remains unsold. The individvals cannot mistake the opinion the public entertains of his credit, and such a state of things is generally the prelude of a bankruptcy. To say that a man's guarantee is bad, or that he is embarrassed, is actionable, because it tends to prevent the sale of his property.

Hence people are very careful about what they say on the subject, and many an unfortunate stranger has been the victim of not having received seasonable advice, before buying property which was puffed up in the newspapers, but about which it was already understood in every quarter, that an ejectment would be the inevitable consequence. To enter fully into the