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increasing the Crown Rent payable by the tenants.
As for (2) The right to the reversion:-
This is a contingent interest so remote as to be of little practical account. The real lessee is the family and not the individual. Adoption is freely practised and it can very rarely happen that a family dies out for want of heirs. Furthermore, the lessee had absolute freedom to assign his rights subject to the rent charge and consequently, any re-entry by the original tax lord on his original estate must have been almost unknown.
12.
It will therefore be fair in considering the compensation due to the tax lord to take into account the rent charge merely and not to include the value of the reversion.
I have received a large number of petitions from tax lords and tenants and heard a certain number of typical cases under both the Land Court and the Rent Recovery Ordinance. Judging from my experience, the task of determining the proper compensation will not be an easy one. Maps and area statements are not available and Crown Rent on padi-land is fixed for the present, so some elements of delay in the past are not removed. It is, however, usually quite impossible not to trust the bona fides of either party; the tax lord accounts are, as a rule, in a terrible muddle and when they appear to be in any sort of order, patient enquiry usually elicits the fact that they have been written up with a view to the case.
13. As for the tenants, they have very soon discovered that it is...