AGRARIAN LAWS, the provisions of the Frame of the Commonwealth limiting the landed revenue any single estate may hold: two thousand pounds a year in England, five hundred in Scotland or Ireland, figures unaltered in nominal terms since 1660 and consequently a good deal less restrictive, in real purchasing power, than the framers intended them to remain. The plantations of the Western Provinces were exempted from any cap whatever until the Second Frame of 1691, when a ceiling of three thousand pounds a year was at last imposed upon them; the exemption's first thirty years, and the comparative mildness of the cap that replaced it, are not incidental facts in the economic history that follows.
The Agrarian's purpose, as its framers stated it, was to prevent the re-concentration of political power in a landed oligarchy of the kind the old constitution had, in their reading, been unable to withstand. Measured by that narrow object the law has succeeded: no single estate in England has approached the statutory ceiling in above two centuries, and the distribution of landed rental recorded in the Commonwealth's own land-tax returns shows a markedly wider spread of moderate holdings than is reported for comparable soil in France or in the German states. Measured by any broader object, the record is less flattering. A ceiling drawn upon land alone constrains only one form of revenue, and the framers of 1660, whose own wealth was almost entirely agricultural, appear simply not to have contemplated that revenue might as readily be drawn from the ownership of persons as from the ownership of acres. The plantations' thirty-year exemption gave the Western interest a running start at exactly the form of property the Agrarian never reached at all; the three-thousand-pound ceiling of 1691, applying to land alone, left that same interest free to hold, without any statutory limit whatever, as many bondsmen and bondswomen as its capital could purchase.
The consequence is visible in the returns themselves. By the Guinea Bubble of 1720 — the collapse of the Guinea Company, whose shares had been bid to several multiples of any plausible value on the strength of contracts to supply captive Africans to the Indies plantations — the private fortunes implicated in the wreck were estimated by the Senate's own committee of inquiry at sums several times the Agrarian ceiling on land, held by persons whose landed rental in every case fell comfortably within it. The phrase coined at the time, "the wealth the Agrarian cannot reach," has outlived the particular scandal that produced it and is still current among this Commonwealth's economists as shorthand for the gap between the letter of a statute and the object it was drawn to serve. Whether that gap was an oversight or a convenience to those who benefited from it is a question this contributor is not in a position to settle from the land-tax returns alone; it is enough to record that the returns show the gap to be real, that it was never closed by any amendment before 1836, and that its consequences for the Commonwealth's later history are not, on the evidence, small. (M. S. W.)