A tenant may acquire rights of emfiteuse directly from the owner of the land, like an ordinary lease; or he may acquire them by settlement—­“squatting,” as the popular term is.  Wherever land is lying waste, any one may establish himself upon it and cultivate it, on condition of paying to the owner a certain proportion of the yield of the land—­generally one quarter—­either in kind or in money.  The landlord may, indeed, refuse the right of settlement in the first instance, which would very rarely occur, since most people who own barren tracts of rock and heath are only too glad to promote any kind of cultivation.  But when the landlord has once allowed the right, the right itself is constituted thereby into a possession of which the peasant may dispose as he pleases, even by selling it to another.  The law provides, however, that in case of transfers by sale, the landlord shall receive one year’s rent in kind or in money in addition to the rent due, and this bonus is paid jointly by the buyer and the seller according to agreement.  Such holdings are inherited from father to son for many generations, and are considered to be perpetual leases.  The landlord cannot expel a tenant except for non-payment of rent during three consecutive years.  In actual fact, the right of the emfiteuta in the soil is far more important than that of the landlord; for the tenant can cheat his landlord as much as he pleases, whereas the injustice of the law provides that under no circumstances whatsoever shall the landlord cheat the tenant.  In actual fact, also, the rents are universally paid in kind, and the peasant eats what remains of the produce, so that very little cash is seen in the land.

Corona discovered that the income she enjoyed from the lands of Astrardente was collected by the basketful from the threshing-floors, and by the barrel from the vineyards of some two hundred tenants.  It was a serious matter to gather from two hundred threshing-floors precisely a quarter of the grain threshed, and from fifty or sixty vineyards precisely a quarter of the wine made in each.  The peasants all made their wine at the same time, and all threshed their grain in the same week.  If the agent was not on the spot during the threshing and the vintage, the peasant had no difficulty whatever in hiding a large quantity of his produce.  As the rent was never fixed, but depended solely on the yield of the year, it was preeminently to the advantage of the tenant to throw dust in the eyes of the landlord whenever he got a chance.  The landlord found the business of watching his tenants tedious and unprofitable, and naturally resorted to the crowning evil of agricultural evils—­the employment of a rent-farmer.  The latter, at all events, was willing to pay a fixed sum yearly; and if the sum paid was generally considerably below the real value of the rents, the arrangement at least assured a fixed income to the landlord, with the certainty of getting it without trouble to himself.  The middleman then proceeded to grind the tenants at his leisure and discretion in order to make the best of his bargain.  The result was, that while the tenant starved and the landlord got less than his due in consideration of being saved from annoyance, the middleman gradually accumulated money.