Question

Who benefitted from the quit rent

Answer 1

I wish to write briefly of the character and importance of the quit-rent, without trespassing more than can be helped upon the subject of Professor Bond's volume. His volume deals with the quit-rent system in all fhe British colonies in America before the Revolution and discloses the long-continued and wide-spread influence of this seemingly trivial detail of the colonial land system. It gives to the quit-rent for the first time its proper place not only as a feature of colonial land tenure and legislation, but as a contributory cause also to the discontent which brought on the Revo- lution. This little incident of men 's daily lives, probably unfamiliar to a majority of those to-day who are versed in colonial history, involved a principle quite as funda- mental as that of no taxation without representation and one that probably had more actual influence in bringing about independence than had some of the widely heralded political and constitutional doctrines of the pre-Revo- lutionary period. It is, therefore, of the meaning and significance of this somewhat obscure payment, badge of an inferior title to the soil and relic of feudalism and the past, that I would say something here. The subject in- volves more than an incident of land tenure, it raises the question of the treatment of 'history as well. When we consider the liking which every American has for his " heritage of freedom," it is not surprising that the aristocratic and feudal characteristics of our colonial beginnings should have been either overlooked entirely by writers on our early history, or if discussed at all