LAND STEWARD

A person who has the care of a landed estate, and whose duties vary in different countries according to the mode in which landed property is managed. In England, where the landlord very commonly undertakes to keep the buildings and fences of his tenants in repair, the duties of the land steward are constant and multifarious; while in Scotland, where the buildings and fences are kept in repair by the tenant, the duties of the steward are limited to receiving the reuts, and seeing that the covenants of the leases are duly fulfilled. In many parts of the Continent, and particularly in Italy, where the landlord is a partner with his tenant, and shares the produce with him, the duties of the land steward, or faitore, as he is there called, are much more onerous than in Britain. It is generally considered, both by British and Continental writers on agriculture, that one principal cause of the retardation of this art has been the employment of lawyers as land stewards; and the truth of this can hardly be denied, more especially in those countries where the tenaot is bound down by his lease to particular modes of cropping, -or where there is a discretionary power as to cropping on the pan of the steward. The objection to lawyers as stewards is founded on their general habits of acting from precedent rather than from principle; and hence such a habit, exercised in the case of 'an art that is calculated to be so rapidly progre ive as agriculture, must materially impede its advancement. At the same time the convenience to a landed proprietor of having^ a land steward who po e es legal knowledge is so great, as generally to overpower the objections that are made against them by farmers and agricultural writers. [s. 649]