Notes on the Anti-Corn Law Struggle/Chapter 4

by Andrew Bisset

CHAPTER IV.

THE LANDLORDS.

Some of us who, like the old man in the story-book, have "gone flying in the face of the Bible," where, according to that old man's dutiful and affectionate son "three score-and-ten's the mark; and no man with a conscience, and a proper sense of what's expected of him, has any business to live longer," can bring up strange memories of the days when George the Third was King and his son was Regent. In those days of the Regency the British landlords were glorious upon earth. Their power seemed as firmly established as that of Louis XIV. when the star of his prosperous fortune was in its blazing zenith.^[1] They had enriched themselves by a war, the most expensive in which their country had ever been engaged. The general who had conducted that war with consummate ability was on their side. Everything that had opposed them was prostrate in the dust; and the monarchical potentates of Europe were banded together in a Holy Alliance to establish them, as Strafford wrote to Charles the First, "in wealth, strength, and glory, far above any of their progenitors."^[2]

In this plenitude of power, the English, Scotch, and Irish landlords could find little more for their hearts to desire. Their palaces—for their old manor-houses ^[3] were found too rude and too small for their rapidly expanding greatness—exhibited every luxury that the planet on which they dwelt could produce. All that the world possessed of rich and rare, of gorgeous and beautiful, to tempt the appetite and delight the eye, to gratify the senses and feast the imagination, was theirs. All the inventions of science, all the resources of art contributed to their enjoyment. The most industrious and ingenious people the world had ever seen, was toiling jfrom morning to night and from night to morning to procure them new pleasures, to produce for them new discoveries in the arts of luxury. And all this rested on a foundation of military and naval force, so great that without much of a metaphor it may be said, their armies covered the earth, their navies swept the ocean.^[4]

There was one element of their happiness, one ingredient in their cup of prosperity; that must not be passed over. They had a state-religion, which, though it professed self-denial as the very essence of it, and forbade unlicensed carnal pleasure under the penalty of an eternity of carnal pain, was dear to them as the very pleasantest of their vices. There was a pungency of pleasure indescribably refreshing to a faded appetite, in revelling amid forbidden joys under the very eyes of the hierarchs of the Church that forbade them. It was true, the strict text was clear in regard to respect of persons. But the living commentators could expound the paradox. The ascetic precepts of their state-religion might be good, very good for men at large, but correctly interpreted they were clearly not intended for persons of their quality, and they might perhaps be of the opinion of a court lady^[5] of the time of Louis XIV. who, when doubts of the salvation of the King's brother were expressed in her presence, said very gravely, "I assure you that with respect to people of that quality, God thinks twice before damning them."

A similarity has been said to be nothing but a slight difference. When the difference becomes a good deal more than slight, the similarity may disappear and difference take its place. There is a curious and interesting illustration of this subtle connection between similarity and difference afforded by the similarity and difference between the French and English aristocracy. In the eighteenth century the French aristocracy paid no taxes. Was there ever a time when the English aristocracy paid no taxes? In the nineteenth century, as General Perronet Thompson has observed in his Catechism on the Corn Laws, the English aristocracy paid taxes and recovered them through another tax, the Corn Law, that caused the community to lose the amount ten times over. On this result General Thompson observes, "We are prodigiously stupid. Our posterity will have very little to say about the wisdom of their ancestors."

But the difference between the French and the English aristocracy is here very curiously manifested. The French aristocracy paid no taxes; the English aristocracy paid taxes but not their due proportion of taxes; and recovered far more than they paid through another tax, the Corn Law. The French aristocracy were destroyed by the people they had long robbed and oppressed. For the English aristocracy, too, there might come a day of reckoning. They were like the horse-leech which had swallowed more blood than was good for it, and its health required that its tail should be dipped in salt. "And," says the writer above quoted, "they may think themselves well off, that this is all. They will have their tails salted yet, they may depend upon it; as certainly as the manufacturers would, if they had been all this time laying a duty on home-grown corn."

The landlord class, including simple squires as well as the titled nobility, in its relation to the trading and professional classes, somewhat resembled the French noblesse before the Revolution in its relation to the bourgeoisie. For more than the first quarter of the nineteenth century, even the members of the House of Commons were regarded by the upper portion of the landlord class somewhat as the doorkeeper of the House of Lords regarded them in the beginning of the seventeenth century, shutting the door in their faces with the words, "Good man burgess, you come not here." The wives of men who would sit in the House of Lords on the death of their fathers, have been heard to say that the men in question would then —that is, when they sat in the House of Lords—be among gentlemen. If circumstances had permitted the fashionable morals of the Regency to be continued for some generations, and the lofty pretensions of the men of large rentals to become loftier by the bread-tax being made perpetual, the pride and luxury of the rent-receiving class, like the pride and luxury of the French noblesse, would have gone on advancing in extravagance and audacity till they reached that condition in which words that have been applied to the French noblesse before the Revolution might be applied to them:—"All the old safeguards were broken down, and no new ones created. Ties formerly the most sacred became despised. Marriage was a farce: honesty, as between man and man, was obsolete. The decencies as well as the virtues of life passed away; and every licentious desire had uncontrollable dominion."

When within a period of years not exceeding the duration of a single life the rent of land ran up so rapidly as to be more than trebled—more even than quintupled—it is not very surprising to find the territorial grandees, who had in some sort abandoned for a time their old pretensions to regard the industrial and trading classes of their countrymen as little better than a subjugated race,—when they saw estates, the rental of which less than half a century back would have been reckoned high at twenty hundred pounds sterling a year, run up in a few years to be worth twenty thousand pounds sterling a year,—resume their old attitude of conquerors and look down on those with whom for a portion of the eighteenth century they had associated on a footing of equality, as a pack of despicable pedlars.

It was the isolation of England by the great war with Bonaparte, or Buonaparté as was the grammatical form of the name, that made England so much dependent on her own produce for food, and thus raised rent so prodigiously. When Bonaparte fell, the Corn Laws were resorted to as a substitute for Bonaparte in the raising of rents. Lord Byron in his satire, "The Age of Bronze," which appeared, I think, in 1823, that is somewhat more than two years after the death of George III. and the accession of George IV., has some lines on this subject of rent. I will quote a few of them:—

"For what were all these country patriots born?

To hunt and vote and raise the price of corn? *** Why would you trouble Buonaparté's reign? *** Why did you chain him on yon isle so lone?
The man was worth much more upon his throne. *** But where is now the goodly audit ale?
The purse-proud tenant, never known to fail?
The farm which never yet was left on hand?
The marsh reclaimed to most improving land?
The impatient hope of the expiring lease?
The doubling rental?"

Those who have had opportunities of observation have seen the effects of the prospect of the expiring lease and the doubling rental in encouraging profuse expenditure, and an increase of the number and magnitude of the demands on the increased rents. In the place of the old manor houses, costly and extensive mansions were built. It was as if the old manor houses, that seemed built for men of moderate means, had disappeared, and in their room had sprung up palaces such as kings or emperors might deign to dwell in. Some large landholders have been heard to declare that they pulled down some of those vast palaces which had been built before they came to the succession because they were too large for the estate. The only remedy that occurred to them being an increase of rent, even beyond that which had already taken place, the satirist represents their cry as being—

    "Down with everything, and up with rent.
Their good, ill, health, wealth, joy, or discontent;
Being, end, aim, religion—rent, rent, rent!"

The writer of the lines above quoted, besides being a wit and a poet, was one of those who, though his estates were encumbered, must have profited with the other receivers of rent from the influence of the Corn Laws on the price of bread. Yet his rentals could hardly have risen so as to treble or even to double in a few years, since his biographers give us reason to conclude that the interior at Newstead never exhibited the profuse luxury and licentious revelry which are indicated in the opening stanzas of Childe Harold. Not the less, however, does Lord Byron's case serve as an illustration of the effects of the high rents in raising to a notable height the pride and arrogance of the landlord class. For the profuse luxury—the lordly revelry—

"The goblets "brimm'd with every costly wine,
And all that might to luxury invite,"

—if they were above the means of men of small or encumbered estates, characterized the banquets of the larger landholders, whose pride was not unworthy of kings. And if Lord Byron was not equal in wealth, his pride was equal to the pride of the largest-acred baron or squire who voted for the Corn Laws. His pride was' very much pride of race, as if the sword had made him a conqueror, lord of the soil, and of all who trod the soil. If Lord Byron could have proved that the Byrons were the same family as the Buruns, and that

"eight-and-forty manors
Were their reward for following Billy's banners,"

the Byrons, whether Norman or not Norman, were as thoroughly beaten at Marston Moor^[6] as the English were at Hastings; and the men who beat them—men who, wherever they went, never found an enemy that could stand their onset, said in their Remonstrance to the Parliament for justice on the King: "If kings claim by right of conquest, God hath given us the same right against them, and there is an end to their pretensions as if the whole people were made only for them, and to serve their lusts."

The men who made that Remonstrance to the Long Parliament put down in England the divine right of kings, which arrogated the right to treat the people as if the people were made only to be their slaves. The Anti-Corn Law League had to contend with the divine right of squires, which claimed the power of having a monopoly of the food of the people. In an admirable letter which I will quote presently, Mr. Bright says of the Americans putting down slavery, "It is strange that a people who put down slavery are not able to suppress monopoly, which is but a milder form of the same evil." Much as I have read on the subject of Protection or Monopoly and Free Trade, I never met with so clear an exposition of the text of "Nations slowly wise and meanly just," as the remarks of Mr. Bright which I am about to quote. What we have seen in our own days goes far to corroborate Mr. Bright's remark—that freedom of industry will do much to put down great armies and the peril and suffering of war. I will quote a few words in illustration of this point from a traveller of singular courage and great intelligence:—

"The English," says Mr. Borrow,^[7] "who have never been at war with Portugal, who have fought for its independence on land and sea, and always with success, who have forced themselves, by a treaty of commerce, to drink its coarse and filthy wines, which no other nation cares to taste, are the most unpopular people who visit Portugal."

The lowering of the duties on French wines has had an effect very different from the treaty of commerce with Portugal. The introduction into England of French wines is beneficial to the bodily health of the English; it has also a pacific tendency in proportion to the quantity of claret and other French wines consumed in England and the consequent numbers of Frenchmen, from the capitalist to the labourer, interested in the wine trade between France and England. And though treaties of commerce are not strictly in agreement with the principle of Free Trade, the commercial treaty which Mr. Cobden negotiated with France may be admitted to have had a beneficial and a pacific tendency in regard to the two great nations concerned in it.

I will now give Mr. Bright's letter from which I have quoted a few words:—

"The man," says Mr. Bright in a letter^[8] to a friend in America, "who possesses a monopoly by which he thinks he gains is not open to argument. It was so in this country forty years ago, and it is so with you now. It is strange that a people who put down slavery at an immense sacrifice are not able to suppress monopoly, which is but a milder form of the same evil. Under slavery the man was seized and his labour stolen from him, and the profit of it enjoyed by his master and owner. Under Protection the man is apparently free, but is denied the right to exchange the produce of his labour except with his countrymen, who offer him much less for it than the foreigner would give. Some portion of his labour is thus confiscated. In our protective days, our weavers and artisans could not exchange with American flour. They exchanged with an English farmer, who gave them sometimes only half the quantity the American would have given them. Now your farmer is forbidden to trade with the Englishman, and must give to an American double the quantity of grain and lour for many articles he is constantly requiring that he would give if your laws did not forbid his trade with England. A country may have democratic institutions, its government may be Republican, and based on a wide suffrage, and yet there may be no freedom to men for that which is the source of life and comfort. If a man's labour is not free, the man is not free. And whether the law which enacts this restriction be the offspring of republican or autocratic government and power, it is equally evil to be condemned and withstood by all who love freedom and understand what it is. Nations learn slowly—but they do learn; and therefore I do not doubt that the time will come when trade will be as free as the winds, and when freedom of industry will do much to put down great armies and the peril and suffering of war."

I should be wanting in my duty in the publication of a chapter headed "Landlords," if I did not at least make an effort, however inadequate, to delineate a class of the species "Landlords" which has produced some specimens that may well call for the astonishment, if not the admiration of mankind. I have attempted to give in the third section of the next chapter some very imperfect notes of the treatment which the people of Scotland receive from their landlords. I will here give one or two examples of the treatment the people of Ireland have received from their landlords. In Scotland the relation of landlord and tenant may, in some cases, be very unsatisfactory, but its effects do not manifest themselves much beyond the sphere of their immediate action. In Ireland the relation of landlords and tenants is such as to produce the most disagreeable effects to the inhabitants of Great Britain who reap none of the profits obtained by the landlords of Ireland, and consequently reap nothing but loss and ignominy, while the landlords of Ireland reap all the profit and all the honour, if honour it can be called.

The inhabitants of Ireland have taken up a deep and murderous hatred towards the inhabitants of Great Britain. The whole story of the causes of this hatred would be "sad to tell and long to trace." But it has manifested itself by overt acts of the most murderous kind—acts which perhaps should not be called overt, since they have more of the character of covert than overt. One of their attempts at murder on a large scale was to blow up a railway train in an underground London railway filled with industrious Englishmen and Englishwomen who had never done any injury or given any offence to the murderous Irish who had laid explosives in the railway tunnel to destroy the passengers of the railway train.

It therefore seems a duty incumbent on Englishmen to attempt to direct public attention to the cause of this state of things in such a way as to afford some chance of putting a stop to such disgusting exhibitions of the worst and most disgraceful of human passions. But the cause of this deplorable state of things is so closely connected with the relation of landlord and tenant, that some words explanatory of that relation in Ireland will be necessary.

Everybody knows that there is a wide difference between farming in England and farming in Ireland. In England, landlords having to deal with capitalist farmers can see their own advantage in making it the interest of the tenant to improve the land; or even in improving it for him. An average Irish landlord does not even go so far in improving his estate as to put up the fences and farm buildings which everywhere else are provided by the landlord. They are left to the labourer-tenant to provide; and if a tenant is willing, by making them better than ordinary, to add to the value of the farm, there is nothing in the English feudal law of landlord and tenant to prevent the landlord from waiting till it is done, and then making his appearance and seizing on the result, in the shape of additional rent from the tenant, for the fruits of his own labour, or turning out the tenant if he is unable or unwilling to pay such additional rent.

In looking over the map of Ireland the eye may chance to meet with the word Kilkee, not on "Galway's shipwreck'd coast," but on the coast of the adjoining county of Clare. The French showed their good taste at the same time with their chivalrous spirit in erecting at Coruña a monument to the memory of Sir John Moore, with this simple inscription:—

JOHN MOORE,

Leader of the English Armies,

killed in battle,

16 January, 1809.

In attempting to raise a memorial to Kilkee the simple brevity of the French inscription to the memory of the English General killed at the battle of Coruña, cannot be imitated. Yet as Sir John Moore, though he wanted that perfect self-confidence in great emergencies, which belongs only to the highest order of minds, died in his duty like a gallant soldier, and fills an honourable grave, and his name will be for ever associated with chivalrous courage, keen sense of honour, and enthusiastic devotion to the duties of his profession and the service of his country; so the name of Kilkee will be associated with the exertion, not merely of honest industry, but of extraordinary energy and enterprise in the creation of a flourishing town under the blighting curse of the English law of landlord and tenant—a law belonging to the pirate age, and made by men who were barbarians and robbers.

The disgrace of the frightful robbery committed on those poor Irish labourer-tenants who, after they had increased by their labour the value of the property in some instances 700 per cent, had the alternative given them of either having the rents at once raised to the full value of the improvements or of being turned adrift to wander about as vagabonds on the face of the earth, and carry with them to America an exile's sorrows and an outlaw's hate—for though it may be shown to be in accordance with the form of law, it was a robbery of the most cruel nature—a robbery that took advantage of the best qualities of its victims to make those very qualities the instruments of their destruction—the disgrace of this frightful robbery, I say, must fall not on the head landlords who, in such cases, only followed the law of human nature, but on those who coming forward to make laws to redress the law of human nature produced the English law of landlord and tenant, which had its foundation in the system of government introduced into England by the man who displayed the same spirit of unrelenting cruelty when he enclosed the New Forest, and when he reduced the northern counties of England to a desert. It is not creditable to any government calling itself a Christian and civilized government to allow such a law to remain on the English Statute Book. If an equitable allowance had been made for the Kilkee improvements by an equitable law of landlord and tenant, a vast amount of crime and of the consequences of crime might have been avoided.

Having had occasion to examine somewhat minutely the English law of landlord and tenant, I will quote here a portion of what I have said elsewhere on that subject:—

"The English law of landlord and tenant having during the last six hundred years been made by the landlords, may be expected to favour the landlords rather than the tenants. The operation of the law of landlord and tenant is partly seen in the numerous cases in the law reports where the tenant is a man of some capital, and can make a fight in the courts of law against the landlord. But another picture is presented in the numerous cases where the law can be, and has been made an instrument of grinding oppression in the hands of those who have become the landlords of the cottages and small houses inhabited by the working men, whether farm labourers in the country or artificers in the towns. But though the oppression in these cases is very grievous, it is mercy compared to that which the English law of landlord and tenant has enabled those who have got possession of land in Ireland to apply to tenants completely at their mercy."

In the case of Ireland the Encumbered Estates Act—though intended to substitute for landlords, without capital for improvement, a better class of landlords— showed the difficulty of the question dealt with, for it defeated the intentions of its framers, and exchanged one set of bad landlords for a set of landlords worse than the former. This effect of the Act is shown in a passage quoted in a note to J. S. Mill's Political Economy (vol. i., p. 413, sixth edition, 1865), from a private communication from Professor Cairnes.

"A class of men, not very numerous, but sufficiently so to do much mischief, have, through the Landed Estates Court, got into possession of land in Ireland, who, of all classes, are least likely to recognize the duties of a landlord's position. These are small traders in towns, who by dint of sheer parsimony, frequently combined with money-lending at usurious rates, have succeeded, in the course of a long life, in scraping together as much money as will enable them to buy fifty or a hundred acres of land. These people never think of turning farmers, but, proud of their position as landlords, proceed to turn it to the utmost account. An instance of this kind came under my notice lately. The tenants on the property were, at the time of the purchase, some twelve years ago, in a tolerably comfortable state. Within that period [that is, within twelve years] their rent has been raised three several times; and it is now, as I am informed by the priest of the district, nearly double its amount at the commencement of the present proprietor's reign. The result is that the people, who were formerly in tolerable comfort, are now reduced to poverty; two of them have left the property and squatted near an adjacent turf bog, where they exist trusting for support to occasional jobs. If this man is not shot, he will injure himself through the deterioration of his property, but meantime he has been getting 8 or 10 per cent, on his purchase-money. This is by no means a rare case. The scandal which such occurrences cause casts its reflection on transactions of a wholly different and perfectly legitimate kind, where the removal of the tenants is simply an act of mercy for all parties."

A thorough reform of the law of landlord and tenant has no chance of passing the House of Lords. To a person acquainted with other parts of England it seems incomprehensible that the people of London should submit to the tyrannous absurdity of being compelled to build houses upon land which, by the terms of the lease, is, at the end of ninety-nine years, to be given up, with everything on it, to the landowner, while during the ninety-nine years they are to pay a yearly rent, called a ground-rent, for the land. The device of such ninety-nine years' leases in London is due to the power of the great land monopolists, the Dukes of Bedford, Portland, Westminster, the Marquis of Salisbury and others. Those persons, not content with having become owners of large portions of national property by the liberality of Henry VIII, James I and William III in giving away what did not belong to them, employed the most astute lawyers that could be got for money to devise schemes such as this of making a house and the land on which it is built return at the end of ninety- nine years to the ground landlord. This device, framed by the conveyancing counsel of the great landowners, is eagerly seized on by tradesmen, who invest their savings in land for building, and have been heard to declare the delight with which they would step in at the end of ninety-nine years and take away the house from the children of the man who built it or bought it from the builder of it. To any one who has not got saddled with the vampire notion that ninety-nine years' leases are part of the original scheme of Creation, it is at once a monstrous absurdity and intolerable injustice that, when a man builds a house on another man's land, for the use of which he pays a yearly ground-rent representing at the date of the lease not merely the full annual value of the land on which the house is built, but double, sometimes treble^[9] its annual value, the person to whom the ground-rent is paid should step in and take away the house from the children of the builder. One direct result of such a system is the erection of houses not intended to last longer than the lease. But there are other results more serious. Among these is the deep hatred which injustice and oppression, backed by power such as that of the British House of Lords, are sure to produce sooner or later. The great peer sets the example of oppression to the small tradesman who deals in house property, and the small tradesman, in his dealing with men or women poorer than himself, fortifies his conscience with the reflection that Providence ordained that the large fish should eat the small.

It will help to explain the London ninety-nine years' lease system to compare it with the system of Manchester, where the houses are built upon land for which a yearly ground-rent is paid. This ground-rent is not limited to ninety-nine years, but so long as it is paid the payer of it is absolute owner of the land. An interesting illustration of this is afforded by the case of Mr. Cobden. It is mentioned by Mr. Cobden's biographer that Mr. Cobden, having made speculative purchases of land in various quarters of Manchester where his imagination painted a great demand for buildings on the repeal of the Corn Laws, was compelled to pay a thousand pounds a year as ground-rent. But as long as the thousand pounds a year was paid the land was his own, and would have increased in value if houses, shops and factories had been built on it. Mr. Cobden it seems kept up for twenty-five years this payment, which would therefore amount to a sum of £25,000, and helps us to understand how Mr. Cobden was enabled to absorb the amount collected for him, which has been estimated at not much under £200,000. I have not happened to meet with any case of ground-rents in London being speculated on in this way. But suppose a man were to build an expensive factory such as are built at Manchester on a ninety-nine years' lease, at the termination of which lease the factory, worth several thousand pounds, would fall into the pocket of the ground-rent landlord, the inference is that no such factories would be built, and the trade of Manchester would not have existed, but Manchester would be now the village or small town it was two centuries ago.

The land of England was held on certain conditions, which may be termed the purchase-money of that land. That purchase-money had been made payable as a sort of perpetual annuity to the State, increasing in value as the land increased in value. But the Convention Parliament of 1660 passed an Act by a majority of two—the votes being 151 for, and 149 against—the Act 12 Car. 2, c. 14—that the holders of the land of England should be totally exonerated from the future payment of this perpetual annuity, which constituted the purchase-money of their estates; and that this annuity, or purchase-money, should for the future be paid, in the shape of an excise, by people who held none of the land for which they were thus made to pay. In the debate many members spoke vehemently against the measure proposed. The most learned lawyer of that time, Prynne, said it was not fit to make all housekeepers hold in capite, and to free the nobility; and inveighed passionately, says the Diary, against the excise, which was to be substituted in lieu of the payments for which the lands of England had been granted to be held as private property.

Without embarrassing the reader with legal technicalities, it may be sufficient to say that so far as the words of their laws enable us to judge of their meaning and intention, the framers of no inconsiderable portion of that system of government which is generally understood when we say the English Constitution, certainly intended that the tax which the land was to pay was to be a certain proportion of the "full yearly value thereof at the time of assessing thereof," not a proportion of a nominal yearly value thereof. It may be added in corroboration that in all the land-tax acts down to the 38 Geo. 3 inclusive, the commissioners are directed to appoint "assessors" (see 38 Geo. 3, c. 5, s. 8) for the purpose of assessing all property, real as well as personal. Now unless there was to be every year a new assessment, collectors of the moneys to be levied would be sufficient, whereas, after directing the appointment of assessors, there is always a distinct and separate clause for the appointment of "collectors of the moneys which shall be assessed as aforesaid."

William the Norman took from the Anglo-Saxons their country, but bound himself and his successors, as far as he could bind them, by engagements, which were fulfilled for six hundred years, to defray the main part of the expenses of governing it in peace and defending it in war. Upon these conditions William the Norman and some sixty thousand of his followers became masters of the land of a country which contained a very large quantity of fertile land. To repudiate these conditions and declare that in future the expenses of the government in peace and war should be paid by taxes on the poor, was to reduce the bulk of the community to the condition of a people like the Dutch, This was what William the Dutchman did for England.

To substitute for the rent to the State, which was the purchase-money of the land, a vast number of taxes on industry and commercial enterprise was to reduce a country like England to the condition of a country like Holland. And the parallel was followed so far as to introduce the funding system, and the system of raising money by lotteries, and to leave nothing untaxed from salt to French wine. The effect was to deprive the people of England of many of the natural advantages of soil and climate, and reduce the quantity of land in England (as far as the bulk of the population was concerned) to the quantity of land in Holland.

The manner of dealing with the Irish forfeitures seems to have cooled even Lord Macaulay's zeal for his Dutch hero. Lord Macaulay says:—

"If his Parliament had been forced to defer, year after year, the consideration of so large and complex a question as that of the Irish forfeitures, it ill became him to take advantage of such a laches with the eagerness of a shrewd attorney. Many persons who were sincerely attached to his government, and disapproved of resumptions, thought the case of these forfeitures an exception to the general rule. . . . Of all the grants the largest was to Woodstock, the eldest son of Portland; the next was to Albemarle. An admirer of William cannot relate without pain that he divided between these two foreigners an extent of country larger than Hertfordshire. . . . William's answer was that he had thought himself bound to reward out of the forfeited property those who had served him well, and especially those who had borne a principal part in the reduction of Ireland. The war, he said, had left a heavy debt; and he should be glad to see that debt reduced by just and effectual means. This answer was but a bad one; and, in truth, it was hardly possible for him to return a good one. He had done what was indefensible; and, by attempting to defend himself, he made his case worse. It was not true that the Irish forfeitures, or one-fifth part of them, had been granted to men who had distinguished themselves in the Irish war; and it was not judicious to hint that those forfeitures could not justly be applied to the discharge of the public debts. The Commons murmured, and not altogether without reason. 'His Majesty tells us,' they said, ' that the debts fall to us and the forfeitures to him. We are to make good out of the purses of Englishmen what was spent upon the war; and he is to put into the purses of Dutchmen what was got by the war.'"^[10]

I am not writing about William the Third, but it was necessary to introduce him here to show how easily the land had been obtained which some of our noble landlords let on such terms as those ninety-nine years' building leases, so craftily devised to suck the blood of the unhappy man who is so ill-advised as to build a substantial house under such leases. Among the other debts we owe to "Old Glorious" is this, that his Dutch advisers designed that the method of raising money by a pound rate—the subsidy of earlier days or the Land Tax Act of 4 William and Mary, c. 1, the principle of which was strictly observed in the five succeeding years—should not prove effectual in order to reduce us to the necessity of taxing consumption, and thereby, because taxes on consumption must always be heavy upon trade, prevent our being such formidable rivals to the Dutch.^[11]

Mr. Villiers, in his speech in the House of Commons, May 9, 1843, said:—

"Let them remember what has been the consequence of urging that there are peculiar burdens on the land as a pretext for the Corn Laws. Inquiry into its truth was demanded. Two motions were made in this House for it. But they were not carried. No; the House shrank from them. And why? Because, after the matter had been thoroughly sifted, it was found that so far from there being exclusive charges, there were shameful exemptions."

After a few words respecting the tithes as a plea for raising rent by law, Mr. Villiers went on to the question of the Land Tax:—

"As for the Land Tax, it is doubtless a deduction from rent, but one to which the State is entitled; and surely, considering the manner in which the landlords in Parliament have dealt with it since it was imposed, it never can be for their interest to have it discussed or inquired into: no man can learn that history without almost feeling that, as a class, the landowners have proved themselves utterly unworthy of public trust. Nothing ever was more shameless than the manner in which the State has been deprived of its due amount of the Land Tax by a gross violation of the bargain the landowners made with the Crown when it was imposed. It was strictly in lieu of the feudal services by which alone their lands were held, and from which 4s in the pound on the rental were required—clearly an inadequate commutation for the inconvenience to which such services would have exposed them.; but which, did it yield what it ought, would now cover the whole amount of the Excise, and thereby dispense with it. If the Land Tax now paid its proper quota, it would yield thirteen millions a year instead of little more than one million; and by causing the assessment to be fixed upon the valuation of the land made 150 years since, the public have been defrauded of the difference."^[12]

Mr. Villiers has, as has been seen in the above extract from his speech, estimated the Land Tax in 1843 at, if it paid its proper quota, thirteen millions a year instead of little more than one million. In the Financial Reform Almanack for 1876, page 39, the Land Tax is described as a tax—it is not a tax at all, but the purchase-money of the land payable in the shape of a perpetual annuity—which at this day (1876) should be producing £30,000,000 a year towards the public revenue, in place of only £1,000,000 a year, as it is now doing. When it is borne in mind that this £30,000,000 a year represents the result of a transaction of such magnitude that it changed, transformed all the land of an extensive country from public land into private land, the magnitude of the perpetual annuity which represents the purchase-money will not be considered as in any degree extravagant or beyond the limits of fair dealing, of reason, and equity. It will not be considered extravagant, when the claims of those who have got present possession of this landed property is taken into consideration—the claim that the land is theirs for the whole remainder of eternity, notwithstanding the truth shining by its own light, that landed property must be more limited in its nature than other proprietary rights, because no man made the land.

1. In a speech made in the House of Commons, February 26, 1846, Mr. Villiers said, "Up to the present time it has been the boast of the landed proprietors that they have chosen the Ministers of the Country."—Villiers's Free Trade Speeches, vol. ii., p. 332.
2. Strafford's Letters and Despatches, vol. ii., pp. 61-62.
3. Some of those manor-houses might suggest antiquity of family. But the wars of the Roses had rooted up most of the older families. I knew a manor-house from its belonging to an old friend which once belonged to Robert Bruce, King of Scotland. There was a moat round it of clear water full of beautiful water-plants. It came to Robert Bruce in this way. Bruce, Lord of Skelton and Anandale, gave Anandale to his second son who complained to his father that he could not get wheaten bread in Scotland. Thereupon his father gave him the manor I have referred to, and another in Essex to supply him with wheaten bread. I forget the name of the manor in Essex, but I feel confidence in the accuracy of the authority for this story, which I saw in. a paper in The Quarterly Review, written, I believe, by J. G. Lockhart, the Editor of that Review, who was deeply read in historical antiquities.
4. The power of Great Britain is very well expressed in the following passage of Mr. Cobden's work, entitled "1793 and 1863," p. 64:—"The French have a lively recollection of the terrible disasters they suffered from the implacable enmity of oar government during the last war. They found themselves assailed by a feudal aristocracy, having at its command the wealth of a manufacturing and mercantile people, thus presenting the most formidable combination for warlike purposes to be found recorded in the world's history."
5. Madame la Maréchale de Meilleraye. Nouveaux Mémoires de Dangean, p. 82.
6. Some idea may be formed of the slaughter in the encounter between Rupert's and Cromwell's cavalry at Marston Moor, brought on by Lord Byron's impetuosity in dashing over the ditch that separated him from Cromwell's cuirassiers, from the fact that four of Lord Byron's brothers fell. There must have been sis brothers at least, for Sir John Byron, created Lord Byron, in 1643 was succeeded in 1652 by his brother, Richard Byron.
7. "The Bible in Spain," chap. viii.
8. Mr. John Bright to Mr. Cyrus W. Field of New York, dated January 21, 1879, and published in The Daily News, February 19, 1879.
9. A case came to my knowledge only yesterday where land, the annual value of which was £6, was let for building a house at a ground rent of twenty guineas. The gentleman who built the house for himself at a cost of £2000, on a ninety-nine years' lease, built a house that would last more than double ninety-nine years. Consequently the ground- ground-rent man will step in at the end of the ninety-nine years and turn out the children of the builder of this substantial house.
10. Macaulay's History of England, iv., pp. 323, 324, 327.
11. See Cunningham's History of Taxes, p. 186, 3rd edition. London, 1778.
12. Villiers's Free Trade Speeches, vol. ii., pp. 42-44.