deter him from investing his savings in the purchase of land. … The state of the law led also to the absorption of the smaller proprietors … it was diminishing the number of small properties."[1]
This was the state of the law in 1846. By how much is it better now? Will an assembly of great landowners ever reform it? Up to 1832 the vast majority of members of the House of Commons were landowners. The few who were not, were, like Burke, the nominees of landowners. The best argument for the retention of rotten and pocket boroughs used to be that they gave a poor but able man a chance of entering Parliament by the favour of the owner of such a borough.
Even the Reform Bill did not much alter this—landowners still formed the majority, and the present House contains more members who are not considerable owners of land than any which ever sat in England. One of the changes made by the Reform Bill was to give an occupier a vote if he was rented or rated at a certain value. This gave political power to the land, but not to the man; for the landlord could deprive his tenant of his vote by turning him out. And so, even after 1832, landlords drove their tenants to the poll like a flock of sheep. Our land system, in the country districts where it can work unrestrained, is a strange anomaly in "a free country." It is totally inconsistent with the spirit of those political institutions on which we pride ourselves as Englishmen. If an English squire chose to pull down a whole village, and drive out the people to be a charge upon the town into which they must go, he would not violate the law. He can, if he chooses, turn pasture or tillage into a park, and can exclude the public from that park. He can, and frequently does, pull down a house and erect no other in its place. He can, and still more frequently does, refuse to allow a new house to be built. He still, in the twentieth century, regards it as something like petty treason if his tenants do not vote for the candidate he supports. He has even given very strong hints that, notwithstanding the ballot, it leaks out how a man votes. As a rule, the great landlord does not use his full legal rights.
- ↑ 24th March 1846.
