Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 137.djvu/722

716 who were at some period robbed in order that landlords might fatten at their expense. Let the sovereign and long-abused people at once resume their own, and eject them who have usurped it.

The landlord is, according to the latest evangelists, the real and only obstacle to universal happiness. Eliminate him, and half the evils which afflict society will at once flee away; his baleful presence and influence will no longer hinder the benevolent energetic masses in their endeavours to help each other and themselves; labour will be not nominally only, but really, free; no more want, no more pauperism, no more lack of employment; prosperity and good-will (except to the wicked landlords) all round. It is useless to offer any moral argument against this agitation. Those outside the movement require no convincing; the actors in it are not to be convinced in that way. They may nevertheless learn by experience, as did they who joined in the anabasis against public creditors.

The seizure of the land, simple as it is made to appear to us, will probably be not one whit more easy of accomplishment than the robbery of the fundholder. The present relations of the land to the mass of our people are so intricate, they twine so intimately through our whole system, that the convulsion occasioned by a forcible expropriation of the soil would be a revolution of the most dangerous character – one of which no man, at its beginning, could possibly foresee the end. Only just attempt to shake the existing scheme, and observe to what a distance, and through what countless channels, you will produce vibrations. Those warning vibrations will make Britain pause as she paused when incited to defraud her public creditors. While she lingers it is quite possible that some State or colony of yesterday, being full of youthful ardour, may try the effect of "nationalising the land." Teaching will then be by example, and future history may have to record how Great Britain learned another lesson from the wreck of some wilful Government, how she tried to forget that she had been near falling into the same pit herself, and how the "nationalising of the land " had suddenly dropped out from among her household words, and been shrouded in dictionaries and annals as an exploded folly.

Already there has been in Ireland a violent seizure of part of the profits derived from the land; but the robbery there has not yet been so thorough as to silence quacks who will still be bawling that the dose failed because it was not strong enough. For those, however, who do not scorn instruction, there is a great deal to be learned, as regards landlords, from the present state of Ireland. If landlords be the real and sole obstacles to the prosperity of the masses, and if the fall of them be the riches of the world, and the diminishing of them be the riches of the working classes, then ought Ireland to be the great pioneer of prosperity, the first-fruits of a dispensation untainted by the upas-tree of landlords' influence. For, although landlords are still to be found in that island, yet they are there reduced to such poverty, and impotence, and insignificance, that humanity must find itself unshackled. Here, then, we have the condition insisted upon by our last prophets and reformers as antecedent to the new golden age. Here we ought even now to see begun the blessed revolution –