Page:Notes on the Anti-Corn Law Struggle.djvu/192

 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