Page:Notes on the Anti-Corn Law Struggle.djvu/213

 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