Page:The Complete Works of Henry George Volume 3.djvu/39

 PROPOSED REMEDIES. 31

proprietary "the State to buy out the landlords and resell to the tenants, for annual payments extending over a term of years, and covering principal and interest. Waiving all practical difficulties, and they are very great, what could thus be accomplished ? Nothing real and permanent. For not merely is this, too, but a partial measure, which could not improve the condition of the masses of the people or help those most needing help, but no sooner were the lands thus divided than a process of concentration would infallibly set in which would be all the more rapid from the fact that the new landholders would be heavily mort- gaged. The tendency to concentration which has so steadily operated in Great Britain, and is so plainly show- ing itself in our new States, must operate in Ireland, and would immediately begin to weld together again the little patches of the newly created peasant proprietors. The tendency of the time is against peasant proprietorships ; it is in everything to concentration, not to separation. The tendency which has wiped out the small landowners, the boasted yeomanry, of England which in our new States is uniting the quarter-sections of preemption and homestead settlers into great farms of thousands of acres is already too strong to be resisted, and is constantly becoming stronger and more penetrating. For it springs from the inventions and improvements and economies which are transforming modern industry the same influ- ences which are concentrating population in large cities, business into the hands of great houses, and for the blacksmith making his own nails or the weaver working his own loom substitute the factory of the great corporation. That a great deal that the English advocates of peasant proprietorship have to say about the results of their favorite system in continental Europe is not borne out by the facts, any one who chooses to look over the testimony may see. But it is useless to discuss that.

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