Page:The land, the people, and the coming struggle .djvu/11

 wider and wider; towns are enlarged, and new ones built; the construction of a railway suddenly gives to this suburb, to that district, an artificial value of some importance. All this combines in a manner to raise the value of land."

These land monopolists, too, are ever grasping; they swallow common lands and enclose wastes, relying on their long purses, the cost of legal proceedings, and the apathy of a peasantry ignorant of their rights and unable to perform their duties.

The Westminster Review says that no less than 7,000,000 acres of commons have gone to increase the already large estates of adjoining proprietors during the last 200 years—all, be it remembered, since the landed aristocracy have, under the present reigning family, wielded full parliamentary power—all taken during the time that the imperial national debt had risen from about £52,000,000 to that enormous sum, of which we still owe upwards of £750,000,000 in England, besides our debt in India, being estimated at over £120,000,000 more. Side by side with this increased taxation, and upon these huge estates, we find an unimproved—if not an absolutely deteriorated—farm population. The parliamentary blue-books of 1867 describe the population round Mayhill as seeming "to lie entirely out of the pale of civilisation; type after type of social life degraded almost to the level of barbarism." In Yorkshire we are told of the "immorality and degradation arising from the crowded and neglected state of the dwellings of the poor."

In Northamptonshire some of the cottages "are disgraceful, necessarily unhealthy, and a disgrace to civilisation." In a Bedfordshire parish "one-third of the entire population were receiving pauper relief, and it seemed altogether to puzzle the relieving officer to account for the manner in which one-half the remainder lived." In Bucks the labourer has to "pay exorbitant rent for a house in which the ordinary decencies of life become a dead letter." So we may go through all the eastern, southern, south-western, and most of the midland rural districts, until the repetition grows as nauseous as it is hideous.

The wages of this wretched agricultural class varied before the union of agricultural labourers from 7s. to 15s. per week, wage of 10s. to 12s. per week being the most common, out of which a man had to pay rent, and feed, clothe, and educate himself and his family. Children were