Page:The land, the people, and the coming struggle .djvu/18

 your partridges; and when you see each acre of land won by the fierce suasion of hardy toil to give life and hope to the tiller, in this you will find your recompense.

You few, who lock up in your iron safes the title-deeds of more than half Scotland's acreage, I plead to you; forget mere territorial pride and power, and be generous while you may, for the day is near when your pride may be humbled, and your power may be broken.

For you, lords of Erin's fertile soil—you who have wrought her shame and made her disaffection—you who have driven her children across the broad ocean to seek for life—even for you there is the moment to save yourselves, and do good to your kind. Thoughtful workmen will try to gradually win your land by law, hungry paupers may suddenly wrest it from you in despair; you may yield it now on fair terms, and grow even richer in the yielding. England is growing hungry, empty bellies make angry faster than heads reason, and the Land Question cannot stand still.

The struggle—if you compel it, landlords of Great Britain—will be one in which the landless will claim political power, and use it as a weapon, as did their French brethren eighty-five years ago.

At present by gradual concession, you may even win a meed of praise for generosity of conduct, and you may avert for generations that appeal which hunger has always prompted, when pride and power have been deaf to the cry of a nation. At present you have prestige to aid you; use it for good, while you can, for once let the storm-wind of popular indignation turn against your rank and position, and your peerage-prestige will be like a rotten reed on which to lean.

To-day the arbitrament is in your hands, and we pray a just deliverance. To-morrow—if to-day you do nothing—it may be your turn to pray, while your judges may be too hungry to listen. To-day you make the law; use it for human right; for it may be that if you do nothing, to-morrow the law will unmake you, as penalty for having worked and permitted so much wrong against your poorer brethren.