Page:The land, the people, and the coming struggle .djvu/6

 In too many cases these landholders treat their freehold rights as of infinitely more importance than the happiness of the peasantry of the neighbourhood. Ancient footpaths are closed, common rights denied, game preserving and rabbit breeding carried on to the point of crop annihilation, county members nominated and returned as if the title to the freehold carried with it monopoly of political right; and a most contemptuous indifference is shown as to the condition of the tiller of the soil, or, what is even worse, there is a mockery of charity, to remedy in small part the evil which the very charitable gentry have themselves created.

For the last 163 years this landed aristocracy has been the real governing class, superseding the Crown, and, until 1832, entirely controlling the people.

During this time—viz., from 1714—the standing army has been built up, and the National Debt has been almost entirely created, while Imperial taxation, and the rent-rolls of the few privileged ones, have enormously increased; thus the burdens of Imperial and local taxation have been shifted from the shoulders of the landholder to those of the labourer. For since, with the accession of the Brunswick family to the English throne, the monarch, excluded even from the political councils of the nation—at first because he could not speak the language of his subjects, as in the case of George I.; then because of his indifference, as in that of George II.; and then because of his oft-recurring insanity, as in that of George III.—has been practically reduced to a mere costly show puppet, it is impossible for the student of our history not to remark how the landed aristocracy have utilised their possession of political power for the transference from their own shoulders of the bulk of the local and Imperial taxation.

Amongst the agricultural classes, pauperism has become more permanent and more widespread, and certain classes of crime and misery have more prevailed, as the land monopoly has become more complete.

The agricultural labourers of many English counties, and notably of Dorset, Wilts, Gloucester, Norfolk, Suffolk, have, from bad and insufficient food and shelter, so degenerated, that their state is a disgrace to any civilised country in the world. The Westminster Review urges, on the evidence of Mr. Simon, Medical Inspector, that rather more than one-half of our Southern population are so badly fed, that a class of starvation diseases, and a general deterioration of mind,