Page:The land, the people, and the coming struggle .djvu/7

 must result. In Berkshire, Oxfordshire, and Somersetshire, insufficiency of nitrogenous food is the average.

Landowners, in the large majority of instances, and this whether the proprietor be Whig or Tory, regard their tenants as bound to follow the politics of their freeholder, and as fairly liable to ejectment when malcontent.

Mr. Latham, a magistrate of Cheshire, before the House of Commons' Committee, said that "it was the evil of property that a man considers that he owns not only the property itself, but that he owns the souls of the tenants also."

The Duke of Buccleuch, not content with the influence which his vast holdings in Scotland give him, has actually followed the practice of manufacturing voters, by granting to certain persons feu rents or freehold rent-charges, to qualify them for county voters, and this to such a glaring extent as to excite popular indignation. This fabrication, however immoral, is held to be legal, although, since the grant of the rent charges, his Grace has actually sold to a railway company a considerable portion of the property charged. This Duke of Buccleuch, in his Wanlockhead mining works, in Dumfriesshire, employs a number of wretched lead miners, who sometimes do not see five pounds in actual money from year's end to year's end, being constantly in debt to the overseer's shop. They are badly paid and tyrannically dealt with.

In Wales, because at the general election in 1868 the advantage was "won by the Liberals, through the votes of the freeholders and leaseholders of cottages, the landlords," says the Westminster Review, "enraged at their defeat, proceeded to wreak their vengeance upon those of their tenants who had presumed to vote in accordance with their convictions." Mr. Harris, a gentleman of independent means in Cardiganshire, "believed that as many as 200 notices to quit had been served in Cardiganshire alone, at Lady Day after the election. He was himself aware of from thirty to thirty-five served upon tenant farmers, in some cases where the families had been 200 years upon the estates; in others where considerable sums had been laid out by the farmers in improving their farms, which, as the law now stands in England, they have no means of recovering."

In Ireland you have a landlord—perhaps like the late Most Noble the Marquis of Hertford—constantly residing out of the country, having no sympathy or connection with