Page:Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne.djvu/213

Rh conclusion been farther followed, it would have compelled the admission that all rent was unjustifiable which normally maintained any person in idleness; which is indeed the whole truth of the matter. But Mr. Mill instantly retreats from this perilous admission; and after three or four pages of discussion (quite accurate for its part) of the limits of power in management of the land itself (which apply just as strictly to the peasant proprietor as to the cottier's landlord), he begs the whole question at issue in one brief sentence, slipped cunningly into the middle of a long one which appears to be telling all the other way, and in which the fatal assertion (of the right to rent) nestles itself, as if it had been already proved,—thus—I italicise the unproved assertion in which the venom of the entire falsehood is concentrated.

"Even in the case of cultivated land, a man whom, though only one among millions, the law permits to hold thousands of acres as his single share, is not entitled to think that all is given to him to use and abuse, and deal with it as if it concerned nobody