Mary A. M. Marks

“ As no landowner would allow the sudden irruption of a hundred persons into a village—where in all probability there would not be a single house to accommodate them—they must have scattered themselves, as in fact they did, in the nearest towns. On a small scale, this sort of thing is constantly happening, and fully accounts for the overcrowding of towns. The exodus is doubtless helped by the fact that in a town a man feels himself more free, and has more amusements; but as the children of villagers grow up, they have little choice—go they must. ”

“ The destruction of small holdings, and of common land, has had a most powerful influence on the unequal distribution of population. Everything has long conspired, and still conspires, to drive the people into the towns. Thus has arisen that vast, unmanageable mass of "casual" labour, which hangs on the skirts of regular labour, and pulls it down.
The class which suffers most from the unequal distribution of population is the class of "unskilled" labour. Not that any labour can be wholly unskilled—every kind of work can be done well or ill. ”

“ I can conceive nothing more cruel, I had almost said more insolent, than to condemn a labourer to the lowest possible wages on which life may be sustained, by an act of Parliament, interpreted and enforced by an ubiquitous body of magistrates, whose interest it was to screw the pittance down to the lowest conceivable margin, and to inform the stinted recipient that when he had starved on that pittance during the days of his strength, others must work to maintain him in sickness or old age. ”

“ The effect was to destroy the real "Old Nobility" of England, a class which with all its faults produced in every generation men capable of directing the councils of kings; and it did this only to make way for Henry VIII.'s new nobility, noble in nothing but the name — mostly adventurers, with no great traditions of the past to inspire or restrain them. No one can fail to be struck by the contrast between the independent spirit of the old Norman and Plantagenet barons and earls, and the sordid subserviency of the new men, who sold themselves without shame for mere wealth. ”

“ It flooded the country with "out-o'-works," created a vast body of extreme poverty, and, by its cruel treatment of the poverty it had caused, it gave us a large degraded population—a hotbed of misery and crime, a curse from generation to generation.
But it was not the only robbery. Since then another system has been pursued—a system of stealthy and gradual enclosure—stealthy and gradual at first, soon growing bolder, as statutes ceased even to affect any care for the rights of small landowners, and went on to authorise land-robbery, under the name of "improvement." ”

“ Every other country in the world has a peasant class. England alone has none. For to call the English agricultural labourer a "peasant" is to misrepresent his condition. He is not a peasant, but a day-labourer, living in a cottage not his own, and working for a wage as much fixed by his master as it formerly was by the justices. He cannot call his soul his own. ”

“ And the irony of this is, that whenever small holdings are mentioned, we are told that the peasant is too poor to farm to advantage—he will not get out of his land what could be got out of it by a man able to spend money as well as labour on it; and the very persons who think this a good reason for extinguishing small holdings are the most anxious to prevent the bankrupt owner of half a shire from selling one of the acres, which he is too poor to farm to advantage.
But the evils of our land system are not confined to entail. The transfer of land has long been crying out for reform. ”

“ Thus, the Wars of the Roses had destroyed the only class able to resist the pretensions of the Crown. Not until Edward IV. governed by fear were men put to death for words spoken, suggesting a doubt of the King's title, even though the Judges might give their opinion that there was no evidence of treasonable intent. Only the spectre of a renewed civil war could have made Englishmen submit to such a reign of terror. What battle had begun, attainder completed, and Richard III. carried on the work of destroying the men great enough to be formidable. ”

“ Political economists have been a great deal too apt to consider economic problems from the point of view of money profits, to consider them with reference to property rather than to life. And so they talk of profits, without defining whose profits. Unless wages rise, or profits are shared, the worker cannot be truly said to "share" in national prosperity. It is true that in good times there are fewer out of work, but when "profits" double, wages do not double. Yet the doubling of profits is set down as the doubling of the general prosperity of the country. ”

“ The sequestrators tore the jewels from the shrines, and bundled the rich sacerdotal garments, the jewelled pyxes and chalices, the splendid illuminated Bibles and Psalters, the priceless Manuscripts, into waggons, while the frightened people looked on aghast. In 1541 he took all the monasteries of Ireland. Such rapine had never been seen since the Huns and Goths overran the Roman Empire. It scandalised all Europe. And because Henry burnt in the same fire Catholics who denied his supremacy and reformers who denied Transubstantiation, his enemies declared that he had no religion at all. ”

“ The levellers said : "The most necessary work of mankind is to provide for the poor. The rich can help themselves ... the wealth and strength of all countries are in the poor, for they do all the great necessary works, and they make up the main body of the strength of armies." And Winstanley the Digger wrote: "England is not a free people till the poor that have no land have a free allowance to dig and labour the commons, and so live as comfortably as the landlords that live in their enclosures." ”

“ Here, of course, freedom of contract means the freedom of the freeholder to drive the hardest bargain he possibly can; and the "abilities to be brought to bear" are the abilities which enable one man to exploit the labour of another man. The one-sidedness of the "freedom" never seems to have struck Mr Ryde at all. Where is the tenant's freedom? The landlord is truly "free." He can make a more or less hard bargain with the lessee, but the lessee must submit to the terms, or give up business altogether. ”

“ We shall be the less tempted to excuse the robbery of the poor, which was the instant result of the suppression of the monasteries, and we shall be less inclined to believe that the English poor have always been more vicious, idle, and numerous than all others. There cannot be a doubt that the dislike of the poor, the eagerness to blame them for their poverty, which strikes foreigners as so strange in English people, had its birth in the great wrongs done them with respect to the land. Foreigners reproach us with making poverty a crime. ”

“ Our land system is too often regarded as, on the one hand, of so reverend an antiquity that to touch it is to break with all the traditions of Englishmen, and on the other, as so great an improvement, in a democratic direction, on the system of the past, that we cannot materially improve it. ”

“ It will be a hard task to restore the people to the soil. Many of them, alas ! have lost the taste for that first and most blessed form of human labour, the cultivation of the fruitful earth. But give them a little bit of their own—though but a garden—to till, and the taste will revive. ”

“ The writer of a letter in the Gentleman's Magazine for 1798, signed "Agricola," says that it has been the custom in open fields of leaving one-third or one-fourth every year as of common right for all persons, "as well those of smaller property, and that not in land, as those of superior property and that in land, to turn their cattle, horses and sheep to feed, in proportion to their several legal holdings, whether land or cottage." "Agricola" does not believe in "the unlimited right of common—it is too absurd to be defended." ”

“ What fortune amassed by a manufacturer can make up to the State for such a physical ruin of the next generation? We all believe that many terrible abuses existed in the past, and we know that these abuses have long since come to an end. But all that this knowledge does for most of us is to encourage us to believe that all is right now. Unfortunately, it is not so. An abuse may be swept away only for a worse abuse to come in its place. ”

“ In England, property in land is protected far more effectually than property in money. Yet, of the two, property in money needs more protection, for whereas we are always being reminded that land "cannot run away," we all know that money cannot only "take to itself wings" by our own folly, but that when we are robbed of money it is seldom that we recover it. The worst that can happen to the ground landlord is to lose his rent for a time—his land remains where it was, and possession can be recovered, if his title is clear. ”

“ Then came sixteen years of civil war, with twelve pitched battles—battles in most of which only a few thousands of each side took part, but which were very fatal to the noble families who cast in their lot with the White or the Red Rose—and in that quarrel it was impossible for any great family to stand aloof. ”

“ The religious houses found it easy to cope with the inevitable misfortunes of sickness, bad years, old age, and helplessness. There were the blind, the lame, the crippled; but there were not hordes of able-bodied men for whom their country had no use and no place.
We have but to study the Acts of Parliament to see that the destruction of small farms caused a mass of poverty and misery which terrified the rich, and made them first think of hanging the vagrants, and when this proved impracticable, of trying to cope with the evil by Poor Laws. ”

“ Mr Balfour explained to them, that "by the law of production, if you double the number of hands on a farm, the actual productiveness of each man will be diminished, because you have increased the number of men extracting from the soil produce which it gives perhaps reluctantly and grudgingly. ... Every economist knows that you cannot increase the amount of labour you put on land, without diminishing the productiveness of that land." ”

“ The position of such a spendthrift, or of his luckless heir, always has a fascination for the public—as is shown by the many works of fiction whose plots turn on such a situation. But there is another aspect, less picturesque, but immeasurably more important than the troubles of a man who is at once a great landowner and almost a beggar, and that is the position of his tenants. If "even slight difficulties have a powerful influence in arresting the improvement of the land," what must be the effect of a system for securing a man in the possession of property when he cannot improve? ”

“ The idea that the poor multiplied "like lice and fleas" seems to have haunted our fathers like a nightmare. Nor did ever a nation inflict such penalties on poverty. It is but literal truth to say that in England poverty is a crime. ”

“ Everyone who knows anything of the condition of a "sequestered" estate knows that a landlord cannot be beggared without his estate being starved. The whole position is a false one. It is bad for all parties—for the A family, whose estate has become a millstone tied to their necks, for the creditors, who must wait through a long term of years to recover their debts, and for the tenants, who see their holdings gradually deteriorating for want of money to be laid out, and have to choose between rubbing on as they can and having their rent raised to make up for any outlay on improvements. ”

“ There can be no more striking instance of the fact that the individual is better able to defend himself than the community. It would have been impossible to force a single individual to pay an artificial price for his bread, but when the whole people suffered, they were tolerably submissive. ”

“ For as hypocrisy and superstitions do blear the eyes: so covetousness and ambition do put the eyes clean out. For if ye were not stark blind ye would see and be ashamed that where fifty tun-bellied monks given to gluttony filled their paunches, kept up their house, and relieved the whole country round about them, there one of your greedy guts devouring the whole house and making great pillage throughout the country, cannot be satisfied. The King is disappointed that both the poor be despoiled, all maintenance of learning decayed, and you only enriched. ”

“ So tender are we of the "right" of a landlord to do what he will with his "own," that we forget that the "duties" of landholding are greater than the "rights," by so much as land differs from all other possessions.
The power wielded by land is far too great to be concentrated in so few hands. In the rural districts it is omnipotent. Country magistrates are almost invariably landowners, when not parsons; and when they are parsons, it is generally because the parson is also a landowner—or, as he has been called, "a squarson." ”

“ He agrees, not because he willingly accepts the terms, but because they are the only terms on which he can obtain something for which there is no substitute. There is certainly "nothing like it," and it is certainly" nothing like the old feudal system, there is nothing to be compared to it"—not even the right of asking what price you please for a horse that has won the Derby, a right also "seen beforehand." In no market but the English land-market is any commodity paid for over and over again; and in no other market is an improvement acknowledged by a "fine." ”

“ He can, and frequently does, pull down a house and erect no other in its place. He can, and still more frequently does, refuse to allow a new house to be built. He still, in the twentieth century, regards it as something like petty treason if his tenants do not vote for the candidate he supports. He has even given very strong hints that, notwithstanding the ballot, it leaks out how a man votes. As a rule, the great landlord does not use his full legal rights. He rarely does more than turn out a tenant who is too "independent," and prevent the increase of cottages. ”

“ The countrymen of Hampden boasted of liberty, but they were content to live in a nation of slaves—homeless and landless men, whom their own selfish policy had made so numerous that they were alarmed at the great army of destitute unemployed who had been weeded off the lands which the gentry had been stealthily enclosing for a century. These poor creatures had place and work under the feudal system, but none under the Commonwealth. There is not a particle of evidence that there was work waiting to be done—all the evidence shows that they were not wanted. ”

“ The whole body of our Land Laws conspires to promote and perpetuate a state of things in which, as in North Dorset, one man can own six parishes and half of six more. No responsible thinker proposes any violent change, any forcible confiscation or redivision of the land—he knows that, even if it could by any possibility be done, the same causes which have produced accumulation once would produce it again. ”