PROBLEMS OF PROPERTY. 333 



it does so as a moral feeling which may be neglected with no legal 

 - penalty and often no social odium. The Duchess of Sutherland could 

 banish the occupants from the estates which their ancestors had tilled 

 for centuries, and convert the land into pastures, yet legal resource 

 there was none. A sybarite Marquis of Hertford could live in Paris 

 for thirty years together, with an income of ninety thousand pounds, 

 and dismiss without a reply a deputation of his Irish tenants petition- 

 ing for assistance in building a much-needed railway. Could the orig- 

 inal founders of the two families thus unworthily rejDresented have 

 treated their retainers and tenantry thus haughtily and unjustly, and 

 not suffer for it ? I think not. The rules of property, devised with 

 a limited glance into future time, and with no expectation of the vast 

 strides in population and wealth w T hich the world has made during the 

 past century, have had very awkward strains put upon them strains 

 which they were not originally expected or intended to bear. The rise 

 of manufacturing towns and the drift of the rural population to the 

 cities have conferred upon land-owners an immense multiplication of 

 their fortunes, and made the incomes of many of them aggregate 

 sums far beyond the legitimate demand of mortal, and this to the 

 plain deprivation of the public. 



Mark, too, the influence of the landlord in legislation. Note the 

 privilege which attends his claims even in America. 



In Great Britain in 1G92 the tax on land was one fifth of its annual 

 value, now it is about one fifth of that fraction. Landlords have thus 

 grossly evaded their fair share of taxation. And note what horrid 

 suffering and violences, often unpardonable, have been necessary to give 

 Ireland such measure of land-reform as she enjoys to-day. The agita- 

 tion against primogeniture and entail grows constantly in force in Great 

 Britain, and the reform begun in Ireland and hastened there by differ- 

 ences in race and religion between landlords and tenants must of its 

 justice spread to the sister island in time. 



The complaint against property has, I think, been unduly directed 

 against land, perhaps because land used to be the chief form of wealth. 

 Real estate may present the most evident cases of abused privilege, 

 but the main social difficulty, it appears to me, is the undue accumu- 

 lation of wealth of any kind. The land of the world is certainly lim- 

 ited in quantity, but so are other forms of wealth : houses, mills, ma- 

 chinery, railways, and merchandise all these, though vast in amount, 

 are something short of infinite ; and while land, as in America, is freely 

 exchangeable for these other things, no special harm attaches to undue 

 possession of it. And if it be said that these other things differ from 

 land in that they can be indefinitely increased in amount, such an in- 

 crease may be fairly compared with the settlement of barren territory 

 in old countries, or of virgin soil in new. The forms of wealth other 

 than land, while practically quite as limited in quantity, are quite as 

 necessary to human life, so that, in their arguments against excessive 



