206 Tithes versus Rent. [FEB. 



The writer is here endeavouring to shew that landed property possesses, 

 independently of lucrative rent, immense advantages over any other 

 in the fact of its durability. The writer knows full well, if his attempts 

 to advertise the public of a most important truth should attract any 

 attention, how commonly the counter argument will in society assume 

 the tone of indignation and impassioned sense of injury. 



" What, then," will the Duke of Newcastle's class, in all its degrees, 

 exclaim, tf am I not only to be deterred from doing quite what I will 

 with my own, but is my own to be rendered absolutely profitless to me ? 

 * Quousque tandem abutere Radicalis palientia nostra ?' As well take my 

 property from me at once as abolish its uses ! This is surely the first 

 time that any such principles were openly avowed in decent society ! 

 If this be not to advocate spoliation, it is the next degree to it, and must 

 soon lead to it," c. &c. &c. 



It is, therefore, important to shew that to deprive a landlord of a por- 

 tion of his rent profits is not to rob him of his property. The landowner 

 will, of course, be very slow to apprehend this fact, and will never can- 

 didly admit it. The public, however, the humane and compassionate 

 public (the most humane and considerate, notwithstanding what block- 

 heads sometimes say to the contrary), is to be prevented from feeling 

 anything like pity for the landowners ; it must be heart-hardened, with- 

 out loss of time, against all appeals in the shape of the argumentum ad 

 misericordium in favour of rent. 



There is not, within the whole compass of political verity, a more cer- 

 tain truth than this ; and with this the titheman purposes to floor the 

 rentman of the Westminster, beyond any chance of his coming, up again 

 to time. " The security of landed property, and the returns it will 

 yield to a cultivator (not a rent receiver), constitute advantages far be-' 

 yond those of any other sort of property, and these are all the advan- 

 tages to which landed property is entitled." 



And now, having beat the renter out of all power of farther mischief 

 from him, and jumped over the ropes of the ring in token of my own 

 unabated powers of fight, let me, good gentlemen patrons, have a word 

 with you before we part. 



Gentlemen of England ! if you'll only be persuaded to set apart a 

 little of the zeal and energy with which you prosecute the various pur- 

 suits of ambition and profit, for a personal, inspiriting, manly interest in 

 the advancement of unadulterated Christianity ; if you'll only take the 

 lead in religious matters, instead of leaving them, as beneath your manly 

 dignity, to the well intentioned and amiable, but feminine and mis- 

 judging patronage of your grandmothers, mothers, wives, and daughters, 

 the work of substituting a body of masculine, philosophic, clerical, 

 Christian philosophers, for the present aides-dii-camp of the dowagers 

 and faded spinsters of the country, will have been accomplished in a 

 very short time indeed. 



You shall not, gentlemen of England ! good and well-intentioned fel- 

 lows as you are in the main, while I have a voice to expose the injustice, 

 " dum spirilus hos regit artus,'' shift the blame of the present comparative 

 inefficiency of the parsons to their shoulders, from the only one's that 

 ought to bear it from your own ! 



I tell you plainly it is your own fault that the interests of Christianity 

 are entrusted to less clear-sightec^ and experienced persons than your- 

 selves. I complain not of those amongst you who care nothing about 

 religion. Every grown gentleman has an undoubted right to despise 



