338 STUDIES, SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL chap. 



gives elaborate figures to show that the amount of that 

 portion of the poor-rate contributed by the land during 

 the last two-and-a-half centuries amounts to about 500 

 millions, and this he thinks is more than the " prairie- 

 value " of the whole of the land ! He says : 



"Thus, even if we ignore the fact that this amount, gradually 

 contributed, would, if otherwise gradually invested, have yielded in 

 returns of one kind or another a far larger sum, it is manifest that 

 against the claim of the landless may be set off a large claim of the 

 landed — perhaps a larger claim." 



Here is a turning of the tables with a vengeance ! If 

 this is the true state of the case we had better at once 

 present a humble petition to the landlords, praying that 

 they will let us off whatever balance may be due to them, 

 on our undertaking to pay all the poor-rates for the future. 

 For, if Mr. Spencer's reasoning is sound, this is what, in 

 his own words, " Equity sternly commands should be 

 done." But, first, let us look a little closer at this " new 

 way to pay old debts." Mr. Spencer says, that " if we are 

 to go back upon the past at all, we must go back upon 

 the past wholly." These are his own words. Let us then 

 do so, and what shall we find ? We find that the land- 

 lords have, century by century, continuously evaded or 

 thrown off the burdens and duties which appertained to 

 their original tenure of the land. The whole costs of the 

 maintenance of the crown, of the army and navy, of the 

 church, and of the poor, were payable by the landlords or 

 by the proceeds of land which they have stolen from the 

 church and from the people. We find also that the 

 tenants on their estates had originally rights of possession 

 similar to their own, on performance of specified duties. 

 We find that in the time of the Tudors, they themselves 

 created the very pauperism that has been handed down 

 to us, by over-riding those rights. They carried out 

 wholesale evictions of the cultivators of the soil, because 

 the high price of wool rendered the turning of arable 

 land into pasture profitable to them.^ Again we find 



1 See Mr. Joseph Fisher's History of Landowning in England for 

 authentic records of these cruel evictions and their consequences. Also 

 Greene's Short History of the English People, p. 320. 



