RATIO OF LAND OWNERS TO POPULATION. 41 



they were before the Great Charter secured personal rights- and 

 a trial by jury to every freeman born upon English soil. 



At the time of the Norman conquest the population of Eng 

 land was supposed to be a million and a half, and the roll of 

 land oivners numbered over 45,000. In 1861, with a population 

 of 20,000,000, the number of land owners is reduced to 30,000, 

 and every twentieth man is a pauper. In Ireland, just before 

 the famine, the rural population amounted to twenty-five for 

 every hundred acres; in France, at the same period, to sixteen; 

 in England to twelve, and in the Scotch Lowlands to five. 

 Land monopoly has driven two millions of agricultural labor 

 ers out of Great Britain. The English farm laborer has been 

 cheated of his manhood; first, by a monopoly of government) 

 which, by withholding the ballot, kept him in a servile condi 

 tion; second, by monopoly of land, which destroyed the high 

 est motive for industry, viz: the improvement of his condition, 

 and the attainment of a permanent home; and third, a monop 

 oly of education. 



In 1848 an English statesman was asked if something could 

 not be done to check the stream of emigration setting from 

 Ireland toward America. &quot;Not while middlemen hold all the 

 land as agents of the aristocracy, and get all the profits,&quot; was 

 the significant reply. 



Professor J. Thorold Kogers has given us a history of British 

 agriculture from 1259 to 1793. He shows, from carefully collected 

 data, how gradually the emancipation of the agricultural classes 

 took place; how the aristocracy were eating each other up with 

 expensive wars and the extravagance of courts; how the yeomanry 

 lost ground during the reformation; what was their Golden Age, 

 and that the English peasant is again becoming a serf, and the 

 yeomanry disappearing in the absorption of nearly all the land 

 by a small number of great proprietors. 



If the end of labor, and of wealth created by labor, is man 

 himself, the civilization of England finds a parallel in that of 

 Rome, and for the same reasons. Its agriculture, successful 

 and wonderful in its results during the last century and a half, 

 is an exhibition of the power of capital applied to land. The 

 development of agricultural wealth and of civilization in the 

 &quot;United States and in Australia is an exhibition of the power of 

 manhood similarly applied. 



The advance in the price of agricultural labor in England has 



