396 History of the English Landed Interest. 



Land Laws, there is little doubt that the seignorial interest 

 would have yielded to public opinion. The fact that no such 

 clamour arose is proof positive that the nation did not regard 

 the question as vital to its interests. The lawyers, the 

 savants, the merchants, and the shopkeepers of England were 

 prospering, and regarded any revolutionary redistribution of 

 wealth as a menace to their own interests. Only the wage- 

 earning classes had cause to grumble, and they were not as 

 yet so desperate as to proceed to extreme measures. Far- 

 seeing pohticians kept their fingers on the public pulse, and 

 when they felt it throbbing under their touch with suppressed 

 excitement, they prescribed the necessary remedies. These 

 took the form of the Eeform Bill of 1832, and the Repeal 

 of the Corn Laws in 1846. In neither case was it necessary 

 to interfere with vested interests. Parliament, as the theatre 

 of corruption and abuse, required a cleansing, not one whit 

 less thorough than did any Augean Stable of old. In the 

 Repeal of the Corn Laws the legislature withdrew a pro- 

 tection which should never have been considered permanent, 

 and there is a wide distinction between its action in this in- 

 stance and the powers claimed for it by the Radical. " I do 

 not," said Mr. Grladstone, when defending the management of 

 his father's estates against the charges brought by Lord 

 Howick in 1833, " view property as an abstract thing; it is the 

 creature of civil society. By the legislature it is granted, and 

 by the legislature it is destroyed." ^ Surely, however, the 

 rights of property are an institution which antedates that of 

 society, and for the defence of which society was created ? 

 Has not Mill taught his countrymen to believe that the tri- 

 bunals of society preceded laws, and were originally established 

 not to create or destroy, but to protect ? Such a contention 

 does not deny society the right of interference with private 

 property ; for what is private property but public goods held 

 in trust for the benefit of the human race ? The owner of it, 

 whether nation, class or individual, violates that trust, and 

 renders himself liable to spoliation, whenever he excludes his 



1 The Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone. G. "W. E. Russell, p. 33. 12th 

 thousand. 



