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most earnestly and carefully discussed at the present day, and 

 it is there that its solution involves the niost momentous con- 

 sequences. The feudal tenure still prevails so generally in the 

 United Kingdom that the integrity of the government seems 

 to depend largely upon its preservation. The inheritance of 

 large landed estates, the protection of those estates by entail 

 and primogeniture, their preservation by every support which 

 the law can throw about them, are all objects which the Eng- 

 lishman has deeply at heart — feeling as he does that upon the 

 power of a nobility based upon such possessions depend the 

 safety and power of the throne. Great as her commerce and 

 manufactures are, and powerful, she knows that the tie which 

 binds those engaged in these great industries to the govern- 

 ment which protects them is but feeble when compared with 

 the devotion of a great class who cling to their lands and their 

 homesteads, and enjoy the sense of superiority which fills the 

 breast of him who, under the constitution and the laws, is 

 counted one of the lords of the soil. It is upon land-holding 

 of this description that the liberals of England now make war 

 — upon a system which, to their minds, stands opposed to every 

 popular right and privilege for which they contend. 



More than ten years ago, John Bright predicted to an audi- 

 ence in Manchester that the time was rapidly coming when the 

 " American system of land-holding" would be adopted by a 

 reformed British government. Mr. Gladstone presented this 

 system to the minds of the Irish people as the next step in his 

 endeavor to regenerate that island, after the disestablishment 

 of the English church there. The clamor of the most violent 

 and radical of the liberal leaders has been for reform in the 

 direction of a proper distribution of the land among the peo- 

 ple. In parliament, at the hustings, at agricultural meetings 



