THE PROPER END OF ROYALTY.
I did not confine my observations of land troubles to Ireland alone, though it is in Ireland that there is the worst condition of affairs, for the reason that there is a vital difference between the ruling classes of England and the entire Irish people, in race and religion, and that makes a great deal more difference in the British Empire than anywhere else on the footstool.
But the English or Scotch farmer has not so happy a time of it as he might have, and England will have just as violent a land agitation as Ireland within a very few years. The average Englishman has a vast veneration for royalty and nobility, and all that sort of thing, for he ascribes to the “system” what he himself has done to make Britain great, but his wife and children are nearer to him than Her Majesty or My Lord, and he is beginning to ask why he is yearly getting worse off, while Her Majesty and My Lord are living even more luxuriously and expensively than ever?
When a strong, vigorous race of men get to asking themselves this question, it is high time that Her Majesty and My Lord begin to look out for themselves. The French peasantry and the French artisans made it very warm for the “Divine Righters” several times, and finally they have a republic that will endure; not the best republic in the world, but a very good attempt at one; as good as we could expect from Frenchmen.
Farming in England doesn’t pay much better than in Ireland, and the reason for it, as in Ireland, is summed up in the one word, rent. In Bedfordshire, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, and Cambridgeshire, there are hundreds upon hundreds of farms vacant, and doing nothing, the reason being the insecurity of tenant farmers and the rottenness of land ownership. It all comes from the fact that in England as in Ireland, the fee simple of the land is in the hands of the few, and that the few owners regard the tenants as so many cows to be milked for their infernal extravagancies, and that they are so stupid that they cannot be made to understand that there is a point beyond which the tenant cannot go, and that when that point is reached something must break.
LAND TROUBLES IN ENGLAND.
One farm I saw was a good piece of land of two hundred and eighty acres. It lies as dead as Julius Cæsar, and is growing up to thistles. Why? Because the rent is four hundred pounds a year, or two thousand dollars. It has been screwed up to that point by successive owners, till the closest labor and the most starving economy will not pay the rent. It would not pay it anywhere on the globe.