Let us see how the political economist defines “plunder:”
“When a portion of wealth passes out of the hands of him who has acquired it without his consent and without compensation, whether by force or artifice, to him who has not created it, I say that property is violated, that plunder is perpetrated.... If the law itself performs the action it ought to repress, I say that plunder is still perpetrated, and even in a social point of view, under aggravated circumstances.”[91]
Now tell me, my Friend, how do the instances I have given above differ from legalized Plunder as defined by Bastiat?
When Judge Flannagan says, “you must submit to the inevitable,” he says, in fact, “you must submit to be legally plundered.”
When Judge Ormsby says “no one could foresee what would occur,” he says in fact, “no one could foresee that the law would become an instrument of plunder.”
No one could foresee it? Why, every one with common sense could foresee it—every one but those wilfully blind. An admirer of Mr. Gladstone naively writes in the Westminster Review respecting the Land Act:—
“The people of the United States would not have tolerated such an interference with the laws of contract as it involved. No member of Congress could be found who would propose anything so indefensible from the American point of view.”[92]
And he might have added indefensible from every point of view.
Froude, the historian, says:
“It was England which introduced landowning and landlords into Ireland as an expedient for ruling it. If we choose now to remove the landlords or divide their property with their tenants, we must do it from our own resources; we have no right to make the landlords pay for the vagaries of our own idolatries.”[93]