"We give two-ninths of arable, and one-eighth of green land to the tithe-owner. So far as tithes belong to the clergy, they put so much land in mortmain. But land in mortmain is not so injurious to agriculture as tithes taken in hand. And I thought the Bill might lead to some permanent commutation, or at least to a settled rent, putting all the occupiers of land on an equal footing with respect to cultivation.
"The French agriculturists have gained a great advantage by throwing the maintenance of their clergy on the nation at large, instead of tithes which pressed wholly on agriculture. Formerly land was almost the only property productive of income; and, therefore, many charges were imposed on land which ought, in the present circumstances, to be a charge on property generally, if that could be effected. It seems to me that the present state of the European world is so changed that other changes must follow. Moneyed property, the profits of trade and manufacturers, are now a vast proportion of the income of the inhabitants of this country, and the persons deriving income from these sources bear that proportion only of the public burdens which are taxes on expenditure; while the income derived from land maintains the Church, the poor, the roads, the administration of justice, etc., etc., to a vast amount, and pays at the same time all taxes on expenditure; and the direct burdens on land increase with the riches produced by trade and manufactures, and the moneyed property. This I take to be a great cause of distress amongst the agriculturists and their landlords.
"Truly yours,
"Redesdale."
[TRANSPORTATION (1823).]
Source.—In the Edinburgh Review, 1823, by the Rev. Sydney Smith.
Men are governed by words, and under the infamous term convict, are comprehended crimes of the most different degrees and species of guilt. One man is transported for stealing three hams and a pot of sausages; and in the next berth to him on board the transport is a young surgeon, who has been engaged in the mutiny at the Nore; the third man is for extorting money; the fourth was in a respectable situation of life at the time of the Irish Rebellion, and was so ill-read in History as to imagine that Ireland had been ill-treated by England, and so bad a reasoner as to suppose, that nine Catholics ought not to pay tithes to one Protestant. Then comes a man who set his house on fire, to cheat the Phœnix Office; and, lastly, that most glaring of all human villains, a poacher, driven from Europe, wife and child, by thirty lords of manors, at the Quarter Sessions, for killing a partridge. Now, all these are crimes no doubt—particularly the last; but they are surely crimes of very different degrees of intensity, to which different degrees of contempt and horror are attached—and from which those who have committed them may, by subsequent morality, emancipate themselves, with different degrees of difficulty, and with more or less of success. A warrant granted by a reformed bacon-stealer would be absurd; but there is hardly any reason why a foolish hot-brained young blockhead, who chose to favour the mutineers at the Nore when he was sixteen years of age, may not make a very loyal subject, when he is forty years of age, and has cast his Jacobine teeth, and fallen into the practical jobbing and loyal baseness which so commonly developes itself about that period of life.
It is to be believed that a governor, placed over a land of convicts, and capable of guarding his limbs from any sudden collision with odometrous stones, or vertical posts of direction, should make no distinction between the simple convict and the double and treble convict—the man of three juries, who has three times appeared at the Bailey, trilarcenous—three times driven over the seas.