WHO OWNS THE LAND IN ENGLAND.

Hawke's Bay Herald, Volume XXI, Issue 5416, 24 June 1879, Page 3

WHO OWNS THE LAND IN ENGLAND.

More than half the soil of the United; Kingdom is nominally owned by some 2000 persons. According to a valuable analysis of the very ill-arranged and incomplete Parliamentary return of the landowners of the United E-ingdora, published in the Financial Reform Almanac for 1878, 421 persons are the owners of 22,830,755 acres, or nearly 5,000,000 acres more than one-fourth of the total area of the United Kingdom. The mind is unable to grasp what such a monopoly costs the country j but certain features of it stand forth with a prominence sufficiently notable. In a most absolute sense, the well-being of the entire population of some 32,000,000 souls is placed in the power of a few thousands. For these thousands the multitude toils, and it may be on occasion starves. Hence it is that all through rural England we have continually before us that most saddening of all spectacles— two or three families living in great splendor, and hard by their gates . the miserably poor', the abject slaves of the soil, whose sole hope in life is too often the workhouse — that famous device against revolution, paid for by the middle cfass— and the pauper's grave. Our land-owners have not merely burdened the land Tyith their game preserves ; they have tied it np, and actively conspired to prevent its due cultivation. Instead of rising to the true necessities of the case, they cling to their game, make penal enactments about it, and struggle to augment the intensity of the evil which it is to the people, as if the very existence of the country depended upon hares and rabbits. In this absolute supremacy the land-owner overrides all justice, takes precedence of all ordinary creditors on his helpless tenants' estates, and controls the system of cultivation, often in utter disregard of private rights or private judgment, and, in addition, secures to himself the absolute reversion of every improvement which the tenant may make on the land. — Macmillan's Magazine.