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Poverty Bay Herald, Volume VI, Issue 615, 1 February 1879, Page 2

A Domesday Book, with certain modern improvements, has been published in Great Britain, giving the names of landed proprietors, with the areas of their holdings, and the rental paid. The facts revealed by a perusal of that compilation, as we gather from the summaries published in English newspapers are, says the Auckland Evening Star, startling in the extreme, and should stimulate the people of this colony to resist to the utmost the greedy attempts which are being made to monopolise enormous slices of the national patrimony, and to reproduce all those social miseries arising from agrarian inequalities. In the United Kingdom there are forty-three persons who each own 100,000 acres. The Duke of Sutherland stands at the top of the list as champion monopolist with 1,208,546 acres, or a block of land aboxit 43 miles square, and in addition to this his Duchess owns 149,879 acres in her own right. The Duke of Buccleugh and Queensberry has 459,260 acres ; Earl of Breadalbane, 438,350 ; Sir James Matheson, 406,070 ; Earl of Seafield, 305,891 ; Duke of Richmond, 286,407 ; Earl of Fife, 257,652 ; and plain Mr. Alexander Matheson, 220,433 acres. Forty-three great land owners in the United Kingdom have hereditarily and otherwise managed to "grab" 8,345,978 acres;

and 2,141 persons own more than half the United Kingdom, while millions are existing on a wretched pittance, struggling to keep the wolf from the door, and living in a condition, in many respects, worse, and in few better, than serfdom. The people of this colony will have only themselves to blame if they allow the evils which were introduced into England with the Norman Conquest to be perpetuated here.