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Observer, Volume 2, Issue 37, 28 May 1881, Page 400

How shall we best guard against the impending danger? Major Atkinson advises a law limiting the holding of any man to a certain average, and the gallant Treasurer speaks of this as if he were propounding a new idea He must know how signal has been the failure of such attempts in all countries. Is he not aware that in no country was the failure more signal than in England itself. Let him turn to the statutes of Henry VII. — four hundred years a g o—and0 — and he will find that no man was allowed to have "a farm of more than ten marks yearly." He will find that in the preamble to the statute that special reference is made to the Isle of Wight as being "lately decayed of people by reason that many farms and villages have been beaten down and the fields ditched and. made pasture for beasts and cattle." Let him go on to the next reign and he will find a statute forbidding any man to keep "more than 2000 sheep." He will find that English history is full of the conflict between landed monopolists and the people. He will find that the Crown was almost always against the monopoly and sided with the people. Yet the united and powerful few, in the long run, prevailed. They managed to get entire control of the Government and with it they secured their possession of the land with a monopoly for centuries of all the patronage and power of office which the control of Government brings. They managed moreover under various pretexts to seize the millions of acres that were to relieve the land of the taxation and the feudal duties that then attached to it by throwing on the people burdens which they were bound in justice to bear themselves. The attempt to limit "by statute the area that a man may own proved impracticable in England, has proved impracticable in other countries and will prove impracticable here. The proposal smacks of

either quackery or insincerity and should not be entertained for a moment by those who really desire to see this great matter dealt with successfully.