CRITICISING A DUKE.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XII, Issue 20, 5 September 1884, Page 29

CRITICISING A DUKE.

(From the Pilot.) Henry Geobgb enjoys the felicity of tearing a Duke to pieces in the July number of the Nineteenth Century. His Grace of Argyle, who dabbles in literature, had the temerity to criticise Mr. George's " Progress and Poverty " in a previous number of the same periodical, and now the American scalps him with a sharpened tomahawk. Referring to the Duke's boast of his own paternal benevolence as a landlord, Mr. George says : — " Take Scotland, of which the duke is one of the large proprietors. What, then, are the results of this private property in land ? That wild beasts have supplantad human beings ; that glens which once sent forth their thousand fighting men are now tenanted by a couple of gamekeepers ; that there is destitution and degradation that would shame savages ; that little children are stunted for want of proper nourishment ; that women are compelled to do the work of animals ; that young girls who ought to be fitting themselves for wifehood and motherhood are chained to the machinery of factories, or prowling the streets ; that while a few Scotchmen have castles and palaces, more than a third of the Scottish families live in one room each, and more than two-thirds in not more than two rooms each ; that thousands of acres are kept as playgrounds for strangers, while the masses have not enough of their native soil to grow a flower, and are shut out even from moor and mountain — dare not take a trout from a loch, or a salmon from the sea." The utter callousness of the privileged classes to the sufferings of the poor is well illustrated in a story Mr. George tells of a " lady," of tbe small landlord class, who thought the poor deserved no sympathy, '• because they. are so dirty." To his suggestion that cleanliness was not compatible with the conditions which forced women to trudge, daily, several miles with creels of peat and seaweed on their barfS, she replied by pointing at the much harder lot of the horses : -"^ Did you ever think of the horses ? They have to work all their lives, till they can't work any longer. It makes me sad to think of it. There ought to be a big farm where horses should be turned out after they bad worked some years, so that they could have time to enjoy themselves before they die." Her sympathetic preference for the horses was based on the good, pious ground that when they die, they die all over, but human beings have souls and the prospect of heaven to console them for their earthly tribulations. We offer her argument for the use of the people who advocate contract-servitude in this country and the principle of " buying labour" in the cheapest market. The Hungarian women of the Connellsville coke region, in Pennsylvania, have no occasion to envy the lot of their Scotch sisters. Working, half naked, from dawn to dark, at the heavy labour of " forking " coke, housed in kennels, ignorant, degraded, horrible caricatures of womanhood — what have they to hope for on earth ? His Grace of Argyle and the advocates of cheap labour in America can piously reflect that there is a hereafter for those earthly outcasts. There are thousands of contract-slaves working for Italian agents throughout the country, herded in contractors' shanties like cattle, clad in rags, half-starved, deluded and cheated by everybody, and made the unconscious tools of monopolists for the impoverishment and degradation of other labourers. The advocates of cheap labour do not. indeed, insult the toilers by referring them to a better future. Mr. Vanderbilt, on the contrary, distinctly consigns a complaining public to a worse one. Mr. George says that if Scotland has a surplus population it should force the surplus to emigrate, and he considers the idle nobles and pampered landlords the superfluous class which should he first to go. This is plain language, and, no doubt, blasphemous in the ears of a duke, but Scotland, like Ireland, is waking up to the belief that the earth belongs to those who till it ; as America is beginning to believe that the fruits of labour belong first to labour and not, as usually has been, wholly to cash and cunning.