Untitled

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XIII, Issue 52, 23 April 1886, Page 9

It is a singular as well as a shameful fact that the Protestant Episcopal sect in New York is the landlord of some of the vilest dens in that city. Under the caption of "Trinity's Dens," the Herald of that city says: " Trinity Church Corporation is owner of the worst olass of tenements in this city. Trinity Church has the universal reputation, among the wretched people who are forced to live in such places, of being the hardest and meanest landlord in New York. The policy of the Trinity Church Corporation is never to make repairs on a tenement they own, but to let it actually fall to pieces, until no one, however wretched, can live in it. Then the Corporation tears it down and builds a store or a warehouse or a comparatively expensive flat house. But it never spends its money to improve the condition of the poor." Such is the conduct of Protestant preachers who send shiploads of Bibles to tbe Fiji islanders and then call themselves "Christians," whilst they are thus grinding the faces of the poor in NewYork city. —Monitor. Mr. John La Toucne, in " Travel in Portugal," says :—" The farmer told me the land was his own, and bad been his father's and grandfather's, being afforado, or held as a copyhold estate, on payment of a trifling rent of one or two shillings to a nominal landlord. But so absolutely was the land his own, he told me, that even if he were to fail to pay the rent for several years the landlord would not be entitled to re-enter, but only to sue him for debt, so that as tenant or bolder he is to all intents and purposes the actual proprietor of the estate. This is tbe tenure by which almost all tbe land of North Portugal is held. It is, of course, not conducive to high *»f««<ntr t but it results in this, that the length and breadth of the land iscultivated like a market garden." Mr. La Tonche goes on to say: " This system has created in the Northern provinces of the kingdom a population of hardy, independent, contented yeomen. There are no great territorial possessions, no accumulation of agricultural wealth in one man's hands; bat then, again, there Is no pauperism. If we cross into some of the Southern provinoes we find, howenr, the reverse of this pietore of prosperity and content—mat estates iU-tarmed, rioh abentes landlord*, and crowds of ill-looking, poverty-stricken and woe-begoM day-laborer**