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Untitled Article
the greater part of the landed pro p ert y of the country must change hands . The landlords , then , are so deeply in debt , that they cannot keep -their estates if compelled to live honestly ; they must therefore be allowed to plunge their hands into the pocket of every person who lives by bread , in order to keep themselves out of the Gazette . They cannot afford to be landholders unless we pay them for it . We must tax ourselves to give them salaries for being a landed Aristocracy . We thank them for nothing . Their creditors will do it gratis .
A bolder language must be held to these people than they have been ac customed to . The landlords have hitherto been the ruling power , and , like all ruling classes , have been estimated at whatever value they chose to put upon themselves . If there were a man to whom nobody dared tell that he was not a god , he would end by believing it . Almost every member of the House of Commons really is , and all have sworn that they are , landlords ; to such Sir James Graham was quite safe in thinking that he had said enough ,
when he said that wi 4 feout a subsidy from the public the landlords could not remain landlords . But what concern is it ( except as a question of humanity ) of any but themselves ? Are the present landlords so much more precious to us than any other landlords , that when they cannot live upon their own means we should subscribe to enable them to live upon ours ? If they are so deeply in debt that they own no more than twenty per cent , of their nominal incomes , and are mere receivers of the other four lifths for the benefit
of their creditors , the sooner they abandon their false position , cease to pretend to a character they have no right to , and let the real owners of the land become the avowed owners , the better . Land is power ; and power cannot be more fatally placed than in the hands of spendthrifts by station ; of men who have to maintain the externals of a large income with the resources of a small one ; of men with the wants and habits of the rich , and the fortunes of the poor . * One word here on the philosophy of Aristocracy . The theoretic
foundation both of Toryism and Whiggism ; the moral and philosophical basis of all the modern European aristocratical politics ; the justification of that paradox in practical ethics , the doctrine that the working bees should be governed by the drones , is the axiom , so dear to Aristocracy , that those who have the greatest stake in the country are the fittest to govern it . When the doctrines of Oligarchy are at variance with the interests of Oligarchy , we see which gives way . Who so far from having a stake in the country as needy rich men ? people accustomed to profuse expenditure , which they
have no longer the means of keeping up ; through whose hands large incomes are constantly passing , only to be paid away to other people ; to whom great wealth is constantly shown , while nothing of it is theirs except its wants—wants which have become unconquerable , and which they are under the strongest temptations to find the means of supplying at whatever cost ? It is false that poor men , as such , are dangerous in a State ; but those who are really dangerous are the poor who are miserable if they are not rich . Over such men not only the interest of others , but their own
permanent interest has no hold ; it is worth their while to be ruined in two years rather than to economize in one ; they are dishonest debtors , bad landlords ; gamblers themselves , they compel all under them to be so ; rather than submit to a diminution of their rents to-day , they would run the risk of losing them altogether to-morrow , by forcing their tenants to exhaust the land ; they are dishonest legislators ; they must have a bread-tax , and their sons and nephews must have a provision out of the other taxes . In an age of conspiracies such men are conspirators ; Catiline was such a man .
If the class to which Sir James Graham belongs , are in the condition which he describes , they may be an Aristocracy , but they are not a landed Aristocracy ; they are a debtor Aristocracy : an Oligarchy not of the rich , but of the grasping and dissipated poor . Have they * a stake in the country ?" No . But let the land pass from them to the mortgagees , the real owners ,
Untitled Article
244 Notes on the Newspapers .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), April 2, 1834, page 244, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2632/page/12/
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