[p. 99]
The rights of manorial lordship, which can likewise be comprised in that apprehension of the reform extending itself to them in time, no longer go in England, and have not for a long time, as far as the bondage of the agricultural class, but they press upon the mass of it as much as serfdom, indeed press it down to a worse destitution than the serfs. In England itself, although held in incapacity to possess landed property and reduced to the estate of tenant farmers or day-labourers, it finds work partly in the wealth of England generally and in the enormous manufacture, when this is flourishing; but still more the Poor Laws, which oblige every parish to care for its poor, keep the consequences of extreme destitution away from it. In Ireland, on the other hand, the general propertylessness of the class living by the labour of agriculture does not have this protection; the descriptions of travellers as well as the statements documented by Parliament depict the general condition of the Irish tillers of the soil as so wretched that even in small and poor districts of the civilised countries of the Continent, including those backward in civilisation, examples are not easily found. The propertylessness of the class engaged in agriculture has its origin in relations and laws of the old feudal right, which, however, as it still exists in several states too, secures to the peasant attached to the soil which he has to cultivate a subsistence upon it; but since on the one side the Irish serfs indeed possess personal freedom, on the other side the manorial lords have taken the property so completely to themselves that they have declared themselves released from all obligation to provide for the subsistence of the population that cultivates the land belonging to them. According to this entitlement it happens that manorial lords, when they find a cultivation of the soil more advantageous in which they need fewer hands, expel the former cultivators, who were as good as the serfs bound to this soil for their subsistence
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