On the English Reform Bill

[p. 100]

|100| and whose families had for centuries inhabited cabins on this soil and cultivated it, by hundreds, indeed thousands, from these cabins, which are not the property of the inhabitants, and withdraw from those already without possessions also their home and the inherited opportunity of their subsistence, – by right; this too by right, that they, in order to drive them out with certainty from the ground of those cabins and to cut off from them any delay of the departure or the creeping back under such shelter, had these cabins burnt.

This cancer of England is laid before Parliament year in, year out; how many speeches have been made about it, how many committees appointed, how many witnesses heard, how many thorough reports delivered, how many remedies proposed, which seemed either wholly insufficient or wholly impracticable! The proposed withdrawal of the surplus of the poor by colonisation would, to promise an effect, have to carry away at least a million inhabitants; how is this to be brought about? quite apart from the fact that the empty space thereby arising, if the other laws and relations remained, would soon fill up in the same way as it was filled before. An act of Parliament (subletting act), which was to restrict the division into small tenancies, the mode of lodging and the breeding-ground of the fertile class of beggars in Ireland, proved so little fitted to remedy the evil that, after a few years of trial, it recently had to be repealed. The moment of the transition from feudal tenure into property, for granting landed property to the agricultural class, has passed by unused; some possibility of it could be introduced by an alteration of the laws of inheritance, the introduction of the equal division of the parental property among the children, the power of seizure and sale of estates for the payment of debts, in general by a mitigation of the legal character of landed property, which draws after it unspeakable formalities and costs on alienation

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