'The Irish Question' is, in short, in every sense, the English question too. It is a question of equal lawsabove all, of laws relating to land; it is a question which two aristocratic parties' have created, and which only a great national party can solve.

THE LAND SYSTEM OF ENGLAND, 1867.*

It is becoming apprehended by all classes, and apprehended in the sense of dread by some, that the question of Reform is not only a great political, but also a great economical question, concerning, especially, legislation calculated to modify the structure of our territorial system. It may, perhaps, tend to reassure those to whose minds the presentiment takes the form that private property is in danger, to be reminded that a lawyer of the highest eminence, now a peer and an exChancellor, and in the enjoyment of all the rights of property known to English law, assured the House of Commons, on the third reading of the Reform Bill of 1832, that 'he could conscientiously say, that looking to his own interests as a member of the community, and casting about to see how he might place any property he might possess in security, he was at a loss to find out a satisfactory way, and he believed that a large proportion of those who possessed property thought with him. He came down to this House night after night to discuss the Bill, but he felt as he believed others did―depressed more and more on each occasion, with the fear of the results from it.' Sir Robert Peel, too, at various stages of the Bill, uttered several gloomy Reprinted from 'Fraser's Magazine,' February 1867.

presages, foreshadowing among them, as tending to shake the security of property, the very measures on which his own reputation rests,*-of which the one evil has been that they have so prodigiously added to property and wealth, that members of Parliament are disposed to think no evils remain requiring another reform of Parliament for their redress.† The object of this article is to show that evils of great magnitude do remain in our land system, urgently demanding measures of reform which Parliament, as at present constituted, would not even patiently consider, although they are measures in perfect harmony with, and the mere logical development of, successive improvements in our jurisprudence for many centuries, are essential to its symmetry and simplification, and are, moreover, measures which, so far from confiscating the present rights of property in land of its possessors, would very greatly enlarge them.

The prospect of a failure of the supply of coal before many generations pass has occasioned serious alarm, but a far greater peril is at our doors. The supply of

With respect to property, he had no fear of its destruction by confiscation; but he was afraid that some popularity-seeking Chancellor of the Exchequer might be found by a democratic assembly to propose the repeal of taxes, and adopt steps the ultimate tendency of which would be to shake the confidence of the country in the security of property; and that confidence once shaken, there would be an end to the chief stimulus to productive industry, the foundation of all our wealth, power, and eminence.'-Speech of Sir R. Peel, on the second reading of the Reform Bill, March 22, 1832.

'I believe the problem of Reform may be thus stated: On the one hand we have a system which since the great Reform Bill of 1832 has worked admirably, which has carried out so many reforms that no practical grievances remain to be redressed.'-Speech of Mr. Laing to his Constituents, August 27, 1866.

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land has already failed. This failure presents itself in the most palpable form in great cities, and most people are more or less distinctly aware that throughout the country also there is an insufficiency of land for the requirements of the population; but the connection of the failure of the supply in cities with its failure in the country, and with the entire structure of our territorial system-with the unseating of the rural population, and their decline in numbers and prosperity; with artificial restrictions of the business of towns to particular spots, and with a forced and unnatural aggregation of disproportionate multitudes in a few principal towns-especially the metropolis— seems hitherto to have escaped attention. It will be the first object of this article to exhibit, step by step, the connection of these facts.

the

Paradoxical as it may be, especially in contrast with progress of England in trade and manufactures, and the progressive rise of the cultivators of the soil in all other civilised countries, from the Southern States of America to Russia, it is strictly true, that the condition of the English rural population in every grade below the landed gentry has retrograded; and, in fact, there is no longer a true rural population remaining for the ends, political, social, and economic, which such a population ought to fulfil. The grounds of this assertion are well known to students of our social history; but it is necessary to a sufficient presentment of the state of the land question to show what they are. The different grades which are still sometimes, in un

conscious irony, spoken of as the landed interest, once had a common interest in the land; an unbroken connection both with the soil and with each other subsisted between the landed gentry, the yeomanry who farmed their own estates, the tenant-farmers, and the agricultural labourers. From the yeomanry who owned land downwards, moreover, each of the lower rural grades had risen politically, economically, and socially; and there was for the members of each a prospect of a higher personal elevation and a larger. interest in the soil. Now the landed yeomanry, insignificant in number and a nullity in political power, are steadily disappearing altogether; the tenant-farmers have lost the security of tenure, the political independence, and the prospect of one day farming their own estate, which they formerly enjoyed; and lastly, the inferior peasantry not only have lost ground in the literal sense, and have rarely any other connection with the soil than a pauper's claim, but have sunk deplorably in other economical aspects below their condition in former centuries. Thus a soil eminently adapted by natural gifts to sustain a numerous and flourishing rural population of every grade, has almost the thinnest and absolutely the most joyless peasantry in the civilised world, and its chief end as regards human beings seems only to be a nursery of over-population and misery in cities.

The landed yeomanry at the head of the triple agricultural class, once so numerous in England, were many of them the descendants of peasants who had held their land in villenage, or by a yet more servile