[Black and White by Timothy Thomas Fortune]@TWC D-Link bookBlack and White CHAPTER XV 6/17
But the one great question at the root of the agitation is the monopoly of the land by the "nobility" and the successful cormorants of trade, and the consequent pressure of population upon the enforced circumscription of production.
The best lands have been alienated from the people, while the inferior lands upon which they are allowed to live will not yield the exorbitant rental demanded and the necessary subsistence for those who work them. Hence, Ireland is in a state so explosive that it can only be appropriately described by the term "dynamitic." In the interest of a few landlords the whole Irish nation has been demoralized and impoverished, so that the government of Great Britain finds it necessary to "_assist_" able-bodied men to reach America, or any other portion of the world they desire to go to, in order to make a living. If monopoly in land produces such results as these is it not to be condemned as subversive of correct social adjustments and the perpetuity of government? The question admits of but one answer.
If monopoly in land compels a government to "assist" its able-bodied men, its laborers, its producers of wealth, its soldiery, to go to other lands, is it not to be condemned as parasitical, destroying the very bone and sinew of government? The answer is self-evident.
If monopoly in land produces such results as these, would it not be wise statesmanship and sound governmental policy to confiscate to the people the millions of acres which avarice, cunning, favoritism and robbery have turned into parks, pasturages and game preserves--making the few thousands who constitute the land monopolists, the idlers and the harpies, go honestly to work to make a living, and giving at the same time the same opportunity to the great laboring classes, who earnestly desire to make a living but to whom the opportunity is cruelly and maliciously denied? I am opposed to aristocracies and so-called privileged classes, because they are opposed to the masses.
They make inequalities, out of which grow all the miseries of society, because there is no limit to their avarice, parsimony and cruelty.
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