To enjoy a little brief authority, he would enslave universal mankind, and declare, as Solomon did, after exhausting the catalogue of tyranny and libertinism, "all is vanity"-- emptiness! Thus, it is dangerous to confide in the humanity of man.

To place in his hands a weapon so all-powerful as land, is to place him upon a pinnacle from whose vast altitude he can, will, and does crush his unfortunate fellowman.
Like the small stream which gathers volume and momentum in its wanderings from the small lake to the gulf, into which it debouches as a mighty river like the "Father of Waters," so the first encroachments of the land shark are small, and hardly felt; but give him time, let him grow from the Norman soldier of fortune into the English nobility of to-day, and you have a monster whose proportions and rapacity stagger the imagination to fully apprehend.

What the common soldier of fortune received as reward for his valor eight hundred years ago, and which he held subject to confiscation to his prince if he failed to render him service in person and with retainers, has developed into a huge monopoly which appropriates in rental more than the tenant can pay, with the added necessary subsistence required to sustain him.
There are also the imposition of direct taxes by the government and indirect taxes upon all implements and other articles of manufacture, occasioned by the division of labor, which he must use; all of which taxes the land monopolists have managed to shift upon the tenant and wage-laborer.

Time augments the evil.

So that, to-day, in Great Britain, a man cannot purchase land, except in rare cases, and then the purchaser must pay a fortune for the privilege.