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As to our former aristocracy, a class influential by its connections, and by its large landed property: you remember that, when we succeeded to abolish the feudal charges, and converted millions of our countrymen, of different religion and different language, out of leaseholders into free landed proprietors, we guaranteed an indemnification to the landowners for what they lost.

As ballast to lighten the Act of 1881 the leaseholders were thrown overboard. For this exclusion from the benefits of the Act there was, on principle, no excuse.

It recommended that the term of judicial rents should be lowered from fifteen years to five, that those rents already fixed should be revised, and that leaseholders should be brought under the Act of 1881. In reference to the Bill of the year before Lord Salisbury had said that the revision of judicial rents would not be honest and would be exceedingly inexpedient.

At the Restoration it was restored to its former holders, who retained it until the debt due to them was discharged. The park was then let to various leaseholders, the last of whom was the Duke of Portland, whose lease ended in 1811, when the land reverted to the Crown. Regent Street was designed to form a continuous line between the Palace and Carlton House, near St. James's Park.

There are 114 tenants, of whom 15 hold under judicial rents; 22 are leaseholders, and 77 are non-judicial yearly tenants. There are 12 Protestants holding in all a little more than 1200 acres. All the rest are Catholics, 14 of these being cottier tenants. The estate consists of 5165 acres. The average is about £24, and the average rental about £26, 10s.

There was nothing horrible in this churchyard, in the shape of tight mounds bonded with sticks, which shout imprisonment in the ears rather than whisper rest; or trim garden-flowers, which only raise images of people in new black crape and white handkerchiefs coming to tend them; or wheel-marks, which remind us of hearses and mourning coaches; or cypress-bushes, which make a parade of sorrow; or coffin-boards and bones lying behind trees, showing that we are only leaseholders of our graves.

And it began to be observed that leaseholders were invariably light, frivolous, pleasure-loving people, such as kept the big house crowded with youth and folly, to company youth of its own.

Warned by the troubles to which the question of Upper House reform gave rise in Victoria, the South Australians tackled it last session, when both Chambers were on the best of terms with each other, and an Act was passed by which the franchise was reduced from £50 freeholders and £20 leaseholders, to £20 leaseholders and £10 freeholders; the tenure of a seat shortened from twelve to nine years; the colony divided into electoral districts instead of voting in block; and a scheme introduced for finally dissolving the Council in the event of the occurrence of certain circumstances tending to produce a deadlock.

The Bill, which is known as Lord Cadogan's, which was introduced on the last day of March, 1887, and which purported to carry out the recommendations of the Cowper Commission, opened the Land Court to leaseholders, setting aside in this way the more solemn forms of agrarian contract.

The elective franchise in counties, hitherto confined to freeholders, was to be conferred on £10 copyholders and £50 leaseholders; the borough franchise was to exclude "scot and lot" voters, "potwallopers" and most other survivals of antiquated electorates, but to include ratepaying £10 householders.