Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 20, 2025
Hitherto the landlords had directed the votes of their tenantry, the forty-shilling freeholders; but now the elections were determined by the direction of the Catholic Association, which was controlled by the priests, and by O'Connell and his associates.
Now these are words of the Constitution, fellow-citizens, which I have taken the pains to transcribe therefrom, so that he who runs may read: Is there any mistake about that? Is there any forty-shilling attorney here to make a question of it? No. I will not disgrace my profession by supposing such a thing.
By the forty-shilling franchise, the landlords encumbered the soil with a loose and unsettled population that possessed within itself, as poverty always does, a fearful facility of reproduction a population which pressed heavily upon the independent class of farmers and yeomen, but which had no legal claim upon the territory of the country.
Such testimony is not worthy to be relied on in any forty-shilling cause. What occasion had he to call himself to an account? Did he suppose that he should be suspected? Had he any intimation of this conspiracy?
We are aware that the small-farm system is more successful in Belgium and Lombardy. On the reasons for this, it is here needless to enter. We take the examples offered in Great Britain, where it has never come up to the expectations of philanthropists. The purchase of forty-shilling freeholds has lately been put forward as a method of investing money by the working-classes.
The conferring of the elective franchise upon the forty-shilling freeholders, or in other words upon paupers, added to the absence of proper education, or the means of acquiring it, generated, by the fraudulent subdivision of small holdings, by bribery, perjury, and corruption, a state of moral feeling among the poorer classes which could not but be productive of much crime.
But there came the Corn Laws, making cultivation unprofitable, and earlier the law of Catholic Emancipation, withdrawing the right of voting from the forty-shilling freeholders, and the crisis was reached when the Great Famine appeared and was followed by the Great Clearances. The Famine lasted for three years, the Clearances endured for over thirty.
Leaving out the "legitimate weight" of landed proprietors, as exercised through the forty-shilling freeholders, the above statement, besides being a remarkable one from such a cautious Minister, is not far from being correct.
It was sold for a trifling sum, with an imperfect title, which time has cured, to a speculating banker; and, after having been let to the late James Watt on a long lease, is now likely to exchange mansion and park for a congeries of cottages in rows, forming forty-shilling freeholders.
A landlord had political influence in proportion to the number of voters he brought, or rather drove, to the poll. To secure and extend this influence, the manufacture of forty-shilling freeholders went on rapidly, and to an enormous extent.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking