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Updated: June 8, 2025
The new idea of property in land, which then obtained, proved too powerful to be altered by legislation. Another change in the system of landholding took place in those reigns. The suppression of the RELIGIOUS HOUSES gave the Crown the control of a vast quantity of land. It had, with the consent of the Crown, been devoted to religion by former owners.
Consequently, when a landholding churchman died, some one had to be chosen in his place who should enjoy his property and perform his duties. The rule of the Church had been, from time immemorial, that the clergy of the diocese should choose the bishop, their choice being ratified by the people.
And most of the old aristocrats, the old knightly and landholding people, have, so to speak, converted themselves into members of this new class. It is a class with scarcely any specific characteristics beyond its defining one, of the possession of property and all the potentialities property entails, with a total lack of function with regard to that property.
If such then was the footing on which landholding on a large scale stood in the earliest times, it was far from being an open sore in the commonwealth; on the contrary, it was of most material service to it.
So long as the land was weak and depended for its very existence upon the solidarity of its people, so long as the intendant was there to guide the system with a praetorian hand and to prevent abuses, so long as strength was more to be desired than opulence, the seigneurial system served New France better than any other scheme of landholding would have done.
As to the second course, that of denying those clear and unanswerable proofs of the injustice of landholding, which he had drawn from Spencer's Social Statics, and the brilliant corroboration of which he had at a later period found in the works of Henry George, such a course was impossible to him.
Both landowning and landholding classes, gentry and tenant farmers alike, were clamoring, the one for an increase of their landed estates, the other for freedom from the feudal restraints which still legally bound them. The land-hunger of neither class could be satisfied in a narrow island where the law and the lawgivers were in favor of the maintenance of feudal rights.
Accordingly, in comparison with the uprising of the peasants as well as that of the nobles under Franz von Sickingen both of which had the principle in common of basing participation in the government, more definitely than had before been the case, upon landholding the rising monarchical idea was relatively a justifiable and revolutionary factor, since it was based upon the idea of a state sovereignty independent of landholding, representing the national idea independent of private property relations; and it was just this which gave it the power for a victorious development and for the suppression of the uprising of the peasants and the nobles.
I was over one property in the County Antrim, the property of a man who combines landholding as a middleman, with trade in linen fabrics and manufacturing or bleaching, or both. I cannot say that this gentleman is excessively popular, but he is exceedingly prosperous.
The county representatives were voted for by all "forty shilling freeholders," that is, landowners whose farms would rent for forty shillings a year. But the whole tendency of English landholding, as has been seen, had been to decrease the number of landowners in the country, so that the actual number of voters was only a very small proportion of the rural population.
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