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Updated: July 4, 2025
One of the clauses of the articles of reunion declared that the co-operation of Irishmen of all classes and creeds willing to aid in the attainment of, among other things, "the completion of the abolition of landlordism" is cordially welcomed.
Of course, if neither steam nor the inventions which made the factory system possible had ever been introduced, it would have been merely a question of a longer time before the capitalist class, proceeding in this case by landlordism and usury, would have reduced the masses to vassalage, and overthrown democracy even as in the ancient republics, but the great inventions amazingly accelerated the plutocratic conquest.
The story of this stalwart and skillful Scotch farmer, George Hope, enables us to understand what agitators mean by the term "landlordism." It is a very striking case, as the reader will admit. George Hope, born in 1811, was the son of a tenant farmer of the county of East Lothian, now represented in Parliament by Mr. Gladstone.
Asquith, who succeeded Mr. Matthews that very year as Home Secretary, was also, if I remember right, of the party; and there was a good deal of rather hot discussion of the game laws, and of English landlordism in general. With these things in my mind, as soon as we had settled into Stocks, I began to think of Marcella.
The English may not understand the Irish question, but they may be sure that whatever suits the Papal power does not suit them. The modern Irish priest is a sworn foe to England. It cannot be otherwise. He springs from the small farmer class, which has sworn to extirpate landlordism, which, to their minds, is synonymous with British rule.
The fact that most of the railroad magnates lived in the East added that element of absentee landlordism which is essential to most agrarian problems.
We know they will fulfil their pledges, not because they have promised, nor because they wish to benefit us, but because they wish to abolish landlordism and landlords from the country. The landlord interest is English interest, and that they want to get rid of.
English landlordism, imposed from without upon the crofter of Skye or the rack-rented tenant of a Connemara hillside, has never crushed out the native feeling of a right to the soil, the native resistance to an alien system. The south-east, I assert, has been brutalised into acquiescent serfdom by a long course of feudalism; the west and north still retain the instincts of freemen.
Therefore labor should bear the whole burden of taxation, while landlordism and all other forms of monopoly should go scot free. The iniquity of our present system of taxation is that a portion of it is levied on land instead of being all levied on labor products, like the tariff! To be strictly just, we must quit taxing land and exact no royalty from owners of coal mines and oil wells!
This was the program that the Nationalist government had attempted unsuccessfully to enforce in liberated China after the Pacific War. It is well known that the abolition of landlordism and the distribution of land to small farmers do not in themselves improve or enlarge production.
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