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Updated: June 29, 2025
The landscape has need of moderation, of that fast-disappearing grace of unconsciousness, and, in short, of a return towards the ascetic temper. The English way of landowning, above all, has made for luxury. Naturally the country is fat.
Then, irritated more and more by Lord Maxwell's gentle attention, and the interjections he threw in from time to time, she plunged into history, attacked the landowning class, spoke of the Statute of Labourers, the Law of Settlement, the New Poor Law, and other great matters, all in the same quick flow of glancing, picturesque speech, and all with the same utter oblivion so it seemed to her stiff indignant hostess at the other end of the table of the manners and modesty proper to a young girl in a strange house, and that young girl Richard Boyce's daughter!
From a faithful perusal of the Radical Press I had been led to believe that Scotland was seething with righteous indignation against that branch of the Legislature of which I am, it is true, only a humble and very recent member, but yet a member, and therefore involved in the general condemnation of the ruthless hereditary tyrants and oppressors of the people, the privileged landowning class, which is alleged to be so out of sympathy with the mass of their fellow-countrymen, although, oddly enough, it supplies many of the most popular candidates, not only of one party, at any General Election.
The Southern Unionists were the old landowning and professional class, friendly in all ways of intercourse, but politically severed and sundered from the mass of the population.
I am no sportsman and have no landowning relations, so he ought to bid me hold my tongue. But he lets me rave. To me the simple fact is that game preserving creates crime. Agricultural life is naturally simpler might be, it always seems to me, so much more easily moralised and fraternised than the industrial form. And you split it up and poison it all by the emphasis laid on this class pleasure.
The Virginia planters were a landowning gentry; when Washington died he had more than sixty thousand acres. The growing of tobacco, the one vital industry of the Virginia of the time, with its half million people, was connected with the ownership of land. On their great estates the planters lived remote, with a mail perhaps every fortnight. There were no large towns, no great factories.
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.
Before the repeal of the Corn Laws there was a strong antagonism of interest between the landowning aristocracy and the manufacturers of the North, but that antagonism is now at an end; the sympathy of wealth has taken its place; the old aristocracy has veiled its social pride and learned to conciliate the new men, who on their part are more than willing to enter the privileged circle.
They do not represent the landowning and the farming interests, both of which detest them; they do not represent the artisans and industrial workers, who have expressly formed themselves into unions in order to fight them, and who have only been able to maintain their rights by so doing; they do not represent the labourers and peasants, who are ground under their heel.
What public life needs above all things is the presence in it of men who have a knowledge of reality. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the landowning classes supplied this kind of direction to the State as the fruit of their leisure, and, despite some narrowness and selfishness, they undoubtedly did their work well.
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