A few men have vast estates and excessive incomes; the millions have seldom an inch of land until they inherit the grave, and have a starvation wage out of which a proportion is taken back for rent. Take the vast property of the Marquis of Westminster, whose income is credibly stated at something near a million a year; or that of the Duke of Devonshire, amounting to 96,000 acres in the county of Derby alone, without regarding his Irish or other estates; or that of the Duke of Norfolk, whose Sussex estate is fifteen miles in circuit; or that of the Duke of Sutherland, which stretches across and contains the whole of Sutherlandshire from sea to sea; or that of the Marquis of Bute, on which £2,000,-000 sterling were spent by his trustees during his minority; or that of the Marquis of Breadalbane, who is said to be able to ride from his own door one hundred miles straight to the sea on his own freehold land; or those of the Duke of Richmond and Lord Leconfield, who between them own nearly the whole of the eastern portion of the county of Sussex, containing nearly 800 square miles. And such estates have a tendency to increase rather than to diminish. In Northumberland, the Ducal proprietor, whose titular rank is derived from the county, is a constant purchaser of any lands put up for sale. Mr. Bright, in 1864, spoke of one nobleman who devoted £80,000 a year of his income to the purchase of additional land.
These large properties must all be broken up; they paralyze the people, and they corrupt their possessors. We prefer that the breaking up shall be voluntary and gradual, but it must begin at once, for hungry bellies are multiplying daily.
The State ought to put the peasantry in possession of the land, and this might be done in several ways at the same time.
1. There is the Prussian Land System, a modification of which might be made to work well here, and which since 1850 has enabled the smallest occupiers of peasants' land to acquire the proprietorship at twenty years' purchase; the amount of which is paid to the landlord, not in money, but in rent debentures issued by authority of the State, and bearing four per cent, interest, and gradually redeemable by means of the one per cent, difference, which at compound interest extinguishes the principal in a little over forty-one years. The Prussian peasant has, however, two other options: he may pay less by one-tenth to the State bank than the rent he formerly paid to his landlord, in which case the purchase debentures take fifty-six years to redeem; or he may, if he can raise the cash, compel his landlord to accept eighteen years' purchase money of the annual rent. By this means nearly 100,000 peasant proprietors have been created in Prussia. Kent debentures to the extent of many millions have been issued to the landholders, and in less than nineteen years more than one-eighth of the debentures issued have been entirely redeemed and extinguished.