the august assembly, whispered, "And these men own three-fourths of the United Kingdom." "Would to God they did," I answered. "I doubt if there are a dozen men there who have an acre of land that they can call their own. Their families, not they, are the owners of the kingdom. Years ago, in their hot youth, when they were neither statesmen nor practical agriculturalists, as many of them are now, they signed away to their sons, and failing them, to a long line of brothers and cousins -even when they had not a thought of marriage— the freehold of their inheritance.""

It has already been demonstrated that the laws relating to the land of this country are generally more favourable to the landlord than to the tenant. The landlords have had most power in making those laws, and the largest of those landlords are in the House of Lords. The hereditary privilege of a seat and vote in the House of Lords-enjoyed by some peers-would not be altered in the least by the transfer of their wealth into Government securities, under Lord Cairns' Settled Land Act of 1882. Tying up land by entail or settlement gives no strength or lustre to the hereditary privilege of an English peer. But inasmuch as wisdom, and not wealth, should be the qualification for a seat

in the House of Lords, and as wisdom cannot be bequeathed or inherited with wealth, the hereditary privilege of English peers to sit and vote in the House of Lords detracts from that confidence which the nation should repose in the cultured and ripe opinions of a SECOND CHAMBER.

Lord Brougham says in his work on the Constitution, "GOVERNMENT BY REPRESENTATION is the grand invention of modern times." If then, after every general election, the new members of the House of Commons were to select a certain number from the whole list of the Peerage to form the House of Lords, and if eminent men of moderate means, who had retired from public life and professional business, were made life-peers, and were eligible to be selected for a seat in the House of Lords, the opinions of the SECOND CHAMBER on the public questions of the day would be more in harmony with the opinions of the country. abolishing hereditary legislative privilege, and substituting selected representative power, the House of Lords is likely to last as long as the monarchy. But by retaining the abuse of hereditary privilege in the constitution of the House, that institution, through being open to attack, may be abolished altogether. Is it not time that hereditary legis

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lative privilege was abolished? Past history shows the evil of it. Let us glance at one instance. In the reign of Charles II., the House of Lords rejected Lord Coke's resolution, which had first been introduced by Lord Coke in the reign of James I., and which proposed to tax land per acre to keep a standing army, instead of the landlords keeping retainers to form one, as they had done during the times of the Plantagenets and Tudors. The unscrupulous peers of the profligate court of Charles II. induced the King to threaten the House of Commons with a notice of dissolution, unless the Commons consented to raise the money for the army through the excise, instead of from the landlords; and by thus shifting the incidence of taxation, remove the burden off the rich landed class on to the poor consuming class. Also, beer that was sold in public-houses to the poor people was made to pay the tax, whilst the large quantity of beer brewed in the mansions of the rich landlords was exempted.

Selfish class legislation, such as taints the land laws of the United Kingdom, will naturally continue as long as hereditary legislative privilege lasts.

NATIONALIZATION OF THE LAND.

If nationalization does not involve confiscation, but only graduated taxation of excessively large holdings of cultivable land left waste, it is not unreasonable. But if all landholders were tenants of the State, the strongest stimulant to improvement, viz. that of occupying ownership, would not exist; and if no one could leave their landed property to their own children or family, there would be no inducement to make any very costly permanent improvements on it; and thus the land of the British Isles, which might improve under free land laws, occupying ownership, and smaller holdings, fertilized as in Jersey and Guernsey, would deteriorate under nationalization, as it has done under landlordism.

Is it possible to buy out the landowners of the United Kingdom? Would the millions of persons who have purchased their small freeholds through land building societies willingly part with their holdings at any price? You might as well think of offering a mother a price for its child. There is an instance on record of a poor man who bought a piece of land through a Building Society for £30,

at the rate of 2d. a day, by giving up his daily beer for ten years.

Suppose, however, it was determined to buy out the landlords, then the object would be to apportion economic rent equitably, and to raise revenue by rent instead of by taxes. But would that object be attained? A stupendous loan must first be raised in order to purchase all the land and house property in the country. Government official administration of landed and house property is always the worst and most costly, and it is often corrupt. The exposure of the corruption in the Metropolitan Board of Works is a proof of this. Imagine the temptation that nationalization of the land would afford to an army of official land-agents spread all over the country. Under such a system the rent on the land would not pay the interest on the loan that had been raised to buy the land with. A constant deficit would in time bring about national bankruptcy. It is simpler and cheaper to raise revenue by taxes than by rent.

The late Mr. Fawcett, the eminent professor of political economy, published a pamphlet in 1833, to prove that Mr. George's idea of nationalization of the land was both impracticable and impolitic. The following quotation, from a philosophic

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