The Sun.
London, England, 1847-01-26 00:00:00

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LONDON, TUESDAY, JANUARY 26, 1847

" Property has its duties as well as its rights." Such
was the proposition enunciated ten years since by Mr.
DRUMMOND—such was the proposition against which a
vain clamour was raised at the time by the Irish land-
owners— such is the proposition, the truth of which is
odr;ei gbi ny and
now universally admitted. "The poverty of the country
has a right to be maintained out of the property of the
country "—such is the proposition enunciated in fact,
although not in words, by Lord JOHN RUSSELL last
Principle. It is an admis-
sion of the poor to the land.
evening, and admitted by Mr. BELLEW (himself an Irish
landlord), and by Sir ROBERT INGus. We take note
measures proposed last
of the social pact.
et its
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1 for the purpose of showing the state of England in the
the showiug of Sir THOMAS MORE, was worse in the
sixteenth century than is that of Ireland in the nine-
teenth. What is the essential difference between the
England of the sixteenth century, and the England of
the nineteenth ? it is this—the great principle
that .. the property of the country is bound to
evening for the renovation of the Irish nation, this
sixteenth century. The state of England, according to
maintain the poverty of the country," is a great fact
in the nineteenth century, which it was not in the
sixteenth. It has never been a fact in Ireland,
but if we can make it a fact, then, after the lapse
of a very few years, Ireland will be what England
is. Never did Lord Jour/ RUSSELL show himself so
great a statesman as last night. The famine in Ireland
is a national calamity, and therefore should the nation at
large bear its proportion of the burden; but the calamity,
national though it be, is aggravated by the misconduct of
the absentee Irish landlords (and the greater portion of
them are absentees), who, grasping avariciously at preser
profit, have neglected their duties, and have oppressed the
cultivators of the soil. Therefore it is just that, while
the empire bears one-half of the calamity, the
other half should be borne by those through whose
neglect of their duties it has been at least
doubled in intensity. It has been said that great
allowances should be made for the Irish landlords. We
must confess that we have very little sympathy with them.
To benefit the people we would go to any extent ; but
as regards the landlords, we cannot see why, if they
are idle, non-producing insolvent debtors, they should
have any more favour shown to them than is shown to
other unfortunate gentlemen who daily make their ap-
pearance in the Court in Portugal-street. If, residing
on their estates, they devoted themselves to the culti-
vation of those estates, superintending that cultivation,
and giving labour to those who lived upon their peo_
perty, then, indeed, a case might be made out in their
favour ; but we must confess vee feel no sympathy with
the man who never sees his tenantry, who passes his
time in the salons of Paris or the casinos of Naples,
because, on a certain day, he finds that those rents
which have hitherto enabled him to waste away his
life in vicious and sensual indulgence, are not forth-
, coming, and he is, for one twelvemonth of his exist-
race, forced to become virtuous from want of means
' to be vicious. The Ministerial plan, too, is
admirable in the manner in which it
-- pro-
poses to deal with waste lands. All waste lands
below the value of 2s. 6d. an acre, if the owner does not
choose to improve them, may be taken by the State and
improved, and let or sold—in other words, confiscated
This is an admirable carrying out of the old principle of
the law. We have of late heard a vast deal too much of
landed proprietors. According to the law of the land,
there is no such a thing as a landed proprietor in the
' British dominions. The law knows no allodial tenure—
no property in land absolutely. The highest tenure
known to the law is that of fee simple—
' that is to say, land held of the State on
. condition of the performance of oertain duties.
We
will not now go into the question of what these
duties
are, but, among them, as we are prepared to prove,
. were the maintenance, virtually, of all persons born
upon the land, and the proper cultivation of the land
itself, and if either of those duties were neglected, the
land became forfeited to the State, and might be re-
granted to persons who would perform those duties
properly. Such is
the tenure by which every freeholder
holds his land, not only in Ireland, but in England also,
and we are rejoiced to find that Lord Joan RUSSELL, as
Prime Minister of the Crown, comes
boldly forward, and