West-Jersey pioneer., 1872-05-10
ENGLISH sERFs.

Worcestershire is one of the most signif-
cant signs of a coming change in the old
order of things in England that has oc-
CURED for long time, and coupled with
the unexpectedly large vote which bill
providing for certain changes in the entail
laws received a few nights ago in the House
Of Commons, despite the opposition not
only of the conservatives but of the liberals
who blindly follow the lead of Mr. Glad
stone, it indicates very clearly that receg-
milton of the fact that the Almighty did not
create England for the especial benefit of a
few lords and gentlemen will be forced upon
the attention of the lords and gentlemen
aforesaid in such a manner that they will
not be able to avoid any longer the consid-
Grafton Of the rights of the thousands who
now suffer simply because the laws unustly
discriminate against them. The entail
laws which enable a very few persons to
hold possession Of all the land in the king
dem, and which make the rural laborers the
serfs OF the great landed proprietors, are
what perpetuate the power of the English
aristocracy, and which make England the
least democratic country in Europe, if not
In the world. Abolish the entail laws, and
give the humblest peasant the opportunity
to own the plot of ground from which he
draws his subsistence, and down tumbles
the whole fabric of English society, as we
see it. Cut up the great estates by dividing
them among all the children equally, in.
stead of permitting the eldest son to appro.
pirate everything and pride will have moth.
ing to feed itself upon, except the recolec-
ton of past grandeurs while, as in the
United States, there will grow up class OF
substantial. well-to- do and measureably con.
tented owners of moderate-sized farms,
who will have to work for their living, but
who will be beholden to no great man foI
what they put on their backs or into their
stomachs. AS it is now, all the smaller
farmers and all the agricultural laborers
must come and go at the beck of rich men,
who have it in their power to deprive them
by word of the means of subsistence, and
who esteem them, as indeed they are, no
other than serfs who are as much in bond
age as if they were living under laws like
those of South Carolina fifteen years ago.
In point of fact the South Carolina slaves
in the worst days of slavery were better off
than the English rural laborers, who to-day
are practically in the same condition they
were when William the Conqueror estab-
lished the peculiar system of government
that in some of its worst features has lasted
until the reign of Queen Victoria. For the
farm laborers to engage in a strike is looked
upon by their masters in much the same
light that revolt of the negroes in South
Carolina would have been by the slave,
owners of a decade and a half ago and SO
completely have the laborers been at the
mercy of the landowners that the fact OF
their having struck is the surest evidence
that their condition has become utterly un-
bearable, and that they are convinced any
change must be for the better. These peo-
pie are brutally ignorant, and all efforts to
educate them, or to ameliorate their condi-
ton either physically or morally, have ac-
complished little or nothing, as it is impos-
sible they should do under existing circum-
stances; and it is not the least of the Of
fenses for which the ruling classes of Eng
and will some day be called to account,
that her laws have SO invariably discrimi-
mated in favor of a small portion of the
population that the mass of the nation has
been Obliged to endure unnumbered suffer
ings, that the aristocracy may be able to
maintain their dignities. This is the age Of
revolutions, however, and it is not unlikely
that the English farmland will have his
turn as well as the French peasant the
Russian serf, and the South Carolina negro
-Erening Telegraph.