The Louisiana Democrat. [volume] (Alexandria, La.) 1845-1918, 1890-06-04
ARE WE WEALTHY

ARE WE WEALTHY
The Land Tax Problem In Great Britain
Wealthy in the Wrong Place.
The Family Herald, published in Lon
don, asks the question, care we
wealthy" and concludes that the true
answer is eyes; in the wrong place"
The editor notes that within sound of
the carriages rolling to the fashionable
ball that costs $1,000 work twenty seam
stresses who never had enough to eat.
There is not good horse that Mother
England does not care for. and there are
half million children who can rarely
satisfy their hunger, and are styed in
dens where the horses would die in
week. English people did not under
stand the genesis of poverty until the
developments of society in America
showed with terrific rapidity the histor-
ical development of poverty in Britain.
| Poverty in England was before that a
horrid mystery; but in America its de-
| velopment was brought out in lurid
distinctness. In the old countries
the men who first seized the
land were able to sublet it for money or
military service. Gradually manufact-
urers came, and then great centers of
population with workingmen ready to
sell their labor for a bare living. Thus
came about the appalling spectacle of
| old world slums. All this has been
done in America with the rapidity of
| scene shifting. With this swift object
lesson before them Englishmen have
cried: 'Back to the land; the land for
the nation" They now see that the
| hope held out by reform bills was vain.
For time the church exercised con-
servative influences; but bold doubters
who had come to believe that we die
like dumb brutes said: "Why not give
the poor their share Of this worlds good
| things since there is nothing for them
in another world?"
The editor sees a hope if only the
masses will exercise their powers under
existing laws. The people must resolve
that they shall no longer live in slums.
Prof. Huxley has done much good, and
he once spoke of Jacobs ladder from
the gutter to the university. The lad
der, however, reaches only from trades
mans shop and the artisans dwelling to
the seats of higher learning, the gutter
child can not climb. Meanwhile Hux.
ley has become so savagely conservative
that he may next denounce Magma
Charta as mistake. Suppose an awk.
ward leader of the people should say:
'You tell u.s. professor, that we arc.
wealthy, and that it is right that some
men should be gorged while we are Bit
ten with famine. If Britain is SO
wealthy, how is it that eleven million
acres of good agricultural land are now
out of cultivation, while the people
whom the land used to feed are crushed
lin the slums of the towns in the case OF
laborers, or gone beyond the sea in the
case of the farmers?" We want to be
impartial, but we freely own that we
should not like to answer that question,
and we do not believe the professor
could. The men who used to supply our
fighting force are now becoming ex-
tinct. If they go into the town and
pick up some kind of work, then the
second generation are weaklings and
a burden to US; while, if they
go abroad, they are still re-
moved from the mother of Nations,
who needs her sons of the soil, even
though she may feel proud Of the gall
liant new States which they are rearing.
And, while rats and mice and obscure
vermin are gradually taking possession
of the land on which Britons were bred,
the signs of bursting wealth are thick
among us. Is a nation rich that can not
afford even to keep the kind of men who
once defended her? To us the gradual
return of the land to it's primitive Wild
ness is more than depressing. There
are districts on the borders of Hartford
and Essex which might make a senti-
mental traveller sit down and cry. 1t
all seems so strange; it looks so poverty
stricken, SO filthy, so sordid, so like the
site of slum after all the houses have
been leveled for dozen years; and this
in the midst of our England We say
nothing about land laws and SO forth,
but we will say that those who fancy
the towns can survive when the farms
are deserted are much mistaken. The
letters we receive from provincial
tradesmen in little market towns are
saddening in the extreme, for the return
of the land to the wilderness stage is
running men who were once among thu
very pillars Of the State"