he became a great and celebrated man, and his name a
synonym for the doctrine.[229]

Now, then, the conditions that caused Malthus thus to give his signal of
alarm and proclaim his brutal doctrine--he addressed it to the working
class, thus adding insult to injury--have since grown worse from decade
to decade. They have grown worse, not alone in the fatherland of
Malthus, Great Britain, but in all the countries of the world run by the
capitalist system of production, whose consequences ever are the robbery
of the soil and the dependence and subjugation of the masses through
machinery and the factory. This system consists, as has been shown, in
the separation of the workingman from his means of production--be these
land or tools--and in the transfer of the latter to the capitalist
class. That system produces ever new branches of industry, develops and
concentrates them, and thereby throws ever larger masses of the people
upon the street as "superfluous." On the field of agriculture it
promotes, as the Rome of old, the latifundia ownership with all its
sequences. Ireland, in this respect the classic land of Europe, and
afflicted worst of all by the English system of land-grabbing, had in
1887 an area of 884.4 square miles of meadow and pasture land, but only
263.3 square miles of agricultural fields and the conversion of
agricultural fields into meadows and pastures for sheep and cattle and
into hunting grounds for the landlords makes every year further
strides.[230]

Moreover the agricultural fields of Ireland are, in great measure, in
the hands of a large number of small tenants, who are not able to
cultivate the land in the most profitable manner. Thus Ireland presents
the aspect of a country that is retrogressing from an agricultural into
a pastoral condition. The population, that at the beginning of the
nineteenth century was over eight million strong, has declined to about
five million, and still several millions are "in excess." Ireland's
normal state of rebellion against England is thus easily explained; and
yet the struggle of the "Home Ruler" aims only at the creation of an
Irish landlord class and no wise carries the wished-for deliverance to
the mass of the Irish people. The Irish people will perceive that so
soon as the Home Ruler shall carry out his plans. Scotland presents a
picture similar to that of Ireland with regard to the ownership and
cultivation of its soil.[231]

A similar development reappears