removal a principle has emerged of such world-wide importance in the
present, and even more in the future, that we may well trace its history
in detail.

The Normans, as we saw, paid themselves for conquering the Saxons and
Angles by assuming a perpetual right to tax their produce; a right still
in full force, and forming the very foundation of the ruling class in
England. The land tenure thus created was, under the Tudors and the
first Stuarts, bodily transferred to Ireland. In Ireland the land had
ever been owned by the people, each tribe, as representing a single
family, holding a certain area by communal tenure, and electing a chief
to protect its territory from aggression. For this elective
chieftainship the English law-courts substituted something wholly
different: a tenure modeled on the feudal servitude of England. This new
principle made the land of the country the property not of the whole
people but of a limited and privileged class: the favorites of the
ruling power--"hungry parasites" as the Congress of 1775 called them.
This "landed" class continued to hold absolute sway until quite
recently, and it was this class which succumbed to bribery in 1800, and
passed the Act of Legislative Union with England. The clergy of the
Established church were little more than the private chaplains of the
"landed" class, the two alien bodies supporting each other.

Folly, however, was the child of injustice; for so shortsighted were
these hungry parasites that they developed a system of land-laws so bad
as to cause universal poverty, and bring a reaction which is steadily
sweeping the "landed" class of Ireland to extinction and oblivion. The
fundamental principle of these bad land-laws was this: the tenant was
compelled to renew his lease from year to year; and whenever, during the
year, he had in any way improved the land in his possession,--by
draining marshes, by reclaiming waste areas, by adding farm-buildings,
the "owner" of the land could demand an enhanced rent, as the condition
of renewing the lease. The tenant had to submit to a continually
ascending scale of extortion, sanctioned by law and exacted by armed
force; or, as an alternative, he had to give up the fruit of his
industry without compensation and without redress.

Anything more certain to destroy energy, to cut at the roots of thrift,
to undermine all the best qualities of manhood, it would be impossible
to imagine. The slave on the plantation could i