Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: It is easy to understand that the territorialists and their champions should fervently believe in the impossibility of change. Having reduced the occupants of the soil to a condition of comparative servility, and used the parliamentary votes of the farmers for their own purposes, why, they may ask, should they not be able to do the same with the labourer ? Admitting; that the labourer is at present an En.fran- 0 ' cmsement unknown quantity, let us attempt to look a little Jf|j" ahead, and to appraise somewhat definitely the situ- of6'','""11 ation in which he will find himself. Here we have mons' something else than mere conjecture by which to go. Mr. Broadhurst,s Bill for the compulsory enfranchisement of leaseholders is about to be supplemented by a measure which Mr. Jesse Collings has in hand for the restitution of illegal enclosures. The object of this measure is to restore all common- lands, wastes, roadsides, and other enclosures and encroachments which have been made illegally and without the sanction of Parliament since 1800, and to provide that such lands be placed in trust of the local authorities of the districts in which they are found for the benefit of the labouring classes and other inhabitants of those districts. How many private properties are there in the United Kingdom whose estates would be unaffected by legislation proceeding upon these lines ? Yet Sir Charles Dilke, speaking at Aylesbury, avowed his belief that this Bill will pass. It may be that so cool- headed and clear-sighted a man, expressing himself with the knowledge and responsibility which the presidency of the Local Government Board gave to him, was wrong, and that the voters in rural districts have no wish to repossess themselves of those portions of the land of which they have been des...