their fellow citizens, lest their poverty should render them ridiculous, it is thought reasonable that they should have others. It is, however, an oppressive and indefensible grievance. In the present state of society there is no utility in guaranteeing to particular families the perpetual enjoyment of vast masses of property-that this property shall not be liable to the ordinary vicissitudes of life-that it shall not, like personal estates, either be devisable or saleable-and that all, except members of the privileged order, shall be irrevocably interdicted from ever becoming proprietors of the soil-of that soil which is the common inheritance of the whole community. Other evils result from this feudal institution. Primogeniture enriches one, and leaves all the other members of a family destitute. Hence they are thrown, like mendicants, on the public for support; but they are unlike mendicants in this-that the public has no option, whether they will support them or not. The Aristocracy, usurping the power of the state, have the means, under various pretexts, of extorting, for the junior branches of their families, a forced subsistence. They patronize a ponderous and sinecure church-establishment; they wage long and unnecessary wars, to create employments in the army and navy; they conquer and retain useless colonies; they set on foot expensive missions of diplomacy, and keep an ambassador or consul, and often both, at almost every petty state and every petty port in the world; they create offices without duties, grant unmerited pensions, keep up unnecessary places in the royal household, in the admiralty, the treasury, the customs, excise, courts of law, and every department of the public administration: by these, and other expedients, the junior as well as elder branches of the great families are amply provided for out of the taxes. They live in profusion and luxury; and those by whom they are maintained alone subsist in indigence and privation. It is only in the less civilized states of Europe, in Hungary, Bohemia, Poland, and Russia, that primogeniture is retained. Countries enjoying the benefits of political regeneration have abolished this remnant of feudality, and introduced the law of equal partibility. The happy effects of this reform are visible in the condition of France and the Netherlands; in the greater harmony subsisting among the different classes of society-in the absence of the miserable jealousy and exclusiveness that embitter domestic intercourse in England-in the public spirit, unanimity, and personal independence of the inhabitants, produced, no doubt, by a conviction of common interests, reciprocal obligations, and the equal participation in all the advantages and enjoyments of the social state. II. PRIVILEGES OF PEERS. There are some other laws originating in the same aristocratic spirit, and directed to the maintenance of similar exclusive privileges as those described in the last section. Such are the Insolvent Laws. Lest the dignity of a peer should be violated, his person is privileged from arrest for debt. Why should this be tolerated? He is not ostensibly entrusted with representative functions, like the members of the lower house. He represents only himself, with the exception of the sixteen peers of Scotland and the twenty-eight peers of Ireland. Why, then, should his person be protected from imprisonment, if he is so inexcusably improvident, with all the advantages he enjoys, as to incur debts he cannot pay? A Scotch peer, though not one of those sitting in parliament, is privileged from arrest, as appears from the case of Lord Mordington. This lord, who was a Scotch peer, but not one of those who sat in parliament, being arrested, moved the Court of Common Pleas to be discharged, as being entitled, by the Act of Union, to all the privileges of a peer of Great Britain; and prayed an attachment against the bailiff; when a rule was granted to show cause. Upon this, the bailiff made an affidavit that, when he arrested the said lord, he was so mean in his apparel, as having a worn-out suit of clothes, and a dirty shirt on, and but sixteen pence in his pocket, he could not suppose him to be a peer of Great Britain, and, therefore, through inadvertency, arrested him. The Court discharged the lord, and made the bailiff ask pardon. A peer, sitting in judgment, is not required to give his verdict upon oath, like a commoner, but upon his honour. What a stigma on the other classes of the community! Just as if a peer alone had honour, and all others were base perfidious slaves, from whom truth could only be extorted when they had been forced into the presence of their Creator. A member of the lower house is the deputy or representative of others, and cannot delegate his powers, but a peer represents only himself, and may vote by proxy on any question, even though he has never been present to discuss its merits. If a thief breaks into a church, and steals the surplus or cushion, it is not like stealing a ledger or cash-box from a shop or counting-house -it is sacrilege. If a man scandalizes a peer, by speaking evil of him, it is not common scandal, it is scandalum magnatum, that is, great scandal, subjecting the offender to indefinite punishment. You may If a peer jobs in the funds, as many of them do; or if he gets up bubble companies, as some of them have done, to dupe credulous people; and if he involves himself in debt by these fraudulent practices, you cannot imprison him to enforce payment; neither can you make him a bankrupt, and sequestrate his estates. The property of a peer, like his person, has a dignity about it, and must not be violated. knock down Nathan Rothschild, though he is a very rich man, or a worshipful alderman, or even a right honourable lord mayor, and the justices will only charge you a few shillings for the liberty you have taken; but, if you knock down a peer, though he is ever so insolent, it is almost as bad as murder. Peers being great landowners, therefore, land, as well as their persons, enjoys immunities which do not attach to chattel property. A noble lord may run into as much debt as he pleases, and then, with impunity, defraud all his creditors. He may live in the utmost profusion; he may borrow money to support his extravagance, or for providing portions for younger children, making the most solemn promises, or even giving his written engagement to repay it; or he may raise loans, and with these loans buy houses and land, and when he dies leave the houses and land purchased with this borrowed money to whom he pleases: and in all these cases the lenders who have trusted to the honour of a peer have no power to touch a shilling worth of his real estates. These are a few of the privileges of peers; we shall proceed to illustrate other results of aristocratic legislation. III. INJUSTICE OF ARISTOCRATIC TAXATION. Nothing can demonstrate more incontestably the necessity of the different interests in society being represented in the general government than the course of fiscal legislation. The political power of the state we need not repeat nor explain is, in this country, consolidated in the aristocracy. If we only glance at public burthens we shall see with what admirable adriotness they have been distributed, so as to press as lightly as possible on those who imposed them, and with disproportionate weight on those who had no share in their imposition. Does not this show better than all the general reasoning in the world the utility of universal representation; otherwise, whatever interest is unprotected will assuredly be sacrificed, and this injustice will be perpetuated by the dominant party, however exalted this dominant party may be by birth, by station, by education, by wealth, or other adventitious circum stance. Let us appeal to facts in illustration of this principle. The landed interest is the primary interest of the Aristocracy; whatever tends to enhance the value of land or its produce tends directly to augment their incomes. Hence, their leading policy has been to protect agriculture, to encourage husbandry, by abstaining from burthening it with imposts, to impose no additional tax on land, and above all things to secure the home market against competition from abroad. For this latter purpose they have passed laws the most unjust and outrageous; the importation of some articles they have absolutely prohibited; others they have loaded with heavy duties; so that they have been able to sell their own produce at a monopoly price. The following list of articles of foreign production, and the import duties to which they are subject, will show to what extent the landowners have availed themselves of political power to promote their own interests, by excluding foreign competition. Bacon, per cwt. Beer, per thirty-two gallons. • £ s. d. 4121 2000 8 2 13 0 0 Wheat 16s. 5d. a quarter to ls. according as the price rises from 61s. to 70s. a quarter. Barley 13s. 10d. a quarter to 1s. according as the price rises, from 32s. to 40s. a quarter. Oats 10s. 9d. a quarter to 1s. according as the price rises from 24s. to 31s. a quarter. Beef, lamb, mutton, pork, sheep, and swine are prohibited to be imported, by 6 Geo. IV. c. 117. While the landowners have been strenuously exerting themselves to close, hermetically, if possible, the home market against foreign agricultural produce, they have, with admirable consistency of policy, been, at the same time, endeavouring to throw it wide open for the admission of foreign manufactures. This places their conduct in a most conspicuous light. Surely, if a free trade in manufactures was for the benefit of the community, so was a free trade in the produce of the soil. But, then, our feudal Solons do not deal in cotton, nor silk, nor hardwares; they are only dealers in corn, and that makes all the difference. It is not a difficult problem to ascertain the annual burthen imposed on the community by the corn-tax. It appears, from the resolutions submitted to the House of Commons last session, by Lord Milton, that the average price of wheat in this country, in the year ending February, 1830, had been 64s. 2d. per quarter. The average price on the Continent and in America, during the same period, had been 46s. 3d. per quarter. Now, if there were no restrictions on the importation of corn, the price in England would be nearly the same as in Poland or in the United States; but, in consequence of the boroughmongers' tax, the price is about 20s. per quarter higher: so that, if the annual consumption of corn by the community be 48 millions of quarters, they pay exactly so many pounds additional, in order to swell the rents of the land owners. A tax upon bread is the most oppressive and unjust that could be imposed on the industrious classes. A man with £50 a year consumes, individually, as much bread as a man with £50,000, and, consequently, sustains as great an annual loss by the artificial enhancement of its price. All taxes on articles of ordinary consumption fall in the same disproportionate manner. They are like a fixed per centage on income, levied indiscriminately on every person, without regard to large or small revenues. Sugar, tea, and malt are articles of general use; and the labourer and artizan contribute exactly in the same proportion as a lord on their individual consumption of those commodities. In fact, it is to duties of this description the Aristocracy have always shown a marked partiality: the excise, it is known, being the most productive branch of the revenue. Mr. Pitt used to say that the high price of labour in England was chiefly from the excise; three-fifths of the wages of a poor man passing into the exchequer. But no such proportion of the incomes of the Aristocracy flow into the public treasury. Yet it is the incomes of the landed interest, as we shall briefly illustrate, which form the most legitimate and unexceptionable fund for taxation. A person who employs himself in making a pair of shoes or inexpressibles adds nothing to the value of the leather or cloth beyond the price of his labour. Land, however, is a more profitable material to work upon; yielding not only a produce adequate to defray the expenses of its culture, but also a surplus: and this surplus constitutes the landlord's rent. But the soil of every country belongs to the people; consequently, the rent or surplus revenue it yields is not so much the property of a particular class of individuals as of the whole community. It follows that the landowners are only so many pensioners or sinecurists, paid out of a revenue which originally constituted the sole fund out of which all the exigencies of state were provided. Instead of the "Lords of the Soil" taxing every article we eat and drink, and impeding, with vexatious imposts, every operation of industry, they ought to have laid a direct tax on rent, which would have been easily and economically collected. They have acted quite the reverse. The Land-Tax continues to be levied at this day according to the defective valuation in the reign of William III.; and, in 1798, it was made perpetual at 4s. in the pound on the inadequate estimate of |