a real island with thirty thousand proprietors and five or six millions of laboring serfs. Let the political arrangements be what they may, let there be universal or any other suffrage, so long as the aristocracy have all the land, and derive the rent of it, the laborer is only a serf, and a serf he will remain until he has uprooted the rights of private landed property. The land is for the nation, and not for the aristocracy.

We affirm, then, that serfdom has not been abolished, but only generalized, in England, Ireland, and Scotland; and this generalization appears to be the step of transition through which society must pass, in its progress from the condition of individual lord and individual serf, to the condition of equitable equality, in which there shall be no lord and no serf, but only freemen without privileges and without oppressions.* But it is necessary to understand what we mean by a lord and a serf.

A serf is a man who, by the arrangements of

"These villeins, belonging principally to lords of manors, were either villeins regardant,—that is, annexed to the manor or land, or else they were in gross, or at large; that is, annexed to the person of the lord, and transferable by deed from one owner to another. They could not leave their lord without his permission, but, if they ran away or were purloined from him, might be claimed and recovered by action, like beasts or other chattels. They held, indeed, small portions of land, by way of sustaining themselves and families, but it was at the mere will of the lord, who might dispossess them whenever he pleased; and it was upon villein services, that is, to carry out dung, to hedge and ditch the lord's demesnes, and any other the meanest offices; and their services were not only base, but uncertain, both as to their time and quantity. A villein, in short, was in much the same state

mankind, is deprived of the object on which he might expend his labor, or of the natural profit that results from his labor, and, consequently, is under the necessity of supporting himself and his family by his labor alone. And a lord, or an aristocrat, is a man who, by the arrangements of mankind, is made to possess the object, and who, consequently, can support himself and his family without labor, on the profits created by the labor of others. This is the essential distinction between the lord and the serf; and we maintain that the constitution of the world forbids that any arrangement of this kind should result in any other than an evil condition of society, which must necessarily condemn a large part of the population to physical degradation; and if to physical degradation, to moral degradation. No instance can be adduced of a population reduced to extreme poverty as must ever be the case where the land, the great source of wealth, is allotted to a few who labor not where that popula

with us as Lord Molesworth describes to be that of the boors in Denmark, and which Stiernhoak attributes also to the traals or slaves in Sweden, which confirms the probability of their being, in some degree, monuments of the Danish tyranny. A villein could acquire no property either in lands or goods; but, if he purchased either, the lord might enter upon them, oust the villein, and seize them to his own use, unless he contrived to dispose of them again before the lord had seized them, for the lord had then lost his opportunity.

'In many places, also, a fine was payable to the lord if the viliein presumed to marry his daughter to any one without leave from the lord; and, by the common law, the lord might also bring an action against the husband for damages in thus purloining his property.” — BLACKSTONE's Commentaries, book ii. chap. 6.

tion has not been also and in consequence reduced to moral and intellectual degradation, and where the spirit of man has not been depraved and borne down by the circumstances in which man, and not God, has placed him.*

In endeavoring to estimate what must be the ultimate condition of mankind with regard to natural property, we have two methods of determination : first, that of political science; second, that of analogy, based on the actual history of the past evolution of mankind with regard to natural liberty. We have already stated that the too great substantives of politics are liberty and property. Each of these gives rise

* Poverty and want are evils, inasmuch as they produce human suffering; but they are far greater evils, as they tend to produce the deterioration of man. And when this deterioration is produced by the political arrangements of a country, with regard to the land and the other natural sources of wealth, the alteration of those arrangements becomes a moral duty of the very highest character. As an illustration of this deterioration of man, we quote the following passage from the Edinburgh Review, October, 1848, where the writer is treating of man scientifically, and without reference to politics. Let the reader contrast this passage with a political article in the same number of the Edinburgh Review, where the writer appears to assert, that "of a hundred honest, industrious, and upright men, the vast majority are certain to do well." According to the laws of nature they would do well, but according to the laws of Ireland no personal qualifications would relieve the masses from hopeless poverty so long as the present politcal arrangements are allowed to remain. In Ireland, the object of labor (the land) has been taken from the inhabitants, and vast districts are lying unimproved and uncultivated in the face of a population willing to work for the lowest wages. On the one hand is the land lying idle, and on the other is the labor lying idle; and the landlordocracy is the obstacle that prevents the two from being brought into contact, and

to a course of evolution, and the two courses of evolu tion are analogous; that is, the process is similar, while the substantives involved in the process are diverse. Thus the lord and the serf present the farthest possible remove from equity, both as regards liberty and as regards property; and the process by which the serf gradually emancipates his personal actions from the power of the lord, may be taken as an indication of the process by which he will ultimately succeed in depriving the lord of his exclusive possession of the earth, and thereby emancipating his own labor from the burdens that oppress it, and from the depreciation of value which it must necessarily

!

thereby securing an abundant provision for the population.

So

long as the land is unimproved and uncultivated, it is nonsense to assert that Ireland is over-populous, or that she could not support a much larger population. It is the law, and not nature, that reduces Ireland to starvation.

"Races which have advanced the farthest in civilization, and attained the greatest perfection of physical form, produce also examples of physical inferiority in individuals or families. Among other consequences of long-continued want and ignorance, the conformation of the cranium appears to have been affected. The Sanatory Commission would arrive at this conclusion, we believe, were it to examine the worst part of the population of our great towns; the most convincing proof, however, is unfortunately furnished by the lowest classes of the Irish population." There are certain districts in Leitrim, Sligo, and Mayo, (as pointed out by an intelligent writer in the Dublin University Magazine, No. 48,) chiefly inhabited by the descendants of the native Irish, driven by the British from Armagh and the south of Down, about two centuries ago. These people, whose ancestors were well grown, able bodied, and comely, are now reduced to an average stature of five feet, two inches, are pot-bellied, bow legged, and abortively featured, and are especially remarkable for "open, projecting

experience, so long as the great body of the population are merely laborers for the lords. And laborers for the lords the great body of the population must be, so long as the soil, the mines, the fisheries, &c., are accorded to a small number of individual proprietors.

As regards personal liberty, the lord and the serf present the greatest possible diversity. They are the antipodes, the positive and negative poles, of man's possible condition. The antagonism cannot be greater; it is absolute, ultimate, final. Man cannot make the disparity more perfect; it is the absolute dominion of strength, and the absolute subjection of weakness. The lord is the possessor, the serf is the

mouths, with prominent teeth and exposed gums, their advancing cheek bones and depressed noses bearing barbarism on their very front." In other words, within so short a period they seem to have acquired a prognathous type of skull, ["the third type of configuration of the skull has been very happily named by Dr. Prichard prognathous, to express its most distinctive character, namely, the forward prominence of the jaws,"] like the savages of Australia, “thus giving an example of deterioration from known causes, as almost compensates by its value to future ages for the suffering and debasement which past generations have endured in perfecting its appalling lesson." "The hordes of wretched Irish, whom famine has driven to seek subsistence in the seaports and manufacturing towns of Great Britain, must have enabled many of our readers to make this observation for themselves: every gradation being perceptible, from the really noble type of countenance and figure seen in some of them, to that utterly debased aspect which can be looked at only with disgust. In both cases (the

Irish and the Australians) the same cause a long-continued deficiency of food and social degradation (where a sufficient elevation to resist these depressing agencies had not been previously attained) — has terminated in the same results."-Edinburgh Review, October, 1848, p. 443.