Black and White: Land, Labor, and Politics in the SouthFortune, Timothy Thomas
History
Black and White: Land, Labor, and Politics in the South
Fortune, Timothy Thomas
African Americans -- Southern States; Southern States -- Economic conditions; United States -- Race relations
English Syndicate (represented by Closs Bros.) Wisconsin 110,000
M. Ellerhauser, of Halifax, Nova Scotia, in West Virginia 600,000
A Scotch Syndicate, in Florida 500,000
A. Boysen, Danish Consul, in Milwaukee 50,000
Missouri Land Company, of Edinburgh, Scotland 165,000
Total 20,747,000
Commenting upon these startling figures, the _New York (Daily) World_,
one of the best informed papers of the time says:
The land grabber is not a fungus of nineteenth century
growth. He first came among English-speaking peoples over
eight centuries ago. Wherever his foot has found a
standing-place pauperism and its sequence, crime, have
followed. In the British Isles he is known as an Acreocrat.
Since he has extended his operations from his native country
to our own free soil the land-grabber should be examined
under the microscope of history analytically, impartially,
and truthfully.
The unnaturalized foreigner threatens us with other dangers
than those which would be created by our indigenous American
land-grabber. The British acreocrat who owns real estate in
this country believes in the cancer of English monarchy with
its hideous annals of nearly a thousand years. He accepts
the tradition of an hereditary House of Lords, a body
composed of the effete and played out descendants of the
most tyrannical and profligate rascals which Europe ever
produced, and he will remain an English blueblood in every
thought and action, which cannot fail to bring about in free
America and on his own acres here the same poverty-stricken
class of peasants as now curse Great Britain and Ireland.
English "upper-tendom" is represented in recent purchases
of American soil by one duke, one marquis, two earls, a
baron, two baronets and two members of Parliament. The
British duke owns 425,000 acres; the marquis, 1,750,000
acres; the two earls, 160,000 acres; the baron, 60,000
acres; the brace of baronets, 2,000,500 acres; and the pair
of Parliamentary politicians, 860,000 acres. In the rest of
the land purchased by our brand-new imported lords of the
soil, England's governing acreocrats, are largely
represented in their 20,941,666 acres.
Much ignorance is affected in American society respecting
the manner in which the British landocrats came by their
property. It is enough that "my lud" has a handle to his
name, and Murray Hill shoddyocracy will wine and dine and
toady him, and perhaps for his title marry him to some
sweet, pure and good American girl, whose life hereafter
will be a purgatory to herself and a mutual misery to both.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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