Newman--the man who was always boldest where there was a cause that needed fighting for, or fellow citizens who were powerless to right their own wrongs, and who required someone to voice them--spoke out his views on this subject, unhesitatingly. "That a man should be able to buy up large tracts of land, and make himself the owner of them--to keep them in or out of culture as he pleases--to close or open roads, and dictate where houses should be built ... this is no natural right, but is an artificial creation of arbitrary law; law made by legislation for personal convenience ... certainly not for the benefit of the nation.... I find it stated that in 1845 the Royal Commission estimated that, since 1710, above seven millions of acres had been appropriated by Private Acts of Parliament." (This was because of the enormous extension of claims made by lords of the manors.) "It is certain that wild land was not imagined to be a property in old days. The moors and bogs, and hillsides and seacoast imposed on the baron the duty of maintaining the King's peace against marauders, but yielded to him no revenue.... Supplies open to all ought never to have been made private property.... Vast private estates are pernicious in every country which permits them. It was notorious to the Romans under the early emperors how ruinous they had been to Italy.... There they wrought out, among other evils, emptiness of population, and extinction of agriculture." He represents that it was really due to the break-up of the feudal system in the Tudor times which was responsible for the "chronic pauperism" and multitude of "sturdy beggars" of later centuries. And the reason is a very patent one. If more and more land is swamped in private enterprise, private revenue, it is a _sine quâ non_ that peasant proprietorship must get less and less. There is not, in effect, enough land to go round. Newman points out that, as regards land cultivation, we are behind France, Spain, Italy, Germany, and Hungary; that a hundred years ago there were far more small freeholds in England than is now the case; that England is a "marked exception in Europe in the land tenure." "We know not whither beside England to look for a nation of peasants living by wages, and divorced from all rights in the crops which they raise." As Henry Fawcett said long ago, these wages of English labourers will not allow of the least provision to be made either for the sickness or the feebleness of old age. They have, at the close of a life of hard toil, nothing but the workhouse to live in, the road to beg in or sell in that out-at-elbow, trade, the modern "chapman's."