"The United States of America _ought_ to be our leader in chief, but mainly through ... the dreadful colour war that is year by year waxing worse. The only thing clear to me is, that their _home_ calamity must for a long while hinder their giving aid to the world. The policy in Russia is so fatal, and its result presages an overturn of the scale of the France of 1793. This makes all foresight impossible, except that every State is safest which least violates the laws of universal morality. That England can avoid great retribution seems to me scarcely probable. But as soon as morality is allowed to speak loud in high places, I believe our main dangers will quickly disappear. The prospect cannot be defined, but is to me of intense interest. Britain seems to me immensely superior to its own ruling classes in goodness, and the good is sure _at length to prevail_, to the benefit also of your Ireland. "With kindest best wishes, I am, "Most truly yours, "F. W. Newman." CHAPTER XXI LANDOWNERS AND WAGE RECEIVERS BY FRANCIS W. NEWMAN CONTRIBUTED BY MR. WILLIAM JAMIESON [Presumably written in 1886, when Newman was Vice-President of the "Land Nationalization Society." It was kindly sent me by Mr. William Jamieson, who was Hon. Sec. to the above Society at the time. I wish to express here my sense of gratitude to him for much help and information regarding his own work with Newman in 1886.] The tendency of English industry for a long time back has been to exalt the land_lord_, or chief man in any locality, into land _owner_ (a phrase implying that no one but he has legal right in the land), and to convert a larger and larger fraction of the nation into wage receivers, liable to be cast out of work either at the simple will, or by the imprudence or misfortune of their paymaster. In order to analyse the natural results of this juncture, we must follow the method received in Political Economy, of taking an imaginary case, far simpler than any which is actually met in human life, so as to make all the conditions of the problem known to us by hypotheses. Let us suppose an island, secluded commercially from the rest of the world, and peopled by a vast working lower class under three small ruling castes. The island is physically divisible into three parts: _first_, marshy coast land, abounding with shrubs, canes, rushes of many kinds, from which human garments of various sorts can be made; _secondly_ rolling land, eminently suitable for the cultivation of grain, and of certain fruit trees and roots on which the whole population live; _thirdly_, the mountain land, on which are timber trees and copses affording firewood; also quarries of stone, gravel pits, lime rocks, and mines of copper and iron. Of the marshy coast land, the _second_ lordly caste is acknowledged to be absolute owner; the first or highest caste owns the rolling land, which is the arable and cultivated portion; and the _third_ caste owns the mountain land and its products. From the first