Representative British Orations Volume 3 (of 4): With Introductions and Explanatory Notes
History
Representative British Orations Volume 3 (of 4): With Introductions and Explanatory Notes
Speeches, addresses, etc., English
Now, I hold that this duty begins nearer home, and that the landed
proprietors are the parties who are responsible if the laborers have
not employment. You have absolute power; there is no doubt about that.
You can, if you please, legislate for the laborers, or yourselves.
Whatever you may have done besides, your legislation has been adverse
to the laborer, and you have no right to call upon the farmers to
remedy the evils which you have caused. Will not this evil—if evil
you call it—press on you more and more every year? What can you do to
remedy the mischief? I only appear here now because you have proposed
nothing. We all know your system of allotments, and we are all aware of
its failure. What other remedy have you? for, mark you, that is worse
than a plaything, if you were allowed to carry out your own views.
[Hear!] Aye, it is well enough for some of you that there are wiser
heads than your own to lead you, or you would be conducting yourselves
into precisely the same condition in which they are in Ireland, but
with this difference—this increased difficulty,—that there they do
manage to maintain the rights of property by the aid of the English
Exchequer and 20,000 bayonets; but divide your own country into small
allotments, and where would be the rights of property? What do you
propose to do now? That is the question. Nothing has been brought
forward this year, which I have heard, having for its object to
benefit the great mass of the English population; nothing I have heard
suggested which has at all tended to alleviate their condition.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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