Great Britain -- Description and travel; Great Britain -- Rural conditions
possibly object to this, except those, who, amongst them, now divide the
possession or benefit of this property? I have once before mentioned,
but I will repeat it, that _Marlborough House_ in Pall Mall, for which
the Prince of Saxe Coburg pays a rent to the Duke of Marlborough of
three thousand pounds a-year, is rented of this generous public by that
most Noble Duke at the rate of less than _forty pounds_ a-year. There
are three houses in Pall Mall, the whole of which pay a rent _to the
public_ of about fifteen pounds a-year, I think it is. I myself,
twenty-two years ago, paid three hundred pounds a-year for one of them,
to a man that I thought was the owner of them; but I now find that these
houses belong to the public. The Duke of Buckingham's house in Pall
Mall, which is one of the grandest in all London, and which is not worth
less than seven or eight hundred pounds a-year, belongs to the public.
The Duke is the tenant; and I think he pays for it much less than twenty
pounds a-year. I speak from memory here all the way along; and therefore
not positively; I will, another time, state the particulars from the
books. The book that I am now referring to is also of a date of some
years back; but I will mention all the particulars another time. Talk of
_reducing rents_, indeed! Talk of _generous landlords_! It is the public
that is the generous landlord. It is the public that lets its houses and
manors and mines and farms at a cheap rate. It certainly would not be so
good a landlord if it had a Reformed Parliament to manage its affairs,
nor would it suffer so many snug _Corporations_ to carry on their
snugglings in the manner that they do, and therefore it is obviously the
interest of the rich tenants of this poor public, as well as the
interest of the snugglers in Corporations, to prevent the poor public
from having such a Parliament.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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