His speech is interesting, not because it voices the ultra-Conservative's apprehensions but because the Earl had really discovered the legal basis of the new Social Democratic advance, which had come unheralded. The Earl reviewed the bills that Parliament had sanctioned, which dealt with state "interference." Twelve bills referred to lands and houses. "All of these measures assume the right of the state to regulate the management of, or to confiscate real property"--steps in the direction of substituting "land nationalization" for individual ownership. Five laws dealt with corporations, "confiscating property of water companies," etc.; nine dealt with ships: "all of them assertions by the Board of Trade of its right to regulate private enterprise and individual management in the mercantile marine;" six with mines, "prompting a fallacious confidence in government inspection;" six with railways, "all encroachments upon self-government of private enterprise in railways--successive steps in the direction of state railways." Nine had to do with manufactures and trades, "invasions by the state of the self-government of the various interests of the country, and curtailment of the freedom of contract between employers and employed." "The Pawnbrokers' Act of 1872 was the thin edge of the wedge for reducing the business of the 'poor man's banks' to a state monopoly." Twenty laws dealt with liquor, "all attempts on the part of the state to regulate the dealings and habits of buyers and sellers of alcoholic drinks." Sixteen dealt with dwellings of the working class, "all embodying the principle that it is the duty of the state to provide dwellings, private gardens, and other conveniences for the working classes, and assume its right to appropriate land for these purposes." There were nine education acts, "all based on the assumption that it is the duty of the state to act _in loco parentis_." Four laws dealt with recreation, "whereby the state, having educated the people in common school rooms, proceeds to provide them with common reading-rooms, and afterwards turns them out at stated times into the streets for common holidays." Of local government and improvement acts, there were passed "a vast mass of local legislation ... containing interferences in every conceivable particular with liberty and property." The Earl quotes Lord Palmerston as saying in 1865, "Tenant right is landlord wrong," and Lord Sherbrooke, in 1866, "Happily there is an oasis upon which all men, without distinction of party, can take common stand, and that is the good ground of political economy." And the noble lord concludes by predicting, "The general social results of such Socialistic legislation may be summed up in 'dynamite,' 'detectives,' and 'general demoralization.'"[1]