As a matter of fact, this sham feudalism is generally upheld more by a love of power and patronage than by kindness of heart. Our landlord is consciously proud of having people directly dependent on him whom he can order according to his will (even at election time), whom he can enrich or impoverish as he judges right, and can remove from his cottages when they do not please him. If the result is spick and span to the eye and he is greeted by smiles of apparent gratitude he feels, and it is difficult to disillusion him, that his methods are successful, and he is induced to believe that his actions are justified and his presence in the community indispensable. But what kind of impression is in reality produced on those who come under his sway? Not gratitude, because they soon begin to regard his gifts as a natural right, and knowing that the squire can easily afford so much, discontent is likely to be roused that he does not give more. Consequently a whole class of people are retained devoid of all the self-reliance and energy which independence alone can give. Without their being aware of it, the yoke of subjection is placed upon them under the guise of beneficent charity, weighing them down, creating in them false habits of cringing subservience, and indefinitely postponing the day of their liberation. The landlord is not the elected chief of a village community whom the people can feel to be one of themselves, chosen by them and removable by them. Under such circumstances service is no longer subservience, for congregations of human beings will always seek out their leaders, organisers, managers, or controllers. But this landlord has imposed himself upon them, or is the descendant of one who imposed himself on their fathers, who took, in fact, what was once rightfully theirs, enclosed it or confiscated it. To go no further back than the Enclosure Acts, one can note the irreparable wrongs that were then committed by those who had the political power in their hands. Arthur Young reported in 1801 that “by nineteen Enclosure Acts out of twenty the poor are injured, and in some cases greatly injured.” The protests made at the time were practically unheeded by an aristocracy too much absorbed in making its fortune to give a thought to the ruin of the classes that were losing their little inheritance in the common fields or the common waste. We repeat, the landlord has imposed himself upon them; this he can do, and will continue to do, not because he is particularly fitted by special training for the administration of landed property, nor even because he has a strong preference for the pursuit of agriculture, but simply and solely because he has money. To state his one qualification for the position he holds is quite sufficient to prove its falseness and absurdity.