Synopses & Reviews
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 14 The State as Landlord. with coronets and titles, and vested privileges, and extensive landed possessions, instead of, as in America, the higher positions in life being occupied by men who have earned their promotion by their toil, by their energy and by their exceptional ability. It is not strange, therefore, that Mr. George's assaults upon property, which seem to us here so absurd as to be unworthy of refutation, are regarded as dangerous by one of the most accomplished of critics, and that the valuable pages of the Quarterly Review are devoted to his reply. Mr. Mallock demonstrates very clearly that Mr. George's scheme to make the landlords middlemen for the state, by taxing them up to, or nearly up to, the rentable value of their estates, would not benefit the general public, for the state would simply take the place of the landlord, and, it may be added, would probably be more severe in the collection of rents, for it is admitted in a quotation by Mr. George himself from Miss C. G. O'Brien's article on The Irish Land Question in the Nineteenth Century, that an aristocracy, such as that of Ireland, has its virtues as well as its The State as Landlord. 15 vices, and is influenced by sentiments which do not enter into mere business transactions ? sentiments which must often modify and soften the calculations of cold self-interest. The same may be said of the English aristocracy, and while there may be instances of harshness and oppression, the tenant of the English landowner is doubtless more pleasantly situated than he would be as tenant of the soulless and inexorable state. Besides, it is impossible to see how the poor would be helped by such a change of tenure; for, as Mr. George proposes that the property should be let to the highest bidder, the man without a...
Synopsis
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