Without ties to bind the people to the land, they have been driven, especially of late years, in ever increasing multitudes to the towns. Here they have herded apart from the better classes, forming an atmosphere and a society marked on the one hand by an absence of all the elevating influences of wealth, education and refinement, and on the other by the depressing presence of almost a dead level of poverty, ignorance and squalor. They are not owners either of the scraps of land on which they live or of the tenements which cover them; but they are rackrented by the agents of absentee landlords, who know less of them than Dives knew of Lazarus.
— CARDINAL VAUGHAN, Inaugural Address to the Annual Conference of the Catholic Truth Society, Stockport; published in the St. Vincent de Paul Quarterly, New York, November, 1899; p. 286.
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