The rent which landlords draw from their lands is an income which they derive from the sale of what are avowedly God's gifts which "no man made."
— BISHOP OF MEATH, Letter to Clergy and Laity, April 2, 1881.
Landlordism Takes the Patrimony of the People.
Let the democracy of England as well as of Ireland, learn the melancholy fate that has overtaken this splendid inheritance which God has placed in their hands, and which would have saved them eighty millions sterling which they now annually pay by direct and indirect taxation for the government of the country. That patrimony was once theirs by right, and by right it is theirs still; but, in fact, it is theirs no longer: a class has wrested the land from the people of the country and now hold a strict monopoly in it. They sell it out to the people as if it were an ordinary article of private property and solely the result of their own capital and labour.
The rents which the landlords draw from their lands is an income which they derive from the sale of what are avowedly God's gifts, which "no man made." If they had only claimed the right of selling the use of the permanent improvements they had made in the soil, by the capital and labour they had expended on it, no one could dispute the Justice of their demand; but any element of income that might possibly be derived from this source is called in the language of political economy, not Rent, but Profit.
Political economists who have written with scientific precision on the nature and properties of Rent, confine it exclusively to the moneys which the landlord receives for allowing the tenant the use of the original and natural productiveness of the soil.
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