erty just dealt with—was an old Teutonic institution which lived on under cover of feudalism. We have seen how the forcible usurpation of this, generally accompanied by the turning of arable into pasture land, begins at the end of the 15th and extends into the 16th century. But, at that time, the process was carried on by means of individual acts of violence against which legislation, for a hundred and fifty years, fought in vain. The advance made by the 18th century shows itself in this, that the law itself becomes now the instrument of the theft of the people’s land, although the large farmers make use of their little independent methods as well.[1] The parliamentary form of the robbery is that of Acts for enclosures of Commons, in other words, decrees by which the landlords grant themselves the people’s land as private property, decrees of expropriation of the people. Sir F. M. Eden refutes his own crafty special pleading, in which he tries to represent communal property as the private property of the great landlords who have taken the place of the feudal lords, when he, himself, demands a “general “Act of Parliament for the enclosure of Commons,” (admitting thereby that a parliamentary coup d'état is necessary for its transformation into private property), and moreover calls on the legislature for the indemnification for the expropriated poor.[2]
Whilst the place of the independent yeoman was taken by tenants at will, small farmers on yearly leases, a servile rabble dependent on the pleasure of the landlords, the systematic robbery of the Communal lands helped especially, next to the theft of the State domains, to swell those large farms, that were called in the 18th century capital farms[3] or merchant farms,[4] and to “set free” the agricultural populations as proletarians for manufacturing industry.
- ↑ “The farmers forbid cottagers to keep any living creatures besides themselves and children, under the pretence that if they keep any beasts or poultry, they will steal from the farmers’ barns for their support; they also say, keep the cottagers poor and you will keep them industrious, &c., but the real fact, I believe, is that the farmers may have the whole right of common to themselves.” (A Political Inquiry into the consequences of enclosing Waste Lands. London, 1785 p. 75.)
- ↑ Eden, l. c. preface.
- ↑ “Capital Farms.” Two letters on the Flour Trade and the Dearness of Corn. By a person in business. London, 1767, pp. 19, 20.
- ↑ “Merchant Farms.” An inguiry into the present High Prices of Provisions.
