Since then, centralization has made great progress.  The landholders now amount, as we are informed, to only 30,000, and the gulf which separates the great proprietor from the cultivator has gradually widened, as the one has become more an absentee and the other more a day laborer.  The greater the tendency towards the absorption of land by the wealthy banker and merchant, or the wealthy cotton-spinner like Sir Robert Peel, the greater is the tendency towards its abandonment by the small proprietor, who has an interest in local self government, and the greater the tendency towards the centralization of power in London and in the great seats of manufacture.  In all those places, it is thought that the prosperity of England is dependent upon “a cheap and abundant supply of labor."[1] The “Times” assures its readers that it is “to the cheap labor of Ireland that England is indebted for all her great works;” and that note is repeated by a large portion of the literary men of England who now ask for protection in the American market against the effects of the system they so generally advocate.

   [Footnote 1:  North British Review, November, 1852.]

The more the people of Scotland can be driven from the land to take refuge in Glasgow and Paisley, the cheaper must be labor.  The more those of Ireland can be driven to England, the greater must be the competition in the latter for employment, and the lower must be the price of labor.  The more the land of England can be centralized, the greater must be the mass of people seeking employment in London, Liverpool, Manchester, and Birmingham, and the cheaper must labor be.

Low-priced laborers cannot exercise self-government.  All they earn is required for supplying themselves with indifferent food, clothing, and lodging, and they cannot control the expenditure of their wages to such extent as to enable them to educate their children, and hence it is that the condition of the people of England is as here described:—­

“About one half of our poor can neither read nor write.  The test of signing the name at marriage is a very imperfect absolute test of education, but it is a very good relative one:  taking that test, how stands Leeds itself in the Registrar-General’s returns?  In Leeds, which is the centre of the movement for letting education remain as it is, left entirely to chance and charity to supply its deficiencies, how do we find the fact?  This, that in 1846, the last year to which these returns are brought down, of 1,850 marriages celebrated in Leeds and Hunslet, 508 of the men and 1,020 of the women, or considerably more than one half of the latter, signed their names with marks.  ’I have also a personal knowledge of this fact—­that of 47 men employed upon a railway in this immediate neighborhood, only 14 can sign their names in the receipt of their wages; and this not because of any diffidence on their part, but positively because they cannot write.’