You see, the land system of England remains—­the changes having been for the worse.  William the Conqueror wanted to keep the Saxon peasantry contented, so he left them their “commons”; but in the eighteenth century these were nearly all filched away.  We saw the same thing done within the last generation in Mexico, and from the same motive—­because developing capitalism needs cheap labor, whereas people who have access to the land will not slave in mills and mines.  In England, from the time of Queen Anne to that of William and Mary, the parliaments of the landlords passed some four thousand separate acts, whereby more than seven million acres of the common land were stolen from the people.  It has been calculated that these acres might have supported a million families; and ever since then England has had to feed a million paupers all the time.

As an old song puts the matter: 

  Why prosecute the man or woman
  Who steals a goose from off the common,
  And let the greater felon loose
  Who steals the common from the goose?

In our day the land aristocracy is rooted like the native oak in British soil:  some of them direct descendants of the Normans, others children of the court favorites and panders who grew rich in the days of the Tudors and the unspeakable Stuarts.  Seven men own practically all the land of the city and county of London, and collect tribute from seven millions of people.  The estates are entailed—­that is, handed down from father to oldest son automatically; you cannot buy any land, but if you want to build, the landlord gives you a lease, and when the lease is up, he takes possession of your buildings.  The tribute which London pays is more than a hundred million dollars a year.  So absolute is the right of the land-owner that he can sue for trespass the driver on an aeroplane which flies over him; he imposes on fishermen a tax upon catches made many hundred of yards from the shore.

And in this graft, of course, the church has its share.  Each church owns land—­not merely that upon which it stands, but farms and city lots from which it derives income.  Each cathedral owns large tracts; so do the schools and universities in which the clergy are educated.  The income from the holdings of a church constitutes what is called a “living”; these livings, which vary in size, are the prerogatives of the younger sons of the ruling families, and are intrigued and scrambled for in exactly the fashion which Thackeray describes in the eighteenth century.

About six thousand of these “livings” are in the gift of great land owners; one noble lord alone disposes of fifty-six such plums; and needless to say, he does not present them to clergymen who favor radical land-taxes.  He gives them to men like himself—­autocratic to the poor, easy-going to members of his own class, and cynical concerning the grafts of grace.