Commenting upon these startling figures, the New York (Daily) World, one of the best informed papers of the time says: 

The land grabber is not a fungus of nineteenth century growth.  He first came among English-speaking peoples over eight centuries ago.  Wherever his foot has found a standing-place pauperism and its sequence, crime, have followed.  In the British Isles he is known as an Acreocrat.  Since he has extended his operations from his native country to our own free soil the land-grabber should be examined under the microscope of history analytically, impartially, and truthfully.

The unnaturalized foreigner threatens us with other dangers than those which would be created by our indigenous American land-grabber.  The British acreocrat who owns real estate in this country believes in the cancer of English monarchy with its hideous annals of nearly a thousand years.  He accepts the tradition of an hereditary House of Lords, a body composed of the effete and played out descendants of the most tyrannical and profligate rascals which Europe ever produced, and he will remain an English blueblood in every thought and action, which cannot fail to bring about in free America and on his own acres here the same poverty-stricken class of peasants as now curse Great Britain and Ireland.

English “upper-tendom” is represented in recent purchases of American soil by one duke, one marquis, two earls, a baron, two baronets and two members of Parliament.  The British duke owns 425,000 acres; the marquis, 1,750,000 acres; the two earls, 160,000 acres; the baron, 60,000 acres; the brace of baronets, 2,000,500 acres; and the pair of Parliamentary politicians, 860,000 acres.  In the rest of the land purchased by our brand-new imported lords of the soil, England’s governing acreocrats, are largely represented in their 20,941,666 acres.

Much ignorance is affected in American society respecting the manner in which the British landocrats came by their property.  It is enough that “my lud” has a handle to his name, and Murray Hill shoddyocracy will wine and dine and toady him, and perhaps for his title marry him to some sweet, pure and good American girl, whose life hereafter will be a purgatory to herself and a mutual misery to both.

But the land held by the foreigner in the United States is a mere bagatelle.  He is odious not because he is a foreigner, but only because he is the representative, on the one hand, of the odious land system of the Old World, and on the other of those monarchical ideas which have made the great body of the European people unwilling slaves, reducing them to the very verge of desperation and starvation.  Archimedes explained, as illustrating the vast power of the fulcrum, that if he had a place to stand he could move the world.  The British land-shark, having got his hold upon the soil, possesses the place to stand for which the Greek sighed in vain, and no man will say he does not move the world; and he will continue to move it until such time as the world shall move him.