Punch (86.1884)

170

PUNCH, OR THE LONDON CHARIVARI. [April 12, 1884.

“TEMPORA MUTANTUR.”

SnooJcson. “Yes; Hastings is a charming place, and has

QUITE A PECULIAR—A—AND HALE-MELANCHOLY INTEREST FOR ME.

We came oyer with the Conqueror, you know ! ”

Fair Bostonian Cate from Paris). “Ah, that must have been
very trying! We came over with the CaloUs-Douvres.’’

[S. tries not to look foolish.

THE SURVIVAL OE THE FITTEST;

OK, SOMETHING LIKE A LANDLORD.

Time-—Apud, 1984, a.d. Scene—The library of the Marquis of
Swallowland. Present the Marquis and his Man of Business.
The table is strewn with Title-deeds, Maps, Charts, 4’c.

Marquis {complacently). Well, Mouxter, I fancy that at last we
are within sight of land !

Mr. Moulter. The metaphor, my Lord Marquis, is marked by
more than your accustomed felicity.

Marquis. Ahem ! Quite so ! I had not so considered it, but with
our race fitness is an instinct. And you really think we shall bring
that stiff-necked Nail-man to his knees at last ?

Mr. Moulter. Haven’t a doubt of it, my Lord. He has long been
your only surviving rival. With the exception of his miserable twenty
thousand acres the whole land—and water, too, for that matter—of
the United Kingdom has long been your private freehold.

Marquis {hotly). Yes ! Just imagine!! A stubborn jumped-up
third descendant of a Brummagem tin-tack manufacturer contend
with Me for the monopoly of land-holding, and hinder by ten good
years the realisation of the Great Ideal!! !

Mr. Moulter. It is indeed an atrocity! When your Lordship’s
grandfather first conceived the noble ambition of concentrating in the
possession of the head of his family the freehold of his Native Land,
it, like other Ideals, was laughed to scorn by the brawling levellers
of the time. Amur respected progenitor argued thus : “ The Land is
now the Monopoly of the Lew. These blatant Socialistic agitators

aim at making it the common possession of the Many. I will render
it the Exclusive^ Privilege of the One ! ” The scientific theory of the
survival of the fittest bids fair to be vindicated in your person, my
Lord, by your Lordship’s becoming that One !

Marquis. Ah, yes. It has been a tough fight, though, and even
now——by the way, how has that Thames riparian question between
myself and the residents of Camfordham been decided ?

Mr. Moulter. In your favour, my Lord. The riparian leaseholders
are—at their own expense, of course—to carry their grounds right down
to the river, and the public traffic will have to make a detour of a mile
and a quarter—for the present. We hope next year to exclude the
public from the left bank of the river for the whole thirteen miles
between Camfordham and Maplemead.

Marquis. That’s right, Moulter ! The Public, as the levellers
vaguely call the tag-rag-and-bob-tail of the country, is getting too
bounceably exacting. YYant to walk on the banks of my river where
and when they like ; fish in its waters at their own sweet will; and
indulge in what they are pleased to call the “harmless recreation”
of boating and pic-nicing without restriction! Monstrous !

Mr. Moulter. It is, my Lord! The pettiest little suburban
villa-dweller, who’d howl himself apoplectic if he caught a strange
youngster angling in his four-by-six fish-pond, will talk largely
about the “hardship” of not being made free of your eyots and
backwaters when he takes his red-faced wife out for a Sunday
morning’s gudgeon-fishing.

Marquis. Precisely! lrou—ah—really put these things very well,
Moulter. You—ah !—should be in Parliament to—ah ! defend the
Rights of Property, which very shortly, as you say, will be my
rights.

Mr. Moulter (effusively). Oh! my Lord —the honour — the
privilege of — ah !—defending--

Marquis (-indignantly). When men appeal—as some still do
appeal—(in the admirable words of Sir Bobus Reel) in the most
mischievous, inflammatory, and ill-conditioned manner to the very
worst passions that can be engendered by ignorance, poverty, and a
sense of injustice, it is high time that—ah !—somebody else, should
be there to, to—ah !—appeal to—well, quite different passions.

Mr. Moulter {eagerly). Quite so, my Lord! The passions
engendered by the desire to possess the land and exercise its exclusive
privileges are doubtless the fiercest and basest, the most grasping
and unscrupulous that can inspire--

Marquis {disturbed). Ahem ! Moulter, Ahem !

Mr. Moulter {adroitly). That can inspire those whom pedigree and
a wise Providence have not marked out as the inheritors or—ahem !—■
accumulators of Landed Property.

Marquis {relieved). Well turned, Moulter, well turned ! I must
certainly sound Smugsby about your probable chances^ in Slugford.
But now, how about that trespass case in Pibrochshire ?

Mr. Moulter. My Lord, in future any person caught off the main
roads in any of your Lordship’s Game Counties will be liable to be
shot as a poacher ; whilst anyone found wandering in the hillswith-
out a pass, may be summarily pitched over the nearest precipice, or
tossed into the next loch.

Marquis. Ah ! that’s as it should be, Moulter ! Nothing less
will keep the moors and mountains free of the confounded herd of
tourists, and botanists, and painter-fellows, or make the Rights of
Property worth a twopenny rap, as Lord Handy Birchem would say.
By the way, what do you calculate is the net gain to me of the leases
that have just fallen in at YYestminster ?

Mr. Moulter. A million and a quarter, my Lord.

Marquis. All Unearned Increment, as the gabbling doctrinaires
call it.

Mr. Moulter. Every penny, my Lord.

Marquis. Hum ! hum ! Anything further to tell me this morning,
Mr. Moulter ?

Mr. Moulter. Well, m’Lord, I think we shall succeed in getting
the Bill through for constituting the Thames above Slangbourne a
strict preserve, for making Wastwater a private lake,^ for summarily
ejecting the twenty thousand tenants on the Crowsfoot Estate, for
erecting an hotel in the middle of Hyde Park, for enclosing Burnham
Beeches, and running a railway with twenty stations through the
Lake District. The Kail-man,'as your Lordship humorously calls
Mr. Hammerhead of Birmingham, opposed them all; but his oppo-
sition was too evidently interested. We were able. to show how his
Gray’s Common Estate gradually grew from permission granted to
his great-grandfather, to put a donkey out to grass, there. This
created a prejudice against him which his demonstration that your
Lordship’s Eenbury Flats Park originated in a stolen drying-ground
surreptitiously enclosed failed to remove.

Marquis. Naturally, naturally !

Mr. Moulter. And quite properly! How could Landed Estates
have been accumulated, without those time-honoured and law-con-
secrated-ahem! appropriations which rude and rascally Radicals

call theft ? Shall we say that the Israelites stole Canaan; that
William the Conqueror stole England, or that your Lordship and.
your Lordship’s ancestors have stolen the hundreds of thousands of