Sale of Leasehold Suburban Land.

"A novel experiment in connection with land sales was tried on the 2nd inst. The Syndicate which has acquired a leasehold of the 80 acres called the Grace Park Estate offered it by auction in 309 allotments, the purchasers of the leases having the option of building or not, but if a building be erected on each lot, the structure to be of brick or stone, and of not less than £750 value.

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"Whatever buildings are erected must be put in repair shortly before the termination of the lease.

"Each lot has a ground rent of about £3 10s. per annum. Sixty-four allotments were sold at from 8s. to 65s. per foot. Freehold land in Hawthorn sells at from £4 to £10 per foot."—S. A. Register, Melbourne Telegram, July 7.

"He said he had adopted this title for his paper in order to distinguish between absolute property and those privileges which he would rather call limited property. What he meant to express was, that land was not an absolute property, but a limited property; a privilege conferred by the community for the benefit of the community, and subject, to a certain extent, to the convenience of the community. For instance, he might do what he pleased with his handkerchief, and the law recognized his absolute property in it. But as regarded land, his contention was that there was not absolute property of that kind; that the land was made, not by man, but by God; was originally the property of the nation, and that certain limited privileges were conceded to individuals for the benefit of the nation, which must be held subject to the will and convenience of the nation."—Speech of Sir George Campbell at meeting of British Association at Belfast, 1874.

The Rev. Dr. Fairbairn, the Chairman of the Congregational Union of England and Wales, in his address to the last annual meeting of that body, said :—"The Gospel is full of great economical principles, and these never so needed to be made explicit as at this hour. There is the land question—whether it be good to allow the aggregation of land into a few hands, to permit the rights of property to override the duties of humanity, and whether it be within a man's moral power to depopulate the district he owns or sacrifice the people who lived in it and by it to his own pecuniary and ambitious schemes. On a question like that, the religion that loves man and lives by his love has the foremost right to be heard. Then, too, it ought to have something to say on the question of capital and labour. To it the millions that toil are not hands, they are men, the neighbours and brothers of the rich, to be dealt with as their own flesh and blood. The question is not settled when labour gets a fair day's pay for a fair day's work, or, what is as necessary, gives a fair day's work for a fair day's pay. These must stand as cases typical of what is meant; religion ought to feel that social and industrial questions are peculiarly its own, not to be wisely or justly determined without its help. And to feel an obligation ought here to be to fulfil it; loss of opportunity is loss of actual and inherent power. Religion would be all the stronger for being more real—an operative and efficient factor in the spheres where men most strenuously live. Secularism should have had no excuse for its being—religion ought to be secular, and would be all the more spiritual and eternal for so being."

"One mass of money is the outcome of action which has created—another of action which has annihilated—ten times as much as the gathering of it; such-and-such strong hands have been paralysed, as if they had been numbed by nightshade: so many strong men's courage broken, so many productive operations hindered; this and the other false direction given to labour, and lying image of prosperity set up on Dura plains dug into seven times heated furnaces. That which seems to be wealth may in verity be only the gilded index of far-reaching ruin; a wrecker's handful of coin gleaned from the beach to which he has beguiled an argosy; a camp-follower's bundle page 30 of rags unwrapped from the breasts of goodly soldiers, dead; the purchase pieces of potters fields, wherein shall be buried together the citizen and the stranger."

"That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings? "

"Nay, in our own life of peace, the agony of unmatured, untaught, unhelped creatures, awakening at the grave's edge to know how they should have lived, and the worst pain of those whose existence—not the ceasing of it—is death; those to whom the cradle was a curse, and the words they cannot hear, 'ashes to ashes,' are all they ever received of benediction."—John Ruskin,.

"The people are the masters. They have only to express their wants at large and in gross. We are the expert artists; we are the skilful workmen, to shape their desires into perfect form, and to fit the utensil to use."—Edmund Burke,

"We think it enough that our title is derived by the grant of the former proprietor, by descent from our ancestors, or by the last will and testament of the dying owner; not caring to reflect that (accurately and strictly speaking) there is no foundation in Nature, or in Natural Law, why a set of words upon parchment should convey the dominion of land; why the son should have a right to exclude his fellow creatures from a determinate spot of ground, because his father had done so before him," &c.

"In the beginning of the world, we are informed by holy writ, the all-bountiful Creator gave to man 'dominion over all the earth; over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. 'This is the only true and solid foundation of man's dominion over external things, whatever airy metaphysical notions may have been started by fanciful writers upon this subject. The earth, therefore, and all things therein, are the general property of all mankind, exclusive of other beings, from the immediate gift of the Creator. And, while the earth continued bare of inhabitants, it is reasonable to suppose, that all was in common among them, and that every one took from the public stock to his own use such things as his immediate necessities required."—Blackstone.

"When Lord Brougham has the face to caution the Earl of Devon against doing, in the conduct of his Commission, aught that shall in any manner compromise the rights of property, we ask him what does property mean? Is it alone the rich man's right to his acres, to the use of them, and infinite abuse of them? Or does he not mean to include in his protest some regard for the right of the poor man, under God's charter, to live and breathe on this the Almighty's world? "

"The 'occupation of land' is a simple-sounding phrase. But what if we say, instead of it, a 'war for land'—land against life, and both against law!—for so, if we call things by their proper names, so it stands—a bloody war, which rages against rich and poor, and against the laws that are insufficient for the defence of either—a mutual war of the stomach against the purse, and vice versa—of desperate passion on behalf, and for the relief, of inevitable hunger—of the right to live, original and inalienable, against the right to possess, the creation of conventional society."—The Times, 6th February, 1844.

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"As to the improvement of land; those few who attempt that or planting, through covetousness or want of skill, generally leave things worse than they were, neither succeeding in trees nor hedges; and by running into the fancy of grazing, after the manner of the Scythians, are every day depopulating the country."

"But my heart is too heavy to continue this irony longer, for it is manifest that whatever stranger took such a journey, would be apt to think himself travelling in Lapland or Iceland, rather than in a country so favoured by nature as ours, both in fruitfulness of soil and temperature of climate. The miserable dress, and diet, and dwelling of the people; the general desolation in most parts of the kingdom; the old seats of the nobility and gentry all in ruins and no new ones in their stead; the families of farmers who pay great rents, living in filth and nastiness upon buttermilk and potatoes, without a shoe or stocking to their feet, or a house go convenient as an English hog-sty to receive them."

"The rise of our rents is squeezed out of the very blood, and vitals, and clothes, and dwellings of the tenants, who live worse than English beggars."—Dean Swift.

"The individualization of ownership extended and made more definite by trading transactions under contract, eventually affects the ownership of land. Bought and sold by measure and for money, land is assimilated in this respect to the personal property produced by labour : and thus becomes, in the general apprehension, confounded with it. But there is reason to suspect that while private possession of things produced by labour will grow even more definite and sacred than at present, the inhabited area, which cannot be produced by labour, will eventually be distinguished as something which may not be privately possessed. As the individual (primitively owner of himself) partially or wholly looses ownership of himself during the militant régime, but gradually resumes it as the industrial régime develops; so, possibly, the communal proprietorship of land, partially or wholly merged in the ownership of dominent men during evolution of the militant type will be resumed as the industrial type becomes fully evolved."—Herbert Spencer.

"All the old abuses in society, universal and particular, all unjust accumulations of property and power, are avenged in the same manner. Fear is an instructor of great sagacity, and the herald of all revolutions. One thing he teaches, that there is rottenness where he appears. He is a carrion crow, and though you see not well what he hovers for, there is death somewhere. Our property is timid, our laws are timid, our cultivated classes are timid. Fear for ages has boded and mowed and gibbered over government and property. That obscene bird is not there for nothing. He indicates great wrongs that must be revised."—Emerson.

"The unstable and perishable nature of stock and credit, however, renders them unfit to be trusted to as the principal funds of that sure, steady, permanent revenue which can alone give security and dignity to government. The government of no great nation that was advanced beyond the shepherd state seems ever to have derived the greater part of its public revenue from such sources."

"Land is a fund of a more stable and permanent nature; and the rent of public lands, accordingly, has been the principal source of the public revenue of many a great nation that was much beyond the shepherd state. From page 32 the produce or rent of the public lands, the ancient republics of Greece and Italy derived for a long time the greater part of that revenue which defrayed the necessary expenses of the commonwealth. The rent of the Crown lands constituted for a long time the greater part of the revenue of the ancient sovereigns of European States."—Adam Smith.

"What remains to be done concerns the collective body of the people. They are now to determine for themselves, whether they will firmly and constitutionally assert their rights; or make an humble, slavish surrender of them at the feet of the Ministry. To a generous mind there cannot be a doubt. We owe it to our ancestors to preserve entire those rights which they have delivered to our care : we owe it to our posterity not to suffer their dearest inheritance to be destroyed."

"A great operation, directed to an important object, though it should fail of success, marks the genius and elevates the character of a minister. A poor contracted understanding deals in little schemes, which dishonour him if they fail, and do him no credit when they succeed.",—Junius.

Ministers of religion of all denominations are respectfully but earnestly entreated to master this great question of the relation of the people to the land on which they live and from which their subsistence is drawn; and, if on examination they approve of the principles set forth in this manifesto, we ask them to use their powerful influence to aid in their dissemination.

Ladies are admitted as members and their cordial co-operation is solicited.

The Executive Committee will be glad to hear from any persons willing to undertake the distribution of the Society's manifesto and other publications in their towns or districts.

As no agitation for reform can be carried to a successful issue without funds, all who approve of the general principles of this Society are requested to become members of it, and endeavour to induce others to do so also.

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