CHAPTER VH.
THE GREAT-GREAT-GRANDSON OF CAPTAIN KEDD.
I APOLOGIZE to the Irish landlords and to all other landlords for likening them to thieves and robbers. I trust they will understand that I do not consider them as personally worse than other men, but that I am obliged to use such illustrations because no others will fit the case. I am concerned not with individuals, but with the system. What I want to do is, to point out a distinction that in the plea for the vested rights of landowners is ignored a distinction which arises from the essential difference between land and things that are the produce of human labor, and which is obscured by our habit of classing them all together as property.
The galleys that carried Caesar to Britain, the accoutre- ments of his legionaries, the baggage that they carried, the arms that they bore, the buildings that they erected ; the scythed chariots of the ancient Britons, the horses that drew them, their wicker boats and wattled houses where are they now ? But the land for which Roman and Briton fought, there it is still. That British soil is yet as fresh and as new as it was in the days of the Romans. Generation after generation has lived on it since, and generation after generation will live on it yet. Now, here is a very great difference. The right to possess and to pass on the ownership of things that in their nature decay and soon cease to be is a very different thing from the
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