Indeed it is exceedingly difficult to determine whether it has been more
injurious to the country in a political than in a moral sense. Be that
as it may, it had a powerful effect in producing the evils that we now
suffer, and our strong tendencies to social disorganization. By it the
landlords were induced, for the sake of multiplying, votes, to encourage
the subdivision of small holdings into those that were actually only
nominal or fictitious, and the consequences were, that in multiplying
votes they were multiplying families that had no fixed means of
subsistence--multiplying in fact a pauper population--multiplying not
only perjury, fraud, falsehood, and dishonesty, but destitution, misery,
disease and death. By the forty-shilling franchise, the landlords
encumbered the soil with a loose and unsettled population that
possessed within itself, as poverty always does, a fearful facility of
reproduction--a population which pressed heavily upon the independent
class of farmers and yeomen, but which had no legal claim upon the
territory of the country. The moment, however, when the system which
produced and ended this wretched class, ceased to exist, they became not
only valueless in a political sense, but a dead weight upon the energies
of the country, and an almost insuperable impediment to its prosperity.
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