Pictures of Canadian Life by James Ewing Ritchie

I was glad to see, the other day, Mr. Morley's letter advocating the propriety of taking up land and settling on it some of the too numerous class who drift into our great cities, finding no work to do in the country, there to lead indifferent lives and come to an untimely end.

It is a step I have repeatedly advocated. Land is cheap enough now; there is no occasion to wait for an Act of Parliament. It is as easy to buy an estate, and to split it up into small portions, of which each shareholder will become in time the proprietor, as to form a building society, and thus enable any man to become his own landlord. But there are certain drawbacks. There is the parson to be dealt with, who will be sure to claim his higher tithes; there are burdens on property, of which the working man, who is told by Mr. Chamberlain that he is more heavily taxed than any other class of the community (is not the reverse of this the case? ), has no idea; and last, and not least, there is the unfitness for peasant proprietorship of the average English workman, who has no idea of living on the scant fare of the peasant proprietor of Belgium or France, or, I fear, of working as hard. Granting, however, that he does, the great fact remains, that peasant proprietorship is no remedy for all the ills of life, and that France has its surplus population quite as badly off, and a great deal more difficult to deal with than our own.