UNEARNED INCREMENT IN 1833.
[To THE El:wpm OF THE "SFECTATOR."] Sin,—I have just opened at random a volume of the Quarterly Review for 1833, and my eye falls on a, paper called The Church and the .1,and2ords "Next it may occur to him. . . that he should have taken time to sift that grand argument of the Chancellor of the Exchequer by which the seizure of Church property was justified, before he had given it his vociferous assent. . . . 'The State,' said Lord Althorp, was justified in appropriating to itself any increase in value that might accrue to the property, of the Church when that increase was created by an act of State.' Therefore the State .would be inatified in seizing the increase in value of a home when that increase was created by a licence to sell ale and spirits, which the State had granted it: the State would be justified in seizing any increase in value of a district of waste land, when that increase followed upon an act of enclosure which the State had passed; the State would have an incontestable claim (hear it, Mr. Attwood !) to any increased value accruing to property in the funds from a legislative 'action on the currency ; indeed, the State would be justified in making free with any man's private property, to any extent, seeing that its entire value to the individual was derived from his secure possession—a security which he owed altogethei to the State ! ! Truly might Mr. O'Connell return his thanks to ministers for stirring a principle on this occasion that reached further than appeared at first sight. It is worth more to a Chancellor of the Exchequer, under any fiscal embarrassment, than ever was Jew's eye of oh"
What seemed a monstrous conception in 1833 is beginning to come to pass in 1911. Our Chancellors still rob hen-roosts, instead of uniting all classes in a common act of necessary
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