Land and Liberty.

Within the past two years the above heading probably has decorated every public bulletin-board in this country and Great Britain. Yet probably owes its prominence to the mere accidental alliteration, and has no rational significance to the average mind.

What has land to with liberty, or liberty with land? Certainly, if political liberty is meant, the Land Leaguers are strangely adrift, for in the very country to-day where savage despotism reigns and liberty is almost unknown, the people possess, occupy, and enjoy the soil with a liberality equaled by no other, while in that country said to have the most liberal, popular, and truly representative constitution on earth, the people are practically cut off from free and equitable enjoyment of the soil. Russia is as far ahead of Great Britain in the matter of popular enjoyment of the land as Great Britain is in advance of Russia in political liberty. Again, in Switzerland and the United States, both republics, we find in the former a most liberal and equitable distribution of land, while in the latter land monopoly is scarcely less formidable, and vastly more threatening for the future, than in Great Britain.

The sense in which are friends are prompted to associate land with liberty probably arises from the very natural feeling that, were the land more widely distributed, the rent-tax now levied upon the mass of farmers in Ireland would be lifted from their shoulders, and they would attain to greater liberty in the sense that any other animal acquires greater liberty through a lessening or removal of its load. A very elementary idea of liberty this, but logical as far as it goes.

But since the rent-tax is only one form of profit-theft, why land and liberty any more than every other article of commerce, and liberty? For it is by no means certain that land-monopoly is the chief source of profit-theft. It is the original (temporal) source, and a very good basis upon which to attack profit-theft; but it is, after all, only one source. Behind the wide range of profit-plunder lies the concrete embodiment of the whole iniquity - usury.

The problem, then, upon closer analysis, reduces itself to this affirmation: Destroy usury, and you attain liberty. The greatest of all powers for good now working on this planet for the emancipation of oppressed humanity, the "Irish World," has got so far with the problem. "Usury is Theft!" it cries out to 100,000 profit-ridden slaves every week, and it means by usury every species of something-for-nothing tribute, whether it be in the form of rent, interest, or ordinary profits in the realm of trade.

But the "Irish World," glorious as is its work and mission, has yet one more stage in the problem to conquer. Who is responsible for usury? Who sustains it? Who backs it with artillery? Usury, left to its merits as a voluntary social arrangement, could not stand for a day. As Patrick Ford well knows, the insignificant banditti known as landlords, who enslave Ireland, would run for their lives, or sink to their knees like cur whining for merey, were not a police force of 100,000 men kept at their backs against the protest of 5,000,000 people.

The State, then, is the author and defender of usury, as it to-day holds its murderous grasp at the throat of Ireland. And who is the State? The landlords, as the "Irish World" has reiterated a hundred times. Why, then, not abolish the State, and get down to the hard-pan of the whole problem?

Ah! But we touch delicate ground. The "Irish World" will never reach that third and last stage of the problem of liberty. It is with a feeling of deep regret that now indulge in a little plain talk, but duty will not permit us to talk otherwise, if we talk at all, and the silence would be a crime against liberty. The moment the "Irish World" attacks the State, it attacks the popes, the bishops, the priests, and the whole tribe of spiritual userers, who knew their art well before the first temporal landlord was born.

Spiritual Usurers! Yea, these are the worst abominations in the whole series. "The monopolizing of natural wealth," cries the "Irish World," "Is the bottom crime!" But we have natural wealth spiritual and natural wealth temporal. We have landlords spiritual and landlords temporal. Yea, and the landlords spiritual are the creators, abettors, supporters, and defenders of landlords temporal. The very Christian God to whom the "Irish World" appeals every week is the Father of usury, and his agents, the ecclesiastics, from the pope down to the pettiest priest who demands an admission-fee at the church-door for the supposed benefit of enjoying the sacraments, are spiritual landlords' bailiffs. These so-called sacraments - what are they but spiritual natural wealth monopolized by these mitred and surpliced thieves, and rented out for profit? If there is any power for good in this world that it pains us to criticize, it is Patrick Ford's great "Industrial Liberator." But a more pitiable plight never fell to the lot of a beneficent organ of light and truth. It has reached the second stage of solution in the problem of liberty, but can never get any further so long as it remains the "Irish World" with that phallic symbol, the cross, at the top.

The State is the immediate supporter and defender of usury. Behind the civil state is the spiritual state. Both have one common cause, the enslavement of the masses. Behind the whole is God, the author and finisher of usury and every other enslaving device that paves the way for man's inhumanity to man. Liberty aims to abolish them all, and all superstitious reverence for their unholy offices. Liberty alone has mastered the third stage of the problem of emancipation, and proposes to stand upon the logic of it without fear or favor. Come with us, good friends, and then you will not only know what "Land and Liberty" mean, but, in solving the whole problem of liberty, all these other good things will be added unto you.