--"Whereas it is
expedient to facilitate the enclosure and improvement of common and
other lands now subject to the rights of property which obstruct
cultivation and the productive employment of labour," Wallace
ascertained many years later that no single part of the land so enclosed
had been cultivated by those to whom it was given, though certain
portions had been let or sold at fabulous prices for building purposes,
to accommodate summer visitors to the neighbourhood. Thus the
unfortunate people who had formerly enjoyed home, health, and
comparative prosperity in the cottages scattered over this common land
had been obliged to migrate to the large towns, seeking for fresh
employment and means of subsistence, or had become "law-created
paupers"; whilst to crown all, the piece of common originally "reserved"
for the benefit of the inhabitants had been turned into golf-links!

Again and again Wallace drew attention to the fundamental duties of
landownership, maintaining that the public, as a whole, had become so
blinded by custom that no effectual social reform would ever be
established unless some strenuous and unremitting effort was made to
recover the land by law from those who had made the land laws and who
had niched the common heritage of humanity for their own private
aggrandisement.

With regard to the actual value of land, Wallace pointed out that the
last valuation was made in the year 1692, and therefore, with the
increase of value through minerals and other products since then, the
arrears of land tax due up to 1905 would amount to more than the value
of all the agricultural land of our country at the present time;
therefore existing landlords, in clamouring for their alleged rights of
property, might find out that those "rights" no longer exist.

Yet another point on which he insisted was the right of way through
fields or woodlands, and especially beside the sea. With the advent of
the motor-car and other swift means of locomotion, the public roads are
no longer safe and pleasurable for pedestrians; besides the iniquitous
fact that hundreds are kept from enjoying the beauties of nature by the
utterly selfish and useless reservations of such by-paths by the
landowner.

"This all-embracing system of land-robbery," again he writes, "for which
nothing is too great or too small; which has absorbed meadow and forest,
moor and mountain, which has appropriated most of our rivers and lakes
and the fish that li