tribute which London pays is more than a hundred million dollars a
year. So absolute is the right of the land-owner that he can sue for
trespass the driver on an aeroplane which flies over him; he imposes
on fishermen a tax upon catches made many hundred of yards from the
shore.

And in this graft, of course, the church has its share. Each church
owns land--not merely that upon which it stands, but farms and city
lots from which it derives income. Each cathedral owns large tracts;
so do the schools and universities in which the clergy are educated.
The income from the holdings of a church constitutes what is called a
"living"; these livings, which vary in size, are the prerogatives of
the younger sons of the ruling families, and are intrigued and
scrambled for in exactly the fashion which Thackeray describes in the
eighteenth century.

About six thousand of these "livings" are in the gift of great land
owners; one noble lord alone disposes of fifty-six such plums; and
needless to say, he does not present them to clergymen who favor
radical land-taxes. He gives them to men like himself--autocratic to
the poor, easy-going to members of his own class, and cynical
concerning the grafts of grace.

In one English village which I visited the living was worth seven
hundred pounds, with the use of a fine mansion; as the incumbent had a
large family, he lived there. In another place the living was worth a
thousand pounds, and the incumbent hired a curate, himself appearing
twice a year, on Christmas day and on the King's birth-day, to preach
a sermon; the rest of the time he spent in Paris. It is worth noting
that in 1808 a law was proposed compelling absentee pluralists--that