‘Trust the people’—I have long tried to make that my motto; but I know, and will not conceal, that there are still a few in our party who have that l… - Lord Randolph Churchill

[S]uppose the town authorities purchased sites of land and erected great buildings such as I hold are suitable for the class that would inhabit them, the land so purchased and the dwellings so built would belong to the people of the town in which the operations took place, because the corporation or the town council is merely the representative of the people and merely distributes the rates and administers the rates they raise for the people; and, owning the houses, would own them in the name of the people, who would be virtually the owner of an enormous proportion of the dwellings in which they lived. (Cheers.) Under these circumstances, gentlemen, you would have no rack-renting, there would be no motive for rack-renting, for the profits which would arise from very moderate rents would be amply sufficient to maintain those buildings in repair, and would leave a margin for new buildings to be erected.

Balfourism acts like a blister on Ireland and the Irish, and has the bad and good effects which such treatment generally produces. A too protracted application of the blister might do much harm.

That state of things discloses this as a rule; it discloses as a general practice high rents, mercilessly exacted, wretched accommodation, total neglect by the ground landlords of their duties to their tenants, and of the general duties of property. (Hear, hear.) I fancy—I say it in warning to the ground landlords in the large towns—that a heavy reckoning is at hand for them from the people if they do not take time by the forelock, and if they do not recognize that property has its duties as well as its rights. (Cheers.)