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New Zealand Times, Volume XXXIV, Issue 5693, 28 June 1879, Page 3

More than half the soil of the United Kingdom (says MacmMgn’s Magazine) is nominally owned by some 2000 persons. According to a valuable analysis of the very ill-arranged and incomplete Parliamentary return of the landowners of the United Kingdom, published in the Financial Reform Almanac for 1878, 421 persons are the owners of 22,880,755 acres, or nearly 5,000,000 more than one-fourth of the total area of the United Kingdom. The mind is unable to grasp what such a monopoly costs the country, but certain features of it stand forth with a prominence sufficiently notable. In a moat absolute sense, the well-being of the entire population of some 32,000,000 souls is placed in the power of a few thousands. For these thousands the multitudes toil, and it may be on occasions starves. Hence it is that all through rural England we have continually before us that most saddening of all spectacles, two or three families living in great splendor, and hard by their gates the miserably poor and abject slaves of the soil, whose sole hope in life is too often the workhouse—that famous device against revolution, paid for by the middle class—and the pauper’s grave. Our landowners have not merely burdened the land with their game preserves ; they have tied it up, and actively conspired to prevent its due cultivation instead of rising to the true necessities of the case, they cling to their game, make penal enactments about it, and struggle to augment the intensity of the evil which is to the people, as if the very existence of the country depended upon hares and rabbits. In this absolute supremacy the landowners overrides all justice, take precedence of all ordinary creditors on his helpless tenants’ estates, and controls the system of cultivation, often in utter disregard of private rights or private judgment, and in addition secures to himself the absolute reversion of every improvement which the tenant may make on the land. 1

In Baikal (Siberia), soundings have been obtained which, for a lake, are truly astonishing. In the upper part the depth is 3027 metres (about the height of Mount Etna), but downwards the bottom constantly descends, -and near the opposite end, a distance of some 350 miles, the depth amounts to 3766 metres. That measurement far exceeds anything to be found in the Mediterranean Sea, which in its deepest part has only 2197 metres of water. How such an extraordinary depression as that of Baikal could have occurred in the midst of a continent is a problem which greatly puzzles geologists, but] the generally accepted idea is that it was the result of some volcanic eruption in past ages, and a subsequent subsidence of the crust of the earth to a vast extent. The lakes in the centre of these islands, wo believe, are equally remarkable in point of depth. The extreme depths of the Taupo and Waikari lakes in the North, and Lake Wakatipu in the South, have never been fathomed. They are known to be very far below the sea level.