Democratic Sentinel, Volume 7, Number 28, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 August 1883 — London Monopolies and Scandals. [ARTICLE]

London Monopolies and Scandals.

This city—if twenty municipalities working independently side by side can be called a city—comprises the most terrible monopolies in the world. Something like ten square miles are built solidly upon land which is the absolute property of three inen—the Duke i>f Bedford, the Duke of Portland and the Duke of Westminster—and this is the fashionable West End of the city. They own the whole of it. Nobody else owns a lot, except the crown property, the palace and abbey .of Westminster and the parks and royal palaces they inclose. These Dukes not only own tine land, but they own whole square miles of the buildings on the land, winch have fallen to them at the expiration of long leases; and these “improvements” are now dropping in at the rate of $50,000 a day. Nobody knows how much these men are worth —their inedme. is fabulous. There is no map of their possessions. And yet they are not happy. The heir to one of these vast estates is a gambler and debauehee, who has spent millions; and last year, it is said, his father paid off $250,000 of gambling debts for him. During the last year, too, another spendthrift, the Duke of Hamilton, sold Me library and pictures, and the sale attracted great attention, even in America. The sons of these titled magnates can run in debt, and they can, when in extremity, sell their great picture galleries, their libraries, their palaces, their horses, and even their jewels and their clothes; but they cannot sell or even mortgage the splendid estates which they will have by and by. One of the richest noblemen in the realm was defendant in a divorce suit three or four years ago, and his wife obtained the divorce from him on the twin grounds of brutality and infidelity. Thereupon she was permanently banished from court, and will never have another chance to present her respects to the Queen, while the husband’s status is uninjured. This is one of the incon-. gruities of British law. There are other incongruities. The season here is in the heat of summer, while society goes to the oountry and to the seacoast in winter! Parliament sits in hot weather, and begins its sessions at 7 p. m., and oontinnes all night. Both teams and pedestrians turn to the left instead of the right; the people look upon ice as a wicked American invention, and whenever I ring the bell for the chambermaid, up she comes with two jugs of hot water. — W. A. Croffut’s London letter.