of a 4 4 (California THE LAND FOR THE PEOPLE HOW TO OBTAIN IT AND HOW TO MANAGE IT. THE LAND FOR THE PEOPLE: 1bow to btatn 5t anb 1bow to /l&anage 3t Being an Attempt to Draw out the Lines on which the Land may be Regained without Disturbance, and so Managed as Practically to Realise the Grand Conception of the Ideal Equal Rights of Man to the Earth Also an Attempt to Foreshadow to some Extent the Results of Founding Our Civilisation on Justice, especially its Effect on the Power, Distribution, and use of Capital BY CHARLES WICKSTEED PRESIDENT OF THE KETTERING LIBERAL ASSOCIATION SECOND HiMgftffiU EDITION LONDON SWAN SONNENSCHEIN & CO. PATERNOSTER SQUARE 1894 PREFATORY NOTE TO THE SECOND EDITION. THIS essay was first published in 1885, when thoughtful men had been much stirred by Henry George's brilliant work, " Progress and Poverty," and his subsequent lecturing tour through England and Scotland. It was at this time that I first became thoroughly interested in land nationalisation and recognised that it was something more than an economical question. I was soon struck with the lack there was of any carefully thought-out principles to guide us in the practical carrying out of the theory of the equal right of all men to the land. This essay was an attempt to contribute something in this direction, and judging from the kind apprecia- tion of many friends of the movement and the course of public opinion since, I have reason to hope that it has not been entirely unsuccessful. The present edition has been revised throughout, but no essential altera- tion whatever has been found necessary. References to passing events have not been altered. CHARLES WICKSTEED, 169959 SOIMZIB BOOKS PERTAINING TO LAND NATIONALISATION. FLURSCHEIM, MICHAEL. Rent, Interest, and Wages. (W. Reeves.) GEORGE, HENRY. Progress and Poverty. Social Pro- blems. (Regan, Paul & Co.) GEORGE, HENRY. The Condition of Labour. (" Social Science Series " : Swan, Sonnenschein & Co.) GlBBlNS, H. DE B. Industrial History of England. (Methven & Co.) KIDD, B. Social Evolution. (Macmillan & Co.) STUBBS, Rev. C. VV. The Land and the Labourers. (" Social Science Series " : Swan, Sonnenschein & Co.) WALLACE, ALFRED RUSSEL. Land Nationalisation. ("Social Science Series": Swan, Sonnenschein & Co.) WICKSTEED, CHAS. Our Mother the Earth. (Swan, Sonnenschein & Co.) WICKSTEED, CHAS. Cottage Farms and Village Politics, (Land Nationalisation Society.) CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION. Page Want of a work entering into a practicable method of obtaining the land for the people and of managing it when obtained In- sufficiency of H. George's works in this respect Scheme for obtaining the land by gradually increasing the Land Tax con- demned Confiscation condemned . . . ,1 CHAPTER II. How to obtain the Land This must be a compromise Can't get out of a false position without loss Compensation scheme quickest and most equitable Impossible to set things right all at once, no forced means will do it Danger of any other method Scheme for compensation Tables showing how many years it would take to buy out the landowners simply by devot- ing all increase of rent to that purpose . . . . G CHAPTER III. Principles on which the land should be valued Basis present yearly values Speculative value not allowed Rating land at its value instead of its use Order in which first valuation should proceed Difficulty of separating tenant-right from ground rent exists in any scheme Valuation should be carefully and scientifically made . . . . . .15 CHAPTER IV. The fundamental principle on which the State should manage the land Here there is no compromise Here we have merely to follow loyally ideal justice If once this path be deviated from justice becomes impossible and compromise begins Necessity of beginning right and making foundations firm Universal reign of material laws acknowledged The supremacy of the moral law Certainty of punishment if not obeyed No com- promise in the moral law We must go back to first principles We must not tamper with the land question Public spirit necessary for the health of a nation Just laws will foster it, Page unjust destroy it Privileged classes the result of unjust laws and the enemies of public spirit Man's right to all that he makes as an individual, to equal rights to the earth, right of the community to all that is made by the community collec- tively, are the leading principles rigidly to be adhered to . 20 CHAPTER V. State management of the land General scheme How the land should be let Main features and rules All-importance of a reliable and market ground rent and not a fixed one enlarged upon How labourers will obtain their allotments The Govern- ment would in no way interfere with private management of land Would not dismiss a tenant unless rent was not paid- Would not take one unless land was thrown on its hands Competition rents would not mean rack - renting Large incomes, although spent amongst workers, are not spent for their benefit Peasant proprietorship no remedy Irish Land Act only a makeshift Who the first tenants of the State should be The rich could not outbid the poor All-importance of com- petition rents Harmony of economic laws truly worked out with the moral law How the penniless will derive benefit How the poor will -obtain access to the land The element of time necessary to develop advantages Rent a necessary means of justice ..... .26 CHAPTER VI. Valuation Difficulty of separating tenant-right from ground rent Way to do it in town and in country Details of country valuation Simplicity of State management Advantages illustrated ... . .44 CHAPTER VII. A sketch of some of the direct effects in town or country Also on colonisation, war, and social distinctions Effect on towns illustrated Action in villages explained, and probability of manufacturers being worked in conjunction with agriculture Effect on stopping the exodus of unskilled labour from country into towns Benefit to farmers Benefit to the country at large Game Laws Parks and country beauties Beneficial effect on our colonies and improved relations with the inferior races Appearance of war Tendency to abolish social lines . .~>0 CHAPTER VIII. The effect of the unequal distribution of wealth on depression in -The necessary deni'Mits for trade always witli us Ovi-r-.supply tii- illation in land one cause - Inequalit ity of Wealth th principal cause, aided by changes ill fashion Demoralising influences of fluctuations in trade Sufficiency of capital certnin without rich men . . .60 CHAPTER IX. Page Capital : The source of its power, its true position, its uses, its fate Different classes of investment Table Openings that are indefensible and defensible Businesses in their nature monopolies ought to be managed and owned by the State Dishonesty not encouraged by this Interest justifiable as long as it can be obtained by fair means Nature of wealth Com- petition of capital Destruction of capital Possibility of saving wealth Functions of wealth Capital only a means to an end Oppressive only by being able to buy rights of oppression Investment in land practically makes interest certain Abolish such investments, and interest would fall or disappear Pro- vision for old age Co-operation probable Competition of labour healthy, with equal rights to land Large fortunes could be made, but no income in perpetuity Professional classes . . . . . . . .65 CHAPTER X. Population What grounds are there for thinking there are too many people ? A country gathering part of its food supplies from another is no proof Home industry is not necessarily dis- couraged Malthusian theory not applicable to England Moral restraint no good for public reasons, only for private Forty years ago we found it as difficult to find employment as we do now Even small patches of moor, thickly-populated land does not necessarily show over-population but only maladjust- ment Landowners' views of over-population . . .86 CHAPTER XL CONCLUSION. Rapid growth of the movement Reason why the institution of private ownership in land can be overthrown Difficulties and dangers Revolution of some sort inevitable Political action of the wealthy Political action of the poor Instinctive love of justice The duty of leaders No time to be lost Summary of argument Concluding observations . . . .97 THE LAND FOR THE PEOPLE HOW TO OBTAIN IT AND HOW TO MANAGE IT. CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION. Is Nationalisation of the Land the wildest of all wild schemes, or is it practicable in every way a good without an evil, and a glorious illustration of the harmony of God's laws 1 This is the question I am going to try and do something to- wards answering in the following pages. I am not writing in order to prove the moral right of the people to the land they live in, nor yet to show the various evils arising from the present system, as this has been well done by others, but am simply going to explain how I think the nationalisation of the land can be practically carried out with benefit to all and real hardship for none, to try and convince those who only stand aloof from the movement because they think the theory im- possible of application, that it is not only possible, but easy, and that the only practical difficulty will be in educating the nation to do it ; in getting the rich to realise in time that all their wealth rests upon a society which is crumbling beneath their feet ; in overcoming, on the one hand, the timidity, pre- judices, and greed of the middle and upper classes, and in stemming, on the other hand, the violence and ignorance of those millions of poor sufferers who feel they have nothing to lose. The English are supposed to be a very practical nation, and they will not believe in abstract principles, however true and noble they may be, unless they can see their way to putting them into practice. But this is not all. In the absence of some sound method being laid before them for the carrying out of abstract justice, they naturally invent ways of their own instead ; assume that there is no better way ; demonstrate most forcibly how badly their plans would work, and end up by condemning both principle and practice as alike absurd. This is what is continually taking place in discussing the land question. I feel, however, that although such treatment is unfair to the subject, we land nationalisationists can, perhaps, hardly complain, as I do not know of a single work that attempts to show in detail or principle a clear, intelligible, and workable plan of carrying the measure througfi and making it a success. I can well imagine that the land might be nationalised in such a bad form, and in such ignorance of the true bearings of the question, that it would be very questionable if it would do any good at all. Indeed, all the proposals I have seen are open to grave objec- tions. Even Henry George in his magnificent work, " Progress and Poverty," is unjust and untrue to his own principles when he comes to put them in practice. Read and see how he shows, in passages of surpassing eloquence and power, that it is not so much what the landowner actually takes, as what he prevents from being produced, that does the mischief ; how that, as everything comes off the land in the first instance, it necessarily follows that if the land is let at such a price or on such terms that people either cannot do justice to it, or are prevented from making any use of it at all, the very founda- tions of trade and society must be undermined ; and how that, since the landowner possesses that which is absolutely essential for the production of wealth and sustenance of life, he possesses to a greater or less extent, according to circumstances, the lives and property of the people who live on the land ; and then see how, having so powerfully, eloquently, and laboriously demon- strated all this, Mr. George deliberately proposes that we should regain the land by gradually increasing the land tax till it absorbs the whole rent, leaving the management of the estates in private hands, as now. It is best, he says, to carry out new things in old forms. Let the landowners call the land their own if they like, let them and their agents continue to manage it, but tax them to the amount of their rent. Now, what all this means is simply that at the risk of civil war, and at the cost of great individual injustice and hardship, he would, after years of social strife of the keenest description imaginable, succeed in confiscating rent, and enriching the people by that amount, provided other things remained the same. He would, nevertheless, as far as this scheme is concerned, leave all other difficulties inseparable from private ownership in land not only undealt with, but increased ; for there is nothing more certain than that the landlord, finding himself at open war with the people, would redouble his efforts to get all he could out of the land while he had a chance, without the slightest regard to the interests and desires of the people, who he would feel were robbing him. There is yet another point to be considered. Mr. George and others propose commencing operations by reimposing the land tax of 4s. in the pound, and then gradually increasing it. Now, the question is, whether by taxing land 4s. in the pound, it would in the long ran, or in the short in many instances, make any difference to the amount the landowners could draw from the people. Mr. George's contention, unless I have entirely misunderstood him in all the argumentative part of his " Pro- gress and Poverty," is that it would not. He says that the owners of the land have the power in the long run of absorbing advantages which are common to the whole of the people, such as release from taxation, cheap bread, or improvements in machinery. He says that there is a constant tendency to grind down the unskilled labourer to the lowest pittance he can live on, and that the reward of higher classes of labour is founded on this. He contends that extravagance in national and municipal expenditure, does not come out of the pockets of the workman, but of the landowners, whose tenants, having to pay more taxes and rates, are able to pay less rent. He contends that the amount rent leaves for capital and labour depends not upon the amount men can make on the land, but upon their inde- pendence ; upon the proximity or remoteness of free land ; or, in other words, upon external circumstances ; that according to these external circumstances are the people who live on the land more or less slaves to the people who own it. I agree with him, in substance, all through. He has converted me entirely so much so, that I am entirely unable to see how all this logic is to be put on one side when you relieve taxation by taxing rent. The relief effected would enable the people to live so much cheaper, and if that did not enable the landowners to take so much more in the shape of rent, George's whole theory falls. If Imperial taxation were relieved by the imposition of the new land tax, it would take time for the benefit to filter through society to the landowners, just as it would with any other advantage that was distributed through society; but if local rates were relieved, it would be simply taking money out of one pocket and putting it into the other. When landowners were not fettered by leases they would take the advantage at once ; they would be able to raise their rents to the amount of the rates relieved. There are many parishes where the tithes are as much as 10s. per acre. Now, no one imagines for one moment that if the tithes were removed the tenant would get his land for 10s. per acre less ; we know that the landowner could at once charge 10s. an acre more for the land, and would do so. Then in this case, if the landowner were taxed 10s. an acre in order to pay the tithe, the only difference to landowner and tenant would be that the landowner would pay the tax to Government under the name of land-tax, and the tenant would pay it to the landlord under the name of rent. It would make no other difference to either of them. Exactly the same thing would occur if rates were relieved by a tax on laud, the tenants would pay more rent, fewer rates ; the landlord would receive more rent to pay his extra taxes. Of course, the incidence of rent would be changed by impos- ing an extra tax on laud. If, for instance, Imperial taxation were relieved, the town landowners would ultimately be benefited at the expense of the agricultural, as anyone can see who will take the trouble to think the matter out ; but landowners, as a whole, would take the same. As I have said before, Mr. George maintains, and I believe rightly, that the amount capital and labour can insist upon keeping depends upon various external conditions. Now, 1 want to know what single external condi- tion there is that would be altered by relieving taxation by a land tax, and why, if a landowner can take up the advantage of cheapened living by improvements in machinery and cheap- ness of bread, he cannot also take up the advantage of lightened taxation. The fact of the matter is, there can be no way of preventing the landowner from taking advantage of improve- ments, and the only way of giving these advantages to the people is by making the people the landholders them- selves. It is a most important and interesting subject, that requires an exhaustive treatment, quite out of the scope of this essay. The only valid argument that I have heard advanced is, that we should increase the {axation faster than the landowner could take it up. This, of course, might be possible; but how can any one desire to throw the country into such a scramble ? Then, again, Mr. George never even alludes to mortgages on land, money lent by banks, benevolent institutions, life assur- ance companies, widows' and orphans' funds, building societies and private individuals ; nor yet does he appear to realise the fact that our present securities are founded on land, and that the withdrawal of that security in any unjust way (or rather, any way that would be considered unjust, as Mr. George does not himself think it is) would cause a disturbance in the money market, and a loss of confidence in the honour of the nation, which, if it did nothing else, would cause widespread suffering among the working classes and many unoffending and hard- working people who had invested their all in annuities and investments that happen to be drawn off the land. He speaks as if he had no one but the landowners to deal with, and assumes, most untruly, that they would in most instances have plenty left to them in the property built on the land. Now, considering how few estates are free from encumbrances of one sort or another, it may be fairly assumed that if the ground rent were taken away, the landlord, in only too many cases, would have little or nothing left him. In justifying this plan, Mr. George dwells upon the increased prosperity of the nation, in which the landlord would partici- pate. I confess I fail to see myself any great prospect of in- creased national prosperity as long as the land is in the hands of a set of men who feel their interests opposed to the rest of the community. There might certainly be the difference of the rent that was paid into the National Exchequer instead of into the hands of the landlords ; but that the landlords would thus gain anything like the amount they lost, Mr. George would be the last man to maintain. As to how the nation is to manage the land when they have got it under their own con- trol (a happy time which Mr. George evidently contemplates, although I don't notice that he makes any allusion to it in his plan of confiscating rents) he says scarcely anything. This confiscation scheme is, unfortunately, all that the average man understands about Henry George. This one mis- take, as I think, in one of the noblest works that was ever written is all that most men know about it, and about all that the popular critics dwell upon. All his splendid reasoning and grasp of the question in most of its bearings, all his vivid and forcible description of the helpless state that civilisation is bringing men to, and the abyss into which they are running, go for nothing. Few of those who read him can even under- stand him; that is clearly shown by their criticisms. They miss the whole genius of the work, and think that by picking at the accuracy of some minor statement they are undermining the magnificent structure which George has built up, whereas in reality they are not even touching it. He has, perhaps, said but little that is absolutely new, but what he has done is to bring lights and truths partially or wholly understood by others into one grand focus, which is nothing short of a revela- tion to those who understand it. It is to attempt to work out to some extent that practical portion of land nationalisation 6 which George has left undone that I am writing to-day. This little work is an endeavour to discover the lines we must follow in materialising George's theories. CHAPTER II. HOW TO OBTAIN THE LAND. THE best practical scheme for transferring the land from private into public hands must necessarily depend upon the temper and sense of justice of the people at the time it is done. Let it, therefore, be distinctly understood that the scheme set forth in the following pages is merely a suggestion, an attempt to show a way, and a good way, of accomplishing our object. I think a compensation scheme is the quickest way, because I believe the landowners and propertied classes would yield to this without a violent struggle as soon as the voice of the people was clearly and distinctly felt and expressed, and that the people and landowners would be prepared for this very many years before they would be prepared for any other plan. Witness their willingness now to be bought out in Ireland to make way for peasant proprietors. I think the people would suffer less loss by paying for the land than by taking it, for several reasons. In the first place, they would get the land into their management, to be laid out for their advantage, much sooner; and this, in my opinion, and in Mr. George's, if I understand him right, is of more importance than the rent even. In the second place, we should stop the unearned in- crement from continuing to increase the difficulty of the question. In the third place, I believe the social strife, want of confidence, and destruction of credit that would be going on during an agitation for confiscation, would cause great pecuniary loss and distress. To try to get the land without paying for it must inevitably mean a struggle between the propertied and unpropertied classes, between the higher and lower classes, between the educated and uneducated, and it is im- possible to exaggerate the dangers that such a conflict would entail. It would be very likely to degenerate into a violent, unscrupulous attack upon property, which would end, as all such movements do, in anarchy, succeeded by despotism, In the fourth and last place, is anything more evident than that it will be a work of time for the people to reap the advantage of the nationalisation of the land 1 A ship that has been driv- ing in a wrong course for days cannot regain her position all at once. All the steersman can do is to put her helm in the right direction time must do the rest. In the same way, a country that has been breeding all sorts of unhealthy institu- tions and men and women for generations cannot set everything right as soon as she finds out why things have all gone wrong. It is a matter of time, and of long time, to set our house in order. New towns, a new country, new men and women must grow up in place of the old ones, that must give way or die. It is a matter of education in the largest meaning of the word, not of money. The masses of men are quite incapable of using to their advantage a sudden rise in their material position ; it is better for them, in the long run, if it comes gradually. It is no use people saying that they will not compromise matters, that they will not acknowledge the rights of land- owners by paying them a farthing. It is the same thing as saying that we will have no consideration whatever for a large number of our fellow-creatures individually guilty of no wrong. But, as a matter of fact, the advocates of no compromise are guilty of it themselves if they are willing to take 4s. in the pound as an instalment. I don't think the spirit of no compromise will conduce to any future good, nor yet can I see how it is right or possible. It is one thing to compromise with sin and another thing to for- give our neighbour his trespasses against us, especially when we ourselves have been to a great extent responsible for those trespasses as I am sure is the case with the nation versus the landlords. What fair play is there in the nation suddenly turning round on the landowners and saying, We find we have made a great mistake; have been supporting a bad institution; have been selling land that was not ours to sell. We did think that private ownership was just and beneficial, we now think it is the reverse; we have, therefore, made up our minds that you, who are not personally responsible, shall, neverthe- less, bear the whole cost of setting us right. The following is one of many plans that might be suggested, by which the landowners might be compensated, and the land restored to the people without any additional taxation. First. Value the ground rental of the country. (By ground rental I mean the rent of the land, without buildings or re- movable improvements.) 8 Second. Compensate the landowners by giving them Government bonds to the amount of 30 times the ground rent, bearing a fixed interest of 3J per cent, per annum, which would be the amount of the ground rent. Thus, a man whose ground rent was valued at 1,000 a year, after the cost of management had been deducted, would have Government bonds given him worth ?, 0,0 00, redeemable at par, bearing interest of 1,000 a year. The bonds, I need hardly say, would not be redeemable at the owner's pleasure, but at the pleasure of the Government. No money would pass, but the owner of the bonds could, of course, sell them to private indivi- duals, just as he might have been able to sell his land before. Third. As the land was valued and the bonds were given to the landowners, the land so valued would fall under the control of Land Boards to be created, or of some local body already in existence. These bodies would collect the rents and pay the interest on the bonds through the Imperial exchequer, as will be explained in Chapter Y. Fourth. Assuming that rent would increase, devote any excess over the original amount of interest to the redemption of the bonds. Fifth. As the bonds are paid off use the interest thus set free, not in redeeming the bonds, but in relieving taxation. This is, shortly, the way I propose to obtain the land. There is so general an idea that the ]and cannot be bought without the passage of money, that I may be excused for repeating that no money passes in the purchase ; the landowner simply looks to the Government for his ground rent, instead of to his tenant, and the Government ultimately pays off, not by borrow- ing, but by money in hand, accruing by its being able to appropriate the unearned increment or rise in ground values. Further, let me remark that if money was wanted to pay for the whole, money would be found with ease, as long as it was not all wanted at one time, as every million paid to the land- owners would mean a million more money pushed on the. market for investment, and would naturally find its way to the Government bonds. Thus the very men who would by my plan have the bonds given them at once, would for the most part by the purchase system buy them of their own free-will afterwards. It will be seen that the proposed scheme for redemption rests upon the assumption of a continued increase in ground rent. If we cannot reckon on this, of course there would be no \\ay of paying off the bonds, except by increased taxation, for a few years, at any rate. The question then is, whether or not it is reasonable to assume a continued increase. We have these facts before us, that the ground values have been rising for the last 300 years (I won't go farther back), and that they have been rising rapidly in the last 50 years, in many parts of towns ten and twenty fold. We also find that as the popula- tion grows, situations not many years before valueless become of value, and are covered for instance with docks at a sea-port, or lodging-houses at a watering-place. We find that although there are situations in large towns of no more value, or possibly even less, than they were 20 years ago, yet the ground rent taken for the district is distinctly increased. Agricultural rents have been increased, on the whole, con- siderably (during the century about doubled), but latterly they have decreased. It must be borne in mind, however, that we are a manufacturing people, not an agricultural, and that the land question, therefore, is more of a town than a country question. The ground rent of London alone, according to Mr. Sidney Webb, is 15,000,000, and is increasing at the rate of over <300,000 a year, or 2 per cent. And when one travels and sees the rapid growth of industrial and pleasure centres all over the country, it seems as if during the last few years, even in spite of the agricultural depression, the ground rents, as a whole, may not improbably have continued to rise. The only conclusion that can, I think, possibly be come to, is that ground rents will continue to rise in the aggregate unless we discontinue to increase in population and prosperity. Of course there are plenty of people who will say that the very revolution I am advocating will bring England's prosperity to an end. There are plenty of people who have always pro- phesied England's downfall before every change of importance that has been brought about, but England with strange per- verseness has only seemed to thrive by these changes. Of course, that is no reason why she should do so in future, but we must remember that the people will not nationalise the land if they think it will do the country harm ; so that, how- ever true it may be that England's decline will begin as soon as the land is nationalised, the people who are going to carry out the revolution will not believe it. It is an argument against the nationalisation of the land rather than against any scheme for doing it. I think that it is reasonable to assume a continued in- crease in ground rents. The next thing to be considered is how much. There are, most unfortunately, no statistics of the rise in value of ground rents alone. . Sinclair has estimated 10 that during the 250 years between 1542 and 1792 land rose in value nearly 1^ per cent, per annum (compound in- terest). As an illustration, land worth 273,000 in 1542, was worth 6,000,000 in 1792, or about 22 times the value. To give another illustration of the increased value of land, I refer to "The Financial Reform Almanack," of 1884, page 170 and 171, where it is shown that whereas 4s. in the pound only brought in 1,922,900 in 1692, it would at the same rate bring in 34,861,617 in 1880, or over 18 times the amount in under 200 years, calculated from the amount assessed to Schedule A. On page 173 we see that from 1843 to 1881 the assessment of land tenements and tithes not commuted in the United Kingdom, Schedule A, rose from 95,284,497 to 187,598,346, about doubling in less than 40 years ; and what makes the figures stronger is, that profits were also assessed at first, but not after 1866, which alteration brought the assessment down from 135,144,462 to 110,696,900 in the following year, or more than one-sixth less. Taking a sixth off the original assessment in 1843, it would make it about 79 millions against 187 millions in 1881, showing that the value of real pro- perty has increased considerably over double (2*37) in 38 years. In the same number of years, 38, the increase in assessed gains arising from trade, professions, etc., has risen in the United Kingdom from 71,330,344 to 255,355,909, or about 3| times. I need not trouble my readers with any more figures. I think I have given enough to show that it is reasonable to cal- culate on an annual increase of ground rents of 1 per cent. Below are the figures showing how we should regain the land by the appropriation of this unearned increment, and applying it according to the plan just set forth ; they explain themselves. In 70 j^ears the whole of the bonds are paid off, not only with- out putting an extra burden upon the people, but actually relieving them of taxation, in increasing amounts, beginning with 33,000 in the third year, and ending with 99,000,000 on the seventieth, the aggregate relief of taxation having been over 2,177,000,000. The approximate results a.re as under : 11 Valuation of the 1 Land of the United Total Rental, Kingdom. Estimated at Thirty Interest on increasing at the Rate of Reduction of 1 Times the Ground , Bonds which s to R b e e nt p P aid PO to ed the *%&^ d One per Cent, per Annum, all Surplus over Taxation by the Appropriation of the o 6 525 Landowners 'Rise in Rent Go?ee r Sonl ^applied to the Original Amount (100 Millions) being Interest annually set free by Redemption of redeemable at par, Redemption. applied to Bonds. Interest at the rate 1 Redemption of of 3/^ per Cent. on ,.per Annum. I 3,OOO,OOO,OOO 100,000,000 IOO,OOO,OOO 2 ' 3,OOO,OOO,OOO 100,000,000 IOI,OOO,OOO 3 2,999,OOO,OOO 99,977,777 I02,OIO,OOO 33,333 4 2,997,090,000 99,903,000 103,030,000 97,000 5 2,994,060,000 99,802,000 104,060,300 198,000 6 2,989,999,700 99,666,659 105,100,903 333,341 7 2,984,898,797 99,496,622 106,152,012 503,374 8 2,978,746,785 99,291,559 107,213,532 708,441 9 2,971,533,253 99,051,108 108,285,667 948,892 10 98,774,919 109,368,523 1,225,081 ii 2,953,879,063 98,462,635 110,462,208 1,537,365 12 2,943,417,855 98,113,928 111,566,830 1,886,072 13 2,931,851,025 97,728,367 112,682,498 2,271,633 14 2,919,168,527 97,305,^17 113,809,322 2,694,383 15 2,905,359,205 96,845,306 i 114,947,415 3,154,694 16 2,890,411,790 96,347,059 1 16,094,889 3,652,941 17 2,874,314,90! 95,810,496 117,257,857 4,189,504 18 2,857,057,044 95,235,234 118,430,435 4,764,766 19 2,838,627,609 94,620,920 119,614,739 5,379,o8o 20 2,819,012,870 93,967,092 120,810.886 6,032,908 21 2,798,201,981. 93,273,399 122,018,994 6,726,611 22 2,776,182,990 92,539,433 123,239,183 7,460,567 23 2,752,943,807 91,764,793 124,471,574 8,235,207 24 2,728,472,233 90,949,074 125,716,289 9,050,926 25 2,702,755,934 90,091,864 126,973,451 9,908,136 26 2,675,782,483 89,192,749 128,243,185 10,807,251 27 2,647,539,298 88,251,310 129,525,616 11,748,790 28 2,618,013,682 87,267,123 130,820,874 12,732,877 29 2,587,192,808 86,239,760 132,129,080 13,760,240 30 2,555,063,728 85,167,910 133,450,370 14,832,090 31 2,52O,OOO,OOO 84,000,000 134,000,000 16,000,000 32 2,485,000,000 i 83,000,000 136,000,000 17,000,000 33 2,449,000,000 ! 82,OOO,OOO I37,OOO,OOO 18,000,000 34 2,4I2,OOO,OOO 8l,OOO,OOO 138,000,000 ' 19,000,000 35 2,373,000,000 80,000,000 ! 140,000,000 20,000,000 36 2,332,000,000 78,000,000 I4I,OOO,OOO 22,000,000 37 2,291,000,000 77,000,000 I43,OOO,OOO 23,000,000 38 2,248,000,000 75,000,000 I44,OOO,OOO 25,000,000 39 2,203,000,000 74,000,000 I45,OOO,OOO 26,000,000 4 2,157,000,000 72,000,000 147,000,000 28,000,000 No. Yr. Valuation, etc. Interest, etc. Total Rental, etc. Reduction, etc. 41 2,IIO,OOO,OOO 71,000,000 148,000,000 29,000,000 42 2,o6l,ooo,OOO 69,000,000 150,000,000 31,000,000 43 2,olI,OOO,OOO 68.000,000 151,000,000 32,000,000 44 1,959,000,000 66,000,000 153,000,000 34,000,000 45 1,905,000,000 64,000,000 154,000,000 36,000,000 46 1,850,000,000 62,000,000 156,000,000 38,000,000 47 1,794,000,000 60,000,000 158,000,000 40,000,000 48 1,736,000,000 58,000,000 159,000,000 42,000,000 49 1,676,000,000 56,000,000 lbl,ooo,OOO 44,000,000 50 1,615,000,000 54,OOO,OOO 162,000,000 46,000,000 51 1,552,000,000 52,000,000 164,000,000 48,000,000 52 ,488,000,000 50,000,000 166,000,000 50,000,000 53 ,421,000,000 48,000,000 167,000,000 52,000,000 54 ,354,000,000 46,000,000 169,000,000 54,000,000 55 ,284,000,000 43,000,000 171,000,000 57,000,000 56 ,213,000,000 41,000,000 172,000,000 59,000,000 57 ,140,000,000 39,000,000 174,000,000 6l,ooo,OOO 58- ,066,000,000 36,000,000 176,000,000 64,000.000 59 989,000,000 33,000,000 178,000,000 67,000,000 60 911,000,000 31,000,000 179,000,000 69,000,000 61 831,000,000 28,000,000 l8l,OOO,OOO 72,000,000 62 750,000,000 26,000,000 183,000,000 74,000,000 63 660,000,000 23,000,000 185,000,000 77,OOO,ooo 64 581,000,000 2O,ooo,ooo 187,000,000 80,000,000 65 494,000,000 17,000,000 189,000,000 83,000,000 66 405,000,000 14,000,000 190,000,000 86,000,000 67 314,000,000 II,ooo,ooo 192,000,000 89,000,000 68 221,000,000 8,000,000 194,000,000 92,000,000 69 126,000,000 5,000,000 196,000,000 95,000,000 70 29,000,000 I,OOO,ooo 198,000,000 99,000,000 71 2OO,OOO,OOO 2,177,000,000 Can anyone, after studying these figures, and observing how smoothly they run their course, be willing to risk the whole thing in a violent effort to get it all at once, or advocate the half-device of regaining the land by increasing the Land Tax, involving an angry and desolating social strife during the whole course of its operation, and leaving the nation in the meantime divided, and a ready victim of the first foreign combination against her 1 I can conceive of nothing really more reckless than to put the future of what we consider the vastest scheme for the benefit of man and our country that there can be into any danger that we can avoid, just in order to get a few pounds for ourselves. If the question were once settled on the lines I advocate, it would probably never be raised again. If the new 13 system worked smoothly, social strife would be at an end as soon as the valuation was over. It has been suggested to me that a greater popular enthusiasm could be raised for a tax- ation scheme than for a plan such as mine. I believe, on the contrary, that immeasurably more enthusiasm could be raised for a scheme for abolishing landlordism with all its pretensions at one stroke, even if it did entail paying them off, than for gradually taxing them out of existence, and leaving the people in the meantime as much under their thumb as ever. No one can deny, moreover, that any severe social struggle would be a danger to our existence, and that a protracted one would be a momentous danger, which might demoralise the nation, and give the violent and unscrupulous the lead. It requires no stretch of the imagination to see the possibility of panic-striken landowners inviting foreign despotism to help them to crush the movement, and of the history of the French wars at the beginning of the century being repeated, with the difference of Europe coming over to re-establish despotism in England, instead of England going over to re-establish it abroad. We might find ourselves a German province for- a time, instead of the owners of our land. As I consider 2 per cent, yearly increase in rent is one that we may fairly calculate upon, and as remission of taxation, although a part of my scheme, does not show how speedily the land would be paid for simply by the people appropriating the increased value which they make instead of allowing the land- owners to continue to appropriate it, I have run out another table, by which it will be seen that the land would be paid for in 40 years, so long as the ground rent increased 2 per cent, per annum, and the whole were used to pay off the bonds. Reckoning the increase at 1 per cent, only, without relief of taxation, it would run out in 53 years, but I have not thought it worth while to give a table of this. It will be seen that in all the foregoing calculations I have taken the ground-rent at 100 millions per annum. This is probably far below the mark ; but whether one values at 50, 100, or 200 millions, the propor- tions are the same, and the land would be redeemed in the same number of years. There is one column which would be seriously affected, and that would be the relief from taxation, which would be more or less in proportion to the ground rent. Thus, if the ground rent were 200 millions, which is probably nearer the mark than 100,* the relief would be double that which is calculated. * According to the careful calculations of Thos. G. Shearman, the to- tal value of ground rents in the United Kingdom considerably exceeds 200,000,000. 14 Valuation of the Land of the United Kingdom, Estimated at Thirty Interest on Bonds, Total Rental, S/5 Times the Ground being Increasing at the a Rent proposed Annually Reduced Rate of 2 per Cent. to be paid to the by the per Annum, Landowners Application All Surplus of Rental o in the form of of all over Interest 6 Government Bonds, redeemable at par, Surplus in Rent to their being Applied to Redemption of and bearing Redemption. Bonds. Interest at the rate of 3^ per Cent, per Annum. I 3,OOO,OOO,OOO 100,000,000 IOO,OOO,OOO 2 3,OOO,OOO,OOO IOO,OOO,OOO IO2,OOO,OOO 3 2,998,000,000 99,OOO,OOO IO4,OOO,OOO 4 2,993,OOO,OOO 99,OOO,OOO Io6,OOO,OOO 5 2,987,000,000 99,OOO,OOO Io8,OOO,OOO 6 2,978,000,000 99,OOO,OOO IIO,OOO,OOO 7 2,967,000,000 98,OOO,OOO II2,OOO,OOO 8 2,954,OOO,OOO 98,OOO,OOO II4,OOO,OOO 9 2,937,000,000 97,000,000 II7,OOO,OOO 10 2,918,000,000 97,000,000 II9,OOO,OOO ii 2,896,000,000 96,000,000 I2I,OOO,OOO 12 2,870,000,000 95,000,000 I24,OOO,OOO 13 2,842,000,000 94,000,000 I26,OOO,OOO H 2,810,000,000 93,000,000 I29,OOO,OOO 15 2,774,000,000 92,000,000 131,000,000 16 2,735,000,000 91,000,000 I34,OOO,OOO 17 2,691,000,000 89,000,000 I37,OOO,OOO 18 2,644,000,000 88,000,000 I4O,OOO,OOO 19 2,592,000,000 86,000,000 142,000,000 20 2,535,000,000 84,000,000 I45,OOO,OOO 21 2,474,000,000 82,000,000 148,000,000 22 2,408,000,000 80,000,000 I5I,OOO,OOO 23 2,337,000,000 77,000,000 I54,OOO,OOO 24 2,260,000,000 75,000,000 I57,OOO,OOO 25 2,178,000,000 72,000,000 l6o,OOO,OOO 26 2,089,000,000 69,000,000 164,000,000 27 i,995 t ooo,ooo 66,000,000 l67,OOO,OOO 28 1,894,000,000 63,000,000 I7o,OOO,OOO 29 1,787,000,000 59,000,000 174,000,000 30 ,672,000,000 55,000,000 I77,OOO,OOO 31 ,550,000,000 51,000,000 l8l,OOO,OOO 32 ,421,000,000 47,000,000 184,000,000 33 ,283,000,000 42,000,000 188,000,000 34 ,138,000,000 37,000,000 192,000,000 9 984,000,000 ^820,000,000 32,000,000 27,000,000 196,000,000 I99,OOO,OOO 37 648,000,000 21,000,000 2O3,OOO,OOO 38 465,000,000 15,000,000 2o8,OOO,OOO 39 273,000,000 9,000,000 2I2,OOO,OOO 40 70,000,000 2,000,000 2l6,OOO,OOO ... ... 220,000,000 15 One important condition there should be touching the secur- ity of the bonds, which is, that the bondholders should only have a claim on rent for the payment of interest, and not under any circumstances on taxation. This should be insisted upon, not as a matter of precaution only against the possible fall in rent, but as a matter of principle, as I maintain that we have not a right to spend any money but our own, that we have no right to pledge our children to the payment of a farthing, that if representation and taxation ought to go together, it is impossible to admit our right to tax not only the unrepresented, but the unborn. In proposing a plan for the abolition of private landowners, so long as no other security is given than rent, we are no more taxing future generations than the Chancellor of the Exchequer is when he elaborates a scheme for the extinction of the National Debt. In both cases the scheme is not for taxation, but for the relief of taxation un- justly put on us by our forefathers.* CHAPTER III. PRINCIPLES ON WHICH THE LAND SHOULD BE VALUED. IN this chapter I shall try and make clear the principles on which I consider the land should be valued. The details will follow in a succeeding chapter in connexion with the Govern- ment management of the land. The basis of valuation should be the present yearly ground rental. This is soon said, but it involves a great deal. It means that no account be taken of speculative values, or, in other words, of anticipated rise in rents. By ground rent is meant what political economists call economic rent, or, speaking broadly, that part of the rent or value which the community makes, and which is not increased or diminished by the individual occupier, as against that part of the rent or value which is the result of the work of the individual occupier or owner, past or present. Speculative value should be disallowed, in the first place be- cause such value would necessarily vanish as soon as the nation instead of the individual took the benefit of any rise, and it is * This proposal entirely leaves out of account the important consider- ation elaborated by Mr. Fliirscheim in his book "Rent, Interest, and Wages," that interest will rapidly fall when investment in land becomes impossible, thus enabling the government to redeem their land bonds by issuing fresh ones at constantly lower rates of interest* 16 manifest that in allowing speculative rents in the valuation the State would be giving out bonds the interest on which would not be forthcoming until the anticipated rise had been realised. In the second place, it is impossible at any time to value speculative rents even under the present system ; the market selling value would be no basis to go on, as people have both lost and made fortunes by buying at the market value. But more than this, there is nothing more certain than that for a time ground rents would fluctuate considerably in different parts of the country after the land had been nationalised, and the artificial barriers broken down which had been forcing rents to unnatural heights; and it is also probable that if rents went up as a whole after they had settled, or if they went down, the incidence of rent would be altogether changed. Speaking generally, I should say that through the increased use of the land for agricultural and residential purposes, the rent in the country and the surroundings of towns would rise in the aggregate, though by 110 means necessarily per acre, in land already made good use of ; but that the rent of the dwell- ing portions of the towns would decrease considerably. The main business or trading parts of the town (not manufacturing) would have a tendency to rise in value with the increased prosperity of the country ; the present value here is real, not unnatural. What basis for calculating a speculative rent could we then have 1 But there is yet another factor which, it is to be hoped, will have been in operation some time before the land is nationalised. I allude to the rating and taxing land according to its selling value instead of its use. The benefit of such a law as a stepping- stone to land nationalisation would be incalculable. It would materially cheapen land required for dwelling-houses all over the town. The action and importance of rating land according to its value has been fully gone into by Mr. George, and as he said at St. James's Hall, after describing the rising value of estates in the neighbourhood of London, which were being kept out of the market : " Tax these estates according to their value instead of the use to which they are put, and see how soon those dogs in the rnanger would drop them." Yes, they would drop them or try to do so and the land thus thrown upon the market would enormously reduce its selling value. It could not all be needed for building purposes at once, the owner could not afford to pay the taxes on it at its old value, he would, therefore, offer it at a cheaper and cheaper rate, until the value was no more than he could afford to pay taxes on. Vacant places would UN I V tn^i i 17 soon be filled up in towns, and subsequent valuation would be made much easier. Nothing can be more unjust and foolish than assessing land upon its use instead of its value. It is direct State aid to landowners to enable them to injure their countrymen by keeping land out of use, and extracting a far greater price than they otherwise could do. The whole subject of speculative value is most interesting, and requires thoroughly working out. It is, indeed, a curious phenomenon that landowners, by a tacit combination of in- terest, should be able to sell land for building purposes in the midst of land used for agricultural purposes or possibly no purpose at all at so many times its agricultural value, just because the people are able to pay it, and because the land- owner is permitted to take to himself the advantage of the rise in the value of land due to increase of population. The real, fundamental cause of speculative values being the power of the landowner to appropriate other people's earnings and to take advantage of the increased necessities of his fellow- men, we must completely remove the cause before we remove the effect. But the evil effects of this power of the landowners may be materially diminished by assessing the rates and taxes as I have proposed. The Land Boards should have the power of directing in what order the different estates should be valued, and by so doing, they would, of course, get into their hands first those parts of their districts which they were most anxious to obtain the management of. In the meantime, the land that was un- valued would not be interfered with in any way whatever, the landlords continuing to take their rent and managing their estates as usual. By this means the land would be gradually taken over by the nation, without the slightest confusion or overstraining any department. The Land Boards would get accustomed to their work before too much was put upon them, and difficult points would be dealt with as they cropped up. This would avoid all the blundering and inconvenience which would be inevitable did the nation attempt to take all the land over at once. The value of the different estates should be calculated on their rental at the date of the first operation of the Land Act, and not on their rental at the time they happen to be valued. There are three principal classes of landed property to deal with agricultural, building, and mining. Each class would present its peculiar difficulties, but the same principle of valuation would hold good in all of them. 18 The separation of the value given by the community to the land and that given by the individual holder or occupier, presents no insuperable difficulties. In agricultural land I should include in the ground rent any improvements made which in their nature were not removable, the landowner being- allowed for this in the firs*- valuation, the State tenant for any improvement of a like nature in subsequent valuations. I allude to such improvements as reclaiming land from the sea or rivers, draining a bog by open ditches, clearing land of stones ; or, in mining, the removal of superficial matter and consequent clearance of valuable workings ; but such improve- ments as buildings, underground draining, which is not always lasting or well done, cleanliness, extra fertility of the soil, or, speaking broadly, anything in its nature perishable or remov- able, by neglect or design, the State would leave alone as private property. In speaking of valuation on present rent, I do not mean on the rent then and there being taken on the particular plot of land in question, but by a fair rent for the land at the time, which would, of course, be estimated from the average rent such plots were making. A rack renter should not be rewarded, and an easy landlord punished, as would otherwise be the case. In towns, too, a space temporarily disused should be valued at the rental of land in the neighbourhood which was used, otherwise it would have no value at all, as the owner would be receiving no rent. In the present landlord and tenant arrangement, if the tenant's improvements are not separated from the land fairly, either the tenant or the landlord suffers. The whole tendency of land legislation is in the direction of separating what may be called the ground rent from the tenant-right. See the last Agricultural Holdings Bill, the measures the Farmers' Alliance are agitating for, and most notably the last Irish Laud Act. No new difficulty and no new liability to injustice is made by insisting that the community, which has so far been de- prived of all its share, and the farmer, who has been deprived of a portion of his, ought to have their own as nearly as it can be ascertained. In the first valuation it would be a matter between the com- munity and landowner, afterwards between the community and its tenants. The nation clearly must only pay the landowner for what it will be able afterwards to charge the tenant ; the first valuation would, therefore, have to be made on exactly the same lines as it was intended to adhere to afterwards, and would be a basis for all future assessments. If this was done 19 thoroughly and every item put down, the tenant would know exactly upon what he was paying his ground rent, and in case of his leaving he would know exactly what he had to sell. It is evidently impossible to value a tenant fairly out without having also valued him fairly in, since the assessor cannot add the value of supposed improvements to the original value, or subtract in case of dilapidation, unless the original value is known. So long, then, as fair play is wanted, and it is thought desir- able that people should have that which is their due, valuation of the nature I have described is necessary. The landowner has so far taken all that the community has made, and, gener- ally speaking, as much of what the tenant had contributed as he could, and his argument against any attempt being made to allow the community and the tenant to have their share has been, in substance, that because it is so difficult to divide the spoils fairly, it is, therefore, best that it should not be at- tempted, and that he, the landowner, should have all. In advocating a fair and complete valuation, as I have said before, I am only going in the same direction as the legislation of the day. It is felt that without this there can be no security for a tenant's outlay, and no possibility of his doing justice to the land ; it is felt also, by the most enlightened landowners, that a fair tenant-right law is the best protection they can have against the only too prevalent practice of running down a farm. A farm in good condition, it must be borne in mind, can- as easily be robbed of that condition as a house can of its furni- ture. Long leases, which were framed partly to get over this trouble, have grave disadvantages ; they are in practice reck- less speculations on the part of the tenant, and only too often ruin him. The only real solution is to make it to a man's interest to farm well, by allowing him the benefit of his outlay and exertion, and to make it to his disadvantage to farm ill by arranging that all loss through dilapidation should fall upon him instead of the landowner. There is but one way of doing this, viz., fair valuation in and out of a holding. Valuation in towns would be easier than in the country, as the ground values here are perfectly well known, and could without difficulty be separated from the buildings. The different rents taken for buildings in themselves of the same value in different parts of the town would alone be quite a sufficient guide. The cost of superintendence should not be deducted before valuing the ground-rental of an estate. In answer to any fears that the landowning class might have that they would not be sure of getting full value it is only ne- 20 cessary to point out that every unjust institution is the cause of suffering during its life and at its death, and that it is hardly seemly for those who have been its principal supporters and bene- ficiaries to clamour that they alone should be exempt from any portion of the cost and suffering entailed by its removal, that they alone should be hemmed round by compensation, while the people who have been wronged are not only to be uncompensated, but to suffer still more in order to secure absolute immunity to the leaders of the injustice from all share in the cost of its removal. Such selfishness as this, if persisted in, would find in " confisca- tion " an adversary worthy of its steel, willing to fight it on its own ground with its own weapon, an adversary that it could honourably find no fault with, for if it is fair for the landowner to have no consideration for the people, it is at least equally fair for the people to have no consideration for the landowner. If moral considerations had no effect, force would have to be met by force, and when once the battle had begun to rage it would be too late for the landowners to fall back upon men holding opinions like myself. The tide would have gone past. But surely in case of an old institution, such as private ownership in land, where the landowners, as individuals, may have intended and done no wrong, and where the fault has been with the nation in supporting them in a false position, as well as with the landowners in the use they have made of that support, it behoves alike the people and the landowners to deal in a? liberal and generous spirit towards one another, and in spite of the prejudices and crushing social influence of high life, there are doubtless many landowners who will step out of the ranks and come nobly forward to meet and to help the people in the movement. CHAPTER IV. THE FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLE ON WHICH THE STATE SHOULD MANAGE THE LAND. MY endeavour here is to follow one grand central fundamental principle, " The equal and inalienable rights of man to the use of the earth." This is ideal justice, and I believe and shall try to show that ideal justice is the easiest practical basis for legislation, if only faithfully followed from the first. If the way appears difficult, don't at once take what seems an easy course round, but face the difficulty till you see the way to surmount it. But although justice is the easiest practical method of ad- 21 ministration if adhered to from the beginning, if once deviated from it is afterwards impossible. Laws formed to work in concert with unjust laws necessarily compromise with injustice ; they may increase it, they may diminish it, abolish it they can't. Justice is like truth, all in harmony until falsehood is introduced, after which harmony ceases and confusion begins. If the foundation of a story is a lie, the whole must be a lie ; truths must be perverted, lies must be told, to support the original falsehood. The teller of the story may repent of the original lie, he may be sincerely desirous of telling the truth in after parts, but unless he has the courage to own to the original falsehood, and begin over again on a truth, try as hard as he may, he will not be able to avoid further untruth and compromise with falsehood ; his whole moral nature will be in discord ; he may look upon the laying bare of the truth as a thing impossible after so long a time, and after so much has been done on the strength of the falsehood, and he may look upon his repeated failure to cease lying as a thing he will be forgiven, inasmuch as he has earnestly tried to see another way but could not ; he may put down the apparent impossibility of telling the truth to one of God's inscrutable ways that he can- not understand, instead of the necessary result of his deviation from God's laws at the outset. Take again a theory in physics, or anything else, that is based upon error, no matter to how small an extent, if the error be at the base, the whole superstructure will be found faulty. In manufactured things the same rule applies. The thread in the boot may be good, the fit, the workmanship and finish may be perfect, but if the leather be bad, the boot will not last, any more than will the girder of a bridge bear a train, however beautifully proportioned and made, if the piers on which it rests will not bear the strain. In both these cases the good parts will be discredited and made useless, not because they are not good in themselves, but because they are bound up with and founded on something bad. Thus it is in our social organisations. Institutions good, true and noble in themselves cannot prosper, cannot be an unmixed good, as long as they are a part of an unjust system. But suppose that an injustice, instead of being at the foundation of a constitution, is only a miscarriage in the ad- ministration of the law, and that the story, instead of being founded on a lie, only has one incidentally introduced after- wards, or that instead of the error being in the basis of a theory in physics it is only an error in the application of that theory, or that instead of the leather being bad in the boot it 22 is only the finish that is wanted, what a difference it makes : they become matters of little moment, they can soon be altered ; the evil is not far-reaching, it only affects a part of the structure that they belong to. Such things are inevitable, such things are the work of a thoughtless or evil moment, and can be undone in a thoughtful and good moment, They don't show the deliberate ignorance and immorality of a community, of an engineer or a master, but the unplanned ignorance and immorality of a comparatively irresponsible individual. The moral I wish to draw from this is the all-importance of truth at the foundation of things, and of the comparatively little harm untruth can do if it only crops out here and there at the surface ; just as a mistake of a penny if introduced at the beginning of a calculation may make thousands of pounds difference at the end, whereas if introduced at the end it would make the difference of one penny only, so a deviation from justice slight in itself at the foundation of a system works out and multiplies for evil through its whole course a hundred, a thousand, or a millionfold. We must first find the truth and then follow it. We must first find what laws regulate things and then adjust our lives to them. We all tacitly acknowledge the universal reign of material laws, we never for one moment think that they are suspended, or applicable only in certain cases. If there is anything that we don't understand, we put it down to our ignorance, never to a freak of Nature. We know that as far as we neglect these laws so far shall we be denied the fruits of our exertions ; we have implicit faith in their everlasting readiness to help us if we will but apply them properly. If the potato will not grow, or the iron will not weld, we know that something has been wrong, and try to find it out ; we never think that material law has been swerving one jot; we try to find out where the laws of nature ha.ve been neglected, in order that we may succeed in our object another time. We fail, however, to recognise the universality of the moral law. We are taught to obey it in small things and private affairs, but how many are there who think it always possible of application in large things and public affairs. Only too many privately just and kind-hearted men support political injustices, and simply shrug their shoulders at the worst of political crimes, and only too many laugh at Henry George's proposals to acknowledge the brotherhood of man from the beginning. Now it is useless men preaching the application of the moral law in small things if they deny its practicability in great. More than that ; if it is true, as we are told, that God is 23 almighty, as well as good, it necessarily follows that the moral law must not only be universal, but supreme. If God is good and almighty, he will not have ordered that it is only possible sometimes to be just ; he will not have ordered that it is prac- tically impossible to obey those moral instincts which he has implanted in us, and those first principles which Jesus Christ has taught us, and that although we may obey his commands in encouraging neighbourly acts, we may put these on one side in great social questions at the foundation of our civilisation. We should call a man a fool who told us that although small streams would run down hill, large rivers would run up ; or that although stones will fall, there was every reason to believe that if a mountain could be lifted it would float.. But what is there more illogical in this than to suppose that the Maker of the Universe has organised conflict and disorder in His moral law -, that here alone are His commands to be broken, not only with impunity; but with advantage, and to be put on one side when we, in our superior wisdom, think it will be for our good to do so. If it is necessary to observe so closely material laws all through, provided we wish to succeed in our object, is it not supremely necessary to observe the moral law throughout so long as we recognise that as far as man is concerned this law reigns supreme *? I cannot further dwell upon the obvious fact that the moral law is supreme ; how even the abandoned tacitly recognise that suffering follows disobedience to it inasmuch as they try, not to prevent punishment which they know is impossible, but to prevent its descent upon them individually by guiding it on someone else. Surely no other principle than that of " loving our neighbours as ourselves " can be of any good in an age when we, not only as individuals, are becoming- more abjectly dependent upon one another, but also, as nations, feel more acutely every year any disturbance outside, and when we have the every-day lesson of the uselessness of material triumphs unless they are directed to good purpose, and of the contemptible helplessness of wealth to create happiness with- out a good conscience, a healthy life, friendship and respect. Indeed, in all the foregoing observations I have necessarily made no attempt to support my own views, but merely to state my case and explain why I believe that the moral law should be implicitly obeyed in politics. I have myself the firmest belief that there is no compromise in the moral law, that is to say, that what is right is best in every way, and has no drawback ; that, in obeying, it is not a matter of its being the best on the whole, or, in other words, 24 that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, but that it is a case of advantage all round ; when it appears to clash and work badly it is because it comes into contact with something wrong that must be set right before things can go harmoniously. When in a piece of machinery it is found that parts don't work together, if the workman is a scamp he will alter the right part to fit the wrong, if that is the least trouble, hoping it will not be found out ; but if he has a conscience he will alter the wrong part, cost him what it may, knowing that the machine will not be satisfactory if he does not. Politically we are al- ways altering the right to suit the wrong, but the people who do it are not called scamps, but politicians and statesmen. The conclusion I come to then is that, so far from its being absurd to go back to first principles in an old country like this, as we are always being told, it is absurd to think of doing any- thing else if we wish to do any permanent good. First prin- ciples are the immutable laws of God,, and if there is one thing History, Science, and every day's experience tell us plainly, it is that those laws cannot be tampered with, that they truckle to no one, that if we neglect them we suffer for it, and that all attempts to enable people to do wrong with impunity are de- feated with heavy costs. Thus the more we tamper with the land question and try to make its injustice less apparent and more endurable, the more it will suck our life-blood and the greater will be the final crash. If we don't settle it, and settle it on first principles, it will settle us on first principles, and their application will be the total destruction of our civilisation. I have thought out the problem in hand with what I conceive to be the moral law as my single guide, in full faith that any difficulties in the way could be overcome, not by arbitrary laws made to checkmate evil tendencies, but by natural laws based upon the equal rights of man to the gifts of God ; and by following as truly as I could my guiding star, I have, I believe, done something, at any rate, towards showing how practice and theory may har- monise ; those who can make them harmonise better still will do so, not by running out of the course here and there by way of " necessary " modification of the principle of man's equal and inalienable rights, but by being able to follow those prin- ciples more closely and truly than I have done. I shall be told, of course, that it is idle to talk of abstract justice, for as long as human beings are human, you will never get any such laws passed; that there will always be self-serving corruption and class interests to make any theoretically just legislation impossible. 25 Now, people who consider that as things are, so they must always be, are people, as Mr. George says, who do riot think; if they did, they would see that although, as far as we know, human nature appears to have been just the same in all ages and all over the world, it is equally certain that human nature manifests itself in vastly different ways, according to its sur- roundings, the satisfaction or denial of its legitimate wants and higher aspirations. And hence it follows that human charac- ter, or, in other words, the part of one's nature which one develops and brings to the front, taking men in the aggregate, is entirely under the control of the conditions under which they live ; and although individuals may strike out by strong effort and free themselves, the influence on the masses of evil or good institutions may be calculated with almost mathema- tical certainty. If, for instance, we put an extra 10 Ib. per head on a number of men to carry up a mountain, we should be quite certain that they would take longer in going up. Some, it is true, might be stimulated to extra exertions, and get up even sooner, but the men in the mass would lag behind. There is a terrible weight that is always pulling at and coun- teracting our every effort for good in this world. It is a weight commonly supposed to be a part of us, or, in other words, put on by our Maker. I believe, on the contrary, that it is put on by man, and that it is in his power to take it off. People who smile at those who believe that human character may be im- proved, and that such things as a public spirited community and absence of corruption are possible, are blind to the whole teachings of history. The present day better class civilised man is a vast improvement on the low, sordid, treacherous savage that he is descended from, and there is 110 reason why the upward course thus begun should be arrested. The fact is that public spirit ebbs and flows in States ac- cording to circumstances. The conditions that foster public spirit are common objects of interest, just law, social equality, social peace j the conditions that crush it are divided interest, unjust laws, privileged classes, and social strife. Privileged classes are implacable enemies of public spirit ; they always oppose reform of any sort ; if it does not touch them they fear that it may set people on a course that may ultimately do so, and they don't fear without reason. They join together instinctively to protect and augment their privileges, and since all privilege is obtained at the cost of the unprivileged, they necessarily combine against the public good. But in spite of the powerful privileged classes public spirit 26 has had to contend against, it is gaining ground ; it is now threatening their stronghold, the land ; if it succeeds in storming and taking possession of this, or, in -other words, if it nationalises the land, will it not bring on their knees the whole of its enemies (the privileged classes) 1 If it was strong enough to do battle without stores and fortifications, will it not be overwhelmingly strong afterwards, when it has both, when its enemy has neither ? It appears to me obvious that it will, and that I am no dreamer in supposing that if the nation abolishes the monopoly of land it will be public spirited enough to found its laws upon abstract justice. In the possession of the land would there not be an over- whelming common interest, a splendid field for the develop- ment of public spirit ? In conclusion let me point out that a necessary adjunct to the principle of man's equal right to the use of the earth is his individual right of the enjoyment of all he produces, for how can a man be said to have an equal fight to the use of the earth, if his neighbour has a right to take a part of what he produces from him, or even if the Government take part from him. For if the Government take part of the proceeds of individual labour, it will be taking more from one man than from another, and the principle of man's equal rights will be trampled on again. It will be my endeavour to show in this essay that these two fundamental rights can be scrupulously guarded. CHAPTER V. STATE MANAGEMENT OF THE LAND. GENERAL SCHEME. HOW THE LAND SHOULD BE LET. I. THE Central Government should have nothing to do with the working out of the law, except when general and not local affairs were dealt with. Absolute power should be invested in local bodies, whom we will call Land Boards, and so long as the acts of these bodies were legal there should be no interference, any more than there is with a private landowner now ; the Central Government only stepping in, as it does now, when a railway or some such undertaking of national importance is wanted. In this case the Central Government would, of course, 27 be supreme. The size of the areas directed by one board would vary according to circumstances and convenience. In the case of towns there should certainly be a large area in the neighbourhood under the same control 'as the town. In many thickly populated neighbourhoods it would, no doubt, be best to form what might be called a central board for the district, with supreme power over all that affected the district as a whole, but having sub-boards formed out of the central board, and composed of the members respectively elected from the different localities to manage strictly local affairs. II. The boards should lay claim to ground rent only. III. The ground rent should not be fixed, but should rise and fall with the value of the situation. IV. No tenant should ever be disturbed so long as the rent was paid, except for public purposes, when compensation for disturbance should be given. V. The board should not be allowed any right of interfer- ence in a tenant's management of the land, so long as he con- formed to certain regulations considered necessary for the public good, such as at present exist in towns, for instance. VI. A map should be kept in the board office, open for all to inspect, with everyone's holding marked on it, and the rent paid, in a book of reference. VII. The tenant's property built on the land should be as absolutely his own to use, to let, or to borrow on, as it would be did the land belong to him. Any money borrowed on the security of this property, or what we will call the tenant-right, should be registered in the board office, not as a protection to the board, but as a simple and effective protection to the lender. The board would, however, have a prior claim to, say, six months' rent; this would enable it to give its tenants three months' grace in case the rent was paid quarterly, before putting in execution. The boards would lay out the land according to the wants of the people. That is to say, when a new street, improved street, park, playground, public building, or public works were wanted, it would be its business to provide the site and turn out any one who was in the way, giving him, of course, due notice and compensation for disturbance. It will be seen by the foregoing sketch and by what is to follow, that, in carrying out the principle of the equal rights of man to the earth, is also guarded his right to all he makes, and his perfect liberty to do as he likes with his own, so long as he does not injure the community by doing so, or prevent others from enjoying the same rights as he enjoys himself. 28 I ain sure my readers will feel how difficult it must be to deal with so vast a subject as the one in hand in anything like reasonable compass, and they will, I trust, excuse me if in my endeavour not to say more than is absolutely necessary I fail to make some points clear. The 1st Clause requires little comment. We want the Cen- tral Government to mind its own business, and that only, leav- ing the various boards alone to manage theirs. We require no checkmate principle, and no officious interference. The men on the spot ought to know best about the wishes of the people on the spot, and the people on the spot ought to do as the} 7 like with the land so long as they don't transgress any principles which affect the community at large. I fail to see that ordinary men are endued with such vastly superior wisdom as soon, as they get to St. Stephen's, or that they should have any control over local details of which they know nothing, the funds for which they will not find, and the enjoyment or the reverse of which they will not feel. The 2nd Clause deals with the ground rent. I shall explain more particularly what that includes when speaking of valu- ation. The 3rd Clause deals with the ground rents varying with the value of the situation instead of being fixed. On the carrying out of this principle fairly the success of the whole scheme hangs. We want a fair ground rent ; we don't want to take a farth- ing from any individual that the land is not worth, nor yet do we want the individual to keep the land for any less than it would be valued at by his neighbours. If a fixed rent were too high the tenant would be impoverished or ruined, the commun- ity would be taking that which did not belong to it, and in the long run would be impoverished also. If, on the other hand, a fixed rent were too low, the tenant would at once become a privileged man, and a part landowner, and would be appro- priating money that did not belong to him, and would be keep- ing out other men who would be willing to pay more rent to the community, and would be reaping what he had not sown just as the present landowner does, the only difference being one of degree. There would be subletting and speculation in the rise of rent, men would be renting land, not because they wanted it, but because they could pocket the difference between the rent they were paying and the rent others would be willing to give hereafter; in fact, all the evils of the present system would come into play ; and last, but not least, we should be having public questions again overclouded by the greediness 29 of a privileged class endeavouring to secure and augment their privileges. What 1 propose and insist upon, and what I believe would avoid all these objections, is that the ground rent should vary according to the yearly value of the land, but that as long as the rent is paid the tenancy should never be disturbed except for public purposes. If this can be carried out, the possibility of any of the evils just enumerated would be done away with. Nor should we be setting up any other evils in their places. It would be absolutely just to all. The occupier of land need not complain of the rent so long as his neighbours are willing to pay the same, and if the rent was a fair one they always would be. Neither can the non-occupier of land complain of being without ; he has the same chance as his neighbours, and when land comes into the market he must show how much he values it by what he is willing to pay for it. If he is not willing to pay as much as his neighbours, what cause can he have to complain *? He, with the rest of the community, will get his share of the benefit of the rent, and he must be willing to give place to the man who will pay more rent to the community than he. But it will be said that if you allow this sort of thing a man will never be secure, for as soon as he has got his farm into good order, or created a flourishing business in the situation which he rents in the town, some covetous neighbour will offer to pay more rent, which he would have to pay or go. The answer is simply that all this is just what would not happen, but what does happen to some considerable extent both in country and town under the present system, where the landowners have the same power to tax their tenants' business as their neighbours have just been supposed to have. It is well known, and bitterly complained of in agricultural districts, that when times were good large rents were offered by un- scrupulous men for farms in good condition, and that farmers were obliged to pay rents upon their own improvement in order to prevent other men from claiming them. This has had much to do with the present depression. Again, when the agricul- tural value of the land is decreasing, it is notorious that the best farmers have in too many cases fared worst. When they have asked for reduction of rent, the agent on looking over the farm finds that the crop looks well, that the land is clean and in good order, that the fences and ditches are well kept, that the house and garden bear evidences of a comfortable home, that the farmer lives well, and that the rent is paid up. The consequence is he informs the farmer that he can see no reason why he should reduce the rent, that he seems prosperous enough, and that he 30 could find another tenant at the same rent. But when the same agent on looking over a neighbouring farm finds the crops bad, the land poor and foul, the ditches and hedges in bad order, the house looking desolate, and the rent behind, knowing that it would be impossible to let such a place, and that the farmer cannot possibly continue to pay the same rent, he makes a reduc- tion, as the best thing he can do, until times are improved and he can find a better tenant. Now, if this is not taxing a man's business, what is it 1 The good farmer stops, not because the rent is not too high, but because he would lose less by continu- ing to pay it for a time than by allowing someone else to step in and reap what he has sown. The last Agricultural Holdings Act recognised this injustice, and although it does not prevent the rent being raised or kept at an abnormal height on the strength of the farmer's improvement in the case of a sitting tenant, it gives him the advantages of his improvements in case he chooses to go. Exactly the same sort of thing happens in towns, when a tenant has made a good business and would find it difficult or impossible to get an equally good situation, which is not in- frequently the case. The landlord is able to, and often does, without attempt to conceal it, raise the rent in consideration of the prosperity of his tenant's business and the difficulty lie would have in finding another site. Thus is the landowner as by law established, first, able to take the value of the situa- tion which the community made ; second, in some cases able to tax the tenant's business ; third, if the tax be too heavy and his tenant fail, able to take possession of as many of his tenant's creditors' goods as he may require to pay him his rent. What a boon to society landowners must be ! But why should nothing of the sort happen in the plan proposed ] Simply because no one would have the chance of bidding for his neighbour's land at all. The rental of the land would not be fixed in that manner, as will be explained in the next chapter, but by assessment made from the ascertained value of similar plots. But if no one is to be disturbed in this way it will naturally be asked how labourers are to obtain land for their allotments and cottages, and how townspeople are to get land for their new streets and houses, for, if they have to wait till the neigh- bouring farmer gives up his land, they may have to wait a generation or two ; moreover, as only a portion of the farm would be wanted, it would be worse than useless to drive the farmer out of the whole in order to get a few acres. The way out of this difficulty is simple enough. When land 31 is wanted for a different and more profitable purpose than that for which it has been let, or when it is wanted for strictly public purposes, the Land Board would step in and take the land, without waiting for competition to drive the holders out. Pressure would be brought to bear not by an individual who covets his neighbour's farm, but by the community at large, which decides that further opportunities are wanted for coal- mining, iron mining, gardening, or building, as the case may be. The Land Board, representing the public opinion, and backed by private offers, would take over the land required, pay for the tenant-right and compensation for disturbance, and relet the land for the new purpose. This would as clearly come under a provision in the law allowing disturbance of occupation on public grounds as if the land were wanted for a people's park or a railway. This arrangement would not only be beneficial to the people at large, but also to the farmer, for this reason : If the farmer had his rent gradually raised by competition from miners and builders, it would not be fair competition, and he would inevitably be driven out of his holding sooner or later at a loss. The only sort of competition that he ought to have to reckon with would be the competition of other farmers, and in the arrangement I have just men- tioned he would have no other. No injustice could happen. It would be absolutely fair to all. The farmer would not have his rent unfairly pushed up, but only a field taken as it was wanted ; and the community would not be kept out of their gardens, and building sites, etc., when they wanted them. When I speak of the tenant never being disturbed, but be- ing obliged to pay the market rental, it may very naturally leave the impression that even then there would be the practical monopoly of possession, and that it would be rarely that an outsider would have an opportunity of getting in. A little reflection, however, will soon show that that will not be the case, as there will always be plenty of people willing to go out as soon as they get a good bid for their tenant-right. Now and then, for a special reason, no doubt, a man might be tempted to leave by an offer of more than the real value of his tenant-right ; but as long as the ground rent was kept up fairly, these cases would be exceptional, and would merely amount to a payment for disturbance, to which there could be no objection. The Board, in ordinary course, would have ab- solutely nothing to do with a change of tenure ; they would be powerless to refuse a tenant to whom the tenancy had been given. All that would be necessary would be to have the new man entered on the books ; and the only occasion when a 32 board would negotiate direct with a tenant would be when, for one reason or another, the land had been taken over by the Board or thrown on its hands. Then would be the time, as I shall show hereafter, when the market rental would be tested. It would naturally be seldom that the Board would have land thrown on its hands, as it would always be to the interest of the out-going tenant to find a purchaser for his tenant-right, otherwise he would lose it, since the Board would have nothing to do with the tenant-right unless it had disturbed its tenants. In speaking of lauds being let to the highest bidder, one of the first things that suggests itself is, that this means rack- rent and grinding without mercy. So it would were the rent taken out of industry. It is what goes on literally in all our large towns at present, although in the country it is to some considerable extent checked by a feeling of responsibility and a desire to let live on the part of the old landed families. But it will be said that the present proposal would introduce competitive rents in the country as well as the towns. So it would. But it is not " rack-renting," because the rents would return to industry instead of being taken away. It is simply an effectual method of fairly distributing the land and dividing it amongst the people who will value it the most, who will make the best use of it, and who will give the community the most for it. It is the only way of letting the land without fear or favour. Suppose, now, a man died, leaving his property to his child- ren, to be equally divided, consisting of a house, a colliery, a farm, an ironstone mine, a factory, a shop, a ship, and so on, and that these children could not agree as to what each was to have, and that some of these properties were of much more value than others, what would be the obvious course to take? Why, they would put up the things to auction, and, as I am comparing this family with the individuals of a community, in order to make my illustration perfect, this auction must be a private one amongst the children ; thus those who valued the different properties the most would have to show it by bid- ding the most for them, the common fund being equally divided among them. This is not only fair, but it is recognised as being fair in the present state of society, and is the way these things are done. The family cannot be said to be one whit the poorer as a whole or to have injured each other in any way by the transaction. Now, this family represents the commun- ity I have pictured, paying market value for the use of the land in the various forms that they require, and spending the money thus paid for the equal benefit of all. 33 But all this could be reversed by a little alteration in the will, and the same family bidding at the same auction might be bidding against each other as against grim death. Let the property be left to the eldest son instead of equally to all. Bearing in mind still that I am likening this family to a community, we will suppose that those of the brothers and sisters who do not obtain a portion of this estate to manage will be dependent on others for employment. They would then bid against each other till they offered such a rent that only the most capable of them would be able to pay it. This would be rack-renting. Every extra pound they paid would be a pound less for the worker. In this family there would be rich men amongst the disinherited members, because the rent would be decided not by the cleverest, but by an average man ; so a margin would be left for those who are cleverer and luckier than the average to gain riches. But in this family there would also be outcasts and beggars, and there would be a constant drain going from all the workers to the eldest brother, who held in his hand all their natural opportunities for a livelihood, and to their less-gifted brethren who for pity's sake they felt obliged to keep alive. This family represents society as it is at present. This is what competition for land means, when rent goes out to support idleness instead of returning to the people who create it. But there are many people who say that if the landowner does but spend his money in the country, rent is returned to the community. The root of this very serious mistake appears to lie, first, in a general idea that what poor men want is work, and not the result of work ; second, in a confusion of ideas as to the nature of money, which it is im- possible to deal with here, as I am not writing a treatise on political economy. I think, however, it can be shown without much difficulty, and without going into abstract political economy, how absurd it is to think that rent returns to the community because the landowner spends it amongst them and gives the people work. We will suppose his lordship has j5 0,000 a year, and that he spends it at home in a moral and legitimate way. He employs builders building him mansions ; he employs gardeners making him gardens ; upholsterers making him beautiful furniture ; grooms caring for and breed- ing horses ; butchers, gamekeepers, dairymaids, grocers, cooks preparing him and his household sumptuous repasts ; literary men, artists, musicians, preparing him entertainment and pleasure ; weavers, dressmakers, milliners, lacemakers, drapers, shoemakers, tailors, hatters, preparing his wife, himself, his 34 family, and servants with clothing and finery, and so on. Well, here we have all the money returning to the people, my lord finding work for all these operatives and all these trades- men. Yes, but what sort of work ? Work making things, not for themselves, but for him. Now, if instead of this 50,000 going through his pockets, it never left the pockets of those who paid it, and if they spent it to satisfy their legitimate pleasures and wants, as we have been supposing his lordship did, tradesmen would have been employed, operatives would have been kept at work, money would have circulated just as it did under his lordship's management, but with slightly different results; instead of her ladyship wearing apparels costing her, perhaps, a thousand a year, poor women would be going about well shod and suffi- ciently clothed ; in place of new wings and new conservatories growing round the old hall, builders would have been employed making cottages fit for human beings to live in with comfort and decency ; the money that his lordship had spent in pro- viding costly dinners for himself and his retinue would have gone in providing poor children with sufficient food ; uphol- sterers would have been making furniture for poor men's houses, and the money that would have been lavished over a single room at the hall would have furnished a hundred comfortable sitting-rooms for the poor; the thousands that a month or two's holiday in Scotland might have cost his lordship would have been spent in giving scores of poor women and children need- ful rest and change of air; and, in taking their holiday, in- stead of laying waste a few Scotch glens, they would have induced a larger and more prosperous population to reside where they went.* I need not illustrate farther. I have said enough to show what I mean, and to make clear that, although in both cases the money might be circulated and the people employed; in the one case it is taken out of industry, and in the other it is not. In the one case the workers are working for others, in the other they are working for themselves. But to return to rack-rent- ing. What is it that makes rack-renting possible 1 Why, an impoverished community. An Irishman would not pay an exorbitant rent were he able to get a good living by working off the land. All men work either directly or indirectly on the land. Now, when a man is bidding for a farm, if the coni- * It must also be remembered that the landlords do not, except in rare cases, spend all their income, but accumulate it for the purpose of acquiring fresh tribute rights, thus still further enslaving the labourer, and raising the price of land .against him. 35 m unity behind him who are working indirectly on the land are impoverished, he will bid a very high rent sooner than be thrown amongst them; but if the community are well-to-do, and if those who are paying little rent get their share of the whole rental just the same as if they were paying much, nothing would induce a man to bid so high for the privilege of working directly on the land that it would put him at a disadvantage, all things considered, compared to the baker, the butcher, the clothier, and the shoemaker, who are working indirectly on the land. It is the unprovided-for and unprivileged residuum that makes rack-renting possible, and any system that provides only for a part of the population, such as the peasant proprietary system, works its own destruction by the injustice it has com- mitted in leaving a portion of the population out in the cold. The inevitable result of it is that these outcasts are constantly pulling the rest of the community down to their level; and al- though the peasant proprietor may be prosperous in the first generation, the dread of the misery outside causes his sons to divide the land sooner than leave it, causes his tenant to give an exorbitant rent sooner than be cast into the town, causes the purchasers to give an excessive price in order to obtain the privilege of the position. Thus we find abroad the peasant proprietor thrifty, hardy, and industrious, but working his life away in order to obtain the most frugal fare and the most modest provisions for his children and for his own old age. The fact which all this so plainly shows is that no reform can be satisfactory that does not get to the mass of society and give all men equal opportunities. It seems to be a law of God that where one portion of a community suffers the whole shall suffer in the end, and that if we only think of ourselves and leave our neighbours in the ditch, it is only a matter of time to find ourselves there also. If, therefore, after the nation had obtained the land, it proceeded to distribute it on any prin- ciples but those of absolute justice, which would make the growth of a privileged class impossible, it would, to the extent of its failure to carry out this, fail to be the blessing that it ought to be, and check that public-spirited race of men and women growing up without which the nation can never truly flourish. It has been the custom to regard peasant proprietors as a great security to a State, and so they undoubtedly are in a sense, as their lives and privileges tend to make them steady, peaceful, and conservative ; but they are, at the same time, a great danger, as the one thing their position and privileges do not make them, is public-spirited; their whole grinding, thrifty existence tends to make them excessively selfish, and 36 with their privilege they necessarily inherit the failings of all the privileged classes. The result is that the trials and yearnings of the suffering millions in the towns find no response and support, and they form a potent power in the hands of the Government to suppress all healthy political action. By their steady support to the existing Governments they virtually rule and crush the desires of more active-minded and better-spirited men. In this way I believe they have caused revolution after revolution in France, and yet their love of peace seems to be of no avail against the intrigue of courts and influence of interested classes. Witness the Mexican War, the Franco-German War, and the military adventures of France at present. The Irish Land Act is thought by many to be the sort of thing we want here. Now, about all that the Land Act does that is truly sound in principle is to secure to the tenant the value of his improvements. The rest, speaking broadly, is all wrong. The law interferes between the landowner and tenant to fix a fair rent, but there is no restriction to the amount the tenant can extract from the outsiders for his tenant-right. Any advantage in rent and security of tenure extracted from the landowner benefits the individual tenant, and him only ; makes him, indeed, part landowner. The outsiders are .in the same, if not in a worse plight than before ; they have no right to force a landowner to let them a piece of land ; they can only get in by buying a tenant-right. The last farthing will be extracted for the tenant-right, just as before the last farthing was extracted for rent. The money paid will as completely leave them as it did when it was all paid in rent; the exchange to a money- lender instead of a landowner will be far from an improvement. The first generation of farmers will benefit by the privilege con- fered on them, but not the next. As they feel their privilege, moreover, they will lose touch and sympathy with the labourers and townfolk ; but the Government will for a time have simpli- fied the question, and tranquilised the country by the creation of a larger privileged class, who will help them to keep under the unprivileged masses. The landowners are, as has been pointed out, simply living on the parish at present ; they have lost their duties and re- sponsibilities ; the management of their estates is practically taken out of their hands. The real managers (their tenants) will be quite unable to see why, if they can have one slice, they cannot have another, and every slice they get will estrange them so much more from the rest of their countrymen. There is in the Irish Land Act almost every objection that could be urged against the nationalisation of the land, without the obvious 37 advantage of the people taking the rent. I am not blaming the Government ; it was very possibly the best thing public opinion would allow them to do. All that I wish to point out is that we must look on no such Act as anything but a make- shifts Returning from this diversion to the main point, the State man- agement of the land, an all-important question that naturally arises is : Who are to be the first tenants of the State the .ex-landowners or the occupiers 1 The answer is, the ex-land- owners, and not the occupiers. The ex-landowners would be the first State tenants, simply because the tenant-right would belong to them. If the State took the occupiers as tenants, it would have to force a sale of the tenant-right at a valuation, otherwise the ex-landowners would be able to do as they liked with the tenant, charging him what they pleased for their tenant-right, thus making it a mere mockery calling the occupier a tenant of the State. If, however, a sale of the tenant-right were forced on the owner when the occupier chose, it would in many cases act most unfairly, and we should, moreover, be landed in a labyrinth of difficulties, as a State valuation, not only of the ground rents, which the people acknowledged to belong exclusively to the State, but also of the property on the ground, which the people as clearly acknowledged to belong exclusively to the individuals, would necessarily be fraught with the gravest dangers, since the State would be valuing and interfering with private property that in no case belonged to it. On the other hand, if the ex-landowners were State tenants as long as they pleased, things would soon right themselves, for in looking closely into the matter it will be seen that there would be every inducement for the ex-landowner, as far as agricultural land was concerned, at any rate, to sell his tenant-right, and get rid of his tenancy. In the first place, he would have to pay as much for the land as the occupier could get similar land for if he rented directly under the State. At the same time, he would be held responsible for the rent, whether he received it or not. If he tried to charge too much for the tenant-right and get an advantage there, he would soon lose his tenants, for who would rent a farm under a man who could absorb all improvements, who could overcharge for the use of his tenant-right, and against whom there would, at best, be no better remedy than the cumbrous and uncertain action of the law, when by renting direct under the State he could do what he liked, and sell his own to the highest bidder whenever he wished, as will be explained in the next chapter. It may, however, be urged that although this might work out 38 all right in most cases, it would not when one or two persons owned a whole district or township. I acknowledge that there would be more chance for oppression in these cases than where there were many owners of property, but, in spite of this, it is not likely that any special law would be necessary in order to break up these large estates. To begin with, I think that with the abolition of landlordism the rage for territorial influence and power would go out of fashion, and would not be worth the unpopularity attending it, and that, in the country, at any rate, when great landowners were converted into great tenants, they would get rid of all the land they did not wish to use themselves as soon as they could find suitable purchasers for their tenant- right. They might, indeed, have the appearance of having the same power they had before, but it would not take long to show how the tables had been turned against them. In many cases they might find a convenient and useful investment for their money in lending it to the purchaser of the tenant-right on the security of the property bought. In towns there might, for some time, at any rate, be a number of large owners of house property, for the simple reason that here, generally speaking, the yearly value of the tenant-right would be far more than that of the site, the land thus becoming of secondary importance. There need be no fear of abuse or evil resulting from this ; it would simply be a matter of mutual convenience between those who had money to invest and those who had not, or who only intended to reside temporarily in the neighbourhood. It is difficult to conceive how any unfair pressure could be put on a public who were as free to get land for themselves as were the large owners of property ; for how could a large man bid a higher rent than a number of small ones unless he could get it back again 1 And how could he make the small men willing to pay him more rent than they would be willing to pay the State ? Then, again, the great owners would be losing money by hold- ing land that smaller men wanted a state of things they would neither like nor in most cases be able to stand and, although one man might own all the tenant-right in a district, he would not own it all over the country, nor yet would he constitute the Land Board. I think, for reasons it is unnecessary further to enlarge upon, the large owner would find it to his disadvantage to try to tax the people, even if it were possible. He might also be quite sure that, could he succeed in doing the people an injury, a law would soon be made to remove him from the scenes of his exploits. It is often stated that any national scheme of competitive 39 rents would enable the rich to outbid the poor and thus mono- polise the land. It is maintained that, because at present the rich can outbid the poor for the purchase of land, therefore, were the land nationalised, they could outbid them for its rental. Let us see. Why can the rich, in purchasing, afford to give more for a patch of land than the poor ? Is it not because the rich man can't use his money himself, and is glad to find a safe resting-place for it at a low interest ? Is it not, also, because he is willing and can afford to pay for political and social power and rank, which the poor man can't 1 Is it not because the poor can work his own capital to better advantage than the rich, and therefore finds it more profitable to make use of the millionaire's money and rent under him than to lock up his own at 3 per cent, when he might be making 20 1 Mani- festly it is, and the landowners are never tired of talking about the immense benefit they are conferring on society by allowing their money to be out at so small an interest. None of these conditions hold good, however, when it comes to be a competition for rent instead of possession ; indeed, the case is exactly reversed. It then becomes a case of who can produce the most, instead of who can afford to produce the least, or, in other words, can afford to realise the smallest return for his money, and the producer is as certain to be victorious over the non-producer in this competition as he was to be beaten by him in the other. In the one case it is a race of who can run the fastest, in the other of who can go the slowest ; in the one case it is a matter of ability to pay rent, in the other of ability to purchase the right to take it ; or, to put it more simply still, on the one hand it is competition in the power of absorbing the produce of others, on the other hand in the power of producing produce for others to absorb. But supposing, for the sake of the argument, that it were possible for the rich to outbid the poor, so long as the rent went back to the com- munity, what would it matter? Before the poor allowed the rich to have all the land, they would be assured of better wages by working under the rich than they could get by working for themselves, in which case they would surely be gainers ; but if they found that the rich would not give them employment, they would bid up till they found they could live more comfort- ably without work than with, or, in other words, the rich would have literally to keep them on the rent they paid. Of course, this is absurd, but this is what the theory of the rich outbidding the poor comes to, so long as all have equal rights to bid and equal shares in the rent. But, independently of abstract theory, it is well known in practice that the cottar can pay a rent that 40 would ruin a farmer, and that a farmer can pay a rent that would ruin a landowner. We need not go far in the country to find labourers paying <8 an acre for their allotments, a farmer 20s. per acre only for adjoining fields, and a landowner farming at a loss without allowing any rent at all. No ; when it comes to a competition in rent, the big men must inevitably give place to the small whenever the small want any land : and so it ought to be. It is a matter of the man having the land who can make the best use of it, and the man who is willing to devote his own time is pretty certain to be able to make better use of it than the man who can't. But there is a general impression that the rich could afford to pay more, and therefore would, even if they lost by it. How can this idea be supported 1 The rich are fond of display and power, are often reckless in their expenditure, and don't mind throwing away a few thousands here and there to satisfy some whim or pique ; but they have never shown the slightest desire to spend their money in any business that did not pay. Fancy a millionaire full of resentment against his poor brethren who had taken the land showing his pique by paying the people such an enormous rent that they could sit down and live on it. Then, again, riches don't come from heaven ; how long would the rich be rich if they went on like this 1 I have been dwelling on the effect of competitive rents because it is by competitive rents that I find the practical method of working out the fundamental rights of man. My whole scheme stands or falls on the fair working out of this system of letting the land. I maintain that it is not only the best but the only way. There are, of course, plenty of difficult points to decide in carrying out the principle of competitive rents, side by side with the principle of man's right to the fruits of his individual exertions. But is it not a man's duty, and ought it not to be his pleasure to overcome difficulties ? In science, in mechanism it is, so why should it not be in sociology ? He who has no faith in principle, and who believes in nothing being possible that has not been, may be useful in his way, but is necessarily no good as a leader or investigator. I don't myself believe that one in a hundred of the people who tell you that nationalisation of the land may be all right in theory but won't work in practice, have ever given ten consecutive minutes of their invaluable time to earnest thought on the sub- ject. But if they had spent all their lives and failed to solve the problem, it would prove nothing more than their own individual incapacity ; it would by no means prove, as is generally be 41 lieved, that God has created discord. There are thousands of things all around us that work, although for the most part we know not how, and could not find out without being shown did we try. How many of us have a notion how the locomotive works, or what the blood in our own bodies does ] And yet the train continues to move and the blood continues to circulate. That the principle of competitive rents is economically correct perhaps few will dispute, but only too many believe that economic laws are antagonistic to and override humanity ; that the knowledge of them is useful in so much that it helps us to ascertain the causes of wealth and poverty, but that strict observance of them is death to the community that ob- serves them, or, in other words, that they are cruel and relent- less, and that their action must be checked in order to protect the weak ; that, as Mr. Gladstone has said in regard to Ireland, and Sir William Harcourt in regard to Skye, the people should not be economised out of their country and off the face of the earth, and that it is only by stopping the free action of the economic laws that humanity can have fair play. The Social- ists, as far as I understand them, take up this attitude : they propose to regenerate humanity by restriction of individual liberty, and interference with the free working of competition. All this I disagree with. I maintain that the economic law, like any other truth, is in perfect harmony with all other laws, that its application is universal in its sphere, that its dictates should be obeyed, that so far from being an oppressor of man- kind it is a help, and observance of it a necessary part of their pro- sperity. It may be heartless ; all Nature's laws are in a sense, insomuch that they run an even course, but it is heartless in no other sense. So far from disaster falling upon a nation through its strict observance of these laws, it is through its neglect that disaster comes. I am a believer in principles and Nature's laws, and believe that when these won't work in practice it is either because we have not ascertained the truth or because we have not obeyed their commands. Our failure to make economic laws work is more through our neglect of them than through our ignorance of what they are. We found our society upon their direct violation, and then complain because they won't help us ; for if economy's iroii hand points out one thing distinctly, it is that land is not /the creation of man, and can in no case be claimed as private property ; that rent is not the creation of the individual but of the community, and ought to go to the community. Economy, cold and heartless as we have been taught to regard it, joins hands with human instinct, with the human heart, with the 42 Christian sense of brotherhood, with the moral law, and sternly demands by logic, what morality demands by virtue, that man's equal inheritance in the earth should be acknowledged ; but economy does not stop here : it is not content simply to point out a principle, it is ready to go with us hand in hand and tell us how to carry out our principle into practice in every nook and corner. It is foolish to say that economic laws won't work when we have never yet adjusted our lives to them ; we have been tampering with them on the surface, and when we find that they fail, we try to mend matters, not by finding out where we have violated them, but by violating them further still, by making another part of our system wrong in order that it may go jarring and grinding on a little longer. But even admitting that the nationalisation of the land would be a good thing, there are many who will still fail to see how the penniless and helpless poor that we now have in such num- bers will be able to gain direct access to the soil. My answer is twofold. In the first place, it is not necessary, as Mr. George has explained, that all should be able to obtain direct access to the land, but only that a portion should. A manufacturer em- ploying 1,000 hands will be promptly brought to his senses by the loss of 50. It is, comparatively speaking, a small balance of labour, of money, or trade that makes the difference to wages, interest, and profit. In the second place, I freely ac- knowledge that there is nothing in what I have proposed that would give the beggar access to the land. The reform that I am proposing is not a superficial bit of quackery that is going to make the beggar rich and constitute him a capitalist all at once, but a fundamental reform that will take time to work out. I do not claim for it any power to cure all diseases at once, but gradually and surely to sap their sources. Nothing would be more dangerous to the cause than to teach the people to ex- pect great things all at once ; it would tempt them, when dis- appointed, to lose faith in principles and endeavour to hasten matters by illegitimate means. All I claim for land nationalisa- tion, as I have advocated it, is that it would provide equal natural opportunities for all, and by this means would gradually rear a race of men who would be able to take fuller and fuller advantage of those opportunities. It is not proposed to pro- vide money, health, sobriety, thrift, knowledge, or anything else of the sort ; it therefore necessarily follows that a large class of our population cannot be put in a position to gain direct access to the soil, and yet they would be benefited as soon as the land was nationalised, because side by side with those deficient in the necessary funds and qualities are work in LT 43 those who are not, and every year the numbers of the latter would be growing. The pressure would thus be relieved by the action of those on the outskirts of the crowd, who would move on ; not by those in the middle, who would be as helpless to save themselves by their own action as before. New towns, new country, new men and new women must appear before we begin to feel anything like the full advantage of nationalising the land. That taking rent from a man to give to the community is not taking any part of a man's individual earnings is evident enough. Take, for instance, a man carrying on business in one of the most valuable streets in a town, who may be paying .100 a year ground rent, and tell him he may have a piece for nothing if he likes to leave the community and go where there is no town would he not decline, and tell you that he was aware of that before, and would not be giving the 100 a year if it did not pay him to do so ? Here we have, then, the same man with the same capital able to earn more for himself by pay- ing 100 a year ground rent in one situation than by paying nothing in another. How, then, can he be said to be giving any part of his own earnings away because he is paying the 100 per annum rent 2 The fact of the matter is that in one position the community come to him, exchange with him, provide him with all he wants at his door, buy what they want in return, provide him with posts, telegraphs, railways, etc., which he otherwise would not have, and it is by the community doing this that he is able to pay the 100 a year, and very likely make 500 for himself ; whereas without the aid of the com- munity, the same man, work as hard as he could, might scarcely be able to get the common necessaries of life. The same thing applies to agriculture, What but the community enables a man to pay 5 an acre for land close to a town that is only worth 2 a few miles away ? If a farmer thinks the community are taking what does not belong to them, let him leave it and go where there are no people and where he has no rent to pay, and see how he would fare then. It is, of course, the market, railways, and general advantages which the community gives that make the rent and enable the farmer to pay it. Ground rent might be, and I believe is, a part of Divine Providence ; a sort of fluid of justice deciding who shall have ^he land, and in what quantities and what localities ; dividing /the earnings of the community from the earnings of the in- dividual; growing in amount as funds are required for necessary and beneficial public expenditure ; growing in amount as the rent-paying capabilities of the individuals 44 grow through the increased facilities which the community gives them for making rent. Looking at the thing from the most obvious matter-of-fact point of view, if a country wants money to be spent on common objects, ought it not first to look round to see if there is not some fund made by the community that it can take 1 Obviously it ought, and if such a fund exists, as it does in rent, is it not worse than insanity to allow private individuals to absorb it, and then tax private industry, in all sorts of ways, in order to make up the deficiency 1 CHAPTEH VI. VALUATION. So far we have dwelt upon the general system necessary in order to carry out the fundamental principle of man's equal right to the earth. Next we come to the all important detail of valuation, all-important because the possibility of giving the tenant all that he makes and the community all that it makes must necessarily depend upon the fair separa- tion of the ground rent from the tenant-right. How are we to get at the value of the ground rent and at the same time allow the tenants to sell their tenant-right to the highest bidder without let or hindrance from the State 1 The two things seem to clash, as it is evident that no one could bid fairly for the ground without knowing the cost of the tenant- right, neither could anyone bid for the tenant-right without first knowing what the ground rent would be. Thus it appears as if freedom of sale of tenant-right, liberty from official inter- ference, and competitive rents, which have been advocated all along, were at this important juncture incompatible with each other. It appears as if an official valuation of the tenant- right must be inevitable before the ground rent could be thrown open to the competition which would be necessary in order to ascertain its amount. I confess that it puzzled me for some little time to know how to get over this difficulty ; and I don't claim to have got the detail perfect, but I feel certain that I have found out the main lines which must be followed. The way out of the difficulty, then, lies in not attempting to find the value of the ground when there is an ordinary change of occupation ; it can neither be done then, nor yet when there is no change at all. There are other opportunities of testing the 45 value of the ground if you will but look for them, opportunities that will not interfere with the tenant's right to sell his own to the highest bidder, without the purchaser having any greater uncertainty as to what the ground rent would be than the vendor had before. They are ; in town : I. When agricultural land is being built upon on the out- skirt. The tenant-right would in this case have been bought up by the board, in ordinary course, and would no longer be- long to a private individual. The plots could thus be put up in the open market without any tenant-right at all to com- plicate matters. There need be no public auction, but simply the registration of bids placed in the office, and on a notice board on the land concerned. In this way the correct value of the outskirts of the towns could always be ascertained. IT. The value of the centre portions of the towns could be tested when the board had bought up property for town improvement, which would probably be far more frequently than at present. In this case, the town, having cleared a space and marked ut the road, would relet the land to the highest bidder; here again, there being no tenant-right to complicate matters, there would be excellent test cases for the rental value in the town. III. When worthless property was being pulled down to be replaced by better, the board might have power to step in, with the consent of the owner if he were occupier, but without his consent if he were not, and buy the old material, give com- pensation for disturbance, pay any architectural expenses, clear the land, and put the site up to auction. Here again the ground could be let independently of any tenant-right, without any interference with private sale and without any injury to the owner. If he desired the property again he could have it by bidding the market rental for it. IV. If such a state of things arose that these three natural opportunities did not afford sufficient test cases, another but more cumbrous one could be resorted to. When a man sold his property and a new tenant was entered in the books, it would for many reasons be advisable that the price paid for the tenant-right should also be registered. The Land Board might then be empowered whenever it wanted a test case to step in and buy the tenant-right at the same price itself, simply paying the would-be purchaser say 5 per cent, for the loss and trouble of his purchase, then value the tenant-right rnost carefully at its intrinsic value, and put the land in the /market with that valuation upon it. It would be only fair to exempt from this liability cases where the intending purchaser 46 was a child or next of kin to the vendor. None of these four ways of finding out the value of the ground rents in towns would interfere in the least with the tenant selling his pro- perty to the highest bidder, and only the last, which very likely might never be required, would be in any way cumbrous or expensive. I cannot see that in any of these four ways any one would be injured, or that under proper management there would be any room for fraud. In the country amongst the agriculturists I don't see the same natural opportunities for testing the ground rent. There are, however, two methods which have occurred to me. I. Keep certain fields, dotted all about the country, to be let independently of any premises, or fences, or drainage which could be done by making the neighbouring occupiers keep the fences in order, and by the board looking after the drainage. In this way the tenant-right would be reduced to a minimum. Then let the field for a term of years only, say five, instead of indefinitely, at the end of which time the tenant would have to accept a Government valuation for his tenant-right instead of selling it to the highest bidder. These fields would thus be put into the market without injuring any one, and the varying rents they would fetch would give a very correct basis to calculate the agricultural values upon. II. The Board might be empowered to buy up the tenant- right of a farm when it was changing hands (in the same way as in towns it could buy up a house), re-value it ; and put it into the market again with the intrinsic value of the tenant- right on it. There are very likely better ways than either of these two, but these are the best I have to suggest, and would, I feel sure, answer the purpose fairly well. I may say here that I have been intimately connected with agriculture for 25 years, and that I have consulted several farmers whose opinions I value, and they have agreed with me in the practicability of the scheme. If these plans were adopted, it will be seen that in the ordinary transfer of property the land would not be put into the market at all, the tenant-right simply being sold with the same ground rent as before, and subject as before to the same fluctuations, the Land Board interfering in no way, but that if necessity did arise for the Board to interfere it would do so without injury in any way to the outgoing tenant or anyone else, taking any loss there might be upon itself. I do not think that after things had settled themselves there would be any- thing approaching the same changes in value and occupation 47 that there are now, and in so far as this was the case would the valuation question be simplified. The State separation of the ground rents from the tenant-right would seldom, or perhaps never, be necessary in the towns, ex- cept in cases of clearing the land of all tenant-right for the purpose of putting it to a different use, or of making a test case, and in these cases, where the tenant-right was cleared off the land, even if the State gave rather a full valuation, the evil would not spread, as it would make no difference to the amount the land would let for whether they gave 1,000 or 2,000 to^ the outgoing tenant; and since the object would be to ascertain' the market value of the land, and not the value of the tenant- right, an error in the latter valuation would affect nothing more than the individual transaction, so long as the bidder for the ground rent had nothing to do with paying for the tenant-right valuation. I wish I could say the same for the country. Here it appears to me a State separation of the ground value and tenant-right is inevitable in order to get test cases, for the reason that it is practically impossible to remove the tenant- right from a piece of land, because it is mixed up with and part of the soil. In advocating test fields about the country I have reduced the tenant-right as much as possible, but have been unable to get rid of it altogether. This brings us to the ques- tion as to how the tenant-right is to be separated. It is evident that to do this well must necessitate skill, care, and, above all, a desire to deal fairly, which I think we might not un- reasonably calculate upon where the community owned or rented the land, for would it not equally resent favouritism or extor- tion ; would not its interest and instincts desire fair play 1 There would be no conflict between opposing interests ; there could be but one wish, and that would be for justice. And when people who understand agriculture look into the matter, they find no such very great difficulties after all in separating the tenant-right from the soil, now that we can call in the aid of science to determine the amount of virtue in the land. The tenant-right might be divided into the following different heads : buildings, fences, ditches, drains, crops, clean- liness, and fertility. Of these the State would only have to deal with the two last, in their periodical valuation of the " test fields " I have proposed. The first five, which might appear to be the easiest, are in reality by far the most difficult ; in/fact, they could not be valued scientifically or by rule ; very much would have to be left to the individual judgment of the valuers. Such valuations, however, would never have to be made unless the rents of the test fields were found an insuffi- 48 cient guide, a contingency I do not myself think likely. But when we come to the two last classes of tenant-right, cleanliness and fertility, in which latter mechanical properties may be in- cluded, the case is very different. These are the only classes that would have to be valued in the test fields, and here we may hope to obtain mathematical accuracy, here we can value on a system, leaving nothing to the caprice of the individual valuers. Without entering into unnecessary detail, I will explain how this valuation can be made. Take a cart round every field, putting a spadeful of soil at regular intervals, mix the samples of every field well up, put a portion into a bottle with the number of field on it, and send it to the laboratory, when the exact component parts, the mechanical nature, and the number of seeds, can be accurately ascertained. All important parts of the analysis would be put down, and the fields put into the class to which they belonged. There might be 20 of these classes, each meaning a given quality carefully detailed. Twitch and surfa.ee rubbish would be calculated in a similar way, but need not go so far as the laboratory. It is true that the agricultural chemists have a good deal to learn yet, but we may safely say that they know enough already to make it tolerably certain that they will, before long, be able to attain sufficient knowledge to carry out a valuation of the nature I have described with perfect accuracy. The test fields would be periodically valued in this way, and the incoming tenant would be in a far better position to know what he was taking than if he judged for himself in the ordinary manner. On his leaving at the end of the term he would get more or less for his tenant- right according to the way he had farmed, and the incoming tenant would have to pay exactly the same valuation as was given to the outgoing tenant. If the valuation was too high the State would lose in ground rent ; if it was too low they would gain at first, but not ultimately, as the bidders would lose confidence and cease to bid so well. The next point that must be dealt with is the degree of nutrition which the State should charge rent upon and consider part of the ground. This would manifestly vary according to locality and the general state of agriculture. It would be quite safe to charge ground rent on a high average, because it would be difficult for a man to run all classes of tenant-right down to so low a pitch that the State could not find enough to compensate itself for any loss in nutrition and cleanliness, which would be almost the only items that it could lose ; again, on the test fields the State would be able to lay claim 49 on a man's personality for dilapidations, and could afford to run the risk of losing it if the tenant were worth nothing. But whether the line of fertility up to which the State claimed rent were lowered or raised, of course the tenants would have to pay or receive the difference, as the case might be. The management of the land by Boards, according to the system I have laid down, would, it will be seen, be simple enough. The Board would have nothing to do with the great bulk of the land more than to take the rents and make peri- odical assessments. I can see in no single instance an injustice or difficulty which could not be overcome, or which does not exist to a greater extent under the present system, although in many cases they may present a rather different front. But there are plenty of people who will still tell me that things are best as they are, that I should be withdrawing a worthy incentive to industry, that my plans are communistic, etc. I should like a man of this opinion to try and imagine himself coming into a lordship where the land belonged to the people and was managed for the benefit of the com- munity. When they want to make a new street they have not to tax themselves to pay exorbitant compensation to the owners of the land they are going to take, but have simply to pay for the value of the houses built upon it ; and when they want a park or recreation ground or drainage scheme, they have not to haggle and bargain and be thwarted for years by the avarice and stupidity of private landholders, but simply to pay the tenants compensation for disturbance and take what they want. When they want more building ground, they are not locked out for, maybe, a generation by the whim of some absentee landlord, and forced to build noisome courts where their gardens ought to be, but can obtain it by simply paying a fair rent, in any direction which the community chooses to lay out for that purpose ; and instead of having to pay forced prices for building land they are able to get it at its natural value (which at the outskirts of the towns would be little more than the agricultural value plus the cost of the roads), thus enabling a man to surround his house with a garden and have at least three times as much land as he could under our present system. As this community grows, as opportunities and neces- sities for beneficial public expenditure increase, there is more rent forthcoming to provide for the expenses, and the ground rent/instead of filtering away into the hands of idle people, is returned to the community that makes it, and every man alike has an equal right to use the land. Now, if this man came into that lordship and lectured unto the people, saying, " Fel- D 50 low-citizens, it would be far better if you gave up this privilege which you enjoy in common, this ground rent which returns to you, and allowed it to lapse into the hands of private individuals, who would be at liberty to let you the land or not, as they liked, who could through their carelessness, stupidity, or avarice prevent you from getting any land at all in the direction you wished, who after you had increased the value of the land by your industry and numbers would drain so much more out of you, demand so much more money for a recreation ground or a park, and would force up prices of building land to such an extent that instead of being able to afford a nice piece of ground round your house, and fresh air to make your wife and children good-tempered and healthy, you should be packed like herrings for your children and wives to suffer and die from the vitiated atmosphere and society of their surroundings ; instead of your being free from taxes it would be for your good and encourage your industry if every man were fined for what he produced ; so that those of you who worked hard and built yourselves nice houses would have to pay to the community a large annual sum which you would be free from if you would be content to do nothing with the land you owned or occu- pied " would such a man expect this advice of his to be so much in harmony with their natural instinct of what was right and for their benefit that they would petition him to provide them with landlords with all speed, or would he expect them to laugh at him as a madman ? CHAPTER VII. A SKETCH OF SOME OF THE DIRECT EFFECTS IN TOWN AND COUNTRY; ALSO ON COLONISATION, WAR, AND SOCIAL DIS- TINCTIONS. THE particular forms that things would shape themselves into are, comparatively speaking, so unimportant and unascertain- able that I feel I really need not make a long chapter here, especially as no branch of the subject in hand would be more interminable and less profitable than this, were a full treatment attempted. We must work in faith that good seed will bring forth good fruit, as it is impossible for us to foretell what may be evolved as our civilisation advances. 51 TOWN. In order to give an idea of the first results in the town, let us study the following problem : Suppose, without any other alteration, that a law were passed in a town that no house should be built on less than a rood of land, or worth less than 130, and that no two families should live in the same house ; and that there was no hope of getting the law repealed, what would be the result ? Answer : First, all cottage building would be stopped ; second, houses would fill up; third, increase of manufactures and population would cease ; fourth, the landowner would find that that on which he speculated, viz., the growth of the town, had vanished, that the manufacturers could not afford to give more wages, and that the workpeople could not afford to pay the rent of one of these new cottages with the land attached without more wages, and would therefore emigrate to another town where they could get the same wages and cheaper cottages. The result would be that the landowner would be willing to sell the land for building purposes at a little over its agricultural value, and would reduce the price until the labourers could afford to pay for it. Then the town would begin to grow, for the best workmen would willingly flow to the town with such advantages, and the manufacturers would increase and flourish, supported by a superior class of men, and things would go on in regular course. Now, who would be the losers here ? We have seen that the manufacturers would probably be gainers ; the labourers undoubtedly would be; nay, even the landowners, as a whole, by the increased use of the land, might be receiving as much ground rent as or more than they would have received under the old system. The losers would be the landowners with the belt of land lying nearest the town, who would have to sell the land at half or a third the price. The only conclusion that can be drawn from this is that people are now huddled together in long rows of miserable cottages, where mothers and children are incapable of choosing their own companions, where mothers and children get into perpetual wrangles and evil ways by being thrown into close connexion with brawling women and vicious children, where parents and children lead sickly lives and have irritable tempers for want of that fresh air and room to move which is so ilecessary. All this, and the vice, misery, sickness, and early deaths entailed, fall on our population, not by their numbers, not by their poverty, but in order that the landowner next the town may get the last farthing for his land. 52 The benefits I j ust now described as possible by an arbitrary law would, I believe, flow of their own accord if the land were nationalised (not that I wish to bind all men to a rood of land, this I only give you for the sake of example). What makes men speculate in land now and drive it up to unnatural values in the neighbourhood of increasing towns is their power to trade upon the necessaries of their countrymen and absorb future value themselves. But if they merely held land for the use they made of it at the time, and they knew that in case the land became more valuable at a future time they would have to pay more rent for it, there could be no holding land for speculative purposes. A man would merely hold land for his present, or, in some cases, of course, what he considered his future needs, and would have to pay at all times its market rent to the community. Thus the outskirts of a town would be worth no more as building land than as agricultural laud. Hence, building lots would only command the agricultural value plus the cost of the roads, etc. If we take the agricultural value in close proximity to towns at j6 per acre, and add 2 for loss of land used for roads, etc., the ground rent of a rood of land would be <2 a year, or about 9^d. a week. Taking the value of land at present sold on the outskirts of towns at 3s, a yard, which is 726 per acre, the rent per acre at 5 per cent, interest (and people want this for cottage property) would be 36 6s., making a quarter of an acre 9 Is. 6d. per annum, or about 3s. 6d. per week ; add to this 4s. in the pound for rates, we get over 4s. 2d. per week, against 9^d. In other words, the building land on the out- skirts of the town costs us between five and six times as much as it ought. This, with all its attendant evils, could not pos- sibly come about by the natural working out of the principle of competitive ground rents. Certain parts of the town will always be very valuable for purposes of exchange probably as valuable as they are now ; but the cheapness of dwellings on the outskirts must necessarily have the effect of materially cheapening the dwellings of all parts of the town and increasing the amount of land which people can afford and will insist upon having about them. The benefits accruing therefrom are too obvious to need comment. Nor need one be afraid of inconveniences arising from undue ex- tension of the town. Take an ordinary town of about 10,000 inhabitants at present, and stand in the market-place, and you will find that it straggles oat in all directions from half a mile to a mile, that you will come across densely-crowded parts and then great gaps land kept out of the market for one reason 53 or another and then rows of cottages, with wee bits of garden or only yards, as the case may be, and then isolated cottages waiting for neighbours, also for roads, footpaths, gas, sewers, etc. Here we see, then, the disadvantages of overcrowding, of isolation, and of an extended township. If, however, houses on an average stood on a rood of land, and if the town grew fairly regularly as it generally would, were the land nationalised and under communal control allowing five inhabitants to a house, one-fifth of the land for roads and public buildings, we should get a town of 10,240 inhabitants into a square mile, and the inhabitants could have the advantage of light, air, beauty, good communication, good roads, and, in short, everything that could be enjoyed in a township. VILLAGES. The action of land nationalisation in villages would be so simple and so obviously advantageous to the poor that it may be dismissed with comparatively few words. A cottager would then have the right to live in a village independently of the will of any other man. He could build himself a cottage, which would be his own, and surround himself with as much land as he cared to cultivate. His garden lying round about his house could be worked to the very greatest advantage, and all the re- fuse from the house, which is now, generally speaking, worse than useless, would return to the land. His tenure being, moreover, absolutely secure, he would spare no energy in im- proving the land in every way. He might not be able to grow crops in competition with large farmers for the wholesale market, but he could do so with advantage for his own use and that of his cattle. Where personal and careful attention is necessary, small holdings are better than large, as, for example, in the case of vegetables of all sorts, flowers, shrubs, fruit, poultry, honey; and milk and butter, with the aid of a co-operative dairy and milk-cart. We now get from abroad every year at least 30,000,000 worth of produce of this sort which could be equally well grown at home. There is no climate better adapted for pigs than ours. Under fair conditions for farmers of all classes things 7 would settle themselves. There would be plenty of land/ for both large and small so long as one man was not allowed to monopolise a thousand acres while another was starving for five. Machinery, when necessary, could be hired or worked co- operatively, but little would be wanted for the class of farming 54 just indicated. The opportunity thus given for an independent livelihood would enable the labourer to demand a fair wage, that is, as much as he could earn by working for himself. This would leaven the whole of society by giving a status and opportunity of an independent living to every capable industri- ous man, who being able to provide himself with home, bread, butter, milk, bacon, potatoes, vegetables, eggs and fruit, would require but little else, and would be comparatively independent of the markets. In many cases, no doubt, industrial villages even would grow up where small manufactures would be carried on in the winter months. That the state of things described would stop the exodus of unskilled labourers from the country into the towns, where little but ruin and starvation awaits them in their old age, appears self-evident. " Oh, but the labourers would never have money enough to build their cottages," I am told every day. Of course they won't as long as all they have is taken .from them, as is the case now ; but if the rent ceased to go into the pockets of the idlers, and was returned to the people that made it, evidently the people would be able to build as much, if they chose, as the landowner previously could, even if he spent all the rent he received for that purpose. It is as sensible to say that a hen cannot herself lay enough eggs for a sitting, but is dependent upon her master, who is daily taking them from her, as to say that the workers are dependent on the idlers for means of building houses. The workers are dependent so long as they allow the idler to take all the surplus of their work, but no longer. AGRICULTURE. The nationalisation of the land would be as beneficial to the farmer as to the rest of the community. He would have all the advantages of ownership with none of the disadvantages. He would have what he is asking for now absolute security for improvements, security of tenure, freedom of action and a fair rent. A farmer wants and requires nothing more to do his farm justice. He would be subject to none of the uncertainties and vexations that he is now. He would no longer be ruined or impoverished by a long agricultural depression, as rents would be as sensitive as the barometer ; they would rise and fall according to their real value. In a time of agricultural depression, the farmer would, without asking, have his rent lowered by the assessment committee. In this way industry would not be disorganised ; no people would be thrown out of 55 work ; there would be no loss or suffering of any kind arising from the deficiencies except smaller receipts for a time on agricultural rents accounts. Nor need we go out of our way to imagine a Chancellor of the Exchequer in difficulties on these occasions, as rents as a whole seldom go down in any consider- able district, and never in the country at large. An exodus from the country means increased town value. Of course, the indirect benefit of land nationalisation or any just institution at the foundation of society would be as wide as civilisation itself ; and in this chapter, I am merely at- tempting to shadow forth a few of the first and direct changes that would take place. As for the vexed question of the Game Laws, these would soon disappear for want of game. I believe in the Game Laws myself. I believe that a man has as much right to keep rabbits as he has hens, so long as he does not hurt his neighbours, and that those who do not keep them have no more right to take one than the other. What creates so universal a detestation of these laws is the instinctive feeling that both the game and the land have been filched from the people, and that although the hen really does belong to the owner, the rabbit does not. More than this, originally all wild animals were common property, I believe, and it was bit by bit, as the commons where these animals lived were stolen, that the game was also appropriated. The bitter and almost universal hatred of the Game Laws among the poor, then, is founded on the fact that they have been robbed of the land, and is well ex- pressed in the homely lines : " The law condemns the man or Woman Who steals the goose from off the common, But lets the greater felon loose Who steals the common from the goose." This rhyme does not go far enough, however, for the law not only lets the greater felon loose, but perpetually and increas- ingly rewards him and his successors for the felony. The resentment against the law of trespass arises from the same source, the instinctive feeling of our common right to the land, but the feeling both against this and the game laws would/be quite unreasonable, did we fully recognise the right of private ownership in land. We don't, however, and cen- turies of drilling cannot make us; our judgment has been blunted, our whole education has been directed towards crush- ing any ideas of common ownership and instilling into us the " sacred " rights of landed property ; but human nature revolts 56 against it in spite of all, and still insists on asserting itself here and there in this sort of way. The case appears to be simply this : that if the land is to belong to private individuals, they have a right to keep what game they choose and stop all trespass, but that if the people own the land, they have a right to let it under what conditions they please ; if they chose to let any land on condition that the public have a right to shoot where they like, they could do so, and there would soon be an end to all trouble on that score, as there would not long be any game to shoot. If, on the other hand, they let this land with the right of the tenant to keep game for himself so long as he did not injure his neighbours, in all highly cultivated parts of the country the question would there again soon disappear, as either the occupier or his neighbours would be sure to object to having their crops eaten up where no reduction was made in rent to compensate them. The law of trespass would be equally easily solved. The people would reserve the right of walking where they liked, the tenant paying so much less rent according to the deprecia- tion consequent. Practically, however, there would be very slight loss of rent in this respect, as the very places that people would wish left open are as a rule just those places where there would be no appreciable damage done. All our mountain scenery, moorlands, etc., would, of course, be open, also pro- bably most of our beautiful riversides and lakes. In all lovely neighbourhoods of resort the opening of these places would, naturally, be a gain to the community, as for every shilling lost in rent there would be many gained by the number of visitors drawn to the place. Cultivated lands and private gardens, etc., would for the most part, no doubt, be closed ; sentiment would demand this privacy as much as it would demand the publicity of moors, and sentiment would be in harmony with economy. I have frequently been asked by people what would become of our beautiful parks. They seem to suppose that they would all be swept away, and they seem to imply that they value an occa- sional glimpse of them much more than they do the health and welfare of the masses of their countrymen ; they seem to have an idea, moreover, that the grand old lordly avenues of trees are the special production of the aristocracy, and that an avenue planted by plebeians would not grow ; that the people as a whole are so indifferent to such charms of nature that, so far from creating new parks, they would abolish those that we have. That this should be a general idea amongst a certain class of 57 people, in spite of the fact that populous places so long for parks at present that they are willing to pay enormous sums of money, and burden themselves with heavy rates in order to obtain them, is curious, to say the least of it; for if the people are willing to do this now, would they not be more willing still when they could get the parks without paying for them, when it was simply a matter of foregoing so much rent, and when even this would be wholly or partly made up for by the increased ground rent that would be given for land adjoining for building pur- poses 1 Would not the same people who now not only pay rent enough to the landowner to enable him to keep his park, but fifty times as much for other purposes as well, be willing to keep the parks in order themselves when the land was their own? It appears to me quite manifest that the result of nationalising the land would be considerably to increase the number of parks and their utility. I wish everyone could see " The Quarry," as it is called, in Shrewsbury. They would see the finest avenue of limes there in the country, and as beautiful a pleasure ground as they could conceive, and this has never been in the hands of a private individual, but has always belonged to the town. COLONIES. .No page of history is more shocking than the relations of Europeans and the natives of the countries which they have colonised and acquired. The " inferior " races, as they are called, have almost without exception been willing to welcome the white man with open arms till experience has taught them to hate and fear him. The Africans have been found peculiarly tractable and affectionate, and naturally as trustful as children. Read history where you like, and you will find that all but a few of the lowest type of savages have the keenest appreciation of good faith, and are willing to trust and love those who keep it. All this trustful expectancy has been repaid, down from the Spanish and Portuguese conquest in the sixteenth century to the present time, by a long series of sickening crimes, by the most abandoned wickedness that it is possible to imagine. The Spanish used to butcher for the mere fun of the thing, and when ntassacre, debauchery, robbery, and destruction had had theirx^un, they were followed by centuries of slavery and grind- ing cruelty. Our own colonial history, although base enough for anything, may bear favourable comparison with that of some other nations. We first settle, then " obtain " land by treaty or barter, we then break faith with any engagement we have 58 made with neighbouring tribes then, punish them for resenting it, and take more land, and so on ; we are never satisfied, there is always a cry for more land by land jobbers abroad, there are always quarrels got up by these land jobbers breaking faith with the natives, and there are always plenty of sympathetic classes in England strong enough to force the Government to send out troops and money to help land robbers to murder the natives. And all this abomination is looked upon as a painful necessity, as the only way that God has provided for the ad- vance of civilisation, as the irresistible working out of the Darwinian theory of the survival of the fittest. What blas- phemy ! What grand and true theory will ever be taught that will not be twisted to justify wickedness^ Many of the peoples we destroy are as virtuous and intelligent as ourselves, and will civilise with infinitely less trouble than our own slum popula- tion. They are killed off for no better reason than that we want their land. , This is not civilisation or progress. It is simply a combina- tion of barbarism, greed, and hypocrisy. We don't civilise the natives but barbarise ourselves. We don't teach them a higher standard of morality, but lose our own, All this wickedness rests on land robbery. Now, what would be the inevitable effect on our relationship with uncivilised races if the equal rights of all to the land were recognised ? Why, that we should go there as leaders of indus- try, as organisers of government, that we should show the nations how to live happier and better lives, that as we prospered so would they, that so far from our being attacked by neighbour- ing tribes they would always be soliciting our guidance and friendship, that instead of murdering and making thieves, drunkards, tramps, and slaves of those left, we should be creat- ing a healthy working community, who would be making us far greater fortunes as leaders of trade than we had ever got in the capacity of cheats, thieves and oppressors. Those who doubt all this had better read Livingstone and other writers, and see their account of the natives, and judge for themselves as to whether I am right or wrong. WAR. It appears to me war would necessarily vanish after the principle of man's common right to the earth was recognised, not through any greater wisdom of the people, nor yet through the introduction of arbitration, but through the main cause of war having vanished through there being nothing to fight about. All that " imperial instinct " which we are so proud of, 59 and which is little more than the instinct of a bully and a brute to domineer and, if need be, chastise those weaker than himself, would vanish if we were not allowed to seize the land. What would be the good of exterminating a tribe of negroes if the land no more belonged to the exterminator than it did before, and were so much the less valuable through the reduction of the population ? It is simply impossible to recognise man's equal right to the earth without granting him equal liberties in every way, and even if the classes interested in war still existed, which is doubtful, it would be impossible to whip on one nation of slaves to cut the throats of another nation of slaves, and excite national hate, ill-will, and jealousy by means of a tissue of misrepresentations and falsehoods, not because the people would be all angels, but because they would not be slaves, and ceasing to live in a society of robbers and robbed, of oppressors and oppressed, would have a keen notion that it was possible to get along as a nation as they did as individuals, without robbing or oppressing anyone, declining to interfere with their neighbour's affairs, but at the same time, always willing to help. SOCIETY. Man is a social animal, and suffers acutely from the present social distinctions. The great bulk of the better educated people live all their lives to a great extent in social isolation. Everyone thinks it most contemptible of those immediately above them to be so exclusive, but, nevertheless, the more anxious they are to get into that same society the more exclu- sive they are to those below. So they go on receiving slights that cut them to the quick, and passing them down to the next grade. People rave, young men and women of good position now and then break loose for a time, and are determined to welcome the tinker as their social equal, but only to be driven back again between the social lines that society has placed around them. The fact is it is no use raving at or preaching against an unhealthy growth : if you want to stop it, deprive it of its nourishment. The hard and fast lines of society, however unjustly they may work in particular instances, are founded upon facts, upon real distinction, upon differences of occupation, of ease, of wealth, of refinement and cultivation, of class sym- pathies,/ and so on, and these differences are created by the grossly unequal distribution of wealth, by the division of society into " workers, idlers, and thieves." Do away with or mitigate the real distinction, and you will do away with or mitigate social divisions, but not till then. 60 CHAPTER VIII. THE EFFECT OF THE UNEQUAL DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH ON DEPRESSION IN TRADE. IN approaching this important subject, let us first define what is popularly meant by trade. By trade we generally under- stand, I think, not only the exchange of goods, but the employment of labour, as we should hardly call trade good if it were only a matter of heavy exchange, or even of heavy pro- duction, so long as labour was not also well employed ; at any rate, the work-people would not, as it is the commonest thing to hear of a catastrophe making " trade " better, that is to say, finding a little extra employment, although, of course, the " trade " thus created is a loss to the community as a whole, instead of being a benefit, as trade proper ought to be. The next question to consider is which of the elements that are necessary for the existence and prosperity of trade as popularly defined every now and then falls short and makes trade bad, and which it is that is always short enough to make it difficult to create a business or get a good situation. The necessary elements for the creation of wealth are first land and labour, and then, in civilised countries, at any rate, capital. Which of these is it that is always failing us here and in America, and in all other progressive countries ? Obviously, none. The laud is always with us, labour and capital in bad times are superabundant and idle, begging for work. It is true that the weather, which is the necessary helpmate of the land so far as its vegetable and animal production is concerned, is irregular in different localities, but not taking the world as a whole ; but even if the weather went a little against us taking the world through, or even taking a country by itself, the consequent decreased productive power of the earth would not necessarily make trade bad in the ordinary acceptation of the term, any more than a big fire would when the building is insured, and more people put into employment than thrown out ; in both cases it would simply mean, other things being the same, the necessary employment of more labour to attain a given result. Individuals might be inconvenienced, and the incidence of 61 trade shifted, but the community, as a whole, would simply be obliged to work so much harder. The farmer would have to employ more men and spend more money to produce a quarter of wheat, and the townsmen would have, in their turn, to pay more for the wheat, or, in other words, give the farmer a greater quantity of their manufactures in exchange for a quarter of wheat than they did before. Other things being the same, it might make the country poorer, but it would also tend to in- crease the employment of labour, and to brighten rather than to depress trade. We have, then, these three factors of trade always present, land, labour, and capital. We have them not only with us, but especially hungry for employment arid anxious to get together whenever trade is bad. Obviously, then, there must be something radically wrong in our social system somewhere, which prevents their coming together. The ignorant popular theory of over-supply and lack of demand has been well ex- posed by Henry George. Greater nonsense has never been talked. Over-supply, indeed, when millions are starving for the want of the common necessities of life ! Have we all so many of the good things of this life ? Do we get them so easily that they make us ill, like spoilt children after Christmas Day ? Mani- festly, there can be no over-supply so long as we are starving for want of the commonest necessities of life j manifestly in every hungry mouth and starving body there is a demand, and in every able, willing hand there ought to be the supply. We find boot-makers, tailors, and agriculturists all starving for e^ch others produce, all anxious to exchange, all willing to work, but all helpless in this civilisation of ours to trade with each other. Such a state of things would be absolutely im- possible in a simple community where .the people got touch of each other; but such a state of things is becoming increasingly possible and likely in our complex civilisation, where great masses of men are driven in certain grooves like so many sheep, as helpless to control trade and to exchange the produce of their hands as the horse that draws their cart. No one can look at these things without being convinced that Henry George is right in saying it is an unhealthy social system that pre- vents the necessary elements of trade coming together, and that periodically causes bad trade, and not the niggardliness of Nature, o? any lack of land, labour or capital. Speculation in land, he believes, is the greatest cause of the constant depressions and uprisings in trade. The constant ad- vance in the value of land in a progressive country, lie points 62 out, leads men to speculate and buy land, not at what it is worth at the time, but at what the purchaser thinks it will be worth. The constant tendency is to over-speculate and over- rent land until the tenants can stand it no longer, and begin to fail. ' Their confidence is shaken. Capitalists, having tried to make a profit after having paid the rent, and failed, shrink back; those who work directly on the land, begin to dis- miss the labourers, and leave manufacturers unpaid. This paralyses the trade of those who work indirectly on the land. In this way general depression and wide-spread suffering are brought about, not because there are not all these elements of wealth around us, but because labour and capital cannot get at the land at a price that in the then state of progress of popula- tion they can afford to pay. Labour walks the street starving, capital is shut up in bank safes doing nothing, land is ready, as always, to produce at the touch of man ; but the owner of the land will not allow man to touch. In the course of time the landowner takes less rent, capital and labour take a small reward, trade begins to push along again, but only to be knocked on the head in the course of a few years by the old enemy rent rising too high once more. Such is a sketch of the principal cause to which Mr. George, so truly, as I think, attributes the periodical trade de- pressions that sweep over the world, independently of war or famine. But, although this is, no doubt, the fundamental cause, there is another an outgrowth that I think in practice completely outdoes its parent in activity and persistency. It is the enormously unequal distribution of wealth, which is made possible only, as I shall try and show in the next chapter, by private ownership in land. When trade is bad, it must be remembered that it is only a comparatively small number of the people, as a whole, that are out of work ; that production, as a whole, is not greatly re- duced ; and that it is necessary only for a fraction of the whole community to be out of work, or a fraction of the capital of the country to be lost, in order to cause a depression and a grinding down of profits in the whole. Bearing this in mind, let us point out that a large percentage of money flows annually into the hands of very rich people, who have no material wants to supply ; trade, therefore, has to tempt them to part with it. Their ordinary necessities and pleasures of life do not absorb all their wealth; there is no natural investment or way of spend- ing their money. They are, therefore, tempted by fashion- mongers, pleasure-mongers, and bubble-company-mongers, with the most disastrous results to society. The evils brought 63 about by constant changes in fashion are something frightful. Great masses of people, alternately destitute and in receipt of high wages, which their previous condition makes them alto- gether unfit to use for any good purpose, are the annual work of varying fashions. Add to this the fact that every mantle, bonnet, or hat that a lady buys costs, perhaps, 25 per cent, more than it would cost were it not for the constant change in style, and the fact that fashion tempts people of all classes to spend money on dress which they want only too much for other and better uses ; also that, since there cannot be many healthy and elegant fashions, people must constantly be led to most unhealthy and inelegant modes of dressing themselves; and you have but a small idea of the evil done. These fashions are set by the highest in the land, and run their baneful ruinous course down to the very lowest. Bubble companies, like fashion, are largely the creation of surplus capital. So long as there is a plethora of money, trade is unnaturally bloated. Work- men do not know how to behave themselves, masters do not know how to contain themselves until the bubble bursts and the fraud is found out, when ruin and destitution follow as a natural result. The demoralising influence of this violent fluctuation in trade is incalculable. I believe as you go through the country you may find invariably that the more constant the employment the steadier and more respectable are the hands, and that the more irregular the employment the more vicious the people. This is not because the steadier people naturally go to the steadiest employment. Men formerly steady are demoralised when work is irregular. Whole districts and trades are recognised to con- tain comparatively steady and unsteady workpeople. I don't, of course, mean that there are not other causes to account for the varying respectability in different trades, but I attribute to irregularity of work the lion's share. Three hundred millions of capital is created in England every year, requir- ing new investments, which the owners find it increasingly difficult to meet with, a difficulty which seems in the nature of things inevitable. In the meantime we have trade bad, men and women destitute and starving, and tens of thousands out of work. How would it be if the 300 millions instead of being heaped up in great lumps where it was not wanted, had never left the pockets of the producers, and were distributed all about the/land amongst the poor and comparatively poor? What wjauld the result be ? Would it be idle waiting for in- vestment ? Would it be travelling out of the country seeking investment there? Would it be roaming about at home, 64 corrupting commerce, beating down trade, raising the price of monopolies, such as the land and railways, increasing the power of vested interests, making it more difficult for poor men to live, bullying, swaggering, crushing, demoralising almost wherever it went 1 No, it would have been spent in natural ways to supply everyday wants ; the more money made, the more money spent, the better trade ; the more capital required to aid in supplying the increased wants of the people. If the working population got the result of their labour, it is im- possible to see how trade could be bad as long as they had material to work upon. Ask anyone in trade who comes into direct touch with the consumer, what makes trade good, and he will tell you high wages and full employment; and yet the same man will have a general notion that rich men and large accumulation are good for trade. Wages are practically spent as soon as got, and thereby encourage trade as a matter of course. And so they ought to be ; but by spending I don't mean in things of the hour only, but in something of present or future benefit. If the money is put in a building society it goes to help someone to build a house } if in a chair, it goes to make someone comfortable, and so on. Yes, but I shall be told it is necessary that money should be amassed in hoards in order that there may be the necessary capital to aid in the increased production always going on. This is all nonsense ; the needful capital is of necessity laid by in the course of production. Supposing there to be no capital available other than the wages weekly accruing, there need be no fear of its not being supplied as long as people wish to obtain the best results from their exertions, as it would necessitate a portion of the money that would otherwise have been spent upon the goods the consumer wanted being spent upon the plant necessary to make the goods. If it were not spent, he would either have to pay a greater amount for the goods than if it were, or he would not be able to get them at all, as the case might be. If the mechanic wishes to chip a piece of iron, and has no chisel provided, he will of ne- cessity have to stop and make a chisel before he chips the iron, whether he likes it or not. If the cabinetmaker wishes to make a chair, and has no wood, he will of necessity have to put off the making of the chair till he has got the wood and paid for it, so long as the woodman has no capital to enabk him to provide it on credit. Thus, if the working classes required double the number of houses, clothes, hotels, seaside lodgings, etc., and there were no capital to provide these extra things for them, they would be compelled to put on one side a portion 65 of their wages to provide the lodging-houses, otherwise they could not enjoy the seaside. There would be no option. If they desired anything the means for the production of which was not already provided, nor yet forthcoming from any other source, they would of necessity provide it themselves, or go without. They would, of course, prefer having half a loaf to none ; if they could not have four weeks at the seaside, they would prefer putting one week's money on one side towards building the house, and having only three, to not going at all. The more evenly wealth is distributed, the more even will trade inevitably be, so long, of course, as the distribution is brought about by natural and legitimate means, so as not to destroy the necessary stimulus for work ; and, further, I believe that nationalisation of the land would bring about a sufficiently even distribution of wealth to extinguish the depression of trade, and that it would no longer be a case of starving for want of work but simply a question of how much a man cared to work, and what he could manage to make with a given amount of effort. CHAPTER IX. CAPITAL : THE SOURCE OF ITS POWER ITS TRUE POSITION ITS USES ITS FATE. IN the last chapter I traced to the unequal distribution of wealth the depressions in trade, the want of employment and its accompanying poverty, distress, and vice. In this chapter I propose to review the whole position of capital in order to see if it will be able to take the position and emoluments of the landowners, as is maintained by some, or if, deprived of external aid, it will relapse into its natural position as the helper and servant of its creator, labour, I am going to try and find out if nationalising the land on the basis I have advocated will really make the distribution of wealth fair, and prevent the rich from having the power of absorbing the produce of the poor. I might as well say, to begin with, that I am not attempting to argue th'e matter out as a professor of political economy, making teYms scientifically clear, dividing and subdividing every exception and every byway. That sort of thing is quite out of my lin, and out of the sphere of this essay. I shall use E 66 popular terms which people can understand with as little definition as possible, and simply attempt to show clearly the main issues at stake, and trace their connexion by what I con- sider the obvious dictates of logic and common sense. I am dealing with capital. I want to find out all about it ; how it is made and supported in its present position ; what supports ought to be weeded out and would be were the land nationalised ; and to see iu what position capital would be left after removing all the unjust and artificial conditions which at present surround it. The statement on the next page is drawn up with the view of making my line of argument as clear as possible, and showing how I have built up my conclusions. We see, first, that capital, using the word in a general sense, rests on labour and investments. Labour I acknowledge without discussion, and therefore don't follow up. Investments are a different matter. I don't acknowledge all investments, and must therefore analyse them, and condemn those which are unjustifiable. I divide them into four classes land, public debts, businesses in their nature monopolies, and businesses in their nature not monopolies. I. " Land." Investment in land or in the legal right to tax, to oppress, to drive off the land altogether ; the legal right to buy property which never belonged to anyone to sell, to buy the birthright of our fellow-men from the man or men or the successors of the man or men who stole it ; the legal right to seize the necessary elements of life from the unborn, and charge them when they come into existence for the use of them ; the legal right to trade with and to sell, not the value of our labour, but the value which the creations of our Maker are to our fellow-men ; the legal right to sell our country to foreigners, and give them the right to oppress and banish our own countrymen : this class of investment, of course, I repudiate. The land is equally ours for our use during our lives, and, as Mr. George says, our right to it begins with birth and ends with death. II. " Businesses which in their nature are monopolies " ought to belong to the communities they affect, as George has pointed out in a passage which has commanded far too little attention. The principal businesses of this nature are at present railways, tramways, canals, docks, post .offices, telegraph offices, telephones, water works, gas works, and possibly mines as a whole cer- tainly mines in some cases, besides many businesses peculiar to 67 CAPITAL. Invest] nents. Labour. Acknowledged. Land. Businesses Condemned, in their nature not monopolies. Private investments. Public Loans. Businesses Condemned. in their nature monopolies. Condemned. CAPITAL. A means to an end. 1 Why can it oppress labour ? Because it can buy man's natural opportunities. Why can it command interest ? Because it can invest in monopo- lies where a return is certain. i WEALTH. Why is not wealth consumed in- stead of invested in capital when there is already enough ? 1 1 Can't Those Those store that that wealth. have want Nature don't can't opposes. want. have. i i i Interest tempts men to invest in capital instead of wealth. Would there be interest if capital could not invest in monopolies ? No. Capital might even be subject to depreciation. Would capital continue to compete and destroy itself ? il o. At any rate not to so great an extent. If people could get the use of capital without paying for it, what would induce them to create it ? Capital would be created for the sake of the economies effec- ted, to avoid the enormous depreciation of wealth not used for further production, and as a provision against old a.ge, etc. Would competition in labour have the same destructive tendency as competition in capital ? No ; it could only be a benefit. 68 certain localities, such as piers at watering-places, pleasure- grounds, etc., etc. These businesses in so far as they are monopolies partake practically of the same nature as the owner- ship of land, insomuch as people are obliged to use them and to pay as high a price for the privilege as the companies can make them, restrained only by the Government, which is made up of shareholders in these same companies. They materially differ from investment in land, however, in one important point. Their existence has involved the laying out of capital, the expenditure of labour, and as a defender of the rights of labour to its own I find no fault with the investors, nor would I deprive them of a single farthing of their capital. My line of attack is from another side. I advocate people minding their own affairs, and leaving others to mind theirs, which involves not allowing others to mind yours. I hold that the businesses just alluded to are the affairs of the communities affected, insomuch as the community is dependent on them, and if they are closed or mismanaged the community can't simply transfer its accounts, as it can when a cloth merchant fails, but must suffer and pay. This is not only true, but it is recognised as being true, and capitalists in order to protect themselves keep a certain watch over these businesses and stop them from going too far ; the companies can't get their charters without submit- ting to certain restrictions and conditions, one of which in many cases is that they are liable to be bought up by the Government at a fixed rate. If these businesses so vitally affect the community, it logically follows that they ought to be managed by the community, and that if the community minds its own business it will manage these, and that if it allows others to manage it for them it will suffer. Granting this, how about the money ? for unless the community found its own capital it would not close this channel for invest- ment by merely managing these businesses. I have an idea about this that must necessarily be introduced later on. so will not go into the matter here more than to point out that extensions of any system might come from the profits of the same system as they do practically now, the difference being that in the one case the profits go into private pockets and come out as private investments, and that in the other they would go into the public exchequer as public profits and come out as public investments. I am using the word public in a general sense. I don't mean that all businesses should be managed by the Government, or that all funds should go into the national exchequer, but that business should be managed and funds should be disposed of by the people affected. 69 If the business were a national one, the central Government ought to have control ; if a local one, the local government, and so on. In order to obtain possession of these businesses, a sinking fund should be established to pay off old shareholders. The profits not wanted for extensions should not be given away; but the rates should be reduced. Thus travelling, gas, and water, would gradually become cheaper, and it would be so much easier for us to obtain a living. Thus we should close a vast system by which, as civilisation advances, capitalists ob- tain a firmer and firmer hold of the community, by which a larger and larger number of persons are able to live in idleness and opulence, gathering their income from the work of others. Thus we should be teaching the community that it is only dignified and prudent to follow as a whole the advice that is so liberally tendered to them as individuals, and not to run into debt, to pay as they go on, to manage their own business and not trust it to others to manage for them, to save, to provide for a rainy day, to build a house they may take shelter under without having a landlord to pay, and to owe no man anything. For my part, I can hardly conceive it possible that a wealthy nation, owner of its land, and receiving its rent, would long stoop to borrow from and be dependent on private individuals for money. III. " Public loans " are as indefensible morally as they are injurious materially. What possible right have we to promise that our children shall pay, whether they like it or not, for money we have borrowed for our own convenience ? How can we admit that a man who is taxed has a right to be represented, if we are to tax him before he is born even 1 It is nearly as unjustifiable as grabbing the land and taxing all that follow for the right of living. I am quite at one with Mr. George here, but will not go farther into the matter, as, whether morally right or wrong, the practice of national and local bodies borrow- ing could not possibly survive the nationalising of the land and the other reforms involved. I have stated that these three investments land, public debts, and monopoly ought to be abolished ; but have not proposed to abolish them by making it illegal for private in- dividuals to invest where they like, but simply by the nation ceasing to borrow and to sell what it has no right to part with. This means that the nation, instead of asking individuals for money and binding itself over to pay them certain tribute or give them certain advantages, ceases to do either, refuses to take me money or give the tribute, refuses to sell the land or to maintain the landowner against all comers. This right of the nation to decline to borrow is as plain as the right of an individual to decline to run into debt, and capitalists can no more find fault with the one than they can with the other. No injury is done, for has not the capitalist always the right to use his capital himself? Do I propose to rob him of any of his "hard-earned savings'?" No. All that I protest against is that the nation should find investment for him, or that if he has more money than he wants, he should think it a hardship that other people should refuse to add to his heap. Capital I protect as sacred, resting on a man's right to the fruits of his own exertions, upon his equal right to the use of the earth. I am making no attack on it, but simply suggest- ing that the people should not cut channels for it to run in evil courses and become a tyrant instead of a servant. Some will of course contend that by bringing these busi- nesses under public control, the door will be opened, not only to the most wholesale corruption, but a gigantic system of officialism and patronage, which would have the most baneful effect on the welfare of the community. Tn answer to this ob- jection, I need merely say that the door is open to patronage and corruption as soon as people cease personally to manage their business. The foreman and the buyer in an ordinary private establishment have opportunities, so have the cook, butler, and groom in a large private house. As far as railways, gas, and other companies are concerned, it is well known that there is as much opportunity for dishonesty and favouritism here as there is in Government offices. By transferring the management of companies from private boards of directors to public boards, I can see no fresh- opportunities for dishonesty, but by the aboli- tion of a host of Government tax-gatherers, and of inordinately large fortunes and estates, a number of opportunities will be abolished. As for patronage, there can be no patronage, unless there is something to bestow ; thus, if the Government offices were no better paid than others, there would be an end to favouritism for want of favours to give. We don't hear much of patronage in the Post Office, simply because the employes don't get more than their market value. The temptation at present in higher departments to give people more than their market value is the recognition of the fact that, as a rule, clerks are very much underpaid. If the pay of the clerk outside could be raised by a better organised society, this temptation would cease. Employment is simply the exchange of services for goods, and it ought to be no more of a favour to give a man a situation than to accept one. The only way of curing dishonesty is by making the people 71 honest, and one way of helping them to be honest is to enable them to earn a fair living without cheating, and that is what I am endeavouring to do. IV. I have now disposed of and condemned all classes of in- vestments except investments in business which in their nature are not monopolies. 1 This class of private investment, and this only, do I think ought to exist. I have no sympathy with the cry against interest, if under just laws a man can get any. If we acknowledge a man's right to all that he makes, we must necessarily acknowledge his right to do what he likes with it, to sell, lend, or give. If he has a right to sell in the highest market, he necessarily has a right also to let out in the highest market ; if he has a right to spend 40 in a horse and make 10 per cent, on his money, after paying all expenses and insur- ance by letting out the horse, he surely has a right to induce the same people who would have been hiring the horse to take the money instead and pay him interest. I never could see the force of the cry against interest as such. To interfere be- tween lender and borrower would be interfering with a man's right to do as he liked with his own ; nothing but harm could come of it. The law need not uphold an unrighteous contract that is another thing ; but it should certainly never stop any reasonable agreement between borrower and lender, nor could it if we forbid interest ; it would have to be paid in some other form, so long as anyone wanted and valued the use of other people's money. I think that capital ought to command what interest it can without let or hindrance. All I want to find out is whether or not it could command any interest under just laws. Referring to my " statement," it will be seen that private investments are put down as creating capital and wealth. I will adopt Mr. George's definition of these terms. Wealth in this special sense he defines as the accumulation of property for our own use and consumption, or property in the hands of the consumer used for the satisfaction of his wants and pleasures. Capital he defines as that part of a man's property which he uses in order to produce wealth. If it be in merchandise, it will be wealth in course of exchange ; if in plant, it is simply a means to an end, or property laid down to create wealth. " Wealth," then, is property directly satisfying our wants and desires, or property used in private life ; capital is property indirectly satisfying our wants and desires, or pro- perty used in business. 1 Not that there is any hard and fast line to be drawn between the two. "Probably most businesses are, under certain circumstances, liable to become monopolies, and if so, should be taken over by the community. 72 There is unfortunately no word to express that part of wealth which is used for consumption. Some economics speak of it as " wealth of consumption." I speak of it as " wealth " as distinct from "capital" ; and this must be borne in mind for the rest of the chapter. At this stage of my argument I have mentioned all the investments that I don't think ought to exist or would exist long after the land was nationalised, and I wish now to trace step by step the course private investment would take and the goal it would reach. The first thing that strikes me is that capital, being but a means to an end, must be definitely limited to the amount that can be profitably used to accomplish that end, and that as soon as any extra expenditure on capital account ceases, taking everything into account to make wealth more easily made, so soon does further expenditure on capital account become useless. We don't make capital for the fun of it ; we don't make a railway embankment for any pleasure directly connected with the making. On the contrary, we make it reluctantly as a means to an end ; we make it because, in the long run, we shall be saved more arduous work in walking and hauling than we devote to the making of the embankment. We make the locomotives for the same reason, or any other form of capital it all ought to be made as a necessary instrument of saving labour or adding to our pleasure and ease. The mechanic will not stop and make a chisel unless he wants it, and if he wants to get on with his work he will incline rather to make too few chisels than too many ; and so it is in every trade. In its natural state the capital is made reluctantly ; the desire is to produce as much wealth as possible with as little capital as possible. If new plant is laid down in a mill, it is in order that "wealth" may be obtained more easily, and not because the owner finds new machinery the most pleasurable way of spend- ing his money. Here we have, then, as far as individual businesses are concerned, a state of things quite consistent with logic and with the natural and proper sphere of capital. How is it, then, that there is a tendency, as a whole, in all civil- ised countries to have more capital than is usefully employed, to have a great deal always standing idle in machinery and, indeed, in all description of plant, to have an immense amount annually lost through there being no use for it, to have a great number of capitalists investing their money with the object of de- stroying other capital in order to make room for theirs ? They don't invest it because more wealth is wanted of some sort, and there is no capital to create it ; but because they want a return 73 for their money, and as in all trades that they know anything about, there is already as much or more capital than can be profitably used after paying the interest demanded, they en- deavour to make room for their own capital by destroying other people's. Thus, if a set of capitalists could see their way to building a new railway from London to York which would practically destroy the present one even if it would give the public no advantage, they would do it at once ; they would, with pleasure, destroy all the capital of the present Great Northern simply in order to make room for themselves or to obtain for themselves a better interest than they otherwise could get. They are trying to do this sort of thing every year in the Atlantic lines of steamers. It is so with the great bulk of the investing public, whether the investment be in a^public or private business. A great part of their energies are directed to destruction. If they can afford it, they are willing to work at a loss for so many years, if by so doing they can destroy other businesses and make room for themselves. It is not a natural want that they are supplying, but a war they are carrying on to supply instead of someone else. Some businesses distinctly supply a want, but this is the exception. As a rule, although natural wants are always cropping up, the supply is anticipated, or grows so quietly as not to be appreciable. The general idea of the promoters of new businesses and the public is that of opposition and taking businesses from other people, of driving them down on their knees or off the scene altogether. In the course of this warfare, of course, the fresh regiments try, often successfully, to obtain better plant and better facilities for readily carrying on their business at a greater advantage, and to the greater comfort of their customers. But this is merely the means to the end, which is not service to mankind, but, to oneself, heedless of mankind. There is a cer- tain amount of " travelling " and advertisement that is healthy and good. I allude to the introduction of new things. But three-parts, at least, of the present advertising and travel- ling is simple waste. The men who advertise their tea, or what- ever it is, probably sell no better than other folk, but, by ex- pending 10,000 a year on advertisements, they manage to attract so much more custom to themselves that otherwise would have gone to others. In the same way, the great bulk of coinmercial travelling is simply a method of grabbing orders. Each m^n sends out its skirmishers to snatch orders that other- wise otheV people would have had, who in all probability would have executed them quite as well, perhaps better. 74 The same conditions that make capitalists try and destroy each other's capital, also lead them to destroy their customer's property, and to "create" a little trade by inducing people to have what they know will be of no use to them, or by spoiling some part of their property in order that they may have the job of replacing it, or by advising new articles, when the old ones might profitably have been repaired. It is natural and inevitable that when a man is looking about for trade and can't find it, he will be tempted to u create " a little when he sees an opportunity, and that he will in only too many cases yield to that temptation. There is exactly the same tendency in all the professions. Professional men, like tradesmen, are tempted to make work for themselves that not only does their clients no good, but probably does them harm. Thus, we find this curious phenomenon : We find men de- stroying the very things that it is their business to create ; we find capital bent on the destruction of wealth, which it is its business to make ; we find professional men in too many cases creating difficulties which it is their business to remove. It is no good complaining, and calling all men scamps and rogues in their turn. Their practices are but the natural results of a roguish and scamping system, which drives men in the grind of competition to do what they have no natural bent for. We also find that, although we have all the three elements of wealth always with us laud, capital, and labour we are constantly starving, and that, although our increased knowledge of the nature of matter and our increased control over natural forces ought to make starving in the midst of plenty impossible, as a matter of fact it makes no difference. Can we view all these phenomena without coming to the conclusion that there is something more than a screw loose in our civilisation, but that there is something radically wrong. What we first want to know is, why capital is practically superabundant ^ why, when there is enough capital, people don't stop creating it, and create wealth for consumption in- stead? I say " practically " because, although there is more capital than is usefully employed at present, it by no means follows that there is more than might be usefully used under different conditions. The answer is threefold : 1. Nature abominates storage of wealth ; 2. The people who have the capital to invest are con- suming as much wealth as they want or, with due regard to the future, choose to consume : 3. The unequal distribution of wealth makes those who would be glad of it unable to get it. I have said that surplus capital is not turned into wealth 75 for consumption, because Nature abominates storage of such wealth she, practically speaking, gives us no means of storing any more of it than we require for our every-day life. Whether it be a pair of gloves or a house, we cannot profitably store up much more than we want for present use. Our power of profitable storage is limited in many ways, notably by the durability of the articles, by the cost of keeping them, by the ignorance of what our future wants may be, by the progress of invention, by the change of our surroundings and consequent change of our requirements. We are ever in- venting and improving. We none of us know how long we may live, and whom we may have about us. No one would think of trying to provide himself with everything he wanted for the next ten years, because he had nothing to do with his money, and, if he did, long before the end of the ten years he would find many articles deteriorated, many out of date, many useless, and many, wants not provided for at all. A man can only pro- vide food for a few days or years, according to its nature. The personal attendance which he requires he can't store up at all. When people talk about providing for the future and of the vast stores of wealth we have for that purpose, they don't fully understand the meaning of the words they use. Men, as a whole, can't store wealth for their future wants ; a few indi- viduals may they may store money and jewels, for instance, or some other articles that will not deteriorate, but neither a nation nor a considerable portion of a nation can do that ; if they tried, the result would be, with the first generation at any rate, an enormously enhanced price when they were buy- ing, with a correspondingly low price when they were selling ; there would be the difficulty of keeping it safe too: there could not be a more wasteful and risky method of saving. We talk of the immense wealth hoarded in our warehouses and shops, while there probably is nothing approaching to a year's con- sumption in the lot. But even with this twelve months' store there is an immense amount of loss. What would it be if we tried to store for twenty years? But, although we can't store wealth, there is no limit to the amount we can use. Why don't we use it, then, instead of wasting it by storing, or turning it into capital when it is not wanted 1 Simply through the enormously unequal distribution of wealth ; simply because those that have the surplus wealth don't want to use it, and those who do want to use it can't get it. H is as clear as daylight, as shown in the last chapter. I have Dinted out three absolute bars to the flow of produce in its natural channels, but there is yet another cause which, 76 although not a bar, acts as one, and that is interest, or the re- ward of capital when successfully invested, which is always tempting people to invest their money in capital instead of " spending " it. The result of my investigation on this branch of the argument is this : That wealth is meant for present use, and that only ; that it can't be stored, and used afterwards in driblets ; that its function is not providing for to-morrow but to-day ; that the reason produce is not spent in wealth, which so many are starving for, but flows to capital, where it is already superabun- dant, is, firstly, the enormously unequal distribution of wealth, secondly, the existence of interest. If land nationalisation could get rid of both of these, the problem would be solved ; the phenomena I have enumerated would cease to exist ; land, labour, and capital would always be able to unite in the pro- duction of wealth. And if land, labour, and capital could always come together, there could be no necessity for much storage. All that would be necessary would be to provide for old age, to provide for an equitable and natural way for the aged to ex- change their past labour for the present labour of the young. This, as I will show presently, capital will be able to accom- plish. Having now attempted to explain the nature of wealth, let us try and understand capital. Capital, as has already been stated, is merely a means to an end, that end being the creation of wealth. Capital is created by labour. How, then, comes it that it can oppress labour, its creator ? This is the first question that requires an answer. It does not seem as though it were possible that it could do this of its own strength, nor can it ; it must have external help, that enables it to oppress, that provides it with supplies of war ; what is this help ? An ardent school of reformers believe that in capital itself there is the oppressing power, and that, if brought face to face with labour without support, capital would be victorious. You might as well say that the dead were stronger than the living. The strength of capital lies in the power to purchase oppressive rights, which Governments have given it, and in nothing else ; deprive it of these rights, and you will deprive it of all power for mischief the same hour. This is obvious enough when pointed out. For instance, although in England capital can't deprive us of our right to move about, and do what trade we can, nor yet put us in prison, flog or hang us, take our wives and children away, nor make us personal slaves, it not only could do all this did we allow it to purchase such rights, but it has done all this, and 77 does do all these things in many parts of the world now. But, although we do not give capital such rights as the above in England at present, we allow capital to buy the first necessity of labour, the land, our opportunities of a livelihood, to buy a power of taxing, to buy a right of sending us off our native hills and dales when it likes, of dictating to us as to whether we shall go to church or chapel in many country places, and what political action we shall take, so long as we remain on the land of the man so dictating. Again, it is allowed to buy up our travelling opportunities, our light, our seaboards, our water, our medical springs, to buy up everything that God made, and that it can lay hands on, and make us pay its price or move on. That all this power of oppression is as solely due to unjust laws as is its power to buy slaves in slave countries is plain enough. Take away all this so-called right of capital to buy what no one ever had the right to sell, and its oppressive power is gone at once. Let capital deal with capital ; give it no opportunity of dealing with traders in human rights, and it ceases to be able to persecute humanity. The next question to consider is why capital can command the interest it can ; why, if there is really so much more than can be profitably used after paying the current rate of interest, interest does not fall, and continue falling until there is either none, or until the incentive to create capital becomes too small to induce people farther to flood the market 1 I have already shown how capital destroys itself; the destruction takes place principally amongst those capitalists who are trying to obtain more than the current rate of interest, and tends to keep the average earnings down to the current rate, or thereabouts. What I want to know is how this current rate of interest is kept up in face of the apparently enormous annual excess of capital pro- duced over the investments open for it. There can be no doubt about it, I think, that the secret lies in the power that capital has of buying up monopolies. This power enables the thrifty to invest his savings not in capital proper, not in plant of any sort, but in purchasing the power to tax, in purchasing the right to receive rent or rates, whether water, gas, or railway ; the more rent and rates that accrue from any particular monopoly the more money it is worth, in- dependently of any extra capital being placed in it. Thus, as Mr. Firth has pointed out, the Metropolitan water com- panies, through the increased ratable value of property, will shortly be stble to levy 200,000 more rates per annum than they could cb before, without supplying any more water, or 78 laying down any more pipes, and this will increase the capital value of their property 2,000,000. I should have thought he might have said 5,000,000. The conclusion I have come to is, that as long as there are monopolies, there will be interest ; so long as those monopolies yield a return. So long as land yields rent and can be bought, there will be a return for capital invested in it, be the return ever so small and the price paid ever so large. Saleable mono- polies therefore establish interest. Let it be distinctly understood that although I speak of land, monopoly values, and the National Debt as investments, they are not investments for the nation but only for the in- dividual. A man who gives 1000 for a piece of land, or for so much value in monopoly, does not invest his money but merely passes it on for someone else to invest or spend. If, however, he builds a house with the money, so long as the builders consume the whole 1000 in the process of building the house, the money will have been invested in the house, and 1000 worth of food, clothing, etc., will have disappeared in exchange. The way that these monopolies support interest is not by increasing the real investments of the nation, but by the power they give to the investing classes to realise interest safely without personal control or knowledge of business. Millionaires have most of their money, sometimes all, invested in this way. So a man who buys 1,000,000 worth of land passes on that amount for others to invest or spend. Some of the land- owners he bought the land from might become farmers and buy stock, etc., with it, others might go into various other businesses, while some might invest the money in ships or spend it. Thus the millionaire passes over all risks and work to others, securing to himself a certain revenue. If it were impossible to buy the land, he could not do this. He would be obliged to take on himself the responsibilities and management that others now take for him, or lend the money for others to use. Instead of having the enjoyment of a safe though moderate interest, he would have to undertake the risks and anxieties of business, many of which would involve him in almost cer- tain loss. There are comparatively few businesses except monopolies that are remunerative without personal control and knowledge, and these few are becoming, not less numerous perhaps, but certainly less remunerative. With the rush that would be made on these businesses by large holders of capital, were their 79 present monopoly investments closed, there would certainly very soon be no return whatever. My contention is that, although men might still get a return of their capital so long as they wisely worked it themselves, they would no longer, as a rule at any rate, get it by invest- ment, and that those who could not possibly look after and work their own capital would be only too thankful to lend it to those who would keep it safe for them and insure it against loss without receiving any interest. Those who say that, if they could not get interest for their capital, they would not let anyone have it but would keep it in the bank, don't realise what capital is ; they confuse it with money. To begin with, unless the bankers could get interest on the money intrusted to them they would not keep it with- out payment. But although money is undoubtedly capital, it is only an infinitesimal part which is important, merely by reason of its being interchangeable and a convenient standard of value for all capital. We have about 100,000,000 of bullion in this country, and we have three times that amount saved for investment every year, while the wealth of the nation may be stated in round numbers near enough perhaps for the purpose of this illustration, to be two hundred times the value of its bullion. The result of the wholesale locking-up of gold, the only use of which, as money, is as a circulating medium, and a standard of value, would be to make it useless for both purposes. It would become so dear as to cause the most wholesale disturb- ances and ruin in industry. Fixed money payments would no longer be possible, while the capitalist who wished to bank his capital would find himself forced to exchange an increasingly large amount of property for a sovereign. Thousands of men, tempted by the high price of gold, and thrown out of work by the diversion of capital from its ordinary investments, would rush to the gold fields, in order to dig gold out of the earth that it might be placed in cellars. After a time, both the people and the capitalists would tire of this. The gold would be let out of the cellars at a frightful depreciation and loss to those who had placed it there. So far from capital having been kept safe, a larger proportion would be lost in a given time, probably, than has ever yet been known. Whatever a comparatively few individuals might do, gold as an investment for the savings of a nation to take the place of those at present bearing interest, would be the most disastrous that the .wit of man could devise, both for the capitalist and the people. 80 Capital as a whole must necessarily consist of useful property of a depreciating and perishable nature. If this property is not sufficiently useful to make it worth the while of the user to keep it in repair, or put by a sum year by year sufficient to cover all depreciation, a part or the whole of the property will ultimately he lost. The capitalist will therefore he anxious to find someone to save him from this loss, and will require no great stretch of imagination to see that he will often be obliged to pay a man for keeping it instead of being paid for its use. There will be little inducement for men to hoard great fortunes then. Capital will be used and saved mainly for pro- vision for old age, to do some useful thing with, or to carry on business to the greatest advantage. The great incubus of interest being lifted off the workers, men will begin to live rich and die poor, instead of living poor and dying rich. Their children will have a far better inheritance than the most colossal fortunes, for they will have the opportunity of earning for themselvesja comfortable living, without any of the grosser anxieties of business life to-day. This appears to me to be the obvious common-sense con- clusion after we have performed the exceedingly difficult task of unsealing our eyes from prejudice in the matter. What can be more self-evident than that if capital is brought face to face with labour, its creator, without support, it will have no oppressive power, and that labour, free to natural opportunity, will assert itself 1 Next, then, we want to know if capital under the new con- ditions would continue to carry on the destructive war that it does now. I think not, because there would not only cease to be an incentive, but there would be a growing deterrent. Superabundant capital, having no chance of increase, would by competition make actual loss certain. This would not only act as a deterrent to invest in capital, but, by wasting capital, would reduce the materials of war. More than this, these large and accumulating fortunes would be impossible, and easy opportunities for making a living being always open, the necessity for saving for anything more than contingencies and old age would be quite unnecessary. It is the fear of poverty which, as Henry George, I think, says, people fear more than death, that makes them so fond of hoarding now. Were it not for this fear, people would not be tempted to hoard, but would spend their money for the most part as they got it for their own use and happiness. What temptation could there be for people to supply capital to be destroyed 1 81 But if men could obtain capital without paying for it, what would induce them to create it at all ? Would not the amount of capital get reduced till interest sprang up to a sufficient amount to tempt people to create capital : and would not this state of things after a time make interest the rule after all 1 I think not. Besides the absolute necessity of creating capital in order to save labour in producing more wealth, and to avoid the ruinous depreciation of wealth neither consumed nor used to aid in further production, there would be an inducement to save independently of interest altogether, as the creation of capital would be necessary in order to provide, in the most economical manner, for old age, sickness or accident. I have already shown how consumable forms of wealth can only partially provide for old age and contingencies. It remains to be seen if capital will fill the vacant place. We will imagine an old man with a capital of 2,000 wishing to retire from business, and a young man with no capital wish- ing to start in business. The old man has past labour (id est capital) stored up which he wishes to exchange for present labour; the young man has a life of present labour to part with, and is anxious to exchange part of it for past labour. He is not willing to give the old man any interest for his money, but he is willing to do one of two other things he is willing to pay him an annual sum for depreciation, or he is will- ing to purchase outright by yearly payments. The old and the young strike a bargain ; they are able to help each other for their mutual benefit. Each of them gets his own nothing more and nothing less. What can be more beautiful, what more just? But supposing the young man fails, and loses the capital, or supposing the old man outlives his income, what then? Why, insurance companies would come in, and, as a matter of practice, probably the transaction would not be direct between young and old men, but through these insurance companies, which would agree to pay the old men an annuity for life, and to allow the young men to use the capital, paying for it by degrees. It appears to me that the inevitable tendency would be for people to work in large co-operative concerns for the most part, and in these cases the concern itself might insure the super- annuated with an income in proportion to the amount of capital saved. The hands might be allowed to invest in pro- portion to the wages they earned. Thus the young would always be investing and the old withdrawing. Thus youth would be giving present labour in exchange for past, which would be 82 the property of the old. There would be a field for insurance again, amongst these large concerns, as discoveries might destroy the capital of some particular industry. There would, I believe, be an enormous extension of the insurance system. The staple industries of the country would inevitably be carried on in co-operative concerns for two reasons one, the greater facility with which articles could be made and sold in large concerns ; another the refusal of labour, as a rule, to work in concerns where it could not lay by its savings. There would be no other investment open, so that large private businesses would not be able to find labourers to work for them, unless they allowed their workmen to invest their savings in their business. The masters would have to be paid out, whether they liked it or not, their businesses necessarily becoming co- operative as time went on. Some provision will have to be made for the professional classes, as they use practically no capital ; so that if all public investments were closed, and if most private investments wer* absorbed by the people who work in the businesses with which they are connected, the professional men would be left outside, They could not insure unless the insurance company had some means of investing the money of the insurer. It appears to me that the insurance company might be the nation, and that it might find investments for the money in the various extraordinary and new works that would always be going on. The professional men, then, who were working for the public would find a storage for their earnings in public businesses, as artisans who were working in a factory would find storage for their money in private businesses. The country would no more be borrowing money of the professional classes than annuity and life insurance offices borrow from their clients when they take their premiums. Since the nation would pay no interest, it could not be said to be supporting its annuitants in any way. It would simply take and make use for a time of certain money for the mutual benefit of itself and its annuitants. The nation has the use of the capital ; the annuitant gets rid of his capital which he does not know how to take care of, and gets his annuity when he wants it. Thus there would always be a fund for new works without running upon rent or anything else. The country would be in debt, in a way, to private individuals, it is true ; it would be in debt in the same way that every co-operative concern is in debt to its shareholders. But it may be said that only a portion of the nation would be Government annuitants, whereas all the fac- tory hands might be factory annuitants. That is true, but it must be remembered that if all the nation is responsible for the 83 payment of annuities to only a portion, at the same time all the nation would also be sharers in the benefits of the use of the capital of this portion, and also of their professional services. I don't think this system of insurance properly carried out would partake of the evils and dangers of borrowing as at present practised. But, nevertheless, let it to be distinctly understood that this scheme is a mere suggestion, as I am not quite clear that it is perfectly sound in the form I have put it, at any rate. Of all the side questions that present themselves concerning the enormous diminution, and in some cases, at any rate, the abolition, of the existing professional classes, I feel it is un- necessary for me to say anything, nor yet of the rapid growth of our knowledge of nature and consequent power over her forces which would follow the enfranchisement of labour. There is but one more point I wish to dwell upon before closing this chapter, and that is the action of competition in labour. We have seen that the competition of capital tends not only to diminish its " reward," but to its absolute destruction. The question is, will the competition of labour lead to any similar result ? Different men will always have very different powers of creating wealth; different' men will always have varying desires for the accumulation of wealth ; will the man who collects a big trade and makes a lot of money in any way diminish the amount others can make, who are less clever than himself, if they all have equal access to natural op- portunities ? I think not. I think so far from the clever, successful man hindering his less gifted neighbour, he would help him by showing him better methods. Put ten men into a clay field to make bricks and build them- selves houses; so long as the field belonged equally to all, and so long as there was plenty of clay for all, could the man who built himself a beautiful mansion be said to be stopping the man who only builds himself a hovel from doing likewise. So far from doing this he would by his example be giving the man with the hovel a better chance of building the mansion than he would have had the mansion never been built. If, however, the men had not an equal right to the field, or if they were placed on it with the understanding that the most successful man would be able to buy the field, it would be very different. The successful man would buy up the opportunities of the weaker ones, and by doing this would make it impossible for them to build at all without his leave ; so the successful in this case not only would not help his weaker brother, but he would be able to crush both him and his children, he would be able to perpetuate and multiply the original differences between his 84 labour and that of his less industrious or clever brother. The competition of capital means one man having something instead of another. The competition of labour, as long as all have the same field to work on, is merely the same as with the healthy emulation of boys at school ; it is a competition of who can learn the most for himself, not at the expense of his neighbour, but by his own exertions. The boy who reads the best, so far from preventing the other boys from reading well, gives them a good example and helps to stimulate better reading, so long as the teaching is the same ; if, however, the boy who could read the best could monopolise the master for the future, the case would be quite different, and by his success he would deprive his schoolfellows of all chance. Competition of labour without monopoly would be as helpful to the hindermost as it is destructive with monopoly ; the hindermost could take ad vantage of all the knowledge possessed by the leaders, and would at all times have equal access to natural opportunities. Labour would have its own, the clever and industrious would be able to benefit themselves without having the power to crush anyone else. A man would be able to make a large fortune, but he would not be able to make other people increase it for him. As soon as he left off creating, his fortune would not only leave off in- creasing, but it would be difficult for him to hoard what he had got even. Thus a man who was clever enough to make a locomotive that would do 20 per cent, more work for the same outlay as any other, would soon get a great fortune, not at the expense of other people, but by aiding other people. He would build, perhaps, a large factory, and fill it full of machinery, but he would find it impossible to fill it with good workmen unless he allowed them gradually to buy him out ; and as soon as other people could build as good an engine as himself, he would cease to get any more than manager's wages of his con- cern, and as soon as he retired he would cease to have any in- come at all ; he would merely be able to use what he had made, and live upon the results of his past labour, instead of living upon other people, as he and his descendants can now. In the same way, the contractor who was clever enough to make an embankment with half the labour usually employed, might put the difference into his pocket, and in doing so would be making no one the poorer. But he would be quite unable to get anything of this sort as soon as he ceased to be able to make the embankment cheaper than other folks. He would no longer be able to get as much wealth after his retirement from 85 business, and after he had ceased to create anything, as he did in the midst of his usefulness. There is one class of labour that appears to form an excep- tion to the rule. I allude to professional labour, or the labour of instructing and waiting upon man. It would not be so in reality, however. Doctors and teachers would compete as they do now, but under far healthier circumstances. They would compete with the knowledge that those who had to give way would no longer be outcasts, but merely cast out of a sphere which they were not suited for and never ought to have entered. This sort of competition would go on in trades as well as professions. The difficulty of finding a job which throws so many into their wrong spheres of action at present would cease to exist, and it is sincerely to be hoped that our morals and bodies would no longer suffer and groan in order that some poor fish-out-of-water should be able to feed his wife and family. The professional classes ought to be people of superior genius for the offices they professed, they ought to be people who entered their profession because they loved it and felt drawn towards it, and not because it afforded an opening for a livelihood ; and it ought to be, and, I hope, would be, impossible for any one else to be tolerated. The professions ought to draw the cream of the land ; there is no reason why the common- place should be there. A man of ordinary abilities could do his part as well in industry, perhaps better, than one of our greatest scientists, but could no more take the place of the physician at the sick bed or of the minister in the pulpit than he could fly. If a mechanic makes a blunder it seldom does more than destroy or spoil so much property, but if a doctor makes a blunder he perhaps injures or destroys a fellow creature. It is manifest that those who have to help to form our minds and bodies have a far more responsible and impor- tant occupation than those who merely convert matter into different forms. The simile of the clay field does not hold good with the pro- fessional classes; they don't work on clay, but upon their fellow creatures. The advantages of a freer, happier, and richer population will affect them as much as tradesmen, but it will affect them indirectly. Their surroundings will be healthier and better, and the freedom of natural opportunities to all will make it easy for men to work in the sphere most fitted to them. The opening of natural opportunities means more than the freedom of the clay field, it means the freedom of everything. Competition of labour, both professional and 86 mechanical, then, would merely mean forcing men into depart- ments of life they are most fitted for, and not crushing them in any sense of the word, as it is obvious that the more suited we are to our occupation the better we ought to get on. Men are not all cast in the same mould : there are different spheres in life, requiring different tastes and genius, and there are the men to fill these spheres if we will only look for them. By getting the right men in we should be benefiting them both individually and collectively, and competition in labour would be "creative " instead of "destructive," elevating instead of degrading. As we begin so shall we end. For " good seed bringeth forth good fruit." If we begin with justice, it appears we end with it. I have tried to follow justice simply and loyally throughout these investigations, arid the goal to which it has led me is one of which I had no conception at the beginning, and which has compelled me to sacrifice many foregone conclusions and get rid of many prejudices in my way. The result is in some re- spects quite unexpected, but it is no surprise. It is simply an illustration of the glorious harmony of nature. It is no scheme of mine. In so far as it is true, it is the scheme of my Creator, and in so far as it falls short of the truth it falls short of His beneficent designs. CHAPTER X. POPULATION. THE theory of over-population means, as I take it, that in a given part of the world there are more people than can obtain food and clothing from its surface without an excessive amount of toil. I say food and clothing, for these are grown on the surface. I don't say minerals, as even the stupid know there is any amount of clay, stone, lime, and sand to build houses of, and plenty of iron and coal and everything else of that sort that we can require. Some say that the necessary means for obtaining the products of the earth do not grow fast enough that is to say that capital and organisation for labour do not keep pace with the increased population. This theory is so self-evidently absurd, in face of the fact of the ever-increasing superabundance of capital in civilised countries, and the constant tendency of capital to find a use in opening railways and enlarging factories, etc., far in 87 advance of population which is anxiously expected, that I only mention it to put it on one side, and return to the main conten- tion. As England is one of the most thickly-populated countries in the world, and as I am writing for English people, many of whom consider that it is over-population that causes the poverty, or a great deal of it, in this country, I will take it as an example, and examine its case. England is supposed to be over-populated because there is fierce competition for work ; because there is dreadful poverty ; because there is not employment enough for all the people. Why is there not work enough] What are the necessary elements for work] Capital, labour, and land. Which of these is there a short supply of] There is plenty of capital. The Daily News says that wealth in the aggregate increases 2 per cent, while the population increases only 1 per cent. So there appears to be a sufficient amount of this, to say the least of it. There is plenty of labour too much, apparently, as there are hundreds of thousands who can't find work. " Yes, but there is not material enough." Where is the deficiency ] Is it in clay, wool, iron, coal, wheat, or what] I shall be told it is not that we have not got plenty of minerals, but that we cannot provide ourselves with all our food, and have to pay foreigners to do so. That is what it comes to, then, that we are over-populated because we get a great deal of food from abroad instead of growing it ourselves, which brings us to this position, that as soon as a country does not produce its own food, it is over-populated, and the smaller proportion it produces the more it is over-populated. I hope I am stating the case fairly. I am anxious to do so, and to meet my opponents on their own ground. I don't take it that a town is considered over-populated be- cause it draws its supplies from the country ; nor that one portion of the country would be over-populated because it has to draw part of its supplies from another and more exclusively agricultural district ; but that when a country, as a whole, has to draw its food supplies from another country, then I suppose that over-population begins ; and why ] Is it because being under a different Government transforms everything ] Or is it because exchange between two men to their equal profit in the same country becomes a loss so soon as they live in different lands ] Or is it because farmer Smith, who grows corn in England and exchanges it for manufactured products, does good to his country, but when he goes to America and grows corn there, and exchanges it for manufactured products here, he at once does harm, and is supposed to be living on us while 88 he thinks we are living on him ? Or what is it? I want to know what there is in this change of the locality of the farmer that changes the character of the trade from an advantage into a disadvantage to the eommunity ; what it is that makes us talk of the good it does to the country in the one case and the drain it is upon it in the other. In both cases the manufacturers have to give value in goods for the corn obtained, and on the surface it would appear that the more corn obtained for a given amount of goods the better off the manufacturer would be. In answer to this I shall be told that in one case you en- courage home industry and employ labour at home, but that in the other case there is an annual drain of so much " money." The last is soon answered. It is not money that we lose. We never send any money anywhere, except now and then to correct bank balances ; but this does not go on for long. We do not produce money in this country, and therefore it is im- possible for us to pay in money. On an average during the last twelve years we have imported about one million pounds worth of bullion more than we have exported. If we did pay in money, we should have none left in the course of a few months. We pay for goods we import by goods which we export, and there is no other commercial means of getting other countries to let us have their goods. The farmer abroad will no more let us have his wheat unless we send him goods than the farmer at home. The drain of so much " money," therefore, simply means that the manufacturers do not have the wheat given them, but that they have to work and make goods in exchange wherever they get them or, in other words, it makes work or trade. When we get goods from abroad it makes the shipping trade, or what is called commerce, good. If we could produce everything to as great relative advantage at home as others can abroad, there would be no commerce with other nations, and our vaunted trade would go to the wall ; just in the same way if every county or part of a county here could produce equally well . everything it required, there would be but little work for the railways. And to follow the thing up to its logical issue, if every man could produce everything he required as well as he could exchange a special product for his requirements, there would be an end to all trade of every sort. But not only is such not the case, but the whole course of civilisation is going in the opposite direction, making interchange more necessary and easy. We are supposed to be over-populated here because we do not grow our own wheat, but never because we do not grow our own cotton, sugar, tea, coffee, oranges, spices, etc., etc. And yet if we can obtain these things from abroad cheaper 89 than we can grow them at home, and if it is considered good for the country and for commerce that we should do so, why is it not good that we should import wheat also for the same reason ? Now, as regards the discouragement of home industry and the number of men who might be employed growing wheat at home instead of in America, it is true that many men might be at home who are now abroad. But how come they to be abroad ' One of two causes. The first, and, I believe, the greatest, is our present land laws, which either prevent a man from getting access to the land at all, or do not allow him to till it under conditions that make successful agriculture possible, and these laws I am trying to get altered ; but what is the next cause, and a cause that would outlive the reform of the land laws ? Why, the free will of the men who prefer growing wheat abroad to growing it at home. Whose business is that but theirs 1 We get their trade to the amount of the wheat they send us, as we should do did they grow it here. We are benefited by their removal if they can supply us the wheat cheaper. We simply exchange so much home trade for so much foreign. We have not banished the men ; they have gone abroad for their own benefit. They have simply obeyed their natural instinct to carry on their trade in that part of the world where it can be carried on to the best advantage. In doing so they gain by extra reward for their labour, and their customers gain by extra reward, too that is, by cheaper produce. We want no laws to force men to cultivate land or to help them by Protection to do so. It is best for all that things should take their natural course. But, as we love our country and delight in agriculture the healthiest and, in my thinking, in many ways the most charming occupa- tion there is we should see that things have a chance of tak- ing their natural course, and that every encouragement that just laws can give should be given to agriculture at home, to make our country beautiful and rich, and social inter- course in agricultural districts possible, to gladden those Scotch glens with merry voices once more, and beautify them with bright patches of cultivated land. I fully believe, more- over and I am well conversant with agriculture that, in spite of America or any other competitor, just land laws would repopulate and beautify our land, and that a temporary agricultural depression would not mean agricultural distress, bnt merely the reduction of agricultural rents for a time. If one country can exchange freely with all the world, it cannot possibly be over-populated until the world is over- 90 populated, so long as it can manufacture to advantage, and so long as there is plenty of material to work on. The larger the industry the greater are the facilities of manu- facture. We no more starve for the want of sugar than the grower of sugar starves for the want of our sugar-presses so long as we can exchange. They are as pleased to get our goods as we are to get theirs. There is no line to be drawn, no point at which national exchange becomes a loss instead of a gain. If it is profitable to exchange 1,000, so, under similar cir- cumstances, it is profitable to exchange 1,000,000,000. I have been trying to show the true nature of commerce. It consists in countries changing produce which they can respec- tively produce to better relative advantage than their neigh- bours for produce which their neighbours produce to better relative advantage than they. Thus, for a nation which glories in and makes so much wealth by her commerce to grumble because she cannot do without it is like a child who cries because it can't have its cake and eat it. The conclusion I come to is this : That we have plenty of the three necessaries for work and wealth, that we have plenty of labour, capital and material, and that, whatever the reason of the poverty that exists around us is, it is not that there are too many of us ; and, further, that our not producing our own food is no sign of either poverty or over-population, but that in so far as the present depopulation of the agricultural dis- tricts is forced by unnatural and unjust laws, to that extent does it entail lasting hardship and poverty, and to that extent only. And when I look abroad and see the state of destitution there is in the great wheat-producing countries in the world India, Russia, and America and when I read of the terrible suffering of the poor in France and Austria, my conclusion is strengthened by actual facts, as it appears that not only is the thickly-populated non-food-producing country of England far richer per head than thinly-populated food-producing countries, but that, on the whole, there is even less suffering amongst the poor, and a more regular supply of food for them to eat. But the most absurd thing, showing the greatest confusion of ideas, is when the Malthusian theory is appealed to as able to account for the present poverty and want of work in England. The Malthusian theory may or may not be true. I consider that Henry George has shown it to be ridiculously untrue ; but, even if it be true, all that it goes to show in England is that, so far from population pressing upon us, we are year by year feeling its pressure less. For what is the gist of Malthus's theory ? To use his own words " That there is a natural 91 tendency and constant effort in population to increase beyond the means of subsistence," and that, as population increases, less fertile and convenient lands in the course of time have to be brought into cultivation, thus yielding a smaller return for labour. Unfortunately for the application of the Malthusian theory in England, however, we are not suffering from any shortness of food. On the contrary, food is more plentiful than it ever has been, and a certain class of politicians think that we are suffering from too cheap a loaf. Again, so far from push- ing our agriculture to less fertile lands, we are withdrawing it from them, and in all parts of the country land which it was thought worth cultivating twenty years ago has gone out of cultivation altogether now, so that on the Malthusian theory we ought to be better off. No matter where we look, as Mr. George has so forcibly shown, we find that it is under-population that we are suffering from. Countries once prosperous and rich with teeming popu- lations are now miserable and poor with scant. Read a lecture given by Mr. Arnold Lupton, M.I.C.E., F.G.S., etc., "Our In- heritance in the Earth " (published by C. Goodhall, Leeds), where the enormous capacity of our earth is clearly shown. Even with our present knowledge, he shows that the earth could well support 100,000,000,000 of people, or seventy times its present population, and then leave plenty of fine open country to roam about in, and plenty of room for pleasure grounds of e^ery description, One would have thought, under these circumstances, that we might with profit, to say the least of it, leave the solution of the population theory to those whom it would affect, and to the Maker of the earth and all living things. One would have thought that we had our hands about full, without relieving unknown posterity of problems that we fancy they may have to solve. I am afraid we shall not get many thanks for our excessive kindness, but more likely be found fault with for not minding our own business and making our people rich and happy, instead of making our solicitude for the welfare of future generations the excuse for not only neglecting our duties, but actually for opposing every effort to ameliorate the lot of our unhappy fellow-creatures. The pet scheme of the Malthusians, " moral restraint/ 7 in some form or other, is suicidal, for what does it mean but that public-spirited men would die out while non-public-spirited men would live 1 ? People who would morally restrain themselves on public grounds would be just the salt of the earth whom we should wish to keep, and the vicious and unpublic-spirited 92 people would multiply, according to Malthus, all the faster as there would be so much more room for them. Urging a man to limit his family for private motives is an entirely different matter ; it is a private matter, not a political. A man who has more children than be can properly bring up and feed, so long as he is not a pauper, does not directly im- poverish the State in any way, but only impoverishes himself and family while they are on his hands. He does the same amount of work as if he had half the children, and he spends the same amount of money. The outside public are not affected, but he and his family are, as they have so much less to live upon. We English call ourselves a practical people. The professors of the Malthusian theory look down upon such men as myself as theorists, and yet they found their philan- thropy, not only on a theory, but a theory entirely unsub- stantiated by fact. A gentleman in the Highlands told me that the clearance of those glens was a sad thing, but was the necessary outcome of over-population. So the Highlanders were to be dismissed from these glens which have kept their number for ages, to go on poorer soil and into crowded centres of industry, in order to relieve the pressure of population ! To what absurdity can people go when they have once got a convenient theory in their heads, a theory which supports them in any crime which relieves them of all responsibility and enables them to lavish on themselves the money earned by starving thousands ! No matter where we look, we find suffering and want altogether independently of population ; we find an easy life only possible in a thick population, we find a penurious life inevitable in very thin populations. If over-population is the cause of poverty, why all this suffering in North America'? Are there too many people there, where one State would hold them all with ease and not be nearly as thickly populated as we are then ? Think also of the immense numbers of unemployed, the misery and starvation in Australia, which though nearly as large as the United States, contains only a population of 4,000,000. Will any one dare to say there is over-population there 1 If it is not the actual number but the too rapid growth of population that makes men so poor, how comes it that in France, where the population does not increase at all, there is so much suffering, and such dearth of emplo} r ment that the Government has been borrowing some twenty millions a year lately in order to give work to people ? 93 Let us look these things fairly in the face. There must be some other reason for poverty other than over-population, in thinly-populated countries at any rate, and if there is, is it not more than possible that this other reason is also the cause of the poverty in thickly-populated countries ? Can the over- population theory be consistently held, even in England ? We are suffering from a depression now, and there are hundreds of thousands out of work, but in the ordinary course of things in a few years we shall be full of trade again, and every willing man and woman will be able to find work, and yet population will have been increasing all the time. Yes, I shall be told, but in the meantime we shall have been using up the over- supply. Now, that is just what we shall not have been doing. The people will have been using much less than usual instead of more, and stocks of all sorts of goods will have been increas- ing instead of decreasing ; as soon as good trade comes, however, down will go the stocks, some of them will vanish, and people will be using up things as fast as they can be made. England is suffering from a severe depression now, and so she was forty years ago, when there were many millions fewer people. Young men find it difficult to find berths ; so they did a generation ago, when two of my uncles and other relations went abroad. Ireland has recently had a famine, in spite of a steadily decreasing population. We hear of distress in the Highlands of Scotland, in spite of the population having nearly vanished. Nowhere does the theory of over-population ac- count for any poverty or distress. Ask any scientific man how a theory can be proved to be correct, and he will tell you by its consistently accounting for facts, but that if it does not account for all the facts it is in- tended to it cannot be considered sound, unless you can show how it is overridden by some other and stronger power, which takes its place in these instances. Applying this test to Mal- thus's theory, let me ask, first, where does the theory consist- ently account for poverty 1 and, secondly, if we grant that it does in some cases, what stronger power is there that accounts for its failure in others 1 I shall have some district in Ireland or Scotland or some island pointed out to me, and shall be shown how there are evidently more people than can get a fair living off the land there. Now, putting on one side the question as to how much of the inability is owing to ttie systematic way that the people have been robbed of the fruits of their industry, and the con- sequent decline of agriculture and incentive to work, I will suppose, for the sake of argument, that there is nothing of this 94 kind to impoverish the people, but that, work as hard and cul- tivate the land to as much advantage as they can, they can't get a livelihood. What does it prove more than that in the present state of knowledge there are too many "agriculturists" in that particular spot in proportion to the manufacturing population 1 It no more proves over-population than it would prove that an engineer had too many workpeople because he chose to put all his men to the forge and leave the lathe stand- ing idle, or that a farmer had too many men because he put double the number he wanted to plough, leaving other pro- cesses neglected, or that he had too many sheep because he neglected to plant turnips to feed them in the winter. All these things do not show too many men or sheep, but a wrong management of the men and sheep that leads to starvation. These people in their patches of over-populated, worthless ground, where they have been driven by the landlords of Ire- land and Scotland, are about as helpless as sheep ; they have no one to guide and teach them handicrafts, they have no means or knowledge to help themselves, nor yet any encouragement. Of course they starve, of course there are too many of them ; they have been driven where there is no pasture. It is only by teaching men handicrafts, by the organisation and by the de- velopment of industry, that men are enabled to live in association at all. In the same way in the country, if trade is disorganised and ruined by the greed of landowners, and if there is no field for the introduction and development of industry, the people will starve in the country j ust as under similar circumstances they will starve in the town. After an Irish landowner has con- verted arable land into pasture, and has driven off the inhabitants to bogs and barren, stony mountain slopes, he says there are too many people. Does he ever realise that the land in culti- vation will keep five to ten times the number of people that it will in pasture, and that the people thrown on barren spots have no heart or inclination to make them fertile when they know the landowner will at once absorb all the benefit *? Here we come to the landowner's view of over-population, which accounts for a multitude of errors. The landowner looks on land as a source of revenue and enjoyment to himself and himself alone. The system, then, that brings him in the greatest revenue with the least trouble and the most pleasure is the system that recommends itself; hence it follows that if his estate had 100 people to the square mile on it, it would be over- populated in his opinion, if by having a shepherd only he could draw a little more rent ; hence it follows that even if it yielded him as much, or rather more rent, with the hundred souls than with the shepherd, he still might prefer to have only the shep- 95 herd, as this might entail less trouble and responsibility. We therefore find that landowners begin to speak of over-popula- tion, not when the people even under what may be a blighting rule become too numerous to obtain a living, but when, all things considered, he thinks he can get more rent, or get it with less trouble with fewer people. On estates where the people are getting cleared off, the land- lord will take you over and say, " Look at them, what a miser- able, poor lot they are ; it is all for their own good, although it may seem hard ; they will be far better off in America, or some of the towns." Of course they are miserable and poor; if they are living with nothing before them but eviction, what should make them work and make their homes comfortable ] Of course they are miserable and poor, if for generations they have been systematically denied every incentive to make them- selves happy and rich, if the landowner will do nothing for them, nor yet practically, through his rapacity, allow them to do anything for themselves. " They breed like rabbits,' 7 you will hear next; "they must be kept down." And why do they breed like rabbits, but because they are so miserable and poor, but because their whole soul is ground out of them, and because all sense of responsibility and thought for the future has been weeded out of their nature? The lower you crush mankind the more utterly reckless they are, the more like rabbits. You find none of this recklessness amongst peasant-proprietors, and yet they are descendants of these very same unfortunate classes we have been speaking about. But the landowner has his pleasure to look after as well as his rent, and the principal pleasure of the landowning class is sport. This necessitates the clearance of corn and man off the land to a greater or less extent to make room for game. This accounts for the so-called over- population of the Highlands. In these cases the landowner considers there are too many people, if there are more than he wants to preserve his game ; so a thousand men, women, and children are turned out of a glen to make room for red deer and a gamekeeper. There are too many people not too many to be able to make a living, but too many for the pleasure of his lordship. Cannot people see that in these cases it is not a question of population at all, and that this is merely hauled in by design or ignorance 1 Cannot people see that it is a mere question of rent and pleasure, and cannot people see that this is nothing more or less than acknowledging that the earth is made, not for man, but for a few, a very few men, to collect the greatest amount of plunder for themselves, and to beguile their idle, useless lives away in brutal sports 1 Humanity is outside the 96 quest iorf altogether, and is not considered at all ; humanity, with its throbbing heart, with its joys and sorrows, with its instincts and natural yearning to draw towards the Creator in Whose image, we are told, man was made, is regarded as a simple tool. How long is a nation that wrongs the name of Liberty by calling itself free, that mocks itself by calling its country its own, going to endure all this 1 How long will it be before it will see that the interests of the landowners, or, indeed, any privileged class, are, to a great extent, diametrically opposed to, and careless of, the interest of humanity, and that economic laws working under these conditions inevitably force the land to be used, not in the way which will enable the workers to pro- duce most, and live the happiest and healthiest lives, but in the way by which the idlers cati draw the most money and pleasure with the least trouble 1 Supposing we took the millions of people out of England that some people think we don't want, What then? Who would be benefited 1 What trade would be busier, what occu- pation more profitable 1 The farmer would have a less call for his produce than ever ; railway companies, works, offices, theatres, etc., would require fewer hands, would pay a smaller dividend ; posts, trains, and steamers would run less frequently \ the smaller the population grew, the more of our cherished conveniences should we have to give up there would be fewer hands requiring employment, and fewer jobs for them. We should be able to exchange so much less with other countries ; our traders would do so much less trade ; we should find ourselves just so much poorer, and with the same proportion of men out of work. Ah ! but if we could send all the vagabonds out ! All the idle and vicious, who so many respectable people say form the bulk of the suffering poor, men who don't want to work, and who richly deserve all they get ! Yes, if! But these are just the people we can't get rid of; moreover, these people don't grow without a cause, so that if we did get rid of them, by hanging, for instance, as is often suggested, it would not pre- vent the system that had nurtured them from speedily raising another crop. Then, again, I greatly fear that such a clearance would make such sad havoc amongst the middle and upper classes as to make the process become exceedingly un- popular and inconvenient, to put it mildly, even with some of its most enthusiastic promoters. Henry George has shown how there appears to be no ten- dency for population to increase under certain conditions of 97 easy life. I don't believe that the middle class keeps up its number at present. Of course, a good many emigrate, and a good many fall into the lower class, but let anyone walk round a town where the middle-class houses have doubled, say in thirty years, and inquire at each house asking whether they or their fathers were middle-class people thirty years ago. I should imagine that it would be found that three out of every four have risen from the ranks since that date. Now, without allowing for emigration, etc., if the houses have only doubled, half in- stead of one quarter ought to have been middle-class people thirty years before, if the middle class have kept up their number. It is as monstrous as it is useless for us to trouble ourselves about the over-population question unless it is one that presses for solution in our day. We who do so very small a part of our own duty should do well if we ceased to relieve our posterity of duties which we think might possibly devolve on them. No one who is able to think logically, and will take the trouble to examine facts, can maintain that there are too many people in the world yet, or that the depres- sions in America or Australia, or indeed anywhere else, are due to over-population. If they really believe what they say, that no reform that makes the people more comfortable will be of lasting good until the people are taught not to multiply so fast, why can't they commence their operations in France, where the people are in this happy condition ? Why can't they make the French nation an example of the blessings to be derived from obeying their mandate ? The real reason of all this poverty is, as George says, in the unjust laws and maladministration of a society which is daily becoming more dependent upon the harmonious working of its separate members, and consequently more dependent on the laws which regulate their connexions. CHAPTEK XL CONCLUSION. I REMEMBER a few years ago, when I used to explain Henry George's views on the land question to my friends, they would generally say, without attempting to refute the principle, 98 " It will never be done." I hear comparatively little of this now ; the more usual observation is, " How are you to do it 1 " If I am not mistaken, it will not be many years before " How are you to do it ? " will begin to give way to " Which is the best way V' T can sympathise with and understand the " It will never be done " sentiment. Look at the giant institution of private ownership in land, the growth, in some form or other, of almost every civilisation the world has known ! Look at the firm root it has taken in our nineteenth century western civilisation, which appears to be almost built upon it ; see the enormous power of all those classes interested in the holding of land, and how intimately connected the institution is with all our ideas of property and security, and how prejudiced in its favour the minds of most men are, even when they neither own nor ever expect to own a foot of land and does it not appear as if you would have to upheave the world to get rid of such an overwhelming institution 1 One fact we forget, however, and that one fact changes the whole aspect of affairs. Gigantic as the system is, firmly as it has got us in its grasp, we forget that it is not built upon human instincts of right and justice, but in spite of them ; that it has not advanced naturally and quietly with the progress of civili- sation and with the free will of the people, but unnaturally and violently, in spite of them. Its progress is marked by a long- series of usurpations, crimes, and frauds; each advance has been as desolating as an invading army, the fields of battle have been strewn with ruined homes and broken hearts, and it has been with bitter resentment that the subject population has submitted to the absolute sway of the landowner as he has gradually filched from them almost every inch of common land, and deprived them of every opportunity of true in- dependence. In spite, however, of the triumph of the landowner, and in spite of our having become accustomed to be ordered off mountain sides and beautiful nooks which used to be common land ; in spite of the institution having made such slaves of most of us that we think it only natural that we should have masters to whom we must pay blackmail for the right of living, to whom we must pay respect by reason of their having suc- ceeded to, or bought the results of the crimes of their pre- decessors ; although we are inured to the degradations and to the constant indignities and suffering entailed, and although God has allowed all this, there is one thing He has not allowed He has not allowed our human nature to be stamped out ; He has only allowed its perceptions to be blunted. Centuries 99 have not made us and the invading army of one blood ; it is as alien now as the first year of the conquest. We only require our eyes opened, our instincts appealed to, and we shall be up in arms, full of enthusiasm, ready and able to destroy the institution in about as many days as it took years to create it. A man has come forth I mean Henry George who has opened the eyes of many of us, who has exposed the institution of private ownership in land in all its hideous nakedness ; he has appealed to our highest instincts, our purest nature ; he has kindled a flame that has no more chance of going out or ceas- ing to spread till it has done its work than a prairie fire has of being stopped while there is dry grass in its way to burn. As soon as people have done denouncing him, they will tacitly be- gin to follow him ; indeed, they are doing so already. He is a prophet not without honour in his day ; he has come forth just at the right time, just when the people are willing and able to put his grand theories into practice. I do not speak thus cheerfully and confidently about the whole thing because T do not recognise the difficulties and dangers that beset us, but because I do, and am sure we are strong enough to overcome the one and avoid the other. The danger lies, not in the revolution being brought about too soon though national calamity abroad would make this possible nor yet in its not being brought about at all ; but in its being brought about too late, in its being the work of passion and agony, instead of reason and faith. The difficulty lies in steering the movement clear of its enemies, and bringing it about at the right time ; not forced, but only aided by cir; cumstances. Perhaps, up to the present time, no such revolution as this would have been possible in England ; but the more I study politics, the more do I feel convinced that it is not only possible now, but that it is a case of now or never; that in our genera- tion we have to decide if our civilisation is to go up or down, and that we have now a healthier democracy to work this great change than we are ever likely to have again if we let the op- portunity slip. Things will not go on much longer in their pre- sent course, of that we may rest assured. Rich 'men will not get much richer, and poor men much more helpless, without a strong effort being made to stop the continuance of such mon- strous inequality. The Duke of Westminster will, it is said, be worth five millions a year during the early part of next century if things go on as they are. Other rich men will have been getting pro- portionately richer, and the people are not only beginning to 100 see that every farthing of this money has to be furnished by them and makes them so much the poorer, but they are begin- ning most painfully to feel it too. There will be an attempt made to stop these men taking money that they have in no sense earned, to stop these great avalanches gathering up every- where what they have never planted, working destruction and desolation in their onward course, independently of any will of their own, but simply by their own weight and size making their course almost entirely beyond their control as they sweep down the mountain- sides and dales, destroying villages and home- steads ; there will be an attempt made to stop their course, and the plan of starting small snowballs, nominally independent, but practically simply feeders for the avalanches, will not stop them, but simply make them so much bigger. It is not a question of whether or not an effort will be made, but whether the effort will be constitutionally healthy and successful, or whether the effort will be violent, unhealthy, and disastrous. This will depend upon whether or not the upper classes are successful in misleading the people, in throwing them off the scent of real reforms, in making them vote for their mas- ters instead of themselves in other words, in making their poli- tical power nominal, and not real. The wealthy do not deliberately desire the demoralisation of the people but their political action as a class is nevertheless demoralising. It is the inevitable result of the rich being obliged to appeal to a class into whose lives and aspirations they don't enter. The rich have no programme of reform to offer ; they have no real sympathy with the general position of the poor, which they consider natural and inevitable, and their own fault. They know that the working classes instinctively feel that the privileged and rich live at their expense ; they know that the working classes instinctively feel that they (the rich) are no more likely to be genuinely anxious about making laws for the special benefit of the poor than the poor are to make laws for the special benefit of the rich. The only way, then, that the rich can. hope to gain the support of the poor is to demoralise them that is, to make them vote for personal instead of public considerations ; to make prigs and flunkeys of as many as possible to toady to the private interests, passions, and vices of so many more. There is a deliberate attempt to put personal popularity, local interests, social advantages and pleasures in place of national considerations. For instance, a candidate is to be voted for because he is so great, and yet so condescending and affable ; because he is so kind and liberal in his private life ; because he is presumably so honourable, or 101 such a jolly good fellow ; because he has influence and favour to bestow all very excellent reasons for liking and respecting a man in private life, no doubt, but it happens to be unneces- sary to put a man into Parliament to enable him to practise all these kindly virtues. What we want for a political representa- tive is a man who we know will support just and respectable laws, and who will fight our battles for us in Parliament. It matters not which way we look, we see the same tendency to crush out public spirit, and replace it with petty, impure, self- seeking, snobbish motives. To the wealthy the crucial test of the soundness of a reform is whether or not it will in any way prevent them from getting and keeping as rich and as powerful as they could under the old regime; and if it has any tendency to prevent this, or might, according to their ideas, lead on to other reforms that would , it is condemned as socialistic, and an attempt to raise the poor at their expense, as they are pleased to call it. They are glad to grant and aid reforms which will give the lower classes oppor- tunities of bettering their position by extreme thrift, penury, and toil, so long as the change will increase rather than dimin- ish their ability to keep their present position, but no longer. They are willing to give and to give largely sometimes in order to relieve the sufferings and gladden the lives of the poor, but they are not willing to inaugurate any scheme by which they would be prevented from getting the poor's money, by which it would never leave the pockets of those that made it. They are often kind and generous, but they can't bear to be politically just ; not because they don't try, but because they are brought up surrounded by a film of prejudice and interest which it is impossible for an ordinary man to see through, and which must be broken if broken at all by an outsider. Now justice, as George says, may not be the highest virtue, but it is the first. It is the foundation of politics. There is no health in kindness unpreceded by justice, much less in kind- ness given in place of justice, which is the way the rich are always trying to bribe the poor. From a class which fancies that it cannot mend its position, that it has everything to lose by a change, whose idea of justice is gauged by the effect it will have on its own ambitions and fortunes, it is altogether unreasonable to expect healthy political action. In their private lives the upper classes may be men of better principle, more breadth of thought, more kind- ness and tenderness of disposition than the lower, with their deadening and brutalising surroundings. But I am not speak- ing about private virtues, but of the inevitable political tend- 102 ency of the one class as against the other. The upper classes naturally fear reform, do not desire justice, and don't believe the working men can be trusted with political power, which, being interpreted, means that they cannot trust them, if left alone, to act only for the advantage of their masters, or to per- petuate laws made by the rich for the benefit of the rich, on the sublime principle of " Compounding for sins we are inclined to by damning those we have no mind to." They are quite right : the working classes are not to be trusted in this way. The wealthy can't teach the poor to act wisely politically, as they do not wish them to act politically at all. If they once got such an engine to work, they feel it would soon get entirely out of their control, and do many things which they perhaps honestly think would destroy civilisation that is to say, break into their ranks, which they consider the backbone and salvation of the nation. With a democratic Government, so long as the rich wish to rule, the only course open to them, as far as I can see, is the course they take that of misleading the people ; of directing their attention off public matters to private ones ; of making their political power nominal, and not real ; by induc- ing them to vote, not for themselves, but for their masters, who, by their superior intelligence and respectability, must naturally, they think, be the most suitable men to govern. Once launched on this campaign, which, as I will show, is a campaign against the public spirit and morality of the nation, it necessarily follows that as time and occasion demands, and as men get hardened to the work in hand, they become less and less scrupulous in the means they use to accomplish their object. For instance, the working classes are taught that their com- fort and welfare rest with themselves individually ; that they can be comfortable and happy under their present condition of life if they will but be thrifty, sober, and industrious ; that it is to this and to the benevolence of their betters, who will reward them if they are virtuous, that they must look for bettering their condition. Here we have the first class of teaching and the least objectionable. The working classes are not to help themselves politically but privately ; they are not to be independent but dependent for much of their welfare on the philanthropy of their superiors ; private virtue is not to be preceded and helped by justice ; men are not to be public- spirited and try and help their neighbours to a fair field where virtuous private life is easy instead of nearly impossible, but they are to centre their thoughts on their own. Then the working classes are to be patient and contented with their lot, and grateful for the small mercies they enjoy. 103 Now, patience under trials you cannot remove, contentment with things that are just, gratitude to those we ought to be grateful to, are all virtues that should be encouraged. But to be patient with trials that you not only can remove, but that it is your duty to remove, to be contented with injustice and misery all around, and to be grateful to the perpetrators of in- justice because they don't perpetrate more, is the doctrine for slaves, not men. Here, again, we have a distinctly degrading influence. Next we come to foreign policy. And here the working classes are invited to forget themselves, to be no longer patient, contented, and grateful, but to be willing to die and suffer for what they are told is the glory and honour of their country. Their attention is drawn from the wrongs all about them, not to do good for their fellow-men abroad, but to crush them. They are to be recompensed for being bullied at home by having the honour of joining in common cause with their op- pressors in bullying someone else ; also to have the satisfaction of being patted on the back and called brave fellows. All this is unpatriotic, demoralising in the extreme, Tbe working class are drawn out of their private life. But what for ? Only to do violence to every Christian and manly principle, to help to fasten yokes on other people who loathe them, and to deny to others the rights they claim for themselves. The hardness of heart, the pride and vainglory, the hatred and malice that some of us pray God to deliver us from every week are all to be exalted into national virtues. In fact, all the methods practised to counteract Acts of Parliament nominally putting more power in the hands of the poor, are necessarily demoralising in so much as they are attempts to rob the working-man of his vote without his knowing it. They all tend to throw dust in his eyes, and blind him to the real state of things ; and so long as the upper classes are determined to rule, while the working classes have the voting power, this blinding process is absolutely necessary. How else can the rich get their vote ? It is not to the rich then that I look for help. On the con- trary, it is the action of the rich if left unchecked that will destroy our civilisation. It is to the working classes that I appeal. It is with them, and them only, that I see a fair field for political action. I feel that whatever their private virtues and vices may be as compared with those of the rich, they, at any rate, are not surrounded by interests, prejudices, and fears which make healthy political action next door to impos- sible. I appeal to them because I feel sure that with proper 104 guidance and help they will accomplish great and noble things; because I feel every time that I speak to them that I have only to appeal to first principles to obtain their applause, and that as soon as I begin to say anything that looks like a com- promise a puzzled look comes on their faces, and I lose hold of rny audience ; because I feel that if the best men of our land will come before the w r orking classes, knowing how to lead them out of their misery, they will be trustfully and loyally followed. The working classes make great mistakes, no doubt, and only too often put their trust in men entirely unworthy of it. But one thing they hardly ever do ; they hardly ever fail to recognise and support a man of character and principle who has the power and the will to make himself known. They enthusiastically support him, while the upper and middle class are persecuting and reviling him. An average middle or upper class man cannot follow an argument on an economic question for two minutes before he leaves it to consider how the change would affect his aunt's investments, which he expects to in- herit, or some particular stroke of business by which he has made or hopes to make money ; but a working man, ex- pecting nothing from his relatives, and having never made any money, and never expecting to make any, except by his own work, can follow you without looking either right or left, simply endeavouring to seek justice, which he instinc- tively feels is his friend. He instinctively feels what logic can prove, that all he wants is justice. And why ? What can he get by injustice ? Whom is he to live on but himself? A few idlers can easily live on many workers, but how in the world can many workers live on a few idlers 1 Working men instinc- tively feel that this cannot be done, that their class, at any rate, cannot be privileged, in the nature of things, that it is useless for them to try and get what other men make, but that all they must aim at is to get what they make themselves, to prevent it from passing out of their hands. In the working classes you have a natural leaning towards, and yearning for, justice ; you have a power that, if you will but lead and help to put this yearning into reasonable practice, will carry you over every obstacle. You have a power that, if you deceive, demoralise, and degrade, will turn round upon you in the day of its wild anguish and despair, and rend you to pieces. It is a fearful thing to contemplate. It is strange, indeed, that the wealthy are so blind as to think they can make safe a state by fostering ignoble qualities in the working classes, by polluting the life-blood of their country. It is a question as to whether money or character is to win. 105 Money has no heart, and will run as evenly selfish and un- scrupulous a course as circumstances admit of, and seem to necessitate, in self-defence. That a selfish course is a stupid course that ends in the long run in disappointment and defeat in the very objects attempted to be obtained it is quite unneces- sary for me t'o point out in a Christian country like this. That the just and unjust must suffer together is proverbial. Let not men of character, who are able to see how matters stand, lose time. Money is always at work is always advancing, if not checked but it cannot work fast; it Cannot take the nation by storm ; it is like a slow poison it must have its time. The way to attack it, and the only way, is to overtake it, which is easily done in the earlier part of the contest. The enthusiasm of a nation may be worked up in a moment, its generous and noble side may be put into action at an hour's notice ; but to completely corrupt a people takes generations. It is true money has, like the tortoise, so far won the race, and corruption has ruined ancient civilisations. But why? Not because the democracy was wanting in patriots who could stir the people to do what they wished ; but because those patriots knew not whither to lead them, knew not how to sap the roots of their dreaded and ever-encroaching rival. The problem was too much for them. There is nothing to fear so long as we know where the enemy lies. We have plenty of men of the highest character, intelligence, and philanthropy, and indeed wealth, ready to come forward, and, coming forward, ready to fight for humanity, and able, I believe, to lead it to its long-looked* for haven. The working classes have just had their vote. They are discontented ; but it is the discontent of hope. It is a discontent which makes them able to take part in any grand and thoughtful movement. Don't let us wait till it is a discontent of despair which makes them incapable of taking part in any but a violent and thoughtless revolution. At the risk of repetition let me sum up thus : The rich are in an unnatural position, and are almost ac- knowledged to be so by themselves. They are in the position of being able to absorb annually the work of hundreds or thousands, as the case may be, through no virtue of their own or fault of those they take it from. Even those who are first to oppose any reform that tends to modify this power are ready to acknow- ledge that the extremes of wealth and poverty are an evil, and cannot be accounted for altogether by differences of ability and thrift. They acknowledge the evil, a-nd acknowledge that it would be a mercy if some plan could be found of mitigating it. They don't, however, think that it is possible to alter it, and 106 what is more, they don't wish to think that it is ; they talk of it as inevitable, as springing from the natural inequalities of man ; their political creed is that there always must be rich and poor ; they are content with things as they are. Where there is no will there is no way. We may look in vain for any reform here. But they do not stop at not inaugurating reform ; they naturally actively oppose it. Instinctively feeling they are in a false position, they are touchy as people always are under such circumstances, and ready to take fright at anything and every- thing. Granted that their position is false and untrue, their inevitable action is to support that which is false and untrue, in so much as they fear change. They think there is nothing for it but to be where they are or where the poor are ; and naturally prefer keeping to exchanging their position, and per- suade themselves that they are a necessary part of society. The poor, like the rich, are in an unnatural position, but, unlike the rich, they not only feel that their position might be modified by political change, but are determined that it shall be. They have no fear of change ; they feel that they have everything to gain by reform and nothing to lose. They are not like the rich, afraid of being hurled into poverty. They don't expect all to be millionaires. But they don't see it in the natural order of things that they should be as poor as they are and that others should be so rich. They have the will, and will try and find the way ; they are as naturally inclined to support a true and genuine reform as the rich are to oppose it. Can anyone deny thisl The only answer is that they have not the sense to know how to change things for the better, that their last state will be worse than their first, that the reforms they propose and support are not healthy and true, that they must be saved from themselves. This will be true only in case they are not only left unaided in every legitimate effort they make to break their bonds, but are also persistently demoralised, misled and crushed. The moral is self-evident ; let men from all ranks of society, from the working classes to the aristocracy, who feel they can lead them to something real and true, come out at once and work ; there is the material, there are the men ready to fol- low them. Revolutions, as George says, are not made by majorities, but by a few earnest men. Let those men come out then, and do their duty ; it rests with them, not with the working classes as a class. Such men will have the support of the instinct of justice and yearning for truth planted in the human breast ; with such help, and such an army, victory is 107 certain ; their march will be as irresistible as the rising tides of the sea. Before closing, let me protest against my scheme being called levelling. The real levellers are those whose schemes condemn the great masses of mankind to a monotonous routine of grinding toil, of joyless existence. I have come to certain conclusions, especially about interest, with which many will disagree, and which better heads than mine may prove to be only partially true. Whether this be the case or not, let me once more point out that I have proposed no single arbitrary law, that I have simply endeavoured to follow justice, and protect, not take away, that which belongs to an individual ; that, so far from holding that a man has no right to make a fortune or to get interest, I have maintained that he has a right to get and keep all he honestly can, although under fair laws I do not believe he will be able to get the interest he does now. It is simply a result of justice which I prophesy, but which I never looked for or tried to attain. I do not pretend in my chapter on Capital to have proved my way step by step, and do not for a moment wish it to be considered that I offer the chapter as anything more than a sketch, of what I consider the logical results of nationalising the land ; indeed, to have done much more than this would have been running quite out of the scheme of this essay, which has simply been an attempt to protect in practice what I held in theory were the fundamental and inalienable rights of man. NOTE. A friend of mine, who has seen these pages, has pointed out to me how very unsafe it would be to bind the nation to a rent paid in gold in any way. He points out that the value of gold may at any time immensely increase through the working out of the best mines, and that although the real value of the land might be going up, the gold value might not. He suggests a plan of checking the value by the price of the produce as a whole. I quite agree with all this, and although I feel that to go into the matter is out of the sphere of this essay, I mention it to say that when the arrangement is made for the transfer of the land this matter should be thoroughly discussed: and in case no definite plan can be devised, there ought at any rate to be a saving clause inserted to enable the people to adjust the interest to the value of gold if occasion demands. We are subject to exactly the same danger with the National Debt, which we are bound to pay in coin of the realm. See Jevons on "A Multiple Legal Tender," etc., in his book on " Money and the Mechanism of Exchange," p. 327, etc. THE END. Printed by Cowan &~ Co., Limited, Perth. RETURN CIRCULATION DEPARTMENT TO ^> 202 Main Library LOAN PERIOD 1 HOME USE 2 3 4 5 6 ALL BOOKS MAY BE RECALLED AFTER 7 DAYS Renewals and Recharges may be made 4 days prior to the due date. Books may be Renewed by calling 642-3405. 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