KDI306 
 GTC6
 
 UWLRT 
 
 UNIVERS1T ' CALIFORNIA 
 RIVERSIDE
 
 SOCIAL QUESTIONS OF TO-DAY 
 Edited by H. de B. Gibbins, M.A. 
 
 LAND NATIONALIZATION
 
 SOCIAL QUESTIONS OF TO-DAY. 
 
 Edited by H. de B. GIB BINS, M.A. 
 Crown 8vo, 2s. 6d 
 Messrs. Methuen announce the publication of a series of 
 volumes upon those topics of social, economic and industrial in- 
 terest that are at the present moment foremost in the public mind. 
 Each volume of the series is written by an author who is an 
 acknowledged authority upon the subject with which he deals, and 
 who treats his question in a thoroughly sympathetic but impartial 
 manner, with special reference to the historic aspect of the subject. 
 
 The following form the earlier Volumes of the Series : 
 
 1. TRADE UNIONISM NEW AND OLD. G. Howell, M.P., Author of 
 
 The Conflicts of Capital and Labour. [Ready. 
 
 2. PROBLEMS OF POVERTY : An Inquiry into the Industrial Condition of 
 
 the Poor. By J. A. Hobson, M.A. [Ready. 
 
 3. THE CO-OPERATIVE MOVEMENT TO-DAY. G. J. Holyoake, 
 
 Author of The History of Co-operation. [Ready. 
 
 4. MUTUAL THRIFT. Rev. J. Frome Wilkinson, M.A., Author of The 
 
 Friendly Society Movement. [Ready. 
 
 5. THE COMMERCE OF NATIONS. C. F. Bastable, LL.D., Professor of 
 
 Political Economy in the University of Dublin. [Ready. 
 
 6. THE ALIEN INVASION. W. H. Wilkins, B.A., Secretary to the 
 
 Association for Preventing the Immigration of Destitute Aliens. 
 (With an Introductory Note by the Right Reverend the Bishop of Bedford.) 
 
 [Ready. 
 
 7. THE RURAL EXODUS : Problems of Village Life. P. Anderson 
 
 Graham. [Ready. 
 
 8. LAND NATIONALIZATION. Harold Cox, B.A. [Ready. 
 
 The following are in preparation : 
 
 9. MODERN LABOUR AND OLD ECONOMICS. H. de B. Gibbins, M.A. 
 
 (Editor), Author of The Industrial History of England. 
 
 10. ENGLISH SOCIALISM OF TO-DAY. Hubert Bland, one of the 
 
 Authors of Fabian Essays. 
 
 11. ENGLISH LAND AND ENGLISH MEN. Rev. C. W. Stubbs, M.A., 
 
 Author of The Labourers and the Land. 
 
 12. CHRISTIAN SOCIALISM IN ENGLAND. Rev. J. Carter, M.A., of 
 
 Pusey House, Oxford. 
 
 13. THE EDUCATION OF THE PEOPLE. J. R. Diggle, M.A., Chairman of 
 
 the London School Board. 
 
 14. POVERTY AND PAUPERISM. Rev. L. R. Phelps, M.A., Fellow of 
 
 Oriel College, Oxford. 
 
 15. CONTINENTAL LABOUR. W. Maxwell. 
 
 16. WOMEN'S WORK. Lady Dii.ke. 
 
 17. A SHORTER WORKING-DAY. R. A. Hadkiei.d and H. de B. 
 
 Gibbins, M.A.
 
 LAND NATIONALIZATION 
 
 BV 
 
 HAROLD COX/b.A.) 
 
 FORMERLY SCHOLAR OF JESUS COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE I 
 JOINT AUTHOR OF " THE EIGHT HOURS DAY." 
 
 iHet&uen to Co. 
 
 18, BURY STREET, LONDON, W.C. 
 1892 
 
 [All rights reservtd]
 
 ft*7CC 
 
 Richard Clay & Sons, Limited, 
 London & Bungay.
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 The present volume does not profess to be complete. 
 The writer started with a bias in favour of land national- 
 ization, but at the outset of his work was obliged to 
 recognize that no well-thought-out scheme had yet been 
 presented to the public, and that many professed land 
 nationalizes grounded their faith on arguments historically 
 or economically unsound. It seemed then to him that the 
 most important thing to be done from every point of view 
 was to attack these mistakes ; no cause however good 
 can make headway as long as it is encumbered by argu- 
 ments that will not bear examination. Incidentally, various 
 proposals for the reform of local taxation have been con- 
 sidered, and an alternative reform suggested. On the 
 general question, the writer has limited his own initiative 
 to a few suggestions. Underlying all of them are two main 
 propositions that our first steps towards land nationalization 
 should be experimental, and that meanwhile we should 
 improve to the uttermost the present system of individual 
 ownership. Among the reforms suggested, the one on which 
 the writer lays most stress, is the demand that the land- 
 owner's present power of exclusion should be so restricted 
 that the unoffending public may enjoy the Right to Roam 
 over all uncultivated land. 
 
 H. C. 
 
 I, Field Court, 
 July 1892.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAP. 
 
 I. INTRODUCTION ... 
 
 II. AN HISTORICAL SKETCH 
 
 III. LAND TAXES : PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 IV. THE THEORY OF RENT 
 
 V. THE BURDEN OF LOCAL RATES 
 
 VI. CONFISCATION OR COMPENSATION 
 
 VII. OVERGROWN TOWNS 
 
 VIII. MINING ROYALTIES 
 
 IX. SOME SUGGESTIONS 
 
 PAGE 
 I 
 
 3 
 
 63 
 
 84 
 
 117 
 
 133 
 167
 
 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 As a vague ideal, land nationalization has been rapidly 
 growing in popularity during recent years. The unrestful 
 spirits among us radicals, socialists, and other disturbers 
 of the public peace either captivated by the simplicity of 
 Mr. Henry George's economic theories, or painfully seeking 
 for some definite aid to labourer and to farmer, have turned 
 their eyes hopefully to the suggestion that the nation should 
 possess her own soil ; indeed many persons are so hope- 
 ful of this suggestion, that they believe it to contain a 
 panacea for all the social difficulties that perplex the com- 
 munity. And though such a demand on our faith is certainly 
 a large one, it is less absurd than it sounds at first hearing. 
 For the use of land is as essential to human life as the use of 
 air ; at the very least each individual must have space enough 
 to stand upon. Yet nine out of every ten Englishmen 
 have no independent right to the use of any scrap of land 
 beyond the limited area which has been dedicated to the 
 public for specific purposes. They can neither work nor 
 play nor sleep without a previous permit, and this permit 
 
 B
 
 2 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 must be obtained from individuals who are presumed by the 
 laws of the country to exercise their powers in their own 
 private interest, and not in the interest of the community. 
 
 Thus baldly stated the system of private property in land 
 appears, on the face of it, to involve such a terrible incubus 
 upon human enjoyment and human freedom, that the hope- 
 ful may be excused for dreaming that universal happiness 
 would follow the removal of the system. In practice, how- 
 ever, private property in land is not so terrible, even in 
 England, as the strict legal theory would justify one in 
 believing. At every turn the crude severity of the system is 
 mitigated by various arrangements, legal, moral, or economic, 
 which make life at least tolerable for the majority of English- 
 men ; and as a matter of fact most of us go to our graves 
 without once having realized that we have only been living 
 on the sufferance of private landowners. Obviously these 
 practical mitigations alter the whole perspective of the 
 problem. Instead of wildly longing for the abolition of 
 private property in land, as the slave longs for the breaking 
 of his chain, we have to estimate how the known dis- 
 advantages and advantages of private ownership compare 
 on the balance with the anticipated advantages and dis- 
 advantages of communal ownership. To provide materials 
 for this comparison is the main object of the present book. 
 
 Nationalization includes Municipalization. First of all, 
 however, it is necessary to be quite clear as to the limits 
 of the problem we are going to consider. By itself the 
 word " nationalization " implies that some authority repre- 
 senting the whole nation shall enter into possession of the 
 land. But latterly the idea has been gaining ground, that 
 the evils of individual ownership can most conveniently be 
 removed by substituting local public authorities for private
 
 INTRODUCTION. 3 
 
 landlords, in one word, by " municipalizing " instead of by 
 nationalizing the land. A moment's reflection, however, will 
 show that these two proposals are in principle identical. In 
 England, and for that matter in every other country, muni- 
 cipal authorities are essentially subordinate to the sovereign 
 national authority. Municipal corporations could only 
 acquire the land by the consent of the national authority, 
 and that authority would also define the conditions on 
 which they should hold the land. Whether therefore the 
 land should be " nationalized " or " municipalized" is purely 
 a question of administrative convenience, and the term 
 " nationalization " will throughout these pages except where 
 the contrary is obviously implied be assumed to include 
 " municipalization." 
 
 Ownership involves two distinct rights. By way of 
 further clearing the ground, it is well at once to emphasize 
 an important distinction connected with the right of owner- 
 ship, which will have to be more fully considered later on. 
 Behind all the varied forms of ownership there lie two rights 
 the right to derive a revenue from the land, and the right 
 to determine the use to which the land shall be put. It 
 is mainly on the extent to which these two independent 
 rights are retained in the same hand that the differences 
 in the forms of ownership depend. The farmer occupying 
 his own freehold enjoys in his own person both rights. 
 The equitable owner of a fully mortgaged estate parts 
 with the revenue of the land, but retains the right of direc- 
 tion. The ground landlord of an estate let on building 
 leases gives up the right of direction but retains the revenue. 
 An intermediate type of landlord, in practice very numerous, 
 retains, in addition to the revenue, a partial control over 
 his land by letting it for short terms.
 
 4 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 Three schools of Land Nationalizers. These varying 
 types of landownership are under present conditions mere 
 matters of convenience determined by private bargaining. 
 But as soon as it is proposed to substitute national for in- 
 dividual ownership, the determination of the character of the 
 ownership to be created becomes a question of fundamental 
 importance. Is the State to claim the revenue of the land 
 alone, or the direction alone, or is it to claim both revenue 
 and direction ? The question is variously answered by 
 three schools of social reformers. The school that draws 
 its inspiration from the writings of Mr. Henry George is 
 anxious only to secure the revenue of the land. By gradually 
 increasing taxation this school would transfer all land reve- 
 nues from the present proprietors to the nation. With the 
 control of the land they would not interfere. Another 
 school of land nationalizers, led by Mr. Alfred Russel 
 Wallace, take exactly the opposite view. In their opinion, 
 to interfere with the monetary rights of the present owners 
 would be unjustifiable ; all they care about is the power to 
 control the use of the land. This power they would transfer 
 to the State, and at the same time guarantee to the dis- 
 possessed landholders a permanent income calculated on 
 their present receipts. Lastly, we have the socialists, who 
 want both the revenue and the control. 
 
 The meaning of the word " land." One point more ; to 
 attempt to consider the problem of land nationalization as 
 is sometimes unconsciously done on the supposition that 
 " land " means agricultural land, is to ignore perhaps the 
 major part of the problem. To the majority of Englishmen, 
 the terms on which they are to be allowed to occupy a 
 sufficient area of land for their private houses, for their 
 factories and schools, for their places of amusement and
 
 INTRODUCTION. 5 
 
 their places of worship, are at least as important as the con- 
 ditions of land tenure under which part of their food is 
 produced. For under no system of land tenure will English 
 people be able to direct the production of all the food they 
 eat. At the present day, probably half of our food is grown 
 on land that is clearly beyond our control as a nation ; and 
 whatever the future may bring in the way of more complete 
 cultivation of English soil, it is safe to prophesy that we 
 shall always find it advantageous to import our tea and 
 sugar and rice, besides minor articles of popular con- 
 sumption. Consequently, at best the nationalization of 
 agricultural land will only give us a partial control over our 
 food supply, while the nationalization of urban or residential 
 land may give us a complete control over our houses. 
 Again, a very large proportion of the income of the nation 
 is derived from the mere business of digging up, and pre- 
 paring for the market, coal and iron, tin and copper, lime- 
 stone and granite and slate ; while perhaps a still larger 
 proportion comes from industries which are dependent for 
 their success on a plentiful supply of the first two of these 
 minerals. Obviously, then, in considering the subject of 
 land nationalization, at least some attention must be paid to 
 the mineral wealth that lies beneath the surface of the land. 
 As far as possible, therefore, in the following pages, each of 
 the three main utilities of land will be kept carefully in view.
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 AN HISTORICAL SKETCH. 
 
 There are few subjects on which modern research has 
 thrown more light than the conditions under which English 
 land in past centuries was held and cultivated. That the 
 subject is not yet exhausted any one who attempts to grapple 
 with it will speedily discover. There are large blanks in the 
 evidence which can only be filled in by inference ; and the 
 inference, though often the result of logical deduction from 
 ascertained facts, is at other times unfortunately little better 
 than mere guess work. Happily, however, the obscuri- 
 ties of the subject are for the most part in the earliest period. 
 For more than iooo years back from the present time the 
 records are so far complete that it is possible to build up a 
 fairly consecutive narrative. To begin with the obscurities, 
 the point that it is desirable to set at rest is this : were our 
 ancestors, when they settled in our present home, organized 
 in democratic communities of freemen, or were the bulk 
 of them servile or semi-servile dependents on aristocratic 
 rulers ? The former theory finds its most noticeable support 
 in the writings of Sir Henry Maine ; the latter in the more 
 recent work of Mr. Frederick Seebohm. 
 
 Sir Henry Maine's theory. Sir Henry Maine, partly 
 following the lead of Professor Nasse of Bonn, partly in-
 
 AN HISTORICAL SKETCH. 7 
 
 fluenced by his own experience in India, suggested that the 
 village communities still found in India and in Russia had 
 their counterpart in the German mark as described by 
 Tacitus nearly 2000 years ago ; and that the German mark, 
 or village community, was transported in its entirety to the 
 shores of Britain. There a change took place. Under 
 the stress of war, or civil disturbance, the leading man 
 in each little community of freemen gradually acquired a 
 more and more dominant position. Step by step his former 
 comrades in battle became his followers, his former equals 
 in the village council became his humble dependents. 
 Thus by a process of degradation the village community 
 was converted into the lord's manor. 
 
 Mr. Seebohm's theory. Mr. Seebohm proceeds on other 
 lines. Trusting less to analogy and more to research, he 
 gropes his way back through English history from the 
 present to the past. At each point he finds the manor, 
 never the community. And the farther he gets back 
 towards the beginnings of English history, the more 
 servile does he find the occupiers of the land, the more 
 absolute the power of their lords. He therefore infers that 
 the Englishmen who first settled in Britain, brought with 
 them not the free mark system vaguely described by 
 Tacitus, but the institution of slavery which undoubtedly 
 existed among the German tribes. Hence, if this inference 
 be correct, the earliest cultivators of English soil were not 
 freemen working together in a self-governing community, 
 but slaves or serfs owing obedience to a powerful lord. 
 
 The balance of evidence and of probability undoubtedly 
 weighs in favour of Mr. Seebohm's theory. And for those 
 who take a hopeful view of human affairs, the latter theory 
 has this pleasurable advantage, that it involves a continuous
 
 8 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 record of progress. Sir Henry Maine has to assume that 
 the free Englishman gradually suffered himself to be 
 degraded to a serf ; Mr. Seebohm declares that the serf was 
 a slave on the road to complete emancipation. However, 
 the question is one of fact, not of predilection, and must 
 still remain unsettled until some discovery of ancient records 
 throws fresh light upon it. Let us pass to a period about 
 which there is no dispute. 
 
 The estates of King Alfred. When King Alfred the 
 Great died in a.d. 901, he left a will behind him in which 
 each of his separate estates was designated by the word 
 "ham." 1 A "ham," or "tun," or "toune," was a landed 
 estate consisting essentially of two portions the home farm, 
 and the land set to tenants ; or, to use the phraseology of 
 the time, the thane's inland and the gesettes land. The 
 " inland " was cultivated under the immediate direction of 
 the owner himself, the " thane " ; the " set " land by the 
 tenants, or " geneats." Broadly speaking, the arrangement 
 between the two parties was, that the geneats were allowed 
 to cultivate the land set to them, on condition of giving such 
 work to the thane as he required for his home farm. In a 
 document first published in the tenth century, we find the 
 tenants divided into two classes yardlings and cottiers 2 
 and their duties and rights carefully described. A yardling 
 is the occupier of a homestead and thirty acres of land 
 divided equally among three large fields ; each ten-acre 
 share being again sub-divided into several narrow strips. 
 A cottier has a cottage and five acres of land. Here are 
 their rights and obligations : 
 
 The Cottier's Obligations. The Cottier's services are what on 
 the land is fixed (/. e. they vary to some extent according to the custom 
 
 1 Seebohm, p. 127. - Ibid., p. \2<)etseq.
 
 AN HISTORICAL SKETCH. 9 
 
 of the district). On some he shall each Monday in the year work for 
 his lord, and three days a week in harvest. He ought not to pay land 
 tribute. He pays hearth penny on Holy Thursday, as pertains to every 
 freeman, and defends his lord's inland if required. And he pays his 
 kirkshot at Martinmas. 
 
 The Cottier's Rights. He ought to have five acres in his holding, 
 more if it be the custom on the land, and it is too little if it be less, 
 because his work is often required (by his lord). 
 
 The Yardling's Obligations. The yardling's services are various, 
 in some places heavy, in others moderate. On some land he must 
 work at week-work two days at such work as he is required through 
 the year every week, and at harvest three days for week-work, and from 
 Candlemas to Easter three days. If he does carrying he has not to 
 work while his horse is out. He shall pay tenpence tribute at Michael- 
 mas, and twenty-three sesters of barley and two hens at Martinmas ; 
 a young sheep and twopence at Easter ; and he shall lie from Martin- 
 mas to Easter at his lord's fold as often as he is told. And from the 
 time that they first plough to Martinmas, he shall each week plough one 
 acre and prepare himself the seed in his lord's barn. 
 
 The Yardling's Rights. The yardling shall have given to him for 
 his outfit two oxen and one cow and six sheep, seven acres sown on his 
 yard-land. And he must have given to him tools for his work and 
 utensils for his house ; then when he dies his lord takes back what he 
 leaves. 
 
 To this statement, which has been slightly abridged, must 
 be added, first, that the tenant was not liable to pay the 
 tribute and do the work just described, unless the lord pro- 
 vided him with a house ; and secondly, that if the tenant 
 persisted in neglecting to pay his tribute he must expect 
 " that his lord will spare neither his goods nor his life." x 
 
 Slavery in England before the Conquest. But the 
 yardlings and the cottiers were not the only inhabitants of 
 a tun or ham ; in a lower grade still came the theows or 
 slaves. The yardlings and cottiers, though they must work 
 hard for their lord without pay, were their own masters when 
 
 1 Seebohm, p. 146.
 
 io LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 their work was done and their tribute paid; but the theow 
 was never his own master. He was fed and maintained at his 
 lord's expense, and could be sold like an ox or a horse. 
 As a rule, the theows were used for the domestic work 
 about the lord's mansion ; but were often also employed in 
 farm work on the lord's inland, supplementing the work 
 of the geneats. 
 
 The obligations of the landowner. So far we have 
 only described the obligations of the dependent occupants 
 of a " ham " towards their lord, and his partially reciprocal 
 obligations towards them. But the lord himself, the thane, 
 had other obligations towards his lord, the king. Briefly 
 these were, to follow the king to war, to aid in building 
 the king's castles, and to maintain the bridges. 
 
 These services, it is well at once to point out, were not 
 feudal services, for feudalism proper was as yet unknown in 
 England. They were services imposed on every landowner 
 for the common advantage of the nation, much in the same 
 way that the law till recently imposed upon each London 
 householder the duty of keeping clean the pavement 
 adjoining his house-front. In return for these services 
 the thane got the fee simple of his estate. For that is 
 what hoc, or book, tenure amounted to. An estate in boc- 
 land was as full an estate as a freehold estate of to-day ; 
 it was the thane's own for ever. 
 
 Folc-land becomes later terra regis. But beyond the 
 boc-land estates of individual proprietors, were the royal 
 " hams " already mentioned, and the royal forests. Origin- 
 ally it seems that both these classes of land were looked 
 upon as the property of the nation, and could not be 
 alienated without the consent of the national parliament 
 the witan. But with the increase of royal power that
 
 AN HISTORICAL SKETCH. n 
 
 followed the consolidation of the various Saxon kingdoms 
 into one kingdom covering the whole of England, the con- 
 trol of the people's domain the folc-land passed into the 
 king's hands and the land itself changed its name, and 
 became terra regis, the land of the king. To the king 
 then belonged the right either to give away existing " hams " 
 in his possession, or to carve new " hams " out of the im- 
 mense stretches of virgin forest that still covered a great 
 part of the kingdom. 
 
 This, in broad outlines, is a picture of the conditions 
 under which land was owned and occupied in England 
 during the two or three centuries immediately preceding 
 the Norman Conquest. We now pass to the changes that 
 the Conquest effected in the English land system. 
 
 The feudal system of the Continent. William the Con- 
 queror was familiar in Normandy with a land system differing 
 essentially in one important feature from the English. In 
 both cases it is true there were "hams" on the Continent 
 called " manors " ; but while in England the thane oivned 
 his "ham," subject only to the obligations due to the 
 king, on the Continent the lord of the manor always held 
 his land from a superior lord. The feudal system involved 
 in fact a chain of dependents working downwards from the 
 king. First were the great nobles, the immediate companions 
 of the king, who did homage to him and were his men ; then 
 the lesser nobles, in a similar way dependent on their 
 lords ; and lastly, holders of separate manors. Links in 
 the chain may indeed be omitted, and the holder of a single 
 manor may do homage directly to the king, or a great 
 noble may be the direct holder of several manors. But 
 these variations are incidents that do not even need explan- 
 ation ; the essence of the system remained the same, the
 
 12 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 subordination of each holder of land to a lord above him. 
 Politically the consequence of this system was that the 
 king could never count on the obedience of his more 
 remote subjects, for every vassal was bound to follow his 
 immediate lord, even though the lord broke his own oath of 
 fealty to his lord, the king. Socially and economically the 
 system led to the aggrandisement of the great chiefs at the 
 expense of the lesser landlords. As to the actual cultivators, 
 their position seems to have been much the same under 
 both systems. 
 
 The system established in England by the Conqueror. 
 What William the Conqueror did was not to transplant the 
 feudal system bodily into England, but to graft some of its 
 more prominent features on the English system as he found 
 it. Already, indeed, there had been growing up in England 
 something analogous to the feudal system of progressive 
 dependence. Small landowners, to avoid the loss of their 
 property in times of disturbance, would frequently " com- 
 mend " themselves to the protection of a powerful neighbour, 
 and the powerful neighbour would exact his quid pro quo 
 in the form'of military service or of periodical money pay- 
 ments. This process was rendered formal and systematic 
 with the influx of feudal ideas at the Conquest. It was ex- 
 pected that every man, slave or free, should have a lord, and 
 any sluggishness that the English landowners showed in 
 adapting themselves to the new ideas was roughly dissipated 
 by the successive confiscations of William's reign. Within 
 ten years from the Conquest a very large part of the soil of 
 England had either changed hands or had been regranted 
 to the original holders on new and feudal conditions. But 
 William was careful that his feudal innovations should stop 
 short of the point of danger to his own authority. Each man
 
 AN HISTORICAL SKETCH. 13 
 
 must have a lord, as in the Continental scheme of society ; 
 but each man must also recognize, as in the English scheme, 
 the direct sovereignty of the king. To establish this point 
 was the object of the famous gemot on Salisbury Plain, 
 when all the landowners in England great and small took 
 an oath of direct allegiance to the king. 
 
 The Domesday Survey. Manors everywhere. To the 
 still more famous survey and census that William caused to 
 be made of his new dominions, it is now necessary to turn. 
 As might be expected from the previous pages, the result of 
 this survey was to show that England was covered with 
 "hams" or "tuns," or, in Norman phrase, "manors." 
 There were fourteen hundred manors belonging to the 
 ancient demesne of the Crown ; 1 there were hundreds of 
 manors in the possession of the monasteries and of great 
 nobles : and there were many owners each possessing only 
 one or two manors. Further we find that each manor as a 
 rule corresponded with a village. Like the Indian village of 
 to-day, the mediaeval manor included comprehensively the 
 homesteads of the people who inhabited it, the fields 
 they tilled, the grass-land and wood-land where they found 
 pasture and fuel, and finally, the people themselves. And, 
 except where a royal forest intervened, the boundary of one 
 manor formed also the boundary of the next. 
 
 The inhabitants of the manor. In the Domesday Survey 
 the inhabitants of each manor were carefully enumerated 
 and classified. Over the greater part of the country three 
 classes only are mentioned the yardlings, the cottiers, and 
 the slaves. The yardlings now appear under a new name. 
 They are the most numerous and the most important 
 inhabitants of the manor ; are looked upon in fact as the 
 1 Seebohm, p. 82.
 
 i 4 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 manor-folk proper, and hence are called in the Domesday 
 record villani ; the Latin word villa being the ordinary 
 translation of the English " ham " or "tun." These villani, 
 or "villains," are 38 per cent, of the whole population of 
 the kingdom ; the cottiers a poor and less important class 
 run them close in numbers, being 32 per cent, of the 
 whole ; while the slaves form only 9 per cent., and are mostly 
 found in the western counties. In the eastern counties, 
 on the other hand, and in Lincolnshire and in Suffolk espe- 
 cially, we find two other classes of inhabitants soc-men and 
 freemen, or freeholders. The freemen are 8 per cent, of the 
 whole population ; the soc-men only 4 per cent. 
 
 Free tenants and soc-men. The two classes have one 
 important point in common, and later in our history, as will 
 be presently seen, they become merged in one class. At this 
 early period their common feature is, that they are both 
 occupants of land on the lord's demesne, and are conse- 
 quently not subject to the incidents of villain tenure. The 
 lord, as a rule, cultivated his demesne himself, with the aid 
 of a bailiff. But if the demesne was so large that he did not 
 care for the responsibility of managing the whole, it was an 
 obvious convenience to allow one of his wealthier yardlings, 
 or perhaps some poor relation in distress, to take a piece 
 as tenant. Such an arrangement was, unlike the tenure of 
 the villain, purely one of contract; there was no compulsion 
 of custom or of law ; the parties might make what bargain 
 they chose. If it was a poor relation who had to be pro- 
 vided for, the bargain would generally be the honourable 
 tie of military service, a repetition in fact on a smaller scale 
 of relationship between the lord and his superior. If, on 
 the other hand, a base-born yardling was being promoted, 
 the bargain struck would follow the lines of the man's
 
 AN HISTORICAL SKETCH. 15 
 
 previous life. His duty as a " villain " had been to plough 
 his lord's land, and to do such other work as the custom of 
 the manor required. In return for the new holding carved 
 out for him, he would agree to do a fixed service on what 
 remained of the lord's demesne. He must still work for 
 another as of old, but he is no longer a semi-slave, bound 
 by the rigid customs of the manor ; he is a soc-man, bound, 
 so far as his new holding is concerned, only by his own 
 bargain. 
 
 The constitution of the Manor. The broad division 
 of a manor into the lord's demesne and the yard-land 
 of the villain tenants has been already described. Further, 
 as we have just seen, the lord might carve separate hold- 
 ings out of his superfluous demesne for freemen and soc- 
 men. What he reserved to himself was either cultivated 
 by the compulsory labour of his villain tenants, or left 
 waste for the purposes of sport. Over part of this waste, 
 however, the tenants seem from very early times to have 
 had customary rights of common, either for turning out 
 cattle or geese, or for the collection of fire-wood. Finally 
 within the lord's demesne stood the lord's mansion, sur- 
 rounded probably by farm buildings and a garden or 
 pleasure-ground. So far the picture is not dissimilar from 
 what may be seen in many parts of England to this day. 
 When, however, we come to the yard-land, we find an 
 arrangement so strange to our present experience that it is 
 difficult to realize that for centuries it was the distinguishing 
 feature of rural England. 
 
 The open field. To-day we see fields of all shapes 
 and sizes, divided by hedge and ditch, with here and 
 there, at frequent though irregular intervals, a farm-house 
 with stacks and barns around ; in mediaeval England we find
 
 16 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 everywhere large open fields, sub-divided into narrow 
 rectangular strips by balks of unploughed turf. As a rule 
 round each village there were three such fields, one for the 
 winter wheat, one for spring wheat or beans, and one left 
 fallow. The strips in these three great fields were almost 
 invariably a furlong, i. e. a furrow-long, in length and either 
 two or four rods in width. In the latter case the strip was 
 called an acre; its dimensions, as will be seen, give the 
 area of an English statute acre. The smaller strips are 
 half-acres. It is these regular acre or half-acre strips that 
 went to make up the holdings of the customary tenants of 
 the manor. As a rule the villain or yardling had in all 
 thirty acres of land ; the cottier about five. But the strips 
 composing any particular holdings did not lie side by side 
 so as to form a compact farm. They were scattered over 
 the three great open fields of the manor, so that each man's 
 holding was inextricably interwoven with the holdings of 
 his neighbours. 
 
 In this apparently hopeless confusion, however, there was 
 generally observable a certain sequence, which proves that 
 the system did not grow up hap-hazard. An examination 
 of the actual holdings of which the records have been 
 preserved, shows that the strips of the several tenants of the 
 manor for the most part succeed one another in a regular 
 rotation. 1 
 
 The origin of the intermixed acre strips. How then 
 did this rotation, surviving through centuries, arise ? Here 
 again Mr. Seebohm has unlocked the puzzle, and proved 
 that the rotation of acre strips corresponds to the rotation 
 of individual services in the work of communal ploughing. 
 A remarkable account of co-operative ploughing in Wales, 
 ' Seebohm, p. 26,
 
 AN HISTORICAL SKETCH. 17 
 
 drawn up in the tenth century, is still extant. 1 The 
 following are the principal clauses 
 
 " Whoever shall engage in co-tillage with another, it is right for them 
 to give surety for performance, and mutually join hands, and after they 
 have done that, to keep it until the tye be completed : the tye is twelve 
 acres. 
 
 "The first acre belongs to the ploughman; the second to the 
 irons ; the third to the leading sod ox ; the fourth to the leading sward 
 ox, lest the yoke should be broken ; and the fifth to the driver ; thence 
 onward to the remaining six oxen, from beast to beast, unto the last ; 
 and after that the plough acre (for the wooden framework of the plough). 
 
 "Everyone is to bring his requisites to the ploughing, whether ox 
 or irons, or other things pertaining to him ; and after everything is 
 brought to them the ploughman and driver are to keep the whole safely, 
 and use them as well as they would their own. 
 
 This picture of co-operative tillage in actual working 
 at once explains the rotation of acre strips everywhere 
 found on the yard-land of English manors. Each of the 
 partners in the communal ploughing took the produce of 
 the acre assigned to him for his part in the work, and the 
 relative position of this acre would obviously be the same 
 in each successive " tye " of twelve acres completed by the 
 co-operative plough. Gradually this sequence hardened into 
 prescriptive right, and when the system of co-tillage died 
 out, the yardling continued to occupy the particular acre 
 strips which the practice of communal ploughing had 
 assigned to him or his ancestors. 
 
 The wastefulness of the open field system. The 
 arrangement was obviously inconvenient. The narrowness 
 of the strips prevented cross-ploughing, and their separation 
 involved additional journeying for the cultivator. More- 
 over, the individual cultivator was not free to cultivate his 
 strips according to his own fancy. He was obliged strictly 
 1 Seebohm, p. 118 et seq.
 
 18 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 to follow the rotation and the tillages of his neighbours ; 
 he must plough when they ploughed, and reap when they 
 reaped. For as soon as the crops were off the ground, the 
 whole field became again a communal holding, and every 
 tenant of the manor was at liberty to turn in his cattle to 
 graze off the stubble. This practice would obviously inter- 
 fere with any systematic manuring of the land, and thus 
 led to the exhaustion of the soil. 
 
 The Manor court. Another institution of the mediaeval 
 manor, which has now disappeared almost as completely as 
 the open field, was the manor court. These courts, which 
 Avere not regularly established until after the Norman Con- 
 quest, were of two kinds the court baron, where only the 
 freeholders and soc-men sat, and the court leet or popular 
 court, at which all the customary tenants of the manor had 
 the right to attend. 1 The court baron concerned itself only 
 with matters relating to the free tenants. The court leet, on 
 the other hand, took cognizance of all the affairs of the manor. 
 
 Here are some examples of orders made by the Court, 
 quoted by Mr. Denton from the Launceston Court Rolls 
 
 A.D. 1294. William Cobbe's wife fined $rf. because she worked badly 
 in harvest. 
 
 a.d. 1296. Hugh de Lay's land taken into the lord's hands because 
 he had neither ploughed nor harrowed it, and is unable because he is a 
 pauper. 
 
 A.u. 1296. Ordered that William le Bercher and his wife with all his 
 family be sent away from the village, and not to be taken back again. 
 
 A.D. 1333. Agnes Vainer, a nief (bondwoman), gives to her lord a 
 fine of Gd. that she may be enabled to serve and marry whomsoever and 
 whensoever she pleases, and no more of a fine because she is poor and 
 an orphan. 
 
 On the other hand a certain widow "gives to her lord i&/. that she 
 may be without a husband to the end of her life. " 
 
 1 See Denton, pp. 1316.
 
 AN HISTORICAL SKETCH. 19 
 
 The enclosure of wastes, a.d. 1235. The first serious 
 encroachment on the customary order of the manor was 
 made in the reign of Henry III. The statute of Merton 
 in 1235 gave power to the lord to enclose portions of his 
 waste that were not required for the pasture rights and 
 turf rights of the tenants. How much was to be left 
 unenclosed was not defined, and from the date of the 
 statute, lawsuits and riots frequently occurred, ditches were 
 filled up and the newly-erected hedges pulled down by 
 rioters " warlikely arrayed." x A good illustration of the way 
 in which enclosures were probably often effected is given 
 in Smyth's Lives of the Berkeleys. Lord Maurice, Earl of 
 Berkeley, had " within his manor of Hame a wood called 
 Whitclive, adjoining whereunto were his tenant's arable and 
 pasture grounds." 2 He first negotiated with his manorial 
 tenants for a surrender of some of their acre strips and part 
 of their common grazing rights. When they refused to 
 entertain the proposal, he took the matter into his own 
 hands, secured the land he wanted, and gave the tenants 
 such compensation as he thought fitting. In this particular 
 case the only motive of the lord seems to have been to 
 enlarge his own park. 
 
 Enterprising spirit of thirteenth- century landowners. 
 On the other hand, in the reign of Henry III., and still 
 more in the reign of the great Edward who followed, 
 wealthy noblemen, and the king himself, busied themselves 
 in experiments with new plants and crops, and in devising 
 or borrowing from abroad improved methods of cultiva- 
 tion. It was then that many of the commonest English 
 fruits were first regularly cultivated, either from wild 
 
 1 Uenton, p. 157. 
 
 - Smyth's Lives of the Berkeley's, vol. i. p. 140.
 
 2o LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 native stock or from plants imported from the Continent. 
 With the disorder of Edward II. 's reign this spirit of 
 improvement seems to have died out, and during the 
 Hundred Years' War that followed, the English nobility 
 preferred the excitement of freebooting expeditions across 
 the Channel to the placid delights of fruit-farming. The 
 Wars of the Roses too, though they seem to have but 
 slightly affected the actual cultivators of the land, fully 
 occupied the energies of the great landowners ; and it is 
 not until the settled government of Henry VII. that we hear 
 again of noblemen taking an active interest in agricultural 
 improvements. 
 
 The agrarian struggle in the fourteenth century. But 
 the indifference of the lords of the soil to the art of 
 agriculture during the later Plantagenet and the Lan- 
 castrian period did not imply indifference to the profits of 
 agriculture. Landowners were still anxious to maintain and 
 if possible to increase the revenues they derived from their 
 manors. 
 
 By the time of the Plantagenets, the free tenants settled 
 on the lord's demesne had commuted their services into 
 fixed money payments ; and in a similar way had been 
 commuted the services due from the villains and cottiers, 
 now become the " customary tenants " of the manor. 
 
 At the same time slavery as an institution was dying out 
 in England. The Conqueror had prohibited the Bristol 
 slave trade, and the mediaeval Church constantly used its 
 influence to secure the manumission of slaves. It was 
 so far successful that by the end of the thirteenth century 
 chattel slavery had almost completely disappeared. 
 
 During the fourteenth century, then, lords of manors 
 were no longer able to cultivate their demesne by the forced
 
 AN HISTORICAL SKETCH. 21 
 
 labour of their villains, nor could they fall back upon the 
 labour of personal slaves. Instead they must apply the 
 commuted payments of their villain and free tenants to 
 the hire of free labourers. And as long as the rate of 
 wages for agricultural labour remained fixed at about the 
 point which represented the value to the lord of the villain's 
 forced labour, the lord was no worse off, while the villain 
 was better off, for his time was now his own, subject only to 
 the necessity of paying a fixed rent. The fourteenth century, 
 however, was marked by a succession of wide-spread plagues, 
 of which the Black Death in 1348 was the most famous. 
 The population, which had been steadily advancing through 
 the long reigns of Henry III. and Edward I., rapidly declined 
 under Edward III. Villain holdings and free holdings 
 became vacant, and landless men had now no difficulty in 
 getting land for themselves. The natural result was that 
 the price of free labour rose. At the same time the lord's 
 revenue out of which he paid for labour declined ; for many 
 of his tenants were dead and their holdings vacant. 
 
 Acts of Parliament to keep down wages. To meet 
 these difficulties, the barons and manorial lords tried two 
 separate plans. First, they appealed to Parliament and the 
 king for power to compel labourers to work for the same 
 wage as in times past. 
 
 Parliament meant themselves, and the king, Edward III., 
 not unnaturally followed the advice of his fellow-landowners. 
 In 1349 the first Statute of Labourers was issued by a royal 
 proclamation, which was confirmed by an Act of Parliament 
 two years later. 1 This statute required every labourer, 
 bond or free, man or woman, to work for the same wages 
 
 1 For detailed information in regard to the Statute of Labourers, see 
 Denton, p. 311, et scq.
 
 22 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 as in the twentieth year of the king's reign (i.e. 1347). 
 The statute applied to all agricultural wage labourers, and to 
 mechanics who engaged in agriculture. In spite however 
 of this comprehensiveness, the statute seems to have failed, 
 and mainly from want of loyalty among the persons in whose 
 interest it was passed. Every lord of a manor, or his 
 representative, the steward, was primarily anxious to save 
 his own crops, and in order to secure sufficient labour would 
 covertly offer and pay higher wages than the statute allowed ; 
 or would perhaps supplement the statutory wages by liberal 
 charity. Consequently a few years later we find the giver 
 or promiser of illegal wages freed from penalties if he 
 denounces his own breach of the law ; the receiver alone is 
 to suffer. At the same time charity is forbidden ; while to 
 stop the migration of labour, it is further provided that no 
 man or woman may travel out of the hundred, rape, or 
 wapentake, where he is dwelling, without a letter patent 
 under the king's seal. For breach of this law the offender 
 is to be put into the stocks, which are to be provided in 
 every town. Further, boys and girls who have been brought 
 up to husbandry, and " have served at the plow and cart " 
 till the age of twelve, " thenceforth shall abide at the same 
 labour without being put to any mystery or handicraft." 
 
 The attempt to revert to labour rents. So much for 
 the first plan tried by the manorial lords for keeping up 
 the profits on their manors. The second plan left the 
 question of wages on one side, and. proposed that the 
 customary tenants should be compelled to revert to the 
 practice of forced labour. This incident of villain tenure 
 had now been unknown for at least two generations of 
 tenants, and it was the attempt of the nobles and landlords 
 to revive it that led to the great rising under John Ball and
 
 AN HISTORICAL SKETCH. 23 
 
 Wat Tyler in 1381. By an ingenious utilization of the 
 people's loyalty and the king's perjury the rising was sup- 
 pressed, but the stewards of manors soon found that in 
 practice it was almost impossible to exact the old labour 
 rents. After a time they abandoned the struggle, and in- 
 stead began to adopt the modern system of letting land to 
 tenants for the best money rent obtainable. 
 
 The tenant farmer of the fifteenth century. In the 
 fifteenth century then the tenant farmer first springs into 
 importance. The conditions of his tenure are not dis- 
 similar from those prevailing to-day, and must be carefully 
 distinguished from the conditions imposed on the feudal 
 tenants created in the Norman and Plantagenet period. 
 For while the freeholder or the soc-man had only to 
 pay a fixed rent, called a "rent of assize," the fifteenth- 
 century tenant paid a rack or competition rent. Again, the 
 freeholder, subject always to the payment of his fixed rent, 
 was as much the owner of his land as the lord himself; but 
 the tenant farmer was merely an occupant, able to throw up 
 the farm when he liked, and liable to be turned out if he 
 quarrelled with the lord or the steward of the manor. As a 
 rule, however, through the fifteenth century lords and stewards 
 were only too glad to find tenants, and consequently a 
 tenant had a real fixity of tenure, and could sub-let or sell 
 or bequeath his holding. His position indeed was in many 
 ways better than that of the landowner himself, who was 
 subject to the very heavy burdens of feudalism, and whose 
 power to dispose of his estate was strictly limited. 
 
 Was the fifteenth century equally golden for the 
 labourer ? But while the tenant farmers were thus prosper- 
 ing, it is by no means clear that the labourers Were doing 
 so well. Professor Thorold Rogers has indeed said that the
 
 24 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 fifteenth century was the golden century of the English 
 labourer, and the statement has been often repeated. The 
 basis on which it rests seems, however, curiously insuffi- 
 cient. The statement is grounded on a comparison of the 
 amount of the labourer's wage with the cost of his food. 
 Thus : " the agricultural labourer gets about <\d. a day for his 
 work, in harvest time 6d. . . . The full price of the 
 labourer's board was a shilling a week, often considerably 
 less ; his wages were thus twice or three times the cost of his 
 maintenance under contract. In 1467 two girls are hired 
 to work, and are paid 2d. a day. They are also boarded, and 
 this is put at 2d. a day more. In the same year, at 
 Selborne Priory in Hampshire, the board of men is put at 
 2d., of women at ihd." 1 
 
 In the first place it may be observed, that the calculation 
 here made, that the labourer's weekly wage is twice or three 
 times the cost of his board, rests on the assumption that the 
 labourer will work every day in the week except Sunday. 
 But in the fifteenth century, as well as in the nineteenth, 
 field work must have been sometimes suspended on account 
 of bad weather. Nor in pre-Reformation England was 
 Sunday the only holiday in the week. Every important 
 saint's day was observed with the same strictness as the 
 Lord's day, and it is probable that the working week was 
 on the average nearer to four than to six days. 
 
 The labourer's enjoymentsin the fifteenth and nineteenth 
 centuries. A still more fundamental flaw in the " golden 
 century " theory is this : that the comparison of fifteenth- 
 century prices and wages, and nineteenth-century prices 
 and wages, leaves out of account the additional comforts of 
 modern life which have become necessaries to the immense 
 
 1 Six Centuries, p. 329.
 
 AN HISTORICAL SKETCH. 25 
 
 majority of English labourers. Not only articles like tea and 
 sugar, but bed-linen and even blankets were unknown to the 
 fifteenth-century labourer. He slept at night on a bed of 
 straw or ferns, covered with the same cloak that he wore in 
 the fields in the day-time. 1 The floor of beaten earth was 
 strewn with rushes, so rarely renewed as to generally form a 
 mass of putrifying filth. If the labourer wished, as he probably 
 seldom did, to wash himself or his clothes, he would have 
 to spend half his day's wages for a pound of soap. His food 
 for nearly six months of the year was salted beef or pork, and 
 bread often made from the bad wheat that he had received 
 in lieu of money wages ; potatoes and fresh vegetables were 
 unknown. As to furniture, here is the inventory of the 
 goods and chattels of a landless workman in 1431 : "one 
 dish, one adze, one brass pot, two plates, two augers, one 
 store axe, one three-legged stool, one barrel called stonde." 2 
 When the landless labourer of to-day flits from one cottage 
 to another, he must borrow his employer's waggon, or hire 
 a van to shift his things. Thus even if we leave out of 
 sight such purely modern luxuries as penny postage and 
 Sunday newspapers, cheap railway trips and free hospitals," 
 there is little doubt that the nineteenth-century farm 
 
 1 Denton, p. 206. 2 Ibid., p. 217. 
 
 3 It is true that gratuitous maintenance was provided in the Middle 
 Ages for persons afflicted with the plague of leprosy, now happily 
 extinct ; and through the fifteenth century the leper houses outside 
 each town were still often filled with inmates mostly coming from the 
 labouring classes. The sort of treatment that these sufferers received 
 may be inferred from a market regulation of the town of Benvick-on- 
 Tweed. "Rotten meat or fish" to quote Mr. Denton's summary 
 of the regulation "offered for sale in the market was to be confiscated, 
 and sent to the lepers outside the town for their eating, and ' if there 
 be no leper folk,' then 'the rotten pork or salmon is to be utterly 
 destroyed.' "
 
 26 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 labourer has reached a higher point in the scale of civiliz- 
 ation, and enjoys a higher standard of comfort, than his 
 compeer of the Middle Ages. That he enjoys also a better 
 average of health and a greater length of life is equally 
 provable. 
 
 The deterioration in the sixteenth century. If, how- 
 ever, we contrast the position of the field labourer in the 
 middle of the fifteenth century with his position a hundred 
 years later, the "golden century" theory becomes plausible. 
 For towards the end of the fifteenth century, the agriculture 
 of the country underwent a change that was eminently dis- 
 astrous to the cultivators of the soil. The great land- 
 owners, who for nearly two centuries had been busy with 
 wars abroad or wars at home, under the settled rule of 
 Henry VII. began again to turn their attention to im- 
 proving their estates. Much of the arable land of the 
 country had been worn out by centuries of continuous 
 cropping on the three field system, and was now worth ex- 
 tremely little to the owner. The opening up of trade with 
 the Netherlands created a new utility for the soil ; instead 
 of growing wheat for home consumption it might be made 
 to grow wool for foreign export. The landowners immedi- 
 ately began to resume the farms that their predecessors had 
 been glad to let to tenants at a low rent, and they also began 
 to encroach on the holdings of their customary tenants, or 
 copy-holders as they were now called. By both processes 
 farmers and labourers were driven off the soil in order to 
 make room for sheep. To remedy this evil, Parliament 
 prescribed that a certain portion of land should be kept 
 under tillage, and the farm-houses maintained. 
 
 Risings of the peasantry against enclosures. Unfortu- 
 nately these remedies were not effective. The rule for the
 
 AN HISTORICAL SKETCH. 27 
 
 maintenance of " houses of husbandry " was evaded by keep- 
 ing the house in just sufficient repair to give shelter to a single 
 shepherd ; and the requirement that a certain proportion of 
 land must be kept under tillage, was complied with by driving 
 a single furrow up the middle of a large pasture field. In spite 
 of the law then enclosures went on rapidly, and in the next 
 reign were further stimulated by the confiscation of the Church 
 lands. Up to this time the ecclesiastical corporations, partly 
 doubtless from charitable considerations, and partly from the 
 vis inertia that clogs the action of corporate bodies, had 
 made little or no attempt to keep pace with the " improv- 
 ing" landlord. They had been content to manage their 
 enormous estates according to the old manorial customs of 
 the country. On the dissolution of the monasteries these 
 estates were transferred to individual proprietors, new men, 
 favourites of the king, or hangers-on of king's favourites 
 men bound to their subordinates by no traditional ties, 
 and while freed from the sanctions of the old faith, not yet 
 accepting any new creed as a guide to conduct. These 
 men, suddenly put into possession of vast estates, were in 
 a hurry to turn them to the best profit. They ruthlessly 
 cleared out the old tenants yeomen who could trace their 
 tenure of the land through a dozen generations in unbroken 
 descent they cut up the open fields with hedges and 
 ditches, and fenced off the common pastures to make parks 
 for themselves. 
 
 Many of these enclosures were absolutely illegal as well as 
 cruel, and it was the indignation of the rural population, as 
 well as their suffering, that gave strength to the frequent 
 risings in the reign of Edward VI. 
 
 " The peasant, whose pigs and cow and poultry had been sold or 
 had died, because the commons were gone where they had fed; the
 
 28 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 yeoman, dispossessed of his farm ; the farm servant out of employ, be- 
 cause where ten ploughs had turned the soil, one shepherd now watched 
 the grazing of the flocks ; the artizan, smarting under the famine prices 
 which the change of culture had brought with it all these were united 
 in suffering ; while the gentlemen were doubling, trebling, quadrupling 
 their incomes with their sheep-farms, and adorning their persons and 
 their houses with a splendour hitherto unknown." 1 
 
 In county after county the peasantry rose against these 
 encroachments, tore down the park palings, and re-levelled 
 hedge and ditch. The nobility and gentry quickly combined 
 for common defence; they sold their plate and jewellery, 
 armed their personal retainers, and with the aid of German 
 and Italian mercenaries suppressed the successive risings. 
 The peasantry were thus compelled, by the unanswerable 
 arguments of musketry and the hangman's rope, to submit 
 to the loss of common rights which were theirs by the 
 prescription of centuries. 
 
 During what remained of Edward's reign, and through 
 the brief reign of Queen Mary, the work of enclosure still 
 went on. It began to slacken, however, under Elizabeth 
 and the Stuarts, and ceased altogether about the time of 
 the Commonwealth. 2 
 
 The enclosures of the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries 
 compared. When the practice reappears in the middle of 
 the eighteenth century, it is under different conditions, and 
 is prompted by different motives. 
 
 The enclosures of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries 
 were made by the lords of the soil acting on their own 
 responsibility, and using such private means of force as 
 they could themselves command. The prescriptive rights of 
 the tenants and the well-being of the labouring population 
 
 J Fronde, vol. v. p. 201, chap. xxvi. 
 
 - Economic Review, July 1891, pp. 360, 361.
 
 AN HISTORICAL SKETCH. 29 
 
 were both ignored. Nothing in fact was considered except 
 the probable profit to the lord of converting into pasture 
 for himself the arable fields of his tenants and the common 
 waste of the manor. The whole proceeding was selfish, 
 aggressive, and for the most part illegal from beginning 
 to end. In the eighteenth century there may have been 
 selfishness human beings are never quite devoid of that 
 quality but there was patriotism as well. The eighteenth- 
 century landlord was before all things an agriculturist. 
 Indeed, a passion for agriculture seems to have taken 
 possession of the whole country ; everybody was cogitating 
 how to improve the cultivation of the soil, and wealthy 
 landlords vied with one another in experimenting with new 
 crops, new implements, new methods. In many parts of 
 England the improving landlord had a free hand. The 
 lawless enclosures of the previous period held good, and in 
 some counties nearly the whole area was divided into farms 
 of the modern type. On these the landlord, through his 
 tenant, could experiment and improve to his heart's con- 
 tent. But taking the country through, barely half of the 
 cultivable land was yet enclosed. The great open fields, 
 with their innumerable strips of plough-land, were still a 
 striking feature of the landscape ; and everywhere too were 
 to be seen wide stretches of waste land undrained marsh 
 or uncared-for forest, or upland pasture half buried under 
 gorse and heather. All this was vexation and bitterness to 
 the improving spirit of the eighteenth century. But how 
 was it to be remedied ? The copyhold tenant of the manor 
 had as good a legal right to each one of his scattered 
 acre strips as the lord himself to his manorial estate. 
 Further, all the tenants, freeholders as well as copyholders, 
 had commonable rights over the waste, and as long as they
 
 30 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 insisted on these rights the waste could not be enclosed. 
 Much might, in theory, be done by a voluntary surrender 
 for mutual advantage, but in practice it is difficult to induce 
 a number of individuals to surrender rights which they have 
 long exercised and understand, for future and only partially 
 realized advantages. Thus the only feasible plan was to 
 utilize the omnipotence of Parliament, and compel an 
 agreement for common profit. This was done, and appar- 
 ently with the consent of all parties. Each copyholder 
 gathered together his scattered strips and rounded them off 
 into a farm. The waste was shared out among the lord 
 and his tenants in proportion to their respective estates in 
 the manor. " Unto him that hath shall be given." The 
 lord got most, the landless labourer was left out in the cold. 
 
 The labourer's right of common ignored. It is this 
 neglect of the labourer which is the great blot on the 
 eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century enclosures. By 
 the enclosures the labourer lost the privilege of turn- 
 ing out any beasts he possessed on the common, and 
 received no direct compensation. How valuable his privi- 
 leges were is incidentally evidenced by a writer of a report to 
 the Board of Agriculture and Internal Improvement l on the 
 enclosure of Knaresboro' forest. The report is dated 1794 ; 
 the enclosure was effected between 1775 and 1780. 
 
 Part of the forest, explains the reporter, had been 
 anciently enclosed, but there remained "a tract of upwards 
 of 30,000 acres of common, whereon Knaresboro' and 
 several other towns claimed and had exercised a right of 
 common and turbary equally with the owners of property. 
 This waste in its open state yielded the inhabitants fuel, and 
 
 1 General View of the Agriculture of the West Riding of Yorkshire, 
 1794. Appendix No. I. By Robert Stockdale, Esq.
 
 AN HISTORICAL SKETCH. 31 
 
 pasturage for their sheep, horses, and stock of young cattle ; 
 and some opulent yeomanry profited exceedingly thereby. 
 But to the necessitous cottager and indigent farmer it was 
 productive of more inconvenience than advantage ; if not to 
 themselves, at least to the public at large, who was by that 
 means deprived in a great measure of the exertions of the 
 fanner and the labour of the cottager and their families; for 
 it afforded their families a little milk, yet they would attempt 
 to keep a horse and a flock of sheep. The first enabled them 
 to stroll about the country in idleness, and the second in the 
 course of three or four years were so reduced by the rot and 
 other disasters that upon the whole they yielded no profit." 
 In other language, the common rights of the country folk in 
 the neighbourhood of Knaresboro' were so valuable that many 
 of them were able to maintain themselves without working 
 for wages ; and thus the "public at large," i.e. the land- 
 owners and tenant farmers, were deprived of their services. 
 But the enclosures lead to a rise in wages. If however 
 the labourers received no direct compensation for the loss 
 of their common rights, indirectly they profited by the 
 eighteenth-century enclosures. Everywhere the enclosure 
 of open fields or waste land seems to have been followed 
 by a rise in wages owing to the increased demand for 
 labour. 1 What in fact the labourer lost in ease and 
 variety of occupation he gained in wages, and for the 
 time there may have been a net profit to him as well as 
 other classes in the community. The disadvantage of the 
 change was that it made him absolutely dependent on 
 the labour market ; he had no stand-by left ; for the future 
 he must take what wages are offered or starve. Now that 
 he is a voter, he is trying at length to emancipate himself 
 
 1 See report above quoted, passim.
 
 32 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 from this dependence by forcing Parliament to give him 
 an allotment of land for his own use. Had this been done 
 in each parish when the great wastes were carved up, and 
 at the same time a sufficiency of land reserved for public 
 recreation, the enclosures of the eighteenth and nineteenth 
 centuries would have stood out as an unmixed benefit for 
 the whole community. 
 
 The interest of the general public in commons. Happily 
 the importance of these points, especially the latter, was 
 realized in the great Enclosure Act of 1845. By this Act 
 commissioners were appointed to investigate the desirability of 
 enclosures in all parts of the country. In some cases the 
 commissioners might authorize the enclosure of their own 
 authority ; in others they must make a report to Parliament. 
 Their instructions were to "have regard to the health, 
 comfort, and convenience of the inhabitants of any cities, 
 towns, villages, or populous places ... as well as to the 
 advantage of the proprietors of the land." 1 It was further 
 provided that village greens were not to be enclosed, but 
 might be assigned in trust to the church-wardens to be 
 maintained as a recreation ground for the parish. At the 
 same time the commissioners were authorized, but unfortun- 
 ately not required, to insist that in any case of enclosure, an 
 allotment, proportional in size to the population of the parish, 
 should be reserved for recreation. They were also to reserve 
 "such an allotment for the labouring poor as they shall 
 think necessary, with reference to the circumstance of each 
 particular case." In practice, however, the commissioners 
 seem to have almost entirely ignored these special powers j 
 they still continued to treat the question of enclosure as a 
 matter concerning only the persons having tangible pro* 
 1 S & 9 Vict. c. nS, 27.
 
 AN HISTORICAL SKETCH. 33 
 
 prietary rights. This view was, however, rapidly growing un- 
 popular. And for good reason. In the first place, there was 
 now no longer, as at the beginning of the century, any 
 necessity to increase the corn-growing area in the country ; 
 foreign lands were able to provide us with all the wheat we 
 wanted. Again, one side of the enclosure problem was 
 settled, or nearly so. The " open fields," with their wasteful 
 husbandry, were now nearly all enclosed and re-divided into 
 compact farms. All that remained to enclose were the 
 " commons," as we understand the term to-day, the manorial 
 wastes over which a large and ill-defined body of persons had 
 large and ill-defined rights. These wastes, for the most part 
 poor land, would be little good for corn growing, even had 
 the corn been wanted, but they would be of immense service 
 as breathing spaces for the rapidly increasing population of 
 the country. Public opinion therefore began to demand a 
 reversal of the old policy ; instead of restricting by enclosure 
 the enjoyment of each parcel of land to one individual, the 
 enjoyment was to be extended by " regulation " from the 
 large body of commoners todie still larger body of the general 
 public. Under the influence of these ideas, a committee 
 of the House of Commons was appointed in 1865 to " inquire 
 into the best means of preserving for public use the Forests, 
 Commons, and open spaces in and around the Metropolis." 
 An Act followed on this inquiry, and a further inquiry was 
 held on the whole question of enclosures in 1869. This 
 inquiry in turn resulted in 1876 in an Act for " facilitating 
 the regulation and improvement of Commons, and for 
 annulling the Acts relating to the enclosure of Commons." 
 Here we find a well-marked distinction drawn between 
 " private interests " and the " benefit of the neighbourhood ; " 
 and the policy of the Act was rather to regulate commons for 
 
 D
 
 32 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 from this dependence by forcing Parliament to give him 
 an allotment of land for his own use. Had this been done 
 in each parish when the great wastes were carved up, and 
 at the same time a sufficiency of land reserved for public 
 recreation, the enclosures of the eighteenth and nineteenth 
 centuries would have stood out as an unmixed benefit for 
 the whole community. 
 
 The interest of the general public in commons. Happily 
 the importance of these points, especially the latter, was 
 realized in the great Enclosure Act of 1845. By this Act 
 commissioners were appointed to investigate the desirability of 
 enclosures in all parts of the country. In some cases the 
 commissioners might authorize the enclosure of their own 
 authority ; in others they must make a report to Parliament. 
 Their instructions were to "have regard to the health, 
 comfort, and convenience of the inhabitants of any cities, 
 towns, villages, or populous places ... as well as to the 
 advantage of the proprietors of the land." x It was further 
 provided that village greens were not to be enclosed, but 
 might be assigned in trust to the church-wardens to be 
 maintained as a recreation ground for the parish. At the 
 same time the commissioners were authorized, but unfortun- 
 ately not required, to insist that in any case of enclosure, an 
 allotment, proportional in size to the population of the parish, 
 should be reserved for recreation. They were also to reserve 
 "such an allotment for the labouring poor as they shall 
 think necessary, with reference to the circumstance of each 
 particular case." In practice, however, the commissioners 
 seem to have almost entirely ignored these special powers ; 
 they still continued to treat the question of enclosure as a 
 matter concerning only the persons having tangible pro- 
 1 8 & 9 Vict. c. 118, 27.
 
 AN HISTORICAL SKETCH. 33 
 
 prietary rights. This view was, however, rapidly growing un- 
 popular. And for good reason. In the first place, there was 
 now no longer, as at the beginning of the century, any 
 necessity to increase the corn-growing area in the country ; 
 foreign lands were able to provide us with all the wheat we 
 wanted. Again, one side of the enclosure problem was 
 settled, or nearly so. The " open fields," with their wasteful 
 husbandry, were now nearly all enclosed and re-divided into 
 compact farms. All that remained to enclose were the 
 " commons," as we understand the term to-day, the manorial 
 wastes over which a large and ill-defined body of persons had 
 large and ill-defined rights. These wastes, for the most part 
 poor land, would be little good for corn growing, even had 
 the corn been wanted, but they would be of immense service 
 as breathing spaces for the rapidly increasing population of 
 the country. Public opinion therefore began to demand a 
 reversal of the old policy ; instead of restricting by enclosure 
 the enjoyment of each parcel of land to one individual, the 
 enjoyment was to be extended by " regulation " from the 
 large body of commoners totfie still larger body of the general 
 public. Under the influence of these ideas, a committee 
 of the House of Commons was appointed in 1865 to " inquire 
 into the best means of preserving for public use the Forests, 
 Commons, and open spaces in and around the Metropolis." 
 An Act followed on this inquiry, and a further inquiry was 
 held on the whole question of enclosures in 1869. This 
 inquiry in turn resulted in 1876 in an Act for " facilitating 
 the regulation and improvement of Commons, and for 
 annulling the Acts relating to the enclosure of Commons." 
 Here we find a well-marked distinction drawn between 
 " private interests " and the " benefit of the neighbourhood ; " 
 and the policy of the Act was rather to regulate commons for 
 
 D
 
 36 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 These 700,000 little freeholders are probably for the most 
 part persons who have purchased the houses they occupy. 
 They may possibly deserve to be congratulated on the cir- 
 cumstance, but their existence does not seriously affect 
 the distribution of English land. Even if each of them 
 possessed a full acre and the average is probably less 
 than half an acre there would still be left, according to the 
 return, 33,800,000 acres in England and Wales to be 
 accounted for. Again, the examination of any page taken 
 at hap-hazard, in the new Domesday Book, shows that more 
 than a third of the recorded owners possess less than ten 
 acres, many of them just the bare acre that brings them with- 
 in the limit. Striking an average, we may deduct 90,000 
 persons from the total given above, and half a million from 
 the acreage of the kingdom; we then have left 33,300,000 
 acres, and 180,000 owners. Further analysis would show 
 that even this reduced figure has very little relation to the 
 number of persons who may be said to divide the soil of 
 England between them. A far more accurate picture is 
 given by the following table of the possessions of the great 
 landowners. 1 
 
 1 From the appendix to Bateman's Great Landcnvners. London : 
 Harrison & Sons, 1878. 
 
 A Table showing the distribution of the area of the United 
 Kingdom among the great landowners. 
 
 Number of holders of 100,000 acres and upwards 
 ,, ,, between 50,000 and 100,000 
 
 ,, ,, ,, 20,000 and 50,000 
 
 ,, ,, ,, 10,000 and 20,000 
 
 ,, ,, ,, 6,000 and 10,000 
 
 ,, ,, ,, 3,000 and 6,000 
 
 2,512
 
 AN HISTORICAL SKETCH. 37 
 
 From this table, by a rough calculation, which may be 
 left to the reader, we arrive at the conclusion that half of 
 the United Kingdom is owned by 2500 persons. The 
 population of the kingdom at the last census was 38,000,000 
 persons.
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 LAND TAXES I PAST AND PRESENT. 
 
 As the demand for increased taxation of land is one of 
 the most important features of the land nationalization 
 movement, it is worth while to devote some pages to an 
 examination of the manner in which the present taxes on 
 land have come into being. 
 
 The threefold burden, trinoda ?iecessitas, to which all 
 English landowners were subject before the Norman Con- 
 quest, has already been described. The burden was by its 
 nature necessarily uncertain in severity, and though not 
 immediately affected by the changes made at the Conquest, 
 seems gradually to have been merged in the analogous obli- 
 gations due from feudal tenants. 
 
 Ship-geld, Danegeld, and Carucage. In addition, how- 
 ever, to this uncertain obligation, a definite tax on land was 
 from time to time levied by the Saxon kings, in order to 
 drive off the Norsemen who ravaged the eastern coasts. 
 This tax, taking its name from its intended use, was at first 
 called ship-geld ; but the Norsemen growing stronger, or 
 the Englishmen more timid, after a time the money was 
 used not to drive off, but to bribe the invaders, and ship- 
 geld became danegeld. The tax, however, did not cease
 
 LAND TAXES: PAST AND PRESENT. 39 
 
 with the cause that gave rise to it. The Danish kings of 
 England themselves levied danegeld on various pretexts, 
 and William the Conqueror established it as a yearly tax 
 In the reign of Henry II. it was dropped for a short 
 time, but under Richard I. the same tax reappears with a 
 new name. It is called carucage, and is a land-tax levied 
 at a uniform rate on each carucate of land, the carucate, 
 or the amount of land that can be tilled in a season 
 with one plough, being identical with the hide of 100 to 
 120 acres. The tax was chargeable on all agricultural 
 land, independently of the tenure by which the land was 
 held. Under Edward II. it was imposed for the last time 
 in the year 1224. 
 
 The revenue from the royal demesne. Both before and 
 after the Conquest, however, the kings of England drew the 
 bulk of their revenues from their own estates the royal 
 demesne. The king's forests provided him with game, as 
 well as with the sport of killing it ; the tenants of his manors 
 furnished corn and other produce ; and the occupants of 
 towns built on the royal demesne paid definite rents, 
 collected by the sheriff of the county. This system of 
 revenue was regulated by Henry I., who converted the 
 produce rents of the rural tenants into fixed money rents, 
 and allowed each town to collect its own rent, firma burgi, 
 and pay it into the Exchequer direct. 1 In addition to these 
 fixed town or county rents, the tenants of the royal demesne 
 were all liable to be called upon to assist the king in any 
 emergency up to the tenth part of their goods. It is from 
 this special obligation of the tenants of ancient demesne, 
 that we get the clue to the regular system of taxation that 
 prevailed in England for several centuries. 
 1 Dowell, vol. i. p. 18.
 
 40 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 The revenue from the incidents of feudalism. Before 
 
 passingto this subject, however, it is necessary first to deal 
 with the revenues arising out of the feudal tenures introduced 
 by the Norman kings. These must be carefully distinguished 
 both from the rents levied upon the tenants of the royal 
 demesne, and from the taxes, of which danegeld and 
 carucage are instances, imposed by authority to meet an 
 emergency. The feudal dues were not taxes at all. They 
 were the outcome of an arrangement, largely voluntary, 
 under which the tenant was secured in the peaceable 
 possession of his land in return for certain services to be 
 rendered to his lord. These services were never due to 
 the king as king, they were due to him as feudal lord, and 
 therefore only due from landholders who were the king's 
 immediate tenants /. e. the tenants-in-chief. They in their 
 turn had a claim to similar services from their tenants ; and 
 so downwards, till sooner or later the actual cultivator of 
 the soil was reached, who held not by feudal tenure at all, 
 but by villainage. 
 
 The Knight's fee. It was reckoned that a properly 
 equipped knight cost at least ^20 a year for the mainte- 
 nance of himself and his family and his dignity, and that 
 five to six hundred acres of land would be required to 
 bring in this amount. This portion of land was called a 
 knight's fee, and formed the basis for the calculation of all 
 feudal services. 
 
 Scutage : its origin and disappearance. First among 
 these was the direct obligation of raising a force to serve in 
 the field. One knight must be supplied for every knight's 
 fee of land, and must serve, if required, forty days in each 
 year. Such a limitation of the period of service was 
 obviously inconvenient in the case of foreign expeditions,
 
 LAND TAXES: PAST AND PRESENT. 41 
 
 and on the occasion of an expedition to France, Henry II. 
 accepted from his feudal tenants a money payment in lieu 
 of personal service. This payment was called " scutage," 
 or shield money, and was charged at the rate of two marks for 
 each knight's fee, or is. 4^. in the pound. In subsequent 
 years the rate varied from 6d. to is. Sd. in the pound. 
 But, though obviously a logical outcome of the feudal 
 system, scutage seems always to have been looked upon, 
 by the payers at any rate, as an exceptional charge, 
 and the frequent levies made by King John helped to 
 provoke the barons' rising. For this reason both Henry 
 III. and Edward I. were chary of asking for scutages, 
 and in Edward II. 's reign the charge disappeared alto- 
 gether. The last payment was collected in 13 22, on the 
 occasion of the war with Scotland, from " the archbishops, 
 bishops, clergy, widows, and other women who owed 
 service in the army, and were desirous to make fines for 
 the same." x 
 
 The three regular "aids." The other burdens on 
 feudal tenants were of a less precise character. They 
 arose, like all feudal incidents, out of the personal relation- 
 ship, supposed or real, between the lord and his tenant. 
 The most important were the three regular " aids," as they 
 were called. If the feudal lord were taken captive the 
 tenant must pay his ransom ; when the lord's eldest son 
 came of age, the tenant must bear the expense of the 
 young man's knighthood ; and when the eldest daughter 
 married, the tenant must provide her dower. For any of 
 these purposes the king as feudal lord could levy an 
 "aid" from his tenants-in-chief, the great landowners of the 
 kingdom ; and they in their turn could exact the same aids 
 1 Dowell, vol. i. p. 56.
 
 42 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 from their tenants. At first there was no limitation to the 
 amount that might be taken on any one of these occasions ; 
 but in the compact between king and barons embodied in 
 Magna Charta, it was laid down that the aid must be 
 " reasonable " in amount, and a statute of Edward I. 
 defined the word " reasonable " to mean 20s. for each 
 knight's fee, or a shilling in the pound. 
 
 Relief and primer seisin ; wardship and marriage. 
 The next items in the list of feudal burdens are relief and 
 primer seisin. When a feudal tenant died his lord re-entered 
 upon the land, nominally to protect the rightful heir from 
 intruders, really to secure for himself the first year's profits, 
 the " primer seisin," of the estate. In addition, when he 
 finally handed the estate over, he was entitled to exact 
 a further payment called "relief." By Magna Charta a 
 relief was fixed at ^5 for a knight's fee. If, however, the 
 heir happened to be a minor, the lord, under the plea of 
 "wardship," continued his occupation of the land and his 
 enjoyment of its profits till the young man came of age. 
 Again, in the case of an heiress, the lord had the right, 
 under the title of "marriage," to bestow the hand and 
 property of his ward on whom he chose. The opportunities 
 for profitable extortion are here obvious, and by the sale 
 of rich heiresses the kings of England were able to secure 
 a considerable addition to their incomes. Subsequently, 
 too, this right to give wards in marriage was extended 
 from girls to boys, and there are constant entries on the 
 Exchequer Rolls of fines paid by men as well as women 
 for liberty to marry whom they pleased. 
 
 Fines on alienation. Another serious burden on the 
 feudal landholder was the difficulty of alienating his land. 
 In no case could he dispose of it by will, and if he wished
 
 LAND TAXES: PAST AND PRESENT. 43 
 
 to sell it during his lifetime, he must obtain the licence of 
 his lord, and must pay a fine. 
 
 Escheat and forfeiture. Lastly we come to the incidents 
 of "escheat" and "forfeiture." When a tenant died with- 
 out heirs, his estates reverted or " escheated " to the feudal 
 lord, as the original donor. Escheat also occurred when- 
 ever the tenant was found guilty of a felony. Over and 
 above escheat, however, was " forfeiture," a claim made by 
 the king, not as feudal lord but as king, to the estates of 
 all convicted criminals. If the crime was only an ordinary 
 felony, the king's claim to forfeiture ended with a year and 
 a day, and then the estate escheated to the feudal lord. 
 In the case of treason the estate was forfeited for ever to 
 the king, and all claims to escheat were barred. 
 
 The proposed Great Contract. These various feudal 
 dues the three "aids," "primer seisin and relief," " ward- 
 ship," " marriage," " fines on alienation," " escheat and 
 forfeiture " together made up an important part of the 
 revenue of the kings of England from the Norman Conquest 
 to the Great Rebellion. That such charges lent themselves 
 easily to extortion is not hard to see, and in practice the 
 officers of the Exchequer were ever fertile in excuses for 
 expanding the charges that could legally be made on the 
 feudal tenants of the Crown. To put a stop to this 
 perpetual irritation, it was proposed to King James I. 
 that he should make a " Great Contract " with the nation, 
 and commute his claim to feudal incidents for a fixed 
 sum of ,200,000 a year. The project fell through, and 
 the feudal burdens continued till the outbreak of the 
 rebellion. 
 
 The Restoration Parliament abolishes feudal tenures. 
 During the struggle with Charles I., and through the succeed-
 
 44 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 ing period of the Commonwealth, these burdens were allowed 
 to lapse. On the restoration of Charles II. they were in 
 theory, ipso facto, revived. But it is not easy to recreate a 
 nuisance that has once ceased to exist. And instead of 
 making the attempt, Parliament reverted to the proposal 
 for a great contract. The only doubt was as to the means 
 by which the money should be raised to indemnify the king. 
 The natural and honest way would undoubtedly have been 
 by a rent-charge levied on the properties which had been 
 previously subject to feudal incidents. To this course it 
 was objected that many of these properties had changed 
 hands, and that it would be unfair to impose an unexpected 
 burden on the new proprietors. The argument fell on 
 willing ears, and the House of Commons decided, though 
 only by the small majority of two, 1 to raise the money by 
 an excise on beer. At the same time all feudal tenures, 
 with two unimportant exceptions, were abolished. Hence- 
 forward every holder by knight service became a holder by 
 " free and common socage," or in other words, acquired the 
 unburdened freehold of his estate. The gain to the land- 
 owning classes was enormous, and ought to have been paid 
 for by the persons who profited. To make the general 
 body of tax-payers provide relief for a limited body of land- 
 owners was a gross abuse of the parliamentary power 
 possessed by the latter. 
 
 The tallage of towns, and of the king's rural tenants. 
 To turn back now to another branch of the royal revenue ; 
 it was stated above that the tenants of the king's ancient 
 demesne were liable to be called upon, even to the tenth of 
 their goods, for aid to their lord in any emergency. This 
 obligation extended not only to the rural tenants of the king's 
 1 Taswell-Langmead, p. 622.
 
 LAND TAXES : PAST AND PRESENT. 45 
 
 manors, but also to the inhabitants of nearly all the towns in 
 the kingdom, for, with few exceptions, the towns had been 
 built on the ancient folcland, now part of the royal demesne. 
 Under the Norman kings this heavy obligation was not en- 
 forced. Instead, rural tenants paid their danegeld or land 
 tax, and the urban tenants paid a comparatively mild auxilium 
 or aid. Later under Henry II., when the danegeld was for 
 a time dropped, the auxilium was extended to rural tenants, 
 and the whole tax was then called a " tallage." In practice 
 the tallage was a sort of composition between the king and 
 the tenants of his demesne. 1 They were liable up to the 
 tenth of their goods should the king be driven to neces- 
 sity ; he preferred money down. Thus when money was 
 needed for an expedition, the king first went to the citizens 
 of London and struck a bargain with them, and then, on 
 the basis of this bargain, the judges on circuit assessed 
 every town and every royal manor. Finally the sheriffs 
 collected the money, and paid it into the Exchequer. 
 This arrangement was adopted by Henry II. on three 
 occasions during his reign. The tax, it is to be noted, 
 was not a land tax at all, nor was it a general tax imposed 
 on the whole country; it was a charge upon the property 
 of all persons living on the royal demesne, and the king's 
 right to exact it arose not from his authority as sovereign, 
 but from his privileges as landlord. 
 
 The Saladin Tithe. So far then we have discovered 
 no one tax of the whole kingdom. Danegeld and carucage 
 only touched the agriculturists ; scutage only affected the 
 king's feudal tenants-in-chief; tallages were only demanded 
 from the tenants, urban and rural, of the royal demesne. 
 But as early as the reign of Henry II. a tax was imposed 
 1 Dowcll, p. 42.
 
 46 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 that was undoubtedly general. This was the Saladin tithe 
 of 1 1 88. The origin of the tax, as the name implies, was 
 religious rather than feudal or civil. Money was wanted to 
 drive Saladin from Jerusalem, and all over Europe chests 
 were placed in the churches to be filled by voluntary con- 
 tributions. The contributions were supposed to be pro- 
 portional to the wealth of the donor, and any one who 
 understated his property was liable to the penalty of 
 excommunication. Henry II. took advantage of this 
 enthusiasm and systematized it. By the authority of the 
 royal council, he required every one throughout his 
 dominions in France and England to "give in alms the 
 tenth of his rent and moveables." Various exceptions were 
 allowed, and knights and clergymen who served personally 
 in the crusade were altogether exempted. But apart from 
 these exceptions care was taken that no one should escape. 
 "And if any one shall, in the opinion of those presiding 
 at the collection, have given less than he ought, let there 
 be chosen from the parish four or six freemen, who on oath 
 shall state the amount which he ought to have stated, and 
 then he shall add what before was wanting." * 
 
 Growth of the general property tax. The general 
 property tax that had its origin in the Saladin tithe did not 
 readily establish itself. Like the income tax of our own 
 century, it was at first regarded as an exceptional tax, only 
 to be tolerated in circumstances of grave national danger. 
 Under such circumstances, however, it might rise to almost 
 any figure, and the nation would submit. Richard I., for 
 example, apart from the enormous tallages he took from 
 the tenants of his demesne, imposed in 1193 a property tax 
 of 25 per cent., or one-fourth of the goods and rents of every 
 1 Dowell, vol. i. p. 46.
 
 LAND TAXES : PAST AND PRESENT. 47 
 
 person in the kingdom. King John was more moderate, 
 and took only one-thirteenth. To collect this tax com- 
 missioners were appointed for each county, with power 
 to examine individuals on oath as to the value of their 
 chattels and rents. Under-valuation or concealment was 
 punished by the forfeiture of all the delinquent's goods, 
 and by imprisonment during the king's pleasure. 1 In spite, 
 however, of these severe provisions, it is probable that the 
 tax-payer rarely paid on the full value of his property. On 
 several occasions large categories of property were inten- 
 tionally exempted from taxation, for example, household 
 furniture, riding horses, and church plate, and sometimes 
 all rents were exempted and only movables charged. Again, 
 a provision is more than once found for sparing the small 
 belongings of the poor. Thus in 1232, when the tax was 
 at 6d. in the pound, all persons were exempted whose goods 
 amounted to less than 3^. 4^. 
 
 Some mediaeval assessments. This minimum was con- 
 stantly shifted, and the searching character of the tax may 
 be inferred from a surviving assessment of the town of 
 Colchester in the year 1301. Here, among others, John 
 Fitz Elias Weaver is returned as possessing an old coat 
 valued at 25-., and one lamb, value 6d. On this he pays a 
 fifteenth of 2d. 2 Other assessments are similar : William of 
 Tending, the tailor, has an old cloak, 35., a bed, 2s. 6d., a 
 brass pot, is. 6d., and a pair of scissors, 3d. total js. 3d. 
 Walter the weaver " has a surtout valued at 2s. Sd. 
 nothing more." 3 
 
 The " Tenth and Fifteenth." Up to the middle of Edward 
 I.'s reign, the general property tax with which we are now 
 
 1 Dovvell, p. 69. 2 Denton, p. 214. 
 
 '' Dowell, vol. i. p. 257.
 
 48 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 dealing went on side by side with the special taxes before 
 described. In one year there was a tallage or a scutage, 
 in another a general property tax ; or the three or any two 
 might fall together, no rule being observed except the 
 necessities of the king. Towards the end of the thirteenth 
 century, however, an attempt was made to combine the 
 tallage of the royal demesne with the general taxation of the 
 country, and the superior liability of the royal tenants was 
 recognized by demanding from them a higher rate. It is thus 
 that we get the system followed through several centuries of 
 demanding a tenth from the tenants of royal manors and 
 the inhabitants of all towns, while only a fifteenth is demanded 
 from the rest of the country. This system became firmly 
 established in the reign of Edward III., when, on the failure 
 of a final attempt to revive the old exceptional rights of 
 tallaging the royal demesne, a general " tenth and fifteenth " 
 was granted by Parliament, as a solatium to the king. 
 
 The settlement of the tax. The king, however, seems to 
 have revenged himself by instructing the commissioners of 
 taxation to screw up the assessments. The tax-payers 
 grumbled that they had never been asked to pay so much 
 before. To remove this discontent, it was arranged in the 
 next year, 1334, that the commissioners might treat with each 
 township as a whole, and make a composition for the payment 
 of a lump sum. The sum raised under this new system was 
 about ^39,000 for the whole country. Being the result of 
 a bargain, or rather of hundreds of separate bargains, no 
 attempt was made in the succeeding years to alter it. From 
 henceforward, when Parliament voted a grant of a tenth of 
 all the property in towns and on royal manors, and a fifteenth 
 for the rest of the country, nothing more was meant than 
 that each township should pay the sum agreed upon in 1334.
 
 LAND TAXES: PAST AND PRESENT. 49 
 
 Occasionally a town pleaded poverty, and Parliament made 
 an abatement, which was afterwards allowed to continue, so 
 that after some years the amount raised by a fifteenth and a 
 tenth gradually dropped to about ^30,000. 
 
 Various experiments in taxation. The system of 
 fifteenths and tenths, however, as settled by Edward III., 
 was not entirely satisfactory, and in the succeeding reigns 
 various experiments were made in taxation. Richard II. 
 twice tried a poll tax ; Henry IV. attempted to re-establish 
 the old land tax on the knight's fee ; Henry VI. tried a 
 graduated income tax. The last experiment is the most inter- 
 esting. This graduated tax, or " subsidy," to use the language 
 of the period, was first granted in 1435, and was repeated 
 in 1450 under a more complete form. The rate began at 
 6d. in the pound, and rose to 2s. in the pound for incomes 
 over ^200. The new tax involving a careful assessment 
 of property by royal commissioners was not popular, and 
 was slowly paid. The taxpayers preferred the old plan of a 
 fixed contribution from each township and a local assess- 
 ment, and two further attempts, made in the latter half of 
 the fifteenth century, to introduce the new subsidy failed. 
 
 Henry VIII. 's first "subsidy." Henry VIII. was more 
 successful. In 15 13 he wanted ^160,000 for a war with 
 France, and it was granted to him by an Act, 5 Henry VIII. 
 c. 17, which may most conveniently be taken as the 
 first of the long series of " subsidy " acts. Briefly, the first 
 subsidy was an income and property tax at the rate of 
 6d. in the pound. Wage-earners were to pay on their 
 yearly earnings, and landholders on their yearly rents, while 
 the owners of personalty were charged on the capital value 
 of their belongings " for every pownde in coyne, and the 
 valewe of every pownde that eny person hath in plate, house- 
 
 E
 
 50 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 hold stok of marchaundyse or other goodys or cattalles, 
 moveables ... to the value of x\s. or above, v)d." x 
 
 In order to collect the tax, commissioners were appointed 
 for every county, borough, and city in the kingdom, their 
 names being printed in the body of the Act. 
 
 The "entire subsidy" established as a regular tax. 
 From henceforward the " entire subsidy," as it was called, 
 became a regular feature of the English fiscal system. 
 At the same time, however, the fifteenth and tenth being an 
 old-established and therefore not unpopular tax, was still 
 retained. What was done was to supplement the old tax 
 fixed in amount by the new subsidy based on contemporary 
 assessments. Sometimes one fifteenth and tenth was 
 granted, together with one or more subsidies ; sometimes as 
 many as " foure holle XV meis and X meis to be hadde paide 
 taken and levied of the moveable goods cattails and other 
 things usual." 2 In 1545, Parliament, moved by the con- 
 sideration that "under his Majesties sure protection, wee 
 do yet so live as if there were no warre at all, even as the 
 small fishes of the sea in the most tempestuous and stormie 
 weather doe lie quietly under the rocke," 3 granted one 
 " entire subsidie " for the year, together with two fifteenths 
 and tenths, payable in two years. 
 
 Decadence of the subsidy. By the end of Henry VIII.'s 
 reign the productiveness of the subsidy began to decline. 
 Wages and salaries had entirely dropped out, and gradually 
 other property effected its escape from assessment. In 
 Elizabeth's reign the Chancellor of the Exchequer pointed 
 out to the House of Commons " how favourable was the 
 taxation of subsidies, whereby far less cometh to her 
 
 1 5 Henry VIII. c. 17. - 32 Henry VIII. c. 50. 
 
 3 37 Henry VIII. c. 25.
 
 LAND TAXES: PAST AND PRESENT. 51 
 
 Majesty's coffers than by law is granted, a matter now 
 (1575) drawn to be so usual that it is hard to be reformed." 1 
 Again in 1601 a demand was made in Parliament for a 
 revision of the assessment, and Sir Walter Raleigh protested 
 against the under-assessment of persons known to be 
 wealthy. " Our estates that be ^30 or ^40 in the Queen's 
 books are not the hundredth part of our wealth." 2 
 
 Systematic under-assessment. This persistent and 
 glaring under-assessment is not hard to explain. The com- 
 missioners for assessing the tax were local men, selected on 
 account of their position in each county or each borough. 
 These local magnates would not unnaturally be careful to 
 keep the valuation of their own district as low as possible, 
 lest they should be paying more than their neighbours. 
 They had too always before them the precedent of the 
 fifteenths and tenths, where the fixed sum paid by each 
 district had no longer any relation to the nominal rate. 
 There was thus always a tendency in assessments for sub- 
 sidies to drop back to the payments of previous years, and to 
 take those for the maximum that the district ought to pay. 
 So far had this tendency been carried, that by the end of 
 Elizabeth's reign a subsidy of 4s. in the pound on lands, and 
 2s. %d. in the pound on goods, had degenerated into a fixed 
 charge of about ^80,000 a year from the laity and ^20,000 
 from the clergy. 
 
 At this figure the tax continued throughout the next 
 two reigns. Parliament still religiously prescribed the way 
 in which the commissioners should do their work, and 
 assess every man at the full value of his property, and 
 the commissioners with equal persistency ignored their 
 instructions. 
 
 1 Denton, vol. i. p. 189. 2 Ibid., p. 193.
 
 52 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 During the reign of James I. too, the old fifteenths and 
 tenths finally disappeared, and henceforward the subsidy 
 stood alone. To make up the revenue it was necessary to 
 vote several subsidies at once. On one occasion as many 
 as five were granted to King Charles I., 1 all payable within 
 twelve months ; so that in this year, if the real rate had been 
 equal to the nominal rate, the whole of every man's rent, 
 and nearly three-quarters of his goods, would have gone in 
 taxation. 
 
 Monthly assessments of the Commonwealth. On the 
 outbreak of the Great Rebellion, the need for raising large 
 sums of money rapidly in order to pay the army speedily 
 convinced the Long Parliament that the time had arrived 
 for sweeping away the farce of the subsidy assessments. 
 Instead of pretending to impose a pound rate which every 
 one knew would never be exacted, Parliament fixed a 
 sum to be raised from the whole country, and shared out 
 the burden as fairly as it could guess between the different 
 counties and boroughs ; and in framing this guess, it was 
 guided by the previous assessments of the locality for a 
 subsidy. In fact the precedent, set by Edward III. in 1334, 
 was closely followed by the Long Parliament in 1648. The 
 difference was, that the sum demanded by the Long Par- 
 liament from the whole country was determined, not by the 
 sums previously paid, but by the needs of the Common- 
 wealth. Each locality then made its own arrangements 
 for levying its proportion of the tax by an equal pound rate 
 on all property real and personal. The tax was payable by 
 monthly instalments, and was generally voted by Parliament 
 for a few months at a time, and not for the whole year. 
 For example, in 1656 Parliament voted an "Assessment 
 1 3 Car. I. c. 8.
 
 LAND TAXES: PAST AND PRESENT. 53 
 
 upon England at the rate of ^60,000 by the moneth for 
 three moneths," 1 to meet the expenses of the Spanish War, 
 " and other necessary services of this Commonwealth." 
 
 William III.'s new assessment in 1692. The Common- 
 wealth tax on these lines survived both the Restoration of 
 Charles II. and the Revolution that drove out his brother, 
 and was employed during the first few years of the reign 
 of William and Mary. But it was found to have serious 
 defects. In the first place, personal property had, before 
 the accession of William, altogether slipped out of assess- 
 ment ; secondly, the proportions for the different counties and 
 boroughs had grown unfair. These proportions, as already 
 mentioned, had been fixed on the basis of the last subsidy 
 payments made in the reign of Charles I., nearly fifty years 
 ago. Probably even then they were not quite fair ; by the end 
 of the century they had grown obviously unjust, for some 
 districts had prospered and others declined. To correct 
 these anomalies it was decided to have a new assessment ; 
 and as the Government was grievously in need of money 
 for the French War, the tax was set for the year at the high 
 rate of 4s. in the pound. This and nothing more is the 
 meaning of the famous land tax, so called, of William III. 
 
 Details of the so-called "land tax" of 1692. The 
 tax was granted by an Act, 4 William and Mary, c. 1, 
 entitled, " An Act for granting to their Majesties an aid of 
 4s. in the pound for one year for carrying on a vigorous 
 war against France." Section 1, without the verbiage, is as 
 follows : " Be it enacted that all persons and bodies cor- 
 porate having any estate in ready moneys or in any debts 
 owing to them within this realm or without, or having any 
 estate in goods, wares, merchandise, or other chattels, or 
 1 Scobell, Ordinances, Anno 165 1, c. 12.
 
 54 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 personal estate whatsoever . . . shall pay unto their 
 Majesties 4s. in the pound, according to the true yearly- 
 value thereof for one year." 
 
 Section 2 deals with professional incomes : " And be it 
 further enacted that all persons holding any public offices 
 or employment of profit (except military and naval officers), 
 and their clerks, substitutes, &c, shall pay 4s. for every 
 pound of their salaries." 
 
 Section 3 : " And to the end a further aid and supply 
 may be raised by a charge upon all lands, tenements, &c, 
 ... be it further enacted that all manors, messuages, 
 lands and tenements, quarries, mines, ironworks, saltworks, 
 parks, chases, warrens, woods, coppices, fishings, tithes, 
 tolls, annuities, and all other yearly profits, and all heredita- 
 ments of what nature or kind whatsoever situate in England 
 or Wales or Berwick-on-Tweed are hereby charged with the 
 sum of 4s. for every 20s. of the full yearly value." 
 
 In one word, the tax of 1692 was not a land tax, but 
 a property and income tax. 
 
 Let us pass to succeeding years : The tax of 1693 is the 
 same as that of 1692. In 1694 we have in addition a poll 
 tax of 4s. a head, with certain exceptions, and a small 
 graduated income tax. In 1695 the Money Act is again 
 the same as in 1692. In 1697 the phrase "land tax" is 
 first used 8 and 9 William III., chap. 3 : "An Act for 
 granting an aid to His Majesty as well by a land tax as by 
 other subsidies and other duties payable for one year." 
 But it is not clear whether the phrase " land tax '' here 
 refers to the whole tax or only to that part of the tax which 
 applied to land. 
 
 The settlement of the tax in 1697. In this year too 
 an important change was made in the tax, probably with
 
 LAND TAXES: PAST AND PRESENT. 55 
 
 the object of correcting the fraudulent assessments of the 
 owners of personalty. For already personalty had begun to 
 slip out of William's assessments, as it had slipped out of 
 the monthly assessments under Charles II. Each year the 
 produce of the tax grew less, and to prevent a farther fall, in 
 1697 the principle of the pound rate for the whole country 
 was again abandoned in favour of the plan of fixed local 
 assessments. Just as Edward III. in 1334 had fixed and 
 localized the fifteenth and tenth ; so now in 1697 William 
 III. fixes and localizes his new subsidies, the quota of 
 each district being fixed on the basis of the payment made 
 in 1692. Referring to the Act, we find that 
 
 Section 1 defines the quotas to be raised in each county 
 and in each town. 
 
 Section 2 enacts that personal estates, offices, pensions, 
 &c, are to pay at the rate of 35-. in the pound. 
 
 Section 3 " And to the end the full sums charged by 
 this Act upon the several counties, cities, &c, may be fully 
 raised, be it further enacted, that all manors, messuages, 
 &c, shall be charged with as much equality as is possible by 
 a pound rate for or towards the respective sums of money 
 by this Act imposed upon the several counties, &c." 
 
 In other words, the tax-gatherer in each district is to get 
 as much as he can out of the owners of personalty, and 
 then to come upon the land for the rest. Consequently 
 the more skilful the holders of personal property were in 
 evading the tax, the greater would be the proportion thrown 
 upon land. Nor does it need many words to prove that 
 personalty can more easily escape assessment than realty ; 
 the farmer can drive off his cattle before the assessor comes 
 round, the householder can conceal his furniture, but the 
 land and the fixtures upon it are always in evidence. Thus
 
 56 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 it is easily intelligible that in time a tax originally intended 
 for a general property and income tax became little more 
 than a charge upon real estate. 
 
 The Commutation Act of 1798. But to complete the 
 history of the tax : The Act of 1697 was followed by a 
 series of Acts which were repeated in exactly the same 
 form year after year for 100 years. The only variations 
 introduced were variations in the rate at which personalty 
 was charged and in the whole amount to be levied. The rate 
 is sometimes 3^., sometimes 2s., and sometimes only is., 
 but after the commencement of the war with our American 
 colonies in 1776 it is always 4s. The amount to be levied 
 per each shilling of rate is almost exactly constant, being 
 close upon half a million pounds. 
 
 The last of these Acts was passed in the year 1797 : 38 
 George III., c. 5. It was in all essentials identical with 
 that passed in 1697 and already quoted, except that the 
 rate was 4s. instead of 3s. In the next year, but in the same 
 session of Parliament, an Act was passed 38 George III., 
 c. 60 for making perpetual not the whole of the land tax, 
 but the portion of it that related to land. For even 
 in 1798 part of the produce of the tax about ;i 50,000 
 a year in all was still derived from personalty and from 
 incomes. 1 
 
 The landed portion of the tax, thus made perpetual, was 
 to be redeemable by the purchase and cancelling of an 
 equivalent amount of consols. The personalty portion was 
 ascertained for each district, and was voted annually by 
 Parliament as a charge upon all the personalty of the 
 district till 1833, when the tax was dropped. Finally the 
 portion of the tax relating to incomes from offices and 
 1 Do well, vol. iii. p. 101.
 
 LAND TAXES: PAST AND PRESENT. $7 
 
 employments was also ascertained and voted annually till 
 1876. 
 
 Pitt's income tax. So much for the land tax, so called, 
 apparently disposed of by Pitt in 1798. But as with French 
 kings so with English taxes, the succession is perpetual 
 le roi est mort, vive le roi. No sooner had the property 
 and income tax of William III. been converted into a fixed 
 charge by the Act of 1798, than a new property and income 
 tax was called into being by an Act of 1799. Pitt's income 
 tax was in fact nothing more than the old land tax 
 charged on a new assessment. The old form of the tax was 
 indeed allowed to continue side by side with the new form, 
 just as in Tudor days the old fifteenths and tenths continued 
 side by side with the subsidy, but the new and expansible 
 tax became the keystone of the Exchequer. It is true 
 that in comparing Pitt's tax with William III.'s, differences 
 of detail will be found ; in particular the Government 
 machinery for assessment and collection was improved. 
 But fixing one's attention on the main features and not 
 on minor details, one sees that the chain of continuity is 
 unbroken; Pitt's income tax, William III.'s land tax, and 
 the Tudor subsidy are all in essence the same. 
 
 The Land Restoration League and the land tax. We 
 are now in a position to appreciate at its proper value the 
 proposal made by some land reformers, that William III.'s 
 Land Tax of 1692 should be re-assessed at its original rate 
 of 4s. in the pound. 1 This proposal is ingeniously calcu- 
 
 1 English Land Restoration League, Leaflet No. 16. A Candidate's 
 Catechism. 
 
 Ask your Candidate I. Will you press for the re-assessment of the 
 " Land Tax" of " four shillings in the on the full, true yearly value 
 of the land," so that it shall be paid on the current value of the land, 
 instead of (as at present) on the value which it had in 1692 ?
 
 58 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 lated to enlist in its favour the universal sense of justice 
 and our peculiarly English love of precedent. Our ancestors 
 in their wisdom, say the land nationalizers of to-day, 
 decided in 1692 that all land should be taxed at the rate 
 of 4s. in the pound ; by the dishonesty of landowning 
 parliaments this magnificent tax has been whittled down 
 to a rate of twopence or less. Parenthetically it may be 
 remarked, that the dishonest landowners were our ancestors 
 quite as much as the men of 1692, and if we are to be 
 guided by precedents without examining their intrinsic 
 merits, the continuous policy of a century of parliaments 
 is at least as good a precedent as the heroic act of one 
 particular House of Commons. The examination of the 
 facts shows, however, that this apparently fascinating pre- 
 cedent is in reality no precedent. The tax of William III. 
 was not a land tax ; the rate of 4s. in the pound was not 
 intended to be permanent, and did not in fact become 
 permanent till three-quarters of a century later. Further, 
 the very evil of which complaint is now made was fully 
 dealt with by Pitt; the farce of William III.'s assessments 
 was swept away, and the tax re-established on a modern 
 basis. What the land nationalizers demand has in fact 
 been done ; and the landowner of to-day pays his property 
 tax on the "current value of the land." In addition, on 
 those estates where the old land tax has not been redeemed, 
 he continues to pay a fixed rent-charge. 
 
 The history of the death duties. If, however, land- 
 owners as a class are free from political sin in the matter 
 of the so-called land tax, it cannot be said that they are 
 equally blameless in the matter of the death duties. 
 The original probate duty imposed in 1694 was only a 5^. 
 stamp on any probate of a will or letters of adminis-
 
 LAND TAXES : PAST AND PRESENT. 59 
 
 tration. 1 Realty under English law has always passed direct 
 to the heir, and therefore required no probate. And as long 
 as the tax on probate was merely nominal this inequality was 
 of little consequence. But in 1795 Pi tt: imposed a serious 
 probate duty with an ascending scale of charges. By 18 14 
 this tax brought in as much as half a million a year, but 
 no effort was made to bring realty within the scope of 
 the tax. The reason for this tenderness to the landowners 
 is sufficiently explained by the fate of Pitt's legacy tax of 
 1796. As proposed by Pitt the tax would have fallen on 
 all successions, though with the proviso that successors 
 to realty should be allowed to pay their tax gradually. 
 Even this concession failed to conciliate the House of 
 Commons, and the tax was imposed on personalty only. 
 Thus landed property passing by death escaped, and down 
 to 1853 continued to escape, both probate and legacy duty. 
 In 1853 Mr. Gladstone as Chancellor of the Exchequer 
 ventured to deal with one of these evasions, and imposed 
 a succession duty on real estate. But even then the land- 
 owners escaped lightly. Legacy duty, or the tax on 
 personalty, is levied on the full value of the property 
 passing; succession duty, or the tax on realty, is only 
 charged on the life interest of the successor, and is 
 payable in gradual instalments, which cease altogether 
 should the successor die before they are completed. This 
 arrangement made in 1853 still continues; nor has any 
 Chancellor of the Exchequer yet ventured to ask the 
 landowners of the House of Commons to subject their 
 estates to any kind of probate duty. 
 
 The extent to which landowners escape. The amount 
 of taxation that real property thus escapes is considerable. 
 
 1 Dowell, vol. iii. p. 139.
 
 60 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 Taking the figures of 1889, we find that while legacy duty 
 levied on ^78,000,000 of personal property brings in to 
 the revenue ^2, 842, 000 ; succession duty levied on 
 ^44,000,000 of real property only brings in ,929,000. 
 Were the rate in each case the same, real property should 
 contribute nearly ^1,400,000. Thus on this account alone 
 real property escapes annually nearly half a million of 
 taxation. The case is worse when we come to probate 
 duty. This duty, charged only on personalty, brings in 
 ^4,300,000 a year. Were the same duty charged on 
 realty also, the revenue would be benefited to the extent 
 of nearly two millions a year. Thus altogether under the 
 death duties real property escapes taxation to the extent of 
 nearly two and a half millions annually. 
 
 Local taxation; personalty originally liable. On the 
 other hand, it is contended that this injustice is more than 
 redressed by the fact that real property forms the sole basis 
 for local taxation. The argument is plausible, and derives 
 additional weight from the fact that personalty has escaped 
 local taxation, not through the deliberate intention of Parlia- 
 ment, but through the carelessness of assessment authorities, 
 or through the skilful evasions of the possessors of personalty. 
 For there is no doubt that, so far at any rate as the poor 
 rate is concerned, the original intention of Parliament was 
 that all classes of property should be equally rated. Sewer 
 rates and paving rates, on the other hand, were charged 
 upon the owners of the land affected. 1 This latter is an 
 obviously equitable arrangement, for the landowner is the 
 person who reaps the most tangible benefit from good 
 
 1 Cf. the Poor Law Acts of Queen Elizabeth, and various Acts for 
 constructing sewers and paving roads from Henry VI. to Henry VIII.; 
 e.g. an Act of Henry VIII. for paving the Strand.
 
 LAND TAXES : PAST AND PRESENT. 61 
 
 roads and good drains through or past his property. Not 
 less equitable was the original intention of Parliament to charge 
 all classes of well-to-do people towards the relief of the poor. 
 If it is the duty of the rich to prevent the poor from starving, 
 the obligation is a moral one, and cannot by any logic be made 
 to hinge on the economic origin of the rich man's riches. 
 But, as with the land tax (so called) so with the poor rate, 
 personalty, easily moved and easily concealed, was able to 
 evade assessment till its original liability was forgotten. 
 
 Local rates no set-off to the death duties. Whether 
 this liability should again be enforced is a matter which 
 may be left for discussion later on. For the present, it is 
 sufficient to point out that a long- established charge upon 
 land (or any other permanent investment) has a very differ- 
 ent effect from a tax on floating property. For in the former 
 case the charge is allowed for in the price at which the land 
 (or stock) changes hands, so that the actual holder at the 
 present time suffers no hardship, and would gain an un- 
 looked-for advantage if the charge were removed. In the 
 latter case, the tax takes from the owner something that he 
 has acquired in the expectation that it will be his. And a 
 moment's consideration will show that for the purposes 
 of this comparison, all property passing by death becomes 
 for the moment " floating," whether it be in the form 
 of bank-notes or broad acres. For when the property 
 passes, the important question is its present value, and this 
 is known, or ascertainable, whether the property be per- 
 sonalty or realty. And from this known present value in 
 the case of personalty the State takes a large percentage ; in 
 the case of realty it takes next to nothing. 
 
 A particular instance will make the point clearer. A man 
 dies leaving ^iooo, whether consols or an accumulated
 
 62 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 balance at his bank makes no difference to the argument. 
 This ;iooo will pay legacy duty and probate duty, amount- 
 ing in the case of a child of the deceased to ^35. But if 
 the deceased had instead left land worth ^"iooo, the child 
 would only pay succession duty on his life interest, amounting 
 probably to less than ^5, payable in eight equal instalments. 
 Clearly this difference of more than ^30 is not compensated 
 for by the fact that land is subject to local taxation. For 
 local burdens must be taken account of in estimating the 
 present value of the land left, and would equally be 
 reckoned for if the heir wished to spend his ^"iooo in the 
 purchase of land. The sole difference is, that in the one case 
 his net inheritance is worth ,965, in the other case ^995. 
 An added legal absurdity. To make this inequity still 
 more apparent, the lawyers have grafted upon it an absurdity 
 of their own devising. For should the deceased in his will 
 have left directions that his ^1000 at the bank should be 
 invested in land, then the courts will rule that the cash is 
 thereby turned into realty, and the heir becomes liable only 
 to succession duty. So that if we suppose that a son, who 
 is expecting a gross inheritance of ,1000, has in any case 
 the intention of purchasing land, the sum that the State 
 will leave at his disposal for the purchase can be increased 
 by ^30 by a single line in his father's will. In the same 
 way, should a landowner direct by will the sale of his landed 
 estates, they are in the legal mind ipso facto converted into 
 personalty, and the children become liable for the higher 
 duties. The abolition of these absurdities would, as calcu- 
 lated above, increase the revenue by two and a half millions, 
 and save not a little needless litigation. However, the more 
 complete consideration of possible reforms in taxation must 
 be left to another chapter.
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE THEORY OF RENT. 
 
 In the two preceding chapters we have been dealing 
 almost exclusively with historical facts, only drawing from 
 them in passing the most obvious inferences. We must now 
 leave this safe ground for a while, in order to arrive, if it be 
 possible, at a clear understanding on economic theories ; 
 for on the theory of rent must necessarily turn a large 
 part of the arguments for or against land nationalization. 
 
 Ricardo's statement of his theory. The most widely 
 known and the most generally quoted theory of rent 
 is that due to the economist Ricardo. It is mathe- 
 matical in its simplicity. " Rent," says Ricardo, " is that 
 portion of the produce of the earth which is paid to the 
 landlord for the use of the original and indestructible 
 powers of the soil." 1 And then he goes on to show how 
 rent arises and how it grows. 
 
 ' ' On the first settling of a country in which there is an abundance 
 of rich and fertile land, a very small proportion of which is required to 
 be cultivated for the support of the actual population, . . . there will 
 be no rent ; for no one would pay for the use of land when there was an 
 abundant quantity not yet appropriated, and therefore at the disposal of 
 
 Ricardo, chap. ii.
 
 64 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 whosoever might choose to cultivate it." But "when in the progress 
 of society land of the second degree of fertility is taken into cultivation, 
 rent immediately commences on that of the first quality, and the 
 amount of rent will depend on the difference in the quality of these two 
 portions of land. When land of the third quality is taken into cultiva- 
 tion, rent immediately commences on the second, and it is regulated as 
 before by the difference in their productive powers. At the same 
 time, the rent of the first quality will rise, for that must always be 
 above the rent of the second, by the difference between the produce 
 which they yield with a given quantity of capital and labour. With 
 every step in the progress of population, which shall oblige a 
 country to have recourse to land of a worse quality, to enable it to 
 raise its supply of food, rent, on all the more fertile land, will rise." 
 
 The theory eulogized by Mr. Henry George. This 
 theory of rent invented by Ricardo, and endorsed by John 
 Stuart Mill, has been enthusiastically accepted by Mr. 
 Henry George. " Fortunately as to the law of rent," he 
 writes, "there is no necessity for discussion. Authority 
 here coincides with common sense, and the accepted dictum 
 of current political economy has the self-evident character 
 of a geometric axiom." 1 In a later work 2 Mr. George goes 
 farther, and apparently identifies the Ricardian theory with 
 what he is pleased to call " God's Law of Rent." 
 
 Whether the origin of this famous law be divine or human, 
 Mr. George must decide for himself. But it may at once 
 be admitted that he has good reason for saying that the 
 Ricardian theory is self-evident, and that it is supported 
 besides by all the authority of the classic economists. Indeed 
 there is only one objection to the theory it does not 
 correspond with the facts. 
 
 A preliminary objection. In the first place the definition 
 is inaccurate. Rent is not paid for " the use of the inde- 
 
 1 Progress and Poverty, p. nS. 
 
 " The Condition of Labour, p. 73.
 
 THE THEORY OF RENT. 65 
 
 structible powers of the soil ; " for the indestructible powers 
 of the soil are for the most part useless. As the late Pro- 
 fessor Thorold Rogers, among others, shrewdly pointed out, 1 
 what is indestructible in the soil is not its fertility, but its 
 infertility. A bed of granite will remain barren, however 
 much labour be spent upon it ; while, on the other hand, the 
 most fertile of virgin soils may quickly be rendered unpro- 
 ductive by careless cultivation. Indeed Nature herself often 
 performs the work of destruction, and land that by much 
 exertion of human effort has been made fertile, will within 
 a few years, if the effort cease, relapse into barrenness. 
 Consequently, so far as the permanent properties of the soil 
 are concerned, what the farmer pays for is rather the ab- 
 sence of bad qualities than the presence of good ones. This 
 is of course merely a verbal distinction, but it is useful as 
 helping to emphasize the fact that there is no such thing as 
 a permanent fertility. 
 
 The theory historically untrue. Leaving, however, the 
 question of a more complete definition of rent for the 
 present alone, let us pass to the more important question of 
 the origin of rent. According to Ricardo rent arose by the 
 gradual extension of cultivation from fertile to inferior soils. 
 So far as England is concerned this statement is completely 
 at variance with known facts. Rents in England had a 
 compulsory or military, not an economic origin. The rent- 
 payer was in nine cases out of ten the serf or slave of the 
 rent-receiver. He paid because he could not help himself; 
 the payment was a personal one ; no attempt was made to 
 graduate the rent according to the nature of the soil ; nor 
 was one serfs rent raised because some other serf was culti- 
 vating worse land. The only circumstances that affected the 
 
 1 See for example, Industrial and Commercial History oj England. 
 
 V
 
 66 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 rent were the needs of the lord, and the customs of the manor. 
 Nor did economic considerations affect the rent in cases 
 where a voluntary payment was made, as where a freeholder 
 commended himself to a powerful lord. Here what the free 
 tenant paid for was military protection, not profitable land. 
 And, to jump from these early and obviously non-economic 
 rents to the fifteenth century, when tenant-farmers in the 
 modern sense began to grow common, there is still no evi- 
 dence for Ricardo's imaginary picture of the extension of 
 cultivation inducing an increase of rent. On the contrary, the 
 population was stationary, or nearly so, and an immense area 
 of cultivable land was lying idle. Nevertheless the villain 
 tenants of manors were willing to take up land and pay a 
 rent for it, because they acquired by so doing a more inde- 
 pendent status. A still more important test is furnished by 
 the rapid increase of rents at the end of the fifteenth and 
 through the greater part of the sixteenth centuries. Here 
 the causes were purely economic, and therefore here if any- 
 where support should be found for the Ricardian theory. 
 It is not found. The rise was due, not to the extension 
 of cultivation, for thousands of acres were thrown out of 
 tillage, and the labourers flocked to the towns in search of 
 work, but to a change in the use to which the land was 
 put. The fields that brought in little profit as corn-land 
 could be made to bring in much profit as grass-land. 
 
 The rise in eighteenth- century rents. Again, in the 
 eighteenth century there was a rise in rents that cannot be 
 attributed to the pressure of population against the soil. 
 During three-quarters of the century population increased 
 very slowly, prices were almost stationary, and labourers 
 were prosperous. The accompanying increase of rent was 
 due to the improvements in the art of agriculture, of which
 
 THE THEORY OF RENT. 67 
 
 something has been said in a previous chapter. " In 173 1-2, 
 when wheat was 20X. a quarter, barley us., and oats gs. 6d., 
 Lord Lovell reports as the result of the new agriculture 
 that his profits on his outlay are more than 36 per cent." l 
 In brief, the landowners were teaching the farmers how to 
 make more profit out of the land by better cultivation, and 
 this increased profit, or part of it, came back to the land- 
 owner in the form of increased rents. 
 
 The law of diminishing return. Nor can it be said 
 that this is only another aspect of the Ricardian theory. 
 It is true that Ricardo allowed not only for the case of a 
 more extensive cultivation by the breaking up of inferior 
 land, but also for a more intensive cultivation by the em- 
 ployment of additional capital on the old land. He did ; 
 but the expenditure of additional capital, according to the 
 old methods, is a very different thing from the adoption of 
 improved methods. It is the latter procedure that gave 
 rise to the increase of rents in the eighteenth century; it 
 was the former on which Ricardo based the second half 
 of his theory of rent. 
 
 Doses and diagrams. This side of the theory has been 
 fully worked out by later writers, notably by Professor 
 Marshall. 2 With much admirable reasoning Professor 
 Marshall explains how rent arises from what, following 
 Ricardo and Mill, he calls the Law of Diminishing Return. 
 This explanation, like the other branch of the Ricardian 
 theory, is extremely pretty, and has the additional advantage 
 that it can be illustrated by diagrams. A diagram always 
 appeals to the imagination. The laziest of readers when 
 
 1 Thorold Rogers, The Economic Interpretation of History, p. 270. 
 
 2 See Marshall's Economics of Industry and Principles of Economics 
 on the subject of rent.
 
 68 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 he sees a neat little diagram, and is told that one line, 
 by distances measured along it, represents the farmer's 
 "doses" of capital, another in a similar way the successive 
 returns obtained, and a third line a wavy one the rate of 
 return per dose, at once grasps the whole theory, or thinks 
 he does, and accepts without a murmur the conclusion, that 
 a certain area included between these lines must be the 
 landlord's rent, and another area the farmer's profit. No- 
 thing could be more beautiful only it is not true. That 
 is to say, the theory, with or without diagrams, does not 
 explain, even approximately, the growth of rent in the 
 majority of cases where rent has grown. 
 
 The essence of the theory is that rent begins when the 
 point of diminishing return has been passed. As a matter 
 of fact, on ninety-nine farms out of a hundred now paying 
 rent, the point of diminishing return has not yet been even 
 approached. The capital that in theory ought to be spent 
 on the land is not spent, for the simple reason that the 
 farmer has not got it to spend. This unpretentious fact 
 at once reduces the Ricardo-Marshall theory, adopted by 
 Henry George, to its proper position as an ingenious intel- 
 lectual exercise. Its abstract, unreal character has been 
 sufficiently exposed by that most cautious of economists, 
 Professor Sidgwick 
 
 "It is misleading," he writes, 1 "to speak of the 'last 
 dose of capital which pays no rent ' as if this ' dose ' were 
 an element definitely ascertainable in the business reckonings 
 of an ordinary farm. . . The art of agriculture has not yet 
 reached the degree of exactness that would be required to 
 ascertain even approximately in any particular case the 
 portion of capital that is to be regarded as paying no rent. 
 1 Sidgwick, Principles of Political Economy, p. 287.
 
 THE THEORY OF RENT. 69 
 
 Thus" with regard to the changes following on the recent 
 fall in the value of English wheat " the most that can be 
 said is, that the fall of prices has caused a general tendency to 
 diminish expense in farming wherever it can be diminished : 
 and even this is in many cases merely due to loss of capital, 
 and is in consequence a tendency to farm more cheaply 
 than is really economical." 
 
 The narrowness of the Eicardian theory. But per- 
 haps the most sweeping condemnation of the Ricardian 
 theory is to be found in the fact that Ricardian theorists 
 invariably argue as if the only crop obtainable from the soil 
 were a crop of wheat. All their arithmetical calculations 
 and geometrical diagrams are based on this tacit assumption. 
 But the uses to which land can be put fall little short in 
 number of the wants which human beings can feel ; and for 
 any one of these uses the landless man will in general be 
 willing to pay some price to the landlord. It is, therefore, 
 on the face of it absurd to attempt to deduce the law of rent 
 for all land from reasoning drawn solely from one use of 
 land. 
 
 The fundamental attribute of land. And curiously 
 enough Professor Marshall, who has taken so much pains 
 to elaborate the Ricardian theory, elsewhere points out the 
 multifold utility of land, and states, more clearly than any 
 other writer has yet stated, the essential attributes which dis- 
 tinguish land from other commodities. 
 
 " When we have inquired," he writes, " what it is that 
 marks off land from those material things which we regard 
 as products of the land, we shall find that the fundamental 
 attribute of land i.5 its extension. The right to use a piece 
 of land gives command over a certain space a certain part 
 of the earth's surface. The area of the earth is fixed ; the
 
 70 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 geometric relations in which any part of it stands to other 
 parts are fixed. Man has no control over them." And 
 again : " The use of a certain area of the earth's surface is 
 a primary condition of anything that man can do ; it gives 
 him room for his own actions, with the enjoyment of the 
 heat and the light, the air and the rain which nature assigns 
 to that area; and it determines his distance from, and in 
 a great measure his relations to, other things and other 
 persons." 1 
 
 Let us take this admirable statement as the basis for a 
 further investigation of the theory of rent. Only before 
 starting on the task, let it be clearly understood that we do 
 not expect to discover any simple law, that may be expressed 
 in algebraic formula? or illustrated with geometric diagrams. 
 Our only object is to arrive at a clearer understanding of 
 the way in which the general phenomenon of rent affects 
 particular proposals for land nationalization. 
 
 The law of supply and demand as applied to land. 
 First then, when a man offers to hire a piece of land he 
 must have in view one or more of the numberless uses to 
 which land can be put ; and the advantage that he expects 
 to derive from the occupation of the land for that purpose, 
 will influence him in his estimate of the price the rent 
 which he should pay. But this consideration will not neces- 
 sarily, will not even probably, determine the rent that is 
 finally agreed upon. Our particular applicant for land, and 
 the particular proprietor with whom he is bargaining, are not 
 alone in the world. There are other pieces of land on the 
 earth's surface which will suit the applicant as well or nearly 
 as well ; there are other applicants, actual or potential, 
 willing to come to terms with the landlord. The final 
 1 Marshall, Principles of Economics, p. 198.
 
 THE THEORY OF RENT. 71 
 
 price agreed upon will therefore be determined after such 
 bargaining as is possible between the two parties by the 
 Law of Supply and Demand. " When there's two pigs in 
 the market and only one buyer, pigs is cheap ; when there's 
 two buyers and only one pig, pigs is dear," said the old 
 farmer, and the law of supply and demand has never been 
 better stated. 
 
 The supply of land. Obviously, however, this state- 
 ment does not exhaust the question of rent. To say that 
 the rent of a piece of land is determined by the law of 
 supply and demand, is useless except as a prelude to an 
 explanation of how this universal law of price operates 
 in the case of land. In other words, we must consider 
 what circumstances create the demand for land or alter the 
 effective supply of land ; for though the final supply of 
 land is unalterably limited by the size of the globe, the 
 effective supply of land at any given place for any given 
 purpose is constantly modified by social conditions. For 
 example, the establishment of a service of fast steamboats 
 from St. Heliers to Southampton may render the soil of 
 Jersey as effectively available for the purpose of growing 
 potatoes for the London market, as if the whole island had 
 been taken up bodily and dropped down in Kent. Or 
 again, the supply of land effectively available for dwelling- 
 houses in any given district of London may be suddenly 
 diminished by the construction there of a wide-spreading 
 railway terminus, and as suddenly increased by the running 
 of daily cheap trains to and from the country. 
 
 The " cost of production " of land. Such illustrations 
 might be multiplied almost ad infinitum, but the practical 
 point we have to consider is how these modifications in the 
 supply of land ultimately affect its price. In the case of
 
 72 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 most commodities there is a well-understood connection 
 between the price of the commodity and the cost of increas- 
 ing the supply of that commodity. Where competition is 
 keen and free, the price of an article tends to equal the cost 
 of producing more specimens of the same article. Does 
 the same thing hold true of land ? Is there in fact any 
 cost of production in the case of land? 
 
 The land nationalizer, especially if he be a theologian, 
 would at once answer No ! The land he asserts has been 
 created by a Divine Maker and delivered as a free gift to 
 the human race. 1 To discuss the actions and intentions of 
 a Divine Maker is an endless task ; but even Mr. Henry 
 George must admit that the land which God gave to the 
 human race was only partially suitable to human purposes. 
 Many broad fields that now carry rich crops of wheat were, 
 when man took them over, but stagnant marshes breeding 
 pestilence ; the Weald of Kent, now covered with orchards 
 and hop-gardens and acres of dwarf fruit, was once a solid 
 forest. It is man who has drained the marsh, and man 
 who has cleared the forest. More than this. On particular 
 areas of land, human labour has fenced off one field from 
 another ; has dug ditches and water-courses ; has cut roads 
 to give convenient access to the different fields, and erected 
 suitable buildings in the spot where they are likely to be 
 most serviceable. In brief, a farm has been produced. 
 
 The thing called a farm. Let us concentrate our 
 attention for a moment on this product of human labour 
 this thing, this farm. It has been produced by processes 
 which are essentially similar to those involved in the con- 
 
 1 " But land has no cost of production, since it is created by God, 
 not produced by man." Henry George, The Condition of Labour, 
 p. 17.
 
 THE THEORY OF RENT. 73 
 
 version of wheat into bread, or pig-iron into pen-knives. In 
 each case man has availed himself of the forces of nature, 
 so far as they go, and utilized them in co-operation with his 
 own muscles to produce a thing he wants. The thing once 
 produced must take its chance in the market. It may fetch 
 far more than will repay the producer for the expenses of 
 production ; it may go for an old song. But if it is a thing 
 constantly asked for and constantly supplied, then, as was 
 just said, its price, so far as competition is keen and free, will 
 tend to an equality with the cost of producing a similar 
 article. In the case of a farm there is not the same ease of 
 production, nor quite the same regularity of demand, as in 
 the case of a penknife. The farm is a fixture on the earth's 
 surface. Other farms cannot be brought to precisely the 
 same spot to compete with it ; nor, as a rule, will applicants 
 coming from a distance wish for it so strenuously as the men 
 living in its neighbourhood. In other words, the fixity of 
 the commodity called a farm limits competition in both 
 directions. But when due allowance has been made for 
 these considerations, it is clear that the cost of production 
 does to some extent affect the price of farms ; for a farmer 
 will in general be willing to pay for a ready-made farm, at 
 least as much as it would cost him to make a similar farm 
 for himself. Part of this payment is in practice made in a 
 lump sum to the outgoing tenant, for such improvements 
 of his own making as the law of England allows him to 
 appropriate. The rest is included in the annual rent paid 
 to the landlord. 
 
 The attempted distinction between original fertility 
 and added value. Mr. Henry George, following Ricardo, 
 recognizes this, but would reply that he separates the value 
 that has been added to the farm by human labour from the
 
 74 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 original value of the land in a state of nature. The pay- 
 ment for the first item is interest on capital ; it is only to 
 the second item that the term rent belongs. Like the rest 
 of the Ricardian theory, the distinction is beautiful when 
 looked at from a distance, but it will not bear contact with 
 everyday facts. It fails indeed at the very outset; for if 
 part of the rent actually paid is interest on capital, clearly it 
 is necessary to know on what capital sum interest is to be 
 allowed. Is it on the whole capital that has been put into 
 the soil in times past? If so, even if the rate were fixed so 
 low as two and a half per cent., then on most English farms 
 the margin left for the "original fertility of the soil" would 
 be reduced to a minus quantity. While if we decide that 
 interest is to be allowed only on that part of the past ex- 
 penditure which can be traced in the present value, we are 
 met by the absolute impracticability of the proposed in- 
 vestigation. For even if we possessed the complete records 
 of a farm for a hundred years back, or any period that we 
 care to take as sufficiently remote, it would still be impossible 
 to ascertain how much of the present fertility and conveni- 
 ence of the farm was due to human labour, and how much 
 was derived from the original condition of the land. Nature 
 works rapidly in the open air, and a momentary neglect on 
 the part of man may set back his work for weeks or months 
 or years. Part of the labour put into the soil may at any 
 time be swallowed up, like manure spread upon a sand-bed, 
 while another part will express itself as a valuable addition 
 to the advantages of the land. But, after the lapse of a 
 few years, the completest ledger record will not be suffi- 
 cient to determine what present results are due to what past 
 operations. 
 
 Professor Sidgwick's definition of rent. On these
 
 THE THEORY OF RENT. 75 
 
 grounds it is far wiser, as Professor Sidgwick has done, 
 to abandon altogether the subtle distinctions attempted by 
 Ricardo and his followers, and to use the term "rent" in 
 its /'ordinary sense to mean the price paid for the use of 
 land, whatever be the source of its utility." 1 
 
 Have building sites a "cost of production"? In 
 applying this definition to land intended for buildings, it 
 must be noticed, that as regards the actual site itself there is 
 no gradual accumulation of fertility or convenience as in 
 the case of a farm. A site must be dealt with de novo for 
 each succeeding house placed upon it, and all the previous 
 work upon that plot of land must be wasted. 
 
 This, however, is not the case with the approaches to a 
 site, and with the sewers leading from it. Ceteris paribus, a 
 man will pay more for a site with a well-made road leading 
 up to it than for a plot of ground that can only be ap- 
 proached by a cart track. Consequently the first thing that 
 a landowner does when he wishes to convert waste or agri- 
 cultural land into building land is to lay out convenient 
 roads, properly metalled and with sewers underneath. 2 A 
 proportional part of the cost of this work of necessity enters 
 into the price, or rent, that a speculative builder or private 
 person will be willing to pay for one of the sites thus 
 rendered available. It is true that in the centre of large 
 
 1 Sidgwick, p. 283. 
 
 2 Here, for example, is an extract from an auctioneer's circular adver- 
 tising the sale of a building estate : 
 
 "The roads are made and formed with an extra thickness of metal- 
 ling. The estate is well drained, the dual system for sewage and 
 surface water having been adopted, and connected with the main 
 drainage system of the town. . . . The cost of the completion and 
 maintenance of all roads and footways, as shown on the Sale Plan, and 
 of all sewers, will be borne by the Vendors."
 
 76 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 towns this original cost of production has long been over- 
 laid by other elements that go to make up the price of 
 building land. But in new towns or residential districts, 
 deliberately laid out with the view of attracting residents, 
 such as Eastbourne or Bedford Park, it is probable that the 
 whole of the capitalized rent of each site is but little in 
 excess of the cost of making that site. It must be admitted, 
 however, that such cases are probably exceptional. As 
 a general rule, long before agricultural land is actually built 
 over, it has begun to rise in value because many persons 
 have begun to appreciate its advantages as building land. 
 Consequently even the first tenants pay for their sites a rent 
 that may very far outstrip the cost of production. 
 
 The "cost of production" of mines. To pass to another 
 use of land, we find that in the case of mines the question of 
 rent is complicated by the progressive exhaustion of the mine. 
 There is indeed for every mine in one sense a very obvious 
 " cost of production," namely, the cost of sinking the shaft, 
 erecting a wheel, propping up galleries, &c, &c. And for 
 these advantages, where they exist, a colliery master would 
 be willing to pay a rent equivalent to the cost of re-creating 
 them elsewhere ; only the very presence of these advan- 
 tages is prima facie evidence that the mine has been to some 
 extent worked out. In other words, it cannot be inferred 
 that an existing shaft and galleries are a real addition to the 
 original value of a mine, in the same way that good roads 
 are always an addition to the value of a farm or a building 
 estate. All we can say is, that a mine cannot be " produced " 
 without the initial labour of sinking a shaft, &c, and the 
 cost of this operation will be taken into account by a colliery 
 master bidding for the lease of a ready-made mine. 
 
 We have shown then that there is generally an element in
 
 THE THEORY OF RENT. 77 
 
 the price of land corresponding very closely to the element 
 called " cost of production " in the price of other commodi- 
 ties. The difference is that land being fixed in one spot, the 
 cost of production of a piece of land for a particular purpose 
 can never affect its price in the same systematic way in 
 which cost of production regulates the prices of penknives. 
 Two penknives can be identical in every respect, but two 
 pieces of land cannot; if in no other respect they must 
 always differ in geographical situation. Consequently while 
 the cost of supplying land for any given purpose does un- 
 doubtedly affect the price of land, the important considera- 
 tion in determining rent is Demand. 
 
 The demand for land. And the first point to be noted 
 about the demand for land is that a different demand comes 
 from different classes of people. The Ricardians say that 
 the rent of a piece of land measures the superior advantages 
 of that piece of land over land that pays no rent. The 
 statement if true would be little better than a truism. But 
 is it true ? Advantages do not exist in the abstract ; there 
 must be some person to appreciate them. For whom then 
 does the Ricardian law measure the rent that should be paid ? 
 A well-to-do farmer will offer for good land in Kent with 
 farm buildings attached eighteen shillings an acre ; one of 
 his labourers will offer for a strip of the same land, without 
 buildings, a shilling a rod, or eight pounds an acre. A rail- 
 way company gets five pounds an acre for labourers' allot- 
 ments carved out of surplus land that no farmer would 
 pay a penny to hire. 
 
 Nor need we confine ourselves to this palpable contrast 
 between the rents paid by labourers and those paid by 
 farmers. The class of farmers itself is not homogeneous. 
 The rent per acre paid by a farmer of a thousand acres
 
 78 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 will not necessarily be the same, will probably be much less, 
 than the rent paid for exactly the same quality of land by a 
 fifty-acre farmer, due allowance in each case being made for 
 the value of the buildings. And the reason is simple. The 
 number of professional farmers who possess sufficient capital 
 to farm fifty acres is considerably greater than the number 
 of farmers who could venture on a farm of a thousand acres ; 
 consequently there will in general be a keener competition 
 for the smaller farms. 
 
 Thus, even for purely agricultural purposes, the demand for 
 land is by no means such a simple matter as the Ricardians 
 assume it to be. But the uses of agricultural land are not 
 confined to agriculture. Land that might be made into a 
 farm, may be made into a park ; land that would command 
 a low rent as a sheep-walk, may command a high rent as a 
 deer forest ; land worth five shillings an acre to plough, may 
 be worth a pound an acre as a poultry farm. Where does 
 the Ricardian ready-reckoner come in here ? 
 
 The truth is that almost the only generalization we can 
 make about the demand for land is this That it depends 
 ultimately on the demander's anticipation of the profit or 
 pleasure to him to be got out of the land. And as nearly every 
 want of human beings involves some use of land, an increase 
 in the prosperity of a community which means always a 
 multiplication of wants will generally cause an increased 
 demand for land. 
 
 The effect of improvements upon rent. Descending 
 from this general statement, that rent grows with the growing 
 wealth of the community, let us come to particular con- 
 siderations. And first, if we regard land for the moment 
 solely as an instrument of production, not as an object of 
 pleasure, it is clear that any invention which increases the
 
 THE THEORY OF RENT. 79 
 
 utility that can be extracted from the soil with a given 
 amount of labour will generally increase rent. For the 
 occupier of the land now finds that his labour or capital is 
 rewarded at a higher rate than formerly, and therefore, un- 
 less there is an accompanying rise in the standard of living 
 among men of his class, competition will compel him to pay 
 over this excess remuneration to his landlord. 
 
 In practice improvements in the art of industry are 
 generally accompanied by an improvement in the standard 
 of living ; the two are in fact only different expressions of 
 an increased mental activity. Consequently though the 
 landlord may, as has been well said, skim off the cream of 
 any particular improvement, the milk that remains behind 
 will be worth something more than pigs' food. 
 
 An increase in rent rarely accompanies an increase 
 in poverty. On the other hand, it must not be forgotten 
 that the landlord can on occasion profit by an actual fall in 
 the standard of comfort. It is indeed this aspect of the 
 operation of rent that seems to have taken exclusive posses- 
 sion of Mr. George's mind, and to have inspired his fancy 
 pictures of the human race groaning under the slavery 
 of private ownership of land. The cases, however, where 
 this does occur are happily rare. One of the best instances 
 is that of the rent of agricultural land in England at the 
 beginning of the present century. 
 
 The population under the artificial stimulus of the Poor 
 Law was increasing even faster than it could be used up as 
 cannon fodder ; a series of bad harvests fell one after the 
 other upon the country ; the price of wheat rose enormously ; 
 so also did rents ; the wages of labour fell piteously. In 
 this case it was indeed out of the misery of the labourer 
 that the landlord ground his rents.
 
 80 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 Such instances, however, it may be safely asserted, are 
 extremely rare ; as a general rule it is not the growing 
 misery but the growing prosperity of the mass of the 
 community that leads to a rise in rents. 
 
 Successive rents for the same piece of land. Another 
 point, important to note, is the way in which rent is affected 
 by the multiplicity of uses to which land can be put. For 
 example, strawberry-growing is under suitable conditions a 
 very profitable use of land. The conditions are that the 
 land must be of fair quality, and within an easy distance of 
 a good market. Such land will command a high rent, and 
 we will suppose that a fruit-grower in order to save this rent 
 moves off to what a Ricardian might call the " margin of 
 cultivation " for strawberries. Will he there find land at 
 no rent ? Certainly not. For though the land is worth 
 nothing, beyond the grower's bare profit, for strawberry- 
 growing, it may be worth an appreciable rent for other 
 purposes, say stock-rearing ; and there is no reason why the 
 owner of the land should forego this rent in order to gratify 
 a particular strawberry-grower. 
 
 This consideration is of fundamental importance in the 
 theory of rent, for it at once disposes of the Ricardian paradox 
 that the rent of land does not enter into the price of com- 
 modities. The Ricardian, arguing as if the soil of the 
 British Isles had no conceivable utility except to grow 
 wheat, contends that the price of wheat is fixed by the cost of 
 its production on the worst land, and that therefore the rent 
 paid for the use of the best land is not the cause, but the 
 consequence, of the price of wheat : hence the landowner only 
 intercepts the extra- profit that would otherwise go to the 
 farmer of the best land ; and the public is not affected by 
 this private arrangement. All of which would be true if
 
 THE THEORY OF RENT. 81 
 
 wheat were the only commodity extracted from the land. 
 But even one alternative use for land upsets this calculation ; 
 for it may create a minimum rent below which even the 
 worst wheat land will not fall. If so this minimum rent, 
 since it enters into the price paid for all wheat land, must 
 enter into the cost of production of all wheat. 
 
 In England, as a matter of fact, there are few acres of land 
 under any sort of cultivation of which the possible uses are 
 not nearer twenty than two ; and it may safely be said that 
 within the limits of the United Kingdom occupied rent- 
 less land is impossible to find. In making this statement 
 one does not forget that at the present moment there are 
 farms lying vacant which the owners declare they would be 
 willing to let rent free, Yes ; but for how long ? For just 
 so long as may be necessary for the tenant at his own 
 expense to bring back the farm to a condition of high fertility. 
 To say that such a farm is let rent free is an abuse of 
 language. 
 
 Some rent enters into the cost of production of commo- 
 dities. However, whether there be or be not rentless land in 
 England, does not seriously affect our present argument. 
 The point is that each lower, i. e. less profitable, use of land 
 makes a minimum rent for every higher use. 1 To take only 
 broad distinctions, agricultural rents form minimum rents for 
 market-gardens, and the rent for market-garden land forms 
 a minimum rent for town building-land. Within a own, too, 
 it is possible to trace the gradations of rent as the number of 
 profitable uses for the land increases from circumference to 
 centre. In the suburbs of London land is available for 
 
 1 This point has been admirably brought out by Mr. J. A. Hobson. 
 See, for example, an article in the Quarterly Journal of Economics for 
 April 1 89 1. 
 
 G
 
 82 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 few except residential purposes ; in the heart of the City there 
 is a possibility of a hundred alternative uses for any square 
 rod of land. 
 
 The most profitable of these e.g. the robbing of guileless 
 clergymen by promoting bogus companies must pay per 
 square foot of land at least as much rent as would be paid 
 for a less profitable use of land, a few hundred yards away 
 from the centre. And for this reason, that " the margin of 
 cultivation " for bogus company offices is reached at about 
 a furlong from the Stock Exchange. Beyond this distance 
 it would not be profitable for the company promoter to 
 open his den. But such a site would be excellent for 
 an accountant's office, or for a manufacturer's show-rooms, 
 or for scores of other purposes. The best rent payable 
 for any of these purposes will be the minimum rent below 
 which no company promoter can get a site for his office. 
 To this extent, then, the cost of production of bogus 
 companies is really enhanced by the item of rent a fact 
 which will perhaps help to console the eminently respectable 
 victims of the City freebooter. 
 
 Again, to take an illustration from another industry, where 
 coal is discovered beneath the surface of corn-fields, the 
 coal-master must pay for all the surface land that his 
 operations require, at least as much rent as the corn-fields 
 commanded. In practice he will generally pay much more, 
 because digging up coal is, as a rule, a more profitable 
 business than growing corn. But while such extra rent as 
 he may pay will be a consequence, not a cause, of the high 
 price of coal, the rent that the land was worth previously 
 for agriculture will be a necessary item in the coal-owner's 
 expenses of production, and will help to determine the price 
 at which coal could be sold.
 
 THE THEORY OF RENT. 83 
 
 Rent, Interest, and Wages. Indeed the way in which 
 the three elements of production affect price is almost 
 identical. It is the minimum rent of land for a particular 
 purpose that affects the price of the commodity produced ; 
 any rent above this minimum will be a consequence of price. 
 In the same way, the average interest on capital must be 
 paid, or allowed for, as a minimum before profits can be 
 calculated. And as regards wages of labour, it is the wage 
 of the average workman that forms the basis on which the 
 expenses of production should be calculated; any extra 
 wage'paid for exceptional skill or ability is only an equivalent, 
 if even that, for the extra profit that the good workman 
 brings. 1 The good workman commands in fact a specific 
 rent, over and above the normal wage in his profession, just 
 as the exceptionally good soil or good site commands a 
 specific rent over and above the rent of the soil or site least 
 suitable for the particular purpose in view. 
 
 These conditions have been insisted on at some length, 
 because they help to dispose of the absurdity that rent 
 is no burden on the community. Obviously that part of 
 rent that does enter into the expenses of production is a 
 burden, making itself felt through the agency of price. On 
 the other hand, specific rents for exceptional advantages 
 are undoubtedly the consequence, not the cause, of price, and 
 are only a burden on the community to this negative extent, 
 that they could conceivably, by taxation, be taken away 
 from private individuals and devoted to the public weal. 
 
 1 So far as manual labour is concerned, this point has been profusely 
 illustrated by Mr. Thomas Brassey, the great contractor, in his book on 
 Work and Wages.
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 THE BURDEN OF LOCAL RATES. 
 
 The preceding chapter, it is to be hoped, has cleared 
 the way for considering the practical question of how taxes 
 upon land affect different classes in the community. Ob- 
 viously this question is of fundamental importance in any 
 scheme of land nationalization ; for even those reformers 
 who, like the English Land Nationalization Society, are 
 mostly concerned with the problem of administering the 
 land, cannot, and do not, ignore the question of taxation. 
 And yet there are few points in the whole range of contro- 
 versy about which all parties talk so loosely. 
 i Who pays local rates? Local rates afford the best 
 example of this vague and often self-contradictory talk. 
 They are a charge upon real property, payable in the first 
 instance by the occupier. Is he also the final payer? That 
 is the whole matter in a nutshell. But the answer to this 
 apparently straightforward question seems to vary with the 
 shifting mood of the person who undertakes to deal with it. 
 When, for example, a proposal is made in the House of 
 Commons by a Tory Government, that local rates should be 
 relieved by contributions from the Imperial Exchequer, 
 Liberal and Radical members will denounce the proposal
 
 THE BURDEN OF LOCAL RATES. 85 
 
 as a bribe to the landowning classes ; while the Tories will 
 contend that it is the poor distressed occupier whom they 
 wish to relieve. A few months later the Liberals will be 
 demanding that the rates shall be divided equally between 
 owner and occupier, in order to relieve the latter ; and the 
 Tories will reply that the owner already pays the whole 
 rate. 
 
 This is no fancy picture. It is a matter-of-fact description 
 of discussions that have taken place in the House of 
 Commons more than once within the last half-dozen years. 
 Part of the self-contradiction is of course due to the 
 peculiar exigencies of the politician's trade. But, in 
 addition, a liberal allowance must be made for honest 
 confusion of thought. For the question is not so simple 
 as it sounds. Where the rate is in the first instance paid 
 by the occupier, as in the case of most middle-class people, 
 the payer has no legal right to make a corresponding 
 deduction from his rent, and therefore on the surface it 
 seems as if the landlord bore no part of the burden. And 
 where, as with most working-class people, it is the landlord 
 who in the first instance pays the rate, there it sometimes 
 happens that he will subsequently raise the rents of his 
 tenants on the plea that rates have gone up. So that here 
 again it seems, on the surface, as if the burden in the last 
 resort fell upon the occupier. 
 
 Rates are allowed for in fixing the rent Let us, to 
 solve the difficulty, go back for a moment to the theory of 
 rent discussed in the previous chapter. It was there 
 pointed out that any individual in applying for land would 
 first consider what the land was worth to him for the 
 purpose or purposes for which he wanted it, and this 
 consideration must determine the maximum price that he
 
 86 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 is willing to pay. He may give less than this, but if he 
 is a free agent he will not give more, whether he is applying 
 for a thousand-acre farm or a half-acre allotment ; a coal- 
 mine or an apple-orchard ; a suburban villa or a cotton 
 factory. In every case he considers what the thing he is 
 applying for is worth to him, and then fixes his maximum 
 payment. But whether the whole of this payment goes to 
 the legal owner of the land, or whatever part is taken by a 
 local authority, clearly does not affect the tenant as tenant. 
 Consequently if the applicant in the course of his bargaining 
 finds that the farm or villa he wants is burdened with a 
 local charge, he will deduct that charge from his estimate 
 of what he can afford to pay the owner. 
 
 Arthur Young's rule for ascertaining rent. Here, for 
 example, is the advice given to applicants for farms by 
 Arthur Young in his Farmer's Calendar published at the 
 beginning of the present century. 
 
 " Ascertainment of Rent. This is a very important part of 
 the business in hiring a farm. . . . The principal point 
 here necessary to touch on, is the combination of rent, rates, 
 and tithes in one sum. Knowing the capital intended to 
 be invested, estimate the interest of it at not less than 10 
 per cent., and then calculate the expenses and the produce : 
 the former deducted from the latter, leaves that sum which the 
 farmer can afford to pay in these three species of rent. 
 Deduct further the tithes and rates, and the remainder is 
 what he can afford to pay the landlord. If rent be valued 
 in any other way, it must be erroneously and deceitfully 
 done, and no dependence can be placed upon it." 1 
 
 In practice there is little doubt that the majority of 
 intending tenants, both in town and country, do take the 
 1 Young's Farmer'' s Calendar, p. 485.
 
 THE BURDEN OF LOCAL RATES. 87 
 
 precaution of inquiring what rates or taxes they will have 
 to pay, and vary their estimates accordingly. In their case 
 then it is the landlord, and not the tenant, who bears the 
 burden of the rates. As for those tenants who do not 
 take this precaution, it is obvious that their neglect to 
 inquire about rates and taxes can only be due to a feeling 
 that these charges are insignificant compared to the item 
 of rent. If so, they at any rate are not the people to 
 grumble about the weight of local burdens. 
 
 Working-class rents and local rates. But how about 
 the cases where the landlord, paying the rates in the first 
 instance, reimburses himself by a levy on his tenants? The 
 answer is that the cases where this does occur prove too 
 much. For example, a penny library rate is imposed in a 
 provincial town : on a workman's house this would amount 
 to perhaps 2s. a year at the outside ; but the landlord to 
 recoup himself will, as the tales go, raise his rents not \d. 
 but 6d. a week. What does this prove ? Obviously that the 
 library rate was not the cause of, but the excuse for, the 
 landlord's action. The explanation of the whole matter is, 
 that at the time the rate was imposed, the rents of workmen's 
 houses were generally tending upwards. But a general upward 
 tendency will not of its own accord produce an increase in 
 a particular rent. The actual moment must come when the 
 landlord goes to his tenant and tells him that for the future 
 his rent will be raised from 6s. a week to 6^. 6d. ; and any 
 landlord, however crudely commercial he may be, will pre- 
 fer that this moment should be preceded by some event 
 which will give a plausible excuse for the unpleasant 
 message. 
 
 Free Education and increased rents. It must be 
 admitted that some landlords are easily satisfied in the
 
 88 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 matter of plausibility. If the accounts in provincial papers 
 may be accepted as correct, many owners of working-class 
 houses have found in the Free Education Act of 1891 an 
 excuse for exacting more rent out of their tenants. The 
 fact seems monstrous, but there is no economic mystery 
 about it. By the abolition of school fees the available 
 income of every working-class parent was increased, and 
 therefore the average tenant could, after the passing of the 
 Free Education Act, afford to pay more rent than previously. 
 If he was living in a district where rents had been previously 
 rising, his new prosperity would be the landlord's oppor- 
 tunity, and he would now be asked for the rise that in strict- 
 ness the landlord could have exacted earlier. In this case 
 the abolition of fees would be the excuse, not the cause of the 
 rise in rent. It might further happen that the remission of 
 fees in the autumn of 1891 caused as well as excused the 
 recorded instances of increased rents. For the poorer 
 parents having more money at their disposal would, some 
 of them, wish to secure better house accommodation. 
 There would consequently be an increased demand for the 
 better types of working-class houses, while the supply of 
 such houses could not be increased at a moment's notice. 
 Here then the remission of fees would by itself be sufficient 
 to cause a rise in rents, and if competition were sufficiently 
 keen, the working-class tenant might be compelled to pay 
 over to his landlord the whole of his children's fees remitted 
 by Parliament. 
 
 An Indian illustration. An amusing instance of the 
 converse case, where a tax upon the landlord affords an 
 excuse for raising the tenant's rent, is furnished by another 
 country. The writer remembers well a conversation with a 
 native gentleman in India, a landowner, a barrister, and a
 
 THE BURDEN OF LOCAL RATES. 89 
 
 patriot, on the subject of the new income tax. With much 
 righteous indignation this gentleman was urging that the 
 income tax was the last straw laid by the heartless British 
 Government on the back of the overburdened peasant. It 
 was pointed out to him that this could hardly be, since 
 the tax was confined to official, professional, and com- 
 mercial incomes. His reply was instructive, " Yes, but if 
 I am taxed on my professional earnings, of course I take 
 it out of my tenants." Of course, what really happened 
 was, that the prosperity of this gentleman's tenants, coupled 
 with their dependent position, enabled him to screw more 
 money out of them, and the income tax on his profes- 
 sional income was as good an excuse as a marriage in 
 his family or the birth of an heir. 
 
 In every case the landlord ultimately pays taxes on land. 
 It might seem at first sight that such a case as this, and the 
 free education cases in England, are hardly on all fours with 
 the condition postulated above that the tenant should be a 
 free agent. Undoubtedly neither the tenant of an Indian 
 nawab, nor of an English jerry-builder, is in the same position 
 to bargain freely as a Yorkshire farmer with a good bank 
 balance behind him. But the greater or lesser amount of 
 independence, though it may affect the total that the tenant 
 will pay, will not disturb the fact that it is on the landlord 
 that any tax upon land ultimately falls. However servile 
 the tenant may be, he must at least be left with sufficient to 
 keep him alive, and whether the land is taxed or not, the 
 grasping landlord will leave him no more. In brief; if the 
 tenant is free to bargain, he will only pay in all what he 
 thinks the land is worth to him, and he will not trouble his 
 head whether the whole of his payment goes to the landlord, 
 or whether part is taken by a taxing authority ; if the tenant
 
 90 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 is unfree, he must submit, tax or no tax, to his landlord's 
 exactions : hence in every case it is the landlord who bears 
 the burden of the tax. 
 
 Leaseholders and new rates. But it may be urged, 
 supposing a tenant has taken a house on a lease, and that 
 during the period of the lease a new rate is imposed, clearly 
 the rate will fall upon the tenant. Of course it will, up to the 
 end of his tenancy, if he has bargained to pay all rates while 
 the tenancy continues. New rates, however, do not drop 
 from the sky. They are imposed by local authorities with 
 much trepidation, and when any important expenditure has 
 to be incurred it is always met by means of a loan, spread 
 over a number of years, so that there may be no sudden 
 increase in the rates. What we have to deal with then in 
 practice is not any entirely unexpected new rate, but the 
 steady growth of old rates. Surely this steady growth, 
 noticeable in almost every town in the kingdom, will be 
 taken account of by a prudent tenant, and he will make his 
 bargain accordingly ; and if tenants neglect this precaution, 
 it can only be, as suggested above, that they think the item 
 unimportant. There is, however, good reason to believe that 
 the majority of middle-class and upper-class tenants, and 
 these are the only classes concerned, do seriously consider 
 the question of rates, and the possibility of their increase, 
 when looking for houses. A careful investigation would 
 probably show that houses or flats where the rates and taxes 
 are paid directly by the landlord, let at a proportionately 
 higher rent than those where the tenant is immediately 
 liable. For example, take a house or fiat that the landlord 
 is willing to let at ;qo a year ; rates and taxes being 
 estimated at about ^18 additional, so that the total cost to 
 the tenant would be about ^108. In sucli a case, if the
 
 THE BURDEN OF LOCAL RATES. 91 
 
 landlord undertook to pay rates and taxes, and thus remove 
 all elements of uncertainty, it may safely be stated that 
 tenants entering upon a lease would be willing to settle for 
 a total rent of ,110. This consideration is probably one 
 of the many reasons why modern fiats command such high 
 rents. 
 
 In London, however, the immediate landlord is rarely 
 the owner of the freehold ; he is probably a builder who 
 has hired the land on a long lease. Here then, it may 
 be argued, the actual owner of the land escapes taxation, 
 the whole burden being borne by that useful person, the 
 speculative builder, who risks his capital to provide houses 
 for his fellow-men. Certainly not. The builder, when he 
 makes his bargain with the freeholder, knows perfectly well 
 that the local rates which he undertakes to pay have a 
 tendency to rise, and he estimates accordingly. It is as 
 much part of his business to allow for rates and taxes as to 
 allow for the cost of bricks and mortar. 
 
 A rate upon houses may fall upon the builder. On 
 the other hand, it must be remembered that local rates in 
 England are levied not on the value of the site, but on the 
 house and site together, and as a rule the house is the more 
 considerable item. Take, for example, the case of a building 
 estate well on the outskirts of a town, where the land by 
 itself has only a market-garden value. As market-garden 
 land it has been liable to rates and taxes which have un- 
 doubtedly come out of the landlord's pocket. This left him 
 with a certain net income, and unless he can realize at least 
 this net income by letting (or selling) the land for building 
 sites, he will keep it as a market-garden. Thus the market- 
 garden rent, minus the market-garden rates, forms the 
 minimum rent at which the land can be got for building
 
 92 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 purposes. If then the builder gets the land at this minimum 
 price, he clearly cannot throw back upon the landlord any 
 additional rate put upon the house when built. Such 
 additional rate will in fact act as a virtual addition to the 
 cost of building the house, and will, therefore, generally 
 present itself in the price of the house. 
 
 But this is rarely the case. If, however (as would be the 
 case where the land is close to a town), the actual rent paid 
 by the builder exceeded the above minimum rent, it cannot 
 be said that the local rate would add to the cost of the 
 house. For the fact that the landlord could get from his land 
 even a penny more than market-garden value, would prove 
 that the builder anticipated for himself a profit after paying 
 all expenses, including rates and taxes ; so that if, when the 
 house were built, the local authority were to forego the 
 additional rate chargeable, it would only be making an 
 unexpected present to the builder. And if the builder had 
 known beforehand that this present would be made to him, 
 he would have been willing to pay a higher ground-rent to 
 the landlord. 
 
 We have thus arrived at a rough criterion by means of 
 which we can determine, as between the ground-landlord 
 and the speculative builder, who pays the rates charged 
 upon buildings. If the ground-rent is just the bare agri- 
 cultural rent or market-garden rent, it is probable that the 
 builder has got the land at the lowest price at which he 
 could get any land for building purposes, and therefore the 
 rates imposed upon the house will be a real addition to the 
 expenses of building. If, on the other hand, the ground-rent 
 is a serious item, then it is certain that the rate upon the 
 building, as well as the rate upon the land, will really be 
 paid by the owner of the soil.
 
 THE BURDEN OF LOCAL RATES. 93 
 
 But in applying the above criterion it must always be 
 remembered that the ground-landlord often takes only part 
 of his rent in cash. The house that the leaseholder builds 
 is by the law of England added to the freehold. Both 
 parties to the bargain are necessarily aware of this fact, and 
 the stipulated ground-rent will be reduced accordingly. In 
 other words, the ground-landlord takes part of his rent in 
 bricks and mortar. Hence a nominal ground-rent of a few 
 pounds an acre, apparently nothing more than land would 
 be worth for agriculture, may really represent a very heavy 
 urban rent. Bearing this in mind, it will be found that the 
 cases are extremely rare where local rates and Imperial taxes 
 on the building are borne by the builder. Probably in nine 
 cases out of ten they have been deducted beforehand from 
 the rent, or the purchase-money, payable to the freeholder. 
 
 A particular illustration. This conclusion is so im- 
 portant that it is well to look at it from every point of view. 
 As a particular illustration let us take the case of Holland 
 Park. The owner of this historic ground is now letting off 
 a portion of it on building lease. Substantial private houses 
 are to be built, and for the site of each a ground-rent of 
 ;ioo will be charged. 1 The houses when built will be 
 subject to heavy rates, payable to the Kensington Vestry, 
 the London County Council, and the London School Board. 
 They will also be subject to the Imperial Inhabited House 
 Duty, and possibly the assessment for the Land Tax may 
 be increased this last probably a trilling matter. All these 
 charges will be payable either by the occupier of the house, 
 or by the leaseholder who builds it. The owner of the soil 
 will hear nothing of them until, at the end of the lease, the 
 
 1 I think this is the actual figure, but it is a matter of no consequence 
 to the argument.
 
 94 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 house which he did not build becomes by the law of England 
 his. Apparently then the owner of Holland Park escapes 
 all taxation except income tax on each ^ioo of ground- 
 rent. In reality every charge falls upon him ; for were these 
 local and Imperial charges removed, the occupants of the 
 houses would be able and willing to afford so much more 
 house-rent, and the leaseholder, knowing this, would have 
 been able and willing to pay so much more ground-rent. 
 The matter, in fact, is purely one of private bargain ; and if 
 the owner of Holland Park cared to make a profitable 
 speculation he would offer to make himself liable for all 
 rates and taxes upon his estate. 
 
 Why landlords avoid direct liability for rates. Why 
 then, it may be asked, do the London ground-landlords 
 never in practice make such an arrangement? For two 
 good reasons. As a class they do not understand speculative 
 business ; their tradition is to let their land at the best price 
 they can get, and to leave to the lessee the business of 
 making a profit out of it, if he can. The second reason is 
 political. The power to impose rates is vested ultimately 
 in an electorate, composed roughly of all the householders 
 in a town. Under the present arrangement a very large 
 number of householders are also ratepayers ; that is, are 
 personally liable for the rates, with no power to deduct them 
 from rents previously agreed upon. These electors, there- 
 fore, have at present a direct interest in keeping down the 
 rates. Were the landlords as a body to become liable 
 for the rates, this check on local expenditure would be with- 
 drawn and the owners, hopelessly outvoted at the polls, 
 would soon discover that they had made a bad bargain. 
 
 Possible cases of hardship. We must take this point then 
 as established, that except in the case dealt with above,
 
 THE BURDEN OF LOCAL RATES. 95 
 
 local rates, as well as Imperial taxes upon land, fall ultimately 
 upon the owner of the soil. 
 
 Is there, however, no injustice in practice owing to the 
 fact that it is the occupier or householder who immediately 
 pays the rate? Probably not much. Cases may indeed 
 occur where an unlooked-for rate is imposed during the 
 currency of a lease, and this the tenant must pay. And it 
 may happen that the rate ceases about the time that the 
 lease runs out. In this case the tenant will get no reduction 
 on his next term of occupation. Should it further happen 
 that this unlooked-for rate was spent on an important local 
 improvement, its effect will be to send up the value of the 
 land, so that the tenant will have to pay an increased rent 
 on account of the very improvement to the cost of which he 
 has already as a ratepayer contributed. 
 
 Such a coincidence, when it occurs, must be extremely 
 galling, but it is not a peculiar consequence of our system 
 of local taxation. Even more galling instances of landlord's 
 right and tenant's wrong might be quoted where no question 
 of taxation is involved. Under English law whatever is 
 fixed to the soil belongs to the owner of the soil Quicquid 
 plantatur solo, solo cedit. A man may therefore improve his 
 house entirely at his own expense, and afterwards be charged 
 a rent on his own improvements. Clearly such a violation 
 of equity will not be prevented by tinkering with local 
 taxation. 
 
 Why local rates are unpopular. Indeed the fuss made 
 about local rates is probably the outcome, not of any wide- 
 spread belief that they are unfair, but of the general dislike 
 of the British citizen to direct taxation. In almost every 
 town in the kingdom associations of ratepayers are formed 
 to keep down the rates. But where is there any association
 
 o6 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 of smokers to protest against the tobacco-duty, or of whisky- 
 drinkers against the taxes on spirits ? And yet the total 
 taxation borne by tobacco and alcohol is more than 
 ^40,000,000 a year, while the revenue raised by local 
 rates only amounts to ^34,000,000 for the whole of the 
 United Kingdom. Again, the householder who grumbles 
 at every fraction of a penny added to his local rate, never 
 thinks of murmuring at the farthing or more that the 
 Government levies as a tax on each penny letter that he 
 posts. 
 
 In brief, local rates are objectionable to the payer prin- 
 cipally because he is conscious of the payment ; they are 
 unsatisfactory to the community, because they are so 
 collected as to cause an altogether needless amount of 
 irritation. In the previous pages it has been shown that 
 local taxation falls in reality upon the owners of the soil 
 a small and generally wealthy body of persons. The 
 system of collection is, however, so arranged that in appear- 
 ance the tax is paid by the occupiers a large and rarely 
 wealthy body. Thus while the few and the rich really pay 
 the tax without feeling it, the many and the hard-pinched 
 feel the tax without paying it. Common sense suggests that 
 the nominal burden shall be laid where the real burden 
 must finally fall. 
 
 Such a simple solution of the problem of local taxation 
 would, however, create a constitutional difficulty of some 
 magnitude. The owners of the soil might with justice 
 complain that they were being taxed by administrative 
 bodies on which as owners they had no direct representa- 
 tion, and where as individuals they were hopelessly outvoted. 
 It is perhaps on account of this possible constitutional 
 difficulty that some politicians have formulated a com-
 
 THE BURDEN OF LOCAL RATES. 97 
 
 promise. Let the rates be divided equally between owner 
 and occupier. 
 
 The proposed division of rates. This proposal is 
 evidently based on the assumption that only two persons are 
 concerned in the question the owner who at present 
 draws all the rent, and the occupier who pays all the rates. 
 But in London, at any rate, this simple arrangement is dis- 
 tinctly rare. In each London house there are generally 
 three parties concerned, sometimes more. Nor is it the 
 case that the actual occupier is always the nominal rate- 
 payer. To the majority of Londoners the rate-collector's 
 knock is absolutely unknown. In Kensington flats, as in 
 Whitechapel buildings, the tenants know nothing of rates or 
 taxes ; the landlord pays all. The weekly seven shillings 
 of the East End workman, and the quarterly fifty guineas of 
 the West End plutocrat, both include every kind of local 
 rate and Imperial tax. It is hard to believe that any political 
 party seriously proposes to upset this voluntary arrangement, 
 and compel every householder in London to pay half of the 
 local rates with his own hand. Apart from the extra ex- 
 pense of collection, the unpopularity of the change would 
 be intense. Rents of working-class houses are generally on 
 the rise in London and other large towns, and consequently 
 the landlord would, in the majority of cases, be able to 
 pocket the whole of the relief, leaving the tenant paying the 
 same rent as before, plus the new burden of half the rates. 
 Nor would other householders necessarily profit even in 
 appearance. The effect of the arrangement in each par- 
 ticular case would in fact depend on the state of the market 
 for houses. In a suburban district where rents were rising, 
 the owner of houses on which the occupier was liable for 
 the rates, would utilize the partial relief of his tenant as an 
 
 H
 
 98 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 excuse for putting up the rent. It would only be where 
 rents were stationary or falling that any net profit would, 
 even in appearance, accrue to the occupier. 
 
 The woes of the long Lease-holder. This aspect of the 
 question seems to have been altogether overlooked by the 
 advocates of a division of rates between owner and occu- 
 pier ; they seem to have assumed that such a compulsory 
 division must always be an advantage to the occupier. The 
 favourite instance is that of a man who has built a house 
 on a long lease. Here is a stock case extracted from an 
 electioneering speech. 1 
 
 "In the year 1820, a great nobleman laid out a large 
 tract of land on a lease of 99 years. The tenant agreed to 
 build a house, and at the end of the 99 years he was to give 
 back to the great nobleman's family the soil and the house 
 he had built upon it. {Shame) During the time of the 
 lease the tenant was to pay the rates. But what were the 
 rates seventy, or sixty, years ago? One thing undoubtedly 
 for which no rates were then paid was popular education. 
 The very idea that it was the duty of the public to educate 
 the people did not exist in 1820 and 1830." 
 
 Hence the speaker concluded, that the leaseholder is 
 wronged because by the terms of his bargain he now has to 
 pay rates which in 1820 he had no possibility of foreseeing. 
 But neither had the landowner any possibility of foreseeing 
 the enormous growth in the value of his land. He expected, 
 of course, some growth, probably a considerable growth, just 
 as the leaseholder most likely expected some increase in the 
 rates, and they made their bargain accordingly. The builder 
 was to have the land at an easy rent, perhaps ^5 per annum, 
 for the site of each large house, for 99 years ; he was to 
 ' See Daily Netvs, Feb. 6th, 1892.
 
 THE BURDEN OF LOCAL RATES. 99 
 
 make himself liable for all rates and taxes, except landlord's 
 income tax, and at the end of the lease the land with the 
 house upon it was to revert to the landlord. The bargain 
 was not apparently a bad one for the landlord, but it has 
 turned out still better for the leaseholder. Surely even 
 political speech-makers must be aware of the high prices 
 which the fag ends of leases fetch on the London estates 
 of " great noblemen." In spite of the burden of unforeseen 
 rates, in spite of the landlord's power to resume the house 
 as well as the land, people are willing to give large sums of 
 money in order to plant themselves in the leaseholder's 
 shoes. 
 
 The truth is, that in most parts of London the value of 
 land has increased in a far greater ratio than the burden of 
 local taxation, and the leaseholder has consequently made 
 a handsome profit on his baigain. It is this bargain that 
 one-eyed reformers want to tear up, in order that the 
 burden of the rates may be divided between occupier and 
 owner. For Parliament, when redistributing the liability 
 for the rates, must give to the parties who are bound by 
 a lease, power to revise their bargains, at any rate to the 
 extent to which their respective incomes are affected by 
 the altered liability. Hence in all districts where rent is 
 on the increase, the utmost that the occupier could hope for 
 would be that the decrease in his rates would just counter- 
 balance the increase in his rent. 
 
 Proposed special taxation of ground values. Another 
 proposal often made for reforming local taxation is to impose 
 a special charge upon the value of the land, apart from the 
 value of the house. This proposal is principally advocated 
 by the followers in this country of Mr. Henry George. 
 Starting with the premise that all taxation should fall upon
 
 ioo LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 land, they object to a tax which is assessed upon the value of 
 the building as well as upon the value of the site. A tax 
 upon houses they contend is a tax upon a manufactured 
 commodity, and enhances the price of this commodity to the 
 consumer. This plausible contention is in practice, as. we 
 have shown above, rarely true. The builder of houses is 
 generally willing to pay for the site a rent which proves by 
 its magnitude that, after meeting every expense, he hopes to 
 make at least the ordinary business profit. If then his 
 expenses were reduced by liberating the fabric of his houses 
 from taxation he would be ready to pay more ground-rent. 
 It is thus upon the ground-landlord as a rule that the rate 
 upon buildings as well as the rate upon sites ultimately falls. 
 Consequently the practical advantages of a separate 
 assessment of building sites are not obvious. The prac- 
 tical difficulties are serious. In the first place, it is not 
 generally possible to determine accurately the value of a 
 site apart from the building upon it. The site and the 
 building together make up a whole thing which has an 
 ascertained value ; it does not follow that the value of 
 the land will be arrived at by deducting the cost of the 
 house, *. e. the cost of building another house of exactly the 
 same character and quality. In some cases the value of 
 the whole thing the house and site may be due mainly 
 to the house, in other cases mainly to the site. For ex- 
 ample, a public-house in a suburb will command a rent far 
 above the rent that would be arrived at by taking the value 
 of an adjoining piece of vacant land, and adding to it the 
 cost of building the " pub." On the other hand, an old- 
 fashioned, but well-built, dwelling-house in a modern quarter 
 may let at a rent barely in excess of what the land alone 
 would be worth, if it were cleared for a new building. In
 
 THE BURDEN OF LOCAL RATES. lor 
 
 such cases, on what principle would the assessors proceed 
 in dividing the rate between site and building? They 
 cannot take as a guide the value of neighbouring sites, even 
 were these known, for their value would not be the value of 
 this particular site. Nor can they take a builder's estimate 
 of the cost of the fabric of the house ; for the shoddy " pub " 
 may be more valuable, /. e. may command a higher rent 
 than the solid mansion. 
 
 And even if these administrative difficulties were sur- 
 mounted, we should still have to face the constitutional 
 difficulty already touched upon. If a special rate is to be 
 imposed on ground values, and charged upon the owners of 
 the soil, they may not unreasonably demand, as they have 
 demanded and obtained in Scotland, special representation 
 on local bodies. The demand will be hard to resist 
 by politicians who proclaim as the first article in their 
 creed, that taxation and representation should go together. 
 We should therefore be driven to make a serious inroad 
 into the democratic character of our institutions, solely for 
 the sake of remedying an imaginary grievance. 
 
 The proposed rating of vacant sites. A more reasonable 
 proposal for the partial reform of taxation in towns, is to 
 bring vacant land within the area of assessment. At present 
 town land not built over is either not rated at all, or only 
 rated at its agricultural value. In this way the local authority 
 loses a considerable potential income. On the other hand, 
 it must be remembered that the owners of the soil also lose 
 the income they might derive from it, and there is some 
 hardship in asking people to pay a tax for a property on 
 which they are earning no income. In fact such a proceed- 
 ing is so contrary to the general principles of taxation, that 
 it obviously needs some special defence. The mere fact
 
 102 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 that the local authority loses so much income is no defence ; 
 it would be as reasonable to argue that the County Council 
 should be authorized to impose a tax on tall hats, because 
 the absence of such a tax involves the loss of a potential 
 revenue. The defence for the proposed new tax, or ex- 
 tended assessment, is in fact social rather than financial. 
 As long as the owners of vacant land are free from taxation, 
 they can, it is contended, hold back valuable sites with a 
 view to forcing up the price ; a tax calculated on the selling 
 value of the property would provide them with a considerable 
 inducement to let go. In other words, the owners of 
 vacant sites are to be taxed, and to this extent the owners 
 of covered sites relieved of taxation, in order that building 
 land may be brought into the market. 
 
 Doubtful expediency of the proposal. To the theory of 
 such a tax there is no serious objection. But would the tax 
 in practice bring about the desired result in the manner 
 desired ? The preparation of land for building purposes is, 
 it must be remembered, largely a matter of speculation. 
 The owner of fields near a town, hoping that the town will 
 grow, lays out his property in convenient plots, intersected 
 by roads. Then he waits for an offer. He may have to 
 wait a dozen years, and all this time he will be receiving no 
 rent ; but he submits to the present loss in the hope of 
 future profit. If, however, he had known beforehand that 
 not only would he get no income till tenants came, but that 
 also he would have to pay a heavy annual rate, it is at least 
 conceivable that he would have been less ready to break up 
 his fields into building-plots. Thus the tax intended to 
 bring more building-land into the market, might in some 
 cases have exactly the opposite effect. And even where 
 the effect intended was also the effect obtained, the result
 
 THE BURDEN OF LOCAL RATES. 103 
 
 might not be from every point of view desirable. For 
 example, in the parish of Kensington, there is a large area 
 of vacant land worth thousands of pounds per acre to build 
 upon, but the owner escapes with a nominal rate on the 
 agricultural value of the land. A monstrous illustration, 
 says the Henry Georgeite, of the iniquities of our land 
 system. If, however, we make further investigation, we shall 
 find that this vacant land, or most of it, is otherwise known 
 by the name of Holland Park, to which allusion has else- 
 where been made. The owner of what remains of this 
 splendid park obtains no rent for it, while his personal 
 enjoyment of the park is after all, probably, not much 
 greater than that of any passer-by who peeps through the 
 railings. But the park is there, with its glorious trees, and 
 its green grass, and its historic associations ; and every Lon- 
 doner may be part possessor of its charms. Yet the very 
 persons who wish to "restore the land to the people," 
 would be ready with their patent tax to compel the owner 
 of Holland Park to break it up into building sites for a 
 few wealthy residents. 
 
 The truth is that the proposed tax on vacant land is at 
 best a clumsy device for securing an object that ought to be 
 secured by more direct means. If land is wanted for build- 
 ing purposes, and the owner refuses to let it go, the local 
 authority should be empowered to take it. And conversely, 
 the local authority should have power to prevent the specu- 
 lative builder from covering with bricks and mortar land 
 that would be more useful to the community as a park or 
 open space. 
 
 Failure of the three popular remedies. These three 
 suggestions the division of rates between owner and occu- 
 pier, the taxation of ground values, and the rating of vacant
 
 104 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 sites are the proposals most frequently made for amending 
 the present system of local taxation. As we have seen, they 
 will none of them bear the test of criticism. 1 And this was 
 to be expected, for they are all tainted in their origin by the 
 false theory that rates fall upon the occupier, and are all 
 prompted by the paradoxical desire to make the owner pay 
 what he already does pay. The grievance, in fact, which 
 the followers of Mr. George, together with some more level- 
 headed persons, seek to remove is purely imaginary ; the 
 means they propose to employ would only be applicable, if 
 even then, were the grievance real. A grievance, it is true, 
 is a grievance still, even if it be imaginary. 
 
 "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." 
 
 Only if the grievance be imaginary, it must be dealt with 
 on that understanding. 
 
 The problem re-stated. Let us re-state the matter. It 
 has been shown above that rates, both upon buildings and 
 upon land, in the vast majority of cases fall ultimately upon 
 the owner of the soil. Sometimes it is the freeholder who 
 pays the rate at first as well as at last ; sometimes there is 
 a leaseholder who is the immediate payer ; sometimes the 
 actual occupant is the person favoured by the collector's 
 visit. One can only guess at the relative proportions of 
 these three cases, but it is safe to say that the last represents 
 less than half of the whole number of householders ; it is 
 
 1 Mr. Sidney Webb, who lias made a special study of this subject, 
 while approving of the principle asserted by the proposals to divide 
 rents between owner and occupier and to levy a special rate on ground 
 value, remarks that "it is doubtful whether any large addition to local 
 revenues could rapidly be obtained from these sources without causing 
 such a depreciation of the value of property ns would inevitably be 
 regarded as confiscation." Webb, London Programme, p. 200.
 
 THE BURDEN OF LOCAL RATES. 105 
 
 this case, however, that causes most of the trouble. For 
 when the rate-collector appears, the occupier of this class 
 generally forgets that the demands of the collector were dis- 
 counted, in fact if not in phrase, when the rent was agreed 
 upon. He therefore treats each demand as a compulsory 
 deduction from his personal income, and hates it accordingly. 
 Hence arises the typical parsimonious ratepayer : the man 
 who uses all his powers as an elector to keep down local 
 expenditure lest rates should rise. 
 
 Electors who never feel the burden of taxation. 
 Equally objectionable from another point of view is the 
 effect of the rating system on the large class that knows 
 not the rate-collector. This class, forming the numerical 
 majority of the population, is freed from all responsibility 
 in the matter of local taxation. Hitherto, its actual power 
 at the polls has been inconsiderable, but is now rapidly on 
 the increase. The working men, who form the bulk of the 
 class, are beginning to emancipate themselves from middle- 
 class guidance, and to formulate a policy of their own a 
 policy which involves generally an enlarged public expend- 
 iture. To this as a policy there is no general objection ; 
 the State could with advantage undertake many things that 
 are still left to private individuals to do, or are left undone, 
 and with equal advantage the State could spend more money 
 in doing well some of the things that it now does cheaply 
 and badly. But it is hardly probable that the question of 
 what the State should do and what money it should spend 
 will be treated with proper caution, when the people who 
 call for the policy know that they will bear none of the 
 expense of carrying it out. 
 
 The present system of rating doubly bad. From both 
 sides then our system of rating is bad; it makes the middle-
 
 106 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 class elector protest with extravagant zeal against burdens 
 that he does not really bear, and it leaves the working- 
 class elector totally unaffected by burdens that his vote can 
 impose. What is wanted is a system that shall bring home 
 to each citizen some responsibility for public expenditure, 
 but only so much responsibility as actually belongs to his 
 portion of the public burdens. In other words, the ideal 
 tax would affect every elector, while every tax-payer would 
 know exactly how much he was paying. 
 
 Combined income tax and electoral poll tax. Such a 
 tax is unattainable in its ideal purity. But it may here be 
 suggested, as a parenthesis to our main subject, that a 
 graduated income tax comes nearest to the ideal, and would 
 get over most of the difficulties of local taxation. The 
 present income tax in England, it is true, stops at incomes 
 below ^150, but it could, without serious difficulty, be 
 extended in the form of a graduated poll tax to every 
 adult citizen. Assuming the country to possess, as it some 
 day will, universal suffrage, it would be the duty of the 
 revenue officials to seek out and place upon the electoral 
 register the name of every adult person. Of the electors 
 thus automatically registered, the wealthier portion would 
 be charged with income tax on a gradually ascending scale ; 
 the poorer portion with a poll tax roughly graduated accord- 
 ing to the elector's estimated income. In some such way as 
 this each voter could be brought to realize that his power to 
 control the State was directly connected with his willingness 
 to support the resulting burdens, both local and imperial. 
 
 Income tax compared with house tax. But the main 
 advantage of an income tax, as compared with a house tax, 
 is that it is less easily shifted. A rate upon a house comes 
 out of the price that a tenant is willing to afford for one
 
 THE BURDEN OF LOCAL RATES. 107 
 
 particular item of his expenditure ; but a tax upon a man's 
 income affects the whole of his expenditure, and there is 
 no reason why he should try and shift it on to his landlord 
 rather than on to his tailor or his wine merchant. To meet 
 the tax he either curtails his general expenditure or decreases 
 his savings, but he does not, as in the case of a house tax, 
 pass on the charge bodily to another person by reducing the 
 price that he would otherwise have paid for a particular 
 thing. It may therefore be assumed that the burden oi an 
 income tax generally rests with the person on whom the tax 
 first falls. And this being the case, it becomes possible so 
 to adjust the tax that it falls as nearly as may be with equal 
 severity on all persons. 
 
 The present income tax in England has many serious 
 defects, but even as it stands the real grievance it causes is 
 probably less than the imaginary grievance caused by the 
 system of local rating. For a man's income is generally a 
 better test of his ability to bear taxation than is the value of 
 the house in which he lives. It is a matter of every-day 
 knowledge that persons whose incomes differ very largely 
 indeed, frequently occupy houses of identically the same 
 value. For example, in a London suburb a struggling city 
 clerk may be in possession of a bijou villa filled to over- 
 flowing witli youngsters whose limbs grow more rapidly than 
 their garments ; next door may be a prosperous old bachelor 
 filling an exactly similar house with handsome furniture and 
 expensive pictures. On the basis of house assessment each 
 man would pay the same tax, but the prosperous bachelor, 
 amply housed in his little villa, may have double or treble 
 the income of his crowded neighbour. Again, the house of 
 a physician is also his place of business ; he must have a good 
 house in a good quarter if he wishes to attract patients. It
 
 10S LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 is for these considerations that he pays a high rent, not 
 because his income is necessarily large : next door to him 
 there may be a retired Jew who could buy him up ten 
 times over. 
 
 Possible reforms in the present income tax. Even the 
 present income tax then would probably be felt as a less 
 irksome impost than local rates as now assessed. And the 
 present income tax is capable of considerable improvement. 
 In the first place, it can be graduated so that large incomes 
 are taxed at a higher rate. Next, provision can be made for 
 reducing the tax where the income is precarious. A man 
 whose income depends on his personal health, or on his life, 
 is a less fit subject for taxation than a man in possession of 
 an income of the same amount guaranteed in perpetuity. 
 The best way to meet this inequality is by allowing the 
 holder of the uncertain income to claim a heavy rebate off 
 the full amount of the tax. 
 
 Again, the income tax would probably be fairer, both to 
 tax-payer and tax-receiver, and certainly less troublesome to 
 the former, if it were levied not on an average of the three 
 years' income, but on the actual net income of the last com- 
 pleted year. At present a business man after a bad year, 
 when every pound is of consequence, may have to pay a 
 heavy tax because of the profits of the two preceding years ; 
 and if he has a dispute with the revenue officials he must 
 produce his books not for one year only but for three. 1 
 
 With these reforms the income tax would become as fair 
 a tax as can be devised. Indeed, almost the only objection 
 to it is the dishonesty attending its assessment. Unscrupulous 
 
 1 Both these reforms, and others too detailed to be here discussed, 
 are ably advocated in the Financial Reform Almanack for 1891, pp. 
 59-63.
 
 THE BURDEN OF LOCAL RATES. 109 
 
 persons habitually return their incomes at less than their true 
 amount, and it is often impossible for the revenue officials 
 to detect the fraud. The same persons, however, are 
 always ready to evade taxes on commodities by smuggling 
 spirits or cigars. And even the taxation of houses and land 
 is not free from the suspicion of dishonesty. A committee 
 of the London County Council has recently unearthed a 
 number of cases of properties under-assessed by the parish 
 authorities, some of which are difficult to reconcile with an 
 hypothesis of universal honesty. 
 
 It must be noticed too that the assessment of the income 
 tax is likely to be easier in the near future than in the past. 
 Private businesses are being merged into public companies, 
 and profits, before uncertain and individual, are now accur- 
 ately calculated and divided among several persons as 
 salaries or dividends. The new company becomes primarily 
 responsible for the tax and deducts it from the salaries of 
 its employe's or the dividends of its shareholders. 
 
 Administrative advantages of a local income tax. 
 From an administrative point of view the substitution of an 
 income tax for local rates would be an immense economy. 
 The same officials who collect the imperial income tax 
 would also collect the local income tax ; the same demand 
 note would even be used ; so many pennies in the pound for 
 parish or town purposes \ so many for the county treasurer ; 
 and so many for the national exchequer. This arrangement 
 would at once get rid of the pernicious system of "grants 
 in aid " from the imperial exchequer ; for if the basis of 
 imperial and local taxation was the same, there would no 
 longer be any excuse for relieving local rates at the expense 
 of imperial taxes. One difficulty may be suggested; how 
 would the collectors decide to what locality to assign the
 
 i to LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 tax on the income of a man living in one parish with his 
 place of business in another ? Here again the answer is to 
 be found in combining taxation with electoral registration, 
 each individual having a vote in that district, and in that 
 only, where he paid his personal income tax. 
 
 An income tax the most perfect method of taxing real 
 property. Lastly, it must be remembered that a local 
 income tax would not abolish the taxation of real, i.e. fixed, 
 property which is now the distinguishing feature of local 
 taxation in England ; on the contrary, it would levy the taxes 
 on real property in a more efficient manner than at present. 
 For when we speak of taxing any class of property, it is the 
 income derived from that property, not the property itself, 
 that we are thinking of, and our object is to bring within 
 the scope of the tax the income of every person beneficially 
 interested in the property. This is exactly what is effected 
 by an income tax. Take, for example, a house in Bayswater 
 fairly assessed at ^90, rented by the occupier on a bene- 
 ficial agreement at ^80, and held by an intermediate 
 landlord on a building lease at ^15. Here three parties 
 are concerned : the occupier who enjoys, as it were, 10 
 of the rental of the house ; the leaseholder who nets 
 ^65 a year ; and the freeholder with his ground-rent of 
 ^15. The Commissioners of Inland Revenue demand 
 from the occupier 2 $s. od. {6d. in the pound on ^go) : 
 this he pays, and deducts 2 (6d. in the pound on ^80) 
 from his next payment for rent ; in turn the leaseholder 
 deducts 7.$-. 6d. from the 1$ ground-rent due to the free- 
 holder. Thus each of the three parties concerned pays a 
 tax proportional to the profit which each derives from the 
 house. The income tax in fact, as already administered for 
 imperial purposes, realizes in the most perfect manner
 
 THE BURDEN OF LOCAL RATES. in 
 
 possible the ideal clumsily expressed in the agitation for 
 a division of rates between owners and occupiers, and the 
 special taxation of ground-values. 
 
 No reason why personalty should escape local taxa- 
 tion. The difference is that an income tax would in 
 addition bring within the tax-collector's net, incomes derived 
 from other sources than the possession of real property. It 
 is exactly on this ground that the followers of Mr. George 
 would object to the proposal to extend the income tax. 
 With this general objection we will deal in another chapter ; 
 but as regards local taxation in particular, a few words may 
 here be said. To take, first, two of the main burdens falling 
 on local revenues, is there any reason in the nature of things 
 why the owners of realty should pay the whole of the poor 
 rate and education rate, while other well-to-do people go scot 
 free ? As has been pointed out in a previous chapter, the 
 obligation to maintain the poor is a moral obligation, and 
 cannot with reason be made to depend on the source of a 
 man's income. In a similar way the burden of public 
 education should rightly fall upon every citizen. Again, 
 landowners, qua landowners, have no special interest in the 
 efficiency of the police force or of the fire brigade. A land- 
 owner's house is not more likely to be burnt down by fire 
 or to be broken into by burglars than is a stockbroker's or a 
 barrister's ; nor do pickpockets confine their attentions to 
 " great noblemen." The higher police too of modern 
 times the prevention of adulteration and light weight, the 
 inspection of workshops interests the landowner, qua land- 
 owner, not at all. What remains ? The expenditure on 
 drainage, paving, and lighting ; on public parks and new 
 thoroughfares. 
 
 The first two are undoubtedly items of direct interest
 
 ii2 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 to the owners of the soil. The value of a house depends as 
 much, and often more, on the quality of the approaches to 
 it and the drains from it, as on the thickness of its walls 
 and the size of its rooms. It may be taken as indisputable 
 that all improvements in the removal of sewage and refuse, 
 and in paving and lighting of public thoroughfares, 
 sooner or later lead to an increased rent of houses. If 
 therefore the occupier pays rent to his landlord for an 
 improvement executed by the local authority, it is only 
 equitable that the cost of the improvement should be borne 
 by the landlord and the landlord alone. This, under the 
 present system of rating, is what ultimately happens ; but 
 with a local income tax falling on all incomes, the landlord 
 would only bear part of the cost. Hence for improvements 
 of this particular kind it would be fair and feasible to charge 
 a special income tax on the profits arising from real property 
 in the localities affected. 
 
 The proposed "improvement" rate. The other two 
 items mentioned, public parks and new thoroughfares, are 
 very similar in character. The creation of a public park 
 generally sends up the value of the neighbouring property, 
 not only because people like to live near a park, but because 
 the operation has restricted the area available for building. 
 In the same way a new thoroughfare will as a rule enor- 
 mously enhance the value of the sites bordering upon it. 
 Here, then, appears an obvious case for a special rate upon 
 the persons beneficially interested in the property. Such a 
 rate has frequently been proposed under the name of a 
 "betterment" rate, and recently the London County 
 Council has become so convinced of the merits of the pro- 
 posal that it has refused to sanction any street improvement 
 until Parliament will authorize this method of taxation.
 
 THE BURDEN OF LOCAL RATES. 113 
 
 Unfortunately this resolute action is less easily defensible 
 than at first sight appears. For the betterment rate advo- 
 cated by the County Council is only an alternative means 
 of carrying out a principle already recognized and already 
 acted upon in another manner. When a new street is to be 
 made, the local authority can purchase compulsorily property 
 on both sides of the intended roadway, and as soon as the 
 cutting is completed they can sell or let this property at such 
 enhanced value as it may command. If the operation is 
 skilfully carried out, the advantage reaped is as great or even 
 greater than would accrue from the assessment of a better- 
 ment rate. For example, in the case of Northumberland 
 Avenue in London, the whole cost of the new thoroughfare 
 was more than paid for by the profit derived from the sur- 
 plus land acquired and afterwards disposed of; whereas the 
 most that the advocates of " betterment " ask is that half 
 the cost of any improvement should be borne by a special 
 rate on neighbouring property. Thus the dispute about 
 betterment involves no question of principle, but merely 
 one of administrative detail. 
 
 Eecoupment versus betterment. As against the present 
 plan of acquiring surplus land, it is urged that the terms on 
 which a local authority can buy land are generally so heavy 
 that there is no profit to be made out of the transaction. This 
 surely depends partly on the way in which the operation is 
 managed. There is, however, no doubt that the powers of 
 local authorities for the compulsory purchase of land are 
 insufficient. It ought to be easy for a local authority to 
 buy up beforehand properties that are likely to be required 
 for future improvements, so as to prevent the artificial 
 inflation of prices that now takes place when an improve- 
 ment scheme is announced. Again, the local authority 
 
 1
 
 U4 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 should have power to take legitimate advantage of any 
 clearance made by private persons : at present it constantly 
 happens that a new house is run up on land wanted for an 
 improvement in order to secure compensation when the 
 improvement is made. 
 
 On the other hand, as regards betterment, it is extremely 
 difficult to determine to what extent the value of any part 
 of a given area has been affected by a public improvement. 
 And yet this question must be determined before the 
 betterment rate can be imposed, and the rate must be 
 imposed before any direct evidence of the alteration in 
 value can be obtained from experience of the improvement. 
 Again, if the improvement is to be charged on the local 
 landowners, they may reasonably claim to have some voice 
 in deciding whether it shall be undertaken at all. This 
 consideration, it may be noticed, was omitted when we 
 were considering the question of paving, lighting, etc., and 
 for this reason, that the lighting and paving of streets, and 
 the construction of main sewers are matters involving no 
 dispute. Every one, landowner as well as householder, 
 realizes their importance, and the local authority, in carrying 
 out such improvements or repairs, is only doing on behalf 
 of the landowners, work which they would find it difficult 
 to do for themselves. But the creation of public parks and 
 new thoroughfares is another matter. To the local land- 
 owner such improvements can only appear in the light of a 
 speculation ; under the betterment scheme he must bear 
 the cost, and yet, as landowner, he has no voice in deciding 
 whether the risk shall be incurred. 
 
 From this point of view the purchase system is the more 
 equitable. The whole community, through its representa- 
 tive authority, decides on the scheme ; the whole community
 
 THE BURDEN OF LOCAL RATES. 115 
 
 by purchasing the surrounding sites undertakes the specula- 
 tive risk involved ; should it turn out that the speculation 
 was unsound, the general advantage gained by the improve- 
 ment will be some set-off to the loss on the speculation. 
 
 Summary of the conclusions arrived at. We may now 
 briefly summarize the present chapter. First, it has been 
 shown that all taxes upon land fall ultimately upon the 
 owner of the soil, whoever pays them in the first instance. 
 Secondly, that in the same way, taxes upon buildings and 
 other improvements fixed to the soil fall generally upon the 
 ground-landlord. The case where he escapes is where he 
 has parted with his land on terms which implied that it had 
 only an agricultural value. The tax on this value falls upon 
 him, but any extra tax that may be imposed on any building 
 added to the soil, will, in this probably rare case, fall upon 
 the builder. Hence we arrive at the position that local 
 rates as assessed in England are in the majority of cases 
 ultimately paid by the ground-landlord. The acceptance of 
 this position at once reduces the importance of the proposals 
 made for dividing the rates between occupier and owner, or 
 for imposing a special tax upon ground values and upon 
 vacant sites. Practical objections to each of these proposals 
 have been pointed out, and it has been suggested that the 
 best remedy for the imaginary grievance of the local rate- 
 payer is to substitute an income tax for the present rate 
 upon houses. This would be the fairest method of meeting 
 the bulk of the expenditure, present and to come, of 
 local authorities ; but in the case of public services 
 which are of special benefit to the owners of houses 
 and sites, such as paving and lighting, the tax should be 
 confined to incomes derived from the possession of real 
 property. The proposed substitution of a local income tax
 
 u6 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 for the present house-rate would, it is true, ultimately 
 relieve landowners of part of a burden which is now wholly 
 theirs. On the other hand it would, without violating a 
 single contract, immediately diminish their present incomes 
 to the extent of their share of the tax, and it would inevitably 
 deprive them of the relief which they now get from the 
 imperial exchequer. There is no reason then for thinking 
 that landowners would gain more than any other class in 
 the community by the introduction of a more equitable 
 system of local taxation.
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 CONFISCATION OR COMPENSATION. 
 
 In the preceding chapter various proposals for the reform 
 of local taxation were considered, and rejected for reasons 
 drawn from generally accepted principles of taxation and 
 government. The division of rates between owner and 
 occupier, the special taxation of ground values, and the 
 assessment of vacant sites, are all ostensibly advocated as 
 useful reforms of a defective system of taxation. Tried on 
 this plea they must all be condemned. But behind this 
 modest plea is the larger theory that land is the most suitable 
 subject for all taxation ; and it needs but a slight acquaint- 
 ance with current doctrines and contemporary actors to 
 know that some of the advocates of these proposals are 
 more anxious to "get at the landowner" than to relieve 
 the ratepayer. The proposals just mentioned cannot then 
 be finally dismissed because they fail to satisfy the tests 
 that would be applied to other suggestions for taxation 
 reform ; they must be further dealt with as parts of a general 
 scheme, or rather as tentative expressions of a general theory, 
 that the owners of land should be taxed more heavily than 
 other persons. It is this theory that we propose now to 
 consider. 
 
 Special taxation is a form of confiscation. The theory
 
 n8 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 that landowners should be specially taxed is obviously 
 only another form of the theory that landed property should 
 be confiscated by the State. Every tax, so far as it goes, 
 is a confiscation of the property of the person taxed ; and 
 therefore to declare landowners liable to special taxation, 
 is equivalent to saying that their property is specially liable 
 to confiscation. A light tax upon landowners qua land- 
 owners is partial confiscation; a tax of ioo per cent, is 
 complete confiscation. This identity of confiscation and 
 special taxation is fully recognized by the advocates of the 
 single tax on land. In Progress and Poverty Mr. Henry 
 George first declares that his object is to confiscate rent, 
 and then explains that the means he proposes to employ is 
 the taxation of land values. 1 
 
 The landowner's income, not his land, is at stake. 
 It must next be noted, in dealing with the question of con- 
 fiscation, that it is with the income derived from the land 
 that we are concerned, not with the land itself. A land- 
 owner may be, often is, forcibly deprived of his land for the 
 benefit of the community, but provided he receives an 
 equivalent money value nothing is confiscated. This fact 
 again Mr. George recognizes, and strictly limits his proposals 
 to the confiscation of rent. " I do not propose either to 
 purchase or to confiscate private property in land. The 
 first would be unjust; the second needless. Let the in- 
 dividuals who now hold it still retain, if they want to, 
 possession of what they are pleased to call their land. Let 
 them continue to call it their land. Let them buy and sell, 
 bequeath and devise it. We may safely leave them the 
 shell if we take the kernel. It is not necessary to confiscate 
 land ; it is only necessary to confiscate rent." 2 
 
 1 Progress and Poverty, p. 288. " Ihid., p. 288.
 
 CONFISCATION OR COMPENSATION. 119 
 
 The question then which we have to consider narrows 
 itself down to this : do any reasons exist why incomes 
 derived from land should be confiscated while other incomes 
 are spared ? 
 
 Some of Mr. George's arguments. Mr. George's argu- 
 ment on this point can hardly be taken seriously. The 
 main contention of his book is, that private property in 
 land is essentially unjust. He devotes a whole chapter to 
 the " Injustice of Private Property in Land " ; and through- 
 out the volume such remarks as the following are plentiful 
 " The recognition of individual proprietorship of land, is 
 the denial of the natural rights of other individuals." * 
 "Our boasted freedom necessarily involves slavery, so long- 
 as we recognize private property in land ; " 2 and so on. 
 Yet, a few pages later, in the passage just quoted, he 
 declares explicitly that he does not wish to abolish private 
 property in land, but only to take the profits. Mr. George 
 would reply that by confiscating the whole of the rent he 
 takes all the sting out of private property in land, and thus 
 effectively abolishes the institution. It may be so, the 
 point will be discussed later on, but if it is so, it can only 
 be because the confiscation of all rent has some economic 
 effect in addition to the money gain to the public treasury. 
 This economic effect e.g. forcing owners to bring their 
 land into the market would clearly continue to exist if the 
 public treasury were to repay in the form of annuities what 
 it had taken in the form of taxation. The only advantage 
 then that can be attributed to the confiscation of rent is the 
 profit to the exchequer. 
 
 The same advantage would result from the confiscation 
 of other forms of property ; but to this Mr. George on 
 1 Progress and Poverty, p. 241. - Ibid., p. 253.
 
 120 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 principle objects. Private property in capital he regards 
 as essentially just, and he is as tender to the pocket of the 
 millionnaire capitalist as to that of the half-starving labourer. 
 When, however, he comes to deal with practical objections 
 brought against his "remedy," he admits that it is often 
 impossible to separate the value of the land from the value 
 of the improvements upon it. " Absolute accuracy is im- 
 possible in any system, and to attempt to separate all that 
 the human race has done from what nature originally 
 provided would be as absurd as impracticable." 1 
 
 A compromise that destroys the principle. Exactly so, 
 but if the accuracy goes, the argument goes with it. It 
 is the bare land, and the bare land alone, that was, as 
 Mr. George would phrase it, given by God to the human 
 race, and thence afterwards stolen by a handful of indi- 
 viduals. This is the primary theft that no lapse of time 
 can convert into a good title. But anything that the 
 human race has added is, according to Mr. George's 
 classification, not land but capital, and remains capital, 
 even though it be not, to our present eyes, distinguishable 
 from the original properties of the soil. When therefore 
 Mr. George proposes to allow only for the "value of 
 the clearly distinguishable improvements, made within a 
 moderate period," he is going back on his fundamental 
 principles. He is confiscating something which is not land, 
 and which was therefore not stolen ; he is, in fact, confiscating 
 capital. But if one form of capital may be confiscated, why 
 not others ? 
 
 The appeal to "natural" law. Nor will Mr. George's 
 principle itself hold water. It is based on the assertion of 
 the existence of some natural law of right and wrong, which 
 1 Progress and Poverty, p. 302.
 
 CONFISCATION OR COMPENSATION. 121 
 
 overrides laws established by opinion or authority. No 
 such law exists. Metaphysicians and theologians may 
 argue about what they are pleased to call "natural" law, 
 till words fail them, but until their "natural" law has 
 been adopted by public opinion, or embodied in a judicial 
 decision, or set down in a statute, it is no law, but only 
 somebody's opinion of what ought to be law. Everywhere 
 the average individual must conform to those laws which 
 are pressed upon him by his neighbours or forced upon 
 him by his rulers laws which he knows and understands ; 
 he cannot be expected to start a little code of his own, 
 evolved out of abstract argument, and defy to his own 
 destruction the world around him. 
 
 Some consequences of confiscation. This general answer 
 to Mr. George covers so much of the ground, that it is 
 hardly worth while to reinforce it by illustration. The 
 task too has been often done. It is a commonplace to 
 point out the widely ramifying injustice that would result 
 from an attempt to confiscate any one form of recognized 
 property. A trustee of an estate held for minors may buy 
 for one ward, gas shares, for another, ground rents; Mr. 
 George would confiscate the ground rents and leave the 
 gas shares. A banker in all honesty of purpose may invest 
 the money at his disposal in freehold mortgages ; Mr. 
 George would confiscate the investment, and thus possibly 
 ruin some disciple of his own who had left his money in 
 the bank rather than buy land with it. Such illustrations 
 might be multiplied without limit, but they would add 
 little to the force of the general considerations urged above. 
 When two or more forms of property exist side by side, 
 all regarded by contemporary opinion as equally sacred, 
 the confiscation of one specified form works a wrong which
 
 122 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 neither metaphysics, nor theology, nor rhetoric can twist 
 into a right. 
 
 The toll that the landowner levies. And what is it 
 that Mr. George hopes to gain by this wrong? Rent, 
 he tells us, "is a fresh and continuous robbery that goes 
 on every day and every hour. It is not from the produce 
 of the past that rent is drawn, but from the produce of the 
 present. It is a toll levied upon labour constantly and 
 continuously. Every blow of the hammer, every stroke of 
 the pick, every thrust of the shuttle, every throb of the 
 steam engine pay it tribute." And so on for half a page 
 more, with much about " agricultural gangs " and " squalid 
 rooms," "penitentiaries" and the "pure joy of mother- 
 hood," "evil passions " and a "merciful creator." 1 
 
 Let us be definite. What is the amount of the toll that 
 produces all these consequences ? In the United Kingdom 
 it may be perhaps fifty, perhaps a hundred millions a year. 
 Not more, and no nearer guess can be made at the actual 
 sum. From the income tax returns it may be inferred that 
 agricultural land and urban sites, together with the minor uses 
 of land, are worth somewhere about 125 millions a year. But 
 this is not the value that Mr. George wants to get at. In a 
 formal statement of his proposals in the Financial Reform 
 Almanack for 1891, he writes : "What we propose is not a 
 tax on real estate, for real estate includes improvements. 
 Nor is it a tax on land, for we would not tax all land, but 
 only land having a value irrespective of its improvements." 
 From the above 125 millions we have then to deduct all 
 that represents interest on the outlay upon improvements. 
 In the case of agricultural land, this is undoubtedly the 
 greater part of the whole. The rent of an English farm 
 1 Progress and Poverty, pp. 258, 259.
 
 CONFISCATION OR COMPENSATION. 123 
 
 includes not only the price paid for the use of the land, but 
 also for the house in which the farmer lives ; for the stables 
 and byres and pigstyes in which his stock is housed ; for 
 the barns and sheds to protect his material ; for the roads and 
 fences and drains that make the land workable. Again, the 
 value of building sites, as pointed out in a previous chapter, 
 is to some extent due to capital expenditure upon roads 
 and drains. So that before we get down to the value of the 
 " bare land," it may easily be that our sum of 125 millions 
 has dropped to half or even less. But what the exact 
 figure will be no person can tell. 
 
 The price of the millennium. Let us, however, for the 
 sake of argument, take some figure, seventy millions will 
 do as well as any other, and call this the value of the bare 
 land which Mr. George wishes to appropriate. Part of 
 this is of course already appropriated by the State by means 
 of taxation, certainly not less than five or six millions a year. 
 Another appreciable part is already vested in corporate 
 bodies and employed for public purposes. Nearly every 
 municipal corporation and board of guardians in the United 
 Kingdom has some freehold property ; hospitals, colleges, 
 and endowed schools have more ; and the ecclesiastical com- 
 missioners have large estates in almost every county. Con- 
 sequently our rough guess must b^ still further reduced, 
 and if we put the net figure at sixty millions it will be a 
 liberal estimate. It is tins sixty millions a year that Mr. 
 George wishes to get at. In return he promises us the 
 abolition of poverty and crime, of dirt and disease, of vice 
 and misery, of every ill, in fact, that flesh till now has been 
 heir to. Truly Mr. George's millennium is cheap at the 
 money ! Sixty millions a year is just two-thirds of the 
 imperial expenditure of the British Government, an ex-
 
 124 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 penditure which cannot be said to seriously distress the 
 British people. And if we add local to imperial expenditure, 
 we find that Mr. George's sixty millions is only two-fifths 
 of the whole. Can any sane man believe that the reign of 
 heaven on earth will begin in these isles when the burden 
 of meeting two-fifths of the public expenditure of the 
 kingdom is transferred from the general taxpayer to the 
 owners of a particular species of property? Or, on the 
 other hand, if it be true that the millennium can be bought 
 so cheap, does not common fairness suggest that since all 
 will profit by the purchase all should share in the expense ? 
 
 With these two questions we must leave Mr. George 
 and his scheme for regenerating the world by confiscating 
 rent. 
 
 The unearned increment of land values. A scheme of 
 a more solid character for dealing with the income derived 
 from land was proposed by John Stuart Mill. The point 
 on which Mr. Mill fixed his attention was the growth of rent 
 apart from the exertions of the owner of the soil the 
 " unearned increment," as he named it. In progressive 
 countries this unearned growth is an almost invariable accom- 
 paniment of the increasing wealth and activity of the popu- 
 lation. The owner of a bit of land in or near a great city 
 need generally have no anxiety about its future value ; he 
 has only to sit still and wait. While he waits others will 
 work, and will presently of their own accord offer him more 
 rent for the use of his land for one year than his fathers 
 would have dreamed of demanding for the freehold. No 
 one can contend that the owner of the soil is morally 
 entitled to this unexpected increase in the value of his 
 property. He has not reckoned upon it ; he has not 
 earned it ; it is a free gift from the industrious and enter-
 
 CONFISCATION OR COMPENSATION. 125 
 
 prising community around him. If then the community 
 chooses to decline for the future to make such gifts, it is 
 perfectly justified in doing so, and the owner of the soil will 
 have no excuse for complaining. 
 
 John Stuart Mill's proposal. The plan suggested by 
 Mill for putting a stop to these liberal gifts to persons who 
 for the most part stand in little need of charity, was some- 
 what as follows : The present value of the land is to be 
 carefully assessed and noted, the value of any improve- 
 ments added to it will also from time to time be noted ; 
 then, after the lapse of a specified period, the whole will 
 be re-assessed, and such additional value as it is found to 
 have beyond the value of the improvements made will be 
 treated as unearned increment, and taken back from the 
 owner by a special tax. This proposal involves no injustice 
 to the owner, and is a theoretically perfect method of 
 enabling the general community to enjoy collectively a 
 source of income which its collective energy has created. 
 
 Practical difficulties. Directly, however, we begin to 
 consider how the scheme would work in practice, we find 
 very serious difficulties. To estimate the value of a piece 
 of real property as it is, treating it as a whole thing, is not 
 hard ; its value is what it will fetch in the market. But 
 how is the value of any added improvement to be estimated ? 
 The cost of the improvement is not necessarily a guide, for 
 different people might take different views as to the wisdom 
 of the expenditure. In no case, indeed, does the cost of 
 production of a commodity exclusively determine its price, 
 and still less can this be so when the commodity is in- 
 separable from one particular small spot on the earth's 
 surface. Nor can the value of the improvement be tested 
 by asking what it would fetch in the market, for an improve-
 
 126 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 ment to a house or farm is not an independent commodity, 
 but a modification of an existing commodity, and cannot 
 therefore have an independent market price. There must 
 then necessarily be room for wide divergence of opinion as 
 to the value to be assigned to particular improvements, 
 and room consequently for frequent disputes between the 
 owners of real estate and the revenue officials. On the 
 one hand, owners would constantly complain of unjust 
 assessment ; on the other hand, the assessors would fre- 
 quently be swindled by speculators who had run up new 
 buildings to secure an allowance for improvements. 
 
 The possibility of unearned decrement. There is, 
 moreover, a further objection to Mill's scheme which is 
 worth considering. The increase in the value of real 
 estate in a progressive community, though general, is by no 
 means universal, and if the community deprives the owner 
 of any possible increase, it ought also to guarantee him 
 against a possible decrease. If it does not do so, the 
 arrangement becomes of the " heads I win, tails you lose " 
 type ; and that this is practically, as well as sentimentally, 
 unjust can easily be shown. The present value of a piece 
 of land, or of any permanent investment, is necessarily 
 affected by the general anticipation of what will be its 
 future value. This fact the assessors under Mill's scheme 
 would in fairness allow for in their assessment ; they would 
 take the actual selling value of the property at the present 
 moment. But directly this was fixed as the maximum 
 value which the property could attain, it would cease to be 
 the selling value'; for any investor would reflect that while 
 there was no hope of the property appreciating there was 
 a risk of its depreciating, and on account of this risk he 
 would offer something less than the maximum fixed. To
 
 CONFISCATION OR COMPENSATION. 127 
 
 this extent then landowners would lose part of their present 
 property by any confiscation of future increment which was 
 unaccompanied by a guarantee against future decrement. 
 
 A State guarantee against decrement impolitic. On 
 the other hand, there is much to be said against the policy 
 of such a guarantee. When Mill wrote, the rise in the 
 value of all land since the beginning of the century had 
 been fairly continuous, and he practically ignored the possi- 
 bility of any general fall. Since his death, however, there 
 has been an almost universal decline in the value of agri- 
 cultural land in the United Kingdom, and an appreciable 
 decline in the value of house property in many small towns. 
 If, therefore, Mill's scheme had been adopted during his 
 lifetime, and the execution of it entrusted to local authorities, 
 many of these would have been landed in a ruinous loss. 
 The same loss, it is true, would not have been felt had the 
 national government undertaken the scheme ; for the decline 
 in country rents has been more than made good by the 
 growth of rents in large towns. But are we justified in 
 assuming that this would always be the case ? The rate of 
 increase in our population has already begun to decline, 
 and other countries are fast encroaching upon our pre- 
 eminent commercial position. It is conceivable that in 
 three or four generations England will no longer be the 
 workshop of the world, and perhaps half of her present popu- 
 lation may be comfortably settled in Bechuanaland or 
 British Columbia. If, however, the nation had guaranteed 
 to the owners of the soil an income based on its present 
 value, there would be no honourable means of avoiding a 
 burden which would then be unbearable. 
 
 This consideration, it will be noticed, applies equally to 
 any schemes for the wholesale purchase of land by public
 
 128 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 authorities. It does not, of course, condemn such schemes 
 entirely, for the public ownership of land may produce 
 compensating advantages, but it condemns them as financial 
 projects, and that is the only aspect with which we are at 
 present dealing. 
 
 The agricultural labourer's "unearned increment." 
 Is there then, it may be asked, no means by which the 
 community may be enabled to realize, for the benefit of all, 
 land values created by the activity of all ? Before attempt- 
 ing an answer to this question, it is worth while to point 
 out that landowners are not the only persons who profit 
 by the general progress of the community. Compare, for 
 instance, agricultural labourers and urban landholders. 
 During the last fifty years, the progress of manufacturing 
 industries in England has caused a depletion of the country 
 districts and a filling up of large towns. The owners of 
 urban land have profited enormously; so also have agri- 
 cultural labourers. There is little doubt that in nearly 
 every county in England, the condition of the agricultural 
 labourer is incomparably better than it was fifty years ago. 
 He is better fed, better housed, better clothed ; he has 
 a more independent position and less prolonged labour. 
 To earn these improvements he has done nothing ; he 
 works not harder but less hard than before ; nor has he 
 lightened his labour by any appliance of his own in- 
 vention. He has, with rare exceptions, joined no trade 
 society, and taken part in no political agitation. In a 
 word, everything he has gained has been poured into his 
 lap as a free gift from those around him. The same cause 
 which has swollen urban rents, namely, the townward flow 
 of the population, has simultaneously forced up agricultural 
 wages. Why then tax the unearned increment of the urban
 
 CONFISCATION OR COMPENSATION. 129 
 
 landlord and leave untouched die unearned increment of 
 the agricultural labourer ? 
 
 No answer can be given except these : that the labourer, 
 in spite of fifty years of progress, is still painfully poor, 
 while the urban landlord is generally rich ; that the labourer 
 must work for his wage, while the landlord may, if he 
 choose, be altogether idle. In other words, the landlord is 
 to be taxed rather than the labourer, because it is desirable 
 that taxation should fall on the idle rich rather than on the 
 industrious poor. 
 
 The " unearned increment " of other classes. This is a 
 proposition with which no man can quarrel, but it carries 
 us far beyond the project for a special tax on the unearned 
 gains of the ground landlord. We are at once driven to 
 ask why one particular class of the idle rich should be selected 
 for taxation. The ground landlord is not the only person 
 among rich men to profit by the progress of the community. 
 A banker's gains are closely dependent on the activity and 
 enterprise of the surrounding population, and a shareholder 
 in a large London bank, living at his ease at Monte Carlo, 
 may find his income steadily increase from causes to which 
 he does not contribute, and which he cannot control. 
 Barristers too as a class do not create their own prosperity ; 
 they are obliged to wait till business comes to them, and 
 their collective earnings are less influenced by their own 
 industry than by the enterprise or the quarrelsomeness of 
 the general public. Indeed, as regards the leaders of the 
 profession, the fancy fees which their reputation enables 
 them to demand are strictly analogous to the rents paid for 
 fashionable sites in a town. Nor can it with accuracy be 
 urged that such special profits as these are irregular and 
 fleeting while the rent of land is permanently progressive.
 
 130 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 It is indeed true that the power of a successful banking 
 firm to command, through several generations, a rent for its 
 name, may be suddenly and completely destroyed ; while 
 obviously the fees of the popular Queen's Counsel must 
 determine with his life, if not earlier. But neither is the 
 growth of ground rent so certain and stable as is generally 
 imagined. There is a fashion in localities as well as in 
 Queen's Counsel ; and business quarters have their ups and 
 downs as well as banking firms. 
 
 Irregularities of fortune cannot be prevented short of 
 communism. There is then no sufficient warranty for the 
 assumption that the incomes of ground landlords will of 
 necessity and for all time grow more certainly and more 
 rapidly than those of other classes in the community. The 
 only safe statement is this : that in the progressive develop- 
 ment of a society, based upon private property and free 
 competition, some individuals will always from time to time 
 profit more than proportionately by the general advance in 
 prosperity. It may be the ground landlord, it may be the 
 farm labourer, it may be the city banker, who for th.2 time 
 being is the lucky individual ; but in no case can we 
 accurately determine the extent of his exceptional gains, 
 and still less can we safely predict their continuance. 
 Further, the more than proportionate gain of some classes 
 must have its counterpart in the less than proportionate 
 gain of other classes. Hence, if equality be our ideal, 
 these classes too ought to be sought out, in order that 
 they may receive just that amount of compensation that 
 will level their gains with the general average. The mere 
 statement of this side of the problem is sufficient to prove 
 the insolubility of the whole. Nothing short of absolute 
 communism rigidly enforced will prevent the growth of
 
 CONFISCATION OR COMPENSATION. 131 
 
 irregularities in fortune, and the attempt to accurately counter- 
 balance these unequal gains by means of taxation must be 
 abandoned as hopeless. 
 
 But can be mitigated by death duties. We come back 
 then to the contention formulated just now, that there is 
 no reason for taxing one set of the idle rich rather than 
 another set. And if we wish to tax all the idle rich in 
 proportion to their riches, the best way to do it is by means 
 of a graduated duty on all property passing by death. The 
 man who to-day is enjoying an income for which he is 
 not working, and has not worked, in ninety-nine cases out 
 of a hundred, has received the capital from which his 
 income is derived by bequest or inheritance. Tax then the 
 corpus of the property as it falls from the dead man's grasp, 
 and the income that his heirs will enjoy without working 
 is instantly reduced. And tax all property, for to the 
 heir of a rich man it matters not a brass farthing whether 
 the property he inherits has grown out of city ground rents, 
 or African gold mines, or fees in fashionable divorce cases ; 
 he invests the principal and lives on the income. A death 
 duty has also this advantage, that it is probably less felt than 
 any other tax of equal severity. With an income tax, the 
 payer has every year to give up a fraction of his actual 
 income ; but with a death duty, the heir or legatee does not 
 have to give up anything that he has already got, but merely 
 to forego the receipt of something that otherwise might have 
 come to him. 
 
 Existing death duties capable of improvement. On 
 the other hand, the death duties at present levied in England 
 have several defects. As was pointed out in a previous 
 chapter, the very considerable exemption of real property 
 is totally indefensible, and can only be explained by the
 
 132 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 predominance in Parliament of the landed interest. Again, 
 the duties are only very slightly graduated ; probate duty 
 starts at two per cent, on personal properties under ^500, 
 and rises to three per cent, on those over ^1000; in 
 addition there is an estate duty of one per cent, on all 
 personal estates and real " successions " above ^10,000 in 
 value. Legacy and succession duties are only graduated 
 according to consanguinity. The first reform is to abolish 
 altogether the fiscal and legal distinction between real and 
 personal property. Next the scale of graduation ought to 
 be altogether recast ; on large estates, or on large legacies 
 ten or even twenty per cent, would not be too high a rate 
 to charge. Lastly, in the case of intestacy, where no near 
 kinsfolk exist, the whole property should lapse to the State ; 
 it is absurd to scour the world in search of some tenth 
 cousin of the deceased who had never dreamt of the good 
 fortune coming to him. With these reforms the death 
 duties might be made an important feature of local as well 
 as of imperial finance, and would be the best means of 
 gradually transferring back to the community the excessive 
 wealth whether in land or in movables that lucky indi- 
 viduals had been able to accumulate.
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 OVERGROWN TOWNS. 
 
 In the preceding chapters we have been solely concerned 
 with the revenue that flows from the ownership of land. It 
 is now necessary to turn to the other main branch of our 
 subject, and consider what are the social and economic ef- 
 fects of leaving the control of the soil in private hands. And 
 the point that specially needs consideration is the question 
 of how far the institution of private property in land is 
 responsible for the overcrowding of large towns. Nothing 
 is commoner than the assertion that it is the bad system of 
 land tenure in England that drives the population from the 
 country to the town ; while the advocates of land nationaliz- 
 ation explicitly declare that it is appropriation of the soil by 
 private persons that is the cause of all the mischief. Here, 
 for example, are the opening words of a manifesto issued by 
 the English Land Restoration League 1 : 
 
 " Whereas .... the appropriation to the few of the land 
 on which and from which the people of England must live 
 is an efficient cause of dulness of trade, lowness of wages, 
 the idleness of men who should be at work, the forcing 
 of women and children to unnatural toil, the depofiiclation 
 1 Offices ; 8 Duke Street, Adelphi, W.C.
 
 134 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 of agricultural districts, the crowding of city slums, the 
 sapping of national strength by forced emigration .... 
 therefore, &c." 
 
 Again, Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace, speaking as president 
 of the Land Nationalization Society on June 18th, 1891, 
 prophesies as a result of land nationalization, that " a large 
 proportion of the millions who have migrated during the 
 last twenty years to the great towns, driven away for the 
 most part by the existing land monopoly," would return to 
 their native villages. 1 
 
 The believers in big towns. Before beginning to 
 examine whether the remedies proposed by these two 
 societies would effect the particular objects they have in 
 view, let us be precise as to the nature of the evil com- 
 plained of. Both societies complain of the depopulation 
 of the country and the congestion of large towns, and 
 assume, as a matter of course, that these things are in 
 themselves an evil. To the present writer the assumption 
 seems a fair one ; but there are many persons who regard 
 the continued growth of large towns with perfect compla- 
 cency. Town life, they urge, is fuller, more intellectual, 
 more progressive than country life, and it is an advantage 
 to the nation that as many people as possible should enjoy 
 this more brilliant existence ; for country life is dull, 
 and impresses its dulness on the characters of country 
 people ; the " son of the soil " is as heavy as the clods he 
 treads, incapable of new ideas, doggedly obstinate to pre- 
 serve antiquated practices. But even if we assume that this 
 comparison is strictly accurate, it does not follow that all 
 the advantages are on the side of the townsman. The 
 
 1 See Report of the Land Nationalization Society (1890-91), p. 2 1, 
 published at 14, Southampton Street, Strand, W.C.
 
 OVERGROWN TOWNS. 
 
 135 
 
 Londoner's contempt for the slowness of country folk is 
 reciprocated by the true countryman's scorn of the " chat- 
 tering Londoner." Such mutual recrimination of course 
 proves nothing, and it is only when we pass from moral to 
 physical qualities that we get on to really solid ground. 
 
 The relative mortality in town and country. And 
 here there is no room for doubt that the balance is on the 
 side of country life. In spite of the greater wealth of the 
 urban population, bringing to the average townsman better 
 food, better clothing, better lodging than the average 
 countryman can afford, the mortality of large towns is, with 
 rare exceptions, largely in excess of the general mortality 
 of the country. In thirty-one towns in the United Kingdom 
 the death-rate for the year ending September 27th, 1890, was 
 233 per myriad (iOjOoo 1 ). For the whole of England and 
 Wales during the year ending December 31st, 1890, the 
 rate was 195 per myriad; 2 in the rural registration districts 
 in England and Wales it was only 174 per myriad; while 
 in the urban districts it was 209 per myriad. 
 
 It must be added, however, that the year 1890 was 
 particularly deadly to townsfolk, as the following table 
 shows : 
 
 Deaths per in 
 
 yriad persons living. 
 
 
 
 Town. 
 
 Country. 
 
 rate and country death-rate. 
 
 1888 
 1889 
 1890 
 
 190 
 
 193 
 209 
 
 166 
 164 
 174 
 
 114 to IOO 
 118 to IOO 
 
 120 to IOO 
 
 This increase both in the absolute and in the relative 
 mortality of the towns is attributed by the Registrar-General to 
 
 1 See Whitaker's Almanack for 1891. 
 
 - Parliamentary Papers, 1891, c. 6478, c. 6309, c. 6520.
 
 136 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 the plague of influenza. It is, however, a poor satisfaction 
 to townsfolk to be told that they are specially liable to die 
 from any epidemic that may visit the kingdom. 
 
 Similar figures for Scotland and Ireland. In Scotland 
 no less than five groups of registration districts are recog- 
 nized and their rates of mortality compared. Here is the 
 comparison for 1890 : 
 
 Principal town districts ... 215 Deaths per myriad persons living. 
 
 Large town districts ... 203 ,, ,, ,, ,, 
 
 Small town districts ... 180 ,, ,, ,, ,, 
 
 Mainland rural districts ... 164 ,, ., ,, ,, 
 
 Insular rural districts ... 154 ,, ,, ,, ,, 
 
 For Ireland no comparison between urban and rural 
 districts is worked out in the Registrar's returns, nor is the 
 town population of Ireland an important quantity. The 
 death-rate for the whole island in 1890 was 183 per myriad, 
 varying from 139 in county Sligo and county Mayo, to 243 
 in county Dublin. In the city of Dublin the death-rate for 
 the year ending Sept. 27th, 1890, was 267 per myriad. 
 
 Death-rates in France. Passing to France we find the 
 same phenomenon. In the period from 1861 to 1865 the 
 average mortality of the urban population in France was 
 261 per myriad, of the rural population 215 per myriad; in 
 the period from 1878 to 1882 the corresponding figures were 
 243 and 209. l It will be noticed that the difference between 
 the two rates is slightly less in the second period. This 
 decrease is probably due both to improved sanitation of 
 large towns, and to the inclusion as " urban " of many sub- 
 urban districts with their relatively healthy populations. Just 
 as the death-rate of London is lowered by its rim of sub- 
 urbs inhabited by prosperous, well-fed people. 
 
 The drain of young blood from the country. Nor do 
 
 1 La Population Francaisc, vol. ii. p. 155.
 
 OVERGROWN TOWNS. 137 
 
 the figures we have just given, showing the heavier mortality 
 of urban districts in England, in Scotland, in Ireland, and in 
 France, disclose the whole of the truth. Everywhere the 
 population of large towns is recruited by young men and 
 women attracted by the gaiety of town life, or by the prospect 
 of better wages. On the other hand, at the end of life, 
 people begin to grow weary of the perpetual strain of town 
 work and town amusement, and there is an ebb of population 
 back to the country. Those who have secured a competency 
 retire to enjoy themselves in the simpler pleasures of country 
 life till death comes. While lower down in the social scale 
 some working-men, for example, railway porters and signal- 
 men, when their strengtli or skill begins to fail, drift back to 
 the less exacting work and narrower wage of the country. 1 
 The consequence is that the population of large towns con- 
 tains more than a fair proportion of active adults, of an age 
 when death is least to be feared. If, therefore, the conditions 
 of town life were as healthy as those of country life, the 
 mortality of towns ought to be not higher, but considerably 
 lower than the general average for the whole country. Or, 
 to state the same proposition in other words, if we wish to 
 get an accurate comparison between the rates of mortality 
 in town and country, we ought to take account of age as 
 well as of numbers. This comparison lias been made 
 by M. Levasseur 2 for Paris and France in the following 
 table : 
 
 1 Mr. II. LI. Smith, in his articles on the influx of population into 
 London, gives some useful statistics of the ages at which country people 
 leave their homes to seek situations in London. Summarizing his 
 figures, he finds that 80 per cent, of these immigrants are between the 
 ages of 15 and 25. See Charles Booth's book on Labour and Life 
 in London, vols, i., ii. 
 
 2 La Population Francaise, vol. ii. p. 402.
 
 13S LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 Deaths per myriad persons living of the same age. 
 
 Ages. 
 
 Paris. France. 
 
 to I year 
 
 1 to 5 years 
 15 to 20 ,, 
 30 to 40 , , 
 
 60 to 70 ,, 
 
 23OO? 
 582 
 
 91 
 136 
 
 512 
 
 I700? 
 280 
 60 
 IOO 
 4IO 
 
 Thus at each of the ages taken, the death-rate for Paris 
 is far higher than the rate for France as a whole. And 
 France, it must be remembered, includes Paris and many- 
 other towns equally unhealthy. If these were excluded so 
 as to compare the mortality at specified ages in Paris, and 
 at the same ages in rural France, the discrepancy would be 
 still more glaring. 
 
 Figures for Germany and Sweden. In Germany again 
 town life is as deadly as in England and France. The mean 
 rate for five principal cities of Prussia was from 1867-71, 
 374 per myriad ; from 1872-75, 406 per myriad. But during 
 sixty years the mean rate for the whole of Prussia was only 
 290 per myriad; being 301 for the urban population, and 
 284 for the rural population. 1 For Sweden the same pro- 
 position that country life is healthier than town life is proved 
 by an abundance of statistics similar to those just quoted. 
 Another aspect of the same thing is shown by the following 
 table giving the average age at death in town and 
 country : 
 
 Sweden, 1871 
 
 75- 
 
 Average age at death in years. 
 
 Men. Women. 
 
 Urban 
 
 Rural 
 
 General 
 
 258 
 
 34 '2 
 32-6 
 
 3 J, 3 
 38-4 
 37 "3 
 
 1 Mnlhall, Dictionary of Statistics,
 
 OVERGROWN TOWNS. 139 
 
 In other words, a Swedish countryman may expect to live 
 eight years longer than a Swedish townsman, and a country- 
 woman seven years longer than a townswoman. 
 
 Lowered physique of the townsman. It is unnecessary 
 to insist further on this point. Wherever the statistics have 
 been worked out, the same fact is found, that the inhabitants 
 of towns everywhere die off more rapidly than the inhabit- 
 ants of the country. And this inability to resist death un- 
 doubtedly arises not merely from the greater facilities in 
 towns for the spread of contagious diseases, but also from a 
 general lowering of the townsman's physique. The point 
 is an important one, and it is abundantly proved by inci- 
 dental evidence. The question of the migration of country 
 people into towns has long occupied public attention. Mr. 
 H. LI. Smith, in the articles already referred to, shows 
 conclusively that the movement is mainly an economic one. 
 The countryman comes up to London to get better wages, 
 and he comes as a rule not on the chance but with the 
 certainty of finding employment, which will be offered to 
 him rather than to a Londoner. There is much town work, 
 says Mr. Smith, that town-bred people are unable to do, 
 and hence the countryman is called in. The country im- 
 migrant does not therefore drift, as used to be supposed, 
 into the ranks of the unemployed ; he goes straight to a 
 situation that has been offered to him, driving out the 
 inefficient townsman. The " unemployed " are " the sedi- 
 ment deposited at the bottom of the scale as the physique 
 and power of application of a town population tend to 
 deteriorate." 
 
 If further proof is needed of the diminished vitality that 
 results from town life, we may point to the every-day advice 
 that doctors give to their patients to go into the country to
 
 Ho LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 recruit, and to the fact that many of the large hospitals have 
 now established country homes for convalescents. In every 
 way the proposition that human physique deteriorates in 
 large towns is so well established that only a love of 
 paradox can suggest a doubt on the point. 
 
 Physical disadvantages of town life irremovable. 
 Nor is there any solid reason for hoping that we shall ever 
 be able to make our Londons, or even our Birminghams, as 
 healthy as the open country. We may improve our sewers, 
 and consume our smoke, and wash our streets ; but we shall 
 never be able to make up for the want of space and country air. 
 To some extent, of course, the establishment of large parks 
 and open spaces does mitigate the evils of crowded towns ; 
 it gives us places where we can breathe freely and move freely 
 without fear of inhaling disease or of jostling our neighbours. 
 But so far as public parks are large enough to form at all effec- 
 tive lungs, they take away from the essential advantage of town 
 life, namely, the concentration of a number of persons on 
 a small spot. On the other hand, the physical advantages 
 of the country are capable of immense improvement. At 
 present the inhabitants of many English villages have the 
 poorest of food, tainted water, and no milk, and but for the 
 pure air they breathe their death-rate would be enormous. 
 The removal of these causes of death and disease in the 
 country districts would add far more to the vitality of the 
 nation than any number of millions devoted to the purchase 
 of parks for crowded towns. 
 
 Intellectual advantages of large towns. We have 
 gone at some detail into this question of the physical dis- 
 advantages of large towns in order to reinforce, by statistical 
 proof, the tacit assumption of land nationalizes and other 
 reformers, that large towns are an evil. And to the
 
 OVERGROWN TOWNS. 141 
 
 question of health may be added the question of crime ; for 
 it is indisputable that large towns are a breeding ground of 
 criminals. In France, for example, the criminality of the 
 urban population appears to be just double that of the rural 
 districts. 1 That there are some compensating advantages in 
 moderately large towns cannot for a moment be denied. The 
 friction of mind against mind that always takes place where 
 masses of people are living within hail of one another, 
 is perhaps the greatest cause of the social advancement 
 of the human race. But it may be suggested that this 
 advantage could be obtained at a much smaller cost to 
 individual health and vitality. At least two-fifths of the 
 area of London is covered by squalid tenements whose 
 occupants, it may safely be asserted, add nothing to London's 
 intellectual life. They are for the most part engaged in 
 occupations that might equally well be performed a hundred 
 miles away. It is not the mere size of a town that creates 
 intellectual vigour. Probably in the whole history of the 
 world, no city has ever contributed so much to the intel- 
 lectual progress of the race as ancient Athens. Yet it is 
 extremely unlikely that the population of Athens at any 
 time exceeded one-twentieth of the present population of 
 London. Or, to confine our comparison to modern cities, 
 Paris has but half the population of London, Edinburgh 
 half that of Glasgow, yet no one will contend that the larger 
 town in each case is notoriously the more intellectual. 
 Admitting then to the full the intellectual gain to the race 
 that comes from the existence of large towns, there is still 
 nothing to justify such enormous and increasing aggregations 
 
 1 In 1S84-86 out of each 100,000 persons living in rural districts eight 
 were charged with crimes ; out of the same town population sixteen 
 were charged. See La Population Frattfaise, vol. ii. p. 456.
 
 H2 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 of people as are to be found in modern towns. This being 
 taken as proved, we have now to examine how far the 
 abnormal development of the modern town is due, as both 
 schools of English land nationalizers declare, to the existence 
 of private property in land. 
 
 Mr. George's remedy would aggravate the evil. 
 Let us deal first of all with Mr. George. Would his famous 
 remedy prevent the depopulation of the country and the 
 overcrowding of towns ? Without the least hesitation it 
 may be answered that it would not. All that Mr. George 
 proposes is to tax land up to the full extent of its un- 
 improved value ; he does not propose to dispossess the 
 present proprietors, or in any way to interfere with the 
 tenure of land. The private proprietor would still be able 
 to attach such conditions to the letting of his land as he 
 chose, and would still be able to absorb, where the law 
 allowed it, the fruits of his tenant's labour and enterprise. 
 The only difference would be, that he would have to pay 
 over a considerable part of his present income to the State, 
 and on that account the probability is that he would be a 
 harder landlord than before. The wealthy landlord who 
 can afford to be generous is nearly always the most lenient. 
 So far then as agricultural holdings are concerned, Mr. 
 George's scheme would rather aggravate the evils of the 
 present system. 
 
 It may be argued, on the other hand, that the heavy tax 
 on land would cause owners who now keep land for their 
 own enjoyment, or in the hope of securing a rise in its 
 value, to sell or let it for the purpose for which it was best 
 adapted. Very likely. But this would not prevent the 
 depopulation of the country. On the contrary, it would 
 rather increase it. For, in England at any rate, almost the
 
 OVERGROWN TOWNS. 143 
 
 only instance where land is held back for a rise, is in the 
 neighbourhood of large towns. If the owners of such land 
 were forced to sell, the general effect would be a slight 
 lowering of urban rents ; but this instead of emptying the 
 large towns would help to swell them. Nor would Mr. 
 George's plan prevent the conversion of Highland pastures 
 into deer forests ; for the capitalists to whom he is so tender, 
 are always willing to pay a higher rent for sporting ground 
 than the farmer will pay for a sheep run. 
 
 Dr. Wallace's remedy insufficient. More apparently 
 hopeful is Dr. Russel Wallace's scheme of land nation- 
 alization, for Dr. Wallace and his party have at any rate 
 realized that the important social question is not the tax- 
 ation but the administration of land. The actual scheme 
 is to create, by means of State intervention a system of 
 small farms held on such secure terms that the tenants will 
 be in practically as good a position as occupying owners. 
 This may or may not be a good method of distributing 
 agricultural land, but there is no reason to expect that it 
 will prevent the depopulation of the country districts. The 
 system has been tried in France, in Germany, and in 
 Belgium, and nowhere has it had the effect that Dr. Wallace 
 anticipates. Everywhere, in fact, throughout the civilized 
 world the townward tendency of the population is as well 
 marked as in Great Britain. 
 
 The growth of large towns a world-wide phenom- 
 enon. In 1846 the urban population of France was only 
 25-5 per cent, of the total ; in 1886 it was 35*9 per cent. 1 
 Yet nearly half the soil of France is owned by peasant 
 cultivators. In Germany again, where small proprietors 
 cultivating their own land are extremely numerous, the 
 1 La Population Fraufaise, vol. ii. p. 338.
 
 144 
 
 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 towns are continually growing out of proportion to the 
 growth of the country. The urban population of the 
 German empire in 1871 was 36'! per cent, of the total; 
 in 1885 it was 41-8 per cent. Even more instructive 
 than these percentages is the following table, showing how 
 the growth of the town population was distributed between 
 large and small towns : 
 
 German Empire. 
 
 1871. 
 
 Rate of 
 increase. 
 
 Towns over 100,000 
 Towns over 20,000 
 Towns over 5,000 
 Towns over 2,000 
 Rural Population 
 
 1,968,000 
 3, 147,000 
 4,588,000 
 5,086,000 
 26,219,000 
 
 3,327,000 
 4,147,000 
 5,694,000 
 5,734,000 
 26,318,000 
 
 69 per cent. 
 31 
 24 
 
 12 
 
 3 ,, mille. 
 
 Nor is it only in the crowded countries of the old world 
 that the towns outstrip the rural districts in rapidity of 
 growth. More than a fifth of the population of the 
 United States is now gathered into towns having more than 
 8,000 inhabitants, and the proportion is rapidly growing. 
 In our Australian colonies the tendency town wards is 
 even more remarkable than in the United States. In the 
 colony of New South Wales the city of Sydney alone now 
 includes more than a third of the population of the whole 
 colony with its immense area of yet uncultivated land. 
 And in the same way Melbourne with its suburbs holds 
 more than a third of the inhabitants of Victoria. 
 
 In the face of such a universal tendency as the above 
 figures show, it is childish to talk as if the overcrowding of 
 London and Birmingham and Liverpool could be com- 
 pletely explained by defects in the English system of land 
 tenure. In order to explain the phenomenon we must 
 clearly find some cause of equally world-wide application. 
 
 The popular explanation. The cause most frequently
 
 OVERGROWN TOWNS. 145 
 
 assigned is the preference that modern men and women are 
 alleged to feel for town-life. Possibly this preference does 
 really exist ; possibly if the inhabitants of the civilized world 
 were polled, an enormous majority would declare that they 
 preferred the brightness of the town to the dulness of the 
 country. But neither the assumption, nor the proof, of this 
 preference in the least explains the phenomenal growth of 
 large towns ; for unfortunately there are very few people 
 in the world who are at liberty to indulge such preferences. 
 Men and women who have to earn their bread must go 
 where work is to be found whether they like it or not. It is 
 only the favoured few whose incomes are secured without 
 any exertion of their own who are free to live where they 
 choose. The real explanation, then, of the universal growth 
 of large towns must be economic. If this proposition be 
 accepted, the search for a general cause becomes com- 
 paratively simple. 
 
 The increased efficiency of labour applied to the 
 land. The great economic feature of the present century 
 has been the improvement of the implements and methods 
 of industry. It is in the department of manufacture that 
 these improvements are most easily noticeable, but they are 
 not less important in agriculture. The typical implement 
 of agriculture, the plough, has been immensely improved 
 by the mechanical progress of the century. The modern 
 plough is lighter to draw, more efficient in its work, and 
 cheaper to buy than the plough of fifty or even thirty years 
 ago. A similar improvement in quality and a similar reduc- 
 tion in price has been effected in nearly every implement 
 that the farmer or his labourer uses. Still more important 
 is the cheapening of the means of conveyance of heavy 
 goods. In the first place, this allows farmers to spread on 
 
 L
 
 146 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 their fields fertilizers brought from the other end of the 
 world. Secondly, it allows each soil and each climate to be 
 devoted to the crop which suits it best. The rich pastures 
 of England are able to grow beef or milk, while the wide 
 prairies of America with their hot sun are producing wheat. 
 The result of these various causes is, that the food of the 
 world is now produced at far less cost of human labour 
 than at any previous period. 
 
 The demand for agricultural products limited ; for 
 manufactured products unlimited. It is true that the 
 same economy of human force, it may be even a greater 
 economy, has been effected in the production of nearly 
 every manufactured article. But while in the products of 
 manufacture there is no limit to human desires, in the pro- 
 ducts of agriculture a limit is soon reached. Persons whose 
 hunger is fairly satisfied spend the surplus income that 
 remains to them, not on more food, but on manufactured 
 articles of comfort or fantasy. And as soon as, in the pro- 
 cess of mechanical improvement, any one of these articles 
 becomes cheaper another similar article will be bought, 
 another pleasure satisfied, with the money saved. The con- 
 sequence is that the labourers, who are no longer needed 
 to produce the world's food, are summoned to the towns to 
 minister to the endlessly expansive wants and whims of the 
 human race. 
 
 The true explanation then of the universal townward 
 drifting of the population of the world is the greater effi- 
 ciency of human labour applied to the production of food. 
 
 The establishment of town industries in country 
 districts. This is obviously not a cause which we should 
 care to remove even if we could. It may, however, be 
 possible, when the cause is clearly understood, to obviate its
 
 OVERGROWN TOWNS. 
 
 147 
 
 effects. When once we are agreed that the business of 
 food production must occupy an increasingly small portion 
 of the energies of the race, it becomes clear that the only way 
 to prevent the growth of large towns is to take manufactures 
 into the country. In England a movement towards this 
 end is specially needful ; for since we are the great manu- 
 facturing nation of the world, the evil of large towns is more 
 serious here than in any other country. This statement is 
 abundantly borne out by the following table, which shows 
 to what extent the largest towns i.e., those over 100,000 
 inhabitants affect the population of different countries : x 
 
 Towns having 
 
 MORE THAN 100,000 INHABITANTS. 
 
 
 Number of towns. 
 
 Percentage of their 
 
 inhabitants to total 
 
 population. 
 
 United Kingdom 
 Holland 
 Belgium 
 France 
 
 German Empire 
 United States 
 
 27 
 
 3 
 
 4 
 
 11 
 
 17 
 
 20 
 
 26 "3 
 167 
 
 157 
 
 106 
 
 9-2 
 
 9-0 
 
 Our position at the head of this table is the undeniable 
 consequence of our industrial supremacy ; but there is no 
 reason for believing that this supremacy is dependent on the 
 existence of such enormous towns. Most of our staple 
 industries can be carried on, and in places are carried on, in 
 comparatively small manufacturing centres. A dispersion of 
 mauufactures throughout the country is therefore within the 
 limits of economic possibility ; the only thing needful is a 
 national determination to bring it about. Probably an 
 improvement in our land laws would facilitate the process, 
 but it would not of itself start the movement, much less 
 1 La Population Francaise, vol. ii. p. 385.
 
 148 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 secure the end. If we wish to accomplish such a huge 
 transformation of the face of the country, we must deliber- 
 ately turn the whole of our national policy in that direction. 
 
 Government encourages large towns. At present, 
 unfortunately, our policy is rather the other way. Con- 
 sciously or unconsciously, the different governing bodies 
 in the country are constantly stimulating the increase of 
 large towns. Let us take first of all the case of London, 
 the largest city in the world. There are undoubtedly many 
 economic reasons for London's enormous size its splen- 
 did commercial situation, the banking business of the world 
 that it has been able to secure, and its long tradition as a 
 manufacturing centre. And in addition, London is the 
 capital of the kingdom and of the empire. As such, it 
 becomes the seat of fashion, and wealthy persons flock into 
 it, followed by crowds of more or less remote dependents. 
 So much cannot be prevented. But the inevitable drift 
 towards the capital is further encouraged by a needless 
 centralization of government institutions. 
 
 The Law Courts. The best illustration of this central- 
 ization is to be found in the law courts. With the exception 
 of such special courts as the Court of Chancery for the 
 county palatine of Lancaster, and with the exception of the 
 intermittent jurisdiction of the assize courts, the only local 
 tribunals for civil cases are the County Courts,"whose juris- 
 diction is strictly limited. Consequently, all the most 
 important legal business of England and Wales is sent up to 
 London for trial. This means, in the first place, an appre- 
 ciable increase in the number of well-to-do persons judges, 
 barristers, solicitors and their clerks living in London ; 
 and, secondly, an increase of custom to London trades- 
 men and hotel keepers, from the constant influx of witnesses,
 
 OVERGROWN TOWNS. 149 
 
 country solicitors, &c, who spend in London money earned 
 in the country. This concentration of all the legal business 
 of the country at one centre is entirely peculiar to England, 1 
 and it is hard to find any solid defence for it. 
 
 The General Post-Office. Another illustration of needless 
 centralization is furnished by the post-office. A sub-post- 
 master selling stamps in a back street of Birmingham or 
 Belfast is not allowed to account for his sales to the head 
 postmaster of the town where he lives ; he must every day 
 send up to London the record of his receipts and outgoings, 
 and must periodically transmit by rail the cash surplus he 
 may have accumulated. The Post-Office Savings Bank is 
 worked on a similar plan. If a Highland shepherd or a 
 Jersey farmer wants to withdraw 10s. from his account at 
 the local post-office, he must apply to London for authority 
 to do so, and he will not be able to touch his money till 
 the warrant arrives. In many ways this excessive central- 
 ization is both inconvenient and costly. So far as our 
 present subject is concerned it has the special disadvantage 
 of drawing a large number of young men and women from 
 the country and provincial towns to London, to serve as 
 clerks in the different departments of the General Post- 
 Office. 
 
 Post-office neglect of the country. This disadvantage, 
 however, representing the addition of perhaps two or three 
 thousand persons to the salaried population of London, is 
 a small matter compared with the indirect encouragement to 
 
 1 As a minor illustration of the way in which London is favoured at 
 the expense of the rest of the country, it may be mentioned that a large 
 part of the cost of the London police courts, and of the metropolitan 
 police, and the whole cost of maintaining several London parks and 
 several London streets is borne by the National Exchequer.
 
 150 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 large towns that the Post-office gives by its neglect of the 
 country districts. A rapid postal service and easy telegraphic 
 communication are necessities of modern business. But if 
 a manufacturer were to attempt to establish a business in 
 any small village or hamlet in England, he would have to 
 face the inconvenience of having only one post a-day, and 
 possibly no telegraph office within a couple of miles. In 
 many businesses such conditions would be absolutely 
 prohibitive. 
 
 Railway neglect. Analogous to the Post-office neglect 
 of the country is the neglect practised by the great railway 
 companies. In the South of England railway directors 
 apparently devote the whole of their attention to the service 
 of London ; villages and small country towns are left to 
 take care of themselves. Not only are the trains slow on 
 cross country lines, but they are often so clumsily timed that 
 passengers are compelled to waste in draughty junctions 
 more time than the journey takes. Moreover, large villages 
 are often left without a station, even though they may be 
 actually traversed by the railway line. In explanation of 
 this neglect, it must be remembered that so far as country 
 districts are concerned, competition between rival companies 
 is, except in rare instances, non-existent. The great railway 
 companies do compete to a limited extent for the traffic of 
 large towns ; the intervening villages are entirely at the 
 mercy of the company within whose district they lie. 
 
 Municipal encouragement to large towns. And it is 
 not only the central government and the railway companies 
 that encourage the growth of large towns ; the governing 
 bodies of the towns themselves are equally active. Every 
 municipal corporation properly strives to increase the amen- 
 ities of the town over which it rules, and the very size of
 
 OVERGROWN TOWNS. 151 
 
 the town, by providing a greater taxable area, increases 
 the power of the corporation in this direction. But in many 
 large towns the local authorities, not content with adding to 
 the general amenities of the town, have adopted a policy 
 of subsidizing individual inhabitants. This matter is so 
 important that it deserves more than'a passing allusion. 
 
 The policy of charity rents. The subsidizing policy 
 everywhere takes the form of providing certain persons with 
 house room at less than the market price. In pursuance of 
 this policy the defunct Metropolitan Board of Works, during 
 its existence, sank more than a million sterling in securing 
 sites for artisans' dwellings. With the same object the 
 London County Council seems likely to spend public money 
 at an even more rapid rate. On one re-housing scheme alone, 
 the Boundary Street area in Bethnal Green, ^300,000 is to 
 be spent for the benefit of 5,720 persons, or at the rate of 
 52 a-head. And this sum, like the previous million, be it 
 well understood, is not a capital outlay that may be re- 
 couped afterwards by the rents charged for the houses ; it 
 is the estimated net loss on the whole transaction. Other 
 schemes similar in character are being rapidly matured ; 
 some less extensive are already in operation. In some of 
 these schemes, the land acquired by the Council is let to 
 builders under covenant to erect workmen's dwellings of a 
 specified character. In other cases, as, for example, in an 
 area at Limehouse, no builder can be found to tender for 
 such a job, and the Council undertakes the work itself. But 
 in no case does the rent paid by the ultimate tenant recom- 
 pence the Council for its original outlay. 
 
 Parliament partly to blame. In defence of these opera- 
 tions it might be argued, that the Council is obliged to clear 
 the land because it is covered by unsanitary houses, and
 
 152 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 that the cost of the clearance exceeds any price that could 
 be realized by the resale of the land. To a partial extent 
 this defence is good, for it distributes the blame between the 
 Council and Parliament. It is the fault of Parliament 
 that there is no readier method of dealing on a large scale 
 with unsanitary areas, and that the cost of purchasing the 
 area is so swollen by the gains of speculators. It is also 
 the fault of Parliament that the municipal authority is com- 
 pelled to provide accommodation for the population dis- 
 placed, instead of being allowed to sell the land for the 
 purpose for which it will command the best price, which is 
 also presumably the purpose for which it is most suited. 
 
 But these views of the legislature are adopted by the 
 administrative body when it starts clearance and re-building 
 schemes. The local body would be within its right in 
 declining to move until provided with proper powers. There 
 is no compulsion of sanitary necessity ; for houses that are 
 plainly unfit for human habitation can already be closed 
 by a magistrate's order. The same summary method cannot, 
 it is true, be applied to large areas, but in the worst of such 
 areas there is no necessity for immediate action. In the 
 Bethnal Green area, selected by the County Council as the 
 worst in London, the clearing operations are to be carried out 
 piecemeal, and spread over a period of six or eight years. 
 
 How the policy is defended. It may therefore be as- 
 sumed that the London County Council, like other municipal 
 bodies, accepts the policy of providing cheap houses for the 
 poor out of public money. And this assumption may be 
 confirmed by examining the proposals adopted by the 
 Council for dealing with the houses that it intends to build 
 itself. The rents of the new dwellings are to be fixed, not 
 at the figure that free competition among possible tenants
 
 OVERGROWN TOWNS. 153 
 
 would determine, but at a figure suitable to the pocket of 
 a " poor man." So that the County Council, having begun 
 with a bad speculation in the purchase of the land, makes 
 no attempt to retrieve its bad bargain, but lets its dwellings 
 at charity rents. The usual defence for such a departure 
 from commercial practice is, that the population to be pro- 
 vided for is so poor that it cannot afford a commercial rent 
 for a decent and healthy dwelling. That depends on where the 
 dwelling is. The committee of the County Council charged 
 with the preparation of the Bethnal Green scheme points 
 out, that at places a few miles from London, easily accessible 
 by workmen's trains, good houses can be obtained in plenty, 
 at moderate rents, even adding the train fare to the actual 
 rent. " But," naively adds the report, " your committee 
 are aware that but a small number will avail themselves 
 even of cheaper and better dwellings when they are at a 
 distance from town life." Put in other language this means, 
 that persons who prefer town life, but are too poor to indulge 
 their preference at their own expense, may come to the 
 County Council and get a subsidy sufficient to cover the 
 extra rent of a town house. 
 
 Economic and administrative objections. It would take 
 us too far from our main subject to deal at length with the 
 manifold objections to such a system of wholesale charity 
 out of public funds ; but two important objections may be 
 mentioned in passing. The first is economic. The kindly 
 hearted philanthropists who are mainly responsible for 
 initiating these charitable schemes, probably imagine that 
 the poor persons who are provided with nice houses at less 
 than the market price, will enjoy the net advantage of the 
 reduced rent. This is not the case. Where competition 
 for employment is as keen as it is among the poorer classes
 
 154 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 in large towns, any serious reduction in the necessary weekly 
 expenditure will be quickly followed by a corresponding 
 reduction in the weekly wage. It is not, in fact, the work- 
 man but the employer who will pocket the subsidy of the 
 County Council. The second objection is administrative. 
 It is easy enough to say that the rent for a four-roomed 
 house shall be three shillings a week, but if the market 
 price is six shillings, i.e. if plenty of persons are willing to 
 take the rooms at six shillings, how is the favoured tenant 
 to be selected ? Is he to be chosen because he had attended 
 church regularly, or because he had voted straight at 
 elections, or because he had given a suitable gratuity to 
 the officer who had the letting of the rooms ? None of 
 these methods of selection is altogether desirable. Again, 
 when this primary difficulty is surmounted, others remain. 
 The " poor " man who has been installed in the three- 
 shilling four-roomed house, may through luck or industry 
 grow richer. Is he to be promptly evicted by the County 
 Council ? Or, on the other hand, he may continue poor, but 
 his family may increase. Is he to be inducted into a larger 
 house at a still lower rent ? 
 
 These are illustrations of the very serious difficulties that 
 would follow any attempt to depart from ordinary com- 
 mercial principles in the letting of houses. But for our 
 present purposes we are concerned only with the effect of 
 such a system in promoting the overgrowth of large towns. 
 As to this there can be no dispute. Whether the benefit of 
 the reduced rent granted by the municipal authority remains 
 in the pocket of the poor man, as the philanthropist hopes, 
 or whether it is appropriated by the employer as the econo- 
 mist believes, in either case a direct encouragement is given 
 to the increase of the urban population.
 
 OVERGROWN TOWNS. 155 
 
 Thus while every politician and writer in England verbally 
 deplores the depopulation of the country side, both the 
 imperial and municipal governments are persistently increas- 
 ing the relative advantages of town life. Until this policy 
 is abandoned it is useless either to tinker with the laws of 
 land tenure, or to introduce any wholesale scheme of 
 nationalization of the soil. Towns will continue to grow 
 more and more populous until the nation makes up its mind 
 to transplant town industries into the country, and to increase 
 in every way the attractiveness of country life.
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 MINING ROYALTIES. 
 
 Popular opinion has attached perhaps rather more im- 
 portance to the question of mining rents and royalties than 
 the subject deserves. Undoubtedly the mining industry is 
 one of the most important in the kingdom, both directly 
 and for its influence on other industries. Undoubtedly, too, 
 mining rents and royalties are a nuisance to the persons who 
 have to pay them, and the total sums paid under these 
 heads are considerable. But these premises are by no 
 means sufficient to authorize the popular conclusion, that 
 the system of royalties is an oppressive tax on one of the 
 staple industries of the kingdom. 
 
 Royalty and dead-rent. First, it is well to be quite clear 
 what mining royalties are. The rent of a mine, it is obvious 
 at first sight, cannot be regulated in exactly the same way as 
 the rent of a farm. A farm is generally improved by culti- 
 vation ; a mine is of necessity gradually exhausted as the 
 process of working is continued. If, therefore, the owner 
 of a mine were merely to stipulate for a fixed annual rent, 
 the lessee might by rapid working get all the coal out in 
 a few years, and the owner would receive only the same 
 number of years' rent. To avoid this risk, the universal
 
 MINING ROYALTIES. 157 
 
 practice of owners of mines is to charge a royalty on each 
 ton of mineral raised. But, again, if this were the only 
 arrangement, a lessee might, for motives of his own, work 
 the mine so slowly that the owner's annual income would be 
 very small. Hence, the royalty charge is always accompanied 
 by a stipulation that a certain minimum sum, called the 
 " dead-rent," shall be paid each year. This, on the other 
 hand, might be a hardship on the lessee who gets up less 
 coal in any one year than will cover the dead-rent. Conse- 
 quently, he is generally allowed to make up the deficiency 
 the "shorts" in the immediately succeeding years. Briefly, 
 then, the main charge upon a mine is a royalty on each ton 
 of mineral raised, subject to certain financial stipulations to 
 secure the continuous working of the mine. 
 
 Way-leaves, above and below ground. In addition to 
 this main charge made by the owner of the mine, there are 
 certain minor charges made by neighbouring landowners or 
 mine-owners. In order to get the coal from the mouth of 
 the pit to the market it is often necessary to cross private 
 property, and the owners insist on being paid for the " way- 
 leave." Or it may happen that a seam of coal is most con- 
 veniently worked by getting at it through an existing mine. 
 Here again a " way-leave" must be paid for. And since it 
 is in this case necessary to make an opening between the 
 two mines, a further charge is also made, under the name of 
 " in-stroke " or "out-stroke," according to the point of view. 
 Sometimes, also, the owner of the first mine makes a 
 separate charge for the use of the shaft of his mine. But 
 all these three charges it will be seen are really part of the 
 same charge, arising out of the divided ownership of the 
 land. Thus, essentially mining rents and royalties consist 
 of (a) the royalty charge made by the owner of the mine,
 
 158 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 {b) the way-leave charged by the owner of the adjoining 
 land. 
 
 The ratio between royalties and produce. Next, as to 
 the amount of these charges that, unfortunately, is not easy 
 to arrive at. The royalties are the result of a series of 
 private bargains, and only guesses can be made at their 
 total. Professor Sorley, who has made an independent 
 examination into the whole subject, estimates the royalties 
 on coal at five or six millions sterling a year. 1 In 1889 the 
 value of the coal raised in the United Kingdom was 
 ^"56,000,000, in 1890 it was ^75, 000,000. 2 Consequently, 
 the total of the coal royalties on a liberal estimate is only 
 ten per cent, of the value of the produce. In agriculture the 
 proportion of rent to produce is far higher. Arthur Young, 
 in his advice to farmers, calculates that the rent, rates, and 
 taxes, which he properly lumps together, ought not to exceed 
 one-third of the total produce of the farm. At the present 
 time the proportion is probably less than this, perhaps only 
 a fourth or a fifth, but it is certainly much more than a tenth. 
 
 Are royalties a tax or a rent? However, this com- 
 parison would be of little importance if, as some people 
 apparently imagine, mining royalties were, not an economic 
 rent, but a compulsory tax. Were this the case, even if 
 the tax were only at the rate of one per cent, on the produce, 
 it might have a more serious effect on prices and wages 
 than an economic rent amounting to twenty-five per cent. 
 But is there any reason for believing that a mining royalty 
 is a tax? In South Wales royalties on coal average 8d. or 
 gd. a ton ; in Durham only \d. or $d. This contrast at 
 once suggests that high royalties are paid where the coal is 
 
 1 See pamphlet on Mining Royalties. 
 
 2 See Parliamentary Tapers, Mines and Minerals.
 
 MINING ROYALTIES. 159 
 
 of good quality or easy of access. A more striking illustra- 
 tion is given by Mr. Sorley, who, in the pamphlet already 
 referred to, quotes the remark of a colliery master, that he 
 would sooner pay half-a-crown a ton for some mines than 
 get others for nothing. This can only mean, as regards 
 the higher royalties at any rate, that the lessee of a mine 
 merely pays for the special advantages he is enabled to 
 utilize ; he pays in fact a rent and not a tax. 
 
 Is there any minimum rent equivalent to a tax ? With 
 the lower royalties the matter becomes slightly different. 
 In order to get at any seam of coal it is necessary to break 
 up and disfigure the surface of the land somewhere in the 
 immediate neighbourhood. The land thus taken might 
 have been used for tillage or pasturage, and this possible 
 alternative use will, as pointed out in a previous chapter, 
 make a minimum rent for the mine beneath. Nor is this 
 the only consideration. Something must be allowed for the 
 actual disfigurement of the surrounding country that results 
 from mining operations. A landowner will not allow his 
 estate to be permanently disfigured unless he receives an 
 appreciable pecuniary advantage. So that it may safely be 
 said that the minimum rent of a mine is always considerably 
 more than the agricultural rent of the land destroyed. In 
 addition, the lessee is generally required at the end of his 
 lease to pay a fine sufficient in amount to restore the surface 
 of the land to its original condition. From these premises 
 Professor Sorley proceeds to argue that there is a minimum 
 royalty on every coal-mine in Great Britain of about ^d. a 
 ton. If this contention be correct, \d. a ton represents a 
 real tax on British coal, and must be either added to the 
 price the consumer pays, or taken from the wages the colliers 
 earn, or from the profits of the coal masters.
 
 160 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 Professor Sorley's estimate. Unfortunately, however, 
 Professor Sorley's calculation is curiously defective. He 
 does not attempt to estimate the money value at which a 
 landowner assesses the amenity of his estate ; and obviously 
 such an attempt would be hopeless. Nor does he try to 
 calculate what charge per ton of mineral raised would be 
 required in order to make up the agricultural rent of the 
 small piece of land occupied by the debris at the mouth of a 
 mine. Here again the calculation is impossible for want of 
 sufficient data. Therefore, in despair, Professor Sorley takes 
 the lowest rent that he finds to be actually paid on any 
 British mine, and roundly declares that this is a minimum 
 rent which must be paid, and is therefore a tax on the 
 British coal industry. But Great Britain is not surrounded 
 by an impassable wall or even by a customs tariff. Her 
 coal enters into competition with the coal of Belgium, France, 
 Germany, America, and even India. Indeed, it is very largely 
 on account of the competition of these countries that the 
 outcry against mining royalties in Great Britain has arisen. 
 This Professor Sorley admits, and labours to ascertain 
 whether mining royalties in France and Germany are really 
 less than in England. Assume that they are less. But 
 surely that only proves, as in his own comparison between 
 Durham and South Wales, that British coal is either of better 
 quality or more easily won than foreign coal. For it must 
 not be imagined that the foreign royalties end with the charge, 
 arbitrary but moderate, which foreign governments make to 
 the concessionnaires of coal-mines. This charge, indeed, may 
 be of the nature of a tax, but below the concessionnaire is 
 the lessee, the capitalist who actually works the mine ; his 
 bargain with the concessionnaire is a purely commercial one. 
 In brief, a colliery lessee, equally in France, in Durham, and
 
 MINING ROYALTIES. 161 
 
 in South Wales, makes the best bargain he can with the 
 legal owner of the coal. In France he pays perhaps 2d. a 
 ton, in Durham 4^., in South Wales &d. Competition is as 
 free between France and England as between Durham and 
 Wales. Clearly then, if, as Professor Sorley properly argues, 
 the extra royalty in Wales represents the advantage of 
 Welsh over Durham collieries, so also must the difference 
 between Durham and French royalties represent the advan- 
 tage of Durham collieries over French. In other words, the 
 fourpence that is the lowest actual royalty in England is 
 not a " minimum rent." Twopence, at any rate, out of the 
 fourpence is the consequence of the superior excellence of 
 British collieries, and that twopence is therefore not a tax. 
 
 The true minimum rent. As to the balance, the true 
 minimum rent which all mines must pay, it is impossible to 
 say whether it is twopence, or a penny, or only a farthing a 
 ton. The means for making the calculation simply do not 
 exist. But this we can say, that whatever this minimum rent 
 may be in amount, it would equally exist if minerals were 
 nationalized. For the minimum rent only arises because of 
 the alternative uses to which the surface of the land can be 
 put, and because of the disfigurement made by mining 
 debris. On both these accounts the owner of the soil 
 would be justly entitled to compensation, whether the 
 ownership of the minerals under the soil remained with him 
 or passed to the State. Consequently, the true minimum 
 rent or royalty, the rent which alone forms a real tax upon 
 mineral production, cannot be abolished by any process 
 short of a grant of public money to mining lessees. If the 
 State were to take upon itself the compensation of every 
 landowner for the destruction and disfigurement of his fields 
 by mining operations, the only burden that lies upon the 
 
 M
 
 162 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 mineral industry would be at once removed. Nor would 
 the expense be very serious. It may, however, safely be 
 prophesied that the public would object to paying any sub- 
 sidy, however small, in order to relieve a particular industry 
 from an economic burden, which in a greater or less degree 
 is common to all industries. 
 
 The colliery lessee is a free agent. To the line of 
 argument followed in the preceding paragraphs, it may be 
 objected that it is based on theoretical considerations which 
 may not be true in actual practice. In many cases this 
 objection would be undoubtedly serious, and might even 
 alter the whole aspect of the question. For example, in the 
 case of farm rents our theory ought always to be modified 
 by the reflection that farmers are not universally free to 
 bargain. They are often tied to one spot by inertia or 
 by sentiment, and will sometimes pay an excessive rent 
 rather than leave the farm they have been brought up in. 
 Moreover, the farmer is generally in a weaker economic 
 and social position than the landlord, and is to this extent 
 at a disadvantage in bargaining. But all this is reversed in 
 the case of collieries. All the more important collieries are 
 worked by wealthy capitalists or by powerful companies. 
 The same capitalist or company may have leases with three 
 or four landowners, and if there is any inequality in bargain- 
 ing, the inequality is in favour of the lessee. Undoubtedly, 
 lessees sometimes > make bad bargains. But that is an 
 accident to which all business men are liable ; and it can 
 hardly be seriously argued that one of the duties of the 
 State is to come to the rescue of every person who, on 
 occasion, makes a bad bargain. Colliery masters have, 
 however, ingeniously contrived to enlist public sympathy 
 in their favour, by pretending that mining royalties keep
 
 MINING ROYALTIES. 163 
 
 down miners' wages. The device is no new one in our 
 history, and in the history of other countries. Protectionist 
 manufacturers abroad, in petitioning for prohibitive tariffs, 
 always talk of the woes of their workpeople ; and English 
 landowners for generations taxed the food of the whole 
 country for the benefit of the " poor farmer." 
 
 The popular demand. Let us consider for a moment 
 what are the definite demands involved in the popular out- 
 cry against mining royalties. The most popular cry un- 
 doubtedly because it is the easiest to repeat is for the 
 " abolition of mining rents and royalties." It is unnecessary 
 to make any elaborate answer to this demand. The rents of 
 mines vary within very wide limits, according to the quality 
 of the coal and the convenience of the mine. The remark 
 of a colliery owner has already been quoted, that he would 
 sooner pay half-a-crown a ton for some mines than nothing 
 a ton for others. Supposing this man in occupation of the 
 rich mine to which he referred, why should he receive from 
 the general taxpayer a subsidy of half-a-crown on each ton of 
 coal he raises, while the occupier of the zero mine receives 
 nothing ? Or, to put the same question more generally, 
 why should South Wales receive an average State subsidy 
 of eightpence a ton, while Durham receives only fourpence ? 
 
 The demand for regulation. A more intelligible demand 
 is sometimes made for the " regulation " of mining rents 
 and royalties. It is alleged that the charges made by the 
 owners of the soil and of the minerals beneath are complicated 
 and oppressive. There is first the main royalty, with the 
 " dead-rent " arrangement attached to it ; then the various 
 way-leaves charged by different proprietors. These should 
 be regulated, it is said. But how? The capitalists who 
 enter upon the business of mining are surely as competent
 
 1 64 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 to take care of themselves as any section of persons in the 
 community. If they preferred any less complicated arrange- 
 ments than those now common, they would probably make 
 them. When a question of wages is raised, the colliery 
 masters are ready enough to combine to crush their men ; 
 it is absurd to suppose that they could not equally well 
 combine against obstinate landowners. For example, much 
 good sympathy is wasted on the poor lessee probably a 
 coal company with a capital of half a million who after 
 paying a heavy royalty to one landowner, has to pay a way- 
 leave to another, in order to get the coal away from the pit. 
 It does not seem to have occurred to these ready sympa- 
 thizers that if the way-leave to the second landowner could 
 have been avoided, the first landowner would have been 
 able to demand a higher royalty. 
 
 The origin of the outcry. The truth is, that the agitation 
 against mining royalties is the outcome of two distinct cir- 
 cumstances. First, the decline of trade as compared with 
 the flourishing period of 1870; secondly, the growth of the 
 idea of land nationalization. As to the first point, it is no 
 doubt unfortunate for the colliery companies who sealed 
 their leases in or about 1870, that coal is cheaper now than 
 then. But the risk of loss is inseparable from the hope of 
 gain, and no colliery master has yet proposed to share with 
 his landowner any unexpected gain. The second point is 
 more important. There is something peculiarly at variance 
 with the popular idea of justice, in the spectacle of a land- 
 owner suddenly enriched beyond the dreams of avarice by 
 the discovery of minerals beneath his fields. For the wealth 
 that then comes to him is not showered down by some 
 gracious fairy ; it is won by the hard work of hundreds of 
 his fellow-beings, toiling in the bowels of the earth to minister
 
 MINING ROYALTIES. 165 
 
 to his luxuries. That such an arrangement is unjust no one 
 can deny. But, unfortunately, an injustice that has been 
 allowed to grow till it has become part of our social system 
 cannot be uprooted at a moment's notice. Any attempt 
 at such sudden reformation must necessarily lead to new 
 injustice. In a previous chapter it was argued at length 
 that to confiscate rent rather than any other form of property 
 would be unjust ; a fortiori, it would be unjust to pick out 
 for confiscation mining rents, leaving other rents and 
 dividends untouched. All that we can do, as regards the 
 private property already established in minerals, is to bring 
 it gradually, by means of a high income-tax and heavy death 
 duties, into the public purse. 
 
 What can be done for the future. But the question still 
 remains whether we can prevent the future extension of the 
 injustice by nationalizing in advance minerals not yet 
 brought into private property. That ought to be possible. 
 Gold and silver found in the United Kingdom are Crown or 
 national property ; and the Chancellor of the Exchequer 
 though not without some friction arranges the conditions 
 on which these minerals may be searched for. In order to 
 establish equitably a similar system for other minerals, it 
 would first be necessary to make a complete record of the 
 mineral rights already existing. The land covered by this 
 record would include all the land known to possess minerals 
 below the surface. In those cases where the minerals are 
 already being worked, the - most that the State could do 
 would be to impose a purely nominal royalty on all minerals 
 raised, in order to assert a dominant proprietary claim. 
 But where the minerals are not being worked, although 
 known to exist, the State need not be so tender. It would 
 throw upon the owner of the soil the burden of proving
 
 166 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 that he had bought the land, or otherwise dealt with it on the 
 expectation of deriving profit from the minerals it concealed. 
 If he could not prove this, his right to the minerals should 
 at once cease, and pass wholly to the State. The same 
 transference of proprietary right is still more obviously 
 equitable in the case of land where the existence of minerals 
 is not even suspected. Here again the State should step in 
 and assert, with regard to all minerals that may be discovered, 
 the same claim that it now asserts to gold and silver. 
 
 In this suggestion that the State should assert a paramount 
 right to all minerals there is nothing novel. Such a right 
 has long been established by law in France, in Germany, 
 and in Spain. In these countries all minerals belong to the 
 State, and the owner of the soil has no power to forbid their 
 extraction. In order to get at the minerals it is of course 
 necessary to do some damage to the surface of the land ; 
 but the landowner cannot equitably claim, and should not be 
 allowed to claim, anything more than reasonable compens- 
 ation for the damage done. By an alteration of the law on 
 these lines, though we cannot at once sweep away the 
 injustice that our ancestors have allowed to grow, we can at 
 any rate prevent its further extension.
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 SOME SUGGESTIONS. 
 
 It has been argued in the two preceding chapters that 
 State ownership of land would not in itself mitigate the 
 overcrowding of large towns, and that the principal reform 
 needed in the case of mining royalties is to prevent the 
 extension of the evil in the future. But these two branches 
 of the subject do not exhaust the advantages that it is 
 alleged would flow from the nationalization of land. Dr. 
 Alfred Russel Wallace, for example, seems to advocate land 
 nationalization mainly because he desires to see established 
 in this country a system of " occupying ownership." The 
 State is to acquire possession of all agricultural land, and is 
 then to let it out in small holdings, on terms which will 
 give to the tenant the same security for improvements and 
 the same guarantee of undisturbed possession as if he had 
 purchased the freehold. Again, municipal ownership of 
 urban land might, it is arguable, improve the conditions 
 under which many of the inhabitants of our towns live. 
 
 Dr. Wallace's small holdings. The first of these points 
 does not require very lengthy consideration. If the soil of 
 England is to be made national property, it must be for 
 some wider reason than for the sake of establishing small
 
 168 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 farms. For, to begin with, most Englishmen are by no 
 means convinced that small farms are economically or 
 socially superior to large farms. The question has been 
 debated by economists and philanthropists for at least one 
 century, and the debate is likely to continue for many 
 centuries more. Plenty of evidence is forthcoming on both 
 sides; France especially forming a favourite field for in- 
 vestigation. In France, Dr. Wallace, following John Stuart 
 Mill, finds evidence of the untiring industry of peasant pro- 
 prietors ; in France, also, Lady Verney finds peasant pro- 
 prietors sunk in squalor that the poorest of English labourers 
 would rebel against, and her experience is confirmed by the 
 observations of such different writers as Georges Sand and 
 Emile Zola. The industry of the peasant proprietor may 
 without hesitation be admitted ; but continuous toil that only 
 ends in misery is a curse, not a blessing. However, it is not 
 a part of our present task to add a word to the interminable 
 debate on small holdings, but only to point out that their 
 advantages are not so transparent as to justify such an im- 
 portant step as the abolition of private property in land. 
 For, after all, small holdings, such as Dr. Wallace hopes for, 
 can be created without any very drastic change in the general 
 law. In Ireland his ideal has been practically realized. 
 Since the Land Act of 1881, the Irish peasant farmer is in 
 the position of an "occupying owner," subject only to the 
 payment of a rent charge fixed by judicial authority. So 
 satisfied is he with this position, that he will not exchange 
 his nominal tenancy for legal ownership, and the Land 
 Purchase Act of 1891 has remained, so far, almost a dead 
 letter. Again, an attempt has been made in England during 
 the session of 1892 to create small proprietary holdings; 
 but so far from this attempt being connected with theories
 
 SOME SUGGESTIONS. 169 
 
 of State ownership, it is avowedly intended by some of its 
 supporters as a bulwark against land nationalization. 
 
 The State as universal landlord. The contention that 
 State ownership of urban land might improve the conditions 
 under which most of us occupy our houses, cannot be so 
 summarily dismissed. Indeed, the proposition may legiti- 
 mately be extended ; and it may be argued that the State, 
 represented by local authorities, should own all land not for 
 the sake of promoting any particular kind of tenure, but for 
 the sake of improving the conditions of all tenures. In other 
 words, land nationalization may be advocated on the ground 
 that the State would prove a better landlord either of house, 
 or farm, or mine, than the present individual owners. 
 Undoubtedly this is possible ; but it is by no means certain. 
 And the suggestion here made is, that before advocating a 
 general system of State ownership, with all the financial 
 risks involved, we should by means of experiment determine 
 the capacity of the State to make a good landlord. 
 
 The importance of experiment. In order to determine 
 this point, not one but a whole series of experiments is re- 
 quired. Already we have the State acting as landlord to 
 the Crown property -a property that includes houses, farms, 
 and mines. But no one would contend that the adminis- 
 tration of Crown land by the Commissioners of Woods and 
 Forests is so brilliantly successful as to form an argument 
 for universal State administration. As far as can be gathered, 
 it is neither much better nor much worse than the adminis- 
 tration of other large landed estates. Again, several muni- 
 cipal bodies have house property, acquired at various periods 
 for various purposes ; but here too the evidence is incon- 
 clusive. There is nothing to show that the estates of the 
 City Corporation or of the London County Council are in
 
 170 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 any marked degree better managed than the Portland or 
 Bedford estates. If, then, we wish to test the capabilities of 
 the State as landlord, we must allow local authorities to try 
 their hand at landowning as a regular part of their ordinary 
 business. 
 
 Enlarged powers for local authorities. At present, local 
 authorities may only acquire land for certain specified pur- 
 poses, and may only hold it under certain statutory con- 
 ditions. Two reforms are necessary : first, to give to public 
 corporations the same power that a private individual pos- 
 sesses, of purchasing land by voluntary agreement and 
 holding it for any purpose ; secondly, to extend the facilities 
 that local authorities now possess for compulsory purchase. 
 The second point is by no means simple. Under the existing 
 law, every compulsory purchase of land requires the sanction 
 of a special Act of Parliament, and the conditions under 
 which Parliament gives its sanction are extravagantly in 
 favour of the landowner. Probably the best remedy lies 
 in the creation of a special judicial body, somewhat on the 
 lines of the Irish Land Commission. This body, with the 
 help, if necessary, of sub-commissioners, would hear and 
 decide all cases of compulsory purchase of land by local 
 authorities. It would decide not only the price at which 
 the land should be bought, but also whether the local 
 authority was justified in selecting for compulsory purchase 
 a particular piece of land. Subject to the control of a Land 
 Commission having these powers, there is no reason why 
 local authorities should not be given independent powers 
 to acquire land compulsorily for any purpose. With these 
 powers, and unlimited power of purchase by voluntary 
 agreement, municipal bodies would be able to get rid of 
 many obstacles to public sanitation and easy locomotion,
 
 SOME SUGGESTIONS. 171 
 
 that now continue to exist because of the expense of re- 
 moving them. At the same time, there would pass under 
 municipal control a landed estate large enough to test the 
 desirability of making the municipal authority the universal 
 landlord. 
 
 The law of landlord and tenant. But while thus en- 
 larging the powers of local authorities, it is of the utmost 
 importance that the general law of landlord and tenant 
 should be amended. At present, the presumption of the 
 law is nearly always in the landlord's favour. If, for example, 
 a tenant enters into a house that is in an unsanitary con- 
 dition, the law presumes that the tenant knew what he was 
 about, and the landlord cannot be compelled to set the 
 matter right. Again, the law as to fixtures is absurdly 
 favourable to the landowner. In practice, of course, many 
 landlords act more liberally than the law allows, and reap 
 their reward either in such consolations as a good conscience 
 brings, or in the readiness of their tenants to pay high 
 rents. But all landowners are not so generous or so far- 
 sighted. Landlords constantly insist on their strict legal 
 rights, and the greatest hardship often results to the tenants. 
 Whether the present system of individual ownership con- 
 tinues, or whether it is to be replaced by municipal owner- 
 ship, in either case it is desirable that the formal relationship 
 between occupier and owner should be made as equitable as 
 the law can make it. 
 
 Compensation for improvements. In this connection 
 the most important point is the question of improvements 
 or additions to the freehold. The old common law gives 
 to the owner of the soil whatever is attached to the soil ; 
 consequently, in general, any improvement of any kind 
 affected by a tenant can be confiscated by a landlord. The
 
 172 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 obvious injustice of this arrangement, and the growing im- 
 portance of the tenant farmer's vote, have together induced 
 Parliament within recent years to pass Acts giving to the 
 tenant of agricultural land, under certain conditions, a 
 property in his own improvements. The last of these Acts 
 the Agricultural Holdings Act of 1883 specifies certain 
 improvements for which the tenant may claim compensation, 
 even if he has executed them without the landlord's consent. 
 These so-called improvements, however, involve little more 
 than the ordinary routine of good farming. On the other 
 hand, all permanent improvements made by the tenant, 
 such as the erection of buildings or silos, improving roads 
 or bridges, digging ponds or wells, planting fruit-trees, re- 
 claiming waste land, &c. &c, belong to the landlord, unless 
 he has given permission in writing to the tenant to execute 
 them. In practice, tenant farmers complain that land- 
 owners refuse to give this permission, in order to reserve to 
 themselves the power of confiscating the results of their 
 tenant's labour. Clearly such a power ought not to exist ; 
 but to give due weight to both sides it would also be 
 extremely unfair to force a landowner to buy " improve- 
 ments " which added nothing to the commercial value of 
 the land. All tenants are not, like the Laureate's Northern 
 Farmer, able to boast that they have done their " duty by the 
 lond." Even under the meagre provisions of the present 
 law, a class of scamps has been developed who, farming on 
 a yearly tenancy, ingeniously contrive to run up a big bill 
 for improvements, and then, leaving the land worse than they 
 took it, pass on. 
 
 The court of arbitration. For this double evil it may 
 be suggested that the best remedy would be found in a 
 system of arbitration. The principle guiding the court
 
 SOME SUGGESTIONS. 173 
 
 would be that the property in an improvement belonged to 
 the improver and not to the freeholder; the question for 
 the court to determine would be whether or not the freehold 
 had been improved. In the case of agricultural land, a 
 jury composed of neighbouring farmers and landowners 
 familiar with the district would quickly decide this question 
 of fact. If the jury found that the land had been so im- 
 proved by the tenant that it would command a higher rent, 
 or sell for a better price, the landowner would be required 
 to pay for what he gained. If, on the other hand, the farm 
 had been let down by bad cultivation, or spoilt by unwise 
 alterations, the tenant would be liable for the consequences 
 of his own conduct. 
 
 In the case of houses, it is not so easy to determine 
 whether a particular alteration is an improvement from a 
 commercial point of view ; but that is not a sufficient reason 
 for giving to the landowner the right to confiscate every 
 improvement. It may safely be prophesied, that if a tenant 
 had power on the expiration of his tenancy to remove every- 
 thing which he had added to the freehold, whether it were 
 a whole house or an ornamental chimney-piece, the two 
 parties would soon discover some way of coming to terms. 
 Under these conditions, applied mutatis mutandis, both to 
 agricultural and to urban tenancies, the necessity for asking 
 the landlord's consent to this or that improvement would 
 disappear. The only case in which the landowner would 
 have ground for interference would be if the tenant proposed 
 to do something which would interfere with the amenity or 
 commercial value of the rest of the estate; for example, 
 in the country, building a jam factory in a needlessly 
 prominent position. 
 
 Landowner's power to misuse his property. This, how-
 
 174 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 ever, is a matter in which the nation as well as the land- 
 owner may rightly claim to interfere. As the law now 
 stands, the freeholder of half an acre may spoil the land- 
 scape for five miles round, and no one can touch him. He 
 may, for example, first build a vulgar house right on the 
 summit of the most glorious hill in Southern England, and 
 then, lest the world should forget what a great man lives 
 within, he may put up a screen fifty feet high to shut himself 
 off from the common herd of human beings. Obviously, it 
 ought to be possible to prevent by public authority such a 
 wanton outrage as this upon the beauty of nature. In towns 
 the municipal authorities already have some control over 
 the plans of proposed buildings, but the control may only be 
 exercised within very narrow limits. For example, except 
 in new streets, the height to which a building may be raised 
 is entirely at the discretion of the individual builder, and 
 such monstrosities as Queen Anne's Mansions are the result. 
 Again, municipal authorities have no general power to 
 compel the setting back of new houses built in a narrow 
 street ; so that though a street may urgently require widen- 
 ing, new houses are continually built up to the old line of 
 frontage, to be eventually pulled down at the expense of the 
 community. In regard to open spaces, too, the community 
 is at the mercy of the builder. Land that would have 
 been invaluable to the community as a public park, is often 
 covered with houses that might equally well have been built 
 elsewhere. 
 
 The community should have a power of veto. Generally, 
 then, what is required is to give the community more com- 
 plete control over the use to which land may be put. 
 Probably the best way to accomplish this would be to 
 empower the local authority, either in town or country, to
 
 SOME SUGGESTIONS. 175 
 
 veto any proposed building. In some cases for example, 
 the setting back of houses the exercise of this veto would 
 have to be accompanied by the payment of compensation 
 to the owner of the soil. But in general, the law should 
 refuse to recognize any claim by an individual to use his 
 land to the detriment of the community. 
 
 Preservation of historic monuments. Another matter in 
 which the nation has a right to interfere with the existing 
 powers of landowners is in preventing the destruction of 
 buildings of historic or aesthetic interest. In this matter 
 the French law is far better than our own. Any interesting 
 building in France may be declared by the Ministry of Fine 
 Arts to be an "historical monument." It is then protected 
 by law from destruction, and the Government undertakes 
 such repairs as may be necessary to preserve it from gradual 
 decay. Unfortunately, there as well as here, the zeal of the 
 restorer occasionally does more harm than a hundred years 
 of wind and weather ; but in the vast majority of cases the 
 intervention of the Government is purely good. Perhaps 
 the best method of securing the same end in England would 
 be to give to county and town councils the power to veto 
 the destruction of any building or monument, and, if the 
 case required it, to arrange with the owner for the purchase 
 of the building and site. 
 
 Wasted margins. Among minor defects of individual 
 ownership of land, the creation of what may be called 
 " wasted margins " is worth mentioning. These arise in 
 towns wherever the line of buildings does not run parallel 
 with the street, or from some accident stands back from the 
 street. From either of these causes a piece of land often 
 gets left between the boundary of the public roadway and 
 the wall of the adjacent houses, and is of no use to anybody.
 
 176 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 A good instance is the long narrow strip of wasted land 
 between the buildings of Lincoln's Inn and the footway on 
 the west side of Chancery Lane. In all such cases as these 
 the local authority should have power to acquire the wasted 
 land compulsorily, paying to the owner a price based strictly 
 upon the actual value of the land to him. 
 
 The rights of the general public. From another point 
 of view, the question just dealt with may be regarded as a 
 particular illustration of a very important aspect of the land 
 problem. Over and above the disputes between land- 
 lord and tenant, between State and individual, is the claim 
 of the general public to use freely for purposes of recreation 
 land that is not set aside for any conflicting purpose. This 
 is a claim as yet quite unrecognized by English law. 1 What 
 is called common land is only common to a limited number 
 of persons who have specified rights over it. The general 
 public has no greater right to the free use of common than 
 of private land, except in the cases where a right has been 
 conferred under the Commons Regulation Acts. Again, in 
 the case of Crown land, or land belonging to a Government 
 department, or to a municipal body, the public may be as 
 rigidly excluded as they would be by a game-preserving 
 squire. 
 
 The landowner's power of exclusion. Consequently, the 
 mere transference to the State of the freehold of all land 
 would not in itself give the general public any greater 
 privileges than it now possesses. If the present law con- 
 tinued, the enjoyable use of the soil would be confined to 
 the tenants of the State, in the same way that it is now con- 
 
 1 An attempt to assert this claim has been made during the session of 
 1892, and the House of Commons has passed a resolution in favour of 
 giving the public free access to Scotch mountains.
 
 SOME SUGGESTIONS. 177 
 
 fined to private owners and their tenants. And for this ex- 
 clusion there is, as regards an immense area of land, no 
 solid reason. Mountain pastures would afford just as good 
 grazing if the holiday-maker were free to ramble over them ; 
 river meadows, except when in hay, are unhurt by the foot- 
 steps of the angler. By many landowners and their tenants 
 these obvious facts are recognized, and in a large number 
 of cases no attempt is made to exclude persons in search of 
 the simple pleasures of a country walk. But there are 
 churls both among occupiers and owners, and some of the 
 most beautiful scenery in the British Isles is barred to all 
 but a handful of persons. 
 
 " Trespassers will be prosecuted." Before considering 
 how this can be remedied, it is well to be explicit as to the 
 exact power of exclusion now possessed by landowners and 
 their representatives. There is a popular belief that trespass 
 upon another man's land is a punishable offence, and this 
 belief is fostered by the threatening notices that may be seen 
 all over the country, warning trespassers that they will be 
 " prosecuted." To the majority of persons the word "pro- 
 secution " implies a criminal procedure ; but, as a matter of 
 fact, a landowner has only a civil remedy against trespassers 
 upon his property. He can only sue them for the damage 
 done. If no damage has been done, the landowner has no 
 remedy. In practice, however, actions against trespassers 
 on land are generally brought before the court of petty 
 sessions, and the sympathetic bench of landowning magis- 
 trates is not very strict in requiring rigid proof of damage 
 done. The court will often assume that nominal damage, 
 estimated at a farthing, has been done by a pedestrian 
 walking across a field, and will give judgment accordingly. 
 The judgment carries costs, and these may amount to an 
 
 N
 
 178 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 appreciable fine. Beyond this, however, trespass upon land, 
 unless the trespasser is in pursuit of game, cannot be 
 punished. On the other hand, the owner or occupier of 
 land has the fullest right to expel, by force, if necessary, any 
 person intruding upon the property. This power of ex- 
 pulsion is the landowner's real protection. Let us briefly 
 consider to what extent it is desirable that it should be 
 maintained. 
 
 Reasonable limitations to the landlord's right. In the 
 case of a dwelling-house or place of business or private 
 garden, there can be no dispute. A man may reasonably 
 claim, if he choose, the same exclusive right to his own 
 house and garden as to his own toothbrush. But when we 
 pass from garden to park, and from park to meadow or 
 pasture or moorland, the case is different. Here well- 
 behaved persons inflict no annoyance on the landowner by 
 walking casually across his land, or even by sitting down 
 upon it. Ill-behaved persons may, admittedly, do consider- 
 able damage ; but there is no reason why the well-behaved 
 should be excluded because of the possible misconduct of 
 the ill-behaved. What is really wanted is a more efficient 
 means of dealing with wanton damage to property, public or 
 private. To trample down ripe hay, or corn, or growing 
 crops, to injure trees, to tear up fences, and even to litter 
 glass bottles or other refuse in park or meadow, should be 
 made criminal offences, punishable by fine or imprisonment. 
 Were this protection given to the owners and occupiers of 
 land, there would be no reason why the general public 
 should not have free access to all open land. The boon to 
 the nation would be enormous, the loss to landowners 
 practically nil. 
 
 Rights of way; their use and abuse. And here it is
 
 SOME SUGGESTIONS. 179 
 
 worth while to mention, that the main reason why both 
 farmers and landlords are eager to close public footpaths is 
 because of the damage done by mischievous or careless 
 persons. Town larrikins out for a country walk will often 
 in pure fiendishness throw gates off their hinges, play at 
 leap-frog through the ripe corn, or scatter the hay-cocks that 
 stand waiting for the cart. Naturally, the farmer objects ; 
 and as the law gives him only a civil remedy, which costs 
 more to obtain than it is worth, he takes matters into his 
 own hands, and tries to close the public footway through 
 his fields. In order that the public interest may be safe- 
 guarded, power has recently been given to county councils 
 to protect rights of way. But county councillors are for the 
 most part either landowners or large occupiers, and their 
 sympathies lean to the side of the defenceless farmer, so 
 that the new powers are little used. Probably this would 
 not be the case if county councils were also empowered to 
 act as prosecutors in the case of malicious injury to any 
 property within the county. One or two heavy sentences 
 would stop the nuisance, and would deprive landowners of 
 the only shadow of excuse which they now have for stealing 
 a public right. At the same time, the attempted theft of a 
 right of way by the exposure of lying notice boards or other 
 means should be made a penal offence, and the local 
 authorities should have power to prosecute. 
 
 Repairs to public footpaths. As a minor but not unim- 
 portant reform, it may be suggested that local authorities 
 should have power to repair public footpaths. At present 
 it frequently happens that a useful short cut, to which the 
 public has as much right as to the main road, becomes quite 
 impassable in the winter. A few loads of gravel would 
 prevent this public loss, but nobody except the owner or
 
 180 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 occupier of the land has power to lay the gravel down. 
 What is further wanted is some easy means of diverting an 
 ancient footpath. Often a public path takes a line that 
 causes the maximum inconvenience to the landowner and 
 the minimum advantage to the public. But where land is 
 settled, the tenant for life cannot dedicate a path to the 
 public, so it is a question between keeping the old path or 
 having none at all. A simple alteration in the law would 
 remedy this defect. The local authority would then arrange 
 with the landowner the line that the public path should 
 take, and would see that it was always maintained in a fit 
 condition for traffic. 
 
 The Game Laws. One word may be added with regard 
 to the game laws. Game-preserving, in a crowded country 
 like Great Britain, is too great a luxury. In order that a 
 few individuals may have the pleasure during a few weeks 
 in the year of slaughtering large numbers of pheasants or 
 grouse, an immense area is, for the rest of the twelve 
 months, cut out of our small island, and rendered unavail- 
 able for any use. Nor is that all. For not only does game- 
 preserving amuse the idle rich, which may be a good thing, 
 but it also encourages the idleness of the poor, which even 
 the rich will admit is distinctly bad. Men, who might have 
 made good workmen, are tempted by the profusion of game 
 around them to take up the uncertain, semi-outlawed pro- 
 fession of poaching. From poaching they pass to farmyard 
 pilfering, and possibly thence to house-breaking. The 
 whole evil results from the statutory privileges that land- 
 owners in Parliament have conferred upon themselves. 
 The law recognizes no property in wild animals ; it should 
 equally refuse to recognize any special privilege to kill them. 
 Subject to the maintenance of a close time for those birds
 
 SOME SUGGESTIONS. 181 
 
 and animals which it is desirable to preserve from extinction, 
 there is no national reason why the natural sporting- grounds 
 of England should not be thrown open to anybody. There 
 would, at any rate, be more "sport" than now, when a 
 single individual stands with a succession of guns beside 
 him, firing into a flock of birds as they are driven past. 
 
 Registration of title. To pass to another category of 
 questions, it is necessary to say a few words about the legal 
 title to land. One of the greatest obstacles to the free 
 transference of land, either between private persons or 
 between individuals and the State, is the difficulty of ascer- 
 taining fully to whom the land belongs. That this evil 
 should be remedied has long been demanded by various 
 schools of reformers, and the gratification of their demand 
 should certainly precede any general scheme of land national- 
 ization. In Australia land can be transferred by a simple 
 alteration in a ledger record ; there is no reason why the 
 same simplicity should not be attained in England. The 
 first step is the only serious one. In order to open the 
 record, something of the nature of a new Domesday Survey 
 would be required. It would be necessary to register 
 every separate holding, carefully describing it by reference 
 to the ordnance map. The names of the occupier and 
 of the owner would of course be registered, and also 
 any mortgages or other charges upon the holding. This 
 would not be quite so simple as it sounds, for it would 
 be necessary to allow time for rival claimaints to assert 
 themselves, and for the disclosure of concealed mortgages. 
 But when once the record was complete, these difficulties 
 would cease. Every new transfer, every new mortgage or 
 rent-charge, every new lease or agreement to let, would be 
 registered automatically ; for the law would refuse to recognize
 
 i8 2 LAND NATIONALIZATION. 
 
 any transaction with regard to the land that was not so re- 
 corded. To the Government this complete compact record 
 would be of immediate advantage for fiscal purposes, for it 
 would give the revenue officials a very valuable check over 
 income tax returns. It would also be a contingent advan- 
 tage to the State by furnishing reliable evidence on which 
 to base, should it ever be deemed desirable, a general 
 scheme of State purchase of land. To the community 
 generally the simplicity of transfer that would result from 
 compulsory registration would be a distinct and consider- 
 able gain. But perhaps the persons who would realize in 
 the most tangible manner the advantages of the system 
 would be the existing body of landholders, who would find 
 their net incomes considerably increased by the reduction of 
 their lawyer's bills. 
 
 Summary and conclusion. In conclusion we may now 
 briefly recapitulate the results at which we have arrived in this 
 and the preceding chapters. In the first place, it has been 
 strongly argued that the scheme of land nationalization, so 
 called, advocated by Mr. Henry George, would effect none 
 of the objects for which State control of land is desirable; 
 and that the confiscation of rent, which is in reality the be- 
 ginning and end of his scheme, cannot be defended on any 
 ground of equity. Almost equally indefensible are the 
 proposals to place special taxation upon ground rents or 
 mining royalties. There is no reason, it has been argued, 
 why incomes derived from these sources should be more 
 highly taxed than other permanent incomes. They can 
 best be dealt with by graduated death duties falling equally 
 on all classes of property, and by a graduated income tax 
 charged at a higher rate on all incomes that are independent 
 of the recipient's own exertions. So much for the income
 
 SOME SUGGESTIONS. 183 
 
 derived from the ownership of land. As regards the question 
 of administration, there is obviously a possibility that State 
 ownership would give better results than individual owner- 
 ship. But in order to put this possibility to the test, it is 
 not necessary to embark upon any wholesale scheme of 
 State purchase. The execution of such a scheme might 
 result in a serious financial loss that would only be partially, 
 if at all, counterbalanced by the administrative gain. It is, 
 therefore, far better, on the one hand, to proceed first by 
 cautious experiment in the direction of State purchase ; on 
 the other, to improve to the uttermost the existing system 
 of individual ownership. Various suggested improvements 
 have been mentioned in the course of the present chapter. 
 From among them may be selected for repetition that which 
 is undoubtedly the most important the^suggestion that with- 
 out altering the present tenure of land the public should be 
 endowed with an extended right to the use of land for the 
 purposes of recreation. So long as neither the processes of 
 agriculture nor the privacy of the immediate occupier are 
 interfered with, every Englishman should be free to roam at 
 will over English land. With this condition attached to 
 present tenures, the soil of our country would, it is suggested, 
 be more truly " nationalized " than under any scheme of 
 State control that has yet been formulated.
 
 LIST OF WORKS REFERRED TO. 
 
 Brassey. On Work and Wages, by Thomas Brassey. London : George 
 
 Bell and Sons, 1874. 
 Denton. England in the Fifteenth Century, by Rev. W. Denton, M.A. 
 
 London : George Bell and Sons, 1888. 
 Dozvell. A History of Taxation in England, by Stephen Dowell. 
 
 London : Longmans, Green and Co., 1884. 
 Froudc. History of England, by J. A. Froude. London: John 
 
 Parker and Son, i860. 
 George. Progress and Poverty, by Henry George. London : Kegan 
 
 Paul, Trench and Co., 1888. 
 George, -The Condition of Labour, by Henry George. London : Swan 
 
 Sonnenschein and Co., 1891. 
 La Population Francaise. Histoirede la Population et De'mographiede 
 
 la France, par E. Levasseur. Paris, 1891. 
 Marshall. The Principles of Economics, by Alfred Marshall. London : 
 
 Macmillan and Co., 1891. 
 Ricardo. The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, by 
 
 David Ricardo. London : John Murray, 181 7. 
 Rogers. Six Centuries of Work and Wages, by J. E. Thorold Rogers. 
 
 London : Swan Sonnenschein, 1884. 
 Rogers. Industrial and Commercial History of England, by J. E. 
 
 Thorold Rogers, edited by his Son. London: Fisher Unwin, 1892. 
 Seebohm. The English Village Community, by Frederic Seebohm. 
 
 London : Longmans, Green and Co., 1884. 
 Sidgwick. The Principles of Political Economy, by Henry Sidgwick. 
 
 London: Macmillan and Co., 1887. 
 Sorley. An Article on Mining Royalties in the Journal of the Royal 
 
 Statistical Society for 1889, by Prof. W. R. Sorley. Since 
 
 published as a pamphlet. 
 Taswcll-Langmead. English Constitutional History, by Thomas Pitt 
 
 Taswell-Langmead. Stevens and Haynes, 1886. 
 Tenon Holdings. Digest of Evidence on Town Holdings. London : 
 
 Cassell and Co., 1 888-1 891. 
 Young. The Farmer's Calendar, by Arthur Young, Esq., F. R.S. 
 
 London : Richard Phillips, 1805. 
 Webb. The London Programme, by Sidney Webb. London : Swan 
 
 Sonnenschein, 1891.
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Abolition of mining royalties, 
 163 
 
 Acre, size of, 16 
 
 Agrarian struggle in fourteenth 
 century, 20 
 
 Agricultural, Holdings Act, 172; 
 labour, increased efficiency of, 
 145 ; labourer's unearned incre- 
 ment, 128 ; products, demand for, 
 limited, 146 
 
 Aids, feudal, 41 
 
 Alfred, King, 8 
 
 Alienation, feudal fines on, 42 
 
 Arbitration, suggested court, 172 
 
 Assessment, William III.'s, 53 
 
 Assessments, Commonwealth, 51 ; 
 dishonest, 109 ; mediaeval, 47 
 
 Assize, rent of, 23 
 
 Australian land transfer, 181 
 
 Ball, John, 22 
 
 Baron, court of the manor, 18 
 Bedford Park, 76 
 Bethnal Green, 151 
 Betterment, 112 
 Black Death of 1348, 21 
 Bogus companies and rent, 82 
 Brassey, Thomas, on wages, 83 11. 
 Building sites, cost of production, 
 75 
 
 Carucage, 38 
 Carucate, size of, 39 
 Centralization, examples of, 148 
 Charity rents, 151 
 Clergymen, guileless, 82 
 
 Colliery lessee a free agent, 162 
 Commons Preservation Society, 
 
 34 
 Commons Regulation Act, 1876, 
 
 33 
 
 Commonwealth assessments, 51 
 
 Communal cultivation, 16 
 
 Commutation of land tax, 56 
 
 Companies, bogus, 82 
 
 Compensation for improvements, 
 171 
 
 Confiscation, of rent, 117; conse- 
 quences of, 121 ; of improve- 
 ments, 172 
 
 Co-operative ploughing, 16 
 
 Cost of production, of land gener- 
 ally, 71 ! of farms, 73 > f sites, 
 75 ; of mines, 76 
 
 Cottier, early English, 8 
 
 County Council (London), and 
 betterment, 112; and charity 
 rents, 151 153 
 
 County Councils and public foot- 
 paths, 179 
 
 Court baron, 18 ; leet, 18 
 
 Crown land, administration of, 
 169 
 
 Danegeld, 38 
 
 Dead-rent, 156 
 
 Death duties, history of, 58 ; ad- 
 vantage of, 131 ; suggested re- 
 forms, 132 
 
 Death rates in towns, 135 et sqq. 
 
 Decrement, unearned, 126 
 
 Demand for land, 77
 
 1 86 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Demesne, how cultivated, 14 ; 
 revenue from royal, 39 
 
 Diminishing return, law of, 67 
 
 Dishonest assessments, 109 
 
 Dissolution of the monasteries, 27 
 
 Divine Maker, 72 
 
 Division of rates between occupier 
 and owner, 97 
 
 Domesday Book, the new, 34 
 
 Domesday Survey, 13 
 
 Doses of capital, 68 
 
 Durham and Welsh royalties com- 
 pared, 159 ct sqq. 
 
 Eastbourne, 76 
 
 Education, cost of, 1 1 1 
 
 Edward VI. , 27 
 
 Eighteenth century, enclosures, 29 ; 
 
 rents, 66 
 Electoral poll tax, 106 
 Enclosure Act, 1845, 32 
 Enclosures, thirteenth century, 19 ; 
 
 sixteenth, 26 ; eighteenth, 29 
 Entire Subsidy, 50 
 Escheat, 43 
 Exclusion, landlord's power of, 
 
 176 
 Experiment, importance of, 169 
 Experiments in taxation, 49 
 
 Farm, cost of production of, 72 
 
 Fertility, original, 73 
 
 Feudal, tenures abolished, 43 ; 
 
 revenue, 40; system, 11 
 Fifteenth century, not golden, 23 
 Financial Reform Almanack, 108 ;/. 
 Firma Imrgi, 39 
 Fixtures, law of, 171 
 Folcland, 10 
 
 Footpath Preservation Society, 34 
 Footpaths, repairs to, 179 
 Forfeiture, a feudal incident, 43 
 France, death rates, 136, 138 ; 
 
 growth of large towns, 143 
 Free education and rent, 87 
 Furlong, meaning of, 16 
 
 ( lame laws, 1S0 
 
 George, Henry, on accuracy, 120 ; 
 on confiscation, 118; on the 
 Divine Maker, 72 ; on God's 
 Law of Rent, 64 ; on the joy of 
 motherhood, 122 ; on large 
 towns, 142 ; on natural law, 
 120 ; on original fertility, 73 ; 
 on private property, 119 ; on 
 the Ricardian theory, 64 
 
 Germany, death-rates, 138 ; growth 
 of large towns, 144 
 
 God's Law of Rent, 64 
 
 Government encouragement to 
 large towns, 148 
 
 Great Contract, the proposed, 43 
 
 Great landowners, 36 
 
 Ground values, taxation of, 99 et 
 sqq. 
 
 Ham, the, 8 
 
 Henry VIII., 26 
 
 Hide, size of the, 39 
 
 Hindhead, Professor Tyndall's 
 house, 174 
 
 Historic monuments, 175 
 
 Hobson, Mr. J. A., 81 n. 
 
 Holland Park, 93, 103 
 
 House tax and income tax com- 
 pared, 106 
 
 Housing of the working-classes, 
 1 5 1 cl sqq. 
 
 Improvement, proposed rate, 112 
 Improvements, compensation for, 
 
 171 ; confiscation of, 172; effect 
 
 of, on rent, 78 
 Income tax, Pitt's, 57 ; compared 
 
 with local rates, 106 ; suggested 
 
 reforms, 108 ; advantages of, for 
 
 local purposes, 109 ; the best 
 
 real property tax, no 
 Increment, unearned, of land, 124 ; 
 
 of labourer, 128; of other classes, 
 
 129 
 Indestructible powers of the soil, 65 
 Indian illustration, 88 
 Intellectual advantages of town. 
 
 life, 141
 
 INDEX. 
 
 187 
 
 Interest, wages and rent compared, 
 
 83 
 
 Intermixed strips of land, 16 
 Ireland, death rates, 136 
 Irish Land Act, 1881, 168 ; Pur- 
 chase Act, 1891, 168 
 Irregularities of fortune, 130 
 
 King Alfred's will, 8 
 Knaresboro' Forest, 30 
 Knight's fee, 40 
 Kyrle Society, 34 
 
 Labourer's dependence on wages, 
 
 31 ; unearned increment, 128 
 Land Act (Ireland) 1881, 168 
 Land Purchase Act (Ireland) 1S91, 
 
 168 
 Land commission, suggested, 170 
 Land Restoration League, and the 
 
 land tax, 57 ; on overgrown 
 
 towns, 133 
 Land Tax of 1692, 53 ; settled, 
 
 54 ; commuted, 56 
 Landlord's power of exclusion, 
 
 176 
 Landlord and tenant, law of, 171 
 Landowner's, early obligations, IO ; 
 
 toll, amount of, 122 
 Lawyers' bills and compulsory 
 
 registration, 182 
 Leaseholders, and new rates, 90 ; 
 
 woes of, 98 
 Leet, court of the manor, 18 
 Legacy duty, 59 
 Lepers, the food for, 25 11. 
 Lessee of mines, a free agent, 162 
 Local authority, enlarged powers, 
 
 17, 175 
 Local rates and death duties, 61 
 Local taxation, personalty origin- 
 ally liable, 60 
 London County Council, and bet- 
 terment, 112 ; and charity rents, 
 I5i 
 
 Maine, Sir Henry, 6 
 
 Manor, constitution of, 13 et sqq. 
 
 Manor court, 18 
 
 Manufacturing supremacy and large 
 towns, 147 
 
 Margin of cultivation, 80, 82 
 
 Margins, wasted, 175 
 
 Marriage, feudal dues for, 42 
 
 Marshall, Professor, on diminishing 
 return, 67 ; on fundamental 
 attribute of land, 69 
 
 Mediaeval assessments, 47 
 
 Melbourne, growth of, 144 
 
 Merton, Statute of, 19 
 
 Metaphysicians, 121 
 
 Mill, John Stuart, on unearned 
 increment, 124 
 
 Millennium, price of, 123 
 
 Mines, State ownership of, 165 ; 
 cost of production of, 76 
 
 Minimum rents, 81 ; of mines, 159 
 et sqq. 
 
 Mining royalties, abolition of, 163 ; 
 regulation of, 163 
 
 Misuse of land, 173 
 
 Monasteries, dissolution of, 27 
 
 Monthly assessments of the Com- 
 monwealth, 52 
 
 Monuments, historic, 175 
 
 Mortality in towns, 135 et sqq. 
 
 Municipal encouragement to large 
 towns, 150 
 
 Municipalization included in nation- 
 alization, 2 
 
 Natural law, 121 
 Nasse, Professor, 6 
 New South Wales, population of, 
 144 
 
 Occupying ownership, 167 
 Open field, 15 
 Original fertility, 73 
 Outrage on nature, 174 
 Ownership, two distinct rights in- 
 volved, 3 
 
 Paradox, the Ricardian, 80 
 Paris, death-rates, 138 
 Parsimonious ratepayer, 105
 
 i88 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Peasantry, risings of, 19, 22, 28 
 Personalty and local taxation, 60, 
 
 in 
 Physical disadvantages of town life, 
 
 140 
 Pitt's income tax, 57 
 Politician's trade, exigencies of, 85 
 Poll tax, early taxes, 49 ; suggested 
 
 electoral, 106 
 Poor law, liability for cost of, 1 1 1 
 Postal grievances of rural districts, 
 
 149 
 Poverty and rent, 79 
 Primer seisin, 42 
 Probate duty, 59 
 
 Production of land, cost of, 71 75 
 Property tax, 46 
 
 Queen Anne's Mansions, 174 
 
 Railway neglect of rural districts, 
 
 150 
 Rates, a deduction from rent, 85 cl 
 sqq. ; why landlords avoid direct 
 liability, 94 ; why unpopular, 
 95 ; proposed division, 97 
 Rating system, doubly bad, 105 
 Recoupment, 113 
 Registration of title, 181 
 Regulation of mining royalties, 163 
 Relief and primer seisin, 42 
 Rent, of assize, 23 ; Arthur Young's 
 rule, 86; dead, of mines, 156; 
 minimum, of mines, 159 et sqq. ; 
 and poverty, 79 ; and free edu- 
 cation, 87 ; how affected by 
 improvement, 79 ; interest and 
 wages compared, 83 ; enters into 
 cost of commodities, 80 
 Rents, early non-economic, 65 ; 
 specific, 83 ; successive, 80 ; 
 minimum, 81 ; charity, 151 ; 
 working-class, 87 
 Repairs to public footpaths, 179 
 Restoration Parliament, 44 
 Ricardian theory, accepted by 
 Henry George, 64 ; historically 
 untrue, 65 ; Professor Sidgwick 
 
 on, 68 ; narrowness of, 69 ; ready- 
 reckoner, 78 ; paradox, 80 
 
 Right of common, labourer's, 
 ignored, 30 
 
 Rights of way, 179 
 
 Risings of peasantry, 19, 22, 28 
 
 Rogers, Thorold, on "golden" 
 century, 23 ; on permanent 
 fertility, 65 ; on eighteenth cen- 
 tury rents, 67 
 
 Royalties, mining, abolition of, 
 163 ; regulation of, 163 ; and 
 produce compared, 158 
 
 Saladin tithe, 45 
 
 Salisbury Plain, famous gemot, 13 
 Schools of land nationalizers, 4 
 Scotland, death-rates, 136 
 Scutage, 40 
 Seebohm's theory, 7 
 Settlement of the land tax, 54 
 Shipgeld, 38 
 
 Sidgwick, Professor, on Ricardian 
 theory, 68 ; definition of rent, 
 
 Sites, taxation of vacant, 101 ; 
 cost of production of, 75 
 
 Slavery in England, 9 
 
 Small Holdings, 167 
 
 Smith, Llewelyn, 137 7/. , 139 
 
 Socialist school of land national- 
 ization, 4 
 
 Society, Commons Preservation, 
 34 ; Footpath Preservation, 34 ; 
 Kyrle, 34 ; Land Nationaliz- 
 ation, 134 
 
 Socmen, 14 
 
 Sorley, Professor, on mining royal- 
 ties, 158 et sqq. 
 
 Specific rents, 83 
 
 Sport, 181 
 
 State, the, as owners of mines, 165 ; 
 as universal landlord, 169 
 
 Statute of Merton, 2 1 ; of Labourers, 
 21 
 
 Strawberries and stock-rearing, 80 
 
 Subsidy, Henry VIII. 's first, 49 ; 
 decay of, 50
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Succession duty, 59 
 
 Successive rents, 80 
 
 Supply and demand, law of, 70 
 
 Supply of land, 71 
 
 Sweden, death-rates, 138 
 
 Sydney, growth of, 144 
 
 Tallage of royal demesne, 45 
 Taxes, on land paid by landlord, 
 
 89; on houses, 91 et sqq.; on 
 
 houses and incomes compared, 
 
 106 
 Taxation, of ground values, 99 et 
 
 sqq.; of vacant sites, 101 
 Tenant farmer in fifteenth century, 
 
 23 
 
 Tenth and fifteenth, 47 
 
 Terra regis, 10 
 
 Thirteenth century, enclosures of, 
 19 ; enterprise of, 19 
 
 Title, registration of, 181 
 
 Toll, amount of landowner's, 122 
 
 Town life, intellectual advantages, 
 141 ; physical disadvantages, 
 140 
 
 Towns, growth of, encouraged by 
 government, 148, 149 ; by rail- 
 ways, 150 ; by municipal bodies, 
 
 151 
 
 Town larrikins, 179 
 
 Transfer of land in Australia, 181 
 
 Trepass on land, 177 
 
 Tun, meaning of, 8 
 
 Tyler, Wat, 23 
 
 Under-assessment of subsidies, 5 1 
 Unearned increment, of land, 124 ; 
 
 of labourer, 128; of other classes, 
 
 129 ; decrement, 126 
 Untaxed electors, 105 
 
 Vacant farms, 81 ; sites, taxation 
 
 of, 101 
 Victoria, population of, 144 
 Villains, 14 
 
 Wages, interest and rent compared, 
 83 ; in fifteenth century, 24 ; in 
 eighteenth century, 31 
 
 Wage-earners and the Tudor sub- 
 sidy, 49 
 
 Wallace, Dr. Alfred Russel, on 
 small holdings, 167 ; on large 
 towns, 134; his remedy insuffi- 
 cient, 143 
 
 Wardship, a feudal incident, 42 
 
 Wasted margins, 175 
 
 Way-leaves in mines, 157 
 
 Webb, Sidney, 104 n. 
 
 Welsh and Durham royalties com- 
 pared, 159 et sqq. 
 
 William I. and the feudal system, 
 12 
 
 William III.'s new assessment, 53 
 
 Yardland, 15 
 Yardling, 8 
 
 Young, Arthur, rule for ascertaining 
 rent, 86 
 
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 6 MESSRS. METHUEN'S 
 
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 EDUCATIONAL LIST 7 
 
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 EDUCATIONAL LIST 9 
 
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 io MESSRS. METHUEN'S 
 
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 EDUCATIONAL LIST n 
 
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 EDUCATIONAL LIST 13 
 
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 EDUCATIONAL LIST 15 
 
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 16 MESSRS. METHUEN'S EDUCATIONAL LIST 
 
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 English Trade and Finance in the Seventeenth Century. 
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