_The Land Problem_
The ownership of land in the South is the same pernicious thing it has
come to be in every civilized country in the world. Instead of being,
as it was intended to be, a blessing to the people, it is the crying
curse which takes precedence of all other evils that afflict mankind.
And the cause is not far to seek. Land is, in its very nature, the
common property of the people. Like air and water, it is one of the
natural elements which inhere in man as a common right, and without
which life could in no wise be sustained. A man must have air, or he
will suffocate; he must have water, or he will perish of thirst; he
must have access to the soil, for upon it grow those things which
nature intended for the sustentation of the physical man, and without
which he cannot live. Deprive me of pure fresh air, and I die; deprive
me of pure fresh water, and I die; deprive me of free opportunity to
earn my bread by the sweat of my brow, by sowing in the sowing time
and reaping in the reaping time, and I die. There is no escape from
this aspect of the case: there is no logic that can reduce these
truisms to sophistries. They are founded in the omnipotent laws of
God, and are as universal as the earth. They apply with as much truth
to life in the United States as in Dahomey; they operate in like
nature upon the savage as upon man in the civilized state. Individual
ownership in the land is a transgression of the common right of man,
and a usurpation which produces nearly, if not all, the evils which
result upon our civilization; the inequalities which produce
pauperism, vice, crime, and wide-spread demoralization among all the
so-called "lower classes;" which produce, side by side, the
millionaire and the tramp, the brownstone front and the hut of the
squatter, the wide extending acres of the bonanza farm and the small
holding, the lord of the manor and the cringing serf, peasant and
slave.
I maintain, with other writers upon this land question, that land is
common property, the property of the whole people, and that it cannot
be alienated from the people without producing the most fearful
consequences. No man is free who is debarred in his right, to so much
of the soil of his country as is necessary to support him in his right
to life, for without the inherent right to unrestrained access to the
soil he cannot support life, except in primitive society where land is
plentiful, population sparse, and industry undiversified. As
population becomes denser and land becomes scarcer from having been
monopolized by the more far seeing, or more fortunate, and industry
becomes more diversified, mankind begins to feel the pressure of
population described by Malthus, and the scarcity of subsistence;
caused, not by this pressure of population, as Malthus maintains, but
by the restricted production of subsistence caused by the monopoly and
concentration of the soil, which inhibits the producing agency from
the production of the increased subsistence necessary to the increased
number of mouths to be fed. There can be no such thing as
overproduction when there are hundreds and thousands who perish for
food; there can be no pressure upon population when there are hundreds
and thousands of acres of arable land locked up in a deed purchase, or
entail, or primogeniture, upon which alone beasts are allowed to
trespass. The idea is preposterous. And yet men who are regarded as
standard authority upon economic questions impose this sophistry of
overproduction and pressure of population upon mankind, and are
applauded for their ignorance, or the cupidity which makes them to
pervert the truth.
Monopoly of land is the curse of the race in every modern government.
Being the one great source from which all wealth must and does spring,
its concentration in the hands of a few men not only impoverishes the
people, but seriously cripples the operations of government (the one
and the other being substantially identical) by curtailing the
productive energies of the people and diverting into the coffers of
individuals rental which should flow into the common treasury as
taxes, thus lifting from the shoulders of the people the enormous
burden of the maintenance of government which falls upon them.
Monopoly of land was the prime element which hastened the decay of
Roman greatness and strength, because when the people no longer had
homes to fight for they ceased to be patriots, ceased to be virtuous,
and became mercenaries, or slaves or tyrants; left to those who had
monopolized the soil, the defense of their property: and these, being
few in numbers, parsimonious after the nature of their class, and
effeminate from luxurious living and habits of indolence, fell easy
victims to the rapacity and iron nerve of Goth and Vandal. The great
French Revolution would have never occurred but for the monopoly of
land, which, after long ages, became centered in a few hands, who by
reason of this were a privileged class and in the refinement of
language had been designated as the "nobility." The nobility, as was
natural, having been created by the State, not only ground the
proletariat to powder but dictated to the State. When it was no longer
possible to purchase land, because those whose nobility rested upon it
would not alienate it, and when the proletariat had been reduced to a
state of vassalage, more vile and grinding than slavery itself, the
proletariat rose up in its might and crushed at one tremendous blow
the hydra-headed monstrosity. Marat, Danton and Robespiere
concentrated in their intense natures the venom, the hate, and the
desperation of the people--a more terrible triumvirate than the
celebrated one which colored the Tiber with the patrician blood of
Rome. The Nihilism of Russia is the outgrowth of monopoly in land and
the consequent enslavement of the people by the aristocracy, beginning
with the autocrat upon his throne. England has reached a transition
period. The pressure of her population has become so intense, that the
great producing classes can no longer stand the tension and live. The
land has been filched from the people to enrich the brainless
favorites and the courtesans of kings, and entailed upon their progeny
generation after generation. The land of Great Britain is held by the
nobility and the princely cormorants of trade, who exact rental which
cannot be paid from the produce of the soil, so usurious is it, or who
turn the rich acres into pleasure grounds and pasturages. As Nero
fiddled while Rome was one vast blaze of conflagration and horror, so
the nobility of Great Britain dance and make merry while the people
starve or seek in other lands that opportunity to live which their
country denies to them. For the past five years the government of
Great Britain has been engaged in a most desperate struggle with the
people of one of her constituent islands, the agitation assuming, like
the chameleon, different colors or names as the exigencies of the
contending forces determined. But the one great question at the root
of the agitation is the monopoly of the land by the "nobility" and the
successful cormorants of trade, and the consequent pressure of
population upon the enforced circumscription of production. The best
lands have been alienated from the people, while the inferior lands
upon which they are allowed to live will not yield the exorbitant
rental demanded and the necessary subsistence for those who work them.
Hence, Ireland is in a state so explosive that it can only be
appropriately described by the term "dynamitic." In the interest of a
few landlords the whole Irish nation has been demoralized and
impoverished, so that the government of Great Britain finds it
necessary to "_assist_" able-bodied men to reach America, or any other
portion of the world they desire to go to, in order to make a living.
If monopoly in land produces such results as these is it not to be
condemned as subversive of correct social adjustments and the
perpetuity of government? The question admits of but one answer. If
monopoly in land compels a government to "assist" its able-bodied men,
its laborers, its producers of wealth, its soldiery, to go to other
lands, is it not to be condemned as parasitical, destroying the very
bone and sinew of government? The answer is self-evident. If monopoly
in land produces such results as these, would it not be wise
statesmanship and sound governmental policy to confiscate to the
people the millions of acres which avarice, cunning, favoritism and
robbery have turned into parks, pasturages and game preserves--making
the few thousands who constitute the land monopolists, the idlers and
the harpies, go honestly to work to make a living, and giving at the
same time the same opportunity to the great laboring classes, who
earnestly desire to make a living but to whom the opportunity is
cruelly and maliciously denied?
I am opposed to aristocracies and so-called privileged classes,
because they are opposed to the masses. They make inequalities, out of
which grow all the miseries of society, because there is no limit to
their avarice, parsimony and cruelty. So _they_ thrive, _all the rest_
of humanity may go to the dogs; so they revel in luxury and
debauchery, all the rest of humanity may revel in poverty, vice and
crime; so they enjoy all the blessings of organized society, all the
rest of humanity may bear its curses. Man is essentially a selfish
animal. Self-preservation is the very first law which he learns to
observe and to practice. That he may get on top of the social ladder
and remain there, he will sacrifice family, common humanity and
patriotism. Naturally, Moloch-self is the god he serves. To enjoy a
little brief authority, he would enslave universal mankind, and
declare, as Solomon did, after exhausting the catalogue of tyranny and
libertinism, "all is vanity"--emptiness! Thus, it is dangerous to
confide in the humanity of man. To place in his hands a weapon so
all-powerful as land, is to place him upon a pinnacle from whose vast
altitude he can, will, and does crush his unfortunate fellowman.
Like the small stream which gathers volume and momentum in its
wanderings from the small lake to the gulf, into which it debouches as
a mighty river like the "Father of Waters," so the first encroachments
of the land shark are small, and hardly felt; but give him time, let
him grow from the Norman soldier of fortune into the English nobility
of to-day, and you have a monster whose proportions and rapacity
stagger the imagination to fully apprehend. What the common soldier of
fortune received as reward for his valor eight hundred years ago, and
which he held subject to confiscation to his prince if he failed to
render him service in person and with retainers, has developed into a
huge monopoly which appropriates in rental more than the tenant can
pay, with the added necessary subsistence required to sustain him.
There are also the imposition of direct taxes by the government and
indirect taxes upon all implements and other articles of manufacture,
occasioned by the division of labor, which he must use; all of which
taxes the land monopolists have managed to shift upon the tenant and
wage-laborer. Time augments the evil. So that, to-day, in Great
Britain, a man cannot purchase land, except in rare cases, and then
the purchaser must pay a fortune for the privilege. The poor farmer,
the wage-laborer, the common man, has not and cannot have any grip
upon the soil, but must come into the world a slave, and go down to
his grave after a life of toil and self-denial, a slave, with the
tormenting consciousness that as he was, so must the unfortunate
offspring of his loins be!
If this be the tendency of organized society--if the tendency be to
enslave mankind, place a premium upon human woe and crime--then
organized society is organized robbery, and the savage state is
preferable. There is no appeal from this deduction. What avail the
triumphs of art, science and commerce, if the majority of mankind are
ground to powder to make those triumphs possible!
It is not the law of God, but the law of man, that produces these
herculean evils which constantly threaten the peace and safety of
society.
But the British land-owner, having enslaved the people of his own
island, has shackled the people of Ireland, Scotland and Wales, doomed
them and their posterity to be perpetual aliens in their native lands;
he has, upon the plea of conquest, the argument of the base assassin
and robber, reduced the people of India to a state worse than death;
and his iron grip has been placed upon the uncounted millions of
African soil; the Islands of the sea squirm in his grasp; the West
India Islands are his prostrate prey; while a portion of the vast
continent of America owns his sway and groans under his exactions.
But this is not all. In our own country the British land shark has
made his appearance. His vile clutch, which our forefathers unwrenched
in the strength of their Colonial greatness, has again been fastened
upon our throat. The following table will show the extent to which the
parasite has insinuated himself into our vital parts. Let the good
people of this country--who should know that monopoly in land is the
death note of free institutions; that large estates are the parasites
of republics and the death of small freeholders--let the people read
the following table with the closeness which its gravity should
inspire. The San Francisco _Daily Examiner_, a leading paper on the
Pacific coast says:
Besides the millions of acres belonging to railroad and
other corporations, the amount of land that is being
acquired by foreign capitalists and landlords is fairly
amazing. Ireland is to-day groaning beneath the yoke of
oppression, and not many years will roll around before the
American tenant, upon his knees, will also look up into the
scowling face of his master and acknowledge his obedience.
Following are a few of America's foreign landlords, and the
amount of their holdings expressed in acres:--
An English Syndicate, No. 3, in Texas 3,000,000
The Holland Land Company, New Mexico 4,500,000
Sir Edward Reid, and a syndicate in Florida 2,000,000
English Syndicate, in Mississippi 1,800,000
Marquis of Tweedale 1,750,000
Philips, Marshal & Co., London 1,300,000
German Syndicate 1,100,000
Anglo-American Syndicate, Mr. Rogers President, London 750,000
Byron H. Evans, of London, in Mississippi 700,000
Duke of Sutherland 425,000
British Land Company, in Kansas 320,000
William Whallay, M.P., Peterboro, England 310,000
Missouri Land Company, Edinburgh, Scotland 300,000
Robert Tennant, of London 230,000
Dundee Land Company, Scotland 247,000
Lord Dunmore 120,000
Benjamin Newgas, Liverpool 100,000
Lord Houghton, in Florida 60,000
Lord Dunraven, in Colorado 60,000
English Land Company, in Florida 50,000
English Land Company, in Arkansas 50,000
Albert Peel, M.P., Leicestershire, England 10,000
Sir J.L. Kay, Yorkshire, England 5,000
Alexander Grant, of London, in Kansas 35,000
English Syndicate (represented by Closs Bros.) Wisconsin 110,000
M. Ellerhauser, of Halifax, Nova Scotia, in West Virginia 600,000
A Scotch Syndicate, in Florida 500,000
A. Boysen, Danish Consul, in Milwaukee 50,000
Missouri Land Company, of Edinburgh, Scotland 165,000
Total 20,747,000
Commenting upon these startling figures, the _New York (Daily) World_,
one of the best informed papers of the time says:
The land grabber is not a fungus of nineteenth century
growth. He first came among English-speaking peoples over
eight centuries ago. Wherever his foot has found a
standing-place pauperism and its sequence, crime, have
followed. In the British Isles he is known as an Acreocrat.
Since he has extended his operations from his native country
to our own free soil the land-grabber should be examined
under the microscope of history analytically, impartially,
and truthfully.
The unnaturalized foreigner threatens us with other dangers
than those which would be created by our indigenous American
land-grabber. The British acreocrat who owns real estate in
this country believes in the cancer of English monarchy with
its hideous annals of nearly a thousand years. He accepts
the tradition of an hereditary House of Lords, a body
composed of the effete and played out descendants of the
most tyrannical and profligate rascals which Europe ever
produced, and he will remain an English blueblood in every
thought and action, which cannot fail to bring about in free
America and on his own acres here the same poverty-stricken
class of peasants as now curse Great Britain and Ireland.
English "upper-tendom" is represented in recent purchases
of American soil by one duke, one marquis, two earls, a
baron, two baronets and two members of Parliament. The
British duke owns 425,000 acres; the marquis, 1,750,000
acres; the two earls, 160,000 acres; the baron, 60,000
acres; the brace of baronets, 2,000,500 acres; and the pair
of Parliamentary politicians, 860,000 acres. In the rest of
the land purchased by our brand-new imported lords of the
soil, England's governing acreocrats, are largely
represented in their 20,941,666 acres.
Much ignorance is affected in American society respecting
the manner in which the British landocrats came by their
property. It is enough that "my lud" has a handle to his
name, and Murray Hill shoddyocracy will wine and dine and
toady him, and perhaps for his title marry him to some
sweet, pure and good American girl, whose life hereafter
will be a purgatory to herself and a mutual misery to both.
But the land held by the foreigner in the United States is a mere
bagatelle. He is odious not because he is a foreigner, but only
because he is the representative, on the one hand, of the odious land
system of the Old World, and on the other of those monarchical ideas
which have made the great body of the European people unwilling
slaves, reducing them to the very verge of desperation and starvation.
Archimedes explained, as illustrating the vast power of the fulcrum,
that if he had a place to stand he could move the world. The British
land-shark, having got his hold upon the soil, possesses the place to
stand for which the Greek sighed in vain, and no man will say he does
not move the world; and he will continue to move _it_ until such time
as the world shall move _him._
The foreign land-shark is still in his infancy. We have an indigenous
land-shark whose maw is so capacious that the rapacity of his appetite
in no wise keeps pace with its lightning-like digestion. Congressman
William Steel Holman, of Indiana, one of the purest statesmen of these
corrupt times, and one of the most thoroughly informed men of the
country upon the question of eminent domain, and the bestowal of that
domain upon corporations and syndicates, recently said, on the floor
of the House of Representatives, in the course of a discussion on the
Post-office Appropriation bill:
Is it just and proper to require the landgrant railroads to
transport your mails at 50 per cent of the rates you pay to
corporations whose railroads were built by private capital?
I think it is. I think it liberal and more than liberal when
the cost in public wealth is considered in the building of
these land-grant railroads. I submit tables of the railroads
built under the land-grant system, compiled from official
reports, and they show an aggregate of 218,386,199 acres,
192,081,155 acres of which were granted between June 30,
1862, and March 4, 1875, the aggregate length of railroads
for which the grants were made being 20,803 miles, 13,071
miles independent of the 7,732 mileage of the Pacific roads;
and the reports of the Post-office Department show that last
year the Government paid, on 11,588,56 miles of land-grant
railroad, independent of the Union Pacific system and the
great body of lapsed grants, $1,144,323.91 for postal
service. The startling fact appears that in the gradual
development of these grants, great as they are, they still
swell in their proportions. I pointed out on a former
occasion the startling discrepancies that appear in the
official statements of these grants, and can only say now,
as I did then, that in such enormous grants a few million
acres either way is considered of no moment.
Again:
There are other grants which I have not included in either
of the foregoing tables where not a spadeful of earth has
been dug in the construction of a railroad, yet the lands
are withdrawn from settlement and claimed by the
corporation, although the grants were long since forfeited.
The forfeiture of these grants will, of course, be declared.
Of all of these grants over 109,000,000 acres, including
over 16,000,000 this House has already declared forfeited,
are beyond any reasonable question forfeited, and the
declaration of that forfeiture by Congress is demanded by
the highest consideration of public policy, common honesty,
and justice to the people. Even to the extent these
land-grant railroads enumerated in the first table were
completed, you paid them, as I have shown, last year
$1,144,323.91 for transporting your mails. This bill would,
as to these roads, to the extent they are entitled to the
lands granted and including the Pacific systems, save to the
Treasury annually, I think, near a million dollars, perhaps
more.
Deducing from the foregoing statement of land-grants to corporations,
Mr. Holman draws the following picture of what the people may do when
they are fully informed and aroused to the enormous extent to which
they have been despoiled by their unfaithful servants in congress:
The wealth that builds palaces, undermines the foundations
of free Government, and wrings from the heart of labor the
cry of despair! With the public lands exhausted, with
remnants of the Indian-tribes despoiled of their
reservations, and the lands seized upon by capitalists and
merciless speculators (except so far as you have pledged
them in advance to the railroad corporations), and lands
everywhere advanced in price beyond the reach of laboring
men, with the hope of better fortune and of independent
homes dying out of the heart of labor, with men fully
conscious of the wrong you have done them by your
legislation, can the peaceful order of society be hoped for
as of old? I am not astonished that gentlemen deem this
early hour an opportune moment to urge the policy of a great
navy; it will come, if it does come, in the natural order
before a great army. Capital is timid and full of
suggestions; the Navy is the most remote, but I am not
surprised that here and there comes also the intimation that
your Army is too small. These, too, may be some of the
bitter fruits of your imperial grants. I fear that it will
be seen soon enough that when you have destroyed the very
foundations of security and hope upon which labor has rested
so long, the old-time repose and peaceful order will be no
more. Gentlemen should not forget that the wrong that has
been done to laboring men and their children by giving over
their natural inheritance to an accursed monopoly will in
due time be considered by the most intelligent body of
laboring men who ever debated a public wrong--men fully
aware of their rights and capable of asserting them.
But the foreign land-shark, and the corporate land-shark, dwindle into
insignificance by the side of the individual land-shark. Every hamlet,
town, city, and state in the Union is in the grasp of the individual
land holder. Starting with his fellows as a pioneer two hundred and
fifty years ago, with his pickaxe on his shoulder, he has steadily
grown in size and importance, so that today he holds in his hands the
destinies of the Republic and the life of his fellow citizens. His
bulk has become mastodonian in proportions and his influence has
shrivelled up the energies of the people. More absolute than the Iron
Prince of Germany, he pays no taxes; he limits production, not to the
requirements of the population but to the demand of the market, at
such figures as he can extort from the crying necessities of the
people through the operations of "corners;" he regulates the wheels of
government, State and Federal, and dictates to the people by making
them hungry and naked.
We stand only upon the threshold of governmental existence; the
nation, in comparison to the hoary-handed commonwealths of Europe, was
born but yesterday; but, having adopted at the beginning the system
which hastened the downfall of Rome after she had spread her authority
over the known world, we are already weak and exhausted. Monopoly has
stunted the people, and they stagger to the grave, starved to death by
a system of robbery almost too transparent to require minute
elucidation at the hand of the conscientious writer upon economic
questions. The suppressed groans of the toiling masses are echoed and
reëchoed from every corner of the land, and burst forth in mobocratic
fury that the entire police authority finds it almost impossible to
stay. The newspapers are a daily chronicle of the desperate condition
to which the country has been brought by the rapacity and ignorance of
legislators and the parasitical manipulations of the gang which has
rooted itself in the soil of the country.
The fires of revolution are incorporated into the _Magna Charta_ of
our liberties, and no human power can avert the awful eruption which
will eventually burst upon us as Mount Vesuvius burst forth upon
Herculaneum and Pompeii. It is too late for America to be wise in
time. "_The die is cast._"