But labor cannot reap the benefits which advancing civilization

thus brings, because they are intercepted. Land being necessary to

labor, and being reduced to private ownership, every increase in the

productive power of labor but increases rent—the price that labor

must pay for the opportunity to utilize its powers; and thus all the

advantages gained by the march of progress go to the owners of land,

and wages do not increase. Wages cannot increase; for the greater the

earnings of labor the greater the price that labor must pay out of its

earnings for the opportunity to make any earnings at all. The mere

laborer has thus no more interest in the general advance of productive

power than the Cuban slave has in advance in the price of sugar. And

just as an advance in the price of sugar may make the condition of the

slave worse, by inducing the master to drive him harder, so may the

condition of the free laborer be positively, as well as relatively,

changed for the worse by the increase in the productive power of his

labor. For, begotten of the continuous advance of rents, arises a

speculative tendency which discounts the effect of future improvements

by a still further advance of rent, and thus tends, where this has not

occurred from the normal advance of rent, to drive wages down to the

slave point—the point at which the laborer can just live.

And thus robbed of all the benefits of the increase in productive

power, labor is exposed to certain effects of advancing civilization

which, without the advantages that naturally accompany them, are

positive evils, and of themselves tend to reduce the free laborer to

the helpless and degraded condition of the slave.

For all improvements which add to productive power as civilization

advances consist in, or necessitate, a still further subdivision of

labor, and the efficiency of the whole body of laborers is increased

at the expense of the independence of the constituents. The individual

laborer acquires knowledge of and skill in but an infinitesimal part of

the varied processes which are required to supply even the commonest

wants. The aggregate produce of the labor of a savage tribe is small,

but each member is capable of an independent life. He can build his

own habitation, hew out or stitch together his own canoe, make his own

clothing, manufacture his own weapons, snares, tools and ornaments.

He has all the knowledge of nature possessed by his tribe—knows what

vegetable productions are fit for food, and where they may be found;

knows the habits and resorts of beasts, birds, fishes, and insects;

can pilot himself by the sun or the stars, by the turning of blossoms

or the mosses on the trees; is, in short, capable of supplying all his

wants. He may be cut off from his fellows and still live; and thus

possesses an independent power which makes him a free contracting party

in his relations to the community of which he is a member.

Compare with this savage the laborer in the lowest ranks of civilized

society, whose life is spent in producing but one thing, or oftener

but the infinitesimal part of one thing, out of the multiplicity of

things that constitute the wealth of society and go to supply even the

most primitive wants; who not only cannot make even the tools required

for his work, but often works with tools that he does not own, and can

never hope to own. Compelled to even closer and more continuous labor

than the savage, and gaining by it no more than the savage gets—the

mere necessaries of life—he loses the independence of the savage. He

is not only unable to apply his own powers to the direct satisfaction

of his own wants, but, without the concurrence of many others, he is

unable to apply them indirectly to the satisfaction of his wants. He is

a mere link in an enormous chain of producers and consumers, helpless

to separate himself, and helpless to move, except as they move. The

worse his position in society, the more dependent is he on society; the

more utterly unable does he become to do anything for himself. The very

power of exerting his labor for the satisfaction of his wants passes

from his own control, and may be taken away or restored by the actions

of others, or by general causes over which he has no more influence

than he has over the motions of the solar system. The primeval curse

comes to be looked upon as a boon, and men think, and talk, and clamor,

and legislate as though monotonous manual labor in itself were a good

and not an evil, an end and not a means. Under such circumstances,

the man loses the essential quality of manhood—the godlike power of

modifying and controlling conditions. He becomes a slave, a machine, a

commodity—a thing, in some respects, lower than the animal.

I am no sentimental admirer of the savage state. I do not get my ideas

of the untutored children of nature from Rousseau, or Chateaubriand,

or Cooper. I am conscious of its material and mental poverty, and

its low and narrow range. I believe that civilization is not only

the natural destiny of man, but the enfranchisement, elevation, and

refinement of all his powers, and think that it is only in such moods

as may lead him to envy the cud-chewing cattle, that a man who is free

to the advantages of civilization could look with regret upon the

savage state. But, nevertheless, I think no one who will open his eyes

to the facts can resist the conclusion that there are in the heart of

our civilization large classes with whom the veriest savage could not

afford to exchange. It is my deliberate opinion that if, standing on

the threshold of being, one were given the choice of entering life as

a Tierra del Fuegan, a black fellow of Australia, an Esquimaux in the

Arctic Circle, or among the lowest classes in such a highly civilized

country as Great Britain, he would make infinitely the better choice in

selecting the lot of the savage. For those classes who in the midst of

wealth are condemned to want suffer all the privations of the savage,

without his sense of personal freedom; they are condemned to more than

his narrowness and littleness, without opportunity for the growth

of his rude virtues; if their horizon is wider, it is but to reveal

blessings that they cannot enjoy.

There are some to whom this may seem like exaggeration, but it is

only because they have never suffered themselves to realize the

true condition of those classes upon whom the iron heel of modern

civilization presses with full force. As De Tocqueville observes, in

one of his letters to Mme. Swetchine, “we so soon become used to the

thought of want that we do not feel that an evil which grows greater

to the sufferer the longer it lasts becomes less to the observer by

the very fact of its duration;” and perhaps the best proof of the

justice of this observation is that in cities where there exists a

pauper class and a criminal class, where young girls shiver as they

sew for bread, and tattered and barefooted children make a home in

the streets, money is regularly raised to send missionaries to the

heathen! Send missionaries to the heathen! it would be laughable if it

were not so sad. Baal no longer stretches forth his hideous, sloping

arms; but in Christian lands mothers slay their infants for a burial

fee! And I challenge the production from any authentic accounts of

savage life of such descriptions of degradation as are to be found in

official documents of highly civilized countries—in reports of Sanitary

Commissioners and of inquiries into the condition of the laboring poor.

The simple theory which I have outlined (if indeed it can be called

a theory which is but the recognition of the most obvious relations)

explains this conjunction of poverty with wealth, of low wages with

high productive power, of degradation amid enlightenment, of virtual

slavery in political liberty. It harmonizes, as results flowing from

a general and inexorable law, facts otherwise most perplexing, and

exhibits the sequence and relation between phenomena that without

reference to it are diverse and contradictory. It explains why interest

and wages are higher in new than in older communities, though the

average, as well as the aggregate, production of wealth is less. It

explains why improvements which increase the productive power of

labor and capital increase the reward of neither. It explains what is

commonly called the conflict between labor and capital, while proving

the real harmony of interest between them. It cuts the last inch of

ground from under the fallacies of protection, while showing why free

trade fails to benefit permanently the working classes. It explains why

want increases with abundance, and wealth tends to greater and greater

aggregations. It explains the periodically recurring depressions of

industry without recourse either to the absurdity of “overproduction”

or the absurdity of “overconsumption.” It explains the enforced

idleness of large numbers of would-be producers, which wastes the

productive force of advanced communities, without the absurd assumption

that there is too little work to do or that there are too many to do

it. It explains the ill effects upon the laboring classes which often

follow the introduction of machinery, without denying the natural

advantages which the use of machinery gives. It explains the vice and

misery which show themselves amid dense population, without attributing

to the laws of the All-Wise and All-Beneficent defects which belong

only to the short-sighted and selfish enactments of men.

This explanation is in accordance with all the facts.

Look over the world to-day. In countries the most widely

differing—under conditions the most diverse as to government, as to

industries, as to tariffs, as to currency—you will find distress among

the working classes; but everywhere that you thus find distress and

destitution in the midst of wealth you will find that the land is

monopolized; that instead of being treated as the common property of

the whole people, it is treated as the private property of individuals;

that, for its use by labor, large revenues are extorted from the

earnings of labor. Look over the world to-day, comparing different

countries with each other, and you will see that it is not the

abundance of capital or the productiveness of labor that makes wages

high or low; but the extent to which the monopolizers of land can, in

rent, levy tribute upon the earnings of labor. Is it not a notorious

fact, known to the most ignorant, that new countries, where the

aggregate wealth is small, but where land is cheap, are always better

countries for the laboring classes than the rich countries, where land

is dear? Wherever you find land relatively low, will you not find

wages relatively high? And wherever land is high, will you not find

wages low? As land increases in value, poverty deepens and pauperism

appears. In the new settlements, where land is cheap, you will find

no beggars, and the inequalities in condition are very slight. In the

great cities, where land is so valuable that it is measured by the

foot, you will find the extremes of poverty and of luxury. And this

disparity in condition between the two extremes of the social scale

may always be measured by the price of land. Land in New York is more

valuable than in San Francisco; and in New York, the San Franciscan may

see squalor and misery that will make him stand aghast. Land is more

valuable in London than in New York; and in London, there is squalor

and destitution worse than that of New York.

Compare the same country in different times, and the same relation

is obvious. As the result of much investigation, Hallam says he is

convinced that the wages of manual labor were greater in amount in

England during the middle ages than they are now. Whether this is so

or not, it is evident that they could not have been much, if any,

less. The enormous increase in the efficiency of labor, which even

in agriculture is estimated at seven or eight hundred per cent., and

in many branches of industry is almost incalculable, has only added

to rent. The rent of agricultural land in England is now, according

to Professor Rogers, 120 times as great, measured in money, as it

was 500 years ago, and 14 times as great, measured in wheat; while

in the rent of building land, and mineral land, the advance has been

enormously greater. According to the estimate of Professor Fawcett,

the capitalized rental value of the land of England now amounts to

£4,500,000,000, or $21,870,000,000—that is to say, a few thousand of

the people of England hold a lien upon the labor of the rest, the

capitalized value of which is more than twice as great as, at the

average price of Southern negroes in 1860 would be the value of her

whole population were they slaves.

In Belgium and Flanders, in France and Germany, the rent and selling

price of agricultural land have doubled within the last thirty

years.[43] In short, increased power of production has everywhere added

to the value of land; nowhere has it added to the value of labor; for

though actual wages may in some places have somewhat risen, the rise

is clearly attributable to other causes. In more places they have

fallen—that is, where it has been possible for them to fall—for there

is a minimum below which laborers cannot keep up their numbers. And,

everywhere, wages, as a proportion of the produce, have decreased.

How the Black Death brought about the great rise of wages in England in

the Fourteenth Century is clearly discernible, in the efforts of the

land holders to regulate wages by statute. That that awful reduction in

population, instead of increasing, really reduced the effective power

of labor, there can be no doubt; but the lessening of competition for

land still more greatly reduced rent, and wages advanced so largely

that force and penal laws were called in to keep them down. The reverse

effect followed the monopolization of land that went on in England

during the reign of Henry VIII., in the inclosure of commons and the

division of the church lands between the panders and parasites who were

thus enabled to found noble families. The result was the same as that

to which a speculative increase in land values tends. According to

Malthus (who, in his “Principles of Political Economy,” mentions the

fact without connecting it with land tenures), in the reign of Henry

VII., half a bushel of wheat would purchase but little more than a

day’s common labor, but in the latter part of the reign of Elizabeth,

half a bushel of wheat would purchase three days’ common labor. I can

hardly believe that the reduction in wages could have been so great

as this comparison would indicate; but that there was a reduction in

common wages, and great distress among the laboring classes, is evident

from the complaints of “sturdy vagrants” and the statutes made to

suppress them. The rapid monopolization of the land, the carrying of

the speculative rent line beyond the normal rent line, produced tramps

and paupers, just as like effects from like causes have lately been

evident in the United States.

“Land which went heretofore for twenty or forty pounds a year,” said

Hugh Latimer, “now is let for fifty or a hundred. My father was a

yeoman, and had no lands of his own; only he had a farm at a rent of

three or four pounds by the year at the uttermost, and thereupon he

tilled so much as kept half a dozen men. He had walk for a hundred

sheep, and my mother milked thirty kine; he was able and did find the

King a harness with himself and his horse when he came to the place

that he should receive the King’s wages. I can remember that I buckled

his harness when he went to Blackheath Field. He kept me to school; he

married my sisters with five pound apiece, so that he brought them up

in godliness and fear of God. He kept hospitality for his neighbors and

some alms he gave to the poor. And all this he did of the same farm,

where he that now hath it payeth sixteen pounds rent or more by year,

and is not able to do anything for his Prince, for himself, nor for his

children, nor to give a cup of drink to the poor.”

“In this way,” said Sir Thomas More, referring to the ejectment of

small farmers which characterized this advance of rent, “it comes to

pass that these poor wretches, men, women, husbands, orphans, widows,

parents with little children, householders greater in number than in

wealth, all of these emigrate from their native fields, without knowing

where to go.”

And so from the stuff of the Latimers and Mores—from the sturdy spirit

that amid the flames of the Oxford stake cried, “Play the man, Master

Ridley!” and the mingled strength and sweetness that neither prosperity

could taint nor the ax of the executioner abash—were evolved thieves

and vagrants, the mass of criminality and pauperism that still blights

the innermost petals and preys a gnawing worm at the root of England’s

rose.

But it were as well to cite historical illustrations of the attraction

of gravitation. The principle is as universal and as obvious. That rent

_must_ reduce wages, is as clear as that the greater the subtractor the

less the remainder. That rent _does_ reduce wages, any one, wherever

situated, can see by merely looking around him.

There is no mystery as to the cause which so suddenly and so largely

raised wages in California in 1849, and in Australia in 1852. It was

the discovery of the placer mines in unappropriated land to which labor

was free that raised the wages of cooks in San Francisco restaurants to

$500 a month, and left ships to rot in the harbor without officers or

crew until their owners would consent to pay rates that in any other

part of the globe seemed fabulous. Had these mines been on appropriated

land, or had they been immediately monopolized so that rent could have

arisen, it would have been land values that would have leaped upward,

not wages. The Comstock lode has been richer than the placers, but the

Comstock lode was readily monopolized, and it is only by virtue of the

strong organization of the Miners’ Association and the fears of the

damage which it might do, that enables men to get four dollars a day

for parboiling themselves two thousand feet underground, where the

air that they breathe must be pumped down to them. The wealth of the

Comstock lode has added to rent. The selling price of these mines runs

up into hundreds of millions, and it has produced individual fortunes

whose monthly returns can be estimated only in hundreds of thousands,

if not in millions. Nor is there any mystery about the cause which has

operated to reduce wages in California from the maximum of the early

days to very nearly a level with wages in the Eastern States, and that

is still operating to reduce them. The productiveness of labor has not

decreased, on the contrary it has increased, as I have before shown;

but, out of what it produces labor has now to pay rent. As the placer

deposits were exhausted, labor had to resort to the deeper mines and to

agricultural land, but monopolization of these being permitted, men

now walk the streets of San Francisco ready to go to work for almost

anything—for natural opportunities are now no longer free to labor.

The truth is self-evident. Put to any one capable of consecutive

thought this question:

“Suppose there should arise from the English Channel or the German

Ocean a No-man’s land on which common labor to an unlimited amount

should be able to make ten shillings a day and which should remain

unappropriated and of free access, like the commons which once

comprised so large a part of English soil. What would be the effect

upon wages in England?”

He would at once tell you that common wages throughout England must

soon increase to ten shillings a day.

And in response to another question, “What would be the effect

on rents?” he would at a moment’s reflection say that rents must

necessarily fall; and if he thought out the next step he would tell

you that all this would happen without any very large part of English

labor being diverted to the new natural opportunities, or the forms and

direction of industry being much changed; only that kind of production

being abandoned which now yields to labor and to landlord together less

than labor could secure on the new opportunities. The great rise in

wages would be at the expense of rent.

Take now the same man or another—some hard-headed business man, who has

no theories, but knows how to make money. Say to him: “Here is a little

village; in ten years it will be a great city—in ten years the railroad

will have taken the place of the stage coach, the electric light of the

candle; it will abound with all the machinery and improvements that so

enormously multiply the effective power of labor. Will, in ten years,

interest be any higher?”

He will tell you, “No!”

“Will the wages of common labor be any higher; will it be easier for a

man who has nothing but his labor to make an independent living?”

He will tell you, “No; the wages of common labor will not be any

higher; on the contrary, all the chances are that they will be lower;

it will not be easier for the mere laborer to make an independent

living; the chances are that it will be harder.”

“What, then, will be higher?”

“Rent; the value of land. Go, get yourself a piece of ground, and hold

possession.”

And if, under such circumstances, you take his advice, you need do

nothing more. You may sit down and smoke your pipe; you may lie around

like the lazzaroni of Naples or the leperos of Mexico; you may go up in

a balloon, or down a hole in the ground; and without doing one stroke

of work, without adding one iota to the wealth of the community, in

ten years you will be rich! In the new city you may have a luxurious

mansion; but among its public buildings will be an almshouse.

In all our long investigation we have been advancing to this simple

truth: That as land is necessary to the exertion of labor in the

production of wealth, to command the land which is necessary to labor,

is to command all the fruits of labor save enough to enable labor

to exist. We have been advancing as through an enemy’s country, in

which every step must be secured, every position fortified, and every

by-path explored; for this simple truth, in its application to social

and political problems, is hid from the great masses of men partly by

its very simplicity, and in greater part by widespread fallacies and

erroneous habits of thought which lead them to look in every direction

but the right one for an explanation of the evils which oppress and

threaten the civilized world. And back of these elaborate fallacies and

misleading theories is an active, energetic power, a power that in

every country, be its political forms what they may, writes laws and

molds thought—the power of a vast and dominant pecuniary interest.

But so simple and so clear is this truth, that to see it fully once

is always to recognize it. There are pictures which, though looked at

again and again, present only a confused labyrinth of lines or scroll

work—a landscape, trees, or something of the kind—until once the

attention is called to the fact that these things make up a face or a

figure. This relation once recognized, is always afterward clear. It

is so in this case. In the light of this truth all social facts group

themselves in an orderly relation, and the most diverse phenomena are

seen to spring from one great principle. It is not in the relations

of capital and labor; it is not in the pressure of population against

subsistence, that an explanation of the unequaled development of our

civilization is to be found. The great cause of inequality in the

distribution of wealth is inequality in the ownership of land. The

ownership of land is the great fundamental fact which ultimately

determines the social, the political, and consequently the intellectual

and moral condition of a people. And it must be so. For land is the

habitation of man, the storehouse upon which he must draw for all his

needs, the material to which his labor must be applied for the supply

of all his desires; for even the products of the sea cannot be taken,

the light of the sun enjoyed, or any of the forces of nature utilized,

without the use of land or its products. On the land we are born, from

it we live, to it we return again—children of the soil as truly as is

the blade of grass or the flower of the field. Take away from man all

that belongs to land, and he is but a disembodied spirit. Material

progress cannot rid us of our dependence upon land; it can but add

to the power of producing wealth from land; and hence, when land is

monopolized, it might go on to infinity without increasing wages or

improving the condition of those who have but their labor. It can but

add to the value of land and the power which its possession gives.

Everywhere, in all times, among all peoples, the possession of land is

the base of aristocracy, the foundation of great fortunes, the source

of power. As said the Brahmins, ages ago—

“_To whomsoever the soil at any time belongs, to him belong the fruits

of it. White parasols and elephants mad with pride are the flowers of

a grant of land._”

FOOTNOTES:

[43] Systems of Land Tenure, published by the Cobden Club.

This Memorial Edition of the Writings of Henry George is limited to

one thousand numbered copies, of which this is

No. 4

MEMORIAL EDITION

OF THE WRITINGS

OF HENRY GEORGE

VOL. II.

THE WRITINGS OF

HENRY GEORGE

PROGRESS AND

POVERTY

AN INQUIRY INTO THE CAUSE OF INDUSTRIAL

DEPRESSIONS AND OF INCREASE

OF WANT WITH INCREASE OF WEALTH

THE REMEDY

II

[Illustration: Colophon]

NEW YORK: DOUBLEDAY

AND McCLURE COMPANY

1898

Copyright, 1891, by

HENRY GEORGE

THE DE VINNE PRESS.

BOOK VI.

THE REMEDY.

CHAPTER I.—INSUFFICIENCY OF REMEDIES CURRENTLY ADVOCATED.

CHAPTER II.—THE TRUE REMEDY.

A new and fair division of the goods and rights of this world

should be the main object of those who conduct human affairs.—_De

Tocqueville._

* * * * *

When the object is to raise the permanent condition of a people, small

means do not merely produce small effects; they produce no effect at

all.—_John Stuart Mill._

CHAPTER I.

INSUFFICIENCY OF REMEDIES CURRENTLY ADVOCATED.

In tracing to its source the cause of increasing poverty amid advancing

wealth, we have discovered the remedy; but before passing to that

branch of our subject it will be well to review the tendencies or

remedies which are currently relied on or advocated. The remedy to

which our conclusions point is at once radical and simple—so radical

that, on the one side, it will not be fairly considered so long as

any faith remains in the efficacy of less caustic measures; so simple

that, on the other side, its real efficacy and comprehensiveness are

likely to be overlooked, until the effect of more elaborate measures is

estimated.

The tendencies and measures which current literature and discussions

show to be more or less relied on or advocated as calculated to relieve

poverty and distress among the masses may be divided into six classes.

I do not mean that there are so many distinct parties or schools of

thought, but merely that, for the purpose of our inquiry, prevailing

opinions and proposed measures may be so grouped for review. Remedies

which for the sake of greater convenience and clearness we shall

consider separately are often combined in thought.

There are many persons who still retain a comfortable belief that

material progress will ultimately extirpate poverty, and there are many

who look to prudential restraint upon the increase of population as the

most efficacious means, but the fallacy of these views has already

been sufficiently shown. Let us now consider what may be hoped for:

I. From greater economy in government.

II. From the better education of the working classes and improved

habits of industry and thrift.

III. From combinations of workmen for the advance of wages.

IV. From the co-operation of labor and capital.

V. From governmental direction and interference.

VI. From a more general distribution of land.

Under these six heads I think we may in essential form review all hopes

and propositions for the relief of social distress short of the simple

but far-reaching measure which I shall propose.

_I.—From Greater Economy in Government._

Until a very few years ago it was an article of faith with Americans—a

belief shared by European liberals—that the poverty of the down-trodden

masses of the Old World was due to aristocratic and monarchical

institutions. This belief has rapidly passed away with the appearance

in the United States, under republican institutions, of social distress

of the same kind, if not of the same intensity, as that prevailing in

Europe. But social distress is still largely attributed to the immense

burdens which existing governments impose—the great debts, the military

and naval establishments, the extravagance which is characteristic

as well of republican as of monarchical rulers, and especially

characteristic of the administration of great cities. To these must be

added, in the United States, the robbery involved in the protective

tariff, which for every twenty-five cents it puts in the treasury takes

a dollar and it may be four or five out of the pocket of the consumer.

Now, there seems to be an evident connection between the immense sums

thus taken from the people and the privations of the lower classes,

and it is upon a superficial view natural to suppose that a reduction

in the enormous burdens thus uselessly imposed would make it easier for

the poorest to get a living. But a consideration of the matter in the

light of the economic principles heretofore traced out will show that

this would not be the effect. A reduction in the amount taken from the

aggregate produce of a community by taxation would be simply equivalent

to an increase in the power of net production. It would in effect add

to the productive power of labor just as do the increasing density of

population and improvement in the arts. And as the advantage in the one

case goes, and must go, to the owners of land, in increased rent, so

would the advantage in the other.

From the produce of the labor and capital of England are now supported

the burden of an immense debt, an Established Church, an expensive

royal family, a large number of sinecurists, a great army and great

navy. Suppose the debt repudiated, the Church disestablished, the royal

family set adrift to make a living for themselves, the sinecurists cut

off, the army disbanded, the officers and men of the navy discharged

and the ships sold. An enormous reduction in taxation would thus become

possible. There would be a great addition to the net produce which

remains to be distributed among the parties to production. But it

would be only such an addition as improvement in the arts has been for

a long time constantly making, and not so great an addition as steam

and machinery have made within the last twenty or thirty years. And as

these additions have not alleviated pauperism, but have only increased

rent, so would this. English land owners would reap the whole benefit.

I will not dispute that if all these things could be done suddenly, and

without the destruction and expense involved in a revolution, there

might be a temporary improvement in the condition of the lowest class;

but such a sudden and peaceable reform is manifestly impossible. And

if it were, any temporary improvement would, by the process we now see

going on in the United States, be ultimately swallowed up by increased

land values.

And, so, in the United States, if we were to reduce public expenditures

to the lowest possible point, and meet them by revenue taxation, the

benefit could certainly not be greater than that which railroads have

brought. There would be more wealth left in the hands of the people as

a whole, just as the railroads have put more wealth in the hands of the

people as a whole, but the same inexorable laws would operate as to its

distribution. The condition of those who live by their labor would not

ultimately be improved.

A dim consciousness of this pervades—or, rather, is beginning to

pervade—the masses, and constitutes one of the grave political

difficulties that are closing in around the American republic. Those

who have nothing but their labor, and especially the proletarians

of the cities—a growing class—care little about the prodigality of

government, and in many cases are disposed to look upon it as a good

thing—“furnishing employment,” or “putting money in circulation.”

Tweed, who robbed New York as a guerrilla chief might levy upon a

captured town (and who was but a type of the new banditti who are

grasping the government of all our cities), was undoubtedly popular

with a majority of the voters, though his thieving was notorious,

and his spoils were blazoned in big diamonds and lavish personal

expenditure. After his indictment, he was triumphantly elected to the

Senate; and, even when a recaptured fugitive, was frequently cheered on

his way from court to prison. He had robbed the public treasury of many

millions, but the proletarians felt that he had not robbed them. And

the verdict of political economy is the same as theirs.

Let me be clearly understood. I do not say that governmental

economy is not desirable; but simply that reduction in the expenses

of government can have no direct effect in extirpating poverty and

increasing wages, so long as land is monopolized.

Although this is true, yet even with sole reference to the interests

of the lowest class, no effort should be spared to keep down useless

expenditures. The more complex and extravagant government becomes, the

more it gets to be a power distinct from and independent of the people,

and the more difficult does it become to bring questions of real public

policy to a popular decision. Look at our elections in the United

States—upon what do they turn? The most momentous problems are pressing

upon us, yet so great is the amount of money in politics, so large are

the personal interests involved, that the most important questions of

government are but little considered. The average American voter has

prejudices, party feelings, general notions of a certain kind, but he

gives to the fundamental questions of government not much more thought

than a street-car horse does to the profits of the line. Were this not

the case, so many hoary abuses could not have survived and so many new

ones been added. Anything that tends to make government simple and

inexpensive tends to put it under control of the people and to bring

questions of real importance to the front. But no reduction in the

expenses of government can of itself cure or mitigate the evils that

arise from a constant tendency to the unequal distribution of wealth.

_II.—From the Diffusion of Education and Improved Habits of Industry

and Thrift._

There is, and always has been, a widespread belief among the more

comfortable classes that the poverty and suffering of the masses are

due to their lack of industry, frugality, and intelligence. This

belief, which at once soothes the sense of responsibility and flatters

by its suggestion of superiority, is probably even more prevalent in

countries like the United States, where all men are politically equal,

and where, owing to the newness of society, the differentiation into

classes has been of individuals rather than of families, than it is

in older countries, where the lines of separation have been longer,

and are more sharply, drawn. It is but natural for those who can trace

their own better circumstances to the superior industry and frugality

that gave them a start, and the superior intelligence that enabled them

to take advantage of every opportunity,[44] to imagine that those who

remain poor do so simply from lack of these qualities.

But whoever has grasped the laws of the distribution of wealth, as in

previous chapters they have been traced out, will see the mistake in

this notion. The fallacy is similar to that which would be involved

in the assertion that every one of a number of competitors might

win a race. That _any_ one might is true; that _every_ one might is

impossible.

For, as soon as land acquires a value, wages, as we have seen, do

not depend upon the real earnings or product of labor, but upon

what is left to labor after rent is taken out; and when land is all

monopolized, as it is everywhere except in the newest communities, rent

must drive wages down to the point at which the poorest paid class

will be just able to live and reproduce, and thus wages are forced

to a minimum fixed by what is called the standard of comfort—that

is, the amount of necessaries and comforts which habit leads the

working classes to demand as the lowest on which they will consent

to maintain their numbers. This being the case, industry, skill,

frugality, and intelligence can avail the individual only in so far

as they are superior to the general level—just as in a race speed can

avail the runner only in so far as it exceeds that of his competitors.

If one man work harder, or with superior skill or intelligence than

ordinary, he will get ahead; but if the average of industry, skill, or

intelligence be brought up to the higher point, the increased intensity

of application will secure but the old rate of wages, and he who would

get ahead must work harder still.

One individual may save money from his wages by living as Dr. Franklin

did when, during his apprenticeship and early journeyman days, he

concluded to practice vegetarianism; and many poor families might be

made more comfortable by being taught to prepare the cheap dishes to

which Franklin tried to limit the appetite of his employer Keimer, as

a condition to his acceptance of the position of confuter of opponents

to the new religion of which Keimer wished to become the prophet,[45]

but if the working classes generally came to live in that way, wages

would ultimately fall in proportion, and whoever wished to get ahead by

the practice of economy, or to mitigate poverty by teaching it, would

be compelled to devise some still cheaper mode of keeping soul and body

together. If, under existing conditions, American mechanics would come

down to the Chinese standard of living, they would ultimately have to

come down to the Chinese standard of wages; or if English laborers

would content themselves with the rice diet and scanty clothing of the

Bengalee, labor would soon be as ill paid in England as in Bengal. The

introduction of the potato into Ireland was expected to improve the

condition of the poorer classes, by increasing the difference between

the wages they received and the cost of their living. The consequences

that did ensue were a rise of rent and a lowering of wages, and, with

the potato blight, the ravages of famine among a population that had

already reduced its standard of comfort so low that the next step was

starvation.

And, so, if one individual work more hours than the average, he will

increase his wages; but the wages of all cannot be increased in this

way. It is notorious that in occupations where working hours are long,

wages are not higher than where working hours are shorter; generally

the reverse, for the longer the working day, the more helpless does

the laborer become—the less time has he to look around him and develop

other powers than those called forth by his work; the less becomes his

ability to change his occupation or to take advantage of circumstances.

And, so, the individual workman who gets his wife and children to

assist him may thus increase his income; but in occupations where

it has become habitual for the wife and children of the laborer to

supplement his work, it is notorious that the wages earned by the whole

family do not on the average exceed those of the head of the family in

occupations where it is usual for him only to work. Swiss family labor

in watch making competes in cheapness with American machinery. The

Bohemian cigar makers of New York, who work, men, women, and children,

in their tenement-house rooms, have reduced the prices of cigar making

to less than the Chinese in San Francisco were getting.

These general facts are well known. They are fully recognized in

standard politico-economic works, where, however, they are explained

upon the Malthusian theory of the tendency of population to multiply

up to the limit of subsistence. The true explanation, as I have

sufficiently shown, is in the tendency of rent to reduce wages.

As to the effects of education, it may be worth while to say a few

words specially, for there is a prevailing disposition to attribute to

it something like a magical influence. Now, education is only education

in so far as it enables a man more effectively to use his natural

powers, and this is something that what we call education in very great

part fails to do. I remember a little girl, pretty well along in her

school geography and astronomy, who was much astonished to find that

the ground in her mother’s back yard was really the surface of the

earth, and, if you talk with them, you will find that a good deal of

the knowledge of many college graduates is much like that of the little

girl. They seldom think any better, and sometimes not so well as men

who have never been to college.

A gentleman who had spent many years in Australia, and knew intimately

the habits of the aborigines (Rev. Dr. Bleesdale), after giving some

instances of their wonderful skill in the use of their weapons, in

foretelling changes in the wind and weather and in trapping the shyest

birds, once said to me: “I think it a great mistake to look on these

black fellows as ignorant. Their knowledge is different from ours,

but in it they are generally better educated. As soon as they begin

to toddle, they are taught to play with little boomerangs and other

weapons, to observe and to judge, and, when they are old enough to

take care of themselves, they are fully able to do so—are, in fact,

in reference to the nature of their knowledge, what I should call

well-educated gentlemen; which is more than I can say for many of our

young fellows who have had what we call the best advantages, but who

enter upon manhood unable to do anything either for themselves or for

others.”

Be this as it may, it is evident that intelligence, which is or should

be the aim of education, until it induces and enables the masses to

discover and remove the cause of the unequal distribution of wealth,

can operate upon wages only by increasing the effective power of labor.

It has the same effect as increased skill or industry. And it can raise

the wages of the individual only in so far as it renders him superior

to others. When to read and write were rare accomplishments, a clerk

commanded high respect and large wages, but now the ability to read and

write has become so nearly universal as to give no advantage. Among

the Chinese the ability to read and write seems absolutely universal,

but wages in China touch the lowest possible point. The diffusion of

intelligence, except as it may make men discontented with a state of

things which condemns producers to a life of toil while non-producers

loll in luxury, cannot tend to raise wages generally, or in any way

improve the condition of the lowest class—the “mud-sills” of society,

as a Southern Senator once called them—who must rest on the soil,

no matter how high the superstructure may be carried. No increase

of the effective power of labor can increase general wages, so long

as rent swallows up all the gain. This is not merely a deduction

from principles. It is the fact, proved by experience. The growth of

knowledge and the progress of invention have multiplied the effective

power of labor over and over again without increasing wages. In England

there are over a million paupers. In the United States almshouses are

increasing and wages are decreasing.

It is true that greater industry and skill, greater prudence, and a

higher intelligence, are, as a rule, found associated with a better

material condition of the working classes; but that this is effect, not

cause, is shown by the relation of the facts. Wherever the material

condition of the laboring classes has been improved, improvement in

their personal qualities has followed, and wherever their material

condition has been depressed, deterioration in these qualities has

been the result; but nowhere can improvement in material condition be

shown as the result of the increase of industry, skill, prudence, or

intelligence in a class condemned to toil for a bare living, though

these qualities when once attained (or, rather, their concomitant—the

improvement in the standard of comfort) offer a strong, and, in many

cases, a sufficient, resistance to the lowering of material condition.

The fact is, that the qualities that raise man above the animal are

superimposed on those which he shares with the animal, and that it is

only as he is relieved from the wants of his animal nature that his

intellectual and moral nature can grow. Compel a man to drudgery for

the necessities of animal existence, and he will lose the incentive to

industry—the progenitor of skill—and will do only what he is forced to

do. Make his condition such that it cannot be much worse, while there

is little hope that anything he can do will make it much better, and he

will cease to look beyond the day. Deny him leisure—and leisure does

not mean the want of employment, but the absence of the need which

forces to uncongenial employment—and you cannot, even by running the

child through a common school and supplying the man with a newspaper,

make him intelligent.

It is true that improvement in the material condition of a people

or class may not show immediately in mental and moral improvement.

Increased wages may at first be taken out in idleness and dissipation.

But they will ultimately bring increased industry, skill, intelligence,

and thrift. Comparisons between different countries; between different

classes in the same country; between the same people at different

periods; and between the same people when their conditions are changed

by emigration, show, as an invariable result, that the personal

qualities of which we are speaking appear as material conditions are

improved, and disappear as material conditions are depressed. Poverty

is the Slough of Despond which Bunyan saw in his dream, and into

which good books may be tossed forever without result. To make people

industrious, prudent, skillful, and intelligent, they must be relieved

from want. If you would have the slave show the virtues of the freeman,

you must first make him free.

_III.—From Combinations of Workmen._

It is evident from the laws of distribution, as previously traced,

that combinations of workmen _can_ advance wages, and this not at

the expense of other workmen, as is sometimes said, nor yet at the

expense of capital, as is generally believed; but, ultimately, at the

expense of rent. That no general advance in wages can be secured by

combination; that any advance in particular wages thus secured must

reduce other wages or the profits of capital, or both—are ideas that

spring from the erroneous notion that wages are drawn from capital.

The fallacy of these ideas is demonstrated, not alone by the laws of

distribution as we have worked them out, but by experience, so far as

it has gone. The advance of wages in particular trades by combinations

of workmen, of which there are many examples, has nowhere shown any

effect in lowering wages in other trades, or in reducing the rate

of profits. Except as it may affect his fixed capital or current

engagements, a diminution of wages can benefit, and an increase of

wages injure an employer only in so far as it gives him an advantage

or puts him at a disadvantage as compared with other employers. The

employer who first succeeds in reducing the wages of his hands, or is

first compelled to pay an advance, gains an advantage, or is put at

a disadvantage in regard to his competitors, which ceases when the

movement includes them also. So far, however, as the change in wages

affects his contracts or stock on hand, by changing the relative cost

of production, it may be to him a real gain or loss, though this gain

or loss, being purely relative, disappears when the whole community

is considered. And, if the change in wages works a change in relative

demand, it may render capital fixed in machinery, buildings, or

otherwise, more or less profitable. But, in this, a new equilibrium is

soon reached; for, especially in a progressive country, fixed capital

is only somewhat less mobile than circulating capital. If there is too

little in a certain form, the tendency of capital to assume that form

soon brings it up to the required amount; if there is too much, the

cessation of increment soon restores the level.

But, while a change in the rate of wages in any particular occupation

may induce a change in the relative demand for labor, it can produce

no change in the aggregate demand. For instance, let us suppose that

a combination of the workmen engaged in any particular manufacture

raise wages in one country, while a combination of employers reduce

wages in the same manufacture in another country. If the change be

great enough, the demand, or part of the demand, in the first country

will now be supplied by importation of such manufactures from the

second. But, evidently, this increase in importations of a particular

kind must necessitate either a corresponding decrease in importations

of other kinds, or a corresponding increase in exportations. For, it

is only with the produce of its labor and capital that one country

can demand, or can obtain, in exchange, the produce of the labor and

capital of another. The idea that the lowering of wages can increase,

or the increase of wages can diminish, the trade of a country, is as

baseless as the idea that the prosperity of a country can be increased

by taxes on imports, or diminished by the removal of restrictions on

trade. If all wages in any particular country were to be doubled, that

country would continue to export and import the same things, and in

the same proportions; for exchange is determined not by absolute, but

by relative, cost of production. But, if wages in some branches of

production were doubled, and in others not increased, or not increased

so much, there would be a change in the proportion of the various

things imported, but no change in the proportion between exports and

imports.

While most of the objections made to the combination of workmen for

the advance of wages are thus baseless, while the success of such

combinations cannot reduce other wages, or decrease the profits of

capital, or injuriously affect national prosperity, yet so great are

the difficulties in the way of the effective combinations of laborers,

that the good that can be accomplished by them is extremely limited,

while there are inherent disadvantages in the process.

To raise wages in a particular occupation or occupations, which is all

that any combination of workmen yet made has been equal to attempting,

is manifestly a task the difficulty of which progressively increases.

For the higher are wages of any particular kind raised above their

normal level with other wages, the stronger are the tendencies to bring

them back. Thus, if a printers’ union, by a successful or threatened

strike, raise the wages of typesetting ten per cent. above the normal

rate as compared with other wages, relative demand and supply are at

once affected. On the one hand, there is a tendency to a diminution

of the amount of typesetting called for; and, on the other, the

higher rate of wages tends to increase the number of compositors in

ways the strongest combination cannot altogether prevent. If the

increase be twenty per cent., these tendencies are much stronger; if

it is fifty per cent., they become stronger still, and so on. So that

practically—even in countries like England, where the lines between

different trades are much more distinct and difficult to pass than

in countries like the United States—that which trades’ unions, even

when supporting each other, can do in the way of raising wages is

comparatively little, and this little, moreover, is confined to their

own sphere, and does not affect the lower stratum of unorganized

laborers, whose condition most needs alleviation and ultimately

determines that of all above them. The only way by which wages could be

raised to any extent and with any permanence by this method would be

by a general combination, such as was aimed at by the Internationals,

which should include laborers of all kinds. But such a combination

may be set down as practically impossible, for the difficulties of

combination, great enough in the most highly paid and smallest trades,

become greater and greater as we descend in the industrial scale.

Nor, in the struggle of endurance, which is the only method which

combinations not to work for less than a certain minimum have of

effecting the increase of wages, must it be forgotten who are the real

parties pitted against each other. It is not labor and capital. It

is laborers on the one side and the owners of land on the other. If

the contest were between labor and capital, it would be on much more

equal terms. For the power of capital to stand out is only some little

greater than that of labor. Capital not only ceases to earn anything

when not used, but it goes to waste—for in nearly all its forms it can

be maintained only by constant reproduction. But land will not starve

like laborers or go to waste like capital—its owners can wait. They may

be inconvenienced, it is true, but what is inconvenience to them, is

destruction to capital and starvation to labor.

The agricultural laborers in certain parts of England are now

endeavoring to combine for the purpose of securing an increase in

their miserably low wages. If it was capital that was receiving the

enormous difference between the real produce of their labor and

the pittance they get out of it, they would have but to make an

effective combination to secure success; for the farmers, who are

their direct employers, can afford to go without labor but little,

if any, better than the laborers can afford to go without wages. But

the farmers cannot yield much without a reduction of rent; and thus

it is between the land owners and the laborers that the real struggle

must come. Suppose the combination to be so thorough as to include

all agricultural laborers, and to prevent from doing so all who might

be tempted to take their places. The laborers refuse to work except

at a considerable advance of wages; the farmers can give it only by

securing a considerable reduction of rent, and have no way to back

their demands except as the laborers back theirs, by refusing to go on

with production. If cultivation thus comes to a dead-lock, the land

owners would lose only their rent, while the land improved by lying

fallow. But the laborers would starve. And if English laborers of all

kinds were united in one grand league for a general increase of wages,

the real contest would be the same, and under the same conditions.

For wages could not be increased except to the decrease of rent; and

in a general dead-lock, land owners could live, while laborers of all

sorts must starve or emigrate. The owners of the land of England are by

virtue of their ownership the masters of England. So true is it that

“to whomsoever the soil at any time belongs, to him belong the fruits

of it.” The white parasols and the elephants mad with pride passed with

the grant of English land, and the people at large can never regain

their power until that grant is resumed. What is true of England, is

universally true.

It may be said that such a dead-lock in production could never occur.

This is true; but true only because no such thorough combination of

labor as might produce it is possible. But the fixed and definite

nature of land enables land owners to combine much more easily and

efficiently than either laborers or capitalists. How easy and efficient

their combination is, there are many historical examples. And the

absolute necessity for the use of land, and the certainty in all

progressive countries that it must increase in value, produce among

land owners, without any formal combination, all the effects that

could be produced by the most rigorous combination among laborers or

capitalists. Deprive a laborer of opportunity of employment, and he

will soon be anxious to get work on any terms, but when the receding

wave of speculation leaves nominal land values clearly above real

values, whoever has lived in a growing country knows with what tenacity

land owners hold on.

And, besides these practical difficulties in the plan of forcing by

endurance an increase of wages, there are in such methods inherent

disadvantages which workingmen should not blink. I speak without

prejudice, for I am still an honorary member of the union which, while

working at my trade, I always loyally supported. But, see: The methods

by which a trade union can alone act are necessarily destructive;

its organization is necessarily tyrannical. A strike, which is the

only recourse by which a trade union can enforce its demands, is a

destructive contest—just such a contest as that to which an eccentric,

called “The Money King,” once, in the early days of San Francisco,

challenged a man who had taunted him with meanness, that they should

go down to the wharf and alternately toss twenty-dollar pieces into

the bay until one gave in. The struggle of endurance involved in a

strike is, really, what it has often been compared to—a war; and, like

all war, it lessens wealth. And the organization for it must, like

the organization for war, be tyrannical. As even the man who would

fight for freedom, must, when he enters an army, give up his personal

freedom and become a mere part in a great machine, so must it be with

workmen who organize for a strike. These combinations are, therefore,

necessarily destructive of the very things which workmen seek to gain

through them—wealth and freedom.

There is an ancient Hindoo mode of compelling the payment of a just

debt, traces of something akin to which Sir Henry Maine has found in

the laws of the Irish Brehons. It is called, sitting _dharna_—the

creditor seeking enforcement of his debt by sitting down at the door of

the debtor, and refusing to eat or drink until he is paid.

Like this is the method of labor combinations. In their strikes,

trades’ unions sit _dharna_. But, unlike the Hindoo, they have not the

power of superstition to back them.

_IV.—From Co-operation._

It is now, and has been for some time, the fashion to preach

co-operation as the sovereign remedy for the grievances of the working

classes. But, unfortunately for the efficacy of co-operation as a

remedy for social evils, these evils, as we have seen, do not arise

from any conflict between labor and capital; and if co-operation were

universal, it could not raise wages or relieve poverty. This is readily

seen.

Co-operation is of two kinds—co-operation in supply and co-operation

in production. Now, co-operation in supply, let it go as far as it

may in excluding middlemen, only reduces the cost of exchanges. It

is simply a device to save labor and eliminate risk, and its effect

upon distribution can be only that of the improvements and inventions

which have in modern times so wonderfully cheapened and facilitated

exchanges—viz., to increase rent. And co-operation in production is

simply a reversion to that form of wages which still prevails in the

whaling service, and is there termed a “lay.” It is the substitution of

proportionate wages for fixed wages—a substitution of which there are

occasional instances in almost all employments; or, if the management

is left to the workmen, and the capitalist but takes his proportion of

the net produce, it is simply the system that has prevailed to a large

extent in European agriculture since the days of the Roman Empire—the

colonial or metayer system. All that is claimed for co-operation in

production is, that it makes the workman more active and industrious—in

other words, that it increases the efficiency of labor. Thus its effect

is in the same direction as the steam engine, the cotton gin, the

reaping machine—in short, all the things in which material progress

consists, and it can produce only the same result—viz., the increase of

rent.

It is a striking proof of how first principles are ignored in dealing

with social problems, that in current economic and semi-economic

literature so much importance is attached to co-operation as a means

for increasing wages and relieving poverty. That it can have no such

general tendency is apparent.

Waiving all the difficulties that under present conditions beset

co-operation either of supply or of production, and supposing it so

extended as to supplant present methods—that co-operative stores

made the connection between producer and consumer with the minimum

of expense, and co-operative workshops, factories, farms, and mines,

abolished the employing capitalist who pays fixed wages, and greatly

increased the efficiency of labor—what then? Why, simply that it would

become possible to produce the same amount of wealth with less labor,

and consequently that the owners of land, the source of all wealth,

could command a greater amount of wealth for the use of their land.

This is not a matter of mere theory; it is proved by experience and

by existing facts. Improved methods and improved machinery have the

same effect that co-operation aims at—of reducing the cost of bringing

commodities to the consumer and increasing the efficiency of labor, and

it is in these respects that the older countries have the advantage of

new settlements. But, as experience has amply shown, improvements in

the methods and machinery of production and exchange have no tendency

to improve the condition of the lowest class, and wages are lower

and poverty deeper where exchange goes on at the minimum of cost and

production has the benefit of the best machinery. The advantage but

adds to rent.

But suppose co-operation between producers and land owners? That

would simply amount to the payment of rent in kind—the same system

under which much land is rented in California and the Southern States

where the land owner gets a share of the crop. Save as a matter of

computation it in no wise differs from the system which prevails in

England of a fixed money rent. Call it co-operation, if you choose,

the terms of the co-operation would still be fixed by the laws which

determine rent, and wherever land was monopolized, increase in

productive power would simply give the owners of the land the power to

demand a larger share.

That co-operation is by so many believed to be the solution of the

“labor question” arises from the fact that, where it has been tried,

it has in many instances improved perceptibly the condition of those

immediately engaged in it. But this is due simply to the fact that

these cases are isolated. Just as industry, economy, or skill may

improve the condition of the workmen who possess them in superior

degree, but cease to have this effect when improvement in these

respects becomes general, so a special advantage in procuring supplies,

or a special efficiency given to some labor, may secure advantages

which would be lost as soon as these improvements became so general

as to affect the general relations of distribution. And the truth

is, that, save possibly in educational effects, co-operation can

produce no general results that competition will not produce. Just as

the cheap-for-cash stores have a similar effect upon prices as the

co-operative supply associations, so does competition in production

lead to a similar adjustment of forces and division of proceeds as

would co-operative production. That increasing productive power does

not add to the reward of labor, is not because of competition, but

because competition is one-sided. Land, without which there can be no

production, is monopolized, and the competition of producers for its

use forces wages to a minimum and gives all the advantage of increasing

productive power to land owners, in higher rents and increased land

values. Destroy this monopoly, and competition could exist only to

accomplish the end which co-operation aims at—to give to each what

he fairly earns. Destroy this monopoly, and industry must become the

co-operation of equals.

_V.—From Governmental Direction and Interference._

The limits within which I wish to keep this book will not permit

an examination in detail of the methods in which it is proposed to

mitigate or extirpate poverty by governmental regulation of industry

and accumulation, and which in their most thorough-going form are

called socialistic. Nor is it necessary, for the same defects attach

to them all. These are the substitution of governmental direction for

the play of individual action, and the attempt to secure by restriction

what can better be secured by freedom. As to the truths that are

involved in socialistic ideas I shall have something to say hereafter;

but it is evident that whatever savors of regulation and restriction

is in itself bad, and should not be resorted to if any other mode

of accomplishing the same end presents itself. For instance, to take

one of the simplest and mildest of the class of measures I refer to—a

graduated tax on incomes. The object at which it aims, the reduction

or prevention of immense concentrations of wealth, is good; but this

means involves the employment of a large number of officials clothed

with inquisitorial powers; temptations to bribery, and perjury, and

all other means of evasion, which beget a demoralization of opinion,

and put a premium upon unscrupulousness and a tax upon conscience;

and, finally, just in proportion as the tax accomplishes its effect, a

lessening in the incentive to the accumulation of wealth, which is one

of the strong forces of industrial progress. While, if the elaborate

schemes for regulating everything and finding a place for everybody

could be carried out, we should have a state of society resembling that

of ancient Peru, or that which, to their eternal honor, the Jesuits

instituted and so long maintained in Paraguay.

I will not say that such a state as this is not a better social state

than that to which we now seem to be tending, for in ancient Peru,

though production went on under the greatest disadvantages, from the

want of iron and the domestic animals, yet there was no such thing

as want, and the people went to their work with songs. But this it

is unnecessary to discuss. Socialism in anything approaching such

a form, modern society cannot successfully attempt. The only force

that has ever proved competent for it—a strong and definite religious

faith—is wanting and is daily growing less. We have passed out of the

socialism of the tribal state, and cannot re-enter it again except by

a retrogression that would involve anarchy and perhaps barbarism. Our

governments, as is already plainly evident, would break down in the

attempt. Instead of an intelligent award of duties and earnings, we

should have a Roman distribution of Sicilian corn, and the demagogue

would soon become the Imperator.

The ideal of socialism is grand and noble; and it is, I am convinced,

possible of realization; but such a state of society cannot be

manufactured—it must grow. Society is an organism, not a machine. It

can live only by the individual life of its parts. And in the free and

natural development of all the parts will be secured the harmony of the

whole. All that is necessary to social regeneration is included in the

motto of those Russian patriots sometimes called Nihilists—“Land and

Liberty!”

_VI.—From a More General Distribution of Land._

There is a rapidly growing feeling that the tenure of land is in some

manner connected with the social distress which manifests itself in

the most progressive countries; but this feeling as yet mostly shows

itself in propositions which look to the more general division of

landed property—in England, free trade in land, tenant right, or the

equal partition of landed estates among heirs; in the United States,

restrictions upon the size of individual holdings. It has been also

proposed in England that the state should buy out the landlords, and

in the United States that grants of money should be made to enable the

settlements of colonies upon public lands. The former proposition let

us pass for the present; the latter, so far as its distinctive feature

is concerned, falls into the category of the measures considered in

the last section. It needs no argument to show to what abuses and

demoralization grants of public money or credit would lead.

How what the English writers call “free trade in land”—the removal of

duties and restrictions upon conveyances—could facilitate the division

of ownership in agricultural land, I cannot see, though it might to

some extent have that effect as regards town property. The removal of

restrictions upon buying and selling would merely permit the ownership

of land to assume more quickly the form to which it tends. Now, that

the tendency in Great Britain is to concentration is shown by the fact

that, in spite of the difficulties interposed by the cost of transfer,

land ownership has been and is steadily concentrating there, and that

this tendency is a general one is shown by the fact that the same

process of concentration is observable in the United States. I say this

unhesitatingly in regard to the United States, although statistical

tables are sometimes quoted to show a different tendency. But how,

in such a country as the United States, the ownership of land may be

really concentrating, while census tables show rather a diminution

in the average size of holdings, is readily seen. As land is brought

into use, and, with the growth of population, passes from a lower to

a higher or intenser use, the size of holdings tends to diminish.

A small stock range would be a large farm, a small farm would be a

large orchard, vineyard, nursery, or vegetable garden, and a patch of

land which would be small even for these purposes would make a very

large city property. Thus, the growth of population, which puts land

to higher or intenser uses, tends naturally to reduce the size of

holdings, by a process very marked in new countries; but with this may

go on a tendency to the concentration of land ownership, which, though

not revealed by tables which show the average size of holdings, is just

as clearly seen. Average holdings of one acre in a city may show a much

greater concentration of land ownership than average holdings of 640

acres in a newly settled township. I refer to this to show the fallacy

in the deductions drawn from the tables which are frequently paraded in

the United States to show that land monopoly is an evil that will cure

itself. On the contrary, it is obvious that the proportion of land

owners to the whole population is constantly decreasing.

And that there is in the United States, as there is in Great Britain, a

strong tendency to the concentration of land ownership in agriculture

is clearly seen. As, in England and Ireland, small farms are being

thrown into larger ones, so in New England, according to the reports

of the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics, is the size of farms

increasing. This tendency is even more clearly noticeable in the newer

States and Territories. Only a few years ago a farm of 320 acres would,

under the system of agriculture prevailing in the northern parts of

the Union, have anywhere been a large one, probably as much as one man

could cultivate to advantage. In California now there are farms (not

cattle ranges) of five, ten, twenty, forty and sixty thousand acres,

while the model farm of Dakota embraces 100,000 acres. The reason is

obvious. It is the application of machinery to agriculture and the

general tendency to production on a large scale. The same tendency

which substitutes the factory, with its army of operatives, for many

independent hand-loom weavers, is beginning to exhibit itself in

agriculture.

Now, the existence of this tendency shows two things: first, that any

measures which merely permit or facilitate the greater subdivision of

land would be inoperative; and, second, that any measures which would

compel it would have a tendency to check production. If land in large

bodies can be cultivated more cheaply than land in small bodies, to

restrict ownership to small bodies will reduce the aggregate production

of wealth, and, in so far as such restrictions are imposed and take

effect, will they tend to diminish the general productiveness of labor

and capital.

The effort, therefore, to secure a fairer division of wealth by such

restrictions is liable to the drawback of lessening the amount to

be divided. The device is like that of the monkey, who, dividing the

cheese between the cats, equalized matters by taking a bite off the

biggest piece.

But there is not merely this objection, which weighs against every

proposition to restrict the ownership of land, with a force that

increases with the efficiency of the proposed measure. There is the

further and fatal objection that restriction will not secure the end

which is alone worth aiming at—a fair division of the produce. It will

not reduce rent, and therefore cannot increase wages. It may make the

comfortable classes larger, but will not improve the condition of those

in the lowest class.

If what is known as the Ulster tenant right were extended to the whole

of Great Britain, it would be but to carve out of the estate of the

landlord an estate for the tenant. The condition of the laborer would

not be a whit improved. If landlords were prohibited from asking an

increase of rent from their tenants and from ejecting a tenant so

long as the fixed rent was paid, the body of the producers would gain

nothing. Economic rent would still increase, and would still steadily

lessen the proportion of the produce going to labor and capital. The

only difference would be that the tenants of the first landlords, who

would become landlords in their turn, would profit by the increase.

If by a restriction upon the amount of land any one individual might

hold, by the regulation of devises and successions, or by cumulative

taxation, the few thousand land holders of Great Britain should be

increased by two or three million, these two or three million people

would be gainers. But the rest of the population would gain nothing.

They would have no more share in the advantages of land ownership than

before. And if, what is manifestly impossible, a fair distribution of

the land were made among the whole population, giving to each his

equal share, and laws enacted which would interpose a barrier to the

tendency to concentration by forbidding the holding by any one of more

than the fixed amount, what would become of the increase of population?

Just what may be accomplished by the greater division of land may be

seen in those districts of France and Belgium where minute division

prevails. That such a division of land is on the whole much better,

and that it gives a far more stable basis to the state than that which

prevails in England, there can be no doubt. But that it does not make

wages any higher or improve the condition of the class who have only

their labor, is equally clear. These French and Belgian peasants

practice a rigid economy unknown to any of the English-speaking

peoples. And if such striking symptoms of the poverty and distress of

the lowest class are not apparent as on the other side of the channel,

it must, I think, be attributed, not only to this fact, but to another

fact, which accounts for the continuance of the minute division of the

land—that material progress has not been so rapid.

Neither has population increased with the same rapidity (on the

contrary it has been nearly stationary), nor have improvements in the

modes of production been so great. Nevertheless, M. de Laveleye, all

of whose prepossessions are in favor of small holdings, and whose

testimony will therefore carry more weight than that of English

observers, who may be supposed to harbor a prejudice for the system of

their own country, states in his paper on the Land Systems of Belgium

and Holland, printed by the Cobden Club, that the condition of the

laborer is worse under this system of the minute division of land

than it is in England; while the tenant farmers—for tenancy largely

prevails even where the _morcellment_ is greatest—are rack-rented with

a mercilessness unknown in England, and even in Ireland, and the

franchise “so far from raising them in the social scale, is but a

source of mortification and humiliation to them, for they are forced to

vote according to the dictates of the landlord instead of following the

dictates of their own inclination and convictions.”

But while the subdivision of land can thus do nothing to cure the evils

of land monopoly, while it can have no effect in raising wages or in

improving the condition of the lowest classes, its tendency is to

prevent the adoption or even advocacy of more thorough-going measures,

and to strengthen the existing unjust system by interesting a larger

number in its maintenance. M. de Laveleye, in concluding the paper from

which I have quoted, urges the greater division of land as the surest

means of securing the great land owners of England from something far

more radical. Although in the districts where land is so minutely

divided, the condition of the laborer is, he states, the worst in

Europe and the renting farmer is much more ground down by his landlord

than the Irish tenant, yet “feelings hostile to social order,” M. de

Laveleye goes on to say, “do not manifest themselves,” because—

“The tenant, although ground down by the constant rise of rents,

lives among his equals, peasants like himself who have tenants whom

they use just as the large land holder does his. His father, his

brother, perhaps the man himself, possesses something like an acre of

land, which he lets at as high a rent as he can get. In the public

house peasant proprietors will boast of the high rents they get for

their lands, just as they might boast of having sold their pigs or

potatoes very dear. Letting at as high a rent as possible comes thus

to seem to him to be quite a matter of course, and he never dreams of

finding fault with either the land owners as a class or with property

in land. His mind is not likely to dwell on the notion of a caste

of domineering landlords, of “bloodthirsty tyrants,” fattening on

the sweat of impoverished tenants and doing no work themselves; for

those who drive the hardest bargains are not the great land owners

but his own fellows. Thus, the distribution of a number of small

properties among the peasantry forms a kind of rampart and safeguard

for the holders of large estates, and peasant property may without

exaggeration be called the lightning conductor that averts from

society dangers which might otherwise lead to violent catastrophes.

“The concentration of land in large estates among a small number

of families is a sort of provocation of leveling legislation. The

position of England, so enviable in many respects, seems to me to be

in this respect full of danger for the future.”

To me, for the very same reason that M. de Laveleye expresses, the

position of England seems full of hope.

Let us abandon all attempt to get rid of the evils of land monopoly

by restricting land ownership. An equal distribution of land is

impossible, and anything short of that would be only a mitigation,

not a cure, and a mitigation that would prevent the adoption of a

cure. Nor is any remedy worth considering that does not fall in with

the natural direction of social development, and swim, so to speak,

with the current of the times. That concentration is the order of

development there can be no mistaking—the concentration of people in

large cities, the concentration of handicrafts in large factories, the

concentration of transportation by railroad and steamship lines, and of

agricultural operations in large fields. The most trivial businesses

are being concentrated in the same way—errands are run and carpet

sacks are carried by corporations. All the currents of the time run to

concentration. To resist it successfully we must throttle steam and

discharge electricity from human service.

CHAPTER II.

THE TRUE REMEDY.

We have traced the unequal distribution of wealth which is the curse

and menace of modern civilization to the institution of private

property in land. We have seen that so long as this institution

exists no increase in productive power can permanently benefit the

masses; but, on the contrary, must tend still further to depress their

condition. We have examined all the remedies, short of the abolition of

private property in land, which are currently relied on or proposed for

the relief of poverty and the better distribution of wealth, and have

found them all inefficacious or impracticable.

There is but one way to remove an evil—and that is, to remove its

cause. Poverty deepens as wealth increases, and wages are forced down

while productive power grows, because land, which is the source of

all wealth and the field of all labor, is monopolized. To extirpate

poverty, to make wages what justice commands they should be, the

full earnings of the laborer, we must therefore substitute for the

individual ownership of land a common ownership. Nothing else will go

to the cause of the evil—in nothing else is there the slightest hope.

This, then, is the remedy for the unjust and unequal distribution of

wealth apparent in modern civilization, and for all the evils which

flow from it:

_We must make land common property._

We have reached this conclusion by an examination in which every step

has been proved and secured. In the chain of reasoning no link is

wanting and no link is weak. Deduction and induction have brought us

to the same truth—that the unequal ownership of land necessitates the

unequal distribution of wealth. And as in the nature of things unequal

ownership of land is inseparable from the recognition of individual

property in land, it necessarily follows that the only remedy for the

unjust distribution of wealth is in making land common property.

But this is a truth which, in the present state of society, will arouse

the most bitter antagonism, and must fight its way, inch by inch. It

will be necessary, therefore, to meet the objections of those who,

even when driven to admit this truth, will declare that it cannot be

practically applied.

In doing this we shall bring our previous reasoning to a new and

crucial test. Just as we try addition by subtraction and multiplication

by division, so may we, by testing the sufficiency of the remedy, prove

the correctness of our conclusions as to the cause of the evil.

The laws of the universe are harmonious. And if the remedy to which we

have been led is the true one, it must be consistent with justice; it

must be practicable of application; it must accord with the tendencies

of social development and must harmonize with other reforms.

All this I propose to show. I propose to meet all practical objections

that can be raised, and to show that this simple measure is not only

easy of application; but that it is a sufficient remedy for all the

evils which, as modern progress goes on, arise from the greater

and greater inequality in the distribution of wealth—that it will

substitute equality for inequality, plenty for want, justice for

injustice, social strength for social weakness, and will open the way

to grander and nobler advances of civilization.

I thus propose to show that the laws of the universe do not deny the

natural aspirations of the human heart; that the progress of society

might be, and, if it is to continue, must be, toward equality, not

toward inequality; and that the economic harmonies prove the truth

perceived by the Stoic Emperor—

“_We are made for co-operation—like feet, like hands, like eyelids,

like the rows of the upper and lower teeth._”

FOOTNOTES:

[44] To say nothing of superior want of conscience, which is often the

determining quality which makes a millionaire out of one who otherwise

might have been a poor man.

[45] Franklin, in his inimitable way, relates how Keimer finally broke

his resolution and ordering a roast pig invited two lady friends to

dine with him, but the pig being brought in before the company arrived,

Keimer could not resist the temptation and ate it all himself.

BOOK VII.

JUSTICE OF THE REMEDY.

CHAPTER I.—INJUSTICE OF PRIVATE PROPERTY IN LAND.

CHAPTER II.—ENSLAVEMENT OF LABORERS THE ULTIMATE RESULT OF PRIVATE

PROPERTY IN LAND.

CHAPTER III.—CLAIM OF LAND OWNERS TO COMPENSATION.

CHAPTER IV.—PROPERTY IN LAND HISTORICALLY CONSIDERED.

CHAPTER V.—PROPERTY IN LAND IN THE UNITED STATES.

Justice is a relation of congruity which really subsists between two

things. This relation is always the same, whatever being considers it,

whether it be God, or an angel, or lastly a man.—_Montesquieu._

CHAPTER I.

THE INJUSTICE OF PRIVATE PROPERTY IN LAND.

When it is proposed to abolish private property in land the first

question that will arise is that of justice. Though often warped by

habit, superstition, and selfishness into the most distorted forms, the

sentiment of justice is yet fundamental to the human mind, and whatever

dispute arouses the passions of men, the conflict is sure to rage, not

so much as to the question “Is it wise?” as to the question “Is it

right?”

This tendency of popular discussions to take an ethical form has

a cause. It springs from a law of the human mind; it rests upon a

vague and instinctive recognition of what is probably the deepest

truth we can grasp. That alone is wise which is just; that alone is

enduring which is right. In the narrow scale of individual actions and

individual life this truth may be often obscured, but in the wider

field of national life it everywhere stands out.

I bow to this arbitrament, and accept this test. If our inquiry into

the cause which makes low wages and pauperism the accompaniments of

material progress has led us to a correct conclusion, it will bear

translation from terms of political economy into terms of ethics, and

as the source of social evils show a wrong. If it will not do this, it

is disproved. If it will do this, it is proved by the final decision.

If private property in land be just, then is the remedy I propose a

false one; if, on the contrary, private property in land be unjust,

then is this remedy the true one.

What constitutes the rightful basis of property? What is it that

enables a man justly to say of a thing, “It is mine?” From what springs

the sentiment which acknowledges his exclusive right as against all the

world? Is it not, primarily, the right of a man to himself to the use

of his own powers, to the enjoyment of the fruits of his own exertions?

Is it not this individual right, which springs from and is testified

to by the natural facts of individual organization—the fact that each

particular pair of hands obey a particular brain and are related to a

particular stomach; the fact that each man is a definite, coherent,

independent whole—which alone justifies individual ownership? As a man

belongs to himself, so his labor when put in concrete form belongs to

him.

And for this reason, that which a man makes or produces is his own, as

against all the world—to enjoy or to destroy, to use, to exchange, or

to give. No one else can rightfully claim it, and his exclusive right

to it involves no wrong to any one else. Thus there is to everything

produced by human exertion a clear and indisputable title to exclusive

possession and enjoyment, which is perfectly consistent with justice,

as it descends from the original producer, in whom it vested by natural

law. The pen with which I am writing is justly mine. No other human

being can rightfully lay claim to it, for in me is the title of the

producers who made it. It has become mine, because transferred to me by

the stationer, to whom it was transferred by the importer, who obtained

the exclusive right to it by transfer from the manufacturer, in whom,

by the same process of purchase, vested the rights of those who dug the

material from the ground and shaped it into a pen. Thus, my exclusive

right of ownership in the pen springs from the natural right of the

individual to the use of his own faculties.

Now, this is not only the original source from which all ideas of

exclusive ownership arise—as is evident from the natural tendency

of the mind to revert to it when the idea of exclusive ownership is

questioned, and the manner in which social relations develop—but it is

necessarily the only source. There can be to the ownership of anything

no rightful title which is not derived from the title of the producer

and does not rest upon the natural right of the man to himself. There

can be no other rightful title, because (1st) there is no other natural

right from which any other title can be derived, and (2d) because the

recognition of any other title is inconsistent with and destructive of

this.

For (1st) what other right exists from which the right to the exclusive

possession of anything can be derived, save the right of a man to

himself? With what other power is man by nature clothed, save the power

of exerting his own faculties? How can he in any other way act upon or

affect material things or other men? Paralyze the motor nerves, and

your man has no more external influence or power than a log or stone.

From what else, then, can the right of possessing and controlling

things be derived? If it spring not from man himself, from what can it

spring? Nature acknowledges no ownership or control in man save as the

result of exertion. In no other way can her treasures be drawn forth,

her powers directed, or her forces utilized or controlled. She makes

no discriminations among men, but is to all absolutely impartial. She

knows no distinction between master and slave, king and subject, saint

and sinner. All men to her stand upon an equal footing and have equal

rights. She recognizes no claim but that of labor, and recognizes that

without respect to the claimant. If a pirate spread his sails, the wind

will fill them as well as it will fill those of a peaceful merchantman

or missionary bark; if a king and a common man be thrown overboard,

neither can keep his head above water except by swimming; birds will

not come to be shot by the proprietor of the soil any quicker than

they will come to be shot by the poacher; fish will bite or will not

bite at a hook in utter disregard as to whether it is offered them by

a good little boy who goes to Sunday-school, or a bad little boy who

plays truant; grain will grow only as the ground is prepared and the

seed is sown; it is only at the call of labor that ore can be raised

from the mine; the sun shines and the rain falls, alike upon just and

unjust. The laws of nature are the decrees of the Creator. There is

written in them no recognition of any right save that of labor; and in

them is written broadly and clearly the equal right of all men to the

use and enjoyment of nature; to apply to her by their exertions, and to

receive and possess her reward. Hence, as nature gives only to labor,

the exertion of labor in production is the only title to exclusive

possession.

2d. This right of ownership that springs from labor excludes the

possibility of any other right of ownership. If a man be rightfully

entitled to the produce of his labor, then no one can be rightfully

entitled to the ownership of anything which is not the produce of his

labor, or the labor of some one else from whom the right has passed

to him. If production give to the producer the right to exclusive

possession and enjoyment, there can rightfully be no exclusive

possession and enjoyment of anything not the production of labor, and

the recognition of private property in land is a wrong. For the right

to the produce of labor cannot be enjoyed without the right to the free

use of the opportunities offered by nature, and to admit the right of

property in these is to deny the right of property in the produce of

labor. When non-producers can claim as rent a portion of the wealth

created by producers, the right of the producers to the fruits of their

labor is to that extent denied.

There is no escape from this position. To affirm that a man can

rightfully claim exclusive ownership in his own labor when embodied in

material things, is to deny that any one can rightfully claim exclusive

ownership in land. To affirm the rightfulness of property in land,

is to affirm a claim which has no warrant in nature, as against a

claim founded in the organization of man and the laws of the material

universe.

What most prevents the realization of the injustice of private

property in land is the habit of including all the things that are

made the subject of ownership in one category, as property, or, if any

distinction is made, drawing the line, according to the unphilosophical

distinction of the lawyers, between personal property and real

estate, or things movable and things immovable. The real and natural

distinction is between things which are the produce of labor and things

which are the gratuitous offerings of nature; or, to adopt the terms of

political economy, between wealth and land.

These two classes of things are in essence and relations widely

different, and to class them together as property is to confuse all

thought when we come to consider the justice or the injustice, the

right or the wrong of property.

A house and the lot on which it stands are alike property, as being

the subject of ownership, and are alike classed by the lawyers as real

estate. Yet in nature and relations they differ widely. The one is

produced by human labor, and belongs to the class in political economy

styled wealth. The other is a part of nature, and belongs to the class

in political economy styled land.

The essential character of the one class of things is that they embody

labor, are brought into being by human exertion, their existence

or non-existence, their increase or diminution, depending on man.

The essential character of the other class of things is that they

do not embody labor, and exist irrespective of human exertion and

irrespective of man; they are the field or environment in which man

finds himself; the storehouse from which his needs must be supplied,

the raw material upon which, and the forces with which alone his labor

can act.

The moment this distinction is realized, that moment is it seen that

the sanction which natural justice gives to one species of property is

denied to the other; that the rightfulness which attaches to individual

property in the produce of labor implies the wrongfulness of individual

property in land; that, whereas the recognition of the one places all

men upon equal terms, securing to each the due reward of his labor,

the recognition of the other is the denial of the equal rights of men,

permitting those who do not labor to take the natural reward of those

who do.

Whatever may be said for the institution of private property in land,

it is therefore plain that it cannot be defended on the score of

justice.

The equal right of all men to the use of land is as clear as their

equal right to breathe the air—it is a right proclaimed by the fact of

their existence. For we cannot suppose that some men have a right to be

in this world and others no right.

If we are all here by the equal permission of the Creator, we are all

here with an equal title to the enjoyment of his bounty—with an equal

right to the use of all that nature so impartially offers.[46] This is

a right which is natural and inalienable; it is a right which vests

in every human being as he enters the world, and which during his

continuance in the world can be limited only by the equal rights of

others. There is in nature no such thing as a fee simple in land. There

is on earth no power which can rightfully make a grant of exclusive

ownership in land. If all existing men were to unite to grant away

their equal rights, they could not grant away the right of those who

follow them. For what are we but tenants for a day? Have we made the

earth, that we should determine the rights of those who after us shall

tenant it in their turn? The Almighty, who created the earth for man

and man for the earth, has entailed it upon all the generations of

the children of men by a decree written upon the constitution of all

things—a decree which no human action can bar and no prescription

determine. Let the parchments be ever so many, or possession ever

so long, natural justice can recognize no right in one man to the

possession and enjoyment of land that is not equally the right of all

his fellows. Though his titles have been acquiesced in by generation

after generation, to the landed estates of the Duke of Westminster

the poorest child that is born in London to-day has as much right as

has his eldest son.[47] Though the sovereign people of the State of

New York consent to the lauded possessions of the Astors, the puniest

infant that comes wailing into the world in the squalidest room of the

most miserable tenement house, becomes at that moment seized of an

equal right with the millionaires. And it is robbed if the right is

denied.

Our previous conclusions, irresistible in themselves, thus stand

approved by the highest and final test. Translated from terms of

political economy into terms of ethics they show a wrong as the source

of the evils which increase as material progress goes on.

The masses of men, who in the midst of abundance suffer want; who,

clothed with political freedom, are condemned to the wages of slavery;

to whose toil labor-saving inventions bring no relief, but rather seem

to rob them of a privilege, instinctively feel that “there is something

wrong.” And they are right.

The wide-spreading social evils which everywhere oppress men amid

an advancing civilization spring from a great primary wrong—the

appropriation, as the exclusive property of some men, of the land on

which and from which all must live. From this fundamental injustice

flow all the injustices which distort and endanger modern development,

which condemn the producer of wealth to poverty and pamper the

non-producer in luxury, which rear the tenement house with the palace,

plant the brothel behind the church, and compel us to build prisons as

we open new schools.

There is nothing strange or inexplicable in the phenomena that are

now perplexing the world. It is not that material progress is not in

itself a good; it is not that nature has called into being children

for whom she has failed to provide; it is not that the Creator has

left on natural laws a taint of injustice at which even the human mind

revolts, that material progress brings such bitter fruits. That amid

our highest civilization men faint and die with want is not due to the

niggardliness of nature, but to the injustice of man. Vice and misery,

poverty and pauperism, are not the legitimate results of increase

of population and industrial development; they only follow increase

of population and industrial development because land is treated as

private property—they are the direct and necessary results of the

violation of the supreme law of justice, involved in giving to some men

the exclusive possession of that which nature provides for all men.

The recognition of individual proprietorship of land is the denial of

the natural rights of other individuals—it is a wrong which _must_

show itself in the inequitable division of wealth. For as labor cannot

produce without the use of land, the denial of the equal right to the

use of land is necessarily the denial of the right of labor to its own

produce. If one man can command the land upon which others must labor,

he can appropriate the produce of their labor as the price of his

permission to labor. The fundamental law of nature, that her enjoyment

by man shall be consequent upon his exertion, is thus violated. The one

receives without producing; the others produce without receiving. The

one is unjustly enriched; the others are robbed. To this fundamental

wrong we have traced the unjust distribution of wealth which is

separating modern society into the very rich and the very poor. It

is the continuous increase of rent—the price that labor is compelled

to pay for the use of land, which strips the many of the wealth they

justly earn, to pile it up in the hands of the few, who do nothing to

earn it.

Why should they who suffer from this injustice hesitate for one moment

to sweep it away? Who are the land holders that they should thus be

permitted to reap where they have not sown?

Consider for a moment the utter absurdity of the titles by which we

permit to be gravely passed from John Doe to Richard Roe the right

exclusively to possess the earth, giving absolute dominion as against

all others. In California our land titles go back to the Supreme

Government of Mexico, who took from the Spanish King, who took from

the Pope, when he by a stroke of the pen divided lands yet to be

discovered between the Spanish or Portuguese—or if you please they rest

upon conquest. In the Eastern States they go back to treaties with

Indians and grants from English Kings; in Louisiana to the Government

of France; in Florida to the Government of Spain; while in England they

go back to the Norman conquerors. Everywhere, not to a right which

obliges, but to a force which compels. And when a title rests but on

force, no complaint can be made when force annuls it. Whenever the

people, having the power, choose to annul those titles, no objection

can be made in the name of justice. There have existed men who had

the power to hold or to give exclusive possession of portions of the

earth’s surface, but when and where did there exist the human being who

had the right?

The right to exclusive ownership of anything of human production is

clear. No matter how many the hands through which it has passed,

there was, at the beginning of the line, human labor—some one who,

having procured or produced it by his exertions, had to it a clear

title as against all the rest of mankind, and which could justly pass

from one to another by sale or gift. But at the end of what string of

conveyances or grants can be shown or supposed a like title to any part

of the material universe? To improvements such an original title can

be shown; but it is a title only to the improvements, and not to the

land itself. If I clear a forest, drain a swamp, or fill a morass, all

I can justly claim is the value given by these exertions. They give me

no right to the land itself, no claim other than to my equal share with

every other member of the community in the value which is added to it

by the growth of the community.

But it will be said: There are improvements which in time become

indistinguishable from the land itself! Very well; then the title

to the improvements becomes blended with the title to the land; the

individual right is lost in the common right. It is the greater that

swallows up the less, not the less that swallows up the greater. Nature

does not proceed from man, but man from nature, and it is into the

bosom of nature that he and all his works must return again.