Yet, it will be said: As every man has a right to the use and enjoyment

of nature, the man who is using land must be permitted the exclusive

right to its use in order that he may get the full benefit of his

labor. But there is no difficulty in determining where the individual

right ends and the common right begins. A delicate and exact test is

supplied by value, and with its aid there is no difficulty, no matter

how dense population may become, in determining and securing the

exact rights of each, the equal rights of all. The value of land, as

we have seen, is the price of monopoly. It is not the absolute, but

the relative, capability of land that determines its value. No matter

what may be its intrinsic qualities, land that is no better than other

land which may be had for the using can have no value. And the value

of land always measures the difference between it and the best land

that may be had for the using. Thus, the value of land expresses in

exact and tangible form the right of the community in land held by an

individual; and rent expresses the exact amount which the individual

should pay to the community to satisfy the equal rights of all other

members of the community. Thus, if we concede to priority of possession

the undisturbed use of land, confiscating rent for the benefit of the

community, we reconcile the fixity of tenure which is necessary for

improvement with a full and complete recognition of the equal rights of

all to the use of land.

As for the deduction of a complete and exclusive individual right

to land from priority of occupation, that is, if possible, the most

absurd ground on which land ownership can be defended. Priority of

occupation give exclusive and perpetual title to the surface of a globe

on which, in the order of nature, countless generations succeed each

other! Had the men of the last generation any better right to the use

of this world than we of this? or the men of a hundred years ago? or

of a thousand years ago? Had the mound-builders, or the cave-dwellers,

the contemporaries of the mastodon and the three-toed horse, or the

generations still further back, who, in dim æons that we can think

of only as geologic periods, followed each other on the earth we now

tenant for our little day?

Has the first comer at a banquet the right to turn back all the chairs

and claim that none of the other guests shall partake of the food

provided, except as they make terms with him? Does the first man who

presents a ticket at the door of a theater, and passes in, acquire by

his priority the right to shut the doors and have the performance go

on for him alone? Does the first passenger who enters a railroad car

obtain the right to scatter his baggage over all the seats and compel

the passengers who come in after him to stand up?

The cases are perfectly analogous. We arrive and we depart, guests

at a banquet continually spread, spectators and participants in an

entertainment where there is room for all who come; passengers from

station to station, on an orb that whirls through space—our rights to

take and possess cannot be exclusive; they must be bounded everywhere

by the equal rights of others. Just as the passenger in a railroad car

may spread himself and his baggage over as many seats as he pleases,

until other passengers come in, so may a settler take and use as much

land as he chooses, until it is needed by others—a fact which is shown

by the land acquiring a value—when his right must be curtailed by the

equal rights of the others, and no priority of appropriation can give

a right which will bar these equal rights of others. If this were not

the case, then by priority of appropriation one man could acquire and

could transmit to whom he pleased, not merely the exclusive right to

160 acres, or to 640 acres, but to a whole township, a whole State, a

whole continent.

And to this manifest absurdity does the recognition of individual right

to land come when carried to its ultimate—that any one human being,

could he concentrate in himself the individual rights to the land of

any country, could expel therefrom all the rest of its inhabitants; and

could he thus concentrate the individual rights to the whole surface of

the globe, he alone of all the teeming population of the earth would

have the right to live.

And what upon this supposition would occur is, upon a smaller scale,

realized in actual fact. The territorial lords of Great Britain, to

whom grants of land have given the “white parasols and elephants mad

with pride,” have over and over again expelled from large districts

the native population, whose ancestors had lived on the land from

immemorial times—driven them off to emigrate, to become paupers, or

to starve. And on uncultivated tracts of land in the new State of

California may be seen the blackened chimneys of homes from which

settlers have been driven by force of laws which ignore natural right,

and great stretches of land which might be populous are desolate,

because the recognition of exclusive ownership has put it in the

power of one human creature to forbid his fellows from using it. The

comparative handful of proprietors who own the surface of the British

Islands would be doing only what English law gives them full power

to do, and what many of them have done on a smaller scale already,

were they to exclude the millions of British people from their native

islands. And such an exclusion, by which a few hundred thousand should

at will banish thirty million people from their native country, while

it would be more striking, would not be a whit more repugnant to

natural right than the spectacle now presented, of the vast body of the

British people being compelled to pay such enormous sums to a few of

their number for the privilege of being permitted to live upon and use

the land which they so fondly call their own; which is endeared to them

by memories so tender and so glorious, and for which they are held in

duty bound, if need be, to spill their blood and lay down their lives.

I refer only to the British Islands, because, land ownership being

more concentrated there, they afford a more striking illustration of

what private property in land necessarily involves. “To whomsoever the

soil at any time belongs, to him belong the fruits of it,” is a truth

that becomes more and more apparent as population becomes denser and

invention and improvement add to productive power; but it is everywhere

a truth—as much in our new States as in the British Islands or by the

banks of the Indus.

FOOTNOTES:

[46] In saying that private property in land can, in the ultimate

analysis, be justified only on the theory that some men have a better

right to existence than others, I am stating only what the advocates

of the existing system have themselves perceived. What gave to Malthus

his popularity among the ruling classes—what caused his illogical book

to be received as a new revelation, induced sovereigns to send him

decorations, and the meanest rich man in England to propose to give him

a living, was the fact that he furnished a plausible reason for the

assumption that some have a better right to existence than others—an

assumption which is necessary for the justification of private property

in land, and which Malthus clearly states in the declaration that the

tendency of population is constantly to bring into the world human

beings for whom nature refuses to provide, and who consequently “have

not the slightest right to any share in the existing store of the

necessaries of life;” whom she tells as interlopers to begone, “and

does not hesitate to extort by force obedience to her mandates,”

employing for that purpose “hunger and pestilence, war and crime,

mortality and neglect of infantine life, prostitution and syphilis.”

And to-day this Malthusian doctrine is the ultimate defense upon which

those who justify private property in land fall back. In no other way

can it be logically defended.

[47] This natural and inalienable right to the equal use and enjoyment

of land is so apparent that it has been recognized by men wherever

force or habit has not blunted first perceptions. To give but one

instance: The white settlers of New Zealand found themselves unable

to get from the Maoris what the latter considered a complete title

to land, because, although a whole tribe might have consented to a

sale, they would still claim with every new child born among them an

additional payment on the ground that they had parted with only their

own rights, and could not sell those of the unborn. The government was

obliged to step in and settle the matter by buying land for a tribal

annuity, in which every child that is born acquires a share.

CHAPTER II.

THE ENSLAVEMENT OF LABORERS THE ULTIMATE RESULT OF PRIVATE PROPERTY IN

LAND.

If chattel slavery be unjust, then is private property in land unjust.

For let the circumstances be what they may—the ownership of land will

always give the ownership of men, to a degree measured by the necessity

(real or artificial) for the use of land. This is but a statement in

different form of the law of rent.

And when that necessity is absolute—when starvation is the alternative

to the use of land, then does the ownership of men involved in the

ownership of land become absolute.

Place one hundred men on an island from which there is no escape, and

whether you make one of these men the absolute owner of the other

ninety-nine, or the absolute owner of the soil of the island, will make

no difference either to him or to them.

In the one case, as the other, the one will be the absolute master of

the ninety-nine—his power extending even to life and death, for simply

to refuse them permission to live upon the island would be to force

them into the sea.

Upon a larger scale, and through more complex relations, the same cause

must operate in the same way and to the same end—the ultimate result,

the enslavement of laborers, becoming apparent just as the pressure

increases which compels them to live on and from land which is treated

as the exclusive property of others. Take a country in which the soil

is divided among a number of proprietors, instead of being in the

hands of one, and in which, as in modern production, the capitalist has

been specialized from the laborer, and manufactures and exchange, in

all their many branches, have been separated from agriculture. Though

less direct and obvious, the relations between the owners of the soil

and the laborers will, with increase of population and the improvement

of the arts, tend to the same absolute mastery on the one hand and the

same abject helplessness on the other, as in the case of the island

we have supposed. Rent will advance, while wages will fall. Of the

aggregate produce, the land owner will get a constantly increasing, the

laborer a constantly diminishing share. Just as removal to cheaper land

becomes difficult or impossible, laborers, no matter what they produce,

will be reduced to a bare living, and the free competition among them,

where land is monopolized, will force them to a condition which, though

they may be mocked with the titles and insignia of freedom, will be

virtually that of slavery.

There is nothing strange in the fact that, in spite of the enormous

increase in productive power which this century has witnessed, and

which is still going on, the wages of labor in the lower and wider

strata of industry should everywhere tend to the wages of slavery—just

enough to keep the laborer in working condition. For the ownership

of the land on which and from which a man must live is virtually the

ownership of the man himself, and in acknowledging the right of some

individuals to the exclusive use and enjoyment of the earth, we condemn

other individuals to slavery as fully and as completely as though we

had formally made them chattels.

In a simpler form of society, where production chiefly consists in

the direct application of labor to the soil, the slavery that is the

necessary result of according to some the exclusive right to the soil

from which all must live, is plainly seen in helotism, in villeinage,

in serfdom.

Chattel slavery originated in the capture of prisoners in war, and,

though it has existed to some extent in every part of the globe, its

area has been small, its effects trivial, as compared with the forms of

slavery which have originated in the appropriation of land. No people

as a mass have ever been reduced to chattel slavery to men of their own

race, nor yet on any large scale has any people ever been reduced to

slavery of this kind by conquest. The general subjection of the many

to the few, which we meet with wherever society has reached a certain

development, has resulted from the appropriation of land as individual

property. It is the ownership of the soil that everywhere gives the

ownership of the men that live upon it. It is slavery of this kind

to which the enduring pyramids and the colossal monuments of Egypt

yet bear witness, and of the institution of which we have, perhaps, a

vague tradition in the biblical story of the famine during which the

Pharaoh purchased up the lands of the people. It was slavery of this

kind to which, in the twilight of history, the conquerors of Greece

reduced the original inhabitants of that peninsula, transforming them

into helots by making them pay rent for their lands. It was the growth

of the _latifundia_, or great landed estates, which transmuted the

population of ancient Italy, from a race of hardy husbandmen, whose

robust virtues conquered the world, into a race of cringing bondsmen;

it was the appropriation of the land as the absolute property of their

chieftains which gradually turned the descendants of free and equal

Gallic, Teutonic and Hunnish warriors into colonii and villains, and

which changed the independent burghers of Sclavonic village communities

into the boors of Russia and the serfs of Poland; which instituted the

feudalism of China and Japan, as well as that of Europe, and which made

the High Chiefs of Polynesia the all but absolute masters of their

fellows. How it came to pass that the Aryan shepherds and warriors

who, as comparative philology tells us, descended from the common

birthplace of the Indo-Germanic race into the lowlands of India, were

turned into the suppliant and cringing Hindoo, the Sanscrit verse

which I have before quoted gives us a hint. The white parasols and the

elephants mad with pride of the Indian Rajah are the flowers of grants

of land. And could we find the key to the records of the long-buried

civilizations that lie entombed in the gigantic ruins of Yucatan and

Guatemala, telling at once of the pride of a ruling class and the

unrequited toil to which the masses were condemned, we should read,

in all human probability, of a slavery imposed upon the great body of

the people through the appropriation of the land as the property of

a few—of another illustration of the universal truth that they who

possess the land are masters of the men who dwell upon it.

The necessary relation between labor and land, the absolute power which

the ownership of land gives over men who cannot live but by using it,

explains what is otherwise inexplicable—the growth and persistence of

institutions, manners, and ideas so utterly repugnant to the natural

sense of liberty and equality.

When the idea of individual ownership, which so justly and naturally

attaches to things of human production, is extended to land, all the

rest is a mere matter of development. The strongest and most cunning

easily acquire a superior share in this species of property, which is

to be had, not by production, but by appropriation, and in becoming

lords of the land they become necessarily lords of their fellow-men.

The ownership of land is the basis of aristocracy. It was not nobility

that gave land, but the possession of land that gave nobility. All the

enormous privileges of the nobility of medieval Europe flowed from

their position as the owners of the soil. The simple principle of the

ownership of the soil produced, on the one side, the lord, on the

other, the vassal—the one having all rights, the other none. The right

of the lord to the soil acknowledged and maintained, those who lived

upon it could do so only upon his terms. The manners and conditions of

the times made those terms include services and servitudes, as well as

rents in produce or money, but the essential thing that compelled them

was the ownership of land. This power exists wherever the ownership

of land exists, and can be brought out wherever the competition for

the use of land is great enough to enable the landlord to make his

own terms. The English land owner of to-day has, in the law which

recognizes his exclusive right to the land, essentially all the power

which his predecessor the feudal baron had. He might command rent in

services or servitudes. He might compel his tenants to dress themselves

in a particular way, to profess a particular religion, to send their

children to a particular school, to submit their differences to his

decision, to fall upon their knees when he spoke to them, to follow him

around dressed in his livery, or to sacrifice to him female honor, if

they would prefer these things to being driven off his land. He could

demand, in short, any terms on which men would still consent to live

on his land, and the law could not prevent him so long as it did not

qualify his ownership, for compliance with them would assume the form

of a free contract or voluntary act. And English landlords do exercise

such of these powers as in the manners of the times they care to.

Having shaken off the obligation of providing for the defense of the

country, they no longer need the military service of their tenants, and

the possession of wealth and power being now shown in other ways than

by long trains of attendants, they no longer care for personal service.

But they habitually control the votes of their tenants, and dictate to

them in many little ways. That “right reverend father in God,” Bishop

Lord Plunkett, evicted a number of his poor Irish tenants because they

would not send their children to Protestant Sunday-schools; and to

that Earl of Leitrim for whom Nemesis tarried so long before she sped

the bullet of an assassin, even darker crimes are imputed; while, at

the cold promptings of greed, cottage after cottage has been pulled

down and family after family forced into the roads. The principle that

permits this is the same principle that in ruder times and a simpler

social state enthralled the great masses of the common people and

placed such a wide gulf between noble and peasant. Where the peasant

was made a serf, it was simply by forbidding him to leave the estate

on which he was born, thus artificially producing the condition we

supposed on the island. In sparsely settled countries this is necessary

to produce absolute slavery, but where land is fully occupied,

competition may produce substantially the same conditions. Between the

condition of the rack-rented Irish peasant and the Russian serf, the

advantage was in many things on the side of the serf. The serf did not

starve.

Now, as I think I have conclusively proved, it is the same cause which

has in every age degraded and enslaved the laboring masses that is

working in the civilized world to-day. Personal liberty—that is to say,

the liberty to move about—is everywhere conceded, while of political

and legal inequality there are in the United States no vestiges,

and in the most backward civilized countries but few. But the great

cause of inequality remains, and is manifesting itself in the unequal

distribution of wealth. The essence of slavery is that it takes from

the laborer all he produces save enough to support an animal existence,

and to this minimum the wages of free labor, under existing conditions,

unmistakably tend. Whatever be the increase of productive power, rent

steadily tends to swallow up the gain, and more than the gain.

Thus the condition of the masses in every civilized country is, or

is tending to become, that of virtual slavery under the forms of

freedom. And it is probable that of all kinds of slavery this is the

most cruel and relentless. For the laborer is robbed of the produce

of his labor and compelled to toil for a mere subsistence; but his

taskmasters, instead of human beings, assume the form of imperious

necessities. Those to whom his labor is rendered and from whom his

wages are received are often driven in their turn—contact between the

laborers and the ultimate beneficiaries of their labor is sundered,

and individuality is lost. The direct responsibility of master to

slave, a responsibility which exercises a softening influence upon

the great majority of men, does not arise; it is not one human being

who seems to drive another to unremitting and ill-requited toil,

but “the inevitable laws of supply and demand,” for which no one in

particular is responsible. The maxims of Cato the Censor—maxims which

were regarded with abhorrence even in an age of cruelty and universal

slave-holding—that after as much work as possible is obtained from a

slave he should be turned out to die, become the common rule; and even

the selfish interest which prompts the master to look after the comfort

and well-being of the slave is lost. Labor has become a commodity, and

the laborer a machine. There are no masters and slaves, no owners and

owned, but only buyers and sellers. The higgling of the market takes

the place of every other sentiment.

When the slaveholders of the South looked upon the condition of the

free laboring poor in the most advanced civilized countries, it is no

wonder that they easily persuaded themselves of the divine institution

of slavery. That the field hands of the South were as a class better

fed, better lodged, better clothed; that they had less anxiety and

more of the amusements and enjoyments of life than the agricultural

laborers of England there can be no doubt; and even in the Northern

cities, visiting slaveholders might see and hear of things impossible

under what they called their organization of labor. In the Southern

States, during the days of slavery, the master who would have compelled

his negroes to work and live as large classes of free white men and

women are compelled in free countries to work and live, would have

been deemed infamous, and if public opinion had not restrained him,

his own selfish interest in the maintenance of the health and strength

of his chattels would. But in London, New York, and Boston, among

people who have given, and would give again, money and blood to free

the slave, where no one could abuse a beast in public without arrest

and punishment, barefooted and ragged children may be seen running

around the streets even in the winter time, and in squalid garrets and

noisome cellars women work away their lives for wages that fail to

keep them in proper warmth and nourishment. Is it any wonder that to

the slaveholders of the South the demand for the abolition of slavery

seemed like the cant of hypocrisy?

And now that slavery has been abolished, the planters of the South

find they have sustained no loss. Their ownership of the land upon

which the freedmen must live gives them practically as much command of

labor as before, while they are relieved of responsibility, sometimes

very expensive. The negroes as yet have the alternative of emigrating,

and a great movement of that kind seems now about commencing, but as

population increases and land becomes dear, the planters will get a

greater proportionate share of the earnings of their laborers than

they did under the system of chattel slavery, and the laborers a less

share—for under the system of chattel slavery the slaves always got

at least enough to keep them in good physical health, but in such

countries as England there are large classes of laborers who do not get

that.[48]

The influences which, wherever there is personal relation between

master and slave, slip in to modify chattel slavery, and to prevent the

master from exerting to its fullest extent his power over the slave,

also showed themselves in the ruder forms of serfdom that characterized

the earlier periods of European development, and aided by religion,

and, perhaps, as in chattel slavery, by the more enlightened but still

selfish interests of the lord, and hardening into custom, universally

fixed a limit to what the owner of the land could extort from the serf

or peasant, so that the competition of men without means of existence

bidding against each other for access to the means of existence, was

nowhere suffered to go to its full length and exert its full power of

deprivation and degradation. The helots of Greece, the métayers of

Italy, the serfs of Russia and Poland, the peasants of feudal Europe,

rendered to their landlords a fixed proportion either of their produce

or their labor, and were not generally squeezed past that point. But

the influences which thus stepped in to modify the extortive power of

land ownership, and which may still be seen on English estates where

the landlord and his family deem it their duty to send medicines and

comforts to the sick and infirm, and to look after the well-being of

their cottagers, just as the Southern planter was accustomed to look

after his negroes, are lost in the more refined and less obvious form

which serfdom assumes in the more complicated processes of modern

production, which separates so widely and by so many intermediate

gradations the individual whose labor is appropriated from him who

appropriates it, and makes the relations between the members of the

two classes not direct and particular, but indirect and general. In

modern society, competition has free play to force from the laborer the

very utmost he can give, and with what terrific force it is acting may

be seen in the condition of the lowest class in the centers of wealth

and industry. That the condition of this lowest class is not yet more

general, is to be attributed to the great extent of fertile land which

has hitherto been open on this continent, and which has not merely

afforded an escape for the increasing population of the older sections

of the Union, but has greatly relieved the pressure in Europe—in one

country, Ireland, the emigration having been so great as actually to

reduce the population. This avenue of relief cannot last forever. It

is already fast closing up, and as it closes, the pressure must become

harder and harder.

It is not without reason that the wise crow in the Ramayana, the crow

Bushanda, “who has lived in every part of the universe and knows all

events from the beginnings of time,” declares that, though contempt of

worldly advantages is necessary to supreme felicity, yet the keenest

pain possible is inflicted by extreme poverty. The poverty to which in

advancing civilization great masses of men are condemned, is not the

freedom from distraction and temptation which sages have sought and

philosophers have praised; it is a degrading and embruting slavery,

that cramps the higher nature, dulls the finer feelings, and drives

men by its pain to acts which the brutes would refuse. It is into

this helpless, hopeless poverty, that crushes manhood and destroys

womanhood, that robs even childhood of its innocence and joy, that the

working classes are being driven by a force which acts upon them like a

resistless and unpitying machine. The Boston collar manufacturer who

pays his girls two cents an hour may commiserate their condition, but

he, as they, is governed by the law of competition, and cannot pay more

and carry on his business, for exchange is not governed by sentiment.

And so, through all intermediate gradations, up to those who receive

the earnings of labor without return, in the rent of land, it is the

inexorable laws of supply and demand, a power with which the individual

can no more quarrel or dispute than with the winds and the tides, that

seem to press down the lower classes into the slavery of want.

But in reality, the cause is that which always has and always must

result in slavery—the monopolization by some of what nature has

designed for all.

Our boasted freedom necessarily involves slavery, so long as we

recognize private property in land. Until that is abolished,

Declarations of Independence and Acts of Emancipation are in vain. So

long as one man can claim the exclusive ownership of the land from

which other men must live, slavery will exist, and as material progress

goes on, must grow and deepen!

This—and in previous chapters of this book we have traced the process,

step by step—is what is going on in the civilized world to-day. Private

ownership of land is the nether millstone. Material progress is the

upper millstone. Between them, with an increasing pressure, the working

classes are being ground.

FOOTNOTES:

[48] One of the anti-slavery agitators (Col. J. A. Collins) on a visit

to England addressed a large audience in a Scotch manufacturing town,

and wound up as he had been used to in the United States, by giving the

ration which in the slave codes of some of the States fixed the minimum

of maintenance for a slave. He quickly discovered that to many of his

hearers it was an anti-climax.

CHAPTER III.

CLAIM OF LAND OWNERS TO COMPENSATION.

The truth is, and from this truth there can be no escape, that there is

and can be no just title to an exclusive possession of the soil, and

that private property in land is a bold, bare, enormous wrong, like

that of chattel slavery.

The majority of men in civilized communities do not recognize this,

simply because the majority of men do not think. With them whatever is,

is right, until its wrongfulness has been frequently pointed out, and

in general they are ready to crucify whoever first attempts this.

But it is impossible for any one to study political economy, even as at

present taught, or to think at all upon the production and distribution

of wealth, without seeing that property in land differs essentially

from property in things of human production, and that it has no warrant

in abstract justice.

This is admitted, either expressly or tacitly, in every standard work

on political economy, but in general merely by vague admission or

omission. Attention is in general called away from the truth, as a

lecturer on moral philosophy in a slave-holding community might call

away attention from too close a consideration of the natural rights of

men, and private property in land is accepted without comment, as an

existing fact, or is assumed to be necessary to the proper use of land

and the existence of the civilized state.

The examination through which we have passed has proved conclusively

that private property in land cannot be justified on the ground of

utility—that, on the contrary, it is the great cause to which are to

be traced the poverty, misery, and degradation, the social disease

and the political weakness which are showing themselves so menacingly

amid advancing civilization. Expediency, therefore, joins justice in

demanding that we abolish it.

When expediency thus joins justice in demanding that we abolish an

institution that has no broader base or stronger ground than a mere

municipal regulation, what reason can there be for hesitation?

The consideration that seems to cause hesitation, even on the part of

those who see clearly that land by right is common property, is the

idea that having permitted land to be treated as private property for

so long, we should in abolishing it be doing a wrong to those who have

been suffered to base their calculations upon its permanence; that

having permitted land to be held as rightful property, we should by

the resumption of common rights be doing injustice to those who have

purchased it with what was unquestionably their rightful property.

Thus, it is held that if we abolish private property in land, justice

requires that we should fully compensate those who now possess it, as

the British Government, in abolishing the purchase and sale of military

commissions, felt itself bound to compensate those who held commissions

which they had purchased in the belief that they could sell them again,

or as in abolishing slavery in the British West Indies $100,000,000 was

paid the slaveholders.

Even Herbert Spencer, who in his “Social Statics” has so clearly

demonstrated the invalidity of every title by which the exclusive

possession of land is claimed, gives countenance to this idea (though

it seems to me inconsistently) by declaring that justly to estimate

and liquidate the claims of the present landholders “who have either

by their own acts or by the acts of their ancestors given for their

estates equivalents of honestly-earned wealth,” to be “one of the most

intricate problems society will one day have to solve.”

It is this idea that suggests the proposition, which finds advocates

in Great Britain, that the government shall purchase at its market

price the individual proprietorship of the land of the country, and it

was this idea which led John Stuart Mill, although clearly perceiving

the essential injustice of private property in land, to advocate,

not a full resumption of the land, but only a resumption of accruing

advantages in the future. His plan was that a fair and even liberal

estimate should be made of the market value of all the land in the

kingdom, and that future additions to that value, not due to the

improvements of the proprietor, should be taken by the state.

To say nothing of the practical difficulties which such cumbrous plans

involve, in the extension of the functions of government which they

would require and the corruption they would beget, their inherent

and essential defect lies in the impossibility of bridging over by

any compromise the radical difference between wrong and right. Just

in proportion as the interests of the land holders are conserved,

just in that proportion must general interests and general rights be

disregarded, and if land holders are to lose nothing of their special

privileges, the people at large can gain nothing. To buy up individual

property rights would merely be to give the land holders in another

form a claim of the same kind and amount that their possession of

land now gives them; it would be to raise for them by taxation the

same proportion of the earnings of labor and capital that they are

now enabled to appropriate in rent. Their unjust advantage would be

preserved and the unjust disadvantage of the non-landholders would be

continued. To be sure there would be a gain to the people at large

when the advance of rents had made the amount which the land holders

would take under the present system greater than the interest upon the

purchase price of the land at present rates, but this would be only a

future gain, and in the meanwhile there would not only be no relief,

but the burden imposed upon labor and capital for the benefit of the

present land holders would be much increased. For one of the elements

in the present market value of land is the expectation of future

increase of value, and thus, to buy up the lands at market rates and

pay interest upon the purchase money would be to saddle producers not

only with the payment of actual rent, but with the payment in full

of speculative rent. Or to put it in another way: The land would be

purchased at prices calculated upon a lower than the ordinary rate of

interest (for the prospective increase in land values always makes the

market price of land much greater than would be the price of anything

else yielding the same present return), and interest upon the purchase

money would be paid at the ordinary rate. Thus, not only all that the

land yields them now would have to be paid the land owners, but a

considerably larger amount. It would be, virtually, the state taking a

perpetual lease from the present land holders at a considerable advance

in rent over what they now receive. For the present the state would

merely become the agent of the land holders in the collection of their

rents, and would have to pay over to them not only what they received,

but considerably more.

Mr. Mill’s plan for nationalizing the future “unearned increase in the

value of land,” by fixing the present market value of all lands and

appropriating to the state future increase in value, would not add to

the injustice of the present distribution of wealth, but it would not

remedy it. Further speculative advance of rent would cease, and in

the future the people at large would gain the difference between the

increase of rent and the amount at which that increase was estimated

in fixing the present value of land, in which, of course, prospective,

as well as present, value is an element. But it would leave, for all

the future, one class in possession of the enormous advantage over

others which they now have. All that can be said of this plan is, that

it might be better than nothing.

Such inefficient and impracticable schemes may do to talk about, where

any proposition more efficacious would not at present be entertained,

and their discussion is a hopeful sign, as it shows the entrance of the

thin end of the wedge of truth. Justice in men’s mouths is cringingly

humble when she first begins a protest against a time-honored wrong,

and we of the English-speaking nations still wear the collar of the

Saxon thrall, and have been educated to look upon the “vested rights”

of land owners with all the superstitious reverence that ancient

Egyptians looked upon the crocodile. But when the times are ripe for

them, ideas grow, even though insignificant in their first appearance.

One day, the Third Estate covered their heads when the king put on his

hat. A little while thereafter, and the head of a son of St. Louis

rolled from the scaffold. The anti-slavery movement in the United

States commenced with talk of compensating owners, but when four

millions of slaves were emancipated, the owners got no compensation,

nor did they clamor for any. And by the time the people of any such

country as England or the United States are sufficiently aroused to the

injustice and disadvantages of individual ownership of land to induce

them to attempt its nationalization, they will be sufficiently aroused

to nationalize it in a much more direct and easy way than by purchase.

They will not trouble themselves about compensating the proprietors of

land.

Nor is it right that there should be any concern about the proprietors

of land. That such a man as John Stuart Mill should have attached so

much importance to the compensation of land owners as to have urged the

confiscation merely of the future increase in rent, is explainable only

by his acquiescence in the current doctrines that wages are drawn from

capital and that population constantly tends to press upon subsistence.

These blinded him as to the full effects of the private appropriation

of land. He saw that “the claim of the land holder is altogether

subordinate to the general policy of the state,” and that “when private

property in land is not expedient, it is unjust,”[49] but, entangled in

the toils of the Malthusian doctrine, he attributed, as he expressly

states in a paragraph I have previously quoted, the want and suffering

that he saw around him to “the niggardliness of nature, not to the

injustice of man,” and thus to him the nationalization of land seemed

comparatively a little thing, that could accomplish nothing toward the

eradication of pauperism and the abolition of want—ends that could

be reached only as men learned to repress a natural instinct. Great

as he was and pure as he was—warm heart and noble mind—he yet never

saw the true harmony of economic laws, nor realized how from this one

great fundamental wrong flow want and misery, and vice and shame.

Else he could never have written this sentence: “The land of Ireland,

the land of every country, belongs to the people of that country. The

individuals called land owners have no right in morality and justice to

anything but the rent, or compensation for its salable value.”

In the name of the Prophet—figs! If the land of any country belong to

the people of that country, what right, in morality and justice, have

the individuals called land owners to the rent? If the land belong to

the people, why in the name of morality and justice should the people

pay its salable value for their own?

Herbert Spencer says:[50] “_Had_ we to deal with the parties who

originally robbed the human race of its heritage, we might make short

work of the matter?” Why not make short work of the matter anyhow? For

this robbery is not like the robbery of a horse or a sum of money, that

ceases with the act. It is a fresh and continuous robbery, that goes

on every day and every hour. It is not from the produce of the past

that rent is drawn; it is from the produce of the present. It is a

toll levied upon labor constantly and continuously. Every blow of the

hammer, every stroke of the pick, every thrust of the shuttle, every

throb of the steam engine, pay it tribute. It levies upon the earnings

of the men who, deep under ground, risk their lives, and of those who

over white surges hang to reeling masts; it claims the just reward of

the capitalist and the fruits of the inventor’s patient effort; it

takes little children from play and from school, and compels them to

work before their bones are hard or their muscles are firm; it robs

the shivering of warmth; the hungry, of food; the sick, of medicine;

the anxious, of peace. It debases, and embrutes, and embitters. It

crowds families of eight and ten into a single squalid room; it herds

like swine agricultural gangs of boys and girls; it fills the gin

palace and groggery with those who have no comfort in their homes;

it makes lads who might be useful men candidates for prisons and

penitentiaries; it fills brothels with girls who might have known the

pure joy of motherhood; it sends greed and all evil passions prowling

through society as a hard winter drives the wolves to the abodes of

men; it darkens faith in the human soul, and across the reflection of

a just and merciful Creator draws the veil of a hard, and blind, and

cruel fate!

It is not merely a robbery in the past; it is a robbery in the

present—a robbery that deprives of their birthright the infants that

are now coming into the world! Why should we hesitate about making

short work of such a system? Because I was robbed yesterday, and the

day before, and the day before that, is it any reason that I should

suffer myself to be robbed to-day and to-morrow? any reason that I

should conclude that the robber has acquired a vested right to rob me?

If the land belong to the people, why continue to permit land owners

to take the rent, or compensate them in any manner for the loss of

rent? Consider what rent is. It does not arise spontaneously from land;

it is due to nothing that the land owners have done. It represents a

value created by the whole community. Let the land holders have, if

you please, all that the possession of the land would give them in the

absence of the rest of the community. But rent, the creation of the

whole community, necessarily belongs to the whole community.

Try the case of the land holders by the maxims of the common law by

which the rights of man and man are determined. The common law we

are told is the perfection of reason, and certainly the land owners

cannot complain of its decision, for it has been built up by and for

land owners. Now what does the law allow to the innocent possessor when

the land for which he paid his money is adjudged rightfully to belong

to another? Nothing at all. That he purchased in good faith gives him

no right or claim whatever. The law does not concern itself with the

“intricate question of compensation” to the innocent purchaser. The

law does not say, as John Stuart Mill says: “The land belongs to A,

therefore B who has thought himself the owner has no right to anything

but the rent, or compensation for its salable value.” For that would be

indeed like a famous fugitive slave case decision in which the Court

was said to have given the law to the North and the nigger to the

South. The law simply says: “The land belongs to A, let the Sheriff put

him in possession!” It gives the innocent purchaser of a wrongful title

no claim, it allows him no compensation. And not only this, it takes

from him all the improvements that he has in good faith made upon the

land. You may have paid a high price for land, making every exertion

to see that the title is good; you may have held it in undisturbed

possession for years without thought or hint of an adverse claimant;

made it fruitful by your toil or erected upon it a costly building of

greater value than the land itself, or a modest home in which you hope,

surrounded by the fig-trees you have planted and the vines you have

dressed, to pass your declining days; yet if Quirk, Gammon & Snap can

mouse out a technical flaw in your parchments or hunt up some forgotten

heir who never dreamed of his rights, not merely the land, but all

your improvements, may be taken away from you. And not merely that.

According to the common law, when you have surrendered the land and

given up your improvements, you may be called upon to account for the

profits you derived from the land during the time you had it.

Now if we apply to this case of The People _vs._ The Land Owners the

same maxims of justice that have been formulated by land owners into

law, and are applied every day in English and American courts to

disputes between man and man, we shall not only not think of giving

the land holders any compensation for the land, but shall take all the

improvements and whatever else they may have as well.

But I do not propose, and I do not suppose that any one else will

propose, to go so far. It is sufficient if the people resume the

ownership of the land. Let the land owners retain their improvements

and personal property in secure possession.

And in this measure of justice would be no oppression, no injury to any

class. The great cause of the present unequal distribution of wealth,

with the suffering, degradation, and waste that it entails, would be

swept away. Even land holders would share in the general gain. The gain

of even the large land holders would be a real one. The gain of the

small land holders would be enormous. For in welcoming Justice, men

welcome the handmaid of Love. Peace and Plenty follow in her train,

bringing their good gifts, not to some, but to all.

How true this is, we shall hereafter see.

If in this chapter I have spoken of justice and expediency as if

justice were one thing and expediency another, it has been merely to

meet the objections of those who so talk. In justice is the highest and

truest expediency.

FOOTNOTES

[49] Principles of Political Economy, Book I, Chap. 3, Sec. 6.

[50] Social Statics, page 142. [It may be well to say in the new

reprint of this book (1897) that this and all other references to

Herbert Spencer’s “Social Statics” are from the edition of that book

published by D. Appleton & Co., New York, with his consent, from 1864

to 1892. At that time “Social Statics” was repudiated, and a new

edition under the name of “Social Statics, abridged and revised,” has

taken its place. From this, all that the first Social Statics had said

in denial of property in land has been eliminated, and it of course

contains nothing here referred to. Mr. Spencer has also been driven by

the persistent heckling of the English single tax men, who insisted

on asking him the questions suggested in the first Social Statics, to

bring out a small volume, entitled “Mr. Herbert Spencer on the Land

Question,” in which are reprinted in parallel columns Chapter IX of

Social Statics, with what he considers valid answers to himself as

given in “Justice,” 1891. This has also been reprinted by D. Appleton &

Co., and constitutes, I think, the very funniest answer to himself ever

made by a man who claimed to be a philosopher.

CHAPTER IV.

PRIVATE PROPERTY IN LAND HISTORICALLY CONSIDERED.

What more than anything else prevents the realization of the essential

injustice of private property in land and stands in the way of a candid

consideration of any proposition for abolishing it, is that mental

habit which makes anything that has long existed seem natural and

necessary.

We are so used to the treatment of land as individual property, it is

so thoroughly recognized in our laws, manners, and customs, that the

vast majority of people never think of questioning it; but look upon

it as necessary to the use of land. They are unable to conceive, or at

least it does not enter their heads to conceive, of society as existing

or as possible without the reduction of land to private possession. The

first step to the cultivation or improvement of land seems to them to

get for it a particular owner, and a man’s land is looked on by them as

fully and as equitably his, to sell, to lease, to give, or to bequeath,

as his house, his cattle, his goods, or his furniture. The “sacredness

of property” has been preached so constantly and effectively,

especially by those “conservators of ancient barbarism,” as Voltaire

styled the lawyers, that most people look upon the private ownership of

land as the very foundation of civilization, and if the resumption of

land as common property is suggested, think of it at first blush either

as a chimerical vagary, which never has and never can be realized, or

as a proposition to overturn society from its base and bring about a

reversion to barbarism.

If it were true that land had always been treated as private property,

that would not prove the justice or necessity of continuing so to treat

it, any more than the universal existence of slavery, which might once

have been safely affirmed, would prove the justice or necessity of

making property of human flesh and blood.

Not long ago monarchy seemed all but universal, and not only the kings

but the majority of their subjects really believed that no country

could get along without a king. Yet, to say nothing of America, France

now gets along without a king; the Queen of England and Empress of

India has about as much to do with governing her realms as the wooden

figurehead of a ship has in determining its course, and the other

crowned heads of Europe sit, metaphorically speaking, upon barrels of

nitro-glycerine.

Something over a hundred years ago, Bishop Butler, author of the famous

Analogy, declared that “a constitution of civil government without any

religious establishment is a chimerical project of which there is no

example.” As for there being no example, he was right. No government at

that time existed, nor would it have been easy to name one that ever

had existed, without some sort of an established religion; yet in the

United States we have since proved by the practice of a century that it

is possible for a civil government to exist without a state church.

But while, were it true, that land had always and everywhere been

treated as private property would not prove that it should always be

so treated, this is _not_ true. On the contrary, the common right to

land has everywhere been primarily recognized, and private ownership

has nowhere grown up save as the result of usurpation. The primary and

persistent perceptions of mankind are that all have an equal right

to land, and the opinion that private property in land is necessary

to society is but an offspring of ignorance that cannot look beyond

its immediate surroundings—an idea of comparatively modern growth, as

artificial and as baseless as that of the right divine of kings.

The observations of travelers, the researches of the critical

historians who within a recent period have done so much to reconstruct

the forgotten records of the people, the investigations of such men

as Sir Henry Maine, Emile de Laveleye, Professor Nasse of Bonn, and

others, into the growth of institutions, prove that wherever human

society has formed, the common right of men to the use of the earth has

been recognized, and that nowhere has unrestricted individual ownership

been freely adopted. Historically, as ethically, private property in

land is robbery. It nowhere springs from contract; it can nowhere be

traced to perceptions of justice or expediency; it has everywhere had

its birth in war and conquest, and in the selfish use which the cunning

have made of superstition and law.

Wherever we can trace the early history of society, whether in Asia,

in Europe, in Africa, in America, or in Polynesia, land has been

considered, as the necessary relations which human life has to it would

lead to its consideration—as common property, in which the rights

of all who had admitted rights were equal. That is to say, that all

members of the community, all citizens, as we should say, had equal

rights to the use and enjoyment of the land of the community. This

recognition of the common right to land did not prevent the full

recognition of the particular and exclusive right in things which

are the result of labor, nor was it abandoned when the development

of agriculture had imposed the necessity of recognizing exclusive

possession of land in order to secure the exclusive enjoyment of the

results of the labor expended in cultivating it. The division of

land between the industrial units, whether families, joint families,

or individuals, went only as far as was necessary for that purpose,

pasture and forest lands being retained as common, and equality as to

agricultural land being secured, either by a periodical re-division, as

among the Teutonic races, or by the prohibition of alienation, as in

the law of Moses.

This primary adjustment still exists, in more or less intact form, in

the village communities of India, Russia, and the Sclavonic countries

yet, or until recently, subjected to Turkish rule; in the mountain

cantons of Switzerland; among the Kabyles in the north of Africa, and

the Kaffirs in the south; among the native population of Java, and

the aborigines of New Zealand—that is to say, wherever extraneous

influences have left intact the form of primitive social organization.

That it everywhere existed has been within late years abundantly proved

by the researches of many independent students and observers, and which

are, to my knowledge, best summarized in the “Systems of Land Tenures

in Various Countries,” published under authority of the Cobden Club,

and in M. Emile de Laveleye’s “Primitive Property,” to which I would

refer the reader who desires to see this truth displayed in detail.

“In all primitive societies,” says M. de Laveleye, as the result of

an investigation which leaves no part of the world unexplored—“in all

primitive societies, the soil was the joint property of the tribes and

was subject to periodical distribution among all the families, so that

all might live by their labor as nature has ordained. The comfort of

each was thus proportioned to his energy and intelligence; no one, at

any rate, was destitute of the means of subsistence, and inequality

increasing from generation to generation was provided against.”

If M. de Laveleye be right in this conclusion, and that he is right

there can be no doubt, how, it will be asked, has the reduction of land

to private ownership become so general?

The causes which have operated to supplant this original idea of the

equal right to the use of land by the idea of exclusive and unequal

rights may, I think, be everywhere vaguely but certainly traced. They

are everywhere the same which have led to the denial of equal personal

rights and to the establishment of privileged classes.

These causes may be summarized as the concentration of power in the

hands of chieftains and the military class, consequent on a state of

warfare, which enabled them to monopolize common lands; the effect of

conquest, in reducing the conquered to a state of predial slavery, and

dividing their lands among the conquerors, and in disproportionate

share to the chiefs; the differentiation and influence of a sacerdotal

class, and the differentiation and influence of a class of professional

lawyers, whose interests were served by the substitution of exclusive,

in place of common, property in land[51]—inequality once produced

always tending to greater inequality, by the law of attraction.

It was the struggle between this idea of equal rights to the soil and

the tendency to monopolize it in individual possession, that caused

the internal conflicts of Greece and Rome; it was the check given to

this tendency—in Greece by such institutions as those of Lycurgus and

Solon, and in Rome by the Licinian Law and subsequent divisions of

land—that gave to each their days of strength and glory; and it was

the final triumph of this tendency that destroyed both. Great estates

ruined Greece, as afterward “great estates ruined Italy,”[52] and as

the soil, in spite of the warnings of great legislators and statesmen,

passed finally into the possession of a few, population declined, art

sank, the intellect became emasculate, and the race in which humanity

had attained its most splendid development became a by-word and

reproach among men.

The idea of absolute individual property in land, which modern

civilization derived from Rome, reached its full development there in

historic times. When the future mistress of the world first looms up,

each citizen had his little homestead plot, which was inalienable,

and the general domain—“the corn-land which was of public right”—was

subject to common use, doubtless under regulations or customs which

secured equality, as in the Teutonic mark and Swiss allmend. It was

from this public domain constantly extended by conquest, that the

patrician families succeeded in carving their great estates. These

great estates by the power with which the great attracts the less, in

spite of temporary checks by legal limitation and recurring divisions,

finally crushed out all the small proprietors, adding their little

patrimonies to the _latifundia_ of the enormously rich, while they

themselves were forced into the slave gangs, became rent-paying

colonii, or else were driven into the freshly conquered foreign

provinces, where land was given to the veterans of the legions; or to

the metropolis, to swell the ranks of the proletariat who had nothing

to sell but their votes.

Cæsarism, soon passing into an unbridled despotism of the Eastern

type, was the inevitable political result, and the empire, even while

it embraced the world, became in reality a shell, kept from collapse

only by the healthier life of the frontiers, where the land had

been divided among military settlers or the primitive usages longer

survived. But the _latifundia_, which had devoured the strength of

Italy, crept steadily outward, carving the surface of Sicily, Africa,

Spain, and Gaul into great estates cultivated by slaves or tenants.

The hardy virtues born of personal independence died out, an exhaustive

agriculture impoverished the soil, and wild beasts supplanted men,

until at length, with a strength nurtured in equality, the barbarians

broke through; Rome perished; and of a civilization once so proud

nothing was left but ruins.

Thus came to pass that marvelous thing, which at the time of Rome’s

grandeur would have seemed as impossible as it seems now to us that

the Comanches or Flatheads should conquer the United States, or the

Laplanders should desolate Europe. The fundamental cause is to be

sought in the tenure of land. On the one hand, the denial of the common

right to land had resulted in decay; on the other, equality gave

strength.

“Freedom,” says M. de Laveleye (“Primitive Property,” p. 116),

“freedom, and, as a consequence, the ownership of an undivided share

of the common property, to which the head of every family in the clan

was equally entitled, were in the German village essential rights.

This system of absolute equality impressed a remarkable character on

the individual, which explains how small bands of barbarians made

themselves masters of the Roman Empire, in spite of its skillful

administration, its perfect centralization and its civil law, which has

preserved the name of written reason.”

It was, on the other hand, that the heart was eaten out of that great

empire. “Rome perished,” says Professor Seeley, “from the failure of

the crop of men.”

In his lectures on the “History of Civilization in Europe,” and more

elaborately in his lectures on the “History of Civilization in France,”

M. Guizot has vividly described the chaos that in Europe succeeded

the fall of the Roman Empire—a chaos which, as he says, “carried all

things in its bosom,” and from which the structure of modern society

was slowly evolved. It is a picture which cannot be compressed into a

few lines, but suffice it to say that the result of this infusion of

rude but vigorous life into Romanized society was a disorganization

of the German, as well as the Roman structure—both a blending and an

admixture of the idea of common rights in the soil with the idea of

exclusive property, substantially as occurred in those provinces of the

Eastern Empire subsequently overrun by the Turks. The feudal system,

which was so readily adopted and so widely spread, was the result of

such a blending; but underneath, and side by side with the feudal

system, a more primitive organization, based on the common rights of

the cultivators, took root or revived, and has left its traces all

over Europe. This primitive organization, which allots equal shares of

cultivated ground and the common use of uncultivated ground, and which

existed in Ancient Italy as in Saxon England, has maintained itself

beneath absolutism and serfdom in Russia, beneath Moslem oppression in

Servia, and in India has been swept, but not entirely destroyed, by

wave after wave of conquest, and century after century of oppression.

The feudal system, which is not peculiar to Europe, but seems to be the

natural result of the conquest of a settled country by a race among

whom equality and individuality are yet strong, clearly recognized, in

theory at least, that the land belongs to society at large, not to the

individual. Rude outcome of an age in which might stood for right as

nearly as it ever can (for the idea of right is ineradicable from the

human mind, and must in some shape show itself even in the association

of pirates and robbers), the feudal system yet admitted in no one

the uncontrolled and exclusive right to land. A fief was essentially

a trust, and to enjoyment was annexed obligation. The sovereign,

theoretically the representative of the collective power and rights of

the whole people, was in feudal view the only absolute owner of land.

And though land was granted to individual possession, yet in its

possession were involved duties, by which the enjoyer of its revenues

was supposed to render back to the commonwealth an equivalent for the

benefits which from the delegation of the common right he received.

In the feudal scheme the crown lands supported public expenditures

which are now included in the civil list; the church lands defrayed the

cost of public worship and instruction, of the care of the sick and of

the destitute, and maintained a class of men who were supposed to be,

and no doubt to a great extent were, devoting their lives to purposes

of public good; while the military tenures provided for the public

defense. In the obligation under which the military tenant lay to bring

into the field such and such a force when need should be, as well as in

the aid he had to give when the sovereign’s eldest son was knighted,

his daughter married, or the sovereign himself made prisoner of war,

was a rude and inefficient recognition, but still unquestionably a

recognition, of the fact, obvious to the natural perceptions of all

men, that land is not individual but common property.

Nor yet was the control of the possessor of land allowed to extend

beyond his own life. Although the principle of inheritance soon

displaced the principle of selection, as where power is concentrated it

always must, yet feudal law required that there should always be some

representative of a fief, capable of discharging the duties as well as

of receiving the benefits which were annexed to a landed estate, and

who this should be was not left to individual caprice, but rigorously

determined in advance. Hence wardship and other feudal incidents. The

system of primogeniture and its outgrowth, the entail, were in their

beginnings not the absurdities they afterward became.

The basis of the feudal system was the absolute ownership of the

land, an idea which the barbarians readily acquired in the midst

of a conquered population to whom it was familiar; but over this,

feudalism threw a superior right, and the process of infeudation

consisted of bringing individual dominion into subordination to the

superior dominion, which represented the larger community or nation.

Its units were the land owners, who by virtue of their ownership were

absolute lords on their own domains, and who there performed the office

of protection which M. Taine has so graphically described, though

perhaps with too strong a coloring, in the opening chapter of his

“Ancient Régime.” The work of the feudal system was to bind together

these units into nations, and to subordinate the powers and rights of

the individual lords of land to the powers and rights of collective

society, as represented by the suzerain or king.

Thus the feudal system, in its rise and development, was a triumph of

the idea of the common right to land, changing an absolute tenure into

a conditional tenure, and imposing peculiar obligations in return for

the privilege of receiving rent. And during the same time, the power

of land ownership was trenched, as it were, from below, the tenancy

at will of the cultivators of the soil very generally hardening into

tenancy by custom, and the rent which the lord could exact from the

peasant becoming fixed and certain.

And amid the feudal system there remained, or there grew up,

communities of cultivators, more or less subject to feudal dues, who

tilled the soil as common property; and although the lords, where and

when they had the power, claimed pretty much all they thought worth

claiming, yet the idea of common right was strong enough to attach

itself by custom to a considerable part of the land. The commons, in

feudal ages, must have embraced a very large proportion of the area of

most European countries. For in France (although the appropriations of

these lands by the aristocracy, occasionally checked and rescinded by

royal edict, had gone on for some centuries prior to the Revolution,

and during the Revolution and First Empire large distributions and

sales were made), the common or communal lands still amount, according

to M. de Laveleye, to 4,000,000 hectares, or 9,884,400 acres. The

extent of the common land of England during the feudal ages may be

inferred from the fact that though inclosures by the landed aristocracy

began during the reign of Henry VII., it is stated that no less than

7,660,413 acres of common lands were inclosed under Acts passed between

1710 and 1843, of which 600,000 acres have been inclosed since 1845;

and it is estimated that there still remain 2,000,000 acres of common

in England, though of course the most worthless parts of the soil.

In addition to these common lands, there existed in France, until the

Revolution, and in parts of Spain, until our own day, a custom having

all the force of law, by which cultivated lands, after the harvest

had been gathered, became common for purposes of pasturage or travel,

until the time had come to use the ground again; and in some places a

custom by which any one had the right to go upon ground which its owner

neglected to cultivate, and there to sow and reap a crop in security.

And if he chose to use manure for the first crop, he acquired the right

to sow and gather a second crop without let or hindrance from the owner.

It is not merely the Swiss allmend, the Ditmarsh mark, the Servian

and Russian village communities; not merely the long ridges which

on English ground, now the exclusive property of individuals, still

enable the antiquarian to trace out the great fields in ancient time

devoted to the triennial rotation of crops, and in which each villager

was annually allotted his equal plot; not merely the documentary

evidence which careful students have within late years drawn from old

records; but the very institutions under which modern civilization has

developed, which prove the universality and long persistence of the

recognition of the common right to the use of the soil.

There still remain in our legal systems survivals that have lost their

meaning, that, like the still existing remains of the ancient commons

of England, point to this. The doctrine of eminent domain, existing as

well in Mohammedan law, which makes the sovereign theoretically the

only absolute owner of land, springs from nothing but the recognition

of the sovereign as the representative of the collective rights of the

people; primogeniture and entail, which still exist in England, and

which existed in some of the American States a hundred years ago, are

but distorted forms of what was once an outgrowth of the apprehension

of land as common property. The very distinction made in legal

terminology between real and personal property is but the survival of

a primitive distinction between what was originally looked upon as

common property and what from its nature was always considered the

peculiar property of the individual. And the greater care and ceremony

which are yet required for the transfer of land is but a survival, now

meaningless and useless, of the more general and ceremonious consent

once required for the transfer of rights which were looked upon, not as

belonging to any one member, but to every member of a family or tribe.

The general course of the development of modern civilization since the

feudal period has been to the subversion of these natural and primary

ideas of collective ownership in the soil. Paradoxical as it may

appear, the emergence of liberty from feudal bonds has been accompanied

by a tendency in the treatment of land to the form of ownership which

involves the enslavement of the working classes, and which is now

beginning to be strongly felt all over the civilized world, in the

pressure of an iron yoke, which cannot be relieved by any extension

of mere political power or personal liberty, and which political

economists mistake for the pressure of natural laws, and workmen for

the oppressions of capital.

This is clear—that in Great Britain to-day the right of the people

as a whole to the soil of their native country is much less fully

acknowledged than it was in feudal times. A much smaller proportion of

the people own the soil, and their ownership is much more absolute.

The commons, once so extensive and so largely contributing to the

independence and support of the lower classes, have, all but a small

remnant of yet worthless land, been appropriated to individual

ownership and inclosed; the great estates of the church, which were

essentially common property devoted to a public purpose, have been

diverted from that trust to enrich individuals; the dues of the

military tenants have been shaken off, and the cost of maintaining

the military establishment and paying the interest upon an immense

debt accumulated by wars has been saddled upon the whole people, in

taxes upon the necessaries and comforts of life. The crown lands have

mostly passed into private possession, and for the support of the royal

family and all the petty princelings who marry into it, the British

workman must pay in the price of his mug of beer and pipe of tobacco.

The English yeoman—the sturdy breed who won Crecy, and Poictiers, and

Agincourt—is as extinct as the mastodon. The Scottish clansman, whose

right to the soil of his native hills was then as undisputed as that of

his chieftain, has been driven out to make room for the sheep ranges

or deer parks of that chieftain’s descendant; the tribal right of the

Irishman has been turned into a tenancy-at-will. Thirty thousand men

have legal power to expel the whole population from five-sixths of the

British Islands, and the vast majority of the British people have no

right whatever to their native land save to walk the streets or trudge

the roads. To them may be fittingly applied the words of a Tribune

of the Roman People: “_Men of Rome_,” said Tiberius Gracchus—“_men

of Rome, you are called the lords of the world, yet have no right to

a square foot of its soil! The wild beasts have their dens, but the

soldiers of Italy have only water and air!_”

The result has, perhaps, been more marked in England than anywhere

else, but the tendency is observable everywhere, having gone further

in England owing to circumstances which have developed it with greater

rapidity.

The reason, I take it, that with the extension of the idea of personal

freedom has gone on an extension of the idea of private property in

land, is that as in the progress of civilization the grosser forms of

supremacy connected with land ownership were dropped, or abolished, or

became less obvious, attention was diverted from the more insidious,

but really more potential forms, and the land owners were easily

enabled to put property in land on the same basis as other property.

The growth of national power, either in the form of royalty or

parliamentary government, stripped the great lords of individual power

and importance, and of their jurisdiction and power over persons,

and so repressed striking abuses, as the growth of Roman Imperialism

repressed the more striking cruelties of slavery. The disintegration of

the large feudal estates, which, until the tendency to concentration

arising from the modern tendency to production upon a large scale is

strongly felt, operated to increase the number of land owners, and

the abolition of the restraints by which land owners when population

was sparser endeavored to compel laborers to remain on their estates

also contributed to draw away attention from the essential injustice

involved in private property in land; while the steady progress of

legal ideas drawn from the Roman law, which has been the great mine

and storehouse of modern jurisprudence, tended to level the natural

distinction between property in land and property in other things.

Thus, with the extension of personal liberty, went on an extension of

individual proprietorship in land.

The political power of the barons was, moreover, not broken by the

revolt of the classes who could clearly feel the injustice of land

ownership. Such revolts took place, again and again; but again and

again were they repressed with terrific cruelties. What broke the

power of the barons was the growth of the artisan and trading classes,

between whose wages and rent there is not the same obvious relation.

These classes, too, developed under a system of close guilds and

corporations, which, as I have previously explained in treating of

trade combinations and monopolies, enabled them somewhat to fence

themselves in from the operation of the general law of wages, and which

were much more easily maintained than now, when the effect of improved

methods of transportation, and the diffusion of rudimentary education

and of current news, is steadily making population more mobile. These

classes did not see, and do not yet see, that the tenure of land is

the fundamental fact which must ultimately determine the conditions of

industrial, social, and political life. And so the tendency has been to

assimilate the idea of property in land with that of property in things

of human production, and even steps backward have been taken, and been

hailed, as steps in advance. The French Constituent Assembly, in 1789,

thought it was sweeping away a relic of tyranny when it abolished

tithes and imposed the support of the clergy on general taxation.

The Abbé Sieyès stood alone when he told them that they were simply

remitting to the proprietors a tax which was one of the conditions on

which they held their lands, and reimposing it on the labor of the

nation. But in vain. The Abbé Sieyès, being a priest, was looked on as

defending the interests of his order, when in truth he was defending

the rights of man. In those tithes, the French people might have

retained a large public revenue which would not have taken one centime

from the wages of labor or the earnings of capital.

And so the abolition of the military tenures in England by the Long

Parliament, ratified after the accession of Charles II., though simply

an appropriation of public revenues by the feudal land holders, who

thus got rid of the consideration on which they held the common

property of the nation, and saddled it on the people at large, in the

taxation of all consumers, has long been characterized, and is still

held up in the law books, as a triumph of the spirit of freedom. Yet

here is the source of the immense debt and heavy taxation of England.

Had the form of these feudal dues been simply changed into one better

adapted to the changed times, English wars need never have occasioned

the incurring of debt to the amount of a single pound, and the labor

and capital of England need not have been taxed a single farthing for

the maintenance of a military establishment. All this would have come

from rent, which the land holders since that time have appropriated to

themselves—from the tax which land ownership levies on the earnings

of labor and capital. The land holders of England got their land on

terms which required them even in the sparse population of Norman days

to put in the field, upon call, sixty thousand perfectly equipped

horsemen,[53] and on the further condition of various fines and

incidents which amounted to a considerable part of the rent. It would

probably be a low estimate to put the pecuniary value of these various

services and dues at one-half the rental value of the land. Had the

land holders been kept to this contract and no land been permitted

to be inclosed except upon similar terms, the income accruing to the

nation from English land would to-day be greater by many millions

than the entire public revenues of the United Kingdom. England to-day

might have enjoyed absolute free trade. There need not have been a

customs duty, an excise, license, or income tax, yet all the present

expenditures could be met, and a large surplus remain to be devoted to

any purpose which would conduce to the comfort or well-being of the

whole people.

Turning back, wherever there is light to guide us, we may everywhere

see that in their first perceptions, all peoples have recognized the

common ownership in land, and that private property is an usurpation, a

creation of force and fraud.

As Madame de Stael said, “Liberty is ancient.” Justice, if we turn to

the most ancient records, will always be found to have the title of

prescription.

FOOTNOTES:

[51] The influence of the lawyers has been very marked in Europe, both

on the continent and in Great Britain, in destroying all vestiges

of the ancient tenure, and substituting the idea of the Roman law,

exclusive ownership.

[52] Latifundia perdidere Italiam.—_Pliny._

[53] Andrew Bisset, in “The Strength of Nations,” London, 1859, a

suggestive work in which he calls the attention of the English people

to this measure by which the land owners avoided the payment of their

rent to the nation, disputes the statement of Blackstone that a

knight’s service was but for 40 days, and says it was during necessity.

CHAPTER V.

OF PROPERTY IN LAND IN THE UNITED STATES.

In the earlier stages of civilization we see that land is everywhere

regarded as common property. And, turning from the dim past to our own

times, we may see that natural perceptions are still the same, and that

when placed under circumstances in which the influence of education and

habit is weakened, men instinctively recognize the equality of right to

the bounty of nature.

The discovery of gold in California brought together in a new country

men who had been used to look on land as the rightful subject of

individual property, and of whom probably not one in a thousand had

ever dreamed of drawing any distinction between property in land and

property in anything else. But, for the first time in the history of

the Anglo-Saxon race, these men were brought into contact with land

from which gold could be obtained by the simple operation of washing it

out.

Had the land with which they were thus called upon to deal been

agricultural, or grazing, or forest land, of peculiar richness; had

it been land which derived peculiar value from its situation for

commercial purposes, or by reason of the water power which it afforded;

or even had it contained rich mines of coal, iron or lead, the land

system to which they had been used would have been applied, and it

would have been reduced to private ownership in large tracts, as even

the pueblo lands of San Francisco, really the most valuable in the

State, which by Spanish law had been set apart to furnish homes for

the future residents of that city, were reduced, without any protest

worth speaking of. But the novelty of the case broke through habitual

ideas, and threw men back upon first principles, and it was by common

consent declared that this gold-bearing land should remain common

property, of which no one might take more than he could reasonably use,

or hold for a longer time than he continued to use it. This perception

of natural justice was acquiesced in by the General Government and the

courts, and while placer mining remained of importance, no attempt was

made to overrule this reversion to primitive ideas. The title to the

land remained in the government, and no individual could acquire more

than a possessory claim. The miners in each district fixed the amount

of ground an individual could take and the amount of work that must

be done to constitute use. If this work were not done, any one could

re-locate the ground. Thus, no one was allowed to forestall or to lock

up natural resources. Labor was acknowledged as the creator of wealth,

was given a free field, and secured in its reward. The device would not

have assured complete equality of rights under the conditions that in

most countries prevail; but under the conditions that there and then

existed—a sparse population, an unexplored country, and an occupation

in its nature a lottery, it secured substantial justice. One man might

strike an enormously rich deposit, and others might vainly prospect

for months and years, but all had an equal chance. No one was allowed

to play the dog in the manger with the bounty of the Creator. The

essential idea of the mining regulations was to prevent forestalling

and monopoly. Upon the same principle are based the mining laws of

Mexico; and the same principle was adopted in Australia, in British

Columbia, and in the diamond fields of South Africa, for it accords

with natural perceptions of justice.

With the decadence of placer mining in California, the accustomed

idea of private property finally prevailed in the passage of a law

permitting the patenting of mineral lands. The only effect is to lock

up opportunities—to give the owner of mining ground the power of saying

that no one else may use what he does not choose to use himself. And

there are many cases in which mining ground is thus withheld from

use for speculative purposes, just as valuable building lots and

agricultural land are withheld from use. But while thus preventing

use, the extension to mineral land of the same principle of private

ownership which marks the tenure of other lands has done nothing for

the security of improvements. The greatest expenditures of capital in

opening and developing mines—expenditures that in some cases amounted

to millions of dollars—were made upon possessory titles.

Had the circumstances which beset the first English settlers in North

America been such as to call their attention _de novo_ to the question

of land ownership, there can be no doubt that they would have reverted

to first principles, just as they reverted to first principles in

matters of government; and individual land ownership would have been

rejected, just as aristocracy and monarchy were rejected. But while

in the country from which they came this system had not yet fully

developed itself, nor its effects been fully felt, the fact that in

the new country an immense continent invited settlement prevented any

question of the justice and policy of private property in land from

arising. For in a new country, equality seems sufficiently assured if

no one is permitted to take land to the exclusion of the rest. At first

no harm seems to be done by treating this land as absolute property.

There is plenty of land left for those who choose to take it, and the

slavery that in a later stage of development necessarily springs from

the individual ownership of land is not felt.

In Virginia and to the South, where the settlement had an aristocratic

character, the natural complement of the large estates into which the

land was carved was introduced in the shape of negro slaves. But the

first settlers of New England divided the land as, twelve centuries

before, their ancestors had divided the land of Britain, giving to each

head of a family his town lot and his seed lot, while beyond lay the

free common. So far as concerned the great proprietors whom the English

kings by letters patent endeavored to create, the settlers saw clearly

enough the injustice of the attempted monopoly, and none of these

proprietors got much from their grants; but the plentifulness of land

prevented attention from being called to the monopoly which individual

land ownership, even when the tracts are small, must involve when land

becomes scarce. And so it has come to pass that the great republic

of the modern world has adopted at the beginning of its career an

institution that ruined the republics of antiquity; that a people who

proclaim the inalienable rights of all men to life, liberty, and the

pursuit of happiness have accepted without question a principle which,

in denying the equal and inalienable right to the soil, finally denies

the equal right to life and liberty; that a people who at the cost of a

bloody war have abolished chattel slavery, yet permit slavery in a more

widespread and dangerous form to take root.

The continent has seemed so wide, the area over which population might

yet pour so vast, that familiarized by habit with the idea of private

property in land, we have not realized its essential injustice. For not

merely has this background of unsettled land prevented the full effect

of private appropriation from being felt, even in the older sections,

but to permit a man to take more land than he could use, that he might

compel those who afterwards needed it to pay him for the privilege of

using it, has not seemed so unjust when others in their turn might

do the same thing by going further on. And more than this, the very

fortunes that have resulted from the appropriation of land, and

that have thus really been drawn from taxes levied upon the wages of

labor, have seemed, and have been heralded, as prizes held out to the

laborer. In all the newer States, and even to a considerable extent in

the older ones, our landed aristocracy is yet in its first generation.

Those who have profited by the increase in the value of land have been

largely men who began life without a cent. Their great fortunes, many

of them running up high into the millions, seem to them, and to many

others, as the best proofs of the justice of existing social conditions

in rewarding prudence, foresight, industry, and thrift; whereas, the

truth is that these fortunes are but the gains of monopoly, and are

necessarily made at the expense of labor. But the fact that those thus

enriched started as laborers hides this, and the same feeling which

leads every ticket holder in a lottery to delight in imagination in the

magnitude of the prizes has prevented even the poor from quarreling

with a system which thus made many poor men rich.

In short, the American people have failed to see the essential

injustice of private property in land, because as yet they have not

felt its full effects. This public domain—the vast extent of land yet

to be reduced to private possession, the enormous common to which the

faces of the energetic were always turned, has been the great fact

that, since the days when the first settlements began to fringe the

Atlantic Coast, has formed our national character and colored our

national thought. It is not that we have eschewed a titled aristocracy

and abolished primogeniture; that we elect all our officers from school

director up to president; that our laws run in the name of the people,

instead of in the name of a prince; that the State knows no religion,

and our judges wear no wigs—that we have been exempted from the ills

that Fourth of July orators used to point to as characteristic of the

effete despotisms of the Old World. The general intelligence, the

general comfort, the active invention, the power of adaptation and

assimilation, the free, independent spirit, the energy and hopefulness

that have marked our people, are not causes, but results—they have

sprung from unfenced land. This public domain has been the transmuting

force which has turned the thriftless, unambitious European peasant

into the self-reliant Western farmer; it has given a consciousness

of freedom even to the dweller in crowded cities, and has been a

well-spring of hope even to those who have never thought of taking

refuge upon it. The child of the people, as he grows to manhood

in Europe, finds all the best seats at the banquet of life marked

“taken,” and must struggle with his fellows for the crumbs that fall,

without one chance in a thousand of forcing or sneaking his way to

a seat. In America, whatever his condition, there has always been

the consciousness that the public domain lay behind him; and the

knowledge of this fact, acting and reacting, has penetrated our whole

national life, giving to it generosity and independence, elasticity

and ambition. All that we are proud of in the American character; all

that makes our conditions and institutions better than those of older

countries, we may trace to the fact that land has been cheap in the

United States, because new soil has been open to the emigrant.

But our advance has reached the Pacific. Further west we cannot go, and

increasing population can but expand north and south and fill up what

has been passed over. North, it is already filling up the valley of

the Red River, pressing into that of the Saskatchewan and pre-empting

Washington Territory; south, it is covering Western Texas and taking up

the arable valleys of New Mexico and Arizona.

The republic has entered upon a new era, an era in which the monopoly

of the land will tell with accelerating effect. The great fact which

has been so potent is ceasing to be. The public domain is almost

gone—a very few years will end its influence, already rapidly failing.

I do not mean to say that there will be no public domain. For a long

time to come there will be millions of acres of public lands carried

on the books of the Land Department. But it must be remembered that

the best part of the continent for agricultural purposes is already

overrun, and that it is the poorest land that is left. It must be

remembered that what remains comprises the great mountain ranges, the

sterile deserts, the high plains fit only for grazing. And it must

be remembered that much of this land which figures in the reports as

open to settlement is unsurveyed land, which has been appropriated

by possessory claims or locations which do not appear until the land

is returned as surveyed. California figures on the books of the

Land Department as the greatest land State of the Union, containing

nearly 100,000,000 acres of public land—something like one-twelfth of

the whole public domain. Yet so much of this is covered by railroad

grants or held in the way of which I have spoken; so much consists of

untillable mountains or plains which require irrigation; so much is

monopolized by locations which command the water, that as a matter of

fact it is difficult to point the immigrant to any part of the State

where he can take up a farm on which he can settle and maintain a

family, and so men, weary of the quest, end by buying land or renting

it on shares. It is not that there is any real scarcity of land in

California—for, an empire in herself, California will some day maintain

a population as large as that of France—but appropriation has got ahead

of the settler and manages to keep just ahead of him.

Some twelve or fifteen years ago the late Ben Wade of Ohio said, in a

speech in the United States Senate, that by the close of this century

every acre of ordinary agricultural land in the United States would be

worth $50 in gold. It is already clear that if he erred at all, it

was in overstating the time. In the twenty-one years that remain of

the present century, if our population keep on increasing at the rate

which it has maintained since the institution of the government, with

the exception of the decade which included the civil war, there will

be an addition to our present population of something like forty-five

millions, an addition of some seven millions more than the total

population of the United States as shown by the census of 1870, and

nearly half as much again as the present population of Great Britain.

There is no question about the ability of the United States to support

such a population and many hundreds of millions more, and, under proper

social adjustments, to support them in increased comfort; but in view

of such an increase of population, what becomes of the unappropriated

public domain? Practically there will soon cease to be any. It will be

a very long time before it is all in use; but it will be a very short

time, as we are going, before all that men can turn to use will have an

owner.

But the evil effects of making the land of a whole people the exclusive

property of some do not wait for the final appropriation of the public

domain to show themselves. It is not necessary to contemplate them in

the future; we may see them in the present. They have grown with our

growth, and are still increasing.

We plow new fields, we open new mines, we found new cities; we drive

back the Indian and exterminate the buffalo; we girdle the land with

iron roads and lace the air with telegraph wires; we add knowledge to

knowledge, and utilize invention after invention; we build schools and

endow colleges; yet it becomes no easier for the masses of our people

to make a living. On the contrary, it is becoming harder. The wealthy

class is becoming more wealthy; but the poorer class is becoming more

dependent. The gulf between the employed and the employer is growing

wider; social contrasts are becoming sharper; as liveried carriages

appear, so do barefooted children. We are becoming used to talk of the

working classes and the propertied classes; beggars are becoming so

common that where it was once thought a crime little short of highway

robbery to refuse food to one who asked for it, the gate is now barred

and the bulldog loosed, while laws are passed against vagrants which

suggest those of Henry VIII.

We call ourselves the most progressive people on earth. But what is the

goal of our progress, if these are its wayside fruits?

These are the results of private property in land—the effects of a

principle that must act with increasing and increasing force. It is

not that laborers have increased faster than capital; it is not that

population is pressing against subsistence; it is not that machinery

has made “work scarce;” it is not that there is any real antagonism

between labor and capital—it is simply that land is becoming more

valuable; that the terms on which labor can obtain access to the

natural opportunities which alone enable it to produce are becoming

harder and harder. The public domain is receding and narrowing.

Property in land is concentrating. The proportion of our people who

have no legal right to the land on which they live is becoming steadily

larger.

Says the New York _World_: “A non-resident proprietary, like that

of Ireland, is getting to be the characteristic of large farming

districts in New England, adding yearly to the nominal value of

leasehold farms; advancing yearly the rent demanded, and steadily

degrading the character of the tenantry.” And the _Nation_, alluding

to the same section, says: “Increased nominal value of land, higher

rents, fewer farms occupied by owners; diminished product; lower

wages; a more ignorant population; increasing number of women employed

at hard, outdoor labor (surest sign of a declining civilization),

and a steady deterioration in the style of farming—these are the

conditions described by a cumulative mass of evidence that is perfectly

irresistible.”

The same tendency is observable in the new States, where the large

scale of cultivation recalls the _latifundia_ that ruined ancient

Italy. In California a very large proportion of the farming land is

rented from year to year, at rates varying from a fourth to even half

the crop.

The harder times, the lower wages, the increasing poverty perceptible

in the United States are but results of the natural laws we have

traced—laws as universal and as irresistible as that of gravitation. We

did not establish the republic when, in the face of principalities and

powers, we flung the declaration of the inalienable rights of man; we

shall never establish the republic until we practically carry out that

declaration by securing to the poorest child born among us an equal

right to his native soil! We did not abolish slavery when we ratified

the Fourteenth Amendment; to abolish slavery we must abolish private

property in land! Unless we come back to first principles, unless we

recognize natural perceptions of equity, unless we acknowledge the

equal right of all to land, our free institutions will be in vain; our

common schools will be in vain; our discoveries and inventions will but

add to the force that presses the masses down!

BOOK VIII.

APPLICATION OF THE REMEDY.

CHAPTER I.—PRIVATE PROPERTY IN LAND INCONSISTENT WITH THE BEST USE OF

LAND.

CHAPTER II.—HOW EQUAL RIGHTS TO THE LAND MAY BE ASSERTED AND SECURED.

CHAPTER III.—THE PROPOSITION TRIED BY THE CANONS OF TAXATION.

CHAPTER IV.—INDORSEMENTS AND OBJECTIONS.

Why hesitate? Ye are full-bearded men,

With God-implanted will, and courage if

Ye dare but show it. Never yet was will

But found some way or means to work it out,

Nor e’er did Fortune frown on him who dared.

Shall we in presence of this grievous wrong,

In this supremest moment of all time,

Stand trembling, cowering, when with one bold stroke

These groaning millions might be ever free?—

And that one stroke so just, so greatly good,

So level with the happiness of man,

That all the angels will applaud the deed.

—_E. R. Taylor._

CHAPTER I.

PRIVATE PROPERTY IN LAND INCONSISTENT WITH THE BEST USE OF LAND.

There is a delusion resulting from the tendency to confound the

accidental with the essential—a delusion which the law writers have

done their best to extend, and political economists generally have

acquiesced in, rather than endeavored to expose—that private property

in land is necessary to the proper use of land, and that again to make

land common property would be to destroy civilization and revert to

barbarism.

This delusion may be likened to the idea which, according to Charles

Lamb, so long prevailed among the Chinese after the savor of roast

pork had been accidentally discovered by the burning down of Ho-ti’s

hut—that to cook a pig it was necessary to set fire to a house. But,

though in Lamb’s charming dissertation it was required that a sage

should arise to teach people that they might roast pigs without burning

down houses, it does not take a sage to see that what is required for

the improvement of land is not absolute ownership of the land, but

security for the improvements. This will be obvious to whoever will

look around him. While there is no more necessity for making a man

the absolute and exclusive owner of land, in order to induce him to

improve it, than there is of burning down a house in order to cook a

pig; while the making of land private property is as rude, wasteful,

and uncertain a device for securing improvement, as the burning down

of a house is a rude, wasteful, and uncertain device for roasting a

pig, we have not the excuse for persisting in the one that Lamb’s

Chinamen had for persisting in the other. Until the sage arose who

invented the rude gridiron, which according to Lamb, preceded the spit

and oven, no one had known or heard of a pig being roasted, except by

a house being burned. But, among us, nothing is more common than for

land to be improved by those who do not own it. The greater part of

the land of Great Britain is cultivated by tenants, the greater part

of the buildings of London are built upon leased ground, and even in

the United States the same system prevails everywhere to a greater or

less extent. Thus it is a common matter for use to be separated from

ownership.

Would not all this land be cultivated and improved just as well if the

rent went to the State or municipality, as now, when it goes to private

individuals? If no private ownership in land were acknowledged, but

all land were held in this way, the occupier or user paying rent to

the State, would not land be used and improved as well and as securely

as now? There can be but one answer: Of course it would. Then would

the resumption of land as common property in nowise interfere with the

proper use and improvement of land.

What is necessary for the use of land is not its private ownership,

but the security of improvements. It is not necessary to say to a man,

“this land is yours,” in order to induce him to cultivate or improve

it. It is only necessary to say to him, “whatever your labor or capital

produces on this land shall be yours.” Give a man security that he may

reap, and he will sow; assure him of the possession of the house he

wants to build, and he will build it. These are the natural rewards of

labor. It is for the sake of the reaping that men sow; it is for the

sake of possessing houses that men build. The ownership of land has

nothing to do with it.

It was for the sake of obtaining this security, that in the beginning

of the feudal period so many of the smaller land holders surrendered

the ownership of their lands to a military chieftain, receiving back

the use of them in fief or trust, and kneeling bareheaded before the

lord, with their hands between his hands, swore to serve him with life,

and limb, and worldly honor. Similar instances of the giving up of

ownership in land for the sake of security in its enjoyment are to be

seen in Turkey, where a peculiar exemption from taxation and extortion

attaches to _vakouf_, or church lands, and where it is a common thing

for a land owner to sell his land to a mosque for a nominal price, with

the understanding that he may remain as tenant upon it at a fixed rent.

It is not the magic of property, as Arthur Young said, that has turned

Flemish sands into fruitful fields. It is the magic of security to

labor. This can be secured in other ways than making land private

property, just as the heat necessary to roast a pig can be secured in

other ways than by burning down houses. The mere pledge of an Irish

landlord that for twenty years he would not claim in rent any share

in their cultivation induced Irish peasants to turn a barren mountain

into gardens; on the mere security of a fixed ground rent for a term of

years the most costly buildings of such cities as London and New York

are erected on leased ground. If we give improvers such security, we

may safely abolish private property in land.

The complete recognition of common rights to land need in no way

interfere with the complete recognition of individual right to

improvements or produce. Two men may own a ship without sawing her in

half. The ownership of a railway may be divided into a hundred thousand

shares, and yet trains be run with as much system and precision as

if there were but a single owner. In London, joint stock companies

have been formed to hold and manage real estate. Everything could go

on as now, and yet the common right to land be fully recognized by

appropriating rent to the common benefit. There is a lot in the center

of San Francisco to which the common rights of the people of that city

are yet legally recognized. This lot is not cut up into infinitesimal

pieces nor yet is it an unused waste. It is covered with fine

buildings, the property of private individuals, that stand there in

perfect security. The only difference between this lot and those around

it, is that the rent of the one goes into the common school fund, the

rent of the others into private pockets. What is to prevent the land of

a whole country being held by the people of the country in this way?

It would be difficult to select any portion of the territory of the

United States in which the conditions commonly taken to necessitate

the reduction of land to private ownership exist in higher degree

than on the little islets of St. Peter and St. Paul, in the Aleutian

Archipelago, acquired by the Alaska purchase from Russia. These

islands are the breeding places of the fur seal, an animal so timid

and wary that the slightest fright causes it to abandon its accustomed

resort, never to return. To prevent the utter destruction of this

fishery, without which the islands are of no use to man, it is not

only necessary to avoid killing the females and young cubs, but even

such noises as the discharge of a pistol or the barking of a dog. The

men who do the killing must be in no hurry, but quietly walk around

among the seals who line the rocky beaches, until the timid animals, so

clumsy on land but so graceful in water, show no more sign of fear than

lazily to waddle out of the way. Then those who can be killed without

diminution of future increase are carefully separated and gently

driven inland, out of sight and hearing of the herds, where they are

dispatched with clubs. To throw such a fishery as this open to whoever

chose to go and kill—which would make it to the interest of each

party to kill as many as they could at the time without reference to

the future—would be utterly to destroy it in a few seasons, as similar

fisheries in other oceans have been destroyed. But it is not necessary,

therefore, to make these islands private property. Though for reasons

greatly less cogent, the great public domain of the American people has

been made over to private ownership as fast as anybody could be got

to take it, these islands have been leased at a rent of $317,500 per

year,[54] probably not very much less than they could have been sold

for at the time of the Alaska purchase. They have already yielded two

millions and a half to the national treasury, and they are still, in

unimpaired value (for under the careful management of the Alaska Fur

Company the seals increase rather than diminish), the common property

of the people of the United States.

So far from the recognition of private property in land being necessary

to the proper use of land, the contrary is the case. Treating land as

private property stands in the way of its proper use. Were land treated

as public property it would be used and improved as soon as there was

need for its use or improvement, but being treated as private property,

the individual owner is permitted to prevent others from using or

improving what he cannot or will not use or improve himself. When the

title is in dispute, the most valuable land lies unimproved for years;

in many parts of England improvement is stopped because, the estates

being entailed, no security to improvers can be given; and large tracts

of ground which, were they treated as public property, would be covered

with buildings and crops, are kept idle to gratify the caprice of

the owner. In the thickly settled parts of the United States there is

enough land to maintain three or four times our present population,

lying unused, because its owners are holding it for higher prices, and

immigrants are forced past this unused land to seek homes where their

labor will be far less productive. In every city valuable lots may be

seen lying vacant for the same reason. If the best use of land be the

test, then private property in land is condemned, as it is condemned

by every other consideration. It is as wasteful and uncertain a mode

of securing the proper use of land as the burning down of houses is of

roasting pigs.

FOOTNOTES:

[54] The fixed rent under the lease to the Alaska Fur Company is

$55,000 a year, with a payment of $2.62½ on each skin, which on

100,000 skins, to which the take is limited, amounts to $262,500—a

total rent of $317,500.

CHAPTER II.

HOW EQUAL RIGHTS TO THE LAND MAY BE ASSERTED AND SECURED.