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with his ten children (which he is sure to have) lying on the sward around him. But when we think of the next step, and picture each of these ten children needing his ten acres also, the economic imagination breaks down before the unrealisable ideal. These peasants are too thick upon the ground already—that is the fundamental cause of their wretchedness: unless they emigrate they will become thicker still, and rapidly so-and what then? This question must not be evaded, and as yet has not been answered.

The other element of the problem is this: When you have given the peasant his acre, or his five acres, or his ten, how are you to secure that he shall retain it ? Short of a jubilee year like that which the Israelitish legislator is said to have enactedshort of declaring this peasant's farm inalienable, sacred from any claim, untouchable for any debt, unforfeitable for any negligence, misuse, or drunken incapacity, indivisible among any heirs-how is he to keep it? We once had a race of small proprietors in certain counties of England. They have all died out, drunk themselves out, been bought out. When common lands have been inclosed, what has always become of the few acres allotted in actual property to the commoners adjoining? In every case they have been sold to tempting bidders or forfeited for debts. Why shut our eyes to the fact that in densely-peopled countries land (like jewels) becomes a luxury only attainable to, or retainable by, the rich; it can only be purchased or possessed by those who have spare means, and can afford themselves a superfluity. The rich man can afford to be satisfied with 2 per cent. for his money (and land rarely yields more); the poor man must have 5 or 10 per cent. The peasant has inherited a farm worth 1007. in fee simple, or he has given 1007. for it, or a land society has enabled him to pay 1007. by difficult instalments. He is proud of it, and attached to it. But a neighbouring proprietor, or a retired tradesman who wants a villa and a garden, offers him 2507., 350%, 500l., for it-is he likely to refuse the offer? Ought he to refuse? Men will always be at hand to give him for his acres more than they are worth: they want them for pleasure, not for profit. They desire them, as they desire jewels, for fashion, for beauty, not caring the least for the return they yield. Five hundred pounds an acre to the millionaire is nothing to the peasant owner, it is wealth. Therefore, we say that, create as many peasant properties as you please, they will all be swallowed up in a few years by the natural process of sale-unless either peasants become fewer and better paid, and possessed therefore of a superfluity, able to afford themselves a luxury, and an ostensibly bad or inferior investment—or unless

you

you actually forbid the sale of such properties:-that is, add a new and more stringent restriction to those which these very enthusiasts are seeking to remove-tie up land in a stricter settlement than any of those against which their clamour is just now so righteously directed.* Encourage peasants as much as you like to claim allotments and to rent or buy cottages, gardens, small farms; enable artisans to live in houses of their own, with paddocks and flower plots attached ;-all that is good, very good, as far as it goes-but do not hope to regenerate or rehabilitate their class by the process. And do not forget the dangers which beset the process in its course and might be fatal to it when successful (unless population became absolutely stationary) the danger, namely, of leading the labourer, like the Irish cottier, to use his potato-fields as a staff instead of a crutch, and work only for himself and not for hire-and the certainty that when you have made all your labourers into peasant proprietors, the class of employers would have died out of the land.†

The various Land-law reformers of the day all assume as the foundation of their reasoning and the justification of their schemes, that the land of a country, by the undeniable conditions of the problem, must belong in proprietary right to the people of that country; because, as no man made it, it was the free and general gift of God to all men, and because, being limited in extent, the monopoly of it by some is an obvious wrong and injury to all others; and that, therefore, those who hold it in actual possession can only rightfully do so on the ground that the system of private property in land is a more beneficial arrangement on the whole to the people than any other mode of joint or State tenure. Various plans, more or less well thought outusually less rather than more-have been suggested for gradually

*It is a singular instance of the degree to which fanatical or sentimental devotion to one cherished idea can cloud the mental vision and disturb the logical consistency even of the clearest and most trained intellects, that reasoners of the stamp of Mr. Mill should at one and the same moment question the right of private property in land and endeavour both to limit its absolute ownership and to confiscate one of the accessories which cause it to be so valued and cherished-viz. its almost inevitable rise in value with the lapse of time-and yet should seek so eagerly to create a class of peasant proprietors, and dwell so enthusiastically on the enormous economic, sentimental, and patriotic value ('magical' they call it) of the sense of absolute ownership which they would confer upon those peasants. It is scarcely less curious that the same men are arguing and labouring with the deepest earnestness to facilitate and cheapen the transfer of land in order to get it into the hands of a class in whose possession it could only be made to remain by the prompt enactment of the most arbitrary and severe prohibitive fetters against any re-transfer.

Essays on Political and Social Science,' by W. R. Greg, i. pp. 131-139, where the entire question of the secondary consequences of peasant proprietorship on the condition of a State is clearly worked out.

putting

putting the great mass of the population in possession of this. their rightful inheritance. Mr. Mill would at present content himself with directing the State to assume the ownership of waste lands, and (on such terms as might be arranged) of estates held by corporations, and of all the increment in the value of the soil arising year after year in consequence of the increase of numbers and aggregate wealth in the country. Mr. Odger would gradually bring back land from the present owners by the produce of a special tax levied upon those owners, and then have the State let that land in small farms, and 'at reasonable rents," to all and sundry-forgetting apparently, among a variety of other forgets, that as there would not be farms for all claimants, some would offer higher terms than others, and rents would soon. become as 'unreasonable' as ever. Mr. Atherton would solve the matter by the simple plan of decreeing that every baby born should at once become entitled to an acre of land (again at a 'reasonable' rent) in the parish where he first saw the light.*

Now, without caring to contest the fundamental premiss of these gentlemen in its abstract shape, we submit that a manifest and fatal fallacy lies at the root of their proposed practical applications of it—a fallacy which vitiates every conclusion they have drawn from their original thesis-a fallacy so obvious that, if they had ever patiently thought out their theory instead of merely playing at bo-peep with it, it could scarcely fail to have occurred to them. It is very true that man did not make the land or any portion of it, and therefore, it may be said, can have no right to monopolise its produce or its use. (It is equally true, however, that man-this man or his predecessors-did, by his labour, skill, or capital, make the productiveness of the chief portion of this land, and therefore may be held entitled to enjoy and to bequeath it. But this by the way). It is very true that the earth was given by the Creator for the benefit of the whole human race, and not of any particular class or favoured individuals. But it by no means follows-and yet this is universally assumed by these reasoners and forms the foundation of their whole argument-that any special portion of the earth was. created for that special section of the human race which happens to be located there. A man may have a natural right to as many acres of the surface of the earth as he can cultivate or as he needs to enable him to live. But it by no means is to be inferred from thence that he has a right to those acres in any

* Land Tenure Reform Association,' Mr. Mill's Inaugural Discourse. temporary Review,' August, 1871.

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given locality;-whether he grounds that claim on individual preference or on propinquity, or on the fact that he first dropped from heaven in that latitude and longitude. He may be entitled to it from the great land Bank of the Universe ;-there is nothing to show that he is entitled to a bank-note of this or that particular number. Mr. Atherton holds, as we have seen, that he is entitled to it in the parish in which he was born-a claim manifestly absurd because impracticable, inasmuch as in a generation or two in several parishes, if not in all, every acre on this principle would be allotted, and none would remain for the next comer. (Who, therefore, must not be allowed to come,for we always run upon this same rock at last.) Mr. Mill,-a thinker of different calibre and of a larger order-holds that a man is entitled to his native inheritance of acres in the land, kingdom, political or geographical division of Europe, in which he lives-i.e., in Great Britain, in 'his country' as it is called ;and if in a large island, then by parity of reasoning, in a small one equally, in the Isle of Man, in Jersey, in Alderney, in Heligoland;-if in England or Ireland, then why not in Devonshire, in the parish of Plumstead, out of the park of the Duke of Bedford? We may grant-for it is not worth while to dispute it, perhaps it would not be easy to controvert it-that man is entitled to claim a sufficient portion of the surface of the earth as a field for his labour-as long as there is land enough. We may even grant, to come nearer home and nearer the practical application of the doctrine, that every Englishman who needs it is entitled to be helped to his ten acres ;-it is a long step to admit that he is entitled to have them where he likes. You may perhaps even stretch a point, and concede for the sake of argument that he is entitled to have them somewhere in the British empire, if he prefers Australia to America, or one side of Lake Ontario to the other. But he is no more entitled to insist upon having his ten acres in England or in Ireland, than to insist upon having them in the parish of Havering, in the county of Surrey, in the climate of Penzance, or in the neighbourhood of London, because he has a personal predilection for any of those localities.*

The

* In pursuing this argument to its legitimate conclusions, we find ourselves wrecked upon yet another rock. The citizens of one State-i.e. the inhabitants of one country-say France, have multiplied slowly out of providence, and have land to spare. The inhabitants of a neighbouring country, say Ireland, have multiplied recklessly, and have no longer any land to apportion to new comers. Is France to allow Irishmen to overflow into her boundaries and divide her 'superfluity' of soil among them? Ought he that hath two coats (one of which he had provided for next year) to give to him that hath none (because he pawned his only one for drink)? Yet if the Irishman may not claim French acres, why

may

The plain truth is that the primary assumption on which is based the entire fabric of the argument we are questioning is distinctly and notoriously false. Land is NOT limited in quantity. There is enough for all, and to spare. Our own conviction is that there always will be. There certainly will be for countless generations. Vast areas of the richest soil of the globe have not one man per square mile. The land in Canterbury parish may be limited; the land in Kent or Essex may be limited; the land of England may be limited. But practically the land of the world knows no limits; the land of the British empire virtually knows no limits;-it can be purchased of excellent quality at the rate of a day's labour per acre;-and the whole edifice of the argument of the Land and Labour League, foundation and superstructure, falls to the ground.

Another false scent by which the Proletariat have long been led astray is that of attempting to better their condition by Trades Unions and strikes. Few of their errors have been more persistent or more pernicious. Few, it may be added, are more natural to uneducated men, ignorant of the principles of Economic Science. This subject has been so often and so fully discussed that we need only and very briefly point out the chief considerations which serve to show that this scent is inherently a wrong one, and must ultimately lead to harm. In the first place, these associations, so far as their object is to raise the wages of labour, aim at a result which either cannot be attained at all, or could equally well and surely be obtained without them. If Labour is redundant-if two men are looking for one employer— no Trades Union, no power on earth, can permanently raise wages, or prevent them from falling. If labour is scarce-if two masters are looking for one man-no master can prevent wages from rising, and no union is needed to raise them. In the second place, Trades Unions, in order to gain their object in the face of adverse circumstances (and it is in such alone that their operation is even apparently required) can only succeed by means equally unjust, oppressive and violent. They have to prevent redundant labourers from competing with employed ones-to prevent those who have no work from offering to work on lower terms than others in order to obtain employment-to prevent those who are starving and anxious to earn 3s. a day, from replacing those who

may the improvident parishioners of Winslow demand the acres of the prudent parishioners of the adjoining district of Evershed? Why ought I, who have toiled and pinched to get together fifty acres for my old age and my infirm wife or child, to share them with my neighbour who never worked and never fasted, because the soil of the earth is limited?

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