Contemporary Socialism Part 17

Putting up land to auction will not secure cheap or nominally rented farms to an indefinite number of new-comers, unless there is an indefinite supply of land to divide into farms, but in the present world that is not so; and when the existing stock of agricultural land is exhausted, and every man has his farm, but there is no more for any new-comer, what is Mr. George's remedy then? Abolition of property in land will of course abolish all trading in such property; but trading in landed property does not restrict its occupation. The land speculator, while he holds the land, of course keeps out another compet.i.tor from the ownership, but he keeps n.o.body from its occupation and cultivation. He is surely as ready as anybody else to make money, if money is to be made, by letting it, even by putting it up to auction, if Mr. George prefers that mode of letting. The transfer of the power of letting to the State will not secure a tenant any faster. And as to the private parks, deer forests and shootings of England, Mr. George forgets that they are, most of them, at present rented, and not, as he seems to fancy, owned by their occupants, and that it would not make a straw of difference to them whether they paid their rents to the Crown factor or to the landlord's agent. Since Mr. George does not prohibit the making of fortunes, he cannot prevent commercial kings from America or great brewers from England hiring forests in the Scotch Highlands. And since, in spite of his celebrated declaration, that "to the landed estates of the Duke of Westminster the poorest child that is born in London to-day has as much right as has his eldest son," he would still leave the Duke a princely income from the rents of the buildings upon his estates, and would suffer him to enjoy it without paying a single tax or rate on it all (p. 320), why should the Duke give up his forest in a.s.synt, merely because the Crown is to draw the rent instead of the Duke of Sutherland?

Mr. George accordingly proposes a remedy that would remedy nothing, but leave things just as they are. Deer forests and the like may not be the best use of the land, but the particular change Mr. George suggests would not suppress them or even in the slightest degree check their spread, and would not throw the ground now occupied by them into the ordinary market for cultivation. And, besides, even if it did, the land so provided for new-comers would necessarily soon come to an end, and with it Mr. George's "simple and sovereign remedy," at least in its specific operation.

But it is noteworthy that in his lectures in this country in 1884, Mr.

George made little account of the specific operation of his remedy as a means of furnishing unemployed labourers with a practicable alternative in agricultural production, to which they might continue indefinitely to resort, and that he preferred for the most part drawing his cure for poverty from the public revenue which the confiscation of rent would place at the disposal of the community. Now as to this aspect of his remedy, it is surely one of the oddest of his delusions to dream of curing pauperism by multiplying the recipients of poor relief, and taking away from it, as he claims credit for doing, through the countenance of numbers, that reproach which has. .h.i.therto been the strongest preventive against it. Besides, he and his friends greatly exaggerate the amount of the fund the country would derive from the rent of its ground. It would really fall far short of paying the whole of our present taxation, not to speak of leaving anything over for wild schemes of speculative beneficence. The rural rent of the country is only seventy millions, and that sum includes the rent of buildings, which Mr.

George does not propose to touch, and which would probably in the aggregate balance the ground rent of towns, which he includes in his confiscation project. Now our local taxation alone comes very near that figure, and certainly the people generally can scarcely be expected to rise from a condition of alleged poverty to one of substantial wealth, or even comfort, through merely having their local rates paid for them.

The result would therefore be poor, even if no compensation were to be made to the present receivers of the rent; but with the compensation price to pay, it would be really too ridiculously small to throw a whole nation into labour and disorder for. Much may be done--much must be done--to make the land of the country more available and more profitable for the wants of the body of the people, but not one jot of what is required would be done by mere nationalization of the ownership, or even done better on such a basis than on that which exists. The things that are requisite and necessary would remain still to be done, though land were nationalized to-morrow, and they can be equally well done without introducing that c.u.mbrous innovation at all. With compensation the scheme is futile; without it, it is repugnant to a healthy moral sense.

Mr. George indeed regards confiscation as an article of faith. It is of the essence of the message he keeps on preaching with so much conviction and courage and fervour. Private property in land, he tells us, is robbery, and rent is theft, and the reason he offers for these strong a.s.sertions is that nothing can rightly be private property which is not the fruit of human labour, and that land is not the fruit of human labour, but the gift of G.o.d. As the gift of G.o.d, it was, he believes, intended for all men alike, and therefore its private appropriation seems to him unjust. Under these circ.u.mstances he considers it as preposterous to compensate landowners for the loss of their land, as it would be to compensate thieves for the rest.i.tution of their spoil. To confiscate land is only to take one's own, Mr. George has no difficulty about the sound of the word, nor is he troubled by any subtleties as to the length it is proper to go in the work. Mr. Mill, whose writings probably put Mr. George first on this track, proposed to intercept for national purposes only the future unearned increase of the rent of land, only that portion of the future increase of rent which should not be due to the expenditure of labour and capital on the soil. Mr. George would appropriate the entire rent, the earned increase as well as the unearned, the past as well as the future; with this exception, that interest on such improvements as are the fruit of human exertion, and are clearly distinguishable from the land itself, would be allowed for a moderate period. He says in one place, "But it will be said: These are improvements which in time become indistinguishable from the land itself! Very well; then the t.i.tle to the improvements becomes blended with the t.i.tle to the land; the individual right is lost in the common right. It is the greater that swallows up the less, not the less that swallows up the greater. Nature does not proceed from man, but man from nature, and it is into the bosom of nature that he and all his works must return again" (p. 242). And in another place, speaking of the separation of the value of the land from the value of the improvements, he says: "In the oldest country in the world no difficulty whatever can attend the separation, if all that be attempted is to separate the value of the clearly distinguishable improvements made within a moderate period, from the value of the land, should they be destroyed. This manifestly is all that justice or policy requires. Absolute accuracy is impossible in any system, and to attempt to separate all the human race has done from what nature originally provided would be as absurd as impracticable. A swamp drained, or a hill terraced by the Romans, const.i.tutes now as much a part of the natural advantages of the British Isles as though the work had been done by earthquake or glacier. The fact that after a certain lapse of time the value of such permanent improvements would be considered as having lapsed into that of the land, and would be taxed accordingly, could have no deterrent effect on such improvements, for such works are frequently undertaken upon leases for years" (p. 302). The sum of this teaching seems to be that Mr. George would recognise no separate value in any improvements except buildings, and would be disposed to appropriate even them after such lapse of time as would make it not absolutely unprofitable to erect them.

What Mr. George fails to perceive is that agricultural land is in no sense more a gift of G.o.d, and in no sense less an artificial product of human labour, than other commodities--than gold, for example, or cattle, or furniture, in which he owns private property to be indisputably just.

Some of the richest land in England lies in the fen country, and that land is as much the product of engineering skill and prolonged labour as Portland Harbour or Menai Bridge. Before the days of Sir Cornelius Vermuyden it was part of the bottom of the sea, and its inhabitants, as they are described by Camden, trode about on stilts, and lived by snaring waterfowl. Some of the best land in Belgium was barren sand-heaps a hundred years ago, and has been made what it is only by the continuous and untiring labour of its small proprietors. "G.o.d made the sea, man made the dry land," is a proverb among the Dutch, who have certainly made their own country as much as Mr. George has made his book. In these cases the labour and the results of the labour are obvious, but no cultivated land exists anywhere that is not the product of much labour--certainly much more labour than Mr. George seems to have any idea of. In the evidence taken before the recent Crofters'

Commission, Mr. Greig, who conducted the Duke of Sutherland's improvements in the Strath of Kildonan, stated that the cost of reclaiming 1,300 acres of land there, and furnishing them with the requisite buildings for nine variously sized farms, was 46,000. Apart from the buildings, the mere work of reclamation alone is generally estimated to have cost 20 an acre, and in another part of the same estates an equally extensive piece of reclamation is said to have cost 30 an acre. By means of this great expenditure of capital and labour, land that would hardly fetch a rent of a shilling an acre before was worth twenty or thirty shillings an acre after. Not the buildings only, but the land itself has been made what it is by labour. It has been adapted to a useful office by human skill as really as the clay is by the potter, or the timber by the wright. Deduct from the rent of these reclaimed acres the value contributed by human labour, and how much would remain to represent the gift of G.o.d? And would it be greater or less than would remain after a like process applied, say, to a sovereign or to a nugget of gold? Mr. George has no scruple about the justice of private property and inheritance in the nugget, and indeed in all kinds of movable wealth. "The pen with which I am writing," he says, for example, "is justly mine. No other human being can rightfully lay claim to it, for in me is the t.i.tle of the original producers who made it"

(p. 236). The original producer of the nugget appropriated what was surely a gift of G.o.d as much as the clays or loams of husbandry; and if he, as Mr. George admits, has "a clear and indefeasible t.i.tle to the exclusive possession and enjoyment" of his nugget, and may transmit that t.i.tle by bequest or sale unimpaired for an unrestricted period of time, why is the original producer of agricultural land to be held up as more than half a thief, and the present possessor as one entirely? And if a proprietor has spent 20,000 in buildings, and 26,000 in reclamations, in order to convert the surface of the earth into useful arable soil, why is he to be allowed rent on the 20,000, and denied it on the 26,000?

So far as the distinction between gifts of nature and products of labour goes, movable wealth and immovable stand on precisely the same footing.

Both are alike gifts of nature, and both are alike products of labour.

In thinking otherwise Mr. George is certainly supported by the high authority of Mr. Mill, who has also failed to recognise how far arable land was really an artificial product. He says: "The land is not of man's creation, and for a person to appropriate to himself a mere gift of nature, not made to him in particular, but which belonged to all others until he took possession of it, is _prima facie_ an injustice to all the rest" (Dissert. iv., 289). But what is of man's creation? He finds his materials already created, and he merely appropriates them, and adapts them to his own uses by labour, exactly as he does with the soil that in his hands becomes fruitful fields. Land is as much a creation of man as anything else is, and everything is as much a gift of G.o.d as land. That distinction is therefore of no possible help to us.

The true ground for observing a difference between the right of property in land and the right of property in other things must be sought for elsewhere. It is not because land is a gift of nature, while other things are products of labour, but because land is at once limited in quant.i.ty, and essential to the production of the general necessaries of life. These are the characteristics that make land a unique and exceptional commodity, and require the right of property in it to be subject to different conditions from the right of property in other products of labour. The justification of the restriction of that right in the case of land accordingly rests neither on theological dogma nor on metaphysical distinction, but on a plain practical social necessity.

Where land is still abundant, where population is yet scanty as compared with the land it occupies, there is no occasion for interference; the proprietor might enjoy as absolute a t.i.tle as Mr. George claims over his pen, without any public inconvenience, but, on the contrary, with all the public benefit that belongs to absolute ownership in other things.

But as soon as population has increased so much as to compel recourse to inferior soils for its subsistence, it becomes the duty of society to see that the most productive use possible is being made of its land, and to introduce such a mode of tenure as seems most likely effectually to secure that end. Under these circ.u.mstances private property in land requires an additional justification, besides that which is sufficient for other things; it must be conducive to the best use of the land.

Society has become obliged to husband its resources; if it will do so most efficiently by means of private property, private property will stand; if not, then it must fall. Of course land is not the only kind of property that is subject to this social claim. All property is so held, but in the case of other things the claim seldom comes into open view, because it is only on exceptional occasions that it is necessary to call it into active operation. Provisions are among the things Mr. George considers not gifts of G.o.d but products of labour, but in a siege private property in provisions would absolutely cease, and the social right would be all in all. These products of labour would be nationalized at that time because in the circ.u.mstances the general interests of the community required them to be so, and the reason why they are not nationalized at other times is at bottom really this, that the general interest of the community is better served by leaving them as they are. In some parts of the world all products of labour actually are nationalized; in Samoa, for example, a man who wants anything has a latent but recognised claim to obtain it from any man who has it; but Dr. Turner explains that the result is most pernicious, because while it has extinguished absolute dest.i.tution, it has lowered the level of prosperity and prevented all progress, no man caring to labour when he cannot retain the fruits of his labour. Civilized communities, however, have always perceived the immense public advantage of the inst.i.tution of private property, and the right to such property, of whatever kind, really rests in the last a.n.a.lysis on a social justification, and is held subject to a social claim, if any reason occurred to exert it. In this respect there is nothing peculiar about land. The only peculiarity about land is that a necessity exists for the practical exercise of the claim, because landed property involves the control of the national food supply, and of other primary and essential needs of the community. The growth of population forces more and more imperatively upon us the necessity of making the most of our land, and consequently raises the question how far private property in such a subject is conducive to that end.

Now, in regard to capital invested in trade or manufactures, it has always been justly considered that the private interest of its possessor const.i.tutes the best guarantee for its most productive use, because the trader or manufacturer is animated by the purely commercial motive of gaining the greatest possible increase out of the employment of his capital. But it must be admitted that the private interest of the landlord does not supply us with so sure a guarantee. He desires wealth no doubt as well as the trader, but he is not so purely influenced by that desire in his use of his property. He is apt to sacrifice the most productive use of land--or, in other words, his purely pecuniary interest--to considerations of ease or pleasure, or social importance, or political influence. He may consolidate farms, to the distress of the small tenants and the injury of the country generally, merely because there is less trouble in managing a few large farmers than a number of small; or he may refuse to give his tenants those conditions of tenure that are essential to efficient cultivation of the land, merely to keep them more dependent on himself in political conflicts. Mr. George, however, has a strong conviction that even the purely pecuniary interest of the private owner tends to keep land out of cultivation, but he builds his conclusion on the special experiences of land speculation rather than on the general facts of land-owning. Of course if there were no land-owning, there would be no land speculation; but to abolish land-owning merely to cure the evils of land speculation is, if I may borrow an ill.u.s.tration of his own, tantamount to burning a house to roast a joint. Besides, all that is alleged is that speculation keeps a certain amount of land in America out of the market. In other countries it suffers from a contrary reproach. The evil of the _bandes noires_ of France and the _Landmetzger_ of Germany is their excessive activity in bringing land into the market, by which they have aggravated the pernicious subdivision of estates that exist. In America the effect of speculation may be different, but at any rate keeping land out of the market is one thing, keeping it out of cultivation is another; and it is hard to see how speculation should prevent the extension of cultivation, because cultivation may be as well undertaken by tenant as proprietor, and why should a speculator, who buys land to sell it in a few years at a high profit, object to taking an annual rent in the interval from any one who thought it would pay him to hire the land? It would not be fair to condemn the landlord for the sins of the land speculator, even if the latter were all that Mr. George's curious horror of him represents him to be, and if he exercised any of the irrationally extravagant effects which Mr. George ascribes to his influence over the economy of things; but as a matter of fact a sober judgment can discover no possible reason why the private interest of a land speculator as such should stand in the way of the cultivation of the soil he happens to hold. What concerns us here, however, is not the private interest of the speculator, but the private interest of the landlord, whether a speculative purchaser or not. Now, much land lies waste at present through the operation of the Game Laws, which establish an artificial protection of sport as an alternative industry against agriculture, but then the general inst.i.tution of private property in land must not be credited with the specific effects of the Game Laws, and need not be suppressed in order to get rid of them. The abolition of these laws would place the culture of wild animals and the culture of domestic animals on more equal terms in the commercial compet.i.tion, and would probably restore the balance of the landlord's pecuniary advantage in favour of the latter. Besides, it is not a question of ownership but of occupation of land that is really involved. If the land were nationalized to-morrow, the State would have to decide whether it would let as much land as had hitherto been let to sporting tenants; and of course it can decide that, if it chooses, now.

So far as I am able to judge, there is only one respect in which the pecuniary interest of the landlord appears to be unfavourable to an extension of cultivation. There is probably a considerable quant.i.ty of land that might be cultivated with advantage to the community generally by labourers who expected nothing from it but the equivalent of ordinary wages, and which is at present suffered to lie waste, because its produce would be insufficient to yield anything more than wages, and would afford nothing to the capitalist farmer as profit or to the landlord as rent. How far this operates I have, of course, no means of knowing; but here again one may deal with waste ground if it were judged requisite to do so, without resorting to any revolutionary schemes of general land nationalization. Of course much land is kept in an inferior condition, or perhaps absolutely waste, through want of capital on the part of its owners, but the same result would happen under the nationalization plan, through want of capital on the part of the tenants. Mr. George does not propose to supply any of the necessary capital out of public funds, but trusts to the enterprise and ability of the tenants themselves to furnish it; so that the occupier would be no better situated under the State than he would be under an embarra.s.sed landlord, if he enjoyed compensation for his improvements. In either case he would improve as far as his own means allowed, and he would improve no further. But if by nationalization of land we get rid of the embarra.s.sed landlord, we lose at the same time the wealthy one, and the tenants of the latter would be decidedly worse off under the State, which only drew rents, but laid out no expenses. The community, too, and the general cultivation of the country would be greatly the losers. Mr.

George has probably little conception of the amount of money an improving landlord thinks it necessary to invest in maintaining or increasing the productive capacity of his land. A convenient ill.u.s.tration of it is furnished by the evidence of Sir Arnold Kemball, commissioner of the Duke of Sutherland, before the recent Crofters'

Commission. Sir Arnold gave in an abstract of the revenue and expenditure on the Sutherland estates for the thirty years 1853-1882, and it appears that the total revenue for that period was 1,039,748, and the total expenditure (exclusive of the expenses of the ducal establishment in Sutherland) was 1,285,122, or a quarter of a million more than the entire rental. Here, then, is a dilemma for Mr. George: With equally liberal management of the land on the part of the State, how is he to endow widows and pay the taxes of the _bourgeoisie_ out of the rents? And without such liberal management how is he to promote the spread of cultivation better than the present owners?

The production of food, however, is only one of those uses of the land in which the public have a necessary and growing interest. They require sites for houses, for churches, for means of communication, for a thousand purposes, and the landlord often refuses to grant such altogether, or charges an exorbitant price for the privilege. He has refused sites to churches from sectarian reasons; for labourers'

cottages in rural districts for fear of increasing the poor-rate; in small towns with a growing trade from purely sentimental objections to their growth; he has refused rights of way to people in search of pure air, for fear they disturbed his game, and he has enclosed ancient paths and commons which had been the enjoyment of all from immemorial time. I do not speak of the ground rent in large cities where owners are numerous, because that, though a question of great magnitude, involves peculiarities that separate it from the allied question of rural ground-rent, and make it more advantageously treated on its own basis.

But in country districts where owners are few, and the possession of land therefore confers on one man power of many sorts over the growth and comfort of a whole community, that power ought certainly to be closely controlled by the State. Its tyrannical exercise has probably done more than anything else to excite popular hostility against landlordism, and to lend strength to the present crusade for the total abolition of private property in land. But here again the cure is far too drastic for the disease. What is needed is merely the prevention of abuses in the management of land, and that will be accomplished better by regulations in the interest of the community than by any scheme of complete nationalization. A sound land reform must--in this country at least--set its face in precisely the contrary direction. It must aim at multiplying, instead of extirpating, the private owners of land, and at nursing by all wise and legitimate means the growth of a numerous occupying proprietary. State ownership by itself is no better guarantee than private ownership by itself for the most productive possible use of the land; indeed, if we judge from the experience of countries where it is practised, it is a much worse one; but by universal consent the best and surest of all guarantees for the highest utilization of the land is private ownership, coupled with occupation by the owner.