Part 17 (1/2)

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 owners.h.i.+p, 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 furnis.h.i.+ng 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 owners.h.i.+p, 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 furnis.h.i.+ng 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 s.h.i.+lling an acre before was worth twenty or thirty s.h.i.+llings 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.