Part 17 (2/2)

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 owners.h.i.+p 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 owners.h.i.+p 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 owners.h.i.+p by itself is no better guarantee than private owners.h.i.+p 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 owners.h.i.+p, coupled with occupation by the owner.

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