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Nationalisation of the Land

Sir,—Having shown, in my letter last week, how the scheme of land-nationalisation which I have proposed would affect farmers and landholders, we have now to consider its action as regards other classes of the community, as well as those incidental effects which would benefit the whole nation. We are so accustomed to the enormous and often prohibitory price which has to be paid for land for residential or trade purposes, that, although a large portion of the population are thereby debarred from a full enjoyment of existence and are seriously injured in their health, few persons consider that these are the inevitable results of the pernicious system of private property—and consequent monopoly—of the land which should have been retained by the nation itself for the full and equal enjoyment of all its members. Without the use of land even existence is impossible. It follows that—granted the right of the great bulk of the population to live—they have a right to the use of land. Our present system, however, denies this right to any but the landlords, who have, legally, full power to destroy their fellow citizens by simply denying them land on which to live. The mere statement of this indisputable fact demonstrates the iniquity of private property in land; and when we know that the power which the law gives to landlords is often actually used—as in the wide devastation of many fertile valleys of the Highlands of Scotland, where the descendants of the old clansmen have been driven to emigrate, or to throng the slums of Glasgow and other great cities, in order that the land may be devoted to sporting purposes and thus bring in a greater revenue to the landlord—it is surely time that a system at once so unjust and so evil in its effects should be exposed, with a view to its speedy abolition. The monopoly of land by the rich, aggravated by the enormous increase of our accumulated wealth during the last forty years, has so completely divorced the labouring and middle classes from any rights of property in their native soil that it is now absolutely necessary to afford special facilities for bringing back a more healthy state of things.

The impossibility of obtaining land in most parts of the country for any purposes of free cultivation or enjoyment, and the enormous revenues derived by landlords from the extension of building around dense centres of population, have been the direct causes of that inordinate growth of cities and simultaneous depopulation of the rural districts which are now admitted and deplored by all public writers. With the rapid growth of towns and cities there come numerous attendant evils—air and water polluted by smoke and sewers, and a waste of fertilising matter which is a disgrace to our boasted civilisation. All these difficulties arise from land monopoly and over-crowding. Every human dwelling, to ensure the health of the occupants, should have ample open space around it, giving garden ground to supply fresh and wholesome food, while the land is kept in a state of fertility by that house-refuse which is now worse than wasted, since it costs vast sums to get rid of and is also the direct cause of the most fatal class of zymotic diseases. The inability of the bulk of the population to obtain land leads also to the system of building-leases, with houses erected by speculative builders whose chief aim is to place the greatest number of dwellings on the smallest quantity of ground; and thousands are obliged to live in these crowded, ill-built, and unhealthy houses, sorely against their will. The absence of land around houses is a fertile source of social evil. With the middle and lower classes it is a direct and, I believe, the most powerful cause of drinking habits, since it leaves the head of a family with no interest or occupation in his home. Give every working man an acre or two of land attached to his cottage with a perpetual tenure, and he will have little time or inclination for the public-house. The land would be used in various ways, according to his taste or knowledge; but vegetables and fruit, poultry and eggs, rabbits and pork, milk and butter, would be largely produced by the labour of the owner and his family during spare hours. The innumerable little details always requiring attention in a house and grounds, adding to the comfort or enjoyment of the family, would be another source of occupation and interest if every man's house were his own. Children brought up in such a home would receive a valuable practical education in handiness and industry, while the profits would be enough to keep the family from want during periods of illness or the absence of regular employment. All this is not theory, but a mere statement of what actually does happen whenever the peasant or labourer occupies his own house and has a useful plot of land attached to it. Arthur Young, Sismondi, Inglis, Laing, Howitt, Kay, Thornton, Laveleye, Boyd Kinnear, and many other observers have noted the facts in every country in Europe. Whether in Norway or Italy, in France, Spain, or Germany, occupying-ownership of house and land is invariably attended with comfort and well-being, with sobriety, contentment, and the absence of pauperism; while the opposite condition—of large estates and a peasantry divorced from the land—as invariably co-exists with pauperism and misery, vice and discontent. The same good results have occurred in England whenever landlords have been wise enough to give their labourers land, as on Lord Tollemache's estates in Cheshire and in several other cases; and it may be asserted as a conclusion supported by an overwhelming mass of evidence, that the divorce of any population from the free use of land is a direct cause of pauperism, disease, vice, and crime, and tends in a variety of ways to deteriorate the whole social condition of the people among whom it prevails.

In due time and place I am prepared to substantiate this statement by a body of detailed evidence. Accepting it now as true, it fully justifies the proposal contained in my scheme—that, when the State acquires possession of the land, it should retain power to remedy this vast evil by permitting every Englishman, as his right once in his life, to obtain a plot of land, for personal occupation at its current agricultural value. To render this "right" beneficially available to its widest extent, such restrictions only as are absolutely needful should be placed upon the choice of land. For instance, to avoid needlessly dividing or cutting-up fields, land should only be available for this purpose alongside the public roads, and the consent of the owner might be required for land within a limited distance of his house or private grounds. A limit might also be placed to the quantity of land taken from any one farm or estate (say five per cent. of the whole, for instance); but, with such obvious exceptions, it is evident that the field of choice should be as unrestricted as possible, in order that population might take a free course, instead, as now, of one district being kept without population, while, in another, men are forcibly crowded together in overgrown towns and cities.

The effects of such freedom of choice in fixing upon a permanent residence would be gradually to check the increase of the towns and to repopulate the country districts. Rural villages would begin a natural course of healthy growth, and if the minimum of land to be taken for one house were fixed at an acre (the maximum being four or five acres) these could never grow into crowded towns, but would always retain their rural character, picturesque surroundings, and sanitary advantages. The labourer would choose his acre of land near the farmer who gave him the most constant employment and treated him with most consideration; and besides those who would continue to work regularly at agricultural labour, there would be many with more land of their own or with other means of living, who would be ready to earn good wages during hay or harvest time. With a million of agricultural labourers, each holding an acre or more of land, and at least another million of mechanics doing the same thing, and all permanently attached to the soil by its secure possession, that scandal to our country, the scarcity of milk and the importation of poultry, eggs, and butter from all parts of the Continent would come to an end, while the vast sums we now pay for this produce would go to increase the well-being, not only of the labourers themselves, but of all the retail and wholesale dealers who supply their wants. Our most important customers are those at home, and there is no more certain cure for the now chronic depression of trade than a system which would at once largely increase the purchasing power of the bulk of the community.

Farmers will, no doubt, at first be inclined to object to any such extensive power of preemption of land as I have here indicated. But a little consideration will show them that they would be gainers rather than losers by it. In the first place, many large districts would for a long time be unaffected by it, except to the extent of the plots chosen by the labourers who cultivate the land; and to have a sober and industrious body of workmen permanently settled near them would certainly be to the farmers' advantage;—for it must be remembered that only the industrious and provident labourer could save the money necessary to purchase the tenant-right of his chosen lot. The public generally would avail themselves of the privilege by degrees, and as compared with the large area of the country, to a very small extent, because the strict limitation of the privilege to a personal occupation, and to a single occasion, would lead to its being exercised chiefly in the vicinity of towns and villages where people's occupations obliged them to live, and in remoter rural districts only by persons retiring from business or such as could afford a country house.

The two main points of this branch of the subject are—firstly, that the vast and overwhelming social importance of the free acquisition of land for a healthy home at its agricultural value is such as to overpower all the sentimental objections of a class who, it must be remarked, now willingly submit to the same or worse annoyances when imposed upon them by a landlord; secondly, that this free choice of land for a home is so great and tangible a boon to all classes, from the agricultural labourer up to the retired merchant, that, once convince people of its practicability, and you will set up a movement powerful enough to overwhelm the opposition of the vast landlord interest in all its ramifications. The man who, in his native country, cannot live where he wishes to live, but is dependent entirely on the pleasure of landlords and the interest of land-speculators, is not a free man as regards one of the most essential of the attributes of true freedom. When the people of this country clearly understand that nothing but an immoral system of land monopoly stand between them and freedom to enjoy their native soil; and, further, when they are shown that this system may be abolished without wronging any individual, while it will certainly tend to eradicate from our land that great blot on our civilisation, persistent pauperism in the midst of ever-increasing luxury and wealth,—and when they see further that, as Mr. George has demonstrated by a strict logical deduction, this connection is a necessary one, and that private property in land is the actual cause of the strange phenomenon of poverty and even famine in our midst, notwithstanding the vast forces of nature now enlisted in our service and producing ever-increasing stores of wealth—when they clearly understand this, the end of landlordism will not be far off. The farmer may agitate for his English Land Bill as a temporary palliative, but he must look forward to land-nationalisation as the only means of obtaining that absolute freedom of action and that permanent interest in the soil which alone can renovate British agriculture.

In conclusion, I must call attention to the vast revenues derived from the soil (now enriching one limited class and to that extent impoverishing all other classes), which would take the place in the national treasury of the whole of our indirect taxation, enabling us to abolish custom duties and so have really free imports, and at the same time setting free an army of unproductive officials, now paid by the productive workers of the country. To the far-sighted politician no less than to the social reformer Nationalisation of the Land thus commends itself, as offering a solution of many difficult problems and a remedy for many crying evils.