The Ownership, Tenure, and Taxation of Land Values
Some Facts, Fallacies And Proposals relating thereto
by The Right Honble. Sir Thomas Whittaker (1914)
(read as pdf: Ownership)
Preface
It is not pretended that this book is a work of original research. It is rather a bringing together of such statistical and historical information as is available, and admission of it, and of the economic, fiscal, and ethical principles and problems which bear upon the distinct and limited subjects—the ownership, tenure, and taxation of land—with which the volume is concerned.
This information and the discussion of these principles are at present scattered over a very wide area of books, papers, and reports. They are so intermingled with, and often practically buried in, masses of figures, records, and detailed information, and in dissertations on principles ranging over a far wider field, that, except to students and specialists, they are comparatively little known.
My object has been to present these facts and principles as they arrange themselves in my mind, together with a statement of what appear to me to be the proper conclusions to be drawn from them. I have stated the position from the point of view of one who claims to be an average man who has had a fairly wide experience of men and things in private and public affairs and business, and who has devoted a considerable amount of time to an endeavour to ascertain the facts and arrive at sound conclusions with regard to the subject here considered.
This has been done in the scattered intervals which have been snatched from a very fully occupied life, and no one is more conscious than I am of the imperfections which must result from those conditions. The temptation to carry the investigation further and collect more particulars has been great, but I have remembered Hallam’s remark that ” an author who waits till all requisite materials are accumulated to his hands is but watching the stream that will run on for ever.”
My aim has been not so much to propound schemes of reform by suggesting remedies and formulating definite proposals (although I have done both) as to clear the way and prepare the ground for that necessary and desirable work by ascertaining and stating the historical and existing facts with which we have to deal, and enunciating the fundamental principles of economics and ethics by which we ought to be, and, if success is to attend our efforts, must be, guided and governed. This involves the clearing away of a dense and tangled mass of error and misconception in which prejudice and lack of knowledge have enveloped the whole subject. Until that has been done, accurate diagnosis of the problems which confront us and the formulation of useful and wise solutions of them are alike impossible.
Students and specialists may say that much of the historical chapters is elementary. So it is; but the vast majority of those for whom I have written—politicians and the general public—either have never known it, or have forgotten it, or have acquired misconceptions with regard to it. As, in addition to this, very inaccurate and misleading statements are being strenuously promulgated in order to influence the judgment of the ordinary citizen with regard to proposals concerning the ownership, tenure, and taxation of land, it has seemed to me to be desirable that the fundamental historical facts which bear on those proposals should be summarised and clearly re-stated.
The mere counter-statement by me of these facts and the conclusions to be drawn from them would carry no more weight than the assertions which I dispute, if my contentions were not supported by references to those who are accepted as standard authorities to-day. I have, therefore, freely used and am largely indebted to the work of others. I have quoted much, because, not only are the facts and arguments stated more forcibly and clearly than I could hope to put them, but I wish the statement of them to carry the full weight of the authority which lies behind it.
I am specially indebted to the works of Professor F. W. Maitland, Sir F. Pollock, Professor P. Vinogradoff, Professor W. J. Ashley, Dr. E. A. Freeman, Bishop Stubbs, Mr. J. R. Green, Mr. Thorold Rogers, Professor E. G. K. Gonner, Mr. R. H. Tawney, Mr. Justice Scmtton, Professor E. R. A. Seligman, Professor Henry Sidgwick, Professor E. Gannan, Mr. F. A. Walker, Professor Alfred Marshall, Professor A. L. Bowley, Mr. Stephen Dowell, the late Duke of Argyll, Professor T. H. Huxley, Mr. Arnold Toynbee, M. Fustel de Coulanges, Mr. F. Seebohm, Sir Henry Maine, Mr. J. H. Round, Professor D. G. Ritchie, and Sir Robert Gifien.
In the great majority of cases the references are given, but in order to avoid burdening the pages with footnotes to an extent which might appear pedantic, I have occasionally summarised without special reference the statement by others of views which I desired to express. I must ask them to accept this acknowledgment of my indebtedness in those instances.
January 1914.
Introduction
“Land reform covers a menagerie of aims and programmes.”—J. Wedgwood, M.P.
Land and Taxation are never-failing subjects of great public interest in all civilised communities. The problems which are connected with them come home to us all very closely in the affairs of our everyday life. Land is necessary for our existence. ”Man is a land animal.” The conditions under which access can be had to land and a foothold maintained upon it are consequently of the greatest importance and of unfailing interest. Taxation is a burden which is practically universal and ever present. It is almost always resented and is usually avoided whenever and wherever possible. In this country for more than eight centuries, as in the ancient world long centuries before that, the laws and customs concerning land and taxation have been burning questions of public controversy. They remain to-day amongst the most pressing and difficult of the problems with which our statesmen are faced and upon which the general public feel most keenly. Land Law Reform and the Reform and Readjustment of Taxation, local and national, are shibboleths which find a place in the programmes of all political parties. The discussions of centuries and the experience of all civilised nations have failed to bring unanimity, or even an approach to general agreement with regard to them. Few subjects, theology excepted, seem to lend themselves so readily and completely to honest misconception and misrepresentation.
At the present time the complicated and difficult problems which centre round land and taxation, and particularly round that exceptionally thorny combination of the two, the taxation of land, are subjects of the keenest political controversy. For fifty years the question has been pressed upon the attention of Parliament, and every Government of both of the great political parties has promised to grapple with it thoroughly and effectively; but none of them has done so. Royal Commissions, Select Committees, Departmental Committees, Private Committees, have inquired and reported. Organisations of various kinds have carried on a more or less vigorous propaganda, in connection with which agitators and political quacks in all parties have advocated almost every method of dealing with land and taxation which the ingenuity of man could devise. There are few subjects about which more prejudice and less accurate knowledge prevail. If the problems involved are to be at all satisfactorily dealt with, a little clear thinking on some elementary phases of the history, economics, and ethics of the subject is very necessary. It is well that we should from time to time clear our minds and verify the principles on which our opinions are based by examining the fundamental facts which do really govern the condition of mankind.
Henry George and his Proposals
Some thirty years ago new life was infused into, and a new turn given to the old and ineffective propaganda which had long been carried on in this country in favour of the nationalisation of the land, and to the later and far more reasonable and practical proposal for securing for the community the future unearned increase in the value of land, with which Mr. J. S. Mill was prominently identified, by the publication here of Mr. Henry George’s book entitled Progress and Poverty.
Mr. George was a remarkable man, and he wrote an extremely able book which had and still has a marked effect on public opinion. The most diverse opinions were and are held about him and his book. To his followers he is a hero, a prophet, a genius, a saviour of man- kind, who discovered and preached a new evangel. To many of his opponents he is a conceited demagogue, preaching iniquity in the form of pillage and plunder which he invites the populace to undertake in the name of justice and religion.[1]
Henry George’s contention is that the great social evil of our time is the private ownership of land, and that, so long as that continues, there cannot be any hope of improving the condition of the masses of the people. He asserts that where there is most material progress, and production and commerce are most highly developed, there is the deepest poverty, the sharpest struggle for existence, and the most enforced idleness. Increased production does not lighten the burden of the toilers, it only widens the gulf between rich and poor. The tramp comes with the locomotive, and almshouses and prisons are as surely the marks of material progress as are costly dwellings, rich warehouses, and magnificent churches. He contends that the reason is that the return to labour and capital can never be more than can be obtained upon the poorest land in use, and that the owner of land can always claim as rent all the produce in excess of what the poorest land in use would yield. All progress and increased production increases the demand for land and forces down the margin of cultivation. This increases rent and lowers wages and interest, with the result that the rich tend to become very much richer, the poor to become more helpless, and the middle class to be swept away.
This is all due to the private ownership of land. To command the land is to command all the fruits of labour save enough to enable labour to exist. Nothing short of making land common property can permanently check the tendency of wages to the starvation point. Reduced taxes, education, free trade, and increased efficiency do not increase wages or interest; they only raise rent.
Private property in land is contrary to the law of Nature; it is unjust and indefensible, and must always lead to the enslavement of the labouring classes. All men have a natural right to free access to and free use of the gratuitous offering of Nature. The equal right of all men to the use of land is as clear as their equal right to breathe the air—it is a right proclaimed by the fact of their existence. It is a natural and inalienable right; it is one of the primary conceptions of mankind. No power on earth can or even could rightfully make a grant of exclusive ownership in land. If all existing men agreed to grant away their equal rights, they could not grant away the rights of those who follow them.
The idea that private property in land is necessary to society is artificial and baseless, a comparatively modern growth, the off- spring of ignorance. Individual ownership of land has nowhere been freely adopted. Historically, it is robbery. Nowhere can it be traced to thoughts of justice or expediency. It has everywhere had its birth in war and conquest and selfish cunning, and has only prevailed as the result of a long course of usurpation, tyranny, and fraud.
The idea of private property in land took many generations to make its way among our ancestors, and did not reach full recognition here until the time of Charles II. The abolition of the military tenures at that time was simply an appropriation of public revenues by feudal land-owners, who got rid of the consideration on which they held the common property of the nation, and saddled it on the people at large by taxation.
This is Henry George’s teaching, and he says that the remedy that will right the wrong is that we must make land common property, not by purchasing it or confiscating it. It is only necessary to confiscate rent. We should abolish all taxation save upon land values, and appropriate rent by taxing land to the full amount of its value. Then wages would rise, and profits and the earnings of capital would increase; wealth would augment; poverty would be banished; crime would be lessened, and moral would be elevated.
Labour would have access to land free of rent on the margin of cultivation, and consequently would not be compelled to accept bare subsistence wages, or starve. The surplus unemployed would betake themselves to the free land, and thus the surplus would be drained off and the pressure relieved. The difficulty of finding employment arises from the difficulty which labour has in finding employment for itself, because barriers fence it off the land.
The assumed validity of public debts and titles to land rests upon the preposterous assumption that one generation may legislate for and bind another generation. If a man asked me to pay a bond which my ancestor had given to his ancestor, I should laugh at him. It is a sound deduction from the self-evident truth that the land belongs in usufruct to the living, that one generation should not hold itself bound by the laws or the defects of its predecessors. Let the parchments be ever so many, or the possession ever so long, the poorest child that is born in London to-day has as much right to the landed estates of the Duke of Westminster as his eldest son.
The foregoing is, I believe, a fairly complete and accurate summary of the argument embodied in Progress and Poverty. I have given it at some length, because the assertions which Henry George makes and the contentions which he founds on them are practically, though not always avowedly, the same as those which are at the basis of the views entertained, and the propaganda carried on by the majority of those who advocate the special penal taxation of land.
John Stuart Mill and Unearned Increment
Some years before Henry George and his proposals were heard of in this country, the Land Tenure Reform Association, of which J. S. Mill became President in 1870, had as one of its objects:
To claim for the benefit of the State, the Interception by Taxation of the Future Unearned Increase of the Rent of Land (so far as the same can be ascertained), or a great part of that increase, which is continually taking place, without any effort or outlay by the proprietors, merely through the growth of population and wealth; reserving to owners the option of relinquishing their property to the State at the market value which it may have acquired at the time when this principle may be adopted by the Legislature.
J. S. Mill, in supporting this policy, said:
The Society are of opinion that in allowing the land to become private property, the State ought to have reserved to itself this accession of income; and that lapse of time does not extinguish this right, whatever claims to compensation it may establish in favour of the land-owners. …
The Society do not propose to disturb land-owners in their past acquisitions; but they assert the right of the State to all such accessions in the future. Whatever value the land may have acquired at the time when the principle they contend for shall obtain the assent of Parliament, they do not propose to interfere with. If, rather than submit to be specially taxed on the future increase of his rent, the land-owner prefers to relinquish his land to the State, the Society are willing that the State should pay for it at its selling value. …
A large margin (of the future increase of rents) should be allowed for possible miscalculation.
By the old land nationalisers, and the new Henry Georgeites these proposals were considered to be quite inadequate. They desired immediate, not prospective revenue; they also had no intention of confirming owners of land in the possession of what they now have. They desired to annex present existing land values and not merely such future increases as might accrue. Such municipal bodies as the London County Council of twenty to twenty-five years ago, the Corporation of Glasgow and others who followed their lead, wanted an immediate revenue from some new source to relieve the heavy burden of rates which they were vigorously piling up. Power to levy rates upon some one other than the ordinary ratepayer, supplemented by liberal subsidies from the Imperial Exchequer, was the ideal of the average municipal councillor. Not being troubled with much knowledge of the history or theory of local and national finance, sharing many popular hazy prejudices regarding land and its owners, and always having before his eyes the terror of the rising wrath of his constituents, the local rate-payers, he readily turned a sympathetic ear to the plausible theories propounded by Henry George, especially as they were presented in the garb of religion and outraged justice. If he did not quite see his way to the millennium which was foreshadowed, he did at least think that he saw a new source of revenue and a means of stemming the rising tide of rates. The result was that a crusade, more or less on the lines of the teaching of Henry George, received considerable impetus and support.
Schemes for the Taxation of Land Values
The United Committee for the Taxation of Land Values is a body composed of representatives of a number of Leagues and Branches in various parts of the United Kingdom which exist to circulate the writings of, and to promote the policy advocated by Henry George and his followers. It spends £10,000 a year on this propaganda, and circulates 50,000,000 leaflets a year in addition to publishing a monthly paper and many pamphlets and books. Its principles are that the rent of land should form a public fund, of which each individual would enjoy the benefit, and its policy is to make rent a public fund by the taxation of land values, and thereby remove all other rates and taxes.
The Committee frankly and openly advocate the plunder of all owners of land. Mr. Joseph Fels, who is their chief financial supporter,[2] in a letter to the Times of February 29, 1912, referring to the recommendation of a Committee of the House of Commons that the State should purchase agricultural land as opportunity offered, and let it to tenant occupiers, said:
There is no doubt that the landlords and their friends in Parliament will welcome a scheme of land purchase, but it would be an outrage upon common sense and common honesty to pour millions of hard-earned money into the pockets of this landlord class, when justice clearly shows that the proper method of procedure is to take millions from them by taxation of land values—values which the dullest intelligence knows are the fruits of the toil of the workers upon the land.
What we have to insist upon is that the land monopolist shall be made to get off the backs of the toilers; that this can be accomplished by a State purchase is about as sane a proposition as suggesting that a dog can be profitably fed upon his own tail.
Later in the year[3] at a Land Values Conference over which Mr. C. P. Trevelyan, M.P., presided, and at which Mr. Ure, M.P., and others spoke, Mr. Fels said:
I am in favour of the Taxation of Land Values and the untaxing of everything else. I am in favour of removing all taxation from labour, every kind of industry, all kinds of business and buildings. I am not even in favour of taxing the income of Sir William H. Lever. … I am in touch with some sixteen countries, and when I have been charged with spending £30,000 or £40,000 in Great Britain to help along the land taxation, let me say I am spending two and a half times that much in my own country, so you see I am entirely cosmopolitan. …
I do not deny that I am a Single Tax man. I am a Single Tax man, and I believe from the bottom of my heart in the theory and economic philosophy taught by that great man Henry George as announced in that bible of the world: Progress and Poverty.
Land Values, their official organ, said:
To confiscate means to appropriate to the public use, and it is true that our Leagues aim at nothing less than the complete appropriation for the public use of the land values of this country.[4]
Mr. W. R. Lester, the Treasurer of the Committee, in a pamphlet entitled The Taxation of Land Values, says:
The value of the bare land apart from the improvements on it is a communal value, and should therefore be shared in common. Li other words, it should be taken in taxation. If you tax it in part, then you have made a beginning with the Taxation of Land Values. If you go further and tax it so as to derive your whole public revenue from it, and at the same time abolish all other taxes, then you have the Single Tax. The Single Tax. is the logical issue of the Taxation of Land Values.
And in Freedom through Taxation of Land Values, he says:
To tax Land Values to the full means, in a word, to abolish every tax save that on the value of land. … The reform can be taken step by step. Little by little let the community tax rent; little by little let it abolish present taxes on industry. This is the practical policy we advocate.
Mr. Ure, M.P., then Lord Advocate for Scotland, speaking at a dinner given by the Land Values Group, said:
Some day, who could tell, a single tax might be established in this country many years hence. But let them not be too confident by talking about a single tax to-day, and so frightening those who might be their friends.[5]
Mr. J. Dundas White, M.P., in The A.B.C. of the Land Question, says:
Fiscal Reform should begin by substituting Rating of Land Values for the present system of rating: it should proceed to substitute Taxation of Land Values for the present taxes on landed property; and it should then be developed further by substituting additional Taxation of Land Values for the other taxes on industry and trade. The further these substitutions are carried, the better shall we secure to the community what is rightly theirs. …[6] The Land Values movement leads to the SingleTax—the proposal to treat the rent of the natural elements as the source of public revenue, and to abolish all other rates and taxes. This rests on the twin principles that all the community have equal rights to the national elements, and that each individual is entitled to the products of his own industry.[7]
Messrs. G. H. Chomley and R. L. Outhwaite, M.P., in The Essential Reform: Land Values Taxation in Theory and Practice, say:
Save, perhaps, in cases of possible emergency, the only tax should be one upon land values, which would yield a revenue adequate for all national and municipal purposes; and we have seen that justice demands the ultimate raising of this tax to a point at which it would absorb private property in land.
Perfect taxation would abolish private property in land: there are unanswerable reasons for condemning private property in land. … All men have an equal right to live, and it follows of necessity that all have an equal right to land. … Rights to life would be unequal if one man were bound and another were not, to pay for land on which a foothold at least is a necessity of living. And this equal right to life, with its corollary an equal right to land, belongs to generations unborn as well as to those living to-day. … No sale of this right which might conceivably be alleged to have been acquiesced in by living people can be urged against the child to be born to-morrow, who has had no possible chance of selling his birthright.[8]
After this repudiation of all purchases and bequests of land, and of all laws and legal contracts authorising, compelling, or confirming the millions of transactions in land which have taken place in the past, and the thousands which take place yearly now, these gentlemen find no difficulty in passing on from their proposal to “abolish private property in land” by confiscating “the whole rental value,” to elaborate a scheme for seizing a large proportion of the property of railway companies, gas companies, water companies, electric lighting and power companies, tramway companies, telephone companies, and dock and wharf proprietors.[9] Their theory is that the value of the land which these undertakings own, or over which their lines, pipes, or wires pass, is not its clear un-improved site value, but is the difference between the value of these undertakings as a whole, as going concerns, and the value of their premises and plant. They express it thus: “The difference between the value of a monopolistic business and the value of the tangible property belonging to it is the measure of the land value possessed by the owners of undertakings of this class.”[10] They propose to acquire the whole of this so-called land value by taxing it at its full value arrived at on that basis. They explain how they think this would work with regard to railways. They say that the value of the shares of the railway companies is the value of the land plus the value of the rolling stock, rails, stations, etc., on it. They would arrive at the value of the land by deducting the value of the rolling stock, rails, stations, etc., from the total value of the capital of the company.[11] They would then levy land value taxes on this so-called land value, and gradually increase them until the nation had “resumed” that value. Their first step would, however, be to buy out the companies at their capital value, and pay the interest on that portion of it which they call land or monopoly value by levying a special land tax on all the land values of the country. They put the capital value of the railways at about £1,200,000,000, of which, they say, probably one-half is monopoly or land value. The amount to be raised by the special land tax to pay interest on this sum at 4 percent would, therefore, be £24,000,000. By this means they suggest that they could raise wages and lower freights to the extent of £24,000,000 a year.[12]
In addition to this, “great national roads” for “motor traffic at a high rate of speed,” and “great waterways” (canals) ”made free to all users” are to be constructed, the interest on all these undertakings being raised by taxes on land values.[13]
That is to say, land values are to be confiscated, and out of the proceeds of the plunder all rates and taxes are to be abolished, ”save perhaps in cases of possible emergency,” half the cost of purchasing the railways is to be paid, and “great national roads” and “great national waterways” are to be constructed and “made free to all users”!
Speaking in the House of Commons on March 13, 1913, Mr. Outhwaite said that “buying out the land-owners and creating a debt of thousands of millions upon which vast interest will have to be paid “is” going the wrong way to deal with the land monopoly.” The right way was “to take the rent fund by the simple process of taxation.”[14]
Mr. F. Verinder is the Secretary of the English League for the Taxation of Land Values which was formerly known as the English Land Restoration League. When the change in the name was made in 1902, it was stated that it “involved no change of front nor change of principles.” What its “front” and “principles” were was thus stated in a Manifesto which was issued by the English Land Restoration League and signed by Mr. Verinder:
We propose to increase taxation on land until the whole annual value is taken for the public benefit, and, finally, to make the English people themselves the landlords of England. As a first step to this end, we shall demand of our representatives in Parliament a re-imposition of the tax of four shillings in the pound on the current value of land, irrespective of whether it is rented, used, or kept idle by the holder. And we shall also demand, at the same time, a measure giving all local governments the power to collect rates from an assessment upon the value of land, exclusive of buildings or improvements, and irrespective of use. We propose to achieve our end—the complete restoration of English land to the English people—as rapidly as may be.
The Land Values Group in Parliament
As one of the preliminary steps towards the consummation of this policy, a memorial to the Government was promoted by the Land Values Taxation Committee in May 1911. That Memorial urged:
- Hastening the completion of the valuation of all land, apart from improvements, provided for in the Budget of 1909-10.
- Making that valuation accessible to the public.
- Empowering Local Authorities to levy rates on the basis of that valuation.
- Levying a budget tax on all Land Values, to be applied
(a) In providing a national fund to be allocated toward the cost of such services as Education, Poor Belief, Main Roads, Asylums, and Police, thereby reducing the local rates; and
(b) In substitution of the duties on tea, sugar, cocoa, and other articles of food.
And is stated to have been signed by 176 Liberal and Labour M.P.’s.
A Memorandum submitted to the Departmental Committee on Local Taxation, in 1912, by Mr. G. L. Davies and Mr. P. W. Raffan, M.P., on behalf of “The Land Values Group of Members of Parliament,” stated the arguments which they consider justify and support these proposals. For the most part that Memorandum is merely a restatement of many of the difficulties, inequalities, and injustices which characterise our present system of rating and taxation. These have been common ground amongst all parties for half a century. The practical question is. How can they best be rectified and adjusted?
The proposal of the Land Values Group is that there should be a local and a national tax upon land values. “The whole of local expenditure should be charged upon the owners of site values,” and “so much of the cost of such services as Education, Poor Belief, Main Roads, Asylums, and Police, as is properly a national charge, should be raised by a national tax on land values.”
The arguments adduced in support of this proposal are largely those propounded by Henry George. They are that land value is public value, which has been created by, and therefore should belong to the public: that a tax on that value cannot be shifted: it would not trench on capital, or interest, or wages: by it no one would be deprived of the return due to his own labour or outlay: every one would contribute to the public revenue in exact proportion to the natural advantages with which he was entrusted by the community, that is, in proportion to the value of the land which he held: each citizen would contribute to the revenue of the State in proportion to the benefit he received from the State.
It is further urged that the present system rewards the land withholder and penalises the land-owner, and that land taxation would stimulate and indeed compel the fullest remuneration and advantageous use of land, whereby progress and development would be encouraged, employment increased, and wealth created: that the imposition of heavy burdens of rates as soon as land is built on and the houses are occupied, delays and prevents building, and thus makes houses fewer and dearer, and keeps men out of work who would be employed if improvements and extensions were not taxed: that taxing land values would not only promote the use of land, but would also lower its price by bringing it into the market, and making its owners anxious to sell or let: that, consequently, houses and business premises would be cheaper, rents would be lower, and the rates and many of the taxes which are now paid would be abolished. Another advantage claimed is, that it would redistribute the burden of rates as between different districts, as regards the local tax the levies on central properties where the site values are highest would be increased, and in the suburbs and on the outskirts, where it is desirable to encourage building, they would be diminished: as regards the national tax, it would relieve agricultural and purely working class districts, and increase the payments of central city and high-class residential districts.
A Kaleidoscopic Propaganda
At different times, in different places, different advocates of specially taxing land accentuate and attach importance to different phases of the policy, and the results which they think would follow its adoption. More or less vaguely most of them skip gaily from phase to phase, and enunciate the most contradictory arguments with bewildering rapidity and inconsistency.
As an indication of the hallucinations which some people are under, and the kind of rhapsody into which they speedily lapse, we may quote from A Hundred Reasons for Taxing Land Values, by Chapman Wright and Arthur Wilby, a few of the advantages which it is alleged would follow the adoption of this policy:
Accidents to workers diminished.
Antiquarian remains preserved (by taxing them so heavily that their owners would be compelled to give them up).
Art encouraged.
Beautiful landscape scenery preserved.
Capital no longer harmful.
Charities made genuine.
Church disestablishment if desired.
Civic responsibility aroused.
Cruelty to children diminished.
Disfiguring advertisements diminished.
Eight-hour day if desired.
Factory Acts unnecessary.
Food adulteration checked.
Gambling diminished.
Gas, Trams, etc., municipalised.
Hospitals benefited.
House of Lords abolished, if desired
Human nature unchanged.
Imperialism on sane lines.
Insanity diminished.
Interest made fair.
Inventions encouraged.
Milk-supply improved.
Millionaires impossible.
Municipal corruption checked.
Rivers for the nation.
Shop hours made reasonable.
Street noises diminished.
Trusts impossible.
Waste of labour stopped.
Worry lessened.
The only sound and sensible statement in this list is that human nature would be unchanged. We can only wonder why they do not tell us that freckles would be abolished, snub noses would dis-appear, the weather would always be what was desired, cats would cease from caterwauling, and babies would squall no more.
An Inquiry into Facts, History, and Fundamental Principles desirable
It is clearly desirable that some effort should be made to elucidate the welter of confusion in which all questions affecting the ownership and taxation of land have been involved. That there are important problems in connection therewith, for which a solution is urgently needed, is not doubted by any one who has given attention to the subject. That there are grievances, inequalities, and injustices, is universally admitted. The difficulty hitherto has been to agree upon the remedy. Proposals for what is called Reform are numerous enough, but some of them would do little more than accentuate existing troubles or create others as bad or worse. No real progress is made if we merely substituted a new injustice for an old one.
It is essential to the formation of a sound judgment on this, as on all other subjects, that we should have accurate knowledge of the facts and history of the matter, and clear views as to the fundamental principles by which we ought to be guided in dealing with it. Our first step, therefore, should be an endeavour to separate the true from the false, the wheat from the chaff, by making an effort to ascertain how much of the assertions and contentions which we have been considering is sound, just, and accurate, and how much is fallacious, inequitable, and untrue. This involves an inquiry into the origin and history of property in land more especially in this country, and also into those theories of natural right which are expounded as the foundation of the claim which is made that much which has been done and allowed in the past should now be reversed and ignored. Some study of the history of taxation, its origin, object, character, and growth, and of the opinions which at various periods have been held with regard thereto, will be necessary. The origin and history of the feudal system, its rise and its fall, its aim and its results, and especially its bearing upon the subjects of our inquiry—the ownership and taxation of land—must be examined with some care. The economic history of the country for several centuries, and the industrial revolution which has characterised the last two hundred years, must also be looked into, in order to ascertain what has in fact been the effect of progress, inventions, and great material prosperity upon the masses of the people. It is further necessary that an effort should be made to determine as precisely as possible what is the real incidence and effect of rates and taxes which are levied on real property.
When this has been done, we shall have cleared away some mis-conceptions which prevail as to matters of fact, we shall have brought forward other factors and considerations which are generally over-looked, and we shall be able to consider some of the proposals which are made in the light of what expediency suggests, sound economic principles teach, and justice demands.
Part I
The Ethics and Origin
of the Private Ownership of Land
It is not to be forgotten that what we call rational grounds for our beliefs are often extremely irrational attempts to justify our instincts.”—Huxley.
“When you have no case according to the law of the land, appeal to the Law of Nature.”—Aristotle (Rhetoric).
“The doctrine of ‘natural rights’ is the fulcrum upon which Henry George, like a good many other political philosophers during the last 130 years, rests the lever wherewith the social world is to be lifted away from its present foundations and deposited upon others.”—Huxley.
“What are these natural laws which nobody has made and which everybody supposes at his fancy?”—Bentham.
“We can only allow natural rights to be talked about in the sense in which natural rights mean those legal or customary rights which we have come to think or may come to think it most advantageous to recognise.”—Prof. Ritchie.
“The distinction between Natural Law and Positive Institution is one of the very deepest subjects in all philosophy, and there are many indications that Mr. George has dipped into its abysmal waters with the very shortest of sounding lines.”—Duke of Argyle.
Chapter I
The Ethics of Private Ownership of Land
From the time of Rousseau to Henry George, and those who are at the present time more or less imbued with the spirit of his teaching and policy, there have always been representatives of a school of thought which propounds the doctrine that private property in land is unmoral and pernicious, a violation of natural rights and contrary to the law of nature. Consciously and avowedly, or tacitly and unconsciously, the ideas and attitude of mind from which this teaching emanates are the foundation and starting-point of much of the policy and propaganda of the present time with regard to land and its taxation. As usual, Henry George states the alleged principle far more frankly, clearly, and concisely than any of his more or less diluted followers:
The equal right of all men to the use of land is as clear as their equal right to breathe the air—it is a right proclaimed by the fact of their existence. For we cannot suppose that some men have a right to be in this world and others no right.
If we are all here by the equal permission of the Creator, we are all here with an equal title to the enjoyment of His bounty—with an equal right to the use of all that nature so impartially offers. This is a right which is natural and inalienable; it is a right which vests in every human being as he enters the world, and which, during his continuance in the world, can be limited only by the equal rights of others. There is in nature no such thing as a fee simple in land. There is on earth no power which can rightfully make a grant of exclusive ownership in land. If all existing men were to unite to grant away their equal rights, they could not grant away the right of those who follow them.[15]
It is desirable, therefore, at the very outset of our inquiry, that we should ascertain what these “Natural Rights” really are and what recognition of them involves.
Natural Rights
What people really mean when they talk of “Natural Rights” is often very difficult to discover. Frequently they talk very loosely, and are obviously confusing natural rights with moral rights and legal rights, and, in the course of any argument which they profess to base on natural rights, they are found tripping gaily from natural rights to moral rights, and then to legal rights, and back again to natural rights, just as it seems to suit their purpose.
In his work entitled. Remarks on the Use and Abuse of some Political Terms, Sir George Cornwall Lewis says:
We hear of original rights, natural rights, indefeasible rights, inalienable rights, inherent rights where there is no pretence of legislative sanction; indeed, the only object of using these names is to induce the Legislature to convert these supposed rights into real rights by giving them the sanction of law. … All that these persons mean is that, in their opinion, the claims which they call rights ought, in sound policy, to be sanctioned by law. It is the duty of such persons to show that sound policy requires what they require; but as this would require a process of reasoning, and as reasoning is often both hard to invent and to understand, they prefer begging the question at issue by employing some of the high-sounding phrases just mentioned.[16]
The words ‘nature’ and ‘natural’ are constantly bandied about in controversy as if they settled quarrels, whereas they only provoked them by their ambiguity. Slavery has been condemned as an ‘unnatural’ institution, and has been defended on the ground of the ‘natural’ inferiority of some races to others. The equality of the sexes is asserted and denied on the ground of ‘nature.’ The ‘natural’ goodness and the ‘natural’ badness of mankind have been maintained with like earnestness and sincerity.”[17]
No Agreement as to what are “Natural Rights”
When people appeal to nature they appeal arbitrarily to what they happen to like or approve. Different peoples at the same time, and the same peoples at different times, and various sections of the same community, may and often do hold different views as to particular rights and duties, and there is no law-court to which an appeal can be made, from which a binding decision can be obtained. The only sanction or otherwise of an alleged moral right is the approval or disapproval of private individuals—that is of public opinion.
If the Law of Nature really represented the consent of the human race it would determine many long-standing controversies; but it has not done so: it has rather promoted some of them. The opinions which have been held amongst different peoples at all ages about two such vitally important matters as slavery and marriage, upon which, if on any subjects, the law of natural rights would speak uniformly and with authority, illustrate the difficulties which there are in interpreting the voice of nature.
If there were a “Law of Nature” to which we could appeal to determine the natural rights of individuals, it would no doubt be very convenient. We could then easily determine what their moral rights were and deduce therefrom what their legal rights should be. There is, however, no universal agreement as to what natural rights are. They usually mean those rights which, in the opinion of the person who is asserting or claiming them, would be recognised by the public opinion of his ideal community, and would be respected by its laws. In a word they are merely the rights which he thinks ought to be recognised. Views as to natural rights vary as much as views as to theology, and the most contradictory assertions are made and defended with equal confidence and authority.
In primitive conditions people regard as natural rights those rights which they have been accustomed to have or which they, rightly or wrongly, believe they once possessed. “Custom is primitive law, and custom determines primitive notions of obligation.” To the Greeks and Romans and other ancients slavery was a natural institution. They knew nothing of any society, civilised or other, without it. Turks, Chinese, Germans, and Americans have different ideas as to the position of women. Each thinks the one to which he is accustomed is the natural, right, and proper one.
Some people regard an appeal to ”Natural Rights,” or the ”Law of Nature,” as an appeal from law or general custom to the natural instincts and feelings which Nature has implanted in our breasts. This appeal to “the voice of God and Nature in the heart of every man,” which is regarded as a universal revelation of the will and intention of the Deity, is really an appeal to the conscience of each individual. It is an appeal to an internal as against an external authority. It suggests the existence of an infallible Pope in the breasts of mankind. Unfortunately, the decisions of this conscience, these instinctive feelings, differ much at different times, at different places, and in different persons. The view of the individual and of the multitude is certain to be very largely a reflection of the environment to which they have been accustomed. Professor Bain said, “Conscience is an imitation within us of the government without us.” Revolts against existing conditions always show strong traces of the influence of the environment that has created them.
It would help many people to clear their minds on this question of “rights” if they would attempt to state clearly and concisely what they really mean when they speak of “natural rights.” Do they mean the rights which men and animals have in a state of nature? Are there any differences between the natural rights of men and animals, and, if so, of what do those differences consist, and how and when do they arise?
Is natural right the unlimited right of all to everything that is provided by nature? Has natural right anything to do with justice or injustice? Do they make any serious and carefully reasoned attempt to distinguish between natural rights, legal rights, and moral rights?
A legal right is any privilege or immunity conferred by law. A legal right is not necessarily a moral right. A legal right is a claim of an individual upon others which is recognised by the law-courts, that is by the State in which the right is claimed. A moral right is a claim of an individual upon others which is recognised by society irrespective of whether it is or is not recognised by law.
At Bottom “Natural Right” is the Right of Force
Sovereignty—ultimate legislative and administrative authority and power—in any nation or community rests with those who have the control and support of those who are the strongest, and consequently have power to enforce their will. They are by no means necessarily the majority. “Legally speaking, the State is almighty,” so far as its own subjects are concerned, up to the limit of its power to enforce its decisions and commands. As Sir George Cornwall Lewis put it, “All governments subsist by force, and that force is ultimately the sole check on wrongdoers.”
Government is based upon the natural law that the stronger rules. One of the bonds of social cohesion is the dependence of the weak upon the strong, from which evolves obedience on the one hand and protection on the other.
The existence and administration of a criminal law are necessary to the existence of a state; and no criminal law can be carried into effect without the means of applying physical constraint to those who infringe it. Nevertheless, the knowledge that force may, if necessary, be applied induces offenders to submit without resistance. … The cases, therefore, in which force is actually applied are not many; and as the effect of the law authorising the use of force is to render its use unnecessary, it has been thought that force is of little benefit in civilised societies, and might be banished from the resources of government, although it is, in fact, the keystone on which all government must ultimately rest.[18]
In the community of nations the first appeal is to physical force. In communities of men forms of government serve to put off the appeal, and often render it unnecessary. But it is still open to the oppressed or the ambitious.[19]
At bottom and in reality “natural right” is simply the right of might and force. Man is not born with any natural rights, as distinct from legal rights, any more than an animal is. He is born with instincts and potential capacity and powers. The “right” which nature gives to men and animals is the right to do, get, and keep what they can. Man’s natural liberty is “unlimited right to everything he is able to obtain.” It means the reign of selfishness and brute force, and is individualism in its purest and most extreme form. To base an argument on an appeal for equity and justice, sympathy and brotherhood, and an effort to ameliorate the condition of the people on “natural rights,” indicates a confusion of thought which is as absurd as it is hopeless.
Huxley and the ”Natural Right” of the Tiger
The theories which are often based on what are very loosely and inaccurately described as “Natural Rights” have never been dealt with more trenchantly than by Professor Huxley, and no one has more clearly indicated the fundamental distinction which separates “Natural Rights” on the one hand from Moral and Civil Rights on the other than he has in two illustrations, which I will here summarise largely in his own words.
He tells the story of a tigress which carried off a man to her cubs and allowed them to worry and maul him, while she from time to time quieted him by cuffing him with her sharp-clawed paw. The tigress and her cubs were afterwards shot.
That tigress had a “natural right” to do what she did, and that she was justified by the “law of nature” is unquestionable. It is their nature to, “for God hath made them so.” It is the “nature” of tigers to prey on other large animals, men included. They are eminently adapted for the operation, and they must perish if they fail to perform it. To deny the right of tigers to torment and devour men would be to impeach the order of nature. If we base our claim to do anything on “natural right,” whence comes our competence to deny the exercise of their natural rights to other beings who stand upon the same foundation of natural right as ourselves? To be, and to have a natural right to be, to possess a faculty, and to have the natural right to exert it, are all one.
The important point is: is a “natural right” a right which ought not to be interfered with—a right which men and animals ought not to be prevented from exercising? The answer to that question will do much to clear the air as to what natural rights really are, and what they really involve.
It is admitted that a tiger has a natural right to eat a man; but if he may eat one man he may eat another, so that a tiger has a right of property in all men, as potential tiger-meat. Men are as much the “gratuitous offering” of nature to tigers for their subsistence, or part subsistence, as fruits are to men. But any one tiger has no more natural right of property in men than any other tiger. All tigers are free to eat any man they can seize. So that we may safely enunciate the conclusion that all tigers have an equal natural right to eat all men.
The use which is frequently made of the doctrine of “natural right” and the interpretation which is often put upon it, would really require the further admission that, as tigers have a right to eat men, it is wrong of men to put obstacles in the way of their having their rights by refusing to be eaten. Those who claim that “natural rights” ought not to be interfered with make a convenient, though unwarrantable, jump from one sense of the word “right” to another—from “natural right” to “moral right” when they contend that the existence of a “natural right” creates a moral obligation to permit it to be exercised. No doubt, he who hinders or refuses to admit a moral right is morally wrong—unjust, or, if you will, wicked. But very little consideration will show that hindrance or denial of “natural rights” may not only be far from wrong, but is, in fact, a necessary consequence of the existence of such “natural rights.” Grant that the tiger kills and eats men in the exercise of his natural right to preserve his own existence, it is no less true that men kill tigers in the exercise of their equal natural right to preserve their existence. If the tiger is entitled by the law of nature to use his claws and teeth and soft-footed, stealthy cleverness for the purpose of his self-preservation, the man may employ his hands and weapons, and use his still greater cunning, in tracking and stalking tigers to the like end.
“Thus,” continues Huxley, “the natural rights of tigers and the natural rights of men, though quite indisputable and alike safely founded on the ‘Law of Nature,’ are diametrically opposed to one another. It follows, therefore, that they are rights to which no correlative duties correspond—rights of which the exercise may be impeded or prevented without the perpetration of wrong. And that is just the difference between ‘natural laws and rights’ on the one hand, and ‘moral and civil laws and rights’ on the other. Moral laws and civil laws are commands of an authority which may be disobeyed; but the sanctioning authority threatens and visits with penalties those who disobey. … The proper object and effect of moral and civil laws are to benefit all who are subjected to them by bringing about a state of peace and mutual confidence—the laws restraining each individual from acts which are hurtful, and encouraging those which are beneficial to the polity of which he is a member. On the contrary, the ‘Law of Nature’ is not a command to do, or to refrain from doing anything. It contains, in reality, nothing but a statement of that which a given being tends to do under the circumstances of its existence; and which, in the case of a living and sensitive being, it is necessitated to do, if it is to escape certain kinds of disability, pain, and ultimate dissolution. The natural right deduced from such a law of nature is simply a way of stating the fact; and there is, in the nature of things, no reason why a being possessing such and such tendencies to action should not carry them into effect.”
Robinson Crusoe
Huxley next takes the case of Robinson Crusoe before the advent of man Friday, and, after remarking that “No one would deny that he had a natural right to take possession of his cave; to cut down the trees that suited his purpose; to gather fruits; to kill any of the wild goats for his subsistence; to shoot any number of the cannibal visitors, who would otherwise kill him for their subsistence,” proceeds to ask what would have happened if another Crusoe had been cast ashore on the opposite side of the island, and both had stalked the same goat from opposite sides. If each insisted upon exerting the whole of his natural rights, it is clear that there would be nothing for it but to fight for the goat. On the other hand, if the two men followed the dictates of common sense, they would agree to unite in peaceful co-operation with each other for their mutual comfort and protection. And that would be possible only if each agreed to limit the exercise of his natural rights. This is to say, the two men would, in reality, renounce the law of nature, and put themselves under a moral and civil law, replacing natural rights, which have no wrongs, for moral and civil rights, each of which has its correlative wrong.
The Social Utility Theory
Henry George’s proposals are based on two fundamental theories—one as to the basis of private property, and the other as to the basis of the taxation of the individual citizen. The first theory is that individual labour alone gives a complete right and clear title to property. This theory is based on the doctrine of natural rights.
Hobbes[20] says, “Nature hath given to each of us an equal right to all things.” “In a state of nature every man has a right to do and take whatever he pleases; whence the common saying that Nature has given all things to all men, and whence it follows that in a state of nature utility is the rule of right.” That is to say, in early times the universal rule was that the use of a thing, the occupation of land, gave the right of possession.
The theory of property which is accepted by modem jurisprudence and political philosophy is what has been called the social utility theory. It is based upon the practically universal experience of civilised mankind extending through the centuries until the light of history becomes dim and uncertain. Just as order, justice, law, and private and social ethics are the outcome of human experience and social and economic conditions, so private property is justified by the simple fact that it is the last stage of the outcome of a prolonged social evolution. As the result of the gradual progress of economic and social forces, private property came to be recognised in all civilised countries as the condition most calculated to promote the well-being of the whole community.
Of course, this does not mean that further progress is unthinkable, and that a change is impossible. What it does mean is that experience and universality count for much, and that when we are asked to entirely reverse the progress of centuries, and revert to primitive conditions which every nation that has become civilised has discarded a very strong case indeed is required to be made out, and that theories of what are called natural rights will furnish a very inadequate foundation for such arguments and proofs as will be required.
At best “Progress is only from one partial and one-sided expression of the whole truth which hovers before us as an ideal to another expression of it which may be equally, and sometimes even more, partial and one-sided, and which at the best is only less in- adequate than that which replaces.” Nevertheless, “durable institutions and widely diffused practical beliefs must have had in them some element of truth and value for the very reason that they flourished.”[21]
“The tendency of careful economic study,” as Professor Marshall*[22] says, “is to base the rights of private property, not on any abstract principle, but on the observation that in the past they have been inseparable from solid progress; and that, therefore, it is the part of responsible men to proceed cautiously and tentatively in abrogating or modifying even such rights as may seem to be inappropriate to the ideal conditions of social life.”
Unconvincing Arguments
Mr. George says that the comparatively small number of people who own the land of the United Kingdom might exclude all the rest of the people from it. If no one is to own anything that he might misuse no one ought to have a gun or a knife, because he might shoot or stab some one. No one ought to own a cartload of bricks, because he might throw them at some one. A man ought not to be allowed to go about, because he might assault others. As Mr. W. H. Mallock puts it: “The Duke of Westminster might make Belgravia a desert. Mr. George when he was in England might have stabbed the Duke of Westminster. But it no more follows that the Duke has no right to his land, than it follows from hence that Mr. George ought to have gone about London in hand-cuffs.” On the face of it, the suggestion that the land-owners could expel all the inhabitants of these islands is preposterous, for the simple reason that those inhabitants would never allow them to do it. If these things were probable or even possible, the law would provide against them. Land is held, as other things are owned, subject to laws which protect the interests of the whole community. The use which men can make of what they own is strictly limited. All Henry George’s comparison of the exclusive ownership of land with exclusive ownership of the air is unconvincing, in view of the fact that under his scheme land would be permanently owned and occupied by a very limited number of people, subject to the payment of a tax. He does not propose to prevent exclusive, permanent personal occupation, an occupation that would as effectually exclude all others from the land occupied as the present system does. If the exclusion of people from the land now is blasphemous against God and Nature, it would be quite as much so under the system of private ownership and exclusive occupation which his scheme of taxation would permit, and indeed involve and necessitate.
The Right to Live— Where ?
“Every man has a right to live.” Where? In his own country or only in his own part of it—where he was born? Does his right cease if he goes to another part of the country? Has he a right to live in any part and in any spot he likes? If not, who has the right to determine where he shall live? Is the land to be divided and subdivided to an unlimited extent? Is it only that every man has a right to live somewhere? If so, who is to decide where that “somewhere” is? Have any number of people, however many may be born there, the right to live on a Scotch island—say one of the Hebrides—even if they become so numerous as to reduce the whole population to poverty and the verge of starvation? If they go away from there, say to Glasgow, have they a right to live there? If so, what right; they were not born there? Have they a right to live in London? On the other hand, have, say Londoners or Yorkshiremen, the right to demand to live on an over-crowded Scotch island?
Is the right limited to a man’s own country? Even so, why should some people have a fertile soil and minerals and others barren hills and moors? Is not this instituting ownership, at any rate of groups or communities as against other groups or communities?
If men from the Hebrides may demand the right to live in Edinburgh or London as a natural, God-given right—as one of the rights of man—have they not an equal right to live in France, Italy, or China? Have not the Chinese a right to live in Australia or in England? What right have the people of England to its coal as against the German, the Russian, the Chinaman, or the Requimaux? The boundaries of nations are artificial and temporary.
Is it not the simple fact, that by the immutable laws of our existence the rights of men with regard to the surface of the earth are and always have been and always must be distributed unequally and arbitrarily? What then comes of the doctrine of ”equal rights” and how could it be enforced and given effect to ? As Mr. Mallock truly says:
Unless it were recognised, with regard to the surface of the earth, that the rights of men to it are distributed, not equally, but unequally; that some men without any personal merit of their own have an exclusive right to its richest and most delightful parts, whilst others have a right only to the parts that are most barren and miserable; that for some is the healthy hill-side, for others the pestilential plain; for some the harbours and the navigable rivers, for others the iron-bound coast and the rock-strewn mountain torrent; for some the perennial spring, for others the perennial winter; for some the fields of corn, for others the fields of ice; unless this were recognised as the order and rule of Nature no progressive civilisation of any kind would be possible; and mankind would consist of nothing but a multitude of warring and wandering tribes, perpetually either plundering or being plundered.
Rights of Nations and of Individuals
If the right to live in a particular country may properly and justly be limited to and vested in one group or nation, or in one section of a race of people, and not in mankind as a whole, on what principle of natural right, natural law, or natural justice can it be contended that a section of that special group, nation, or section of a race may not equally, properly, and justly possess special rights as owners of the land in that country—rights which in principle and character are not more exclusive as regards the other inhabitants of that country than are the rights claimed for those inhabitants as against the rest of humanity? If a nation may appropriate a country and claim it as their exclusive property why may not an individual appropriate a part of it? Or, if an individual may not own a portion of a country, on what principle and by what law of natural right may a group, or tribe, or race claim and own a portion of the earth’s surface to the exclusion of others and their equal right of ownership?
Australians refuse to Chinamen even free admission to their country. By what right do they do it? What greater right have they to assert that prerogative of ownership, which is sounder or greater than the right of the settler or purchaser there, to his particular portion of the land of Australia?
By what right did Henry George’s own countrymen in the United States, when they were a mere handful of people, claim and assert their ownership of and their right to exercise absolute authority over a very large portion of the earth’s surface—an authority which extends to claiming power to exclude from it the whole human race except on the conditions which those who are already there determine? Does Henry George denounce this claim to exclusive ownership? Not a bit of it. Quite the opposite. He condemns his government and his countrymen because they ever consented to part with it.
Who or what gave this exclusive ownership and authority to this group of people at the time when they claimed and asserted it—a group so small that it was impossible for them to effectively occupy more than the merest fraction of the vast territory they had seized? Was it conquest, or occupation, or mere assertion of possession? If so, may not it and other land be acquired with equal justice by any one else who is strong enough to seize it and hold it? Ownership has always been obtained and established in this way, and when so obtained and established has been dealt with as those establishing it have deemed best and most convenient.
Is Labour the only Title to Ownership?
The contention which is built up by Henry George is that land and all that it contains is the creation of God, and is not the result of any man’s labour; that it was intended for the use and benefit of the whole of mankind in all ages, and therefore no one has a right to own it; and that its value is entirely due to the growth, expenditure, and efforts of the community, and therefore every one has a natural right to that value. It is further contended that “Nature acknowledges no ownership or control in man, save as the result of exertion”; and that “as Nature gives only to labour, the exertion of labour in production is the only title to exclusive possession.” From this it is alleged that “if production give to the producer the right to exclusive possession and enjoyment, there can rightfully be no exclusive possession and enjoyment of anything not the production of labour, and the recognition of private property in land is wrong.”[23]
Henry George’s contention that labour is the only title to the exclusive possession of anything is based on his assertion of the right of a man to himself and to the enjoyment of the fruits of his own exertions. “As a man belongs to himself, so his labour when put in concrete form belongs to him.”[24] “What other right exists from which the right to the exclusive possession of anything can be derived, save the right of a man to himself?”[25]
This may seem very clear, and sound, and quite incontrovertible to those who do not look below the surface of high-sounding phrases; but if the argument involved therein be subjected to critical examination, and carried to its logical conclusion, it will be seen that it is merely superficial logic-chopping based on assertions which ignore or contradict the plainest and best known facts of life.
Huxley on “A Man’s Right to Himself”
As Huxley very forcibly puts it:
If labour is the only title to exclusive possession how in the world does a man come by the “right to himself”? I have paid a good deal of attention to those branches of natural history which treat more especially of man, but never yet have I come across even the smallest grounds for believing that a man has ever been known to make himself, or to endow himself by his own labour with the powers he exerts.
No doubt it may be said, with justice, that a man who learns diligently and strives hard to do right, bestows labour on himself, and does so far fulfil the necessary conditions of self-ownership laid down in Progress and Poverty. But, on the other hand, might not his teachers, on the very same ground, claim possession of the fruits of their labours in him? Might not the mother, who not only bore him, but bore with him, day and night, for half-a-dozen years, fed him, clothed him, nursed him in sickness, taught him the rudiments of civilisation—might not she rightfully appeal to this wonderful labour-test of ownership?
It is only a very small part of a man which can in any sense be said to be the product of his own labour. His physical and mental tendencies and capacities, dependent to a very large extent on heredity, are certainly the ”gratuitous offering of Nature”; if they belong to anybody, therefore, they must belong to the whole of mankind.
Further, the very existence of society depends on the fact that every member of it tacitly admits that he is not the exclusive possessor of himself, and that he admits the claim of the polity of which he forms a part, to act, to some extent, as his master.
More Superficial Philosophy
The fact is that when Henry George propounds as two fundamental, indisputable, and self-evident propositions: first, that labour is the “only” title to exclusive possession; and the second, that the foundation of this title lies in the right of a man to himself—that is to say, to the exclusive possession of himself; and attempts to base each upon the other, he puts forward two inconsistent and mutually destructive theories, the unsoundness of which is only partially obscured by the ingenious logic-chopping with which he supports them, and the high-sounding platitudes in which he envelopes them.
His contention is that the real and natural distinction between things which are rightfully property, and the subject of exclusive ownership by individuals, and things which are the common possession of the whole of the human race, is the distinction “between things which are the produce of labour and things which are the gratuitous offerings of Nature. … These two things are in essence and relations widely different. … The essential character of the one class of things is that they embody labour, are brought into being by human exertion, their increase or diminution depending on man. The essential character of the other class of things is that they do not embody labour, and exist irrespective of human exertion and irrespective of man.”[26]
To the superficial reader this again may appear to be very precise and accurate, but, as a matter of fact, it is loose and slip-shod; and when the statement is to be made the basis on which an argument is to be constructed, the adoption of which would involve vitally important and fundamental consequences, a careful examination of it will show that it is really fallacious and absurd.
A Dilemma and an Absurdity
In strict accuracy it cannot be said of anything that it can be “brought into being by human exertion.” The original material of which anything is made, be it a brick, a hatchet, a window, a pair of boots, a chair, a pen or a watch-spring, is “a gratuitous offering of nature.” Some articles embody more human labour than others, but that is not a question of principle; it is only a difference of degree. The raw material of nature is always there, and without it all the labour expended would have produced nothing.
If the expenditure of labour on turning clay into bricks, trees into doors and chairs, iron into knives and hatchets, and copper, zinc, and iron into clocks and watches, rightfully makes those articles the property of those who expended or paid for the expenditure of the labour upon them, by what process of justice of logic is not a piece of land which has been reclaimed from the waste, and by expenditure of labour and capital been transformed into a field of valuable pasture and arable land, also the rightful property of those who have made it what it is?
“In the state of nature,” says Huxley, “I doubt if ten square miles of the surface of the chalk downs of Sussex would yield pickings enough to keep one savage for a year. But, thanks to the human labour bestowed upon it, the same area actually yields, one way or another, to the agriculturist the means of supporting many men. If labour is the foundation of the claim to several ownership, on what pretext can the land, in this case also, be put upon a different footing from the steel pen?”
Clay, wood, iron or copper, and zinc are “the gratuitous offerings of nature”; “they exist irrespective of human exertion and irrespective of man.” Yet labour applied to them makes them rightfully the exclusive property of individuals; but labour applied to land creates no right of property in the soil. To make the absurdity complete, Henry George says:
But it will be said: There are improvements which in time become indistinguishable from the land itself! Very well; then the title to the improvements becomes blended with the title 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.[27]
Make a swamp into a farm and in course of time the improvements will be “indistinguishable from the land itself,” and the individual will lose his right to them in the common right of the whole people to the land; but turn the land into bricks, tools, ships or houses, and while it is true again that the “improvements” become “indistinguishable from the land” of which they are made, in this case the individual does not lose his right to the improvements. The human race loses its right to the land which the improver took away in the form of clay, iron ore, trees, etc.!
Does Labour alone produce Anything?
The truth is, all articles of human production are parts of the material universe. None of the original raw material out of which either the rude weapon or tool of the savage or the delicate chronometer, machine, or mathematical instrument produced by the most highly-skilled labour can be made by man. His most consummate art is but a moving into certain places of the parts of the material universe with which Nature supplies him at least as gratuitously as she supplies land.[28]
The fallacy of Henry George’s argument is similar, if we test it from the point of view of his contention that the value of land is entirely due to the existence, effort, and expenditure of the community, and that therefore it is the common property of all, and every one has a natural and indefeasible right to it. The value of everything, and indeed the power of individuals to do and produce anything, is largely due to the existence of the community and the work it does for each member of the community as part of the whole. Professor Seligman puts this point thus:
Mr. George bases his defence of private property in commodities other than land, on the labour theory. Yet individual labour, it may be said, has never by itself produced anything in civilised society. Take, for example, the workman fashioning a chair. The wood has not been produced by him. It is the gift of Nature. The tools that he uses are the results of the contributions of others. The house in which he works, the clothes he wears, the food he eats (all of which are necessary in civilised society to the making of a chair) are the result of the contributions of the community. His safety from robbery and pillage—nay, his very existence—is dependent on the ceaseless co-operation of the society about him. How can it be said, in the face of all this, that his own individual labour wholly creates anything? If it be maintained that he pays for his tools, his clothing, and his protection, it may be answered that the land-owner also pays for the land. Nothing is wholly the result of unaided individual labour. No one has a right to say: This belongs absolutely and completely to me, because I alone have produced it. Society from this point of view holds a mortgage on everything that is produced.[29]
As has already been observed, it is not the labour theory, but the social utility theory, which is the real justification of private property as it is of governments and laws. If the basis of Henry George’s argument were sound, the conclusions to be based upon it would go much farther than he carries them. The difference between property in land and property in other things, from the standpoint of the fundamental original material of all of them being “gratuitous offerings of Nature” and of individual as distinguished from social effort, is clearly purely one of degree and not of kind.
Experience the Guide
Is not the truth of the whole of this question of so-called “Natural Rights” this—that we must determine right and wrong by reference to experience, and not by any so-called inner light which any and every man may claim to possess and be guided by in arriving at most inconsistent and contradictory conclusions? “Natural Rights” as generally expounded, are really what some individuals or group of individuals happen at the moment to claim as harmonising with their private notions of what they ought to have.
”In the chaos of conflicting individual impulses, instincts, desires and interests, we can find no stable criterion. We must go beyond them to the essential nature of things. But what part of the nature of things is here relevant? Is it not simply—human Society? If there are certain mutual claims which cannot be ignored without detriment to the well-being, and in the last resort to the very being, of a Community, these claims may in an intelligible sense be called fundamental or natural rights. They represent the minimum of security and advantage which a community must guarantee to its members at the risk of going to pieces, if it does not with some degree of efficiency maintain them.”[30]
Theologians avoid the difficulty of ascertaining what the law of nature is by falling back on the authority of revelation. The revelation to which they appeal—and different teachers in different countries and at different times appeal to different revelations—may or may not be a final authority, but clearly it is another and an external authority, and does not help those who discard or ignore the authority to decide what is the law of nature and what are so-called natural rights. When a man appeals to what he terms the law of nature and natural rights, he is appealing to something other than, and different from, the teaching of the particular religious belief that he holds.
Ideas of Right and Wrong are a Growth—Slavery
We shall obtain a much sounder and also a much more hopeful outlook if we approach the study of past and present conditions and institutions with the conception of development and advance—evolution—in our minds than if we attempt to apply to every people in every age the same unvarying code of right and wrong under the impression that there are iron-bound “natural rights” which are applicable at all times and under all conditions. Professor D. G. Ritchie, one of Scotland’s ablest thinkers, considered that—
To the scientific student of human history it seems almost certain that slavery was a necessary step in the progress of humanity. It mitigated the horrors of primitive warfare,[31] and thus gave some scope for the growth, however feeble, of kindlier sentiments towards the alien and the weak. It gave to the free population sufficient leisure for the pursuit of science and art, and, above all, for the development of political liberty; and in this way slavery may be said to have produced the idea of self-government. By contrast with the slave the freeman discovered the worth of freedom. Thus slavery made possible the growth of the very ideas which in course of time came to make slavery appear wrong. Slavery seems to us horrible: it is contrary to nature, it violates the feelings that God and Nature have implanted in our breasts, and so on. It used not to seem horrible or contrary to nature, even to many people who talked loudly about the inalienable right of liberty. There are probably many things existing now which will seem ”horrible” some day, but which now seem quite “natural” to most persons. Science must have no prejudices, and, therefore, we must admit that there was a stage in human development when slavery, being useful to the progress of mankind, was not contrary to what could then have been considered “Natural Rights,” although, when slavery is no longer an institution of progressive societies, it becomes contrary to what people now consider ”Natural Rights.”[32]
Bondage in some form or other was universal in the whole of the ancient world of which we have historical knowledge.[33] It was the alternative for slaughter in the case of prisoners of war. It prevailed amongst the Jews, and Christianity found it existing everywhere and never expressly condemned it. Aristotle said that slavery was written “in the constitution of the Universe.”
As has already been observed, what are called “natural law” and “natural rights” by those who propound this doctrine are really not natural rights at all, but simply and solely what certain people at a particular time think law and rights ought to be. This misnamed doctrine of natural rights may be said to represent the ideal of the philosophers of the period. As to what is really desirable and expedient, opinions will vary, and that will be especially so at different stages of the world’s history. The propounders of the natural rights’ theory attempt to exalt their ideals (which are often wrong) at particular times into eternal and immutable laws of right and wrong.
The Only Safe Appeal
If the phrase “Natural Rights” has any intelligible meaning at all, it means those rights which ought to be recognized; and what those rights are can only be determined from the point of view of society. It is true that society has no existence except as a body of individuals. It is also true that individuals, as human beings with rights and duties, can only be understood in reference to a society. They are the product of a society, and “the rights of the individual must, therefore, be judged from the point of view of a society as a whole, and not the society from the point of view of the individual.”[34] Questions of right and wrong cannot properly be considered without regard to the past that produced them and the future that is even now amongst us. As Professor Ritchie well puts it, “the adults of a community are only the trustees inheriting every moment from the old who are dying and obliged to take into account the interests of those who are being born.”
The only safe appeal is an appeal to what is socially good and useful, account being taken not only of immediate convenience to the then members of a particular community, but of the future welfare of the community, not overlooking its relation to humanity as a whole. An appeal to social utility is an appeal to something that can be tested not only by individual instincts, desires, and feelings, but by experience. “History is the laboratory of politics. Past experience is indeed a poor substitute for crucial experiments, but we are neglecting our only guide if we do not use it.”[35] It means trying to discover from what followed under past conditions what is likely to result from similar or different conditions now.
“The only ‘law of nature’ to which we can listen must be such as will commend itself to our reason as a statement of the principles of a coherent and orderly society which will not throw away the hard- won achievements of man in his struggle with nature and with barbarism, and which will at the same time be progressive, in the sense of being capable of correcting its own faults. Any ‘natural rights’ which are incompatible with such a society are only another name for anarchy. “Nonsense upon stilts’ Bentham called them.”[36]
Chapter II
The Origin of Private Property in Land
The precise nature of the processes by, and the exact conditions under, which private and corporate ownership of land was originally brought about in various part of the world are not known. “Every one of the foundation stones of civilised society had been laid long before history was born, and nothing recorded by history, and nothing observed within our time, enables us with any certainly to clear up the mystery which surrounds the first beginnings of our race.”[37] The truth is that, as Mr. Leacock puts it, the institution of the State is not to be referred back to any single point of time. Nor is it the outcome of any single idea, example, movement, or plan. The State is not an invention; it is a growth, an evolution, the result of a gradual process running through all the known history of man. “The proposition that the State is a product of history means,” says Professor Burgess, “that it is a gradual and continuous development of human society out of a grossly imperfect beginning through crude but improving forms of manifestation towards a perfect and universal reorganisation of mankind.”
Private Ownership an Early Stage of Settled Conditions
So far as we have knowledge, it seems clear that almost every- where, as soon as anything like settled conditions were reached and wandering tribes attached themselves to definite spots, and specified areas became worth owning, land was held as personal or family property, and not as the property of a nation or even of the whole community, still less of the whole human race.
Whether there ever was a time or a country with a settled people who could in any real sense be said to own the land they occupied or claimed jurisdiction over, of whom it could be said that they owned it in common, it is impossible to say. Common occupation and common use for hunting and pastoral purposes there undoubtedly was, but common ownership in anything approaching what we understand by proprietorship has, I think, not yet been historically proved.
An idea has from time to time taken possession of the imagination of men like Rousseau, Henry George, and a certain class of minds, that property in land is contrary to nature, and that communal ownership is natural. In support of their view they have built up an imposing structure out of a series of historical errors and misconceptions largely originated and elaborated out of their own preconceived theories. Common ownership by the family has been assumed to be national communism, tenure in common has been confused with ownership in common, and village commons have been magnified into agrarian communism.
Minds which are under the influence of this idea will never allow that property may be a primordial fact, contemporaneous with the earliest cultivation of the soil, natural to man, produced by an instinctive recognition of his interests, and closely bound up with the primitive constitution of the family. They will always prefer to assume that there must first have been a period of Communism. This will be with them an article of faith which nothing can shake; and they will always be able to find authorities which can be made to support it.[38]
Private Property in Land does not arise until Agriculture begins and Families evolve
The evolution of the modern State cannot be ascribed to the operation of any one force. States probably usually developed from savage ”packs”—Shaving no more permanent family life than animals have—to families—households,—exemplifying it by the control of fathers over their children, then to the control of a patriarch over his descendants. From this grew tribes of kindred descent, then nations. Force, conquest, rapacity played their part all along, and strengthened and extended the power and domination of the strongest. In the early stages of family life which developed from the “packs,” where the usual relations of husband and wife did not exist, various forms evolved at different times, among different peoples, in different places—the polygamic, the polyandric, the exogamic, the endogamic, and the monogamic. The last has tended to become the dominant form, although others still prevail among the least advanced peoples.
Land does not become property until it is worth possessing, and practically particular defined portions of land are not worth possessing, that is to say they are not worth any more than any other piece of land (and in savage conditions there is abundance of land available) until cultivation begins. In the infancy of the human race, agriculture, in our sense of the term, did not exist. The people lived by hunting and fishing, and afterwards by pastoral pursuits. Civilisation has never begun until agriculture commenced and private ownership or individual occupancy arose and gave security that those who cultivated the soil would reap the crop.
Nor does the idea of property in land develop until the family evolves. In the most complete forms of savagery the horde or clan is everything, and the savage is so identified with it that his individuality does not manifest itself either in the family or in properly. In many of these hordes or tribes there existed no family, not even the matriarchal one. The children belonged to the whole tribe.
In those conditions the idea of individual possession, at any rate, of such a thing as land does not exist. Indeed, the savage then has no conception of individuality as distinct from the horde or tribe of which he is a part. The horde has no idea of property in land. It occupies a portion of the earth’s surface. It not infrequently moves from place to place and has no idea of “owning” anything but the spot on which it is for the time being. The thought of “property” in land in anything like its modern sense does not exist. When the tribe ceases to lead a nomadic existence and erects permanent separate dwelling-houses and the family system develops, the idea of private property becomes clearer and expands as agriculture is introduced. Paul Lafargue in The Evolution of Property (p. 49) says:
The family, wherever or however constituted, invariably breaks up the communism of the clan or tribe. At first the clan was the common family of all its members: afterwards there came to exist private families, having interests distinct from those of the clan considered as an aggregate of a number of families: the communal territory of the tribe was then parcelled out so as to form the collective property of each family.
In those days the family was a larger group than the father, mother, and children which are usually meant by the modem use of the word. It consisted of the father, the recognised head of the family, of his wife or wives and his concubines; of his children, his younger sons, with their wives and children, and his unmarried or unallotted sisters, altogether a considerable number.
When Cæsar landed in Kent he found that the Britons had much the same customs as the Gauls. They did not till the land: they lived on milk and flesh, and were clad in skins. They painted themselves blue and had wives in common in groups of ten or twelve, including brothers, fathers, and sons.[39]
All our sources of information as to Celtic antiquities show us the people living chiefly on the produce of their herds. Every household, even that of the low-standing Welsh taeog, is supposed to possess cows. Sheep, pigs, and goats are also constantly mentioned. … By the side of this chief calling appear pursuits connected with the forest and the stream—hunting, fishing, tending of bees. It would be impossible to say when the cultivation of the soil arose, and to what extent it was carried. … It played everywhere a more or less subsidiary part in contrast with the prevailing grazing husbandry.[40]
During the occupation of England by the Romans great progress was made in material culture. Comparing the time of Constantine with that of Cæsar, Dr. Vinogradoff says: “Instead of being the dwelling-place of pastoral and hunting tribes, with a small fringe of agricultural occupation on the south-eastern border, it is extolled as an area of prosperous farming.”[41]
As social life advanced and civilisation in a rude form began to dawn, the family, as we now know it, evolved, and individual property took the place of family property. When the men, on marrying, left the collective dwelling for a home of their own, landed property began to be divided amongst the various branches of the family and was held in severalty.
A Modern Controversy
One of the controversies of the last thirty years amongst scholars has been the dispute as to whether in the early years of English history, after the Romans left and invading tribes from the Continent largely took possession of the country, the population consisted of free men holding land in common as the property of the community as a whole, or it consisted of serfs and tenants of large individual land-owners who were chiefs or lords.
According to those whose teaching was generally accepted from thirty to sixty years ago, all land in the beginning was common land and belonged to all: it was held and cultivated in common before it became the private property of a family or an individual: private property grew up afterwards out of this ancient common ownership. It was further held that the people who came over here were mostly free men of varying ranks, with a few slaves who came from parts of Europe where free communities held land in common. It was held that they continued the same system here, and that manors and the manorial system of Anglo-Saxon times was the result of the subsequent gradual and forcible subjugation of the free communities by powerful neighbours who seized the communal lands and reduced the people to a condition of serfdom and servile dependence.
That theory and the supposed facts upon which it was based were, however, severely shaken some thirty years or more ago by the researches of M. Fustel de Coulanges of Paris and Mr. Seebohm in this country. Their views have been strongly confirmed by subsequent research and discussion, and now what is known as the “mark” theory is largely, if not entirely, discredited as an explanation of the condition of things generally prevailing throughout Northern and Western Europe and England before the growth of the manorial and feudal systems.
It has come to be pretty generally admitted that there is no documentary evidence of the existence of free village communities in early England, and such allusions and reference in later records, and such traces of customs and laws as were supposed to support arguments in favour of the belief in the existence at one time of such communities, are found to be practically worthless, and to be capable of other interpretations when they are carefully examined in the light of the further information which more complete research and study have brought to light.
The Present View
In his Presidential address to the Economic History Section of the International Congress of Historical Studies held in London in April 1913, Professor W. J. Ashley commented on the change which has taken place in the views of scholars as to the early history of the ownership and tenure of land in England since Kemble, Stubbs, and Green wrote. The work of Fustel de Coulanges, Seebohm, Maitland, and Vinogradoff has shown how theories generally held as firmly established forty years ago are now untenable. From Professor Ashley’s summary of what he thinks may be taken as the conclusions which have now been arrived at, we extract the following:
From the earliest historical times, in Gaul and Germany, very much land was owned individually, and wealth on the one side and slavery on the other were always very important factors in the situation.
Even in Germany, communal ownership of land was never a fundamental or generally pervasive social institution; there was something very much like large private estates, worked by dependents and slaves, from the very earliest days of Teutonic Settlement.
As to England, it is highly probable that we shall not find anything that can fairly be called a general communal system of land-owning, combined with a substantial equality among the majority of the people, under conditions of settled agriculture. To find it in any sense we shall have to go back to an earlier and “tribal” condition, if, indeed, we shall find it there.
Professor Ashley points out that the idea that English freemen had sunk into serfdom, and land-owning communities had fallen into subjection to manorial lords, and that the problem which the historian had to solve was how these things had come about, was an importation from Germany. “Nothing of all this had suggested itself to English historians so long as they confined themselves to English evidence: no trace of it is to be found, for instance, in the pages of Hallam.”
Thus during recent years those theories as to the original ownership of land, upon which many politicians who are not also students are still basing arguments in support of their policy, have been exploded and discredited. In an interesting article Professor J. H. Morgan referred to the discussions of the authorities on this subject:
For a generation the obsession of race and its prerogatives had brooded over historical studies. Round the theory of the mark there raged a controversy as bitter as it was assiduous; the Germanists saw modern corporations of freemen in early Teutonic village communities. Parliaments in folk-moots, juries in Saxon doomsmen, and good in everything provided it was Teutonic. The racial controversy found its echo in this country; Stubbs and Freeman boasted our German pedigree, traced all our civilisation to its source, and refused to admit the Celtic bar sinister upon our escutcheon. Then came a reaction: Fustel de Coulanges took a terrible revenge, and in a series of brilliant monographs smote the Germanists hip and thigh, going far to prove that the early Teutons, no less than the Celts, had succumbed to the yoke of Roman institutions, and that nine-tenths of our modern villages descended in a direct line from the great Roman estates. Seebohm followed suit over here, and in a memorable monograph suggested to our ruthless Teutons that ”more things went to the making of England than were imported in the keels of the English invaders.”[42]
Ownership and Lordship evolve slowly
As has already been remarked, the question of property in land does not usually really arise, and certainly does not become a matter of any practical importance, in a country until its people become sufficiently settled and civilised to lead them to systematically cultivate the soil. Until they become more or less an agricultural people they are usually hunters or fishermen or both, and possibly also to a limited extent keepers of sheep and cattle. Population is then sparse and unoccupied territory is plentiful, and questions of the ownership of particular tracts of land do not concern them. What does concern them is their ability to defend themselves and such possessions as they have from attack, and incidentally their power to pillage and plunder others. It is only when they take definitely and extensively to agriculture and they become permanently attached to precise areas, which they have cleared and cultivated at the cost of much labour and time, that the idea of property in land, as we understand it, takes shape and develops. Even then it develops very slowly, because so long as unoccupied and unused land is plentiful, that which is used has little or no value. Value is an essential condition of property, and nobody troubles to claim rights of property, as we understand them, in anything which is so plentiful that everybody can have all he wants of it.
There is no doubt that the source of individual ownership of land was some definite personal effort with regard to it, such as cultivation or occupation, or some original pre-eminence in the battle of life—it may be centuries ago—which was recognised and admitted by society, and has ever since been acknowledged as legitimate. It has been handed down by inheritance or transferred by purchase through generations often reaching back through many centuries, until its history becomes dim.
Primitive custom recognises certain rights in and over land: the right of the first clearer to regard the land as his own family holding; the right of a chief or freeman to a share in the territory which he helps to defend against outsiders; the right of a chief to levy tribute of those who hold land under his protection.
When the state comes into existence the family loses some of its importance; the individual chief or house father is not merely the administrator of the common inheritance: he is owner of his land; it is a thing he can sell or mortgage or dispose of by will; absolute ownership is the basis of the Roman law of ownership and possession.[43]
Earle in Land Charters says:
Of all principles of military requirement there is none as necessary or so elementary as this, that all men must be under a captain, and such a captain as is able to command prompt and willing obedience. Upon this military principle I conceive the English settlements were originally founded, that each several settlement was under a military leader, and that this military leader was the ancestor of the lord of the manor.[44]
In the Saxon and Danish period as in the Norman, the chief or thane or lord was not merely the military leader. He was the local representative of authority and government; he was the local ruler and lord, the civil as well as the military head and chief of the people and of the district; and as the principle of “no land without a lord” became more and more clearly and firmly established and enforced in order that it all might be made to contribute its quota of men and means for national defence and general national purposes, the local lordship and sovereignty of the man in each district who was held responsible for the contribution of men and means from the area under his control, and for the maintenance of order and the administration of local justice therein, became more and more identified with ownership, and all land not definitely belonging to some one else was regarded as his, in the same way as all land over which there was no such lord and owner was regarded as the property of the king. The view was that the lord was the original owner of the whole territory occupied by the manor, and portions which did not belong to any one in particular were taken to belong primarily to him.[45]
From the very first stages of the English occupation of the island we have to reckon not merely with small landowners joining in townships on the shareholding system, but also with great landowners possessed of larger tracts of land and utilising them according to their wishes and notions.[46]
The Early Outcome of Economic and Social Conditions
M. de Laveleye, in Primitive Property, shows how personal and family property and private holdings would gradually grow up in the abundant waste land amongst which the widely scattered nomadic communities ultimately settled. Any enclosed land round their permanent dwellings, and any land outside the settlement which was cleared, reclaimed, and cultivated, or occupied with cattle by individuals or families, was recognised as their personal property. Only those who were industrious, enterprising, and courageous enough would clear, occupy, retain, cultivate, and defend waste land. They would become personal owners of cattle, and would gradually acquire wealth which would enable them to employ others and still further improve their position. As their power increased, and as population grew, the bravest, wealthiest, and most capable fighting men amongst them would become chief’s or a species of nobles, and the force of circumstances, often no doubt aided by force and fraud, would eventually make them the land-owners of the greater part of the district, with the more or less willing acquiescence and consent of the community amongst whom they lived and to whom they extended their protection.
In this way the no doubt communal ownership, so far as it ever existed anywhere, gradually broke down and went to pieces, and was superseded by individual ownership, especially as agriculture developed. Private property was the inevitable outcome of economic and social conditions, and the differing faculties and force of character possessed by the leading men who, from time to time, came to the front and founded territorial families.
Durgan, “one of the acutest of explorers,” tells us that ownership of land by individuals is to be found at a much lower grade in the scale of civilisation than that at which communal ownership makes its first appearance. Maitland says: “There is a sense in which English law may be said to have known a full ownership of land long ages before it knew a full ownership of chattels.”[47]
Occupation and Use the Basis of Possession
The right of property is usually in its origin based on occupation or on labour. The theory which bases property on the occupation of what was previously unoccupied represents the actual conditions of the most primitive states of human society so far as we have knowledge of them. Possession is nine points of the law, with animals as with men. So long as other food, other articles, other locations are to be had by making an effort, it is simpler for men and animals to find what is wanted for themselves than to undertake the risk and trouble of fighting one who has got it for possession of it. When numbers increase and settled communities are formed the rights of each are settled by society, and until they are so settled there are no rights except the right of force—the power to keep what has been taken possession of,—that is to say, rights do not exist until something of the nature of organised society does.
In many of the relations of every-day life, in connection with matters in which the fundamental rights of all are equal, we recognise the right of the first occupier.
“All persons who ride in street-cars,” says Mr. Arthur Eitson, “have an equal right to a seat. But they have not all an equal right to one particular seat. The popular sense of justice recognises that the first man or woman who enters the car has the right to occupy the best seat. And the last comers accept the condition of having to stand, or of taking the least desirable seats, as right and proper. A man who would try to enforce his claim to a seat by ejecting another would be regarded as a violator of justice, and would be universally condemned.[48] In all ordinary affairs regarding the rights of men, public sentiment recognises the prior claims of first occupancy and use as just.”
The right of the first occupier has been recognised as a basis for the valid holding of the property, because communities have realised that it was socially convenient and beneficial that they should do so. Nations recognise the wisdom of this in their relations to each other. International law recognises the right of the first effective civilised occupier of territory which has not heretofore been occupied by another civilised power. The primitive law of nature is the law of force, and that law is modified as communities and society as a whole realise what is more beneficial and conducive to the general well-being.
The theory which bases the right of property on labour really depends in the ultimate resort on the right of possession and the fact that it is socially expedient, and is therefore upheld by the laws of society. Grotius, discussing this in the old Roman days, pointed out that since nothing can be made except out of pre-existing matter, acquisition by means of labour depends, ultimately, on possession by means of occupation.
The Importance of Security
Professor L. T. Hobhouse in Liberalism says:
The basis of property is social. … It is the organised force of society that maintains the rights of owners by protecting them against thieves and depredators. … Many people forget that without the organised force of society their rights are not worth a week’s purchase.
They do not ask themselves where they would be without the judge and the policeman and the settled order which society maintains.[49]
This is true of the middle and poorer classes, but as regards the well-to-do and powerful is not the truth quite as much, if not more, the other way? Without “the organised force of society” the wealthy could and would organise to defend themselves, but the poor could not do so. Conditions analogous to those of the middle ages would prevail, and great barons would dominate the country. The poorest and weakest are the least able to protect themselves, and consequently benefit the most from the maintenance of law and order. In this connection it is important to remember that “the rightfulness of possession, on the one hand, and the sacredness of contract between individual possessors on the other, are among the very first of those foundation-stones on which society reposes.”[50] A Celtic proverb ran: “There are three periods at which the world is worthless, the time of a plague, the time of a general war, the time of a dissolution of spoken promises.”
The Antiquity of Private Ownership
That private property in land is a very ancient institution is quite certain. It did not originate with the feudal system and was not introduced into this country by William the Conqueror, as some people seem to imagine. According to the Book of Genesis land was privately owned in ancient Egypt. In the time of the famine, when Joseph was governor of the land, he bought all the cattle of the Egyptians and in return kept the people for a year. At the end of that time, the famine still continuing, the people requested him to buy them and their land for Pharaoh, and keep them, and he did so. “Buy us and our land for bread, and we and our land will be servants unto Pharaoh; … and Joseph bought all the land of Egypt for Pharaoh; for the Egyptians sold every man his field, because the famine prevailed over them: so the land became Pharaoh’s.” (Genesis zlvii. 19, 20). The Old Testament contains numerous commands and exhortations to respect private property m land: “Thou shalt not remove thy neighbour’s landmark ” (Deut. xiz. 14). “Cursed be he that removeth his neighbour’s landmark” (Deut. xxvii. 17). Job regards as exceptionally wicked the man “who removes the landmarks” (Job xxiv. 2).
There are numerous tablets among the recovered ruins of Babylon and Assyria which represent the title-deeds of property in land, giving security of possession to individual men. Others record contracts for the letting and the sale of land.[51] When Greek emigrants made settlements on territory either previously unoccupied or conquered by them, their practice was to immediately found a town and divide up and distribute the land.
The Romans had very clear and precise conceptions of the right of private property, and did as much as any other ancient people to define and protect it. Rome was one of the youngest cities of the ancient world, and, at the date of its birth, private property had long held sway in Italy.
“It appears to me,”[52] says De Coulanges, “exceedingly rash to maintain that the Romans had at first a system of common ownership of land. Such a statement is not supported by any ancient authority. On the contrary, early writers describe a partition of land which takes place at the very time when the city is founded; and the land thus divided becomes complete and hereditary property. Some years later the city conquers fresh territory; and again, with but little delay, it is divided into private property.”
At the first division the property was allotted to and belonged to the family: at the second it belonged to the individual. De Coulanges says: “Thus, then, the two kinds of proprietary right that the ancient world recognised are seen, one after the other, with an interval of but forty years between.” The Romans were one of the first nations to substitute individual for family property. Plato says: “Our first law must be that no man shall lay a hand on the boundary-mark which divides a field from his neighbour’s field, for it must remain unmoved.” (Laws, viii.).
England under the Romans
It seems probable that it was during the three and a half centuries of Roman rule that England became an agricultural country. There are many indications that during that time corn was grown in considerable quantities, and it is recorded that in a.d. 360 the Romans built 800 vessels to carry corn from Britain to the cities on the Rhine which were suffering from famine.
We know that under the Romans there was private property in land, and that it was cultivated by dependants and slaves. We also know that the manorial system of the Continent in the Middle Ages is considered by many authorities to have been a direct continuation of the conditions which had prevailed under Roman rule. It is reasonable to conclude that the Romans established in England the system of private property to which they were accustomed, and that it continued here after they left, as it did on the Continent.[53] There is certainly no evidence to the contrary, while it is pointed out that one characteristic of the English manor—the dividing of the estate into land in villenage and land in demesne, the latter being cultivated by the tenants of the former, but kept in the lord’s hands—was common to the medieval manor and the Roman domain or village. Another characteristic of the English manor was the three-field system. Neither of these two characteristics was found in North-Western Germany and Jutland, where the English invaders of Britain came from. But the three-field system was found in South-West Germany which was the most Romanised part. From this it seems possible that the English invaders did not bring the manorial system with them and impose it upon a country in which communal ownership prevailed; but that they found a system of a manorial character here, and that it dated from the period of Roman rule, and that finding it they adapted it to their own methods, customs, and requirements.
Be that as it may, Maitland tells us that: “So far back as we can see, the German village had a solid core of individualism”; and “to say the least, we have no proof that among the Germans the land was continuously tilled before it was owned by individuals, or by those small groups that constituted the households. … To all appearance, so soon as the village was formed and had ploughed lands around it, the strips into which those fields were divided were owned in severalty by the householders of the village.”[54]
Two things are clear. One is that there are no definite traces of free communities here, and the other is that there are unmistakable traces of what is afterwards called the manor, within 200 years after the English conquered the coimtry. That there was a large population which was not free is also certain. In the seventh century, when land was transferred by grants, the cultivators on the soil were transferred with it as a dependent population evidently in some form of serfdom. Numerous slaves also went with it.
No Substantial Evidence of Communal Ownership
The theory of the German “mark” which was assumed to mean a free community owning and cultivating its land in common, and which was further assumed to have been brought here by the Continental invaders who settled here and took possession of the country after the Romans left, has been shown to be based on a misconception. The “mark” did not mean the community, or the domain, or village, or manor. It meant a boundary, and usually the boundary of a private property. The truth is, as Professor Ashley puts it, that “early German law is throughout based on the assumption of private property in land, and not upon that of common ownership whether by a whole people or by a village group; and that whatever traces there may be of earlier conditions point to rights possessed by the family and not by any larger body.”
“The history of the mark,” says Professor Ashley, “has served Mr. Henry George as a basis for the contention that the common ownership of land is the only natural condition of things; to Sir Henry Maine it has suggested the precisely opposite conclusion, that the whole movement of civilisation has been from common owner-ship to private. Such arguments are alike worthless, if the mark never existed.”
We must never lose sight of the fact that history is based upon documents and not upon hypotheses or flights of the imagination. When M. de Laveleye says that ”the English manor has destroyed the old village community” he makes an entirely hypothetical generalisation. To imagine the manorial lord of the Middle Ages as a warrior who has forcibly set himself over a community of free men is to show that one knows nothing of the documents from the fifth to the tenth centuries, and that one has an altogether childish idea of the origin of feudalism.[55]
Ownership of land in common by a family is an entirely different thing in principle and fact and results from ownership in common by all in a community or by a whole nation. Ownership by a family is co-proprietorship which is complete, absolute, and hereditary to the conclusion of all others. When it was undivided it was because the family was undivided. Legally it was in the hands of the head of the family. He was the real owner and he did what he liked with it, within the customs and usages of the community in which he lived.
Even if the evidence for anything like communal ownership in settled communities were more substantial than it is, and if there be any disposition to rest any argument against private ownership, and in support of the theory of the universal right of the whole human race to the land of the earth, on the distinction between communal or corporate ownership and individual ownership, it must be pointed out that if no man can justly appropriate any portion of the earth’s surface without the sanction of all other men, because all those other men have an equal right to it, it follows that a group of men are equally debarred from monopolising and appropriating as their joint property any special area of land. “It is obvious that all the arguments against individual land ownership apply to corporate land-ownership. If the rights of A, B, and C are individually nil, you cannot make any more of your 0 by multiplying it by three.”[56] If each member of the community is a usurper, if he occupies land as his own, the community of which they are members must also be a usurper if it occupies a particular portion of land as its own and to the exclusion of other similar communities.
It is also very necessary to distinguish between tenancy, occupation, and cultivation of land in common on the one hand, and ownership in common on the other. They are and were two entirely different things. Confusion of one with the other, and the assumption that common occupancy meant common ownership has led many writers on this subject into error.
In the English manors or townships the land belonged to an individual owner and not to the community. It was a private estate, and the group of peasants who cultivated it in common were the more or less servile tenants. The only thing about it that was collective was the cultivation. It has been made quite clear, as we show in another chapter, that the terms “common,” “common wood,” and similar phrases, which occur frequently in documents of the ninth and following centuries, refer to a customary right of use enjoyed by tenants in common over land belonging to a lord; and that there is no evidence that the tenants were ever joint owners of the land over which they enjoyed such rights.
Early Traces of Private Estates and Servile Cultivators
The English evidence sustains the conclusion that very soon after the Conquest of Britain by the English, if not indeed before that, the manor was the prevailing type of social organisation. Under the Romans the masses of the people in conquered countries were held as slaves. Indeed, it is probable that when the Romans came here they found the greater part of the people in a condition of serfdom and slavery to the more powerful. Cæsar tells us that this was the condition in Gaul, and Professor Ashley reminds us that “when the unconquered tribes of Ireland and Wales come within the ken of history we find among them a Urge class of servile cultivators below the free tribesmen.”
There is much that is far from clear in the early history of dependent and servile tenures and service in England. What does appear to be clear is that there were domains or estates, the property of chiefs or nobles, on which were various grades of occupiers, tenants, or serfs, some more or less free but bound to the soil, others undoubtedly slaves. The further research is carried the more probable does it appear that Mr. Seebohm’s view was correct, that the lord of the manor, instead of being a late intruder, was from the first, so far as England was concerned, the owner of the soil and the lord of those who lived on it and cultivated it; that the development has been in the main and from the first an advance from servitude to freedom, and not an elevation after long centuries of increasing degradation.
The Welsh documents which give us information as to the conditions which prevailed in the early Celtic occupation of the country show that there were free and unfree tenants of the land, and that both were bound to perform certain duties and payments; showing quite clearly that there were ownership and tenancy and rent-paying there in the very earliest time of which we have anything like historic record.
The vague idea which is sometimes asserted as an ascertained fact, that any condition lower than absolute freedom was altogether exceptional in early England is a complete delusion. Professor Ashley says: “We can hardly turn over the old English laws without seeing that this could not have been the case. Not only are there frequent references to slaves, but manumission occupies as prominent a position as in the Continental codes, was accomplished by ceremonies of a similar character, and brought with it the same consequence in the abiding subjection of the freedman to his former master. As on the Continent also, the Church interfered for the slave’s protection, and endeavoured to secure for him a property in the fruits of his labour.”
Theoretically, no doubt, collective ownership of land and its subsequent development successfully and in the best interests of the community is possible. Practically, it has never been done on anything approaching a considerable, still less a national, scale.
Modern Experience
Even in those vast portions of the earth which have been taken possession of and colonised by Europeans during the last century and a half, and especially during the last half or three-quarters of a century, no attempt has been made to retain possession of the land for the community as a whole. This has not been because the doctrines that land belongs to the human race as a whole; that all have an equal right to it; that it is as indefensible to part with it and give individuals exclusive rights over it as it would be to sell the right to let out for use light and air,—it has not been because these doctrines have not been industriously and persistently proclaimed. They have not been adopted and acted upon because in every case the people in those countries where effect might have been given to these principles have invariably found, when faced with the realities of the position and the problems they had to solve, that the path of progress, of general well-being, as well as of common sense and general convenience, lay in adopting and continuing the system of individual ownership of land which unbroken experience of the world has shown to be the real basis of a civilized community.
All the new countries of the world which have had exceptional opportunities for putting these ideals and theories into practice have not only refused to touch them, but have gone to the other extreme. They have not only sanctioned individual ownership of land: they have given it away. Indeed they have gone further and paid people, by subsidising their passages, to go out and occupy it. They have spent large sums in appointing agents and maintaining offices and representatives, and circulating literature in order to persuade people to go out and take their land from them as a gift.
It is altogether beside the mark to talk about the ownership of land being conferred by landlord parliaments. As a matter of fact it was not. It existed long before parliaments. Indeed, it is obvious that there could not be land-owning parliaments or land-owning authorities of any kind until there existed land-owners and private ownership. In the vast territories in America, Australia, and Africa which have been newly settled during the last century and a half, private ownership of land has been established under the most democratic auspices the world has ever known.
NOTES
The conditions which prevailed in Babylonia with regard to the personal status of the people and the ownership and tenure of land and houses were in many important particulars similar to those which existed in England two thousand years or more later. Slavery and serfdom was part of the foundation upon which Babylonian society rested. In times of famine and stress men would sell themselves to pay a debt or obtain subsistence. The slave was always fed and clothed: the free labourer could at times get neither food nor clothing.
There were various kinds of agricultural tenure. Sometimes the tenant farmed the land, found implements, seed, and manure, and paid the landlord half the produce. Sometimes the owner found implements, oxen, and seeds, and the tenant received an agreed percentage of the profits. The most common form of tenure, however, seems to have been that in which a third of the produce went to the land-owner. In those cases, according to the terms of the lease, the tenant kept the farm-buildings in repair, and even erected them if necessary. The labourers were partly slaves and partly freemen who hired themselves out at so much a month.
House property was valuable, especially if it included shops. Records of leases and agreements for letting houses are numerous. The tenant usually undertook the repair and maintenance of the premises. Most of the houses were inhabited by single families; but there were tenements or flats also.
The value of land depended on the amount of grain that could be grown upon it, and in the early days of Babylonia the owner was paid in grain by the tenant or purchaser. Later a metal currency became general, and in course of time rent was rarely paid in kind. Nearly 5000 years before the Domesday survey of William the Conqueror a cadastral survey of Babylonia was made to ascertain the valuation and ownership of the land and property for purposes of taxation. See Babylonians and Assyrians (The Semitic Series), by Professor A. H. Sayce.
“In European Russia village communities did not exist in the olden time; they originated and developed only out of private property, and since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.”—Ian St. Lewinski, in The Origin of Property and the Formation of the Village Community.
[1] Mr. Joseph Fels regards his book as “The Bible of the World.”
Lord Bramwell said: “It is a foolish book, for although Mr. George is anything but a foolish man, his ingenuity is so perverse that his book is filled with foolishness. It is the most arrogant, self-sufficient performance ever seen.”
- H. Mallook says: “His errors, as he puts them, are diffused over so many paragraphs, adorned with so much ezdted rhetoric, and intermixed with so much excited reasoning, that their true character may escape the ordinary reader; but let them only be put into a brief and comprehensible form, and to any sane man they will sound like the ravings of a lunatic.”
Professor F. A. Walker speaks of Henry George’s proposals as “this precious piece of villainy,” and as being “steeped in infamy.”
In the House of Commons on February 27, 1891, Mr. Gladstone said: “There are persons who view the proposals of Mr. George as proposals of a very enlightened character, and who very much resent the use of hard words respecting him. I shall carefully eschew hard words; but I will say that, so far as my examination or knowledge of his proposals goes, I find it extremely difficult, and, indeed, for myself altogether impossible, to exclude them or extricate them from the category of those plans to which hard words no doubt are commonly applied.”
[2] On July 18, 1912, he said he would himself duplicate any sum which the United Committee raised for propaganda work up to £20,000.
[3] Oct. 7, 1912.
[4] May 1906
[5] July 18, 1912.
[6] P 47.
[7] P. 49
[8] Pp. 38, 39.
[9] Pp. 17, 20.
[10] p. 19.
[11] P. 111.
[12] P. 113.
[13] Pp. 114, 115.
[14] In the course of the speech the following episode occurred: Mr. Outhwaite: “We take for the community what is the worker’s own, the value of the land, and we do not pay a penny piece for it.” Sir A. Markham: “Why don’t you say steal?”
[15] Progress and Poverty, p. 240.
[16] P. 31.
[17] Prof. Ritchie, Natural Rights, p. 20.
[18] Sir Geo. C. Lewis, Use and Abuse of some Political Terms, p. 162.
[19] Edinburgh Review, vol. I. (50) p. 111.
[20] De Cive.
[21] Ritchie, Natural Rights, p. 17.
[22] Principles of Economics, p. 48.
[23] Progress and Poverty, pp. 237-238.
[24] Progress and Poverty, p. 234.
[25] Ibid, p. 237.
[26] Pp. 238-9.
[27] Progress and Poverty, p. 243.
[28] “Men do not create material things. They do not ‘produce’ them. They produce utilities. They change the form or arrangement of matter to adapt it to the better satisfaction of wants. They readjust matter as when they make a log of wood into a table, or they put it into the way of being made more useful by nature, as when they sow seed.”—Marshall’s Principles of Economics, p. 63.
[29] Essays on Taxation, p 60.
[30] Ritchie, Natural Rights, p. 87.
[31] Not only did the introduction of the practice of making slaves of captives diminish the ferocity of war, but, as Sir H. Maine points out, “one consequence of the decay and abolition of slavery was an increase of bloodshed.”—International Law, p. 134.
[32] Ritchie, Natural Rights, p. 104.
[33] Among the Romans, under the Republic, and at the beginning of the Empire, manual labour was almost exclusively slave labour. During the Empire it was mainly slave labour, and the labourers who were not slaves were largely freedmen, men who had been slaves.
[34] Ritchie, Natural Rights, p. 101.
[35] Ibid. p. 103.
[36] Natural Rights, p. 106.
[37] Duke of Argyll, The Unseen Foundation of Society, p. 101.
[38] Goulanges, Origin of Property in Land, p. 150
[39] De Bello Gallico V., Sec. 14.
[40] Vinogradoff, The Growth of the Manor, p. 16.
[41] Ibid p. 44
[42] Westminster Gazette, April 4, 1913.
[43] Article “Land” in Palgrave’s Dictionary of Political Economy.
[44] P. 55.
[45] Vinogradoff, The Growth of the Manor, p. 311.
[46] Ibid. p. 221.
[47] Domesday Book and Beyond, p. 347.
[48] If there be no seat available they may have to walk and do without a ride altogether. They do not think they ought to be able to take the place of persons who were already in the car if they offered to pay an extra penny for the seat.
[49] P. 189.
[50] Unseen Foundations, p. 459.
[51] See Note, p. 40.
[52] Origin of Property in Land, p. 105.
[53] “One very important result of the Roman occupation was undoubtedly its powerful influence in furthering private property and private appropriation of land.”—Vinogradoff, The Growth of the Manor, p. 53.
[54] Domesday Book and Beyond, pp. 346-8.
[55] Coulanges, p. 129.
[56] Huxley, p. 84.