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Table of Coriterits, / X & © .
Protection or Free Trade •
The Land Question, tº
Property in Land,
The Condition of Labor.
A Perplexed Philosopher,
ſ.
PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE
AN EXAMINATION OF THE TARIFF QUESTION WITH
ESPECIAL REGARD TO THE INTERESTs
OF LABOR
EY
HENRY GEORGE
“Prove all things; hoid fast that which is good.”
NEW YORK
HENRY GEORGE, 12 UNION SQUARE EAST
1888

WORKS BY HENRY GEORGE.
PROGRESS AND POWERTY. 12mo, paper, 35 cents; cloth,
$1.00; half calf or half morocco, $2.50.
SOCIAL PROBLEMS. 12mo, paper, 35 cents; cloth, $1.00;
half calf or half morocco, $2.50.
- PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE 2 12mo, paper, 35 cents;
cloth, $1.50; half Calf or half morocco, $3.00.
| THE LAND QUESTION. Paper, 10 cents.
PROPERTY IN LAND. A Controversy with the Duke of
Argyll. Paper, 15 cents.
For sale by all Booksellers, or sent post-paid on
receipt of price.
COPYRIGHT, 1886, BY HENRY GEORGE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
TO THE wevony
OF TEIOSE ILLUSTRIOUS FRENCEIMEN
OF A CENTURY AGO,
QUESNAY, TURGOT, MIRA.BEAU, CONDORCET, DUPONT
AND THEIR FELLOWS,
WPIO IN THE NIGHT OF DESPOTISM FORESAW
THIE GLORIES OF THE COMING DAY
P. R. E. F. A. C. E.
IN this book I have endeavored to determine whether
protection or free trade better accords with the interests
of labor, and to bring to a common conclusion on this
subject those who really desire to raise wages.
I have not only gone over the ground generally tra-
versed, and examined the arguments commonly used,
but, carrying the inquiry further than the controversial-
ists on either side have yet ventured to go, I have sought
to discover why protection retains such popular strength
in spite of all exposures of its fallacies; to trace the con-
nection between the tariff question and those still more
important social questions, now rapidly becoming the
“burning questions” of our times; and to show to what
radical measures the principle of free trade logically
leads. While pointing out the falsity of the belief that
tariffs can protect labor, I have not failed to recognize
the facts which give this belief vitality, and, by an exam-
ination of these facts, have shown, not only how little the
working classes can hope from that mere “revenue re-
form " which is miscalled “free trade,” but how much
they have to hope from real free trade. By thus har-
monizing the truths which free traders perceive with
the facts that to protectionists make their own theory
plausible, I believe I have opened ground upon which
those separated by seemingly irreconcilable differences
of opinion may unite for that full application of the
Wi PREFACE.
free-trade principle which would secure both the largest
production and the fairest distribution of wealth.
By thus carrying the inquiry beyond the point where
Adam Smith and the writers who have followed him
have stopped; I believe I have stripped the vexed tariff
question of its greatest difficulties, and have cleared the
way for the settlement of a dispute which otherwise
might go on interminably. The conclusions thus reached
raise the doctrine of free trade from the emasculated
form in which it has been taught by the English econo-
mists to the fullness in which it was held by the prede-
cessors of Adam Smith, those illustrious Frenchmen,
with whom originated the motto Laissez faire, and who,
whatever may have been the confusions of their termi-
nology or the faults of their method, grasped a central
truth which free traders since their time have ignored.
My effort, in short, has been to make such a candid
and thorough examination of the tariff question, in all
its phases, as would aid men to whom the subject is now
a perplexing maze to reach clear and firm conclusions.
In this I trust I have done something to inspire a move-
ment now faint-hearted with the earnestness and strength
of radical conviction, to prevent the division into hostile
camps of those whom a common purpose ought to unite,
to give to efforts for the emancipation of labor greater
definiteness of purpose, and to eradicate that belief in
the opposition of national interests which leads peoples,
even of the same blood and tongue, to regard each other
as natural antagonists.
To avoid any appearance of culling absurdities, I have,
in referring to the protectionist position, quoted mainly
from the latest writer who seems to be regarded by Amer-
ican protectionists as an authoritative exponent of their
views—Professor Thompson, of the University of Penn-
sylvania.
CHAPTER
II.
III.
XIII,
XIV,
XV.
XVI,
XVII.
XVIII.
XIX,
XX.
XXI.
C O N T E N T S.
PAGE
. INTRODUCTORY... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
CLEARING GROUND . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
OF METHOD. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
. PROTECTION As A UNIVERSAL NEED. . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
. THE PROTECTIVE UNIT. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
TRADE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
PRODUCTION AND PRODUCERS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
. TARIFFS FOR REVENUE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
. TARIFFS FOR PROTECTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
. THE ENCOURAGEMENT OF INDUSTRY. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
. THE HOME MARKET AND HOME TRADE . . . . . . . . . 112
. EXPORTS AND IMPORTS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
CONFUSIONS ARISING FROM THE USE OF MONEY. 132
DO HIGEI WAGES NECESSITATE PROTECTION ? . . . . 145
OF ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES AS REASONS
FOR PROTECTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MANUFACTURES.. . . . . . . . . 163
PROTECTION AND PRODUCERS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177
EFFECT OF PROTECTION ON AMERICAN INDUSTRY. 193
PROTECTION AND WAGES. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 208
THE ABOLITION OF PROTECTION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231
INADEQUACY of THE FREE-TRADE ARGUMENT. . . . 288
viii CONTENTS.
CHAPTER
XXII. THE REAL WEAKNESs of FREE TRADE. . . . . . .
XXIII. THE REAL STRENGTH OF PROTECTION. . . . . . . . .
XXIV. THE PARADOX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
~ XXV. THE ROBBER THAT TAKES ALL THAT IS LEFT ....
XXVI. TRUE FREE TRADE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
XXVII. THE LION IN THE WAY. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
XXVIII. FREE TRADE AND SOCIALISM. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
XXIX. PRACTICAL POLITICS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
XXX. CONCLUSION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
PROTECTION OR H'REE TRADE P
CEIAPTER T.
I N T R O D U C T O R. Y.
NEAR the window by which I write, a great bull is
tethered by a ring in his nose. Grazing round and
round he has swound his rope about the stake until
now he stands a close prisoner, tantalized by rich grass
he cannot reach, unable even to toss his head to rid
him of the flies that cluster on his shoulders. Now
and again he struggles vainly, and then, after pitiful
bellowings, relapses into silent misery.
This bull, a very type of massive strength, who,
because he has not wit enough to see how he might be
free, suffers want in sight of plenty, and is helplessly
preyed upon by weaker creatures, seems to me no
unfit emblem of the working masses. *
In all lands, men whose toil creates abounding
wealth are pinched with poverty, and, while advancing
civilization opens wider vistas and awakens new de-
sires, are held down to brutish levels by animal needs.
Bitterly conscious of injustice, feeling in their inmost
Souls that they were made for more than so narrow
a life, they, too, spasmodically struggle and cry out.
. But until they trace effect to cause, until they see how
2 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
they are fettered and how they may be freed, their
struggles and outcries are as vain as those of the bull.
Nay, they are vainer. I shall go out and drive the
bull in the way that will untwist his rope. But who
shall drive men into freedom? Till they use the
reason with which they have been gifted, nothing can
avail. For them there is no special providence.
Under all forms of government the ultimate power
lies with the masses. It is not kings nor aristocracies,
nor land-owners nor capitalists, that anywhere really
enslave the people. It is their own ignorance. Most
clear is this where governments rest on universal suf-
frage. The workingmen of the United States may
mould to their will legislatures, courts and constitutions.
Politicians strive for their favor and political parties
bid against one another for their vote. But what avails
this? The little finger of aggregated capital must be
thicker than the loins of the working masses so long as
they do not know how to use their power. And how
far from any agreement as to practical reform are even
those who most feel the injustice of existing condi-
tions may be seen in the labor Organizations. Though
beginning to realize the wastefulness of strikes and to
feel the necessity of acting on general conditions
through legislation, these organizations when they
come to formulate political demands seem unable to
unite upon any measures capable of large results.
This political impotency must continue until the
masses, or at least that sprinkling of more thoughtful
men who are the file leaders of popular opinion, shall
give such heed to larger questions as will enable them
to agree on the path reform should take.
It is with the hope of promoting such agreement
INTRODUCTORY. J. 3
that I propose in these pages to examine a vexed ques-
tion which must be settled before there can be any effi-
cient union in political action for Social reform—the
question whether protective tariffs are or are not
helpful to those who get their living by their labor.
This is a question important in itself, yet far more
important in what it involves. Not only is it true
that its examination cannot fail to throw light upon
other social-economic questions, but it leads directly to
that great “Labor Question” which every day as it
passes brings more and more to the foreground in
every country of the civilized world. For it is a ques-
tion of direction—a question which of two divergent
roads shall be taken. Whether labor is to be benefited
by governmental restrictions or by the abolition of
such restrictions is, in short, the question of how the
bull shall go to untwist his rope.
In one way or another, we must act upon the
tariff question. Throughout the civilized world it
everywhere lies within the range of practical politics.
Even when protection is most thoroughly accepted
there not only exists a more or less active minority
who seek its overthrow, but the constant modifica-
tions that are being made or proposed in existing
tariffs are as constantly bringing the subject into the
sphere of political action, while even in that country
in which free trade has seemed to be most strongly
rooted, the policy of protection is again raising its
head. Here it is evident that the tariff question is
the great political question of the immediate future.
For more than a generation the slavery agitation, the
war to which it led and the problems growing out of
that war have absorbed political attention in the
4 - PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
United States. That era has passed, and a new one is
beginning, in which economic questions must force
themselves to the front. First among these questions,
upon which party lines must soon be drawn and polit-
ical discussion must rage, is the tariff question.
It behooves not merely those who aspire to political
leadership, but those who would conscientiously use
their influence and their votes, to come to intelligent
conclusions upon this question, and especially is this
inčumbent upon the men whose aim is the emancipa-
tion of labor. Some of these men are now supporters
of protection; others are opposed to it. This division,
which must place in political opposition to each other
those who are at one in ultimate purpose, Ought not to
exist. One thing or the other must be true—either
protection does give better opportunities to labor and
raises wages, or it does not. If it does, we who feel
that labor has not its rightful opportunities and does
not get its fair wages should know it, that we may unite,
not merely in sustaining present protection, but in de-
manding far more. If it does not, then, even if not
positively harmful to the working classes, protection is
a delusion and a snare, which distracts attention and
divides strength, and the quicker it is seen that tariffs
cannot raise wages the quicker are those who wish to
raise wages likely to find out what can. The next
thing to knowing how anything can be done, is to
know how it cannot be done. If the bull I speak of
had wit enough to see the uselessness of going one
way, he would surely try the other.
My aim in this inquiry is to ascertain beyond per-
adventure whether protection or free-trade best accords
with the interests of those who live by their labor
- INTRODUCTORY. 5
I differ with those who say that with the rate of wages
the state has no concern. I hold with those who deem
the increase of wages a legitimate purpose of public
policy. To raise and maintain wages is the great ob-
ject that all who live by wages ought to seek, and
workingmen are right in supporting any measure that
will attain that object. Nor in this are they acting
selfishly, for, while the question of wages is the most
important of questions to laborers, it is also the most
important of questions to society at large. Whatever
improves the condition of the lowest and broadest
social stratum must promote the true interests of all.
Where the wages of common labor are high and remu-
nerative employment is easy to obtain, prosperity will
be general. Where wages are highest, there will be
the largest production and the most equitable distribu-
tion of wealth. There will invention be most active
and the brain best guide the hand. There will be the
greatest comfort, the widest diffusion of knowledge,
the purest morals and the truest patriotism. If we
would have a healthy, a happy, an enlightened and a
virtuous people, if we would have a pure government,
firmly based on the popular will and quickly responsive
to it, we must strive to raise wages and keep them
high. I accept as good and praiseworthy the ends
avowed by the advocates of protective tariffs. What
I propose to inquire is whether protective tariffs are in
reality conducive to these ends. To do this thoroughly
I wish to go over all the ground upon which pro-
tective tariffs are advocated or defended, to consider
what effect the opposite policy of free trade would
have, and to stop not until conclusions are reached of
which we may feel absolutely sure.
6 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
To some it may seem too much to think that this can
be done. For a century no question of public policy
has been so widely and persistently debated as that of
Protection vs. Free Trade. Yet it seems to-day as far
as ever from settlement—so far, indeed, that many have
come to deem it a question as to which no certain con-
clusions can be reached, and many more to regard it as
too complex and abstruse to be understood by those
who have not equipped themselves by long study.
This is, indeed, a hopeless view. We may safely
leave many branches of knowledge to such as can de-
vote themselves to special pursuits. We may safely
accept what chemists tell us of chemistry, or astron-
omers of astronomy, or philologists of the development
of language, or anatomists of our internal structure,
for not only are there in such investigations no pecuni-
ary temptations to warp the judgment, but the ordinary
duties of men and of citizens do not call for such
special knowledge, and the great body of a people may
entertain the crudest notions as to such things and yet
lead happy and useful lives. Far different, however, is
it with matters which relate to the production and dis-
tribution of wealth, and which thus directly affect the
comfort and livelihood of men. The intelligence which
can alone safely guide in these matters must be the in-
telligence of the masses, for as to such things it is the
common opinion, and not the opinion of the learned
few, that finds expression in legislation.
If the knowledge required for the proper ordering of
public affairs be like the knowledge required for the
prediction of an eclipse, the making of a chemical an-
alysis, or the decipherment of a cuneiform inscription, or
even like the knowledge required in any branch of art or
INTRODUCTORY. 3. 7
handicraft, then the shortness of human life and the
necessities of human existence must forever condemn
the masses of men to ignorance of matters which direct-
ly affect their means of subsistence. If this be so, then
popular government is hopeless, and, confronted on One
side by the fact, to which all experience testifies, that a
people can never safely trust to any portion of their
number the making of regulations which affect their
earnings, and on the other by the fact that the masses
can never see for themselves the effect of such regula-
tions, the only prospect before mankind is that the
many must always be ruled and robbed by the few.
But this is not so. Political economy is only the
economy of human aggregates, and its laws are laws
which we may individually recognize. What is re-
quired for their elucidation is not long arrays of statis-
tics nor the collocation of laboriously ascertained facts,
but that sort of clear thinking which, keeping in mind
the distinction between the part and the whole, seeks
the relations of familiar things, and which is as possible
for the unlearned as for the learned.
Whether protection does or does not increase na-
tional wealth, whether it does or does not benefit the
laborer, are questions that from their mature must
admit of decisive answers. That the controversy be.
tween protection and free trade, widely and ener-
getically as it has been carried on, has as yet led to no
accepted conclusion cannot therefore be due to diffi-
culties inherent in the subject. It may in part be ac-
counted for by the fact that powerful pecuniary interests
are concerned in the issue, for it is true, as Macaulay
said, that if large pecuniary interests were concerned in
denying the attraction of gravitation, that most obvious
8 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
of physical facts would have disputers. But that so
many fair-minded men who have no special interests to
serve are still at variance on this subject can only, it
seems to me, be fully explained on the assumption that
the discussion has not been carried far enough to bring
out that full truth which harmonizes all partial truths.
The present condition of the controversy, indeed,
shows this to be the fact. In the literature of the sub-
ject, I know of no work in which the inquiry has yet
been carried to its proper end. As to the effect of
protection upon the production of wealth, all has prob-
ably been said that can be said; but that part of the
question which relates to wages and which is primarily
concerned with the distribution of wealth has not been
adequately treated. Yet this is the very heart of the
controversy, the ground from which, until it is thor.
... oughly explored, fallacies and confusions must con-
stantly arise, to envelop in obscurity even that which
has of itself been sufficiently explained. e
The reason of this failure is not far to seek. Politi-
cal economy is the simplest of the sciences. It is but
the intellectual recognition, as related to social life, of
... laws which in their moral aspect men instinctively rec-
ognize, and which are embodied in the simple teachings
of him whom the common people heard gladly. But,
like Christianity, political economy has been warped by
institutions which, denying the equality and brother-
hood of man, have enlisted authority, silenced objec-
tion, and ingrained themselves in custom and habit of
thought. Its professors and teachers have almost in-
variably belonged to or been dominated by that class
which tolerates no questioning of social adjustments
that give to those who do not labor the fruits of
INTRODUCTORY. 9
labor's toil. They have been like physicians employed
to make a diagnosis on condition that they shall dis-
cover no unpleasant truth. Given social conditions
such as those that throughout the civilized world to-
day shock the moral sense, and political economy; fear.
lessly pursued, must lead to conclusions that will be as
a lion in the way to those who have any tenderness for
“vested interests.” But in the colleges and universities
of Our time, as in the Sanhedrim of old, it is idle to ex-
pect any enunciation of truths unwelcome to the powers
that be.
Adam Smith demonstrated clearly enough that pro-
tective tariffs hamper the production of wealth. But
Adam Smith—the university professor, the tutor and
pensioner of the Duke of Buccleugh, the prospective
holder of a government place—either did not deem it
prudent to go further, or, as is more probable, was pre-
vented from seeing the necessity of doing so by the at-
mosphere of his time and place. He at any rate failed
to carry his great inquiry into the causes which from
“that original state of things in which the production
of labor constitutes the natural recompense or wages
of labor” had developed a state of things in which nat-
ural wages seemed to be only such part of the produce
of labor as would enable the laborer to exist. And,
following Smith, came Malthus, to formulate a doctrine
which throws upon the Creator the responsibility for
the want and vice that flow from man's injustice—a
doctrine which has barred from the inquiry which
Smith did not pursue even such high and generous
minds as that of John Stuart Mill. Some of the pub-
lications of the Anti-Corn-Law League contain indi-
cations that if the struggle over the English corn laws
1%
10 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
had been longer continued, the discussion might have
been pushed further than the question of revenue tariff
or protective tariff; but, ending as it did, the capitalists
of the Manchester school were satisfied, and in such
discussion as has since ensued English free traders, with
few exceptions, have made no further advance, while
American advocates of free trade have merely followed
the English free traders.
On the other hand, the advocates of protection have
evinced a like indisposition to venture on burning
ground. They extol the virtues of protection as fur-
nishing employment, without asking how it comes that
any one should need to be furnished with employment;
they assert that protection maintains the rate of wages,
without explaining what determines the rate of wages.
The ablest of them, under the lead of Carey, have re-
jected the Malthusian doctrine, but only to set up an
equally untenable optimistic theory which serves the
same purpose of barring inquiry into the wrongs of
labor, and which has been borrowed by Continental
free traders as a weapon with which to fight the agi-
tation for social reform.
That, so far as it has yet gone, the controversy be.
tween protection and free trade has not been carried to
its logical conclusions is evident from the positions
which both sides occupy. Protectionists and free
traders alike seem to lack the courage of their convic-
tions. If protection have the virtues claimed for it,
why should it be confined to the restriction of imports
from foreign countries? If it really “provides employ.
ment" and raises wages, then a condition of things in
which hundreds of thousands vainly seek employment,
and wages touch the point of bare subsistence, demands
INTRODUCTORY. 11
a far more vigorous application of this beneficent prin-
ciple than any protectionist has yet proposed. On the
other hand, if the principle of free trade be true, the
substitution of a revenue tariff for a protective tariff is
a ridiculously inefficient application of it.
Like the two knights of allegory, who, halting one
on each side of the shield, continued to dispute about
it when the advance of either must have revealed a
truth that would have ended their controversy, pro-
tectionists and free traders stand to-day. Let it be ours
to carry the inquiry wherever it may lead. The fact
is, that fully to understand the tariff question we must
go beyond the tariff question as ordinarily debated.
And here, it may be, we shall find ground on which
honest divergences of opinion may be reconciled, and
facts which seem conflicting may fall into harmonious
relations.
CELAPTER II.
CLEARING GROUND.
THE protective theory has certainly the weight of
most general acceptance. Forty years ago all civilized
countries based their policy upon it; and though Great
Britain has since discarded it, she remains the only
considerable nation that has done so, while not only
have her own colonies, as soon as they have obtained
the power, shown a disposition to revert to it, but such
a disposition has of late years been growing in Great
Britain herself.
It should be remembered, however, that the pre-
sumption in favor of any belief generally entertained
has existed in favor of many beliefs now known to be
entirely erroneous, and is especially weak in the case of
a theory which, like that of protection, enlists the Sup-
port of powerful special interests. The history of man-
kind everywhere shows the power that special inter-
ests, capable of Organization and action, may exert in
securing the acceptance of the most monstrous doc-
trines. We have, indeed, only to look around us to see
how easily a small special interest may exert greater
influence in forming opinion and making laws than a
large general interest. As what is everybody's busi-
ness is nobody's business, so what is everybody's in-
terest is nobody's interest. Two or three citizens of a
seaside town see that the building of a custom-house or
CLEARING GROUND. 13
the dredging of a creek will put money in their pock-
ets; a few silver miners conclude that it will be a good
thing for them to have the government stow away some
millions of silver every month; a navy contractor wants
the profit of repairing useless iron-clads or building
needless cruisers, and again and again such petty inter-
ests have their way against the larger interests of the
whole people. What can be clearer than that a note
directly issued by the government is at least as good as
a note based on a government bond? Yet special
interests have sufficed with us to institute and maintain
a hybrid currency for which no other valid reason can
be assigned than private profit. -
Those who are specially interested in protective
tariffs find it easy to believe that protection is of gen-
eral benefit. The directness of their interest makes
them active in spreading their views, and having con-
trol of large means—for the protected industries are
those in which large capitals are engaged—and being
ready on occasion, as a matter of business, to spend
money in propagating their doctrines, they exert great
influence upon the organs of public opinion. Free
trade, on the contrary, offers no special advantage to
any particular interest, and in the present state of
social morality benefits or injuries which men share in
common with their fellows are not felt so intensely as
those which affect them specially.
I do not mean to say that the pecuniary interests
which protection enlists suffice to explain the wide-
spread acceptance of its theories and the tenacity with
which they are held. But it is plain that these in-
terests do constitute a power of the kind most potent
in forming opinion and influencing legislation, and
14 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
that this fact weakens the presumption the wide accept.
ance of protection might otherwise afford, and is a rea-
son why those who believe in protection merely because
they have constantly heard it praised should examine
the question for themselves.
Protection, moreover, has always found an effective
ally in those national prejudices and hatreds which are
in part the cause and in part the result of the wars that
have made the annals of mankind a record of blood-
shed and devastation—prejudices and hatreds which
have everywhere been the means by which the masses
have been induced to use their own power for their
own enslavement.
For the first half century of our national existence
American protectionists pointed to the protective tariff
of Great Britain as an example to be followed; but
since that country, in 1846, discarded protection, its
American advocates have endeavored to utilize national
prejudice by constantly speaking of protection as an
American system and of free trade as a British inven-
tion. Just now they are endeavoring to utilize in the
same way the enmity against everything British which
long oppressions and insults have engendered in the
Irish heart, and, in the words of a recent political plat-
form, Irish-Americans are called upon “to resist the
introduction into America of the English theory of free
trade, which has been so successfully used as a means
to destroy the industries and oppress the people of
Ireland.”
Even if free trade had originated in Great Britain we
should be as foolish in rejecting it on that account as
we should be in refusing to speak our mother tongue
because it is of British origin, or in going back to hand
CIEARING GROUND. 15
and water power because steam engines were first intro-
duced in Great Britain. But, in truth, free trade no
more originated in Great Britain than did the habit of
walking on the feet. Free trade is the natural trade—
the trade that goes on in the absence of artificial re-
strictions. It is protection that had to be invented.
But instead of being invented in the United States, it
was in full force in Great Britain long before the Uni-
ted States were thought of. It would be nearer the
truth to say that protection originated in Great Britain,
for, if the system did not originate there, it was fully
developed there, and it is from that country that it has
been derived by us. Nor yet did the reaction against
it originate in Great Britain, but in France, among a
school of eminent men headed by Quesnay, who were
Adam Smith's predecessors and in many things his
teachers. These French economists were what neither
Smith nor any subsequent British economist or states-
man has been—true free traders. They wished to
sweep away not merely protective duties, but all taxes,
direct and indirect, save a single tax upon land values.
This logical conclusion of free-trade principles the so-
called British free traders have shirked, and it meets to-
day as bitter opposition from the Cobden Club as from
American protectionists. The only sense in which we
can properly speak of “British free trade” is the same
sense in which we speak of a certain imitation metal as .
“German silver.” “British free trade” is spurious free
trade. Great Britain does not really enjoy free trade.
To say nothing of internal taxes, inconsistent with true
free trade, she still maintains a cordon of custom-house
officers, coast guards and baggage searchers, and still
collects over a hundred million dollars of her revenue
16 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
from import duties. To be sure, her tariff is “for rev.
enue only,” but a tariff for revenue only is not free
trade. The ruling classes of Great Britain have adopt-
ed only so much free trade as suits their class inter-
ests, and the battle for free trade in that country has
yet to be fought.
On the other hand, it is absurd to talk of protection
as an American system. It had been fully developed
in Europe before the American colonies were planted,
and during our colonial period England maintained a
more thorough system of protection than now anywhere
exists—a system which aimed at building up English
industries not merely by protective duties, but by the
repression of like industries in Ireland and the colonies,
and wherever else throughout the world English power
could be exerted. What we got of protection was the
wrong side of it, in regulations intended to prevent
American industries from competing with those of the
mother country and to give to her a monopoly of the
American trade. -
The irritation produced in the growing colonies by
these restrictions was the main cause of the revolution
which made of them an independent nation. Protec-
tionist ideas were doubtless at that time latent among
our people, for they permeated the mental atmosphere
of the civilized world, but so little disposition was
there to embody those ideas in a national policy, that
the American representatives in negotiating the treaty
of peace endeavored to secure complete freedom of
trade between the United States and Great Britain.
This was refused by England, then and for a long
time afterward completely dominated by protective
ideas. But during the period following the revolution
CLEARING GROUND. 17
in which the American Union existed during the
Articles of Confederation, no tariff hampered impor-
tations into the American States.
The adoption of the Constitution made a Federal
tariff possible, and to give the Federal Government an
independent revenue a tariff was soon imposed; but
although protection had then begun to find advocates
in the United States, this first American tariff was
almost nominal as compared with what the British
tariff was then or our tariff is now. And in the
Federal Constitution state tariffs were prohibited—
a step which has resulted in giving to the principle
of free trade the greatest extension it has had in
modern times. Nothing could more clearly show how
far the American people then were from accepting
the theories of protection since popularized among
them, for the national idea had not then acquired the
force it has since gained, and if protection had then
been looked upon as necessary the different States
would not without a struggle have given up the
power of imposing tariffs of their own.
Nor could protection have reached its present height
in the United States but for the civil war. While at-
tention was concentrated on the struggle and mothers
were sending their sons to the battle-field, the interests
that sought protection took advantage of the patriotism
that was ready for any sacrifice to secure protective
taxes such as had never before been dreamed of—taxes
which they have ever since managed to keep in force,
and even in many cases to increase. *
The truth is that protection is no more American than
is the distinction made in our regular army and navy
between commissioned officers and enlisted men—a dis-
18 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
tinction not of degree but of kind, so that there is be:
tween the highest non-commissioned officer and the
lowest commissioned officer a deep gulf fixed, a gulf
which can only be likened to that which exists between
white and black where the color line is drawn sharpest.
This distinction is historically a survival of that made
in the armies of aristocratic Europe, when they were
officered by nobles and recruited from peasants, and has
been copied by us in the same spirit of imitation that
has led us to copy other undemocratic customs and in-
stitutions. Though we preserve this aristocratic dis-
tinction after it has been abandoned in some European
countries, it is in no sense American. It neither origin-
ated with us nor does it consort with our distinctive ideas
and institutions. So it is with protection. Whatever
be its economic merits there can be no doubt that it
conflicts with those ideas of natural right and personal
freedom which received national expression in the es-
tablishment of the American Republic, and which we
have been accustomed to regard as distinctively Ameri-
can. What more incongruous than the administering
of custom-house oaths and the searching of trunks and
hand-bags under the shadow of “Liberty Enlightening
the World?”
As for the assertion that “the English theory of free
trade” has been used “to destroy the industries and
oppress the people of Ireland,” the truth is that it was
“the English theory of protection ” that was so used.
The restrictions which British protection imposed upon
the American colonies were trivial as compared with
those imposed upon Ireland. The successful resistance
of the colonies roused in Ireland the same spirit, and led
to the great movement of “Irish Volunteers,” who, with
CLEARING GROUND. 19
cannon bearing the inscription “Free Trade or —!”
forced the repeal of those restrictions and won for a time
Irish legislative independence.
Whether Irish industries that were unquestionably
hampered and throttled by British protection could
now be benefited by Irish protection, like the question
whether protection benefits the United States, is only
to be settled by a determination of the effects of pro-
tection upon the country that imposes it. But without
going into that, it is evident that the free trade be-
tween Great Britain and Ireland which has existed
since the union in 1801, has not been the cause of the
backwardness of Irish industry. There is one part of
Ireland which has enjoyed comparative prosperity
and in which important industries have grown up—
Some of them, such as the building of iron ships, for
which natural advantages cannot be claimed. How
can this be explained on the theory that Irish industries
cannot be re-established without protection?
If the very men who are now trying to persuade
Irish-American voters that Ireland has been impover-
ished by “British free trade” were privately asked
the cause of the greater prosperity of Ulster over other
parts of Ireland, they would probably give the answer
made familiar by religious bigotry—that Ulster is en-
terprising and prosperous because it is Protestant, while
the rest of Ireland is sluggish and poor because it is
Catholic. But the true reason is plain. It is, that the
land tenure in Ulster has been such that a larger por-
tion of the wealth produced has been left there than in
other parts of Ireland, and that the mass of the peo-
ple have not been so remorsely hunted and oppressed.
In Presbyterian Skye the same general poverty, the
20 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
same primitive conditions of industry exist as in Catho.
lic Connemara, and its cause is to be seen in the same
rapacious system of landlordism which has carried off
the fruits of industry and prevented the accumulation
of capital. To attribute the backwardness of industry
among a people who are steadily stripped of all they
can produce above a bare living, to the want of a pro-
tective tariff or to religious opinions is like attributing
the sinking of a scuttled ship to the loss of her figure-
head or the color of her paint.
What, however, in the United States at least, has
tended more than any appeals to national feeling to dis-
pose the masses in favor of protection, has been the
difference of attitude toward the working classes as-
sumed by the contending policies. In its beginnings
in this country protection was strongest in those sec-
tions where labor had the largest opportunities and was
held in the highest esteem, while the strength of free
trade has been the greatest in the section in which up
to the civil war slavery prevailed. The political party
which successfully challenged the aggressions of the
slave power also declared for a protective tariff, while
the men who tried to rend the Union in order to es-
tablish a nation based upon the right of capital to own
labor, prohibited protection in the constitution they
formed. The explanation of these facts is, that in one
section of the country there were many industries that
could be protected, while in the other section there were
few. While American cotton culture was in its earlier
stages, Southern cotton planters were willing enough
to avail themselves of a heavy duty on India Cottons,
and Louisiana sugar growers have always been persist-
ent sticklers for protection. But when cotton raised
CLEARING GROUND. 21
for export became the great staple of the South, pro-
tection, in the absence of manufactures, was not only
clearly opposed to dominant Southern interests, but
assumed the character of a sectional imposition by
which the South was taxed for the benefit of the North.
This sectional division on the tariff question had no
reference whatever to the conditions of labor, but in
many minds its effect has been to associate protection
with respect for labor and free trade with its enslave-
ment. -
Irrespective of this there has been mugh in the pre-
sentation of the two theories to dispose the working
classes toward protection and against free trade.
Workingmen generally feel that they do not get a fair
reward for their labor. They know that what prevents
them from successfully demanding higher wages is the
competition of others anxious for work, and they are
naturally disposed to favor the doctrine or party that
proposes to shield them from competition. This, its
advocates urge, is the aim of protection. And what-
ever protection accomplishes, protectionists at least pro-
fess regard for the working classes, and proclaim their
desire to use the powers of government to raise and
maintain wages. Protection, they declare, means the
protection of labor. So constantly is this reiterated
that many suppose that this is the real derivation of
the term, and that “protection ” is short for “protection
of labor.”
On the other hand, the opponents of protection have,
for the most part, not only professed no special interest
in the well-being of the working classes and no desire
to raise wages, but have denied the justice of attempt-
ing to use the powers of government for this purpose.
22 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
The doctrines of free trade have been intertwined with
teachings that throw upon the laws of nature respon-
sibility for the poverty of the laboring class, and
foster a callous indifference to their sufferings. On
the same grounds on which they have condemned leg.
islative interference with commerce, free-trade econ-
omists have condemned interference with hours of
labor, with the rate of wages, and even with the employ-
ment of women and children, and have united protec-
tionism and trades unionism in the same denuncia-
tion, proclaiming supply and demand to be the only
true and rightful regulator of the price of labor as of
the price of pig iron. While protesting against re-
strictions upon the production of wealth they have
ignored the monstrous injustice of its distribution, and
have treated as fair and normal that competition in
which human beings, deprived of their natural oppor-
tunities of employing themselves, are compelled by bit-
ng want, to bid against one another.
All this is true. But it is also true that the needs of
labor require more than kind words, and are not to be
satisfied by such soft phrases as we address to a horse
when we want to catch him that we may put a bit in
his mouth and a saddle on his back. Let me ask those
who are disposed to regard protection as favorable to
the aspirations of labor, to consider whether it can be
true that what labor needs is to be protected?
To admit that labor needs protection is to acknowl-
edge its inferiority; it is to acquiesce in an assumption
that degrades the workman to the position of a depend-
ent, and leads logically to the claim that the employé
is bound to vote in the interest of the employer who
provides him with work. There is something in the
CLEARING GROUND. 23
very word “protection " that ought to make work-
ingmen cautious of accepting anything presented to
them under it. The protection of the masses has in
all times been the pretense of tyranny—the plea of
monarchy, of aristocracy, of special privilege of every
kind. The slave owners justified slavery as protect-
ing the slaves. British misrule in Ireland is upheld
on the ground that it is for the protection of the
Irish. But, whether under a monarchy or under a re-
public, is there an instance in the history of the world
in which the “protection ” of the laboring masses has
not meant their oppression ? The protection that those
who have got the law-making power into their hands
have given to labor, has at best always been the pro-
tection that man gives to cattle—he protects them that
he may use and eat them.
There runs through protectionist professions of con-
cern for labor a tone of condescending patronage more
insulting to men who feel the true dignity of labor than
frankly expressed contempt could be—an assumption
that pauperism is the natural condition of labor, to
which it must everywhere fall unless benevolently pro-
tected. It is never intimated that the land-owner or
the capitalist needs protection. They, it is always as-
sumed, can take care of themselves. It is only the
poor workingman who must be protected.
What is labor that it should so need protection? Is
not labor the creator of capital, the producer of all
wealth 7 Is it not the men who labor that feed and
clothe all others ? Is it not true, as has been said, that
the three great orders of society are “workingmen,
beggarmen and thieves?” How, then, does it come
that workingmen alone need protection ? When the
24 FROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
first man came upon the earth who was there to pro-
tect him or to provide him with employment? Yet
whenever or however he came, he must have managed
to get a living and raise a family
When we consider that labor is the producer of all
wealth, is it not evident that the impoverishment
and dependence of labor are abnormal conditions re-
Sulting from restrictions and usurpations, and that
instead of accepting protection, what labor should de-
mand is freedom 7 That those who advocate any ex-
tension of freedom choose to go no further than suits
their own special purpose is no reason why freedom it-
self should be distrusted. For years it was held that
the assertion of our Declaration of Independence that
all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator
with unalienable rights, applied only to white men.
But this in nowise vitiated the principle. Nor does it
vitiate the principle that it is still held to apply only
to political rights.
And so, that freedom of trade has been advocated by
those who have no sympathy with labor should not
prejudice us against it. Can the road to the industrial
emancipation of the masses be any other than that of
freedom 7
CEIAPTER III.
OF METHOD.
ON the deck of a ship men are pulling on a rope and
on her mast a yard is rising. A man aloft is clinging
to the tackle that raises the yard. Is his weight assist-
ing its rise or retarding it? That, of course, depends
on what part of the tackle his weight is thrown upon,
and can only be told by noticing whether its tendency
is with or against the efforts of those who pull on deck.
If in things so simple we may easily err in assuming
cause from effect, how much more liable to error are
such assumptions in regard to the complicated phenom-
ena of social life.
Much that is urged in current discussions of the
tariff question is of no validity whatever, and however
it may serve the purpose of controversy, cannot aid in
the discovery of truth. That a thing exists with or
follows another thing is no proof that it is because of
that other thing. This assumption is the fallacy post
hoc, ergo propter hoc, which leads, if admitted, to the
most preposterous conclusions. Wages in the United
States are higher than in England, and we differ
from England in having a protective tariff. But the
assumption that the one fact is because of the other,
is no more valid than would be the assumption that
these higher wages are due to our decimal coinage
or to our republican form of government. That Eng-
2
26 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
land has grown in wealth since the abolition of pro.
tection proves no more for free trade than the growth
of the United States under a protective tariff does
for protection. It does not follow that an institu-
tion is good because a country has prospered under
it, nor bad because a country in which it exists is not
prosperous. It does not even follow that institutions
to be found in all prosperous countries and not to be
found in backward countries are therefore beneficial.
For this, at various times, might have been confidently
asserted of slavery, of polygamy, of aristocracy, of es-
tablished churches, and it may still be asserted of pub-
lic debts, of private property in land, of pauperism, or
of the existence of distinctively vicious or criminal
classes. Nor even when it can be shown that certain
changes in the prosperity of a country, of an industry,
or of a class, have followed certain other changes in
laws or institutions can it be inferred that the two are
related to each other as effect and cause, unless it can
also be shown that the assigned cause tends to produce
the assigned effect, or unless, what is clearly impossible
in most cases, it can be shown that there is no other
cause to which the effect can be attributed. The almost
endless multiplicity of causes constantly operating in
human societies, and the almost endless interference of
effect with effect, make that popular mode of reasoning
which logicians call the method of simple enumeration
worse than useless in social investigations.
As for reliance upon statistics, that involves the ad-
ditional difficulty of knowing whether we have the
right statistics. Though “figures cannot lie,” there is
in their collection and grouping such liability to over-
sight and such temptation to bias that they are to be
OF METHOD, - 27
distrusted in matters of controversy until they have
been subjected to rigid examination. The value of
most arguments turning upon statistics is well illus-
trated in the story of the government clerk who, being
told to get up the statistics of a certain question, wished
first to know which side it was desired that they should
support. Under their imposing appearance of exact-
ness may lurk the gravest errors and Wildest assump-
tions.
To ascertain the effect of protective tariffs, we must
inquire what they are and how they operate. When
we thus discover their nature and tendencies, we shall
be able to weigh what is said for or against them, and
have a clew by which we may trace their results amid
the complications of social phenomena. For the largest
communities are but expansions of the smallest com-
munities, and the rules of arithmetic by which we cal-
culate gain or loss on transactions of dollars apply as
well to transactions of hundreds of millions.
Thus the facts we must use and the principles we
must apply are common facts that are known to all
and principles that are recognized in every-day life.
Starting from premises as to which there can be no
dispute, we have only to be careful as to our steps in
order to reach conclusions of which we may feel sure.
We cannot experiment with communities as the chem-
ist can with material substances, or as the physiologist
can with animals. Nor can we find nations so alike
in all other respects that we can safely attribute any
difference in their conditions to the presence or ab-
sence of a single cause without first assuring our-
selves of the tendency of that cause. But the imag-
ination puts at our counmand a method of investi-
28 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE. "
gating economic problems which is within certain
limits hardly less useful than actual experiment.
We may test the working of known principles by.
mentally separating, combining or eliminating con-
ditions. Let me explain what I mean by an illus-
tration I have once before used.*
When I was a boy I went down to the wharf with
another boy to see the first iron steamship that had
ever crossed the ocean to Philadelphia. Now, hearing of
an iron steamship seemed to us then a good deal like
hearing of a leaden kite or a wooden cooking-stove.
But we had not been long aboard of her, before my
comrade said in a tone of contemptuous disgust: “Pooh!
I see how it is. She's all lined with wood ; that's the
reason she floats.” I could not controvert him for the
moment, but I was not satisfied, and sitting down on
the wharf when he left me, I set to work trying mental
experiments. If it was the wood inside of her that
made her float, then the more wood the higher she
would float; and, mentally, I loaded her up with
wood. But, as I was familiar with the process of
making boats out of blocks of wood, I at once saw that,
instead of floating higher, she would sink deeper.
Then, I mentally took all the wood out of her, as we
dug out our wooden boats, and saw that thus lightened
she would float higher still. Then, in imagination, I
jammed a hole in her, and saw that the water would
run in and she would sink, as did our wooden boats
when ballasted with leaden keels. And, thus I saw, as
clearly as though I could have actually made these
experiments with the steamer, that it was not the
* Lecture before the students of the University of California,
on the “Study of Political Economy,” April, 1877.
OF METHOD, 29-
wooden lining that made her float, but her hollowness,
or, as I would now phrase it, her displacement of water.
In such ways as this, with which we are all familiar,
we can isolate, analyze or combine economic principles,
and, by extending or diminishing the scale of propo-
sitions, either subject them to inspection through a men-
tal magnifying glass or bring a larger field into view.
And this each one can do for himself. In the inquiry
upon which we are about to enter, all I ask of the reader
is that he shall in nothing trust to me.
CHAPTER IV.
PROTECTION AS A UNIVERSAL NEED.
To understand a thing it is often well to begin by
Jooking at it, as it were, from the outside and observing
its relations, before examining it in detail. Let us do
this with the protective theory.
Protection, as the term has come to signify a certain
national policy, means the levying of duties upon im-
ported commodities for the purpose of protecting from
competition the home producers of such commodities.
Protectionists contend that to secure the highest pros-
perity of each nation it should produce for itself every-
thing it is capable of producing, and that to this end
its home industries should be protected against the com-
petition of foreign industries. They also contend (in
the United States at least) that to enable workmen to
obtain as high wages as possible they should be pro-
tected by tariff duties against the competition of goods
produced in countries where wages are lower. With-
out disputing the correctness of this theory, let us con-
sider its larger relations.
The protective theory, it is to be observed, asserts
a general law, as true in one country as in another.
However protectionists in the United States may talk
of “American protection” and “British free trade,”
protection is, and of necessity, must be, advocated as of
universal application. American protectionists use the
PROTECTION AS A UNIVERSAL NEET). 31
arguments of foreign protectionists, and even where
they complain that the protective policy of other coun-
tries is injurious to us, commend it as an example
which we should follow. They contend that (at least
up to a certain point in national development) protec-
tion is everywhere beneficial to a nation, and free trade
everywhere injurious; that the prosperous nations
have built up their prosperity by protection, and that
all nations that would be prosperous must adopt that
policy. And their arguments must be universal to
have any plausibility, for it would be absurd to assert
that a theory of national growth and prosperity applies,
to some countries and not to others.
Let me ask the reader who has hitherto accepted the
protective theory to consider what its necessarily uni-
versal character involves. It was the realization of
this that first led me to question that theory. I was
for a number of years after I had come of age a protec-
tionist, or rather, I supposed I was, for, without real
examination, I had accepted the belief, as in the first
place we all accept our beliefs, on the authority of
others. So far, however, as I thought at all on the
subject, I was logical, and I well remember how when
the Florida and Alabama were sinking American ships
at sea, I thought their depredations, after all, a good
thing for the state in which I lived—California—since
the increased risk and cost of ocean carriage in Ameri-
can ships (then the only way of bringing goods from
the Eastern States to California) would give to her in-
fant industries something of that needed protection
against the lower wages and better established indus-
tries of the Eastern States which the Federal Constitu-
tion prevented her from securing by a State tariff. The
32 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
full bearing of such notions never occurred to me till I
happened to hear the protective theory elaborately ex-
pounded by an able man. As he urged that American
industries must be protected from the competition of
foreign countries, that we ought to work up our own
raw materials and allow nothing to be imported that
we could produce for ourselves, I began to realize that
these propositions, if true, must be universally true, and
that not only should every nation shut itself out from
every other nation; not enly should the various sections
of every large country institute tariffs of their own to
shelter their industries from the competition of other
sections, but that the reason given why no people
should obtain from abroad anything they might make
at home, must apply as well to the family. It was
this that led me to weigh arguments I had before
accepted without real examination.
It seems to me impossible to consider the necessarily
universal character of the protective theory without
feeling it to be repugnant to moral perceptions and in-
consistent with the simplicity and harmony which we
everywhere discover in natural law. What should we
think of human laws framed for the government of a
country which should compel each family to keep con-
stantly on their guard, against every other family, to
expend a large part of their time and labor in prevent-
ing exchanges with their neighbors, and to seek their
own prosperity by opposing the natural efforts of other
families to become prosperous 7 Yet the protective
theory implies that laws such as these have been im-
posed by the Creator upon the families of men who
tenant this earth. It implies that by virtue of social
laws, as immutable as the physical laws, each nation
PROTECTION As A UNIVERSAL NEED. 33
must stand jealously on guard against every other ha-
tion and erect artificial obstacles to national inter-
course. It implies that a federation of mankind, such
as that which prevents the establishment of tariffs be-
tween the states of the American Union, would be a
disaster to the race, and that in an ideal world each
nation would be protected from every other nation by a
cordon of tax collectors, with their attendant spies and
informers. *
Such a theory might consort with that form of poly-
theism which assigned to each nation a separate and
hostile God; but it is hard to reconcile it with the idea
of the unity of the Creative Mind and the universality
of law. Imagine a Christian missionary expounding
to a newly discovered people the sublime truths of the
gospel of peace and love—the fatherhood of God; the
brotherhood of man; the duty of regarding the interests
of our neighbors equally with our own, and of doing to
others as we would have them do to us. Could he,
in the same breath, go on to declare that, by virtue of
the laws of this same God, each nation, to prosper,
must defend itself against all other nations by a pro-
tective tariff Ż
Religion and experience alike teach us that the
highest good of each is to be sought in the good of
others; that the true interests of men are harmonious,
not antagonistic; that prosperity is the daughter of good
will and peace; and that want and destruction follow
enmity and strife. The protective theory, on the other
hand, implies the opposition of national interests; that
the gain of one people is the loss of others; that each
must seek its own good by constant efforts to get ad-
vantage over others and to prevent others frcm getting
2*
34 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
ſ'
advantage over it. It makes of nations rivals instead
of co-operators; it inculcates a warfare of restrictions
and prohibitions and searchings and seizures, which
differs in weapons, but not in spirit, from that warfare
which sinks ships and burns cities. Can we imagine
the nations beating their swords into plowshares and
their spears into pruning-hooks and yet maintaining
hostile tariffs 7
No matter whether he call himself Christian or Deist,
or Agnostic or Atheist, who can look about him with-
out seeing that want and suffering flow inevitably from
selfishness, and that in any community the golden rule
which teaches us to regard the interests of others as
carefully as our own would bring not only peace but
plenty 2 Can it be that what is true of individuals
ceases to be true of nations—that in One sphere the law
of prosperity is the law of love; in the other that of
strife? On the contrary, universal history testifies
that poverty, degradation, and enslavement are the in-
evitable results of that spirit which leads nations to
regard each other as rivals and enemies.
Every political truth must be a moral truth. Yet
who can accept the protective theory as a moral truth 7
A few months ago I found myself one night, with
four other passengers, in the smoking car of a Pennsyl-
vania limited express train traveling west. The con-
versation, beginning with fast trains, turned to fast
steamers, and then to custom-house experiences. One
told how, coming from Europe with a trunk filled with
presents for his wife, he had significantly said to the
custom-house inspector detailed to examine his trunks
that he was in a hurry. “How much of a hurry?”
said the officer. “Ten dollars' worth of a hurry,” was
PROTECTION As A UNIVERSAL NEED. 35
the reply. The officer took a quick look through the
trunk and remarked, “That's not much of a hurry for
all this.” “I gave him ten more,” said the story-teller,
“and he chalked the trunk.”
Then another told how under similar circumstances
he had placed a magnificent meerschaum pipºso that it
would be the first thing seen on lifting the trunk lid,
and, when the officer admired it, had replied that it was
his. The third said he simply put a greenback con-
spicuously in the first article of luggage; and the
fourth told how his plan was to crumple up a note, and
put it with his keys in the officer's hands.
Here were four reputable business men, as I after-
ward found them to be—one an iron worker, one a coal
producer, and the other two manufacturers—men of
at least average morality and patriotism, who not only
thought it no harm to evade the tariff, but who made
no scruple of the false oath necessary, and regarded the
bribery of customs officers as a good joke. I had the
curiosity to edge the conversation from this to the sub-
ject of free trade, when I found that all four were
staunch protectionists, and by edging it a little further
I found that all four were thorough believers in the
right of an employer to discharge any workman who
voted for a free-trade candidate, holding, as they put
it, that no one ought to eat the bread of an employer
whose interests he opposed.
I recall this conversation because it is typical. Who-
ever has traveléd on trans-Atlantic steamers has listened
to such conversations, and is aware that the great ma-
jority of the American protectionists who visit Europe
return with purchases which they smuggle through,
even at the expense of a “custom-house oath’ and a
36 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
greenback to the examining officer. Many of our larg.
est under-valuation smugglers have been men of the
highest social and religious standing, who gave freely
of their spoils to churches and benevolent societies.
Not long ago a highly respected banker, an extremely
religious gman, who had probably neglected the pre:
cautions of my Smoking-car friends, was detected in the
endeavor to smuggle through in his luggage (which he
had of course taken a “custom-house oath. " did not
contain anything dutiable) a lot of very valuable pres-
ents to a church
Conscientious men will (until they get used to them)
shrink from false oaths, from bribery, or from other
means necessary to evade a tariff, but even of be-
lievers in protection are there any who really think
such evasions wrong in themselves 7 What theoreti-
cal protectionist is there, who, if no one was watch-
ing him, would scruple to carry a box of cigars or a
dress pattern, or anything else that could be carried,
across a steamer wharf or across Niagara bridge?
And why should he scruple to carry such things
across a wharf, a river, or an imaginary line, since
once inside the custom house frontier no one would
object to his carrying them thousands of miles?
That unscrupulous men, for their own private ad-
vantage, break laws intended for the general good
proves nothing; but that no one really feels smug-
gling to be wrong proves a good deal. Whether we
hold the basis of moral ideas to be intuitive or utili-
tarian, is not the fact that protection thus lacks the
support of the moral sentiment inconsistent with the
idea that tariffs are necessary to the well-being and
progress of mankind Ž If, as is held by some, moral
PROTECTION As A UNIVERSAL NEED. 37
perceptions are implanted in our nature as a means
whereby our conduct may be instinctively guided in
such way as to conduce to the general well being,
how is it, if the Creator has ordained that man
should prosper by protective tariffs, that the moral
sense takes no cognizance of such a law” If, as others
hold, what we call moral perceptions be the result of
general experience of what conduces to the common
good, how is it that the beneficial effects of protection
have not developed moral recognition?
To make that a crime by statute which is no crime
in morals, is inevitably to destroy respect for law; to
resort to oaths to prevent men from doing what they
feel injures no one, is to weaken the sanctity of oaths.
Corruption, evasion and false swearing are inseparable
from tariffs. Can that be good of which these are the
fruits? A system which requires such spying and
searching, such invoking of the Almighty to witness
the contents of every box, bundle and package—a sys-
tem which always has provoked, and in the nature of man
always must provoke, corruption and fraud—can it be
necessary to the prosperity and progress of mankind?
Consider, moreover, how sharply this theory of pro-
tection conflicts with common experience and habits of
thought. Who would think of recommending a site
for a proposed city or a new colony because it was
very difficult to get at? Yet, if the protective theory
be true, this would really be an advantage. Who
would regard piracy as promotive of civilization 7
Yet a discriminating pirate, who would confine his
seizures to goods which might be produced in the
country to which they were being carried, would be as
beneficial to that country as a tariff.
38 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
Whether protectionists or free traders, we all hear
with interest and pleasure of improvements in trans.
portation by water or land; we are all disposed to re-
gard the opening of canals, the building of rail-
ways, the deepening of harbors, the improvement of
steamships, as beneficial. But if such things are
beneficial, how can tariffs be beneficial 7 The effect
of such things is to lessen the cost of transporting
commodities; the effect of tariffs is to increase it. If
the protective theory be true, every improvement that
cheapens the carriage of goods between country and
country is an injury to mankind unless tariffs be com-
mensurately increased.
The directness, the swiftness and the ease with which
birds cleave the air, naturally excite man's desire. His
fancy has always given angels wings, and he has ever
dreamed of a time when the power of traversing those
unobstructed fields might also be his. That this tri-
umph is within the power of human ingenuity who in
this age of marvels can doubt? And who would not
hail with delight the news that invention had at last
brought to realization the dream of ages, and made
navigation of the atmosphere as practicable as naviga-
tion of the ocean? Yet if the protective theory be
true this mastery of another element would be a mis-
fortune to man. For it would make protection impos-
sible. Every inland town and village, every rood of
ground on the whole earth's surface, would at once
become a port of an all-embracing ocean, and the only
way in which any people could continue to enjoy the
blessings of protection would be to roof their coun-
try in.
It is not only improvements in transportation that
PROTECTION AS A UNIVERSAL NEED. 39
are antagonistic to protection ; but all labor-saving
invention and discovery. The utilization of natural
gas bids fair to lessen the demand for native coal far
more than could the free importation of foreign coal.
Borings in Central New York have recently revealed
vast beds of pure salt, the working of which will de-
stroy the industry of salt making, to encourage which
we impose a duty on foreign salt. We maintain a
tariff for the avowed purpose of keeping out the pro-
ducts of cheap foreign labor; yet machines are daily
invented that produce goods cheaper than the cheapest
foreign labor. . Clearly the only consistent protection-
ism is that of China, which would not only prohibit
foreign commerce, but forbid the introduction of labor-
saving machinery.
The aim of protection, in short, is to prevent the
bringing into a country of things in themselves useful
and valuable, in order to compel the making of such
things. But what all mankind in the individual affairs.
of every-day life, regard as to be desired is not the
making of things, but the possession of things.
CEIAPTER W.
THE PROTECTIVE UNIT.
THE more one considers the theory that every nation
ought to “protect” itself against every other nation, the
more inconsistent does it seem.
Is there not, in the first place, an obvious absurdity
in taking the nation or country as the protective unit
and saying that each should have a protective tariff’”
What is meant by nation or country in the protec-
tionist theory is an independent political division.
Thus Great Britain and Ireland are considered one
nation, France another, Germany another, Switzerland
another, the United States, Canada, Mexico, and each
* That protectionist writers are themselves conscious of this ab-
surdity is to be seen in their constant effort to suggest the idea, too
preposterous to be broadly stated, that nations instead of being
purely arbitrary political divisions of mankind, are natural, or
divinely appointed, divisions. Thus, not to multiply instances,
Professor Robert Ellis Thompson (Political Economy, p. 34) defines
a nation as “a people speaking one language, living under one gov-
ernment, and occupying a continuous area. This area is a district
whose natural boundaries designate it as intended for the site of an
independent people.” This definition is given in large type, while
underneath is appended in small type : “No one point of this defi-
nition is essential save the second.” Yet in spite of this admission
that the “nation ” is a purely arbitrary political division, Professor
Thompson endeavors throughout his book to suggest a different
impression to the mind of the reader, by talking of “the existence
of nations as parts of the world's providential order,” the “ proºf.
dential boundaries of nations,” etc.
THE PROTECTIVE UNIT. 41
- N.
of the Central and South American republics are others.
But these divisions are arbitrary. They do not co-
incide with any differences in soil, climate, race or in-
dustry—they have no maximum or minimum of area
or population. They are, moreover, continually chang-
ing. The maps of Europe and America used by school
children to-day are very different from the maps their
fathers used. The difference a hundred years ago was
greater yet; and as we go further back still greater
differences appear. According to this theory, when
the three British kingdoms had separate governments
it was necessary for the well-being of all that they
should be protected from each other, and should Ire-
land achieve independence that necessity would re-
cur; but while the three countries are united under
One government, it does not exist. The petty states
of which a few years ago Germany and Italy consisted
ought upon this theory to have had, as they once had,
tariffs between them. Yet, now, upon the same theory,
they no longer need these tariffs. Alsace and Lorraine
when provinces of France needed to be protected
against Germany. Now that they are German prov-
..inces they need protection against France. Texas, when
part of Mexico, required a protective tariff against the
|United States. Now, being a part of the United States,
it requires a protective tariff against Mexico. We of
the United States require a protective tariff against
Canada, and the Canadians a tariff against us, but if
Canada were to come into the Union the necessity for
both of these tariffs would disappear.
Do not these incongruities show that the protective
theory is destitute of scientific basis; that instead of
originating in any deduction from principles or induc-
42 PROTECTION oR FREE TRADE.
tion from facts, it has been invented merely to serve the
purposes of its inventors 7 Political changes in nowise
alter soil, climate, or industrial needs. If the three
British kingdoms do not now need tariffs against one
another, they could not have needed them before the
union. If it is not injurious to the various states of
Italy or Germany to trade freely with each other now,
it could not have been injurious before they were
united. If Alsace and Lorraine are benefited by free
trade with Germany now, they would have been bene-
fited by it when French provinces. If the people of the
opposite shores of the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence
River would not be injured by the free exchange of
their products should Canada enter the American
Union, they could not be injured by freedom to ex-
change their products now.
Consider how inconsistent with the protective theory
is the free trade that prevails between the states of the
American Union. Our Union includes an area almost
as large as Europe, yet the protectionists who hold that
each European country ought to protect itself against
all the rest make no objections to the free trade that ex-
ists between the American states, though some of these
states are larger than European kingdoms, and the dif'
ferences between them, as to natural resources and in-
dustrial development, are at least as great. If it is for
the benefit of Germany and France that they should be
separated by protective tariffs, does not New Jersey
need the protection of a tariff from New York and
Pennsylvania? and do not New York and Pennsyl-
vania also need to be protected from New Jersey?
And if New England needs protection against the
Province of Quebec, and Ohio, Illinois and Michigan
THE PROTECTIVE UNIT. 43
against the Province of Ontario, is it not clear that
these states also need protection from the states which
adjoin them on the south? What difference does it
make that one set of states belong to the American
Union and the other to the Canadian Confederation 7
Industry and commerce, when left to themselves, pay
no more attention to political lines than do birds or fishes.
Clearly, if there is any truth in the protective theory
it must apply not only to the grand political divisions
but to all their parts. If a country ought not to import
from other countries anything which its own people
can produce, the same principle must apply to every
subdivision; and each state, each county and each town-
ship, must need its own protective tariff.
And further than this, the proper application of the
protective theory requires the separation of mankind into
the smallest possible political divisions, each defend-
ed against the rest by its own tariff. For the larger
the area of the protective unit, the more difficult does it
become to apply the protective theory. With every
extension of such countries as the United States the
possibility of protection, if it can be applied only to the
major political divisions, becomes less, and were the
poet's dream realized, and mankind united in a “Fed-
eration of the World,” the possibility of protection
would vanish. On the other hand, the smaller the pro-
tective unit the better can the theory of protection be
applied. Protectionists do not go so far as to aver that
all trade is injurious. They hold that each country may
safely import what it cannot produce, but should restrict
the importation of what it can produce. Thus dis.
crimination is required, which becomes more possible
the smaller the protective unit.
44 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
Upon protective principles the same tariff will no bet.
ter suit all the states of Our Union than the same sized
shoes will fit all our sixty million people. Massachu-
setts, for instance, does not produce coal, iron or sugar.
These, then, on protective principles, ought to come
into Massachusetts free, while Pennsylvania enjoyed
protection on iron and coal, and Louisiana on sugar.
Oranges may be grown in Florida, but not in Minne-
sota; therefore, while Florida needs a protective duty
on Oranges, Minnesota does not. And so on through
the whole list of states. To “protect” them all with
the same tariff is to ignore as to each that part of the
protective theory which permits the free importation of
commodities that cannot be produced at home; and, by
compelling them to pay higher prices for what they
cannot produce, to neutralize the benefits arising from
the protection of such commodities as they do produce.
Furthermore, while Massachusetts, on the protective
theory, does not need protection on coal, iron and
sugar, which she cannot produce, she does need pro-
tection against the beef, hogs and breadstuffs with
which she is “deluged” from the West to the injury
of her agricultural industries, and of which protection
would enable her to raise enough for her home con-
sumption. On the other hand, the West needs pro-
tection against the boots and shoes and woolens of
Massachusetts, so that Western leather and wool could
be worked up at home, instead of being carried long
distances in raw form, to be brought back in finished
form. In the same way the iron workers of Ohio need
protection against Pennsylvania more than they do
against England, while it is only mockery to protect
Rocky Mountain coal miners against the coal of Nova
'TEIE PROTECTIVE UNIT. 45 -
Scotia, British Columbia and Australia, which cannot
come into competition with them, while not protecting
them against the coal of Iowa; or to protect the infant
cotton mills of the South against Old England while
giving them no protection against New England.
Upon the protective theory protection is most needed
against like industries. All protectionists agree that
the United States has greater need of protection against
Great Britain than against Brazil; and Canada against
the United States than against India—all agree that if
we must have free trade it should be with the countries
most widely differing as to their productions from our
own. Now there is far less difference between the pro-
ductions and -productive capacities of New Hampshire
and Vermont, of Indiana and Illinois, or of Kansas and
Nebraska, than there is between the United States as a
whole and any foreign country. Therefore, on the pro-
tective theory, tariffs between these states are more
needed than between the United States and foreign
countries. And since adjoining townships differ less
in industrial capacities than adjoining states, they re-
quire protective tariffs all the more.
The thirteen American colonies came together as thir-
teen independent sovereignties, each retaining the full
power of taxation, including that of levying duty on im-
ports, which was not given up by them until 1787,
eleven years after the Declaration of Independence,
when the Federal Constitution was adopted. If the
protective theory, then dominant in Great Britain, had
at that time had the hold upon the American people
which it afterward obtained, it is certain that the power
of protecting themselves would never have been given
up by the states. And had the Union continued as
46 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
at first formed, or had the framers of the Constitution
lacked the foresight to prohibit state tariffs, there is no
doubt that when we came to imitate the British system
of protection we should have had as strong a demand in
the various states for protection against other states
as we have had for protection against foreign coun-
tries, and the arguments now used against free trade
with foreign countries would to-day be urged against
free trade between the states.
Nor can there be any doubt that if our political or.
ganization made our townships independent of one
another, we should have, in our townships and villages,
the same clamor for protection against the industries of
other townships and villages that we have now for the
protection of the nation against other nations.
I am writing on Long Island, near the town of
Jamaica. I think I could make as good an argument
to the people of that little town as is made by the pro-
tectionists to the people of the United States. I could
say to the shopkeepers of Jamaica, “Your townsmen
now go to New York when they want to purchase a
suit of clothes or a bill of dry goods, leaving to you
only the fag ends of their custom, while the farmers'
wagons that pass in a long line over the turnpike every
night, carrying produce to New York and Brooklyn,
bring back supplies the next day. A protective tariff
will compel these purchases to be made here. Thus
profits that now go to New York and Brooklyn will be
retained in Jamaica; you will want larger stores and
better houses, can pay your clerks and journeymen
higher wages, will need more banking accommodations,
will advertise more freely in Jamaican newspapers, and
thus will the town grow and prosper.”
• THE PROTECTIVE UNIT. 47
“Moreover,” I might say, “what a useless waste of
labor there is in carrying milk and butter, chickens,
eggs and vegetables to New York and Brooklyn and
bringing back other things. How much better for our
farmers if they had a home market. This we can
secure for them by a tariff that will protect Jamaican
industries against those of New York and Brooklyn.
Clothing, cigars, boots and shoes, agricultural imple-
ments and furniture may be manufactured here as
well as in those cities. Why should we not have a
cotton factory, a woolen mill, a foundry, and, in short,
all the establishments necessary to supply the wants of
our people? To get them we need only a protective tar-
iff. Capital, when assured of protection, will be gladly
forthcoming for such enterprises, and we shall soon
be exporting what we now import, while our farmers
will find a demand at their doors for all their produce.
Even if at first they do have to pay somewhat higher
prices for what they buy they will be much more than
compensated by the higher prices they will get for
what they sell, and will save an eight or ten mile haul
to Brooklyn or New York. Thus, instead of Jamaica
remaining a little village, the industries which a pro-
tective tariff will build up here will make it a large
town, while the increased demand for labor will make
wages higher and employment steadier.”
I submit that all this is at least as valid as the pro-
tective arguments that are addressed to the people of
the whole United States, and no one who has listened
to the talk of village shopkeepers or noticed the
comments of local newspapers can doubt that were our
townships independent, village protectionists could get
as ready a hearing as national protectionists do now.
48 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
But to follow the protective theory to its logical con-
clusions we cannot stop with protection between state
and state, township and township, village and village.
If protection be needful between nations, it must be need-
ful not only between political subdivisions, but between
family and family. If nations should never buy of
other nations what they might produce at home, the
same principle must forbid each family to buy anything
it might produce? Social laws, like physical laws,
must apply to the molecule as well as to the aggregate.
But a social condition in which the principle of protec-
tion was thus fully carried out would be a condition of
utter barbarism.
CHAPTER VI.
TRADE.
PROTECTION implies prevention. To protect is to
preserve or defend.
What is it that protection by tariff prevents? It is
trade. To speak more exactly, it is that part of trade
which consists in bringing in from other countries com-
modities that might be produced at home.
But trade, from which “protection ” essays to pre-
serve and defend us, is not, like flood, earthquake, or
tornado, something that comes without human agency.
Trade implies human action. There can be no need of
preserving from or defending against trade, unless there
are men who want to trade and try to trade. Who,
then, are the men against whose efforts to trade “pro-
tection” preserves and defends us?
If I had been asked this question before I had come
to think over the matter for myself, I should have said
that the men against whom “protection ” defends us
are foreign producers who wish to sell their goods in
“our home markets. This is the assumption that runs
through all protectionist arguments—the assumption
that foreigners are constantly trying to force their pro-
ducts upon us, and that a protective tariff is a means
for defending ourselves against what they want to do.
Yet a moment's thought will show that no effort of
foreigners to sell us their products could of itself make
3
50 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
a tariff necessary. For the desire of one party, how-
ever strong it may be, cannot of itself bring about
trade. To every trade there must be two parties who
mutually desire to trade, and whose actions are recipro-
cal. No one can buy unless he can find some one will-
ing to sell; and no one can sell unless there is some
other one willing to buy. If Americans did not want
to buy foreign goods, foreign goods could not be sold
here even if there were no tariff. The efficient cause
of the trade which our tariff aims to prevent is the de-
sire of Americans to buy foreign goods, not the desire
of foreign producers to sell them. Thus protection
really prevents what the “protected" themselves want
to do. It is not from foreigners that protection pre-
serves and defends us; it is from ourselves.
Trade is not invasion. It does not involve aggression
on one side and resistance on the other, but mutual con-
sent and gratification. There cannot be a trade unless
the parties to it agree, any more than there can be a
quarrel unless the parties to it differ. England, we
say, forced trade with the outside world upon China,
and the United States upon Japan. But, in both cases,
what was done was not to force the people to trade, but
to force their governments to let them. If the people
had not wanted to trade, the opening of the ports would
have been useless.
Civilized nations, however, do not use their armies.
and fleets to open one another's ports to trade. What
they use their armies and fleets for, is, when they quar-
rel, to close one another's ports. And their effort then
is to prevent the carrying in of things even more than
the bringing out of things—importing rather than ex-
porting. For a people can be more quickly injured by
TRADE. * 51
preventing them from getting things than by prevent-
ing them from sending things away. Trade does not
require force. Free trade consists simply in letting
people buy and sell as they want to buy and sell. It is
protection that requires force, for it consists in prevent-
ing people from doing what they want to do. Protect-
ive tariffs are as much applications of force as are
blockading squadrons, and their object is the same—
to prevent trade. The difference between the two is
that blockading squadrons are a means whereby nations
seek to prevent their enemies from trading; protective
tariffs are a means whereby nations attempt to prevent
their own people from trading. What protection
teaches us, is to do to ourselves in time of peace what
enemies seek to do to us in time of war.
Can there be any greater misuse of language than to
apply to commerce terms suggesting strife, and to talk
of one nation invading, deluging, overwhelming or in-
undating another with goods? Goods ! what are they
but good things—things we are all glad to get? Is it
not preposterous to talk of one nation forcing its good
things upon another nation ? Who individually would
wish to be preserved from such invasion? Who would
object to being inundated with all the dress goods his
wife and daughters could want; deluged with a horse
and buggy; overywhelmed with clothing, with groceries,
with good cigars, fine pictures, or anything else that
has value? And who would take it kindly if any one
should assume to protect him by driving off those who
wanted to bring him such things?
In point of fact, however, not only is it impossible
for one nation to sell to another, unless that other wants
to buy, but international trade does not consist in send.
52 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
ing out goods to be sold. The great mass of the im.
ports of every civilized country consists of goods that
have been ordered by the people of that country and
are imported at their risk. This is true even in our
own case, although one of the effects of our tariff is
that many goods that otherwise would be imported by
Americans are sent here by European manufacturers,
because undervaluation is thus made easier.
But it is not the importer who is the cause of impor-
tation. Whether goods are brought here by American
importers or sent here by foreign exporters, the cause
of their coming here is that they are asked for by the
American people. It is the demand of purchasers at
retail that causes goods to be imported. Thus a pro-
tective tariff is a prevention by a people not of what
others want to do to them, but of what they them.
selves want to do.
When in the common use of the word we speak of
individuals or communities protecting themselves, there
is always implied the existence of some external enemy
or danger, such as cold, heat or accident, Savage beasts
or noxious vermin, fire or disease, robbers or invaders;
something disposed to do what the protected object to.
The only cases in which the common meaning of the
word does not imply some external enemy or danger
are those in which it implies some protector of superior
intelligence, as when we speak of imbeciles, lunatics,
drunkards or young children being protected against
their own irrational acts.
But the systems of restriction which their advo-
cates have named “protective” lack both the one and
the other of these essential qualities of real protection.
What they defend a people against is not external
TRADE. - 53
enemies or dangers, but what that people themselves
want to do. Yet this “protection ” is not the protec-
tion of a superior intelligence, for human wit has not
yet been able to devise any scheme by which any
intelligence can be secured in a Parliament or Con-
gress superior to that of the people it represents.
That where protective tariffs are imposed it is in
accordance with the national will I do not deny.
What I wish to point out is that even the people
who thus impose protective tariffs upon themselves
still want to do what by protective tariffs they strive
to prevent themselves from doing. This is seen in
the tendency of importation to continue in spite of tar-
iffs, in the disposition of citizens to evade their tariff
whenever they can, and in the fact that the very same
individuals who demand the imposition of tariffs to
prevent the importation of foreign commodities are
among the individuals whose demand for those com-
modities is the cause of their importation. Given a
people of which every man, woman and child is a pro-
tectionist, and a tariff unanimously agreed upon, and
still that tariff will be a restriction upon what these
people want to do and will still try to do. Protection-
ists are only protectionists in theory and in politics.
When it comes to buying what they want all protec-
tionists are free traders. I say this to point out not
the inconsistency of protectionists, but something more
significant.
“I write.” “I breathe.” Both propositions assert
action on the part of the same individual, but action
of different kinds. I write by conscious volition; I
breathe instinctively. I am conscious that I breathe
only when I think of it. Yet my breathing goes on
54 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
whether I think of it or not—when my consciousness
is absorbed in thought, or is dormant in sleep. Though
with all my will I try to stop breathing, I yet, in spite
of myself, try to breathe, and will continue that en-
deavor while life lasts. Other vital functions are
even further beyond consciousness and will. We live
by the continuous carrying on of multifarious and
delicate processes apparent only in their results and
utterly irresponsive to mental direction.
Between the man and the community there is in
these respects an analogy which becomes closer as
civilization progresses and social relations grow more
complex. That power of the whole which is lodged
in governments is limited in its field of consciousness
and action much as the conscious will of the indi-
vidual is limited, and even that consensus of personal
beliefs and wishes termed public opinion is but little
wider in its range. There is, beyond national direction
and below national consciousness, a life and relation of
parts and a performance of functions which are to the
social body what the vital processes are to the physical
body.
What would happen to the individual if all the
functions of the body were placed under the control
of the consciousness, and a man could forget to breathe,
or miscalculate the amount of gastric juice needed
by his stomach, or blunder as to what his kidneys
should take from the blood, is what would happen
to a nation in which all individual activities were
directed by government.
And though a people collectively may institute a
tariff to prevent trade, their individual wants and de-
sires will still force them to try to trade, just as
TRADE. 55
when a man ties a ligature round his arm, his blood
will still try to circulate. For the effort of each to sat.
1sfy his desires with the least exertion, which is the
motive of trade, is as instinctive and persistent as are
the instigations which the vital organs of the body
obey. It is not the importer and the exporter who
are the cause of trade, but the daily and hourly de-
mands of those who never think of importing or ex-
porting, and to whom trade carries that which they
demand, just as the blood carries to each fibre of the
body that for which it calls.
It is as natural for men to trade as it is for blood to
circulate. Man is by nature a trading animal, impelled
to trade by persistent desires, placed in a world where
everything shows that he was intended to trade, and
finding in trade the possibility of social advance.
Without trade man would be a savage.
Where each family raises its own food, builds its
own house, makes its own clothes and manufactures
its own tools, no one can have more than the barest
necessaries of life, and every local failure of crops must
bring famine. A people living in this way will be
independent, but their independence will resemble that
of the beasts. They will be poor, ignorant, and all but
powerless against the forces of nature and the vicissi-
tudes of the seasons.
This social condition, to which the protective theory
would logically lead, is the lowest in which man is
ever found—the condition from which he has toiled
upward. He has progressed only as he has learned to
satisfy his wants by exchanging with his fellows and
has freed and extended trade. The difference between
naked savages possessed only of the rudiments of the
56 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
arts, cowering in ignorance and weakness before the
forces of nature, and the wealth, the knowledge and
the power of our highest civilization, is due to the
exchange of the independence which is the aim of the
protective system, for that interdependence which comes
with trade. Men cannot apply themselves to the pro-
duction of but one of the many things human wants
demand unless they can exchange their products for
the products of others. And thus it is only as the
growth of trade permits the division of labor that,
beyond the merest rudiments, skill can be developed,
knowledge acquired and invention made; and that
productive power can so gain upon the requirements
for maintaining life that leisure becomes possible and
capital can be accumulated. -
If to prevent trade were to stimulate industry and
promote prosperity, then the localities where he was
most isolated would show the first advances of man.
The natural protection to home industry afforded by
rugged mountain chains, by burning deserts, or by
seas too wide and tempestuous for the frail bark
of the early mariner, would have given us the first
glimmerings of civilization and shown its most rapid
growth. But, in fact, it is where trade could best
be carried on that we find wealth first accumulating
and civilization beginning. It is on accessible har-
bors, by navigable rivers and much traveled high-
ways that we find cities arising and the arts and
sciences developing. And as trade becomes free
and extensive—as roads are made and navigation
improved; as pirates and robbers are extirpated and
treaties of peace put an end to chronic warfare—so
does wealth augment and civilization grow. All our
TRADE. 57
great labor saving inventions, from that of money to
that of the steam engine, spring from trade and pro-
mote its extension. Trade has ever been the extin-
guisher of war, the eradicator of prejudice, the diffuser
of knowledge. It is by trade that useful seeds and
animals, useful arts and inventions, have been carried
over the world, and that men in one place have been
enabled not only to obtain the products, but to profit
by the observations, discoveries and inventions of men
in other places.
In a world created on protective principles, all habit-
able parts would have the same soil and climate, and
be fitted for the same productions, so that the inhabit-
ants of each locality would be able to produce at home
all they required. Its seas and rivers would not lend
themselves to navigation, and every little section in-
tended for the habitation of a separate community
would be guarded by a protective mountain chain. If
we found ourselves in such a world, we might infer it
to be the intent of nature that each people should de-
velop its own industries independently of all others.
But the World in which we do find ourselves is not
merely adapted to intercommunication, but what it
yields to man is so distributed as to compel the people
of different localities to trade with each other to fully
satisfy their desires. The diversities of soil and climate,
the distribution of water, wood and mineral deposits,
the currents of sea and air, produce infinite differences
in the adaptation of different parts to different produc-
tions. It is not merely that one Zone yields sugar and
coffee, the banana and the pineapple, and another wheat .
and barley, the apple and the potato; that one supplies
furs and another cotton; that here are hillsides adapted
3r
58 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
to pasture and there valleys fitted for the plow; here
granite and there clay; in one place iron and coal and in
another copper and lead ; but that there are differences
so delicate that, though experience tells us they exist,
we cannot say to what they are due. Wine of a cer-
tain quality is produced in one place which cuttings
from the same vines will not yield in another place,
though soil and climate seem alike. Some localities,
without assignable reason, become renowned for pro-
ductions of one kind and some for productions of an-
other kind; and experience often shows that plants
thrive differently in different parts of the same field.
These endless diversities, in the adaptation of different
parts of the earth's surface to the production of the
different things required by man, show that nature has
not intended man to depend for the supply of his wants
upon his own production, but to exchange with his
fellows, just as the placing of the meat before one guest
at table, the vegetables before another, and the bread
before another, shows the intent of the host that they
should help one another.
Other natural facts have similar bearing. It has long
been known that to obtain the best crops the farmer
should not sow with seed grown in his own fields, but
with seed brought from afar. The strain of domestic
animals seems always improved by imported stock,
even poultry-breeders finding it best to sell the male
birds they raise and supply their places with cocks
brought from a distance. Whether or not the same
law holds true with regard to the physical part of man,
it is certain that the admixture of peoples produces
stimulating mental effects. Prejudices are worn down,
wits are sharpened, language enriched, habits and cus.
TRADE. 59
toms brought to the test of comparison and new ideas
enkindled. The most progressive peoples, if not always
of mixed blood, have always been the peoples who came
most in contact with and learned most from others.
“Home keeping youths have ever homely wits” is true
of nations.
And, further than this, it is characteristic of all the
inventions and discoveries that are so rapidly increas-
ing our power over nature that they require the greater
division of labor, and extend trade. Thus every step
in advance destroys the independence and increases the
interdependence of men. The appointed condition of
human progress is evidently that men shall come into
closer relations and become more and more dependent
upon each other.
Thus the restrictions which protectionism urges us to
impose upon ourselves are about as well calculated to
promote national prosperity as ligatures, that would
impede the circulation of the blood, would be to pro.
mote bodily health and comfort 7 Protection calls
upon us to pay officials, to encourage spies and in-
formers, and to provoke fraud and perjury, for what?
Why, to preserve ourselves from and protect ourselves
against something which offends no moral law ; some-
thing to which we are instinctively impelled; some-
thing without which we could never have emerged from
barbarism, and something which physical nature and
social laws alike prove to be in conformity with the
creative intent.
It is true that protectionists do not condemn all trade,
and though some of them have wished for an ocean of
fire to bar out foreign products, others, more reasonable
if less logical, would permit a country to import things
60 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
it cannot produce. The international trade which they
concede to be harmless amounts not to a tenth and per-
haps not to a twentieth of the international trade of the
world, and, so far as our own country is concerned, the
things we could not obtain at home amount to little
more than a few productions of the torrid zone, and
even these, if properly protected, might be grown at
home by artificial heat, to the incidental encouragement
of the glass and coal industries. But, so far as the cor-
rectness of the theory goes, it does not matter whether
the trade which “protection ” would permit, as com-
pared with that it would prevent, be more or less.
What “protection” calls on us to preserve ourselves from,
and guardourselves against, is trade. And whether trade
be between citizens of the same nation or citizens of dif-
ferent nations, and whether we get by it things that we
could produce for ourselves or things that we could not
produce for ourselves, the object of trade is always the
same. If I trade with a Canadian, a Mexican, or an Eng-
lishman it is for the same reason that I trade with an
American—that I would rather have the thing he gives
me than the thing I give him. Why should I refuse to
trade with a foreigner any more than with a fellow-citizen
when my object in trading is my advantage, not his?
And is it not in the one case, quite as much as in the
other, an injury to me that my trade should be prevented?
What difference does it make whether it would be pos-
sible or impossible for me to make for myself the thing
for which I trade. If I did not want the thing. I am to get
more than the thing I am to give, I would not wish to
make the trade. Here is a farmer who proposes to ex-
change with his neighbor a horse he does not want for
a couple of cows he does want. Would it benefit these
TRADE. 61
farmers to prevent this trade on the ground that one
might breed his own horses and the other raise his own
cows? Yet if one farmer lived on the American and
the other lived on the Canadian side of the line this is
just what both the American and Canadian governments
would do. And this is called “protection.”
It is only one of the many benefits of trade that it
enables people to obtain what the natural conditions of
their own localities would not enable them to produce.
This is, however, so obvious a benefit that protectionists
cannot altogether ignore it, and a favorite doctrine with
American protectionists is that trade ought to follow
meridians of longitude instead of parallels of latitude,
because the great differences of climate and conse-
quently of natural productions are between north and
south.* The most desirable reconstruction of the world
on this theory would be its division into “countries”
consisting of narrow strips running from the equator to:
the poles, with high tariffs on either side and at the
equatorial end, for the polar ice would serve the pur-
pose at the other. But in the meantime, despite this
notion that trade ought to be between north and south
rather than between east and west, the fact is that the
great commerce of the world is and always has been
between east and west. And the reason is clear. It is
that peoples most alike in habits and needs will call
most largely for each other's productions, and that the
* “This, then, is our position respecting commerce # * * that it
should interchange the productions of diverse zones and climates,
following in its trans-oceanic voyages lines of longitude oftener than
lines of latitude.”—HoRACE GREELEY, Political Economy, p. 39.
“Legitimate and natural commerce moves rather along the
meridians than along the parallels of latitude.”—PROF. ROBERT
ELLIS THOMPSON, Political Economy, p. 217. ty
62 FROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
course of migration and of assimilating influences has
been rather between east and west than between north
and South.
Difference in latitude is but one element of difference
in climate, and difference in climate is but one element
of the endless diversity in natural productions and ca-
pacities. In no one place will nature yield to labor all
that man finds useful. Adaptation to one class of pro-
ducts involves non-adaptation to others. Trade, by
permitting us to obtain each of the things we need
from the locality best fitted for its production, enables
us to utilize the highest powers of nature in the produc-
tion of them all, and thus to increase enormously the
sum of various things which a given quantity of labor
- expended in any locality can secure.
But, what is even more important, trade also enables
us to utilize the highest powers of the human factor
in production. All men cannot do all things equally
well. There are differences in physical and mental
powers which give different degrees of aptitude for dif-
ferent parts of the work of supplying human needs.
And far more important still are the differences that
arise from the development of special skill. By de-
voting himself to one branch of production a man can
acquire skill which enables him, with the same labor,
to produce enormously more than one who has not
made that branch his specialty. Twenty boys may
have equal aptitude for any one of twenty trades, but if
every boy tries to learn the twenty trades, none of them
can become good workmen in any; whereas, if each
devotes himself to one trade, all may become good
workmen. There will not only be a saving of the
time and effort required for learning, but each, more.
TRADE. 63
over, can in a single vocation work to much better ad-.
vantage, and may acquire and use tools which it would
be impossible to obtain and employ did each attempt
the whole twenty.
And as there are differences between individuals
which fit them for different branches of production, so,
but to a much greater degree, are there such differences
between communities. Not to speak again of the dif-
ferences due to situation and natural facilities, some
things can be produced with greater relative advantage
where population is sparse, others where it is dense,
and differences in industrial development, in habits,
customs and related occupations, produce differences in
relative adaptation. Such gains, moreover, as attend
the division of labor between individuals, attend also
the division of labor between communities, and lead
to that localization of industry which causes different
places to become noted for different industries. Wher-
ever the production of some special thing becomes the
leading industry, skill is more easily acquired, and is
carried to a higher pitch, supplies are most readily.
procured, auxiliary and correlative occupations grow up,
and a larger scale of production leads to the employment
of more efficient methods. Thus in the natural devel-
opment of society trade brings about differentiations of
industry between communities as between individuals,
and with similar benefits.
Men of different nations trade with each other for the
same reason that men of the same nation do—because
they find it profitable; because they thus obtain what
they want with less labor than they otherwise could.
Goods will not be imported into any country unless
they can be obtained more easily by producing some-
*
64 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
thing else and exchanging it for them, than by produc.
ing them directly. And hence, to restrict importations
must be to lessen productive power and reduce the
fund from which all revenues are drawn.
Any one can see what would be the result of for-
bidding each individual to obtain from another any
commodity or service which he himself was naturally
fitted to produce or perform. Such a regulation, were
any government mad enough to adopt it and powerful
enough to maintain it, would paralyze the forces that
make civilization possible and soon convert the most
populous and wealthy country into a howling wilder-
ness. The restrictions which protection would impose
upon foreign trade differ only in degree, not in kind,
from such restrictions as these. They would not re-
duce a nation to barbarism, because they do not affect
all trade, and rather hamper than prohibit the trade
they do affect; but they must prevent the people that
adopt them from obtaining the abundance they might
otherwise enjoy. If the end of labor be, not the ex-
penditure of effort, but the securing of results, then
whether any particular thing ought to be obtained in a
country by home production, or by importation, de-
pends solely upon which mode of obtaining it will give
the largest result to the least labor. This is a question
involving such complex considerations that what any
country ought to obtain in this way or in that cannot
be settled by any Congress or Parliament. It can
safely be left only to those sure instincts which are to
society what the vital instincts are to the body, and
which always impel men to take the easiest way open
to them to reach their ends.
When not caused by artificial obstacles, any tendency
TRADE. 65
in trade to take a certain course is proof that it ought
to take that course, and restrictions are harmful because
they restrict, and in proportion as they restrict. To
assert that the way for men to become healthy and
strong is for them to force into their stomachs what
nature tries to reject, to regulate the play of their lungs
by bandages, or to control the circulation of their
blood by ligatures, would be not a whit more absurd
than to assert that the way for nations to become rich
is for them to restrict the natural tendency to trade.
CHAPTER VII.
PRODUCTION AND PRODUCERS.
REMOTE from neighbors, in a part of the country
where population is only beginning to come, stands the
rude house of a new settler. As the stars come out, a
ruddy light glearns from the little window. The house-
wife is preparing a meal. The wood that burns so
cheerily was cut by the settler, the flour now turning
into bread is from wheat of his raising; the fish hiss-
ing in the pan were caught by one of the boys, and the
water bubbling in the kettle, in readiness to be poured
on the tea, was brought from the spring by the eldest
girl before the sun had set.
The settler cut the wood. But it took more than
that to produce the wood. Had it been merely cut,
it would still be lying where it fell. The labor of haul-
ing it was as much a part of its production as the labor
of cutting it. So the journey to and from the mill was
as necessary to the production of the flour as the
planting and reaping of the wheat. To produce the fish
the boy had to walk to the lake and trudge back again.
And the production of the water in the kettle required
not merely the exertion of the girl who brought it from
the spring, but also the sinking of the barrel in which
it collected, and the making of the bucket in which it
was carried. e
As for the tea, it was grown in China, was carried on
PRODUCTION AND PRODUCERS. 67
a bamboo pole upon the shoulders of a man to some
river village, and sold to a Chinese merchant, who
shipped it by boat to a treaty port. There, having
been packed for ocean transportation, it was sold to the
agency of Some American house, and sent by steamer
to San Francisco. Thence it passed by railroad, with
another transfer of ownership, into the hands of a Chi-
cago jobber. The jobber, in turn, in pursuance of
another sale, shipped it to the village store-keeper, who
held it so that the settler might get it when and in such
quantities as he pleased, just as the water from the
spring is held in the sunken barrel so that it may be
had when needed.
The native dealer who first purchased this tea of the
grower, the merchant who shipped it across the Pacific,
the Chicago jobber who held it as in a reservoir until
the store-keeper ordered it, the store-keeper who, bring-
ing it from Chicago to the village, held it as in a smaller
reservoir until the settler came for it, as well as those
concerned in its transportation, from the coolie who
carried it to the bank of the Chinese river to the brake-
men of the train that brought it from Chicago—were
they not all parties to the production of that tea to this
family as truly as were the peasants who cultivated the
plant and gathered its leaves 7
The settler got the tea by exchanging for it money
obtained in exchange for things produced from nature
by the labor of himself and his boys. Has not this tea,
then, been produced to this family by their labor as
truly as the wood, the flour or the water? Is it not
true that the labor of this family devoted to producing
things which were exchanged for tea has really pro-
duced tea, even in the sense of causing it to be grown,
68 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
cured and transported Ž It is not the growing of the
tea in China that causes it to be brought to the United
States. It is the demand for tea in the United States
—that is to say, the readiness to give other products of
labor for it—that causes tea to be grown in China for
shipment to the United States.
To produce is to bring forth, or to bring to. There
is no other word in our language which includes at
Once all the operations, such as catching, gathering,
extracting, growing, breeding or making, by which
human labor brings forth from nature, or brings to
conditions adapted to human uses, the material things
desired by men and which constitute wealth. When,
therefore, we wish to speak collectively of the oper-
ations by which things are secured, or fitted for human
use, as distinguished from operations which consist in
moving them from place to place or passing them from
hand to hand after they have been so secured or fitted,
we are obliged to use the word production in distinc-
tion to transportation or exchange. But we should
always remember that this is but a narrow and special
use of the word.
While in conformity with the usages of our language
we may properly speak of production as distinguished
from transportation and exchange, just as we may prop-
erly speak of men as distinguished from women and
children, yet in its full meaning, production includes
transportation and exchange, just as men includes
women and children. In the narrow meaning of the
word we speak of coal as having been produced when
it has been moved from its place in the vein to the sur-
face of the ground; but evidently the moving of the
coal from the mouth of the mine to those who are to
PRODUCTION AND PRODUCERS. 69
use it is as necessary a part of coal production, in the
full sense, as is the bringing of it to the surface. . And
while we may produce coal in the United States by
digging it out of the ground, we may also just as truly
produce it by exchanging other products of labor for it.
Whether we get coal by digging it or by bringing it
from Nova Scotia or Australia or England in exchange
for other products of our labor, it is, in the one case
as truly as in the other, produced here by our labor.
Through all protectionist arguments runs the notion
that transporters and traders are non-producers, whose
support lessens the amount of wealth which other
classes can enjoy.” This is a short-sighted view. In
the full sense of the term transporters and traders are
as truly producers as are miners, farmers or manufact-
urers, since the transporting of things and the exchang-
ing of things are as necessary to the enjoyment of things
as is extracting, growing or making. There are some
operations conducted under the forms of trade that are
in reality gambling or blackmailing, but this does not
alter the fact that real trade, which consists in exchang-
ing and transporting commodities, is a part of produc-
tion—a part so necessary and so important that without
it the other operations of production could only be car.
* “In my conception, the chief end of a true political economy is
the conversion of idlers and useless exchangers and traſſickers into
habitual, effective producers of wealth.”—HoRACE GREELEY, Politi-
cal Economy, p. 29.
The trader “adds nothing to the real wealth of society. He
neither directs and manages a vital change in the form of matter as
does the farmer, nor a chemical and mechanical change in form as
does the manufacturer. He merely transfers things from the place
of their production to the place of demand.”—PROF. R. E. THOMP-
son, Political Economy, p. 198.
70 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
ried on in the most primitive manner and with the most
niggard results.
And not least important of the functions of the trader
is that of holding things in stock, so that those who
wish to use them may be able to get them at such
times and places, and in such quantities, as are most
convenient. This is a service analogous to that per-
formed by the sunken barrel which holds the water
of a spring so that it can be had by the bucketful when
needed, or by the reservoirs and pipes which enable the
inhabitant of a city to obtain water by the turning of a
faucet. The profits of traders and “middlemen” may
sometimes be excessive (and anything which hampers
trade and increases the capital necessary to carry it on
tends to make them excessive) but they are in reality
based upon the performance of services in holding and
distributing things as well as in transporting things.
“When Charles Fourier was young,” says Professor Thompson
(Political Economy, p. 199), “he was on a visit to Paris, and priced
at a street stall some apples of a sort that grew abundantly in his
native province. He was amazed to find that they sold for many
times the sum they would bring at home, having passed through
the hands of a host of middlemen on their way from the owner of
the orchard to the eater of the fruit. The impression received at
that instant never left him ; it gave the first impulse to his thinking
out his socialistic scheme for the reconstruction of Society, in which
among other sweeping changes the whole class of traders and their
profits are to be abolished.”
This story, quoted approvingly to convey an idea that
the trader is a mere toll gatherer, simply shows what a
superficial thinker Fourier was. If he had undertaken
to bring with him to Paris a supply of apples and to
carry them around with him so that he could have one
when he felt like if he would have formed a much
PRODUCTION AND PRODUCERS. 71
truer idea of what he was really paying for in the in.
creased price. That price included not merely the
cost of the apple at its place of growth, plus the cost of
transporting it to Paris, the octrol at the Paris gates,”
the loss of damaged apples, and remuneration for the
service and capital of the wholesaler, who held the
apples in stock until the vender chose to take them, but
also payment to the vender, for standing all day in the
streets of Paris, in order to supply a few apples to those
who wanted an apple then and there. *
So when I go to a druggist's and buy a small quan-
tity of medicine or chemicals I pay many times the
original cost of those articles, but what I thus pay is in
much larger degree wages than profit. Out of such
small sales the druggist must get not only the cost of
what he sells me, with other costs incidental to the busi-
ness, but also payment for his services. These services
consist not only in the actual exertion of giving me
what I want, but in waiting there in readiness to serve
me when I choose to come. In the price of what he
sells me he makes a charge for what printers call
“waiting time.” And he must manifestly not merely
charge “waiting time" for himself, but also for the
stock of many different things only occasionally called
for, which he must keep on hand. He has been wait-
ing there, with his stock, in anticipation of the fact that
* The octrol, or municipal tariff on produce brought into a town,
is still levied in France, though abolished for a time by the Revo-
lution. It is a survival of the local tariffs once common in Europe,
which separated province from province and town from country.
Colbert, the first Napoleon, and the German Zollverein did much
in reducing and abolishing these restrictions to trade, producing in
this way good results which are sometimes attributed by protections
ists to external tariffs.
tº
72 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
such persons as myself, in sudden need of some small
quantities of drugs or chemicals, would find it cheaper
to pay him many times their wholesale cost than to go
further and buy larger quantities. What I pay him,
even when it is not payment for the skilled labor of
compounding, is largely a payment of the same nature
as, were he not there, I might have had to make to a
messenger.
If each consumer had to go to the producer for the
small quantities individually demanded, the producer
would have to charge a higher price on account of the
greater labor and expense of attending to such small
transactions. A hundred cases of shoes may be sold at
wholesale in less time than would be consumed in
suiting a customer with a single pair. On the other
hand, the going to the producer direct would involve
an enormous increase of cost and trouble to the con-
sumer, even when such a method of obtaining things
would not be utterly impossible.
What “middlemen" do is to save to both parties
this trouble and expense, and the profits which compe-
tition permits them to charge in return are infinitesimal
as compared with the enormous savings effected—are
like the charge made to each consumer for the cost of
the aqueducts, mains and pumping engines of a great
system of water supply as compared with the cost of
providing a separate system for each house.
And further than this, these middlemen between
producer and consumer effect an enormous economy in
the amount of commodities that it is necessary to keep
in stock to provide for a given consumption, and con-
sequently vastly lessen the loss from deterioration and
decay. Let any one consider what amount of stores
º
PRODUCTION AND PRODUCERS. 73
would be needed to keep in their accustomed supply
even for a month a family used to easy access to those
handy magazines of commodities which retail dealers
maintain. He will see at once that there are a number
of things such as fresh meat, fish, fruits, etc., which it is
impossible to keep on hand, so as to be sure of having
them when needed. And of the things that would keep
longer, such as flour, sugar, oil, etc., he will see that but
for the retail dealer it would be necessary that much
greater quantities should be kept in each house, with a
much greater liability to loss from decay or accident.
But it is when he comes to things not constantly
needed, but which, when needed, though it may not be
once a year or once a lifetime, may be needed very
badly—that he will realize fully how the much-abused
“middleman "economizes the capital of society and in-
creases the opportunities of its members.
A retail dealer is called by the English a “shop-
keeper” and by the Americans a “store-keeper.” The
American usage best expresses his real function. He
is in reality a keeper of stores which otherwise his cus-
tomers would have to keep on hand for themselves, or
go without. The English speak of the shops of co-
operative supply associations as “stores,” since it is in
them that the various things required from time to time
by the members of those associations are stored until
called for. But this is precisely what, without any formal
association, the retail dealer does for those who buy of
him. And though co-operative purchasing associations
have to a certain extent succeeded in Fngland (they
have generally failed in the United States) there can
be no question that the functions of keeping things in
store and distributing them to consumers as needed are
7
74 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
on the whole performed more satisfactorily and
more economically by self-appointed store or stock-
keepers than they could be as yet by formal asso-
ciations of consumers. And the tendencies of the
time to economies in the distribution as well as in
the production of commodities, are bringing about
through the play of competition just such a saving
of expense to the consumer as is aimed at by co-op-
erative supply associations.
That in civilized society to-day there seem to be
too many store-keepers and other distributors is
quite true. But so there seem to be too many pro-
fessional men, too many mechanics, too many farm-
ers, and too many laborers. What may be the cause
of this most curious state of things it may hereafter
lie in our way to inquire, but at present I am only
concerned in pointing out that the trader is not a
mere “useless exchanger,” who “adds nothing to
the real wealth of society,” but that the transport-
ing, storing, and exchanging of things are as neces-
sary a part of the work of supplying human needs
as is growing, extracting, or making,
Nor should it be forgotten that the investigator,
the philosopher, the teacher, the artist, the poet, the
priest, though not engaged in the production of
wealth, are not only engaged in the production of
utilities and satisfactions to which the production of
wealth is only a means, but by acquiring and diffus-
ing knowledge, stimulating mental powers and ele-
vating the moral sense, may greatly increase the
ability to produce wealth. For man does not live
by bread alone. He is not an engine, in which so
much fuel gives so much power. On a capstan bar
PRODUCTION AND PRODUCERS. 75
or a topsail halyard a good song tells like muscle,
and a “Marseillaise ’’ or a “Battle Hymn of the
Republic ’’ counts for bayonets. A hearty laugh, a
noble thought, a perception of harmony, may add
to the power of dealing even with material things.
He who by any exertion of mind or body adds to
the aggregate of enjoyable wealth, increases the sum
of human knowledge or gives to human life higher
elevation or greater fullness—he is in the large
meaning of the words, a “producer,” a “working
man,” a “laborer,” and is honestly earning honest
wages. But he who without doing aught to make man-
kind richer, wiser, better, happier, lives on the toil
of others—he, no matter by what name of honor he
may be called, or how lustily the priests of Mammon
may swing their censers before him, is in the last
analysis but a beggarman or a thief,
CEIAPTER VIII.
TARIFFS FOR REVENUE.
TARIFFS may embrace duties on exports as well as
on imports; but duties on exports are prohibited by
the Constitution of the United States and are now
levied only by a few countries, such as Brazil, and by
them only on a few articles. The tariff, as we have to
consider it, is a schedule of taxes upon imports.
The word “tariff’ is said to be derived from the
Spanish town of Tarifa, near Gibraltar, where the
Moors in the days of their power collected duties, prob-
ably much after the manner of those Chinese local cus-
tom houses called “squeeze stations.” But the thing
is older than the name. Augustus Caesar levied duties
on imports into Italy, and there were tariffs long before
the Caesars. -
The purpose in which tariffs originate is that of rais-
ing revenue. The idea of using them for protection is
an afterthought. And before considering the protect-
ive function of tariffs it will be well to consider them
as a means for collecting revenue.
It is usually assumed, even by the opponents of pro-
tection, that tariffs should be maintained for revenue.
Most of those who are commonly called free traders
might more properly be called revenue tariff men.
They object, not to the tariff, but only to its protective
features, and propose, not to abolish it, but only to re-
TARIFFS FOR REVENUE. 77
strict it to revenue purposes. Nearly all the opposi-
tion to the protective system in the United States is of
this kind, and in current discussion a tariff for revenue
Only is usually assumed to be the sole alternative to a
tariff for protection. But since there are other ways of
raising revenue than by tariffs this manifestly is not so.
And if not useful for protection, the only justification
for any tariff is that it is a good means of raising rev-
enue. Let us inquire as to this. -
Duties on imports are indirect taxes. Therefore the
question whether a tariff is a good means of raising
revenue involves the question whether indirect taxa-
tion is a good means of raising revenue.
As to ease and cheapness of collection indirect taxa-
tion is certainly not a good means of raising revenue.
While there are direct taxes, such as taxes on real
estate and taxes on legacies and successions, from
which great revenues can easily and cheaply be col-
lected, the only indirect taxes from which any consid-
erable revenue can be obtained require large and
expensive staffs of officials and the enforcement of
vexatious and injurious regulations. To collect the in-
direct tax on tobacco and cigars, France and some
other countries make the trade and manufacture a strict
government monopoly, while Great Britain prohibits
the culture of tobacco under penalty of fine and im-
prisonment—a prohibition particularly injurious to
Ireland, where the soil and climate are in some parts
admirably adapted to the growth of certain kinds of to-
bacco. In the United States we maintain a costly in-
quisitorial system which assumes to trace every pound
of tobacco raised or imported, through all its stages of
manufacture, and requires the most elaborate returns of
78 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
private business to be made to government officials.
To more easily collect an indirect tax upon salt the
government of British India cruelly prevents the mak-
ing of Salt in many places where the natives suffer
from the want of it. While indirect taxes upon spir-
ituous liquors, wherever resorted to, require the most
elaborate system of prohibition, inspection and espion-
age.
So with the collection of indirect taxes upon imports.
Land frontiers must be guarded and sea-coasts watched;
imports must be forbidden except at certain places and
under regulations which are always vexatious and fre-
quently entail wasteful delays and expenses; consuls
must be maintained all over the world, and no end of
oaths required; vessels must be watched from the time
they enter harbor until the time they leave, and every-
thing landed from them examined, down to the trunks
and Satchels and sometimes the persons of passengers,
while spies, informers and “bloodhounds” must be en-
couraged.
But in spite of prohibitions, restrictions, searchings,
watchings, and swearings, indirect taxes on commodi-
ties are largely evaded, sometimes by the bribery of
officials and sometimes by the adoption of methods for
eluding their vigilance, which though costly in them-
selves, cost less than the taxes. All these costs, how-
ever, whether borne by the government or by the first
payers (or evaders) of the taxes, together with the
increased charges due to increased prices, finally fall
on consumers, and thus this method of taxation is
extremely wasteful, taking from the people much more
than the government obtains.
A still more important objection to indirect taxation
TARIFFS FOR REVENUE. 79
is that when imposed on articles of general use (and it
is only from such articles that large revenues can be
had) it bears with far greater weight on the poor than
on the rich. Since such taxation falls on people not
according to what they have, but according to what
they consume, it is heaviest on those whose consump-
tion is largest in proportion to their means. As much
sugar is needed to sweeten a cup of tea for a working-
girl as for the richest lady in the land, but the propor-
tion of their means which a tax on sugar compels each
to contribute to the government is in the case of
the one much greater than in the case of the other.
So it is with all taxes that increase the cost of articles
of general consumption. They bear far more heavily
on married men than on bachelors; on those who have
children than on those who have none; on those barely
able to support their families than on those whose
incomes leave them a large surplus. If the million-
aire chooses to live closely he need pay no more of
these indirect taxes than the mechanic. I have known
at least two millionaires—possessed not of one, but of
from six to ten millions each—who paid little more of
such taxes than ordinary day laborers.
Even if cheaper articles were taxed at no higher
rates than the more costly, such taxation would be
grossly unjust; but in indirect taxation there is always
a tendency to impose heavier taxes on the cheaper
articles used by all than on the more costly articles
used only by the rich. This arises from the necessities
of the case. Not only do the larger amounts of articles
of common consumption afford a wider basis for large
revenues than the smaller amounts of more costly
articles, but taxes imposed on them cannot be so easily
80. PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
evaded. For instance, while articles in use by the
poor as well as the rich are under our tariff taxed fifty
and a hundred, and even a hundred and fifty per cent.,
the tax on diamonds is only ten per cent., and this
comparative light tax is most difficult to enforce, owing
to the high value of diamonds as compared with their
bulk. Even where discrimination of this kind is not
made in the imposition of indirect taxation, it arises in
its collection. Specific taxes fall more heavily upon
the cheaper than the costlier grades of goods, while
even, in the case of ad valorem taxes, under-valuation
and evasion are easier in regard to the more valuable
grades.
That indirect taxes thus bear far more heavily on
the poor than on the rich is undoubtedly one of
the reasons why they have so readily been adopted.
The rich are ever the powerful, and under all forms
of government have most influence in forming public
opinion and framing laws, while the poor are ever the
voiceless. And while indirect taxation causes no loss
to those who first pay it, it is collected in such insidious
ways from those who finally pay it that they do not
realize it. It thus affords the best means of getting the
largest revenues from the body of the people with the
least remonstrance against the amount collected or
the uses to which it is put. This is the main reason
that has induced governments to resort so largely
to indirect taxation. A direct tax, where its justice
and necessity are not clear, provokes outcry and oppo-
sition which may at times rise to successful resistance;
but not only do those indirectly taxed seldom realize it,
but it is extremely difficult for them to refuse pay-
ment. They are not called on at set times to pay
TARIFFS FOR REVENUE. 81
definite sums to government agents, but the tax
becomes indistinguishably blended with the cost of
the goods they buy. When it reaches those who must
finally pay it, together with all costs and profits of
collection, it is not a tax yet to be paid, but a tax
which has already been paid, some time ago, and many
removes back, and which cannot be separated from
other elements which go to make up the cost of goods.
There is no choice save to pay the tax or go without
the goods.
If a tax-gatherer stood at the door of every store,
and levied a tax of twenty-five per cent. On every
article bought, there would quickly be outcry; but
the very people who would fight rather than pay a tax
like this, will uncomplainingly pay higher taxes when
they are collected by store-keepers in increased prices.
And even if an indirect tax is consciously realized, it
cannot easily be opposed. At the beginning of our
Revolution the indirect tax on tea levied by the British
government, without the consent of the American colo-
nies, was successfully resisted by preventing the land-
ing of the tea; but if the tea had once got into the
hands of the dealers, with the taxes on it paid, the
English government could have laughed at the oppo-
sition of the patriots. When in Ireland, during the
height of the Land League agitation, I was much struck
with the ease and certainty with which an unpopular
government can collect indirect taxes. At the begin-
ning of the century the Irish people, without any
assistance from America, proved in the famous Tithe
war that the whole power of the English government
could not collect direct taxes they had resolved not to
pay; and the strike against rent, which so long as per
82 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
sisted in proved so effective, could readily have been
made a strike against direct taxation. Had the gov-
ernment which was enforcing the claim of the landlords
depended on direct taxation, its resources could thus
have been seriously diminished by the same blow
which crippled the landlords; but during all the time
of this strike the force used to put down the popular
movement was being supported by indirect taxation on
the people who were in passive rebellion. The people
who struck against rent could not strike against taxes
paid in buying the commodities they used. Even had
rebellion been active and general, the British govern-
ment could have collected the bulk of its revenues
from indirect taxation, so long as it retained command
of the principal towns.
It is no wonder that princes and ministers anxious to
make their revenues as large as possible should prefer
a method that enables them to “pluck the goose with-
out making it cry,” nor is it wonderful that this prefer.
ence should be shared by those who get control of
popular governments; but the reason which renders
indirect taxes so agreeable to those who levy taxes is a
sufficient reason why a people jealous of their liberties
should insist that taxes levied for revenue only should
be direct, not indirect.
It is not merely the ease with which indirect taxes
can be collected that urges to their adoption. Indirect
taxes always enlist active private interests in their
favor. The first rude device for making the collection
of taxes easier to the governing power is to let them
out to farm. Under this system, which existed in
France up to the Revolution, and still exists in such
countries as Turkey, persons called farmers of the
TARIFES FOR REVENUE. 83
revenue buy the privilege of collecting certain taxes
and make their profits, frequently very large, out of the
greater amount which their vigilance and extortion
enable them to collect. The system of indirect tax-
ation is essentially of the same nature.
The tendency of the restrictions and regulations
necessary for the collection of indirect taxes is to con-
centrate business and give large capital an advantage.
For instance, with a board, a knife, a kettle of paste
and a few dollars' worth of tobacco, a competent cigar
maker could set up in business for himself, were it not
for the revenue regulations. As it is, in the United
States, the stock of tobacco which he must procure is
not only increased in value some two or three times by
a tax upon it; but before the cigar maker can go to
work he must buy a manufacturer's license and find
bonds in the sum of five hundred dollars. Before he can
sell the cigars he has made, he must furthermore pay a
tax on them, and even then if he would sell cigars in less
quantities than by the box he must buy a second license.
The effect of all this is to give capital a great advantage,
and to concentrate in the hands of large manufacturers
a business in which, if free, workmen could easily set
up for themselves. ,
But even in the absence of such regulations indirect
taxation tends to concentration. Indirect taxes add to
the price of goods not only the tax itself but also the
profit upon the tax. If on goods costing a dollar a
manufacturer or merchant has paid fifty cents in tax-
ation, he will now expect profit on a dollar and fifty
cents instead of upon a dollar. As, in the course of
trade, these taxed goods pass from hand to hand, the
amount which each successive purchaser pays on account
*
84 - PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE. : :
—of the tax is constantly augmenting. It is not merely
inevitable that consumers have to pay considerably
more than a dollar for every dollar the government
receives, but larger capital is required by dealers. The
need of larger capital for dealing in goods that have
been enhanced in cost by taxation, the restrictions
imposed on trade to secure the collection of the tax,
and the better opportunities which those who do busi-
ness on a large scale have of managing the payment or
evading the tax, tend to concentrate business, and, by
checking competition, to permit large profits, which must
ultimately be paid by consumers. Thus the first pay-
ers of indirect taxes are generally not merely indifferent
to the tax, but regard it with favor. t
That indirect taxation is of the nature of farming the
revenue to private parties is shown by the fact that
those who pay such taxes to the government seldom or
never ask for their reduction or repeal, but on the con-
trary generally oppose such propositions. The manu-
facturers and dealers in tobacco and cigars have never
striven to secure any reduction in the heavy taxes on
those articles, and the importers who pay directly the
immense sums collected by our custom houses have
never grumbled at the duties, however they may grumble
at the manner of their collection. When, at the time
of the war, the national taxation was enormously in-
creased there was no opposition to the imposition of
indirect taxation from those who would thus be called
upon to pay large sums to the government. On the
contrary, the imposition of these taxes, by enhancing
the value of stock in hand, made many fortunes. And
since the war the main difficulty in reducing taxation
has been the opposition of the very men who pay these
TARIFFS FOR REVENUE, 85
taxes to the government. The reduction of the war tax
on whisky was strongly opposed by the whisky ring,
composed of great distillers. The match manufacturers
fought bitterly the abolition of the tax on matches.
Whenever it has been proposed to reduce or repeal any
indirect tax Congress has been beset by a persistent
lobby urging that, whatever other taxes might be dis-
pensed with, that particular tax might be left in full
force. In order to provide an excuse for keeping up
indirect taxes all sorts of extravagant expenditures of
the national money have been made, and hundreds of
millions have been voted away to get them out of the
Treasury.” Despite all this extravagance, we have a
surplus; yet we go on collecting taxes we do not need
because of the opposition of interested parties to their
reduction. This opposition is of the same kind and
springs from the same motives as that which the farmers
of the revenue under the old French system would
have made to the abolition of a tax which enabled
them to extort two millions of francs from the French
people for one million which they paid to the govern-
Iment.
Now, over and above the great loss to the people
which indirect taxation thus imposes, the manner in
which it gives individuals and corporations a direct
and selfish interest in public affairs tends powerfully to
the corruption of government. These moneyed inter-
ests enter into our politics as a potent demoralizing
force. What to the ordinary citizen is a question of
public policy, affecting him only as one of some sixty
* Just now (1886) the interests concerned in keeping up indirect
taxation are urging a worse than useless Scheme for spending enor-
mous sums on iron-clad coast defences.
8
86 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
millions of people, is to them a question of special
pecuniary interest. To this is largely due the state of
things in which politics has become the trade of pro-
fessional politicians; in which it is seldom that one who
has not money to spend can, with any prospect of suc-
cess, present himself for the suffrages of his fellow-citi-
zens; in which Congress is surrounded by lobbyists,
clamorous for special interests, and questions of the
utmost general importance are lost sight of in the
struggle which goes on for the spoils of taxation. That
under such a system of taxation our government is not
far more corrupt than it is, is the strongest proof of the
essential goodness of republican institutions.
That indirect taxes may sometimes serve purposes
other than the raising of revenue I do not deny. The
license taxes exacted from the sellers of liquor may be
defended on the ground that they diminish the number
of saloons and lessen a traffic injurious to public morals.
And so taxes on tobacco and spirits may be defended
on the ground that the smoking of tobacco and the
drinking of spirits are injurious vices, which may be
lessened by making tobacco and spirits more expensive,
so that (except the rich) those who smoke may be com-
pelled to smoke poorer tobacco, and those who drink to
drink viler liquor. But merely as a means of raising
revenue, it is clear that indirect taxes are to be con-
demned, since they cost far more than they yield, bear
with the greatest weight upon those least able to pay,
add to corruptive influences, and lessen the control of .
the people over their government. tº -
All the objections which apply to indirect taxes in
general apply to import duties. Those protectionists
are right who declare that protection is the only justi-
TARIFF'S FOR REVENUE. 87.
fication for a tariff,” and the advocates of “a tariff
for revenue only ” have no case. If we do not need
a tariff for protection we need no tariff at all, and for
the purpose of raising revenue should resort to some
system which will not tax the mechanic as heavily as
the millionaire, and will not call on the man who rears
a family to pay on that account more than the man
who shirks his natural obligation, and leaves some
woman whom in the scheme of nature it was intended
that he should support, to take care of herself as best
she cán.
* “Tariffs for revenue should have no existence. Interferences
with trade are to be tolerated only as measures of self-protection.”—
H. C. CAREY, Past, Present and Future, p. 472.
“Taxes for the sake of revenue should be imposed directly, be-
cause such is the only mode in which the contribution of each in-
dividual can be adjusted in proportion to his means.”—PROF. E. P.
SMITH, Political Economy, pp. 265–8.
“Duties for revenue * * * are highly unjust. They inflict
all the hardship of indirect and unequal taxation without even
the purpose of benefiting the consumer.”—PROF. R. E. THOMPSON,
Political Economy, p. 232.
CHAPTER IX.
TARIFFS FOR PROTECTION.
PROTECTIVE tariffs differ from revenue tariffs in their
object, which is not so much that of obtaining revenue
as that of protecting home producers from the compe-
tition of imported commodities.
The two objects, revenue and protection, are not
merely distinct, but antagonistic. The same duty may
raise some revenue and give some protection, but, past
a certain point at least, in proportion as one object is
secured the other is sacrificed, since revenue depends
on the bringing in of commodities; protection on keep-
ing them out. So the same tariff may embrace both
protective and revenue duties, but while the protect-
ive duties lessen its power of collecting revenue, the
revenue duties by adding to the cost of home production
lessen its power of encouraging home producers. The
duties of a purely revenue tariff should fall only on
commodities not produced in the country; or, if levied
on commodities partly produced at home should be
balanced by equivalent internal taxes to prevent inci-
dental protection. In a purely protective tariff, on the
other hand, commodities not produced in the country
should be free and duties should be levied on com-
modities that are or may be produced in the country.
And, just in proportion as it accomplishes its object,
TARIFFS FOR PROTECTION. 89
the less revenue will it yield. The tariff of Great
Britain is an example of a purely revenue tariff, in-
cidental protection being prevented by excise duties.
There is no example of a purely protective tariff, the
purpose of obtaining revenue seeming always to be
the original stock upon which protective features are
grafted. The tariff of the United States, like all actual
protective tariffs, is partly revenue and partly protect-
ive, its original purpose of yielding revenue having
been subordinated to that of giving protection, until it
may now be best described as a protective tariff yield-
ing incidental revenue. &
As we have already considered the revenue functions
of tariffs, let us now consider their protective functions.
Protection, as the word has come to be used to denote
a scheme of national policy, signifies the levying of
duties on the importation of commodities (as a means)
in order (as an end) to encourage domestic industry.
Now, when the means proposed in any such scheme .
is the only means by which the proposed end can be
reached, it is only needful to inquire as to the desir-
ability of the end; but when the proposed means is
only one of various means we must satisfy ourselves
that it is the best. If it is not, the scheme is con-
demned irrespective of the goodness of its end. Thus
the advisability of protection does not, as is generally
assumed, follow the admission of the advisability of
encouraging domestic industry. That granted, the
advisability of protection is still an open question,
since it is clear that there are other ways of encourag-
ing home industry than by import duties.
Instead of levying import duties, we might, for in-
stance, destroy a certain proportion of imported com-
90 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
modities, or require the ships bringing them to sail so
many times round the world before landing at our
ports. In either of these ways precisely the same pro-
tective effect could be secured as by import duties, and
in cases where duties secure full protection by prevent-
ing importation, such methods would involve no more
waste. Or, instead of indirectly encouraging domestic
producers by levying duties on foreign goods, wenight
directly encourage them by paying them bounties.
As a means of encouraging domestic industry the
bounty has over the protective system all the advan-
tages that the system of paying public officers fixed
salaries has over the system prevailing in some
countries, and in some instances in our own, of letting
them make what they can. As by paying fixed salaries
we can get officials at such places and to perform such
functions as we wish, while under the make-what-you-
can system they can only be got at places and in ca-
pacities that will enable them to pay themselves, so do
bounties permit the encouragement of any industry,
while protection permits only the encouragement of the
comparatively few industries with which imported
commodities compete. As salaries enable us to know
what we are paying, to proportion the rewards of
different offices to their respective dignity, responsibility
and arduousness, while make-what-you-can may give to
one official much more than is necessary, and to others
not enough, so do bounties enable us to see and to fix
the encouragement to each industry, while the protect-
ive system leaves the public in the dark and makes
the encouragement to each industry almost a matter of
chance. And as salaries impose on the people much
lighter and more fairly apportioned burdens than does
TARIFFS FOR PROTECTION. 91
the make-what-you-can system, so is the difference be-
tween bounties and protection.
To illustrate the working of the two systems, let it
be assumed desirable to encourage aerial navigation at
public expense. Under the bounty system we should
offer premiums for the building and successful operation
of air ships. Under the protective system we should
impose deterrent taxes on all existing methods of trans-
portation. In the one case we should have nothing to
pay till we got what we wanted, and would then pay a
definite sum which would fall on individuals and locali-
ties in general taxes. But in the other case we should
have to suffer all the inconveniences of obstructed
transportation before we got air ships, and whether we
got them or not; and while these obstructions would,
in some cases, more seriously affect individuals, busi-
nesses and localities than in others, we should never be
able to tell how much they distorted industry and cost
the people, or how much they stimulated the invention
and building of air ships. In the one case, moreover,
after aerial navigation had proved successful, and the
stipulated bounties had been paid, the air-ship men
would hardly have the audacity to ask for more
bounties, and would not be likely to get them if they
did. In the other case, the public would have grown
accustomed to the taxes on surface transportation,
while the air-ship proprietors, if they had not convinced
themselves that these taxes were necessary to the con-
tinued prosperity of aerial navigation, could readily
pretend so, and would have, in opposing their repeal,
the advantage of that inertia which tends to the con-
tinuance of anything that is.
The superiority of the bounty system over the pro-
92 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
tective system for the encouragement of any single in.
dustry is very great; but it becomes greater as the
number of industries to be encouraged is increased.
When we encourage an industry by a bounty we do
not discourage any other industry, except as the neces.
sary increase in general taxation may have a discour-
aging effect. But when to encourage one industry we
raise the price of its products by a protective duty, we
at the same time produce a directly injurious effect
upon other industries that use those products. So
complicated has production become, so intimate are the
relations between industries, and in so many forms do
the products of one industry enter into the materials or
processes of others, that what will be the effect of a
single protective duty it is hard for an expert to say.
But when it comes to encouraging not one nor a dozen,
but a thousand different industries, it is impossible for
human intelligence to trace the multifarious effects of
raising the prices of so many products. The people
cannot tell what such a system costs them, nor in most
cases can even those who are supposed to be its bene-
ficiaries really tell how their gains under it compare
with their losses from it.
The “drawback” system is an attempt to prevent, so
far as exports are concerned, the discouragement to which
the protection of one industry subjects others. Draw-
backs are bounties paid on exports of domestic goods
to an amount which it is calculated will compensate for
the addition a duty on material has made to their cost.
But drawbacks not only leave home prices undimin-
ished, but while fruitful of fraud, can only in small
part prevent the discouragement of exports, since it is
only on goods into which dutiable commodities have
TARIFFs FOR PROTECTION. 98
entered in large proportion and obvious ways that
drawbacks are allowed, or that it is worth the while of
the exporter to attempt to collect them. In 1884, for
instance, the United States paid out a larger sum in
drawbacks on copper than was received in duties on
copper, yet it is certain that very many exports into
which copper entered, and which were therefore en-
hanced in cost by the duty, got no drawback what-
ever. And so of drawbacks on refined sugar, for which
we are paying a sum greatly in excess of the duties
collected on the raw sugar, though many of our ex-
ports, such as those of condensed milk, syrups and pre:
served fruits, are much curtailed by these duties.
The substitution of bounties for protection in en-
couraging industry would do away with the necessity
for such inefficient, fraud-provoking, and back-action
devices. Under the bounty system prices would not be
raised, except as affected by general taxation. Each
encouraged producer would know in dollars and cents
how much encouragement he got, and the people at
large would know how much they paid. In short, all
and even more than protection can do to encourage
home industries can be done more cheaply and more
certainly by bounties.
It is sometimes asserted, as one of the advantages of
tariff duties, that they fall on the producers of im-
ported goods, and are thus paid by foreigners. This
assertion contains a Scintilla of truth. An import duty
on a commodity of which the production is a closely
controlled foreign monopoly may in some cases fall
in part or in whole upon the foreign producer. For
instance, let us say that a foreign house or combi-
nation has a monopoly in the production of a certain
94 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
article. Within the limits of cost on the one hand
and the highest rate at which any can be sold on the
other, the price of such article can be fixed by the
producers, who will naturally fix it at the point they
conclude will give the largest aggregate profits. If we
impose an import duty on such an article they may
prefer to reduce their profit on what they sell to this
country rather than have the sale diminished by the
addition of the duty to the price. In such case the
duty will fall upon them.
Or, again, let us suppose a Canadian farmer so situ-
ated that the only market in which he can conveni-
ently sell his wheat is on the American side. Wheat
being a commodity of which our home production not
merely supplies home demands, but leaves a surplus
for export, the duty on wheat does not add to price,
and the Canadian farmer so exceptionally situated that
he must send wheat to this side although there is no
general demand for Canadian wheat, cannot get back
in enhanced price the duty he must pay.
The two classes represented by these instances sug-
gest all the cases in which import duties fall on for-
eign producers.” Such cases, too unimportant to be
* In certain cases where an import duty, levied in one country
on the produce of another, has the effect of reducing price in the
exporting country at the expense of rent, it may, in Some part, fall
upon foreign land-owners. John Stuart Mill (Chap. III., Book V.,
Political Economy), further maintains that taxes on imports fall
in part, not on the foreign producer of whom we buy, but on the
foreign consumer to whom we sell—since they increase the cost of
products we export. But this is only to say that the injury which
we do ourselves by protection must in some part fall upon those with
whom we trade. And even if import duties do, in such ways,
Somewhat increase the cost to foreigners of what they get from us,
TARIFFS FOR PROTECTION. 95
considered in any estimates of national revenue, are
only the rare exceptions to the general rule that the
ability to tax ends with the territorial limits of the
taxing power. And it is well for mankind that this
is so. If it were possible for the government of one
country, by any system of taxation, to compel the peo-
ple of other countries to pay its expenses, the world
would soon be taxed into barbarism.
But the possibility of exceptional cases in which im-
port duties may in part or in whole fall on foreign
producers, instead of domestic consumers, has in it,
even for those who would gladly tax “foreigners,”
no shadow of a recommendation for protection. For
it will be noticed that the cases in which an import
duty falls on foreign producers, are cases in which it
can afford no encouragement to home producers. An .
import duty can only fall on foreign producers when
its payment does not add to price ; while the only
and thus, in some degree, compel them to share our loss, yet they
also handicap us when we come into competition with them. Thus,
assuming that our tariff upon imports may at times, to some
slight extent, have increased the price which English consumers
have had to pay for our cotton, wheat or oil, the increased cost of
production in the United States has certainly operated far more
strongly to give English producers an advantage over American pro-
ducers in markets in which they compete, and to enable England
to take the lion's share of the Ocean-borne commerce of the world.
The minute tracing of the actions and reactions of taxation
upon international trade is, however, more a matter of theo-
retical nicety than of practical interest, since the general conclu-
sion will be that stated in the text, that while we cannot injure
ourselves without injuring others, the taxing power of a Govern-
ment is substantially restricted to its territorial limit. The
clearest exception to this is in the case of export duties on articles
of which the country levying the export duty has a monopoly, as
Brazil has of India-rubber and Cuba of the Havana tobacco.
96 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
possible way in which an import duty can encourage
home producers is by adding to price.
It is sometimes said that protection does not in-
crease prices. It is sufficient answer to ask, how then
can it encourage? To say that a protective duty en-
courages the home producer without raising prices, is
to say that it encourages him without doing anything
for him. Wherever beneath this assertion, as regard-
less of fact as it is of theory, there is any glimmering
of reason, it is either in the notion that protective
duties do not permanently add to prices, because they
bring about such a competition between home pro-
ducers as finally carries prices down to the previous
level; or else in a confused idea that it would be an
advantage to home producers to be secured the whole
... home market, even if at no higher prices.
But as to the first, the only way in which a pro-
tective duty can increase home competition in the pro-
duction of any commodity is by so increasing prices as to
attract producers to the industry by the superior profits
to be obtained. This competition, when free to operate,
ultimately reduces profits to the general level.” But
this is not to say that it reduces prices to what they
would be without the duty. The profits of Louisiana
sugar growing are now, doubtless, Lo larger than in
other occupations involving equal risks, but the duty
on sugar does make the price of sugar very much
higher in the United States than it is in England, where
there is no duty upon it. And even where there is no
reason in natural or social conditions why a commodity
should not be produced as cheaply as in any foreign
* The effect of protection upon profits in the protected industries
will be more fully examined in Chapter XVII,
--"
TARIFES FOR PROTECTION. ' *r 97
country, the effect of the net-work of duties, of which
the particular duty is but a part, is to increase the cost
of production, and thus, though profits may fall, to keep
prices above the point of free importation. Did the
price of a protected article fall to the point at which the
foreign product could not be imported were there no
duty, the duty would cease to protect, since the foreign
product would not be imported if it were abolished,
and the producers for whose protection it was imposed
would cease to care for its retention. In what instance
has this been the case? Are any of our protected in-
dustries less clamorous for protection now than they
were forty years ago? $
As to the second notion, it is to be observed that the
only way in which a protective duty can give the home
market to home producers is by increasing the price at
which foreign products can be sold in it. Not merely
does this increase in the price of foreign products
compel an increase in the price of domestic products
into which they enter, but the shutting out of foreign
products must increase the price of similar domestic
products. For it is only where prices are fixed by the
will of the producer that increase or decrease in supply
does not result in increase or decrease of price. Thus,
while the newspaper business is not a monopoly, the
publication of each individual paper is, and its price is
fixed by the publisher. A publisher may, and in most
cases will, prefer increased circulation to increased prices.
And if competition were to be lessened, or even cut off,
as, for instance, by imposing a stamp duty on, or pro-
hibiting the publication of all the newspapers of New
York save one, it would not necessarily follow that
the price of that paper would be increased. But the
9
98 ºr PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
prices of the great mass of commodities, and especially
the great mass of commodities which are exported and
imported, are regulated by competition. They are
not fixed by the will of producers, but by the relative
intensity of supply and demand, which are brought to
an equation in price by what Adam Smith called “the
higgling of the market,” and hence any lessening of
supply caused by the shutting out of importations will
at once increase prices.
In short, the protective system is simply a system of
encouraging certain industries by enabling those carry-
ing them on to obtain higher prices for the goods they
produce. It is a clumsy and extravagant mode of giv-
ing encouragement that could be given much better
and at much less cost by bounties or subsidies. If it
be wise to “encourage” American industries, and
this we have yet to examine, the best way of doing
so would be to abolish our tariff entirely and to pay
bounties from funds obtained by direct taxation. In
this way the cost could be distributed with some ap-
proach to fairness, and the citizen who is worth a
million times more than another could have the satis-
faction of contributing a million times as much to the
encouragement of American industry.
I do not forget that, from the bounties given in the
colonial days for the killing of noxious animals to the
subsidies granted to the Pacific railroads, experience
has shown that the bounty system inevitably leads to
fraud and begets corruption, while but poorly accom-
plishing the ends sought by it. But these evils are in-
separable from any method of “encouragement,” and
attach to the protective more than to the bounty sys-
tem, because its operations are not so clear. If pro
g
TARIFFS FOR PROTECTION. 99
tection has been preferred to bounties it is not that it
is a better means of encouragement, but for the same
reason that indirect has been preferred to direct taxa-
tion—because the people do not so readily realize what
is being done. Where a grant of a hundred thousand
dollars directly from the treasury would raise an out-
cry, the imposition of a duty which will enable the
appropriation of millions in higher prices excites no
comment. Where bounties have been given by our
States for the establishment of new industries they
have been comparatively small sums, given in a single
payment or in a subsidy for a definite term of years.
Although the people have in some cases been willing
thus to pay bounties to a small extent and for a short
time, in no case have they consented to regard them as
a settled thing, and to keep on paying them year after
year. But protective duties once imposed, the pro-
tected industry has always been as clamorous for the
eontinuance of protection as it was in the beginning
for the grant of it. And the people not being so con-
scious of the payment have permitted it to go on.
It is often said by protectionists that free trade is
right in theory but wrong in practice. Whatever may
be meant by such phrases they involve a contradiction
in terms, since a theory that will not agree with facts
must be false. But without inquiring into the validity
of the protective theory it is clear that no such tariff
as it proposes ever has been or ever can be made.
The theory of free trade may be carried into practice
to the point of ideal perfection. For to secure free
trade we have only to abolish restrictions. But to
carry the theory of protection into practice some articles
must be taxed and others left untaxed, and, as to the
100 - PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
articles taxed, different rates of duty must be imposed.
And as the protection given to any industry may be
neutralized by protection that enhances the price of
its materials, careful discrimination is required, for
there are very few articles that can be deemed finished
products in relation to all their uses. The finished
products of some industries are the materials or tools
of other industries. Thus, while the protection of
any industry is useless unless sufficient to produce
the desired effect, too much protection is likely, even
from a protective standpoint, to do harm. s
It is not merely that the ideal perfection with which
the free trade theory may be reduced to practice is im-
possible in the case of protection, but that even a rough
approximation to the protective theory is impossible.
There never has been a protective tariff that satisfied
protectionists, and there never can be. Our present
tariff, for instance, is admitted by protectionists to be
full of the grossest blunders.” It was only adopted be.
* For instance, to cite only one case, the last Tariff Act, which
went into effect in July, 1883, raised the duty on the fabric used
in the manufacture of ruching and rufflings from 35 to 125 per
cent., while leaving the duty of the finished article at 35 per
cent. Previous to this, say the manufacturers of these goods, in
a memorial addressed to the Secretary of the Treasury, they not
only supplied the American market, but sold hundreds of thou-
sands of dollars’ worth every year to Canada, the West Indies and
other countries, the labor-saving machinery which they had in
use giving them an advantage which, in spite of the 35 per cent.
tax on their material, enabled them to successfully compete with
European factories. But the 125 per cent. duty has not only cut off
this export trade completely, but has led to such an importation of
British goods that, as the memorial declares, thousands of hands
have lost their employment, and three-fourths of the manufacturers
engaged in the business have been utterly ruined. This, of course,
TARIFF's For PROTECTION. 101
cause, after a long wrangle, it was found impossible to
agree upon a better one, and it is only maintained and
defended because any attempt to amend it would begin
a scramble out of which no one can tell what sort of a
tariff would come. This has been the case with every
former tariff, and must be the case with every future
tariff.
To make a protective tariff that would even roughly
accord with the protective theory would require in the
first place a minute knowledge of all trade and indus-
try, and of the manner in which an effect produced on
one industry would act and react on others. This no
king, congress or parliament ever can have. But, fur-
ther than this, absolute disinterestedness is required, for
the fixing of protective duties is simply the distribution
of pecuniary favors among a crowd of greedy appli-
cants. And even were it possible to obtain for the
making of a protective tariff a body of men themselves
disinterested and incapable of yielding to bribery, to
threats, to friendship or to flattery, they would have
to be more than human not to be dazed by the clamor
and misled by the representations of selfish interests,
The making of a tariff, instead of being, as the pro-
tective theory requires, a careful consideration of the
circumstances and needs of each industry, is in prac-
tice simply a great “grab" in which the retained ad-
vocates of selfish interests bully and beg, bribe and log-
roll, in the endeavor to get the largest possible pro-
tection for themselves without regard for other interests
or for the general good. The result is, and always
was not intended by Congress. The ruffling industry is only one
of the many minor industries that were thrown down and trampled
upon in the last tariff scramble,
I02 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
must be, the enactment of a tariff which resembles the
theoretical protectionist's idea of what a protective
tariff should be about as closely as a bucketful of paint
thrown against a wall resembles the fresco of a Raphael.
But this is not all. After a tariff has been enacted,
come the interpretations and decisions of treasury offi-
cials and courts to unmake and re-make it,” and
duties are raised or lowered by a printer's placing of a
comma or by arbitrary constructions, frequently open
to grave suspicion, and which no one can foresee, so
that, as Horace Greeley naively says (Political Economy,
p. 183):
“The longer a tariff continues the more weak spots are found,
the more holes are picked in it, until at last, through the influence
of successive evasions, constructions, decisions, its very father could
not discern its original features in the transformed bantling that
has quietly taken its place.”
Under the bounty system, bad as it is, we can come
much nearer to doing what we want to, and to know-
ing what we have done.
* The Secretary of the Treasury states that there are now (Feb-
ruary, 1886) over 2,300 tariff cases pending in the Southern Dis-
trict of New York alone.
CELAPTER X.
THE ENCOURAGEMENT OF INDUSTRY.
WITHOUT questioning the end sought by them we
have seen that protective tariffs are to be condemned
as a means. Let us now consider their end—the en-
couragement of home industry.
There can be no difference of opinion as to what
encouragement means. To encourage an industry in
the protective sense is to secure to those carrying it
on larger profits than they could of themselves obtain.
Only so far and so long as it does this can any protec-
tion encourage an industry.
But when we ask what the industries are that pro-
tection proposes to encourage we find a wide difference.
Those whom American protectionists have regarded as
their ablest advocates have asked protection for the
encouragement of “infant industries"—describing the
protective system as a means for establishing new in-
dustries in countries to which they are adapted.* They
* “Whoever will consult Alexander Hamilton's Report on Man-
ufactures, the writings of Matthew Carey, Hezekiah Niles and
their compeers, with the speeches of Henry Clay, Thomas Newton,
James Tod, Walter Forward, Rollin C. Mallary, and other forensic
champions of protection, with the messages of our earlier Presidents,
of Governors Simon Snyder, George Clinton, Daniel D. Tompkins,
De Witt Clinton, etc., cannot fail to note that they champion not
the maintenance, but the creation of home manufactures.”—HoRACE
GREELEY, Political Economy, p. 34.
104 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
have scouted the idea of attempting to encourage all
industry, and declared the encouragement of industries
not adapted to a country, or already established, or for
a time longer than necessary for their establishment, to
be waste and robbery. As it is now popularly ad-
vocated and practically applied in the United States
the aim of protection, however, is not the encourage-
ment of “infant industries” but the encouragement of
“home industry”—that is to say, of all home industries.
And what has proved true in our case is generally true.
Wherever protection is once begun, the imposition of
duties never stops until every home industry of any
political strength that can be protected by tariff gets
Some encouragement. It is only in new countries and
in the beginnings of the system that the encourage-
ment of infant industries can be presented as the sole
end of protection. European protectionists can hardly
ask protection, on the ground of their infancy, for in-
dustries that have been carried on since the time of the
Romans. And in the United States to ask now the en-
couragement of such giants as our iron, steel and textile
industries as a means for their establishment would,
after all these years of high tariffs, be manifestly
absurd.
We have thus two distinct propositions to examine—
the proposition that new and desirable industries
should be encouraged, which still figures in the apolo-
getics of protection, and the proposition popularly
urged and which our protectionist legislation attempts
to carry into effect—that home industry should be
encouraged.
As an abstract proposition it is not, I think, to be
denied that there may be industries to which temporary
THE ENCOURAGEMENT OF INDUSTRY. 105
encouragement might profitably be extended. Indus-
tries capable, in their development, of much public
benefit have often to struggle under great disadvan-
tages in their beginnings, and their development might
sometimes be beneficially hastened by judicious en-
couragement. But there are insuperable difficulties in
the way of discovering what industries would repay
encouragement. There are, doubtless, in every con-
siderable community some men of exceptional powers
who, if provided at public expense with an assured
living and left free to investigate, to invent, or to think,
would make to the public most valuable returns. But
it is certain that, under any system yet devised, such
livings, if instituted, would not be filled by men of this
kind; but by the pushing and influential, by flatterers
and dependents of those in power or by respectable
nonentities. The very men who would give a good
return in such places would, by virtue of their qualities,
be the last to get them. º
So it is with the encouragement of struggling in-
dustries. All experience shows that the policy of en-
couragement, once begun, leads to a scramble in which
it is the strong, not the weak; the unscrupulous, not
the deserving, that succeed. What are really infant
industries have no more chance in the struggle for
governmental encouragement than infant pigs have
with full grown swine about a meal tub. Not merely
is the encouragement likely to go to industries that do
not need it, but it is likely to go to industries that can
only be maintained in this way, and thus to cause
absolute loss to the community by diverting labor and
capital from remunerative industries. On the whole,
the ability of any industry to establish and sustain
106 : PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
itself in a free field is the measure of its public utility,
and that “struggle for existence” which drives out un-
profitable industries is the best means of determining
what industries are needed under existing conditions
and what are not. Even promising industries are more
apt to be demoralized and stunted than to be aided in
healthy growth by encouragement that gives them what
they do not earn, just as a young man is more likely to
be injured than benefited by being left a fortune. The
very difficulties with which new industries must con-
tend not merely serve to determine which are really
needed, but also serve to adapt them to surrounding
conditions and to develop improvements and inventions
that under more prosperous circumstances would never
be sought for.
Thus, while it may be abstractly true that there are
industries that it would be wise to encourage, the only
safe course is to give to all “a fair field and no favor.”
Where there is a conscious need for the making of
Some invention or for the establishment of some in-
dustry which, though of public utility, would not be
commercially profitable, the best way to encourage it is
to offer a bounty conditional upon success.
Nothing could better show the futility of attempting
to make industries self-supporting by tariff than the
confessed inability of the industries that we have so
long encouraged to stand alone. In the early days
of the American Republic, when the friends of pro-
tection were trying to ingraft it upon the Federal
revenue system, protection was asked, not for the main-
tenance of American industry, but for the establish-
ment of “infant industries,” which, it was asserted,
would, if encouraged for a few years, be able to take
THE ENCOURAGEMENT OF INDUSTRY. lū7
care of themselves. The infant boys and girls of that
time have grown to maturity, become old men and
women, and with rare exceptions have passed away.
The nation then fringing the Atlantic seaboard has ex-
tended across the continent, and instead of four million
now numbers nearly sixty million people. But the
“infant industries,” for which a little temporary pro-
tection was then timidly asked, are still infants in their
desire for encouragement. Though they have grown
mightily they claim the benefits of the “Baby Act” all
the more lustily, declaring that if they cannot have far
higher protection than at the beginning they dreamed
of asking they must perish outright.
When United States Senator Broderick, shot by
Chief-Justice Terry in a duel, died without making a
will, a Dublin man wrote to the editor of a San Fran-
cisco newspaper claiming to be next of kin. He gave
the date of his birth, which showed him forty-seven
years of age, and wound up by adjuring the editor to
help a poor orphan, who had lost both father and
mother. The “infant industry” argument nowadays
always reminds me of that orphan.
Protectionist writers have not yet given up the “in-
fant industry” plea, for it is the only ground on which
with any semblance of reason protection can be asked;
but in the face of the facts they have extended the
time in which it is averred that protection can establish
an infant industry. The American people used to be
told that moderate duties for a few years would enable
the protected industries to stand alone and defy foreign
competition. But in the latest edition of his Political
Economy (p. 233), Professor Thompson, of the Univer-
sity of Pennsylvania, tells us that “it will ordinarily
108 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
take the lifetime of two generations to acclimatize
thoroughly a new manufacture, and to bring the native
production up to the native demand.”
When we are told that two generations should tax
themselves to establish an industry for the third, well
may we ask, “What has posterity ever done for us?”
Yet even this promise is not borne out by facts. In-
dustries that we have been, protecting for more than
two generations, now need, according to protectionists,
more protection than ever.
The popular plea for protection in the United States
to-day is not, however, the encouragement of infant
industries, but the encouragement of home industry,
that is, all home industry.
Now it is manifestly impossible for a protective tariff
to encourage all home industry. Duties upon com-
modities entirely produced at home can, of course,
have no effect in encouraging any home industry. It
is only when imposed upon commodities partly im-
ported and partly produced at home, or entirely im-
ported, yet capable of being produced at home, that
duties can in any way encourage an industry. No
tariff which the United States imposed could, for in-
stance, encourage the growth of grain or cotton, the
raising of cattle, the production of coal oil or the mining
of gold or silver; for instead of importing these things
we not only supply ourselves, but have a surplus which
we export. Nor could any import duty encourage any
of the many industries which must be carried on where
needed, such as building, horseshoeing, the printing of
newspapers, and so on. Since these industries that
cannot be protected constitute by far the larger part of
the industries of every country, the utmost that by a
THE ENCOURAGEMENT OF INDUSTRY. 109
protective tariff can be attempted is the encouragement
of only a few of the total industries of a country.
Yet in spite of this obvious fact, protection is never
urged for the encouragement of the industries that
alone can profit by a tariff. That would be to admit
that to some it gave special advantages over others,
and so in the popular pleas that are made for it pro-
tection is urged for the encouragement of all industry.
If we ask how this can be, we are told that the tariff
encourages the protected industries, and then the pro-
tected industries encourage the unprotected industries;
that protection builds up the factory and iron furnace,
and the factory and iron furnace create a demand for
the farmer's productions.
Imagine a village of say a hundred voters. Imagine
two of these villagers to make such a proposition as
this: “We are desirous, fellow-citizens, of seeing you
more prosperous and to that end propose this plan:
Give us the privilege of collecting a tax of five cents
a day from every one in the village. No one will feel
the tax much, for even to a man with a wife and eight
children it will only come to the paltry sum of fifty
cents a day. Yet this slight tax will give our village
two rich citizens who can afford to spend money. We
will at once begin to live in commensurate style. We .
will enlarge our houses and improve our grounds, set
up carriages, hire servants, give parties and buy much
more freely at the stores. This will make trade brisk
and cause a greater demand for labor. This, in turn,
will create a greater demand for agricultural produc-
tions, which will enable the neighboring farmers to
make a greater demand for store goods and the labor
of mechanics. Thus shall we all become prosperous.”
IO
L10 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
There is in no country under the sun a village in
which the people would listen to such a proposition.
Yet it is every whit as plausible as the doctrine that
encouraging some industries encourages all industries.
The only way in which we could even attempt to
encourage all industry would be by the bounty or sub-
sidy system. Were we to substitute bounties for duties
as a means of encouraging industry it would not only
become possible for us to encourage other industries
than those now encouraged by tariff, but we should be
forced to do so, for it is not in human nature that the
farmers, the stock raisers, the builders, the newspaper
publishers and so on, would consent to the payment of
bounties to other industries without demanding them
for their own. Nor could we consistently stop until
every species of industry, to that of the bootblack or
rag-picker, was subsidized. Yet evidently the result of
such encouragement of each would be the discourage-
ment of all. For as there could only be distributed
what was raised by taxation, less the cost of collection,
no one could get back in subsidies, were there any
fairness in their distribution, as much as he would be
called upon to pay in taxes.
This practical reduction to absurdity is not possible
under the protective system, because only a small part
of the industries of a country can thus be “encour-
aged,” while the cost of the encouragement is concealed
in prices and is not realized by the masses. The tax-
gatherer does not demand from each citizen a contribu-
tion to the encouragement of the favored few. He
sits down in a custom house and by taxing imports
enables the favored producer to collect “encourage-
ment” from his fellow-citizens in higher prices. Yet
THE ENCOURAGEMENT OF INDUSTRY. 111
it is as true of encouragement by tariff as of encourage-
ment by bounties that the gain to some involves loss to
others, and since encouragement by tariff involves far
more cost and waste than encouragement by bounty,
the proportion which the loss bears to the gain must be
greater. However protection may affect special forms
of industry it must necessarily diminish the total return
to industry—first, by the waste inseparable from encour-
agement by tariff, and, second, by the loss due to the
transfer of capital and labor from occupations which they
would choose for themselves to less profitable occupa-
tions which they must be bribed to engage in. If we
do not see this without reflection, it is because our at-
tention is engaged with but a part of the effects of pro-
tection. We see the large smelting works and the mas-
sive mill without realizing that the same taxes which
we are told have built them up have made more costly
every nail driven and every needleful of thread used
throughout the whole country. Our imaginations are
affected as were those of the first Europeans who vis-
ited India, and who, impressed by the profusion and
magnificence of the Rajahs, but not noticing the abject
poverty of the masses, mistook for the richest country
in the world what is really the poorest.
But reflection will show that the claim popularly
made for protection, that it encourages home industry
(i. e., all home industry), can be true only in one sense
—the sense in which Pharaoh encouraged Hebrew in-
dustry when he compelled the making of bricks with-
out straw. Protective tariffs make more work, in the
sense in which the spilling of grease over her kitchen
floor makes more work for the housewife, or as a rain
that wets his hay makes more work for the farmer.
-- CELAPTER XI.
TEIE EIOME MARKET AND HOME TRADE.
|WE should keep our own market for our own producers,
seems by many to be regarded as the same kind of a
proposition as, We should keep our own pasture for our
own cows, whereas, in truth, it is such a proposition as,
We should keep our own appetites for our own cookery, or
TWe should keep our own transportation for our own legs.
What is this home market from which protection-
ists tell us we should so carefully exclude foreign
produce? Is it not the home demand—the demand
for the satisfaction of our own wants? Hence the
proposition that we should keep our home market for
home producers is simply the proposition that we
should keep our own wants for our own powers of
satisfying them. In short, to reduce it to the individual,
it is that we ought not to eat a meal cooked by another,
since that would deprive us of the pleasure of cooking
a meal for ourselves, or make any use of horses or
railways because that would deprive our legs of em-
ployment.
A short time ago English protectionists (for pro-
tection is far from dead in England) were censuring the
government for having given large orders for powder
to German instead of to English producers. It turned
out that the Germans were making a new powder
called “cocoa,” which in heavy guns gives great
THE HOME MARKET AND HOME TRADE. 113
velocity with low pressure, and with which all the
continental powers had at once provided themselves.
Had the English government refused to buy from
foreign producers, English ships, in the event of war,
which then seemed imminent, would have been placed
at a serious disadvantage.
Now, just as the policy of reserving home markets
for home producers would in war put a country which
should adhere to it at a great disadvantage—even to
the extent, if fully carried out, of restricting the country
that does not produce coal to the use of sailing ships,
and compelling the country that yields no iron to fight
with bows and arrows — so in all the vocations of
peace does this policy involve like disadvantages. To
strictly reserve our home market for home producers
would be to exclude ourselves from participation in
the advantages which natural conditions or the peculiar
skill of their people give to other countries. If bananas
will not grow at home we must not eat bananas. If
india rubber is not a home production we must not
avail ourselves of its thousand uses. If salt can only
be obtained in our country by evaporating sea water
we must continue so to obtain our salt, although in
other countries nature has performed this work and
provided already-crystallized salt in quantities sufficient
not only for their people, but for us too. Because
we cannot grow the cinchona tree we must shake with
ague and die from malarial diseases, or must writhe in
agony under the oculist's knife because the beneficent
drug that gives local insensibility is not a home pro-
duction. And so with all those products in which
the peculiar development of industry has enabled the
people of various countries to excel. To reserve our
114 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
home market to home production is to limit the world
from which our wants may be supplied to the bounds
of our own country, how little soever that may be.
And to place any restrictions upon importations is,
in so far as they operate, to deprive ourselves of oppor-
tunities to satisfy our wants.
It may be to the interest of a shopkeeper that the
people of his neighborhood should be prohibited from
buying from any one but him, so that they must take
such goods as he chooses to keep, at such prices as he
chooses to charge, but who would contend that this
was to the general advantage 7 It might be to the
interest of gas companies to restrict the number and
size of windows, but hardly to the interest of a com-
munity. Broken limbs bring fees to surgeons, but
would it profit a municipality to prohibit the re-
moval of ice from sidewalks in order to encourage
surgery 7 Yet it is in such ways that protective tariffs
act. Economically, what difference is there between
restricting the importation of iron to benefit iron
producers and restricting sanitary improvements to
benefit undertakers.
To attempt to make a nation prosperous by pre-
venting it from buying from other nations is as ab-
surd as it would be to attempt to make a man pros-
perous by preventing him from buying from other
men. How this operates in the case of the individual
we can see from that practice which, since its applica-
tion in the Irish land agitation, has come to be called
“boycotting.” Captain Boycott, upon whom has been
thrust the unenviable fame of having his name turned
into a verb, was in fact “protected.” He had a pro-
tective tariff of the most efficient kind built around him
THE HOME MARKET AND HOME TRADE. 115
by a neighborhood decree more effective than act of
Parliament. No one would sell him labor, no one
would sell him milk or bread or meat or any service or
commodity whatever. But instead of growing pros-
perous, this much-protected man had to fly from a
place where his own market was thus reserved for his
own productions. What protectionists ask us to do
to ourselves in reserving our home market for home
producers, is in kind what the Land Leaguers did to
Captain Boycott. They ask us to boycott ourselves.
In order to convince us that this would be for our
benefit, no little ingenuity has been expended. It is
asserted (1) that restrictions on foreign trade are bene-
ficial because home trade is more profitable than foreign
trade; (2) that even if these restrictions do compel
people to pay higher prices for the same commodities,
the real cost is no greater, and (3) that even if the cost
is greater they get it back again.
Strangely enough, the first of these propositions is
fortified by the authority of Adam Smith. In Book
II., Chapter W., of The Wealth of Nations, occurs this pas-
Sage:
“The capital which is employed in purchasing in one part of the
country in order to sell in another the produce of the industry of
that country, generally replaces by every such operation two dis-
tinct capitals that had both been employed in the agriculture or
manufactures of that country, and thereby enables them to con-
tinue that employment. * * * The capital which sends Scotch
manufactures to London, and brings back English corn and man-
ufactures to Edinburgh, necessarily replaces by every such opera-
tion two British capitals which had both been employed in the
agriculture or manufactures of Great Britain.
“The capital employed in purchasing foreign goods for home con-
sumption, when this purchase is made with the produce of domestic
industry, replaces, too, by every such operation, two distinct capi-
116 . PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
tals : but one of them only is employed in supporting domestic
industry. The capital which sends British goods to Portugal, and
brings back Portuguese goods to Great Britain, replaces by every
such operation only one British capital. The other is a Portuguese
one. Though the returns, therefore, of the foreign trade of con-
sumption should be as quick as those of the home trade, the capital
employed in it will give but one-half the encouragement to the
industry or productive labor of the country.”
This astonishing proposition, of which Adam Smith
never seemed to see the significance,” is one of the in-
consistencies into which he was led by his abandon-
ment of the solid ground from which labor is regarded
as the prime factor in production for that from which
capital is so regarded—a confusion of thought which
has ever since befogged political economy. This pass-
age is quoted approvingly by protectionist writers, and
made by them the basis of assertions even more absurd,
if that be possible. Yet the fallacy ought to be seen
at a glance. It is of the same nature as the Irishman's
division, “Two for you two, and two for me, too,” and de-
pends upon the introduction of a term “British,” which
includes in its meaning two of the terms previously
used, “English " and “Scotch.” If we substitute for
* In the next paragraph Adam Smith goes on to carry this propo-
sition to an unconscious reductio ad absurdum. He says:
“A capital therefore employed in the home trade will sometimes
make twelve operations, or be sent out and returned twelve times,
before a capital employed in the foreign trade of consumption has
made one. If the capitals are equal, therefore, the one will give
four-and-twenty times more encouragement and support to the in-
dustry of the country than the other.” º
This is just such a proposition as that an innkeeper who only
permits his guests to stay with him one day can, with equal facili-
ties, furnish twelve times as much entertainment to man and beast
as can the innkeeper who permits each guest to stay with him twelve
days.
THE HOME MARKET AND HOME TRADE. 117
the terms used by Adam Smith other terms of the same
relation we may obtain, with equal validity, such prop-
ositions as this: If Episcopalians trade with Presby-
terians, two profits are made by Protestants; whereas
when Presbyterians trade with Catholics only one profit
goes to Protestants. Therefore, trade between Protes-
tants is twice as profitable as trade between Protestanti
and Catholics.
In Adam Smith's illustration there are two quantities
of British goods, one in Edinburgh and one in London.
In the domestic trade which he supposes, these two
quantities of British goods are exchanged; but if the
Scotch goods be sent to Portugal instead of to England
and Portuguese goods brought back, only one quantity
of British goods is exchanged. There will be only
one-half the replacement in Great Britain, but there has
been only one-half the displacement. The Edinburgh
goods which have been sent away have been replaced
with Portuguese goods; but the London goods have
not been replaced with anything, because they are still
there. In the one case twice the amount of British
capital is employed as in the other, and consequently
double returns show equal profitableness.
The arguments by which it is attempted to prove
that it is no hardship to a people to be forced to pay
higher prices to home producers for goods they can
more cheaply obtain by importation are of no better
consistency. The real cost of commodities, it is de-
clared, is not to be measured by their price but by the
labor needed to produce them, and hence as it is put,
though higher wages, interest, taxes, etc., may make it
impossible to produce certain things for as low a price
in One country as in another, their real cost is no
118 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
greater, if no greater amount of labor is needed for
their production, and thus a nation loses nothing by
shutting out the cheaper foreign products.
The fallacy is in the assumption that equal amounts
of labor always produce equal results. A first-class
portrait painter may be able to do whitewashing with
no more labor than a professional whitewasher, but it
would nevertheless be a loss to him to take time in
which he might earn the wages of a portrait painter in
order to do whitewashing that he might get done for
the wages of a whitewasher. Nor would his loss be
the less real if he chose to average his income so as to
credit himself with as much for whitewashing as for
portrait painting. In the same way, it is not the amount
of labor required to produce a thing here or there which
determines whether it can be more profitably obtained
by home production or by importation, but the relation
between what the same labor could produce in that
and in other employments. This is shown by price.
Though as between different times and places the prices
of things do not accurately indicate the relative quantity
and quality of labor necessary to obtain them, they do
in the same time and place. If at any given time, in
any given place, a certain commodity cannot be pro-
duced for as low a price as it can be imported for, this
is not necessarily proof that it would take more labor
to produce it in the given place, but it is proof that
labor there and then can be more profitably employed.
And when industry is diverted from more profitable to
less profitable occupations, though the capital and labor
so transferred may be compensated by duties or boun-
ties, there must be a loss to the people as a whole.
Thé argument that the higher prices which the tariff
THE HOME MARKET AND HOME TRADE. 119
enables certain home producers to charge involves no
loss to those who pay them is thus put by Horace
Greeley (Political Economy, p. 150):
“I never made any iron, nor had any other than a public, general
interest in making any, while I have bought and used many thou-
sands of dollars’ worth, in the shape of power presses, engines,
boilers, building plates, etc. It is my interest, you say, to have
cheap iron. Certainly; but I buy iron, not (ultimately and really)
with money, but with the product of my labor—that is, with
newspapers; and I can better afford to pay $70 per ton for iron
made by men who can and do buy American newspapers than take
it for $50 of those who rarely see and never buy one of my products.
The money price of the American iron may be higher, but its real
cost to me is less than that of the British iron. And my case is
that of the great body of American farmers and other producers
of exchangeable wealth.”
The fallacy is in the assumption that the ability of
certain persons to buy American newspapers depends
upon their making of iron, whereas, it depends upon
their making of something. Newspapers are not bought
with iron, nor do newspaper publishers buy iron with
newspapers. These transactions are effected with
money, which represents no single form of wealth, but
value in all forms. If, instead of making iron, the
men to whom Mr. Greeley refers had made something
else which was exchanged for British iron, Mr. Greeley's
purchase of this foreign iron would have been just as
truly an exchange of his products for theirs. The
$20 per ton additional which the tariff compelled him
to pay for iron represented a loss to him which was
not a gain to any one else. For on Mr. Greeley's sup-
position that the tariff was necessary to give American
iron makers the same remuneration such labor could
have obtained in other pursuits, its effect was simply to
compel the expenditure of $70 worth of labor to obtain
*
120 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
what otherwise could have been obtained by $50 worth
of labor. To do this was necessarily to lessen the
wealth of the country as a whole, and to reduce the
fund available for the purchase of newspapers and other
articles. This loss is as certain and is of the same
kind as if Mr. Greeley had been compelled to employ
portrait painters to do whitewashing.
The more popular forms of this argument that pro-
tection costs nothing, hardly need analysis. If, as is
asserted, consumers lose nothing in the higher prices
the tariff compels them to pay, because these prices are
paid to our own people, then producers would lose
nothing if compelled to sell to their fellow-citizens
below cost. If workmen are necessarily compensated
for high priced goods by the increased demand for their
labor, then manufacturers would be compensated for
high priced labor by the increased demand for their
goods. In short, on this reasoning it makes no dif-
ference to anybody whether the price of anything is
high or low. When farmers complain of the high
charges of railroads, they are making much ado about
nothing; and workmen are taking needless trouble when
they demand an increase of wages, while employers are
quite as foolish when they try to cut wages down.
CHAPTER XII.
EXPORTS AND IMPORTS,
THE aim of protection is to diminish imports, never
to diminish exports. On the contrary, the protection-
ist habit is to regard exports with favor, and to consider
the country which exports most and imports least as
doing the most profitable trade. When exports exceed
imports there is said to be a favorable balance of trade.
When imports exceed exports there is said to be an
unfavorable balance of trade. In accordance with his
idea all protectionist countries afford every facility for
sending things away and fine men for bringing things
in.
If the things which we thus try to send away and
prevent coming in were pests and vermin—things of
which all men want as ſittle as possible—this policy
would conform to reason. But the things of which ex-
ports and imports consist are not things that nature
forces on us against our will, and that we have to
struggle to rid ourselves of; but things that nature
gives only in return for labor, things for which men
make exertions and undergo privations. Him who has
or can command much of these things we call rich;
him who has little we call poor; and when we say
that a country increases in wealth we mean that the
amount of these things which it contains increases
11
.122 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
faster than its population. What, then, is more repug.
nant to reason than the notion that the way to increase
the wealth of a country is to promote the sending of
such things away and to prevent the bringing of them
in? Could there be a queerer inversion of ideas?
Should we not think even a dog had lost his senses
that Snapped and snarled when given a bone, and
wagged his tail when a bone was taken from him?
Lawyers may profit by quarrels, doctors by diseases,
rat-catchers by the prevalence of vermin, and so it may
be to the interest of some of the individuals of a
nation to have as much as possible of the good things
which we call “goods” sent away, and as little as pos-
sible brought in. But protectionists claim that it is
for the benefit of a community, as a whole, of a nation
considered as one man, to make it easy to send goods
away and difficult to bring them in.
Let us take a community which we must perforce
consider as a whole—that country, with a population
of one, which the genius of Defoe has made familiar
not only to English readers but to the people of all
European tongues.
Robinson Crusoe, we will suppose, is still living
alone on his island. Let us suppose an American pro-
tectionist is the first to break his solitude with the long
yearned-for music of human speech. Crusoe's delight
we can well imagine. But now that he has been there
so long he does not care to leave, the less since his
visitor tells him that the island, having now been dis-
covered, will often be visited by passing ships. Let us
suppose that after having heard Crusoe's story, seen his
island, enjoyed such hospitality as he could offer, told
him in return of the wonderful changes in the great
ExPORTS AND IMPORTS. 123
world, and left him books and papers, our protectionist
prepares to depart, but before going seeks to offer some
kindly warning of the danger Crusoe will be exposed
to from the “deluge of cheap goods” that passing ships
will seek to exchange for fruit and goats. Imagine
him to tell Crusoe just what protectionists tell larger
communities, and to warn him that, unless he takes
measures to make it difficult to bring these goods ashore,
his industry will be entirely ruined. “In fact,” we
may imagine the protectionist to say, “so cheaply can
all the things you require be produced abroad that un-
less you make it hard to land them I do not see
how you will be able to employ your own industry at
all.”
“Will they give me all these things?” Robinson
Crusoe would naturally exclaim. “Do you mean that
I shall get all these things for nothing and have no
work at all to do? That will suit me completely. I
shall rest and read and go fishing for the fun of it."
I am not anxious to work if without work I can get
the things I want.”
“No, I don't quite mean that,” the protectionist would
be forced to explain. “They will not give you such
things for nothing. They will, of course, want some
thing in return. But they will bring you so much and
will take away so little that your imports will vastly
exceed your exports, and it will soon be difficult for
you to find employment for your labor.”
“But I don't want to find employment for my labor,”
Crusoe would naturally reply. “I did not spend months
in digging out my canoe and weeks in tanning and
Sewing these goat-skins because I wanted employment
for my labor, but because I wanted the things. If I
124 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
can get what I want with less labor, so much the bet.
ter, and the more I get and the less I give in the trade
you tell me I am to carry on—or, as you phrase it, the
more my imports exceed my exports—the easier I can
live and the richer Ishall be. I am not afraid of being
overwhelmed with goods. The more they bring the
better it will suit me.”
And so the two might part, for it is certain that
no matter how long our protectionist talked the
notion that his industry would be ruined by getting
things with less labor than before would never frighten
Crusoe. *
Yet, are these arguments for protection a whit more
absurd when addressed to one man living on an island
than when addressed to sixty millions living on a con-
tinent? What would be true in the case of Robinson
Crusoe is true in the case of Brother Jonathan. If
foreigners will bring us goods cheaper than we can
make them ourselves, we shall be the gainers. The
more we get in imports as compared with what we
have to give in exports, the better the trade for us.
And since foreigners are not liberal enough to give us
their productions, but will only let us have them in
return for our own productions, how can they ruin our
industry? The only way they could ruin our industry
would be by bringing us for nothing all we want, so as
to save us the necessity for work. If this were possible,
ought it seem very dreadful?
Consider this matter in another way: To impose
taxes on exports in order that home consumers might
get the advantage of lower prices would be quite as
just as to impose taxes on imports in Order that home
producers may get the advantage of higher prices, and
*
EXPORTS AND IMPORTS. 125
it would be far more conformable to the principle of
“the greatest good of the greatest number,” since all of
us are consumers, while only a few of us are producers
of the things that can be raised in price by taxes on
imports. And since the wealthy country is the country
that in proportion to its population contains the largest
quantities of the things of which exports and imports
consist, it would be a far more plausible method of ~
national enrichment to keep such things from going out
than to keep them from coming in.
Now, supposing it were seriously proposed, as a
means for enriching the United States, to put restrictive
duties on the carrying out of wealth instead of the
bringing in of wealth. It is certain that this would be
opposed by protectionists. But what objection could
they make?
The objection they would make would be in sub-
stance this: “The sending away of things in trade
from one country to another does not involve a loss to
the country from which they are sent, but a gain, since
other things of more value are brought back in return
for them. Therefore, to place any restriction upon
the sending away of things would be to lessen instead
of to increase the wealth of a country.” This is true.
But to say this, is to say that to restrict exports would
be injurious because it would diminish imports? Yet,
to diminish imports is the direct aim and effect of pro-
tective tariffs.
Exports and imports, so far as they are induced by
trade, are correlative. Each is the cause and comple-
ment of the other, and to impose any restrictions on
the one is necessarily to lessen the other. And so far
from its being the mark of a profitable commerce that
126 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
the value of a nation's exports exceeds her imports, the
reverse of this is true.
In a profitable international trade the value of im-
ports will always exceed the value of the exports that
pay for them, just as in a profitable trading voyage the
return cargo must exceed in value the cargo carried
out. This is possible to all the nations that are parties
to commerce, for in a normal trade commodities are
carried from places where they are relatively cheap to
places where they are relatively dear, and their value
is thus increased by the transportation, so that a cargo
arrived at its destination has a higher value than on
leaving the port of its exportation. But on the theory
that a trade is profitable only when exports exceed im-
ports, the only way for all countries to trade profitably
with one another would be to carry commodities from
places where they are relatively dear to places where
they are relatively cheap. An international trade
made up of such transactions as the exportation of
manufactured ice from the West Indies to New England,
and the exportation of hot-house fruits from New
England to the West Indies, would enable all countries
to export much larger values than they imported. On
the same theory the more ships sunk at sea the better
for the commercial world. To have all the ships that
left each country sunk before they could reach any
other country would, upon protectionist principles, be
the quickest means of enriching the whole world, since
..all countries could then enjoy the maximum of exports
with the minimum of imports.
It must, however, be borne in mind that all export-
ing and importing are not the exchanging of products.
This, however, is a fact which puts in still stronger
EXPORTS AND IMPORTS. 127
light, if that be possible, the absurdity of the notion
that an excess of exports over imports shows increasing
wealth. When Rome was mistress of the world, Sicily,
Spain, Africa, Egypt, and Britain exported to Italy far
more than they imported from Italy. But so far from
this excess of their exports over their imports indicating
their enrichment, it indicated their impoverishment. It
meant that the wealth produced in the provinces was
being drained to Rome in taxes and tribute and rent,
for which no return was made. The tribute exacted
by Germany from France in 1871 caused a large ex-
cess of French exports over imports. So in India the
“home charges” of an alien government and the remit-
tances of alien officials secure a permanent excess of
exports over imports. So the foreign debt which has
been fastened upon Egypt requires large amounts of
the produce of that country to be sent away for which
there is no return in imports. And so for many years
the exports from Ireland have largely exceeded the
imports into Ireland, owing to the rent drain of ab-
sentee landlords. The Irish landlords who live abroad
do not directly draw produce for their rent, nor yet do
they draw money. Irish cattle, hogs, sheep, butter,
linen and other productions are exported as if in the
regular course of trade, but their proceeds instead of
coming back to Ireland as imports, are, through the
medium of bank and mercantile exchanges, placed to
the credit of the absent landlords, and used up by them.
This drain of commodities in return for which no com-
modities are imported, would be greater yet were it not
for the fact that thousands of Irishmen cross the channel
every summer to help get in the English harvests, and
then return home, and that from those who have perma-
128 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
nently emigrated to other countries there is a constant
stream of remittances to relatives left behind.*
The last time I crossed to England I sat at the
steamer table by two young Englishmen, who drank
much champagne and in other ways showed they had
plenty of money. As we became acquainted I learned
that they were younger sons of English “county
families,” graduates of a sort of school which has
been established in Iowa for wealthy young English-
men who wish to become “gentlemen farmers” or
“estate owners” in the United States. Each had got
him a considerable tract of new land, had cut it up
into farms, erected on each farm a board house and
barn, and then rented these farms to tenants for half
the crops. They liked America, they said; it was
a good country to have an estate in. The land laws
were very good, and if a tenant did not pay promptly
you could get rid of him without long formality. But
they preferred to live in England, and were going back
to enjoy their incomes there, having put their affairs
in the hands of an agent, to whom the tenants were
required to give notice when they wished to reap their
* In Dublin in 1882 I several times met the secretary of one of
the great banking institutions whose branches ramify through Ire-
land. Each time he asked my opinion of the crop prospects in the
United States, as though that were uppermost in his mind when-
ever he met an American. Finally I said to him, “I suppose poor
crops in the United States would be to your advantage, as it would
increase the value of the agricultural products that Ireland ex-
ports.” “Oh, no ; ” he replied, “we are greatly interested in hav-
ing the American crops good. Good crops mean good times, and
good times in the United States mean large remittances from the
Irish in America to their families at home, and these remittances
are more important to business here than the prices we get for our
own products.”
EXPORTS AND IMPORTS. 129
* *
crops, and who saw that the landlord's half was prop-
erly rendered. Thus in this case half the crop (less
commissions) of certain Iowa farmers must annually be
exported without any return in imports. And this
tide of exposs for which no imports come back is only
commencing to flow. Many Englishmen already own
American land by the hundred thousand, and even by
the million acres, and are only beginning to draw rent
and royalties. Punch recently had a podderous joke,
the point of which was that the British House of Lords
had much greater landed interests in the United States
than in Great Britain. . If not true already, it will not
under present conditions be many years before the
English aristocracy will draw far larger incomes from
their American estates than from their home estates—
incomes to supply which we must export without any
return in imports.”
* The Chicago Tribune of January 25, 1886, contains a long
account of the American estates of an Irish landlord, William
Scully. This Scully, who was one of the most notorious of the
rack-renting and evictimg Irish landlords, owns from 75,000 to
90,000 acres of the richest land in Illinois, besides large tracts in
other States. His estates are cut up into farms and rented to ten-
ants who are obliged to pay all taxes and make all improvements,
and who are not permitted to sell their crops until the rent is paid.
A “spy system ’’ is maintained, and tenants are required to doff
their hats when they enter the “estate office.” The Tribune de-
scribes them as reduced to a condition of absolute serfdom. The
houses in which they live are the poorest shanties, consisting gen-
erally of a room and a half, and the whole district is described as
blighted Scully got most of his land at nominal prices, ranging
as low as seventy-five cents per acre. He lives in London, and is
said to draw from his American estates a net income of $400,000 a.
year, which means, of course, that American produce to that value
is exported every year without any imports coming back. The
Tribune closes its long account by saying : “Not content with
acquiring land himself, Scully has induced a number of his rela-
130 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
In the commerce which goes on between the United
States and Europe there are thus other elements than
the exchange of productions. The sums borrowed of
Europe by the sale of railway and other bonds, the
sums paid by Europeans for land in the ºnited States
or invested in industrial enterprises here, capital brought
by emigrants, what is spent by Europeans traveling here,
and some Small amounts of the nature of gifts, legacies,
and successions tend to Swell our imports or reduce our
exports.
On the other hand, not only do we pay in exports to
Europe for our imports from Brazil, India, and such
countries, but interest on bonds and other obligations,
profits on capital invested here, rent for American land
owned abroad, remittances from immigrants to relatives
at home, property passing by will or inheritance to
people abroad, payments for Ocean transportation for-
merly carried on by our own vessels but now carried
on by foreign vessels, the sums spent by American
tourists who every year visit Europe, and by the increas-
ing number of rich Americans who live in Europe, all
contribute to swell our exports and reduce our imports.
The annual balance against us on these accounts is
already very large and is steadily growing larger. Were
we to prevent importations absolutely we should still
have to export largely in order to pay our rents, to
meet interest, and to provide for the increasing number
of rich Americans who travel or reside abroad. But
the fact that our exports must now thus exceed our
imports instead of being what protectionists take it for,
an evidence of increasing prosperity, is simply the evi-
tives to become American landlords, and their system is patterned
~ on his own,”
EXPORTS AND IMPORTS. º 131
dence of a drain upon national wealth like that which
has so impoverished Ireland. -
But this drain is not to be stopped by tariffs. It
proceeds from a deeper cause than any tariff can touch,
and is but part of a general drift. Our internal com-
merce also involves the flow from country to city, and
from West to East, of commodities for which there is
no return. Our large mine owners, ranch owners, land
speculators, and many of our large farmers, live in the
great cities. Our small farmers have had in large part
to buy their farms on mortgage of men who live in cities
to the east of them; the bonds of the national, state,
county, and municipal governments are largely so held,
as are the stocks and bonds of railway and other com-
panies—the result being that the country has to send
to the cities, the West to the East, more than is re-
turned. This flow is increasing, and, no matter what
be our tariff legislation, must continue steadily to
increase, for it springs from the most fundamental of
Our Social adjustments, that which makes land private
property. As the land in Illinois or Iowa, or Oregon,
or New Mexico owned by a resident of New York or
Boston increases in value, people who live in those
States must send more and more of their produce to
the New Yorker or Bostonian. They may work hard,
but grow relatively poorer; he may not work at all, but
grow relatively richer, so that when they need capital
for building railroads or any other purpose, they must
borrow and pay interest, while he can lend and get
interest. The tendency of the time is thus to the
ownership of the whole country by residents of cities,
and it makes no difference to the people of the country
districts whether those cities are in America or Europe.
CEIAPTER XIII.
CONFUSIONS ARISING FROM THE USE OF MONEY.
THERE is no one who in exchanging his own pro-
ductions for the productions of another would think
that the more he gave and the less he got the better
off he would be. Yet to many men nothing seems
clearer than that the more of its own productions a
nation sends away, and the less of the productions of
other nations it receives in return, the more profitable
its trade. So widespread is this belief that to-day nearly
all civilized nations endeavor to discourage the bring-
ing in of the productions of other nations while re-
garding with satisfaction the sending away of their
OWIO.
What is the reason of this? Men are not apt to
apply to the transactions of nations principles opposite
to those they apply to individual transactions. On the
contrary, the natural tendency is to personify nations,
and to think and speak of them as actuated by the
same motives and governed by the same laws as the
human beings of whom they are made up. Nor have
we to look far to see that the preposterous notion that
a nation gains by exporting and loses by importing
actually arises from the application to the commerce
between nations of ideas to which individual transac-
tions accustom civilized men. What men dispose of to
others we term their sales; what they obtain from
others we term their purchases. Hence we become
CONFUSIONS ARISING FROM THE USE OF MONEY. 133
accustomed to think of exports as sales, and of imports
as purchases. And as in daily life we habitually think
that the greater the value of a man's sales and the less
the value of his purchases the better his business; so,
if we do not stop to fix the meaning of the words we
use, it seems a matter of course that the more a na-
tion exports and the less it imports the richer it will
become.
It is significant of its origin that such a notion is
unknown among savages. Nor could it have arisen
among civilized men if they were accustomed to trade
as savages do. Not long ago a class of traders called
“soap-fat men” used to go from house to house exchang-
ing soap for the refuse fat accumulated by housewives.
In this petty commerce, carried on in this primitive
manner, the habit of thinking that in a profitable trade
the value of sales must exceed the value of purchases
could never have arisen, it being clearly to the interest
of each party that the value of what he sold (or ex-
ported) should be as little as possible, and the value of
what he bought (or imported) as great as possible. But
in civilized society this is only the exceptional form of
trade. Buying and selling, as our daily life familiarizes
us with them, are not the exchange of commodities for
commodities, but the exchange of money for commod-
ities, or of commodities for money.
It is to confusions of thought growing out of this
use of money that we may trace the belief that a nation
profits by exporting and loses by importing—a belief
to which countless lives and incalculable wealth have
been sacrificed in bloody wars, and which to-day moulds
the policy of nearly all civilized nations and interposes
artificial barriers to the commerce of the World.
12
134 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
The primary form of trade is barter—the exchange
of commodities for commodities. But just as when we
begin to think and speak of length, weight or bulk, it
is necessary to adopt measures or standards by which
these qualities can be expressed, so when trade begins
there arises a need for some common standard by which
the value of different articles can be apprehended. The
difficulties attending barter soon lead, also, to the adop-
tion by common consent of some commodity as a med-
ium of exchange, by means of which he who wishes to
exchange a thing for one or more other things is no
longer obliged to find some one with exactly reciprocal
desires, but is enabled to divide the complete exchange
into stages or steps, which can be made with different
persons, to the enormous saving of time and trouble.
In primitive society, cattle, skins, shells, and many
other things have in a rude way fulfilled these func.
tions. But the precious metals are so peculiarly adapt-
ed to this use that wherever they have become known
mankind has been led to adopt them as money. They
are at first used by weight, but a great step in advance
is taken when they are coined into pieces of definite
weight and purity, so that no one who receives them
needs to take the trouble of weighing and testing
them. As civilization advances, as society becomes
more settled and orderly, and exchanges more numerous
and regular, gold and silver are gradually superseded
as mediums of exchange by credit in various forms.
By means of accounts current, one purchase is made to
balance another purchase and one debt to cancel an
other debt, Individuals or associations of recognized
solvency issue bills of exchange, letters of credit, notes
and drafts, which largely take the place of coin; banks
CONFUSIONS ARISING FROM THE USE OF MONEY. 135
transfer credits between individuals, and clearing-houses .
transfer credits between banks, so that immense trans-
actions are carried on with a very small actual use of
money; and finally, credits of convenient denominations,
printed upon paper, and adapted to transference from
hand to hand without indorsement or formality, being
cheaper and more convenient, take in part or in whole
the place of gold or silver in the country where they
are issued. *
This is, in brief, the history of that labor-saving in-
strument which ranges in its forms from the cowries of
the African or the warmpum of the red Indian to the
bank-note or greenback, and which does so much to
facilitate trade that without it civilization would be im-
possible. The part which it plays in social life and
intercourse is so necessary, its use is so common in
thought and speech and actual transaction, that cer-
tain confusions with regard to it are apt to grow up.
It is not needful to speak of the delusion that interest
grows out of the use of money, or that increase of
money is increase of wealth, or that paper money can-
not properly fulfill its functions unless an equivalent of
coin is buried somewhere, but only of such confusions
of thought as have a relation to international trade.
I was present yesterday when one farmer gave an-
other farmer a horse and four pigs for a mare. Both
seemed pleased with the transaction, but neither said,
“Thank you.” Yet when money is given for any-
thing else it is usual for the person who receives the
money to say, “Thank you,” or in some other way
to indicate that he is more obliged in receiving the
money than the other party is in receiving the thing
_6.
the money is given for. This custom is one of the
136 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
indications of a habit of thought which (although it
is clear that a dollar cannot be more valuable than
a dollar's worth) attaches the idea of benefit more to
the giving of money for commodities than to the giving
of commodities for money.
The main reason of this I take to be that difficulties of
exchange are most felt on the side of reduction to the
medium of exchange. To exchange anything for money
it is necessary to find some one who wants that par-
ticular thing, but, this exchange effected, the exchange
of money for other things is generally easier, since all
who have anything to exchange are willing to take
money for it. This, and the fact that the value of
money is more certain and definite than the value of
things measured by it, and the further fact that the sale
or conversion of commodities into money completes
those transactions upon which we usually estimate
profit, easily lead us to look upon the getting of money
as the object and end of trade, and upon selling as more
profitable than buying.
Further than this, money, being the medium of ex-
change—the thing that can be most quickly and easily
exchanged for other things—is, therefore, the most
convenient in contingencies. In ruder times, before
the organization of credit had reached such devel-
opment as now, when the world was cut up into small
states constantly warring with each other, when order
was less well preserved, property far more insecure and
the exhibition of riches often led to extortion; when
pirates infested the sea and robbers the land; when
fires were frequent and insurance had not been devised;
when prisoners were held to ransom and captured cities
given up to sack, the contingencies in which it is im.
jº
*- *-
CONFUSIONS ARISING FROM THE USE OF MONEY. 137
portant to have wealth in the form in which it can be
most conveniently carried, readily concealed, and speed-
ily exchanged, were far more numerous than now, and
every one strove to keep some part of his wealth in
the precious metals. The peasant buried his savings,
the merchant kept his money in his strong box,
the miser gloated over his golden hoard and the
prince sought to lay up a great treasure for time of
sudden need. Thus gold and silver were even more
striking symbols of wealth than now, and the habit of
thinking of them as the only real wealth was formed.
This habit of thought gave ready support to the pro-
tective policy. When the growth of commerce made it
possible to raise large revenues by indirect taxation,
kings and their ministers soon discovered how easily
the people could thus be made to pay an amount of
taxes that they would have resisted if levied directly.
Import taxes were first levied to obtain, revenue, but
not only was it found to be exceedingly convenient to
tax goods in the seaport towns from whence they were
distributed through the country, but the taxation of im-
ported goods met with the warm support of such home
producers as were thus protected from competition. An
interest was thus created in favor of “protection,”
which availed itself of national prejudices and popular
habits of thought, and a system was by degrees elabo-
rated, which for centuries swayed the policy of Euro-
pean nations.
This system, which Adam Smith attacked under the
name of the mercantile system of political economy,
regarded nations as merchants competing with each
other for the money of the world, and aimed at en-
riching a country by bringing into it as much gold and
138 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE. -
silver as possible, and permitting as little as possible to
flow out. To do this it was sought not only to pro-
hibit the carrying of precious metals out of the country,
but to encourage the domestic production of goods that
could be sold abroad, and to throw every obstacle in
the way of similar foreign or colonial industries. Not
only were heavy import duties or absolute prohibitions
placed on such products of foreign industry as might
come into competition with home industry, but the ex-
ports of such raw materials as foreign industries might
require were burdened with export duties or entirely
prohibited under savage penalties of death or mutila-
tion. Skilled workmen were forbidden to leave the
country lest they might teach foreigners their art; do.
mestic industries were encouraged by bounties, by
patents of monopoly and by the creation of artificial
markets—sometimes by premiums paid on exports,
and sometimes by laws which compelled the use of
their products. One instance of this was the Act of
Parliament which required every corpse to be buried
in a woolen shroud, a piece of stupidity only paralleled
by the laws under which the American people are taxed
to bury in underground safes $2,000,000 of coined silver
every month, and keep a hundred millions of goldlying
idle in the treasury.
But to attempt to increase the supply of gold and
silver by such methods is both foolish and useless.
Though the value of the precious metals is high their
utility is low ; their principal use, next to that of
money, being in Ostentation. And just as a farmer
would become poorer, not richer, by selling his breed-
ing stock and seed grain to obtain gold to hoard and
silver to put on his table, or as a manufacturer would
CONFUSIONS ARISING FROM THE USE OF MONEY. 139
lessen his income by selling a useful machine and keep-
ing in his safe the money he got for it, so must a nation
lessen its productive power by stimulating its exports
or reducing its imports of things that could be pro-
ductively used, in order to accumulate gold and silver
for which it has no productive use. Such amounts of
the precious metals as are needed for use as money will
come to every nation that participates in the trade of
the world, by virtue of a tendency that sets at naught
all endeavors artificially to enhance supply, a tendency
as constant as the tendency of water to seek a level.
Wherever trade exists all commodities capable of trans-
portation tend to flow from wherever their value is .
relatively low to wherever their value is relatively
high. This tendency is checked by the difficulties
of transportation, which vary with different things
as their bulk, weight, and liability to injury com-
pare with their value. The precious metals do not
suffer from transportation, and having (especially gold)
little weight and bulk as compared with their value,
are so portable that a very slight change in their rela-
tive value is sufficient to cause their flow. So easily
can they be carried and concealed that legal restrictions,
backed by coast guards and custom-house officials,
have never been able to prevent them from finding
their way out of a country where their value was rela-
tively low and into a country where their value was
relatively high. The attempts of her despotic monarchs
to keep in Spain the precious metals she drew from
America were like trying to hold water in a sieve.
The effect of artificially increasing the supply of
precious metals in any country must be to lower their
value as compared with that of other commodities.
140 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
The moment, therefore, that restrictions by which it is
attempted to attract and retain the precious metals,
begin so to operate as to increase the supply of those
metals, a tendency to their outflowing is set up, in-
creasing in force as the efforts to attract and retain
them become more strenuous. Thus all efforts arti-
ficially to increase the gold and silver of a country have
had no result save to hamper industry and to make the
country that engaged in them poorer instead of richer.
This, experience has taught civilized nations, and
few of them now make any direct efforts to attract or
retain the precious metals, save by uselessly hoarding
them in burglar-proof vaults as we do.
But the notibn that gold and silver are the only true
money, and that as such they have a peculiar value, still
underlies protectionist arguments,” and the habit of as.
sociating incomes with sales, and expenditure with pur-
chases, which is formed in the thought and speech of
every-day life, still disposes men to accept a policy which
aims at restricting imports by protective tariffs. Being
accustomed to measure the profits of business men by
the excess of their sales over their purchases, the as-
sumption that the exports of a nation are equivalent to
the sales of a merchant, and its imports to his pur-
* For instance, Professor Thompson writing where and when,
save for subsidiary tokens, paper money was exclusively used, and
so conscious of its ability to perform all the functions of money
that he declares it to be as much superior to coin as the railway is
to the stage-coach (Political Economy, p. 152), goes on subsequently
(p. 223) to contend that protective duties are necessary to prevent
the poorer country being drained of its money by the richer country,
thus tacitly assuming that gold and silver alone are money—since
neither he nor any one else would pretend that one country could
drain another of its paper money.
CONFUSIONS ARISING FROM THE USE OF MONEY. 141
chases, leads easily to the conclusion that the greater
the amount of exports and the less the amount of im-
ports, the more profit a nation gets by its trade.*
Yet it only needs attention to see that this assump-
tion involves a confusion of ideas. When we say that
a merchant is doing a profitable business because his
sales exceed his purchases, what we are really thinking
of as sales is not the goods he sends out, but the money
that we infer he takes in in exchange for them ; what
we are really thinking of as purchases is not the goods
he takes in, but the money we infer he pays out. We
mean, in short, that he is growing richer because his in-
come exceeds his out-go. We become so used in ordi-
nary affairs to this transposition of terms by inference,
that when we think of a nation's exports as its sales
and of its imports as its purchases, habit leads us to at-
tach to these words the same inferential meaning, and
thus unconsciously to give to a word expressive of out-
going, the significance of in-coming ; and to a word
expressive of in-coming, the significance of out-going.
But, manifestly, when we compare the trade of a mer-
chant carried on in the usual way with the trade of a
nation, it is not the goods that a merchant sells, but the
money that he pays out, that is analogous to the ex-
ports of a country; not the goods that he buys, but the
money he takes in, that is analogous to imports. It is
only where the trade of a merchant is carried on by the
* A conclusion frequently carried by protectionists to the most
ridiculous lengths, as, for instance, in the recent declaration of a
Protectionist Senator (Wm. M. Evarts, of New York), that he would
be ready for free trade “when protection had so far developed all
our industries that the United States could sell in competition with
all the world, and at the same time be free from the necessity of
buying anything from all the world.”
142 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
exchange of commodities for commodities, that the com-
modities he sells are analogous to the exports, and the
commodities he buys are analogous to the imports of a
nation. And the village dealer who exchanges grocer-
ies and dry goods for eggs, poultry, and farm produce,
or the Indian trader who exchanges manufactured
goods for furs, is manifestly doing the more profitable
business the more the value of the commodities he takes
in (his imports) exceeds the value of the goods he gives
out (his exports).
The fact is, that all trade in the last analysis is sim-
ply what it is in its primitive form of barter, the ex-
change of commodities for commodities. The carrying
on of trade by the use of money does not change its es-
sential character, but merely permits the various ex-
changes of which trade is made up to be divided into
parts or steps, and thus more easily effected. When
commodities are exchanged for money, but half a full
exchange is completed. When a man sells a thing for
money it is to use the money in buying some other
thing—and it is only as money has this power that any-
one wants or will take it. Our common use of the
word “money” is largely metaphorical. We speak of
a wealthy man as a moneyed man, and in talking of his
wealth say that he has so much “money,” whereas the
fact probably is, that though he may be worth mil-
lions, he never has at any one time more than a few dol-
lars, or at most a few hundred dollars, in his possession.
His possessions really consist of houses, lands, goods,
stocks, or of bonds or other obligations to pay money.
The possession of these things we speak of as the pos-
session of money because we habitually estimate their
value in money. If we habitually estimated value in
CONFUSIONS ARISING FROM THE USE OF MONEY. 143
shells, sugar or cattle, we would speak of rich men as
having much of these, just as the use of postage stamps
as currency at the beginning of our civil war led to
speaking of rich men in the Slang of the day, as those
who had plenty of “stamps.” And so, when a mer-
chant is doing a profitable business, though we speak of
him as making or accumulating money, the fact is,
save in very rare cases, that he is putting out money as
fast as he gets it in. The shrewd business man does not
stow away money. On the contrary, with the money
he obtains from his sales he hastens to make other pur-
chases. If he does not buy commodities for use in his
business, or commodities or services for personal gratifi-
cation, he buys lands, houses, stocks, bonds, mort-
gages, or other things from which he expects a profit-
able return.
The trade between nations, made up as it is of nu-
merous individual transactions which separately are
but parts or steps in a complete exchange, is in the
aggregate, like the primitive form of trade, the ex-
change of commodities for commodities. Money plays
no part in international trade, and the world has yet to
reach that stage of civilization which will give us in-
ternational money. The paper currency which in all
civilized nations now constitutes the larger part of their
money, is never exported to settle balances, and when
gold or silver coin is exported or imported it is as a
commodity, and its value is estimated at that of the
bullion contained. What each nation imports is paid
for in the commodities which it exports, unless received
as loans, or investments, or as interest, rent, or tribute.
Before commerce had reached its present refinement of
division and subdivision this was in many individual
144 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
cases clear enough. A vessel sailed from New York,
Philadelphia, or Boston carrying, on account of owner
or shipper, a cargo of flour, lumber and staves to the
West Indies, where it was sold, and the proceeds in-
vested in sugar, rum and molasses, which were brought
back, or which, perhaps, were carried to Europe, there
sold, and the proceeds invested in European goods,
which were brought home. At present the exporter
and importer are usually different persons, but the bills
of exchange drawn by the one against goods exported
are bought by the other, and used to pay for goods im-
ported. So far as the country is concerned, the trans-
action is the same as though importers and exporters
were the same persons, and that imports exceed exports
in value is no more proof of a losing trade than that in
the old times a trading ship brought home a cargo worth
more than that she carried out was proof of an unprofit-
able voyage.
CEIAPTER XIV.
Do HIGH wages NECESSITATE PROTECTION?
IN the United States, at present, protection derives
strong support from the belief that the products of the
lower paid labor of other countries could undersell the
products of our higher paid labor if free competition
were permitted. This belief not only leads working-
men to imagine protection necessary to keep up wages
—a matter of which I shall speak hereafter; but it also
induces the belief that protection is necessary to the
interests of the country at large—a matter which now
falls in our way.
And further than concerns the tariff this belief has
important bearings. It enables employers to persuade
themselves that they are serving general interests in re-
ducing wages or resisting their increase, and greatly
strengthens the opposition to the efforts of working-
men to improve their condition, by setting against
them a body of opinion that otherwise would be
neutral, if not strongly in their favor. This is clearly
seen in the case of the eight-hour system. Much of
the opposition to this great reform arises from the be-
lief that the increase of wages to which such a reduction
of working hours would be equivalent, would place
the United States at a great disadvantage in production
as compared with other countries.
It is evident that even those who most vociferously
18 º
146 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
assert that we need a protective tariff on account of our
higher standard of wages do not really believe it them-
Selves. For if protection be needed against countries
of lower wages, it must be most needed against coun-
tries of lowest wages and least needed against countries
of highest wages. Now, against what country is it
that American protectionists most demand protection?
If we could have a protective tariff against only one
country in the whole world, what country is it that
American protectionists would select to be protected
against? Unquestionably it is Great Britain. But Great
Britain, instead of being the country of lowest wages,
is, next to the United States and the British colonies,
the country of highest wages.
“It is a poor rule that will not work both ways.” If
we require a protective tariff because of our high wages,
then countries of low wages require free trade—or, at
the very least, have nothing to fear from free trade.
How is it, then, that we find the protectionists of
France, Germany, and other low wage countries pro-
testing that their industries will be ruined by the free
competition of the higher wage industries of Great
Britain and the United States just as vehemently as
our protectionists protest that our industries would be
ruined if exposed to free &ompetition with the products
of the “pauper labor” of Europe?
As popularly put, the argument that the country of
high wages needs a protective tariff runs in this way:
“Wages are higher here than elsewhere; therefore, if
the produce of cheaper foreign labor were freely ad-
mitted it would drive the produce of our dearer domestic
labor out of the market.” But the conclusion does not
follow from the premise. To make it valid two inter-
DO HIGH WAGES NECESSITATE PROTECTION? 147
mediate propositions must be assumed: First that low
wages mean low cost of production; and second, that
production is determined solely by cost—or, to put it
in another way, that trade being free, everything will
be produced where it can be produced at least cost.
Let us examine these two propositions separately.
If the country of low wages can undersell the coun-
try of high wages, how is it that though the American
farm hand receives double the wages of the English
agricultural laborer, yet American grain undersells
English grain? How is it that while the general level
of wages is higher here than anywhere else in the world
we nevertheless do export the products of our high
priced labor to countries of lower priced labor?
The protectionist answer is that American grain un-
dersells English grain, in spite of the difference of
wages, because of our natural advantages for the pro-
duction of grain; and that the bulk of our exports con-
sists of those crude productions in which wages are not
so important an element of cost, since they do not em-
body so much labor as the more elaborate productions
called manufactures. º:
But the first part of this answer is an admission that
the rate of wages is not the determining element in the
cost of production, and that the country of low wages
does not necessarily produce more cheaply than the
country of high wages; while, as for the distinction
drawn between the cruder and the more elaborate pro-
ductions, it is evident that this is founded on the com-
parison of such things by bulk or weight, whereas the
only measure of embodied labor is value. A pound of
cloth embodies more labor than a pound of cotton, but
this is not true of a dollar's worth. That a small
148 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
weight of cloth will exchange for a large weight of cot-
ton, or a small bulk of watches, for a large bulk of
wheat, means simply that equal amounts of labor will
produce larger weights or bulks of the one thing than
of the other; and in the same way the exportation of a
certain value of grain, Ore, stone or timber means the
exportation of exactly as much of the produce of labor
as would the exportation of the same value of lace or
fancy goods.
Looking further, we see in every direction that it is
not the fact that low priced labor gives advantage in
production. If this is the fact how was it that the
development of industry in the slave States of the
American Union was not more rapid than in the free
States? How is it that Mexico, where peon labor can
be had for from four to six dollars a month, does not
undersell the products of our more highly paid labor?
How is it that China and India and Japan are not
“flooding the world” with the products of their cheap
labor? How is it that England, where labor is better
paid than on the Continent, leads the whole of Europe
in commerce and manufactures” The truth is, that
a low rate of wages does not mean a low cost of pro-
duction, but the reverse. The universal and obvious
truth is, that the country where wages are highest can
produce with the greatest economy, because workmen
have there the most intelligence, the most spirit and the
most ability; because invention and discovery are there
most quickly made and most readily utilized. The
great inventions and discoveries which so enormously
increase the power of human labor to produce wealth
have all been made in countries where wages are com-
paratively high.
Do HIGH WAGES NECESSITATE PROTECTION? 149
That low wages mean inefficient labor may be seen
wherever we look. Half a dozen Bengalese carpenters
are needed to do a job that one American carpenter can
do in less time. American residents in China get Ser-
vants for almost nothing, but find that so many are
required that servants cost more than in the United
States; yet the Chinese who are largely employed in
domestic service in California, and get wages that they
would not have dreamed of in China, are efficient
workers. Go to High Bridge, and you will see a great
engine attended by a few men, exerting the power of
thousands of horses in pumping up a small river for
the supply of New York city, while on the Nile you
may see Egyptian fellahs raising water by buckets and
tread wheels. In Mexico, with labor at four or five
dollars a month, silver ore has for centuries been carried
to the surface on the backs of men who climbed rude
ladders, but when silver mining began in Nevada, where
labor could not be had for less than five or six dollars
a day, steam power was employed. In Russia, where
wages are very low, grain is still reaped by the sickle
and threshed with the flail or by the hoofs of horses,
while in our Western States, where labor is very high
as compared with the Russian standard, grain is reaped,
threshed and sacked by machinery.
, If it were true that equal amounts of labor always
produced equal results, then cheap labor might mean
cheap production. But this is obviously untrue. The
power of human muscle is, indeed, much the same
everywhere, and if his wages be sufficient to keep him
in good bodily health the poorly paid laborer can, per-
haps, exert as much physical force as the highly paid
laborer. But the power of human muscles, though
150 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
necessary to all production, is not the primary and ef.
ficient force in production. That force is human intel-
ligence, and human muscles are merely the agency by
which that intelligence makes connection with and
takes hold of external things, so as to utilize natural
forces and mould matter to conformity with its desires.
A race of intelligent pygmies with muscles no stronger
than those of the grasshopper could produce far more
wealth than a race of stupid giants with muscles as
strong as those of the elephant. Now, intelligence
varies with the standard of comfort, and the standard
of comfort varies with wages. Wherever men are con-
demned to a poor, hard and precarious living their
mental qualities sink toward the level of the brute.
Wherever easier conditions prevail the qualities that
raise man above the brute and give him power to mas-
ter and compel external nature develope and expand.
And so it is that the efficiency of labor is greatest
where laborers get the best living and have the most
leisure—that is to say, where wages are highest.
How then, in the face of these obvious facts, can we
account for the prevalence of the belief that the low
wage country has an advantage in production over the
high wage country’ It cannot be charged to the teach-
ing of protection. This is one of the fallacies which
protectionism avails itself of, rather than one for which
it is responsible. Men do not hold it because they are
protectionists, but become protectionists, because they
hold it. And it seems to be as firmly held, and On
occasion as energetically preached by So-called free
traders as by protectionists. Witness the predictions
of free trade economists that trades unions, if successful
in raising wages and shortening hours, would destroy
Do HIGH wagºs NECESSITATE PROTECTION? 151
England's ability to sell her goods to other nations,
and the similar objections by so-called free traders to
similar movements on the part of workingmen in the
United States.
The truth is that the notion that low wages give a
country an advantage in production is a careless infer-
ence from the every-day fact that it is an advantage to
an individual producer to obtain labor at low wages.
It is true that an individual producer gains an ad-
vantage when he can force down the wages of his em-
ployees below the ordinary level, or can import laborers
who will work for him for less, and that he may by
this means be enabled to undersell his competitors,
while the employer who continues to pay higher wages
than other employers about him will, before long, be
driven out of business. But it by no means follows
that the country where wages are low can undersell the
country where wages are high. For the efficiency of
labor, though it may somewhat vary with the particular
wages paid, is in greater degree determined by the
general standard of comfort and intelligence, and the
prevailing habits and methods which grow out of them.
When a single employer manages to get labor for less
than the rate of wages prevailing around him, the effi-
ciency of the labor he gets is still largely fixed by that
rate. But a country where the general rate of wages is
low does not have a similar advantage over other coun-
tries, because there the general efficiency of labor must
also be low.
The contention that industry can be more largely
carried on where wages are low than where wages are
high, another form of the same fallacy, may readily be
seen to spring from a confusion of thought. For in-
152 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
stance, in the earlier days of California it was often said
that the lowering of wages would be a great benefit to
the State, as lower wages would enable capitalists to .
work deposits of low grade quartz that it would not pay
to work at the then existing rate of wages. But it is
evident that a mere reduction of wages would not have
resulted in the working of poorer mines, since it could
not have increased the amount of labor or capital
available for the working of mines, and what existed
would still have been devoted to the working of the
richer in preference to the poorer mines, no matter how
much wages were reduced. It might, however, have
been said that the effect would be to increase the profits
of capital and thus bring in more capital. But, to say
nothing of the deterrent effect upon the coming in of
labor, a moment's reflection will show that such a re-
duction of wages would not add to the profits of capital.
It would add to the profits of mine owners, and mines
would bring higher prices. Eliminating improvements
in methods, or changes in the value of the product,
lower wages and the working of poorer mines come, of
course, together, but this is not because the lower wages
cause the working of poorer mines, but the reverse. As
the richer natural opportunities are taken up and pro-
duction is forced to devote itself to natural opportuni-
ties that will yield less to the same exertion, wages fall.
There is, however, no gain to capital; and under such
circumstances we do not see interest increase. The
gain accrues to those who have possessed themselves of
natural opportunities, and what we see is that the value
of land increases.
The immediate effect of a general reduction of wages
in any country would be merely to alter the distribution
of wealth. Of the amount produced less would go to the
“-w
, *
*
DO HIGH WAGES. NECESSITATE PROTECTION? 153
laborers and more to those who share in the results of
production without contributing to it. Some changes
in exports and imports would probably follow a general’
reduction of wages, owing to changes in relative de-
mand. The working classes, getting less than before,
would have to reduce their luxuries, and perhaps live
on cheaper food. Other classes, finding their incomes
increased, might use more costly food and demand
more of the costlier luxuries, and larger numbers of
them might go abroad and use up in foreign countries
the produce of exports, by which, of course, imports
would be diminished. But except as to such changes
the foreign commerce of a country would be unaffected.
The country as a whole would have no more to sell and
could buy no more than before. And in a little while
the inevitable effect of the degradation of labor involved
in the reduction of wages would begin to tell in the re-
duced power of production, and both exports and im-
ports would fall off.
So if in any country there were a general increase of
wages, the immediate effect would only be so to alter
the distribution of wealth that more of the aggregate
product would go to the laboring classes and less to
those who live on the labor of others. The result would
be that more of the cheaper luxuries would be called
for and less of the more costly luxuries. But pro-
ductive power would in nowise be lessened; there
would be no less to export than before and no less
ability to pay for imports. On the contrary, some of
the idle classes would find their incomes so reduced
that they would have to go to work and thus increase
production, while as soon as an increase in wages began
to tell on the habits of the people and on industrial
methods productive power would increase.
CELAPTER XV.
OF ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES AS REASONS
FOR PROTECTION.
WE have seen that low wages do not mean low cost
of production, and that a high standard of wages, in-
stead of putting a country at a disadvantage in produc-
tion, is really an advantage. This disposes of the claim
that protection is rendered necessary by high wages, by
showing the invalidity of the first assumption upon
which it is based. But it is worth while to examine
the second assumption in this claim—that production
is determined by cost, so that a country of less advan-
tages cannot produce if the free competition of a coun.
try of greater advantages be permitted. For while we
are sometimes told that a country needs protection be-
cause of great natural advantages that ought to be de-
veloped, we are at other times told that protection is
needed because of the sparseness of population, the
want of capital or machinery or skill, or because of high
taxes or a high rate of interest,” or other conditions
which, it may be, involve real disadvantage.
* The higher rate of interest in the United States than in Great
Britain has until recently been one of the stock reasons of American
protectionists for demanding a high tariff. We do not hear so much
of this now that the rate in New York is as low as in London, if not
lower, but we hear no less of the need for protection. It is hardly
necessary in this discussion to treat of the nature and law of interest,
a subject which I have gone over in Progress and Poverty. It may,
ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES. 155
But without reference to the reality of the alleged ad-
vantage or disadvantage, all these special pleas for pro- .
tection are met when it is shown, as it can be shown,
that whatever be its advantages or disadvantages for
production a country can always increase its wealth by
foreign trade.
If we suppose two countries each of which is, for any
reason, at a decided disadvantage in Some branch of
production in which the other has a decided advantage,
it is evident that the free exchange of commodities be-
tween them will be mutually beneficial, by enabling
each to make up for its own disadvantage by availing
itself of the advantage of the other, just as the blind
man and the lame man did in the familiar story. Trade
between them will give to each country a greater
amount of all things than it could otherwise obtain
with the same quantity of labor. Such a case re-
sembles that of two workmen, each having as to some
things skill superior to the other, and who, by working
together, each devoting himself to that part for which
he is the better fitted, can accomplish more than twice
as much as if each worked separately.
But let us suppose two countries, one of which has
advantages superior to the other for all the produc-
tions of which both are capable. Trade between them
being free, would one country do all the exporting
and the other all the importing? That, of course,
however, be worth while to say that a high rate of interest where it
does not proceed from insecurity, is not to be regarded as a disad-
vantage, but rather as evidence of the large returns to the active
factors of production, labor and capital—returns which diminish as
rent rises and the land owner gets a larger share of their produce for
permitting labor and capital to work.
156 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
*
would be preposterous. Would trade, then, be im-
possible? Certainly not. Unless the people of the
country of less advantages transferred themselves bod-
ily to the country of greater advantages, trade would
go on with mutual benefit. The people of the coun-
try of greater advantages would import from the coun-
try of less advantages those products as to which the
difference of advantage between the two countries was
least, and would export in return those products as to
which the difference was greatest. By this exchange
both peoples would gain. The people of the country
of poorest advantages would gain by it some part of
the advantages of the other country, and the people of
the country of greatest advantages would also gain,
since, by being saved the necessity of producing the
things as to which their advantage was least, they
could concentrate their energies upon the production of
things in which their advantage was greatest. This
case would resemble that of two workmen of different
degrees of skill in all parts of their trade, or that of a
skilled workman and an unskilled helper. Though
the workman might be able to perform all parts of the
work in less time than the helper, yet there would be
some parts in which the advantage of his superior skill
would be less than in others; and as by leaving these
to the helper he could devote more time to those parts
in which superior skill would be most effective, there
would be, as in the former case, a mutual gain in their
working together.
Thus it is that neither advantages nor disadvantages
afford any reason for restraining trade.” Trade is al-
* In point of fact there is no country which as to all branches
of production can be said to have superior advantages. The con-
ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES. 157
ways to the benefit of both parties. If it were not there
would be no disposition to carry it on.
And thus we see again the fallacy of the protectionist
contention that if it takes no more labor to produceathing
in our country than elsewhere, we shall lose nothing
by shutting out the foreign product, even though we
have to pay a higher price for the home product. The
interchange of the products of labor does not depend
upon differences of absolute cost, but of comparative
cost. Goods may profitably be sent from places where
they cost more labor to places where they cost less
labor, provided (and this is the only case in which they
ever will be so sent) that a still greater difference in
labor-cost exists as to other things which the first coun-
try desires to obtain. Thus tea, which Horace Greeley
was fond of referring to as a production that might
advantageously be naturalized in the United States by
a heavy duty, could undoubtedly be produced in the
United States at less cost of labor than in China, for in
transportation to the seaboard, packing, etc., we could
save upon Chinese methods. But there are other things,
ditions which make one part of the habitable globe better fitted for
some productions, unfit it for others, and what is disadvantage for
Some kinds of production, is generally advantage for other kinds.
Even the lack of rain which makes some parts of the globe useless
to man, may, if invention ever succeeds in directly utilizing the
power of the Sun's rays, be found to be especially advantageous for
certain parts of production. The advantages and disadvantages
that come from the varying density of population, the special de-
velopment of certain forms of industry, etc., are also largely rela-
tive. The most positive of all advantages in production—that
which most certainly gives superiority in all branches, is that which
arises from that general intelligence which increases with the in-
crease of the comfort and leisure of the masses of the people, that
is to say, with the increase of wages.
14
158 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
such as the mining of silver, the refining of oil, the
weaving of cloth, the making of clocks and watches, as
to which our advantage over the Chinese is enormously
greater than in the growing of tea. Hence, by pro-
ducing these things and exchanging them directly or
indirectly for Chinese tea, we obtain, in spite of the
long carriage, more tea for the same labor than we could
get by growing our own tea.
Consider how this principle, that the interchange of
commodities is governed by the comparative, not the
absolute, cost of production, applies to the plea that
protective duties are required on account of home tax-
ation. It is of course true that a special tax placed
upon any branch of production puts it at a disadvan-
tage unless a like tax is placed upon the importation
of similar productions. But this is not true of such
general taxation as falls on all branches of industry
alike. As such taxation does not alter the comparative
profitableness of industries it does not diminish the
relative inducement to carry any of them on, and to
protect any particular industry from foreign competi-
tion on account of such general taxation is simply to
enable those engaged in it to throw off their share of a
general burden.
A favorite assumption of American protectionists is,
or rather has been (for we once heard much more of it
than now), that free trade is a good thing for rich coun-
tries but a bad thing for poor countries—that it enables
a country of better developed industries to prevent the
development of industry in other countries, and to
make such countries tributary to itself. But it follows
from the principle which, as we have seen, causes and
governs international exchanges, that for any country to
ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES.” 159
impose restrictions on its foreign commerce on account
of its own disadvantages in production is to prevent such
amelioration of those disadvantages as foreign trade
would bring. Free trade is voluntary trade. It can-
not go on unless to the advantage of both parties, and,
as between the two, free trade is relatively more advan-
tageous to the poor and undeveloped country than to
the rich and prosperous country. The opening up of
trade between a Robinson Crusoe and the rest of the
world would be to the advantage of both parties. But
relatively the advantage would be far greater to Robin-
son Crusoe than to the rest of the world.
There is a certain class of American protectionists
who concede that free trade is good in itself, but who
say that we cannot safely adopt it until all other nations
have adopted it, or until all other nations have come up
to our standard of civilization; or, as it is sometimes
phrased, until the millennium has come and men have
ceased to struggle for their own interests as opposed to
the interests of others. And so British protectionists
have now assumed the name of “Fair Traders.” They
have ceased to deny the essential goodness of free
trade, but contend that so long as other countries
maintain protective tariffs Great Britain, in self-defence,
should maintain a protective tariff too, at least against
countries that refuse to admit British productions free.
The fallacy underlying most of these American ex-
cuses for protection is that considered in the previous
chapter—the fallacy that the country of low wages can
undersell the country of high wages; but there is also
mixed with this the notion to which the British fair
traders appeal—the notion that the abolition of duties
by any country is to the advantage, not of the people
160 T PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
- *
of that country, but of the people of the other coun-
tries that are thus given free access to its markets. “Is
not the fact that British manufacturers desire the abo-
lition of our protective tariff a proof that we ought to
continue it 7” ask American protectionists. “Is it not
a suicidal policy to give foreigners free access to our
markets while they refuse us access to theirs?” cry
British fair traders.
All these notions are forms of the delusion that to
export is more profitable than to import, but so wide-
spread and influential are they that it may be well to
devote a few words to them. The direct effect of a
tariff is to restrain the people of the country that im-
poses it. It curtails the freedom of foreigners to trade
only through its operation in curtailing the freedom of
citizens to trade. So far as foreigners are concerned it
only indirectly affects their freedom to trade with that
particular country, while to citizens of that country it
is a direct curtailment of the freedom to trade with all
the world. Since trade involves mutual benefit, it is
true that any restriction that prevents one party from
trading must operate in some degree to the injury of
another party. But the indirect injury which a pro-
tective tariff inflicts upon other countries is diffused
and slight, as compared with the injury it inflicts di-
rectly upon the nation that imposes it.
To illustrate: The tariff which we have so long
maintained upon iron to prevent our people from ex-
changing their products for British iron has unques-
tionably lessened our trade with Great Britain. But
the effect upon the United States has been very much
more injurious than the effect upon Great Britain.
While it has lessened our trade absolutely, it has
ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES. rā1
lessened the trade of Great Britain only with us. What
Great Britain has lost in this curtailment of her trade
with us she has largely made up in the consequent ex-
tension of her trade elsewhere. For the effect of duties
on iron and iron ore, and of the system of which
they are part, has been so to increase the cost of
American productions as to give to Great Britain
the greater part of the carrying trade of the world,
for which we were her principal competitor, and to
hand over to her the trade of South America and of
other countries, of which, but for this, we should have
had the largest share.
And in the same way, for any nation to restrict
the freedom of its own citizens to trade, because other
nations so restrict the freedom of their citizens, is a
policy of the “biting off one's nose to spite one's face”
order. Other nations may injure us by the imposition
of taxes which tend to impoverish their own citizens,
for as denizens of the world it is to our real interest
that all other denizens of the world should be prosper-
ous. But no other nation can thus injure us so much
as we shall injure ourselves if we impose similar taxes
upon our own citizens by way of retaliation.
Suppose that a farmer who has an improved variety
of potatoes learns that a neighbor has wheat of such su-
perior kind that it will yield many more bushels to the
acre than that he has been sowing. He might naturally
go to his neighbor and offer to exchange seed potatoes
for seed wheat. But if the neighbor while willing
to sell the wheat should refuse to buy the potatoes,
would not our farmer be a fool to declare, “Since
you will not buy my superior potatoes I will not buy
your superior wheat l” Would it not be very stupid
162 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
*.
retaliation for him to go on planting poorer seed and
getting poorer crops?
Or, suppose, isolated from the rest of mankind, half
a dozen men so situated and so engaged that mutual
convenience constantly prompts them to exchange pro-
ductions with one another. Suppose five of these six
to be under the dominion of some curious superstition
which leads them when they receive anything in ex-
change to burn one-half of it up before carrying home
the other half. This would indirectly be to the injury
of the sixth man, because by thus lessening their own
wealth his five neighbors would lessen their ability to
exchange with him. But, would he better himself if
he were to say: “Since these fools will insist upon
burning half of all they get in exchange Imust, in self-
defense, follow their example and burn half of all I
get?’”
The constitution and scheme of things in this world
in which we find ourselves for a few years is such that
no one can do either good or evil for himself alone. No
one can release himself from the influence of his sur-
roundings, and say, “What others do is nothing to
me;” nor yet can any one say, “What I do is nothing
to others.” Nevertheless it is in the tendency of things
that he who does good most profits by it, and he who
does evil injures, most of all, himself. And those who
say that a nation should adopt a policy essentially
bad because other nations have embraced it are as
unwise as those who say, Lie, because others are false;
Be idle, because others are lazy; Refuse knowledge,
because others are ignorant.
CEIAPTER XVI.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MANUFACTURES.
ENGLISH protectionists, during the present century
at least, struggled for the protection of agriculture, and
the repeal of the corn laws in 1846 was their Waterloo.
On the continent, also, it is largely agriculture that is
held to need protection, and special efforts have been
made to protect the German hog, even to the extent of
shutting out its American competitor. But in the
United States the favorite plea for protection has been
that it is necessary to the establishment of manufactures;
and the prevalent American idea of protection is that
it is a scheme for fostering manufactures.
As a matter of fact, American protection has not
been confined to manufactures, nor has there been any
hesitation in imposing duties which by raising the cost
of materials are the very reverse of encouraging to
manufactures. In the scramble which the protective
system has induced, every interest capable of being
protected and powerful enough to compel consideration
in congressional log-rolling has secured a greater Or
less share of protection—a share not based upon any
standard of needs or merits, but upon the number of
votes it could command. Thus wool, the production of
which is one of the most primitive of industries, pre-
ceding even the tilling of the soil, has been protected
by high duties, although certain grades of foreign wool
164 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
are necessary to American woolen manufacturers, who
have by these duties been put at a disadvantage in
competing with foreign manufacturers. Thus iron ore
has been protected despite the fact that American steel
makers need foreign ore to mix with American ore, and
are obliged to import it even under the high duty.
Thus copper ore has been protected, to the disadvan-
tage of American Smelters, as well as of all, the many
branches of manufacture into which copper enters.
Thus salt has been protected, though it is an article of
prime necessity, used in large quantities in such im-
portant industries as the curing of meats and fish, and
entering into many branches of manufacture. Thus
lumber has been protected in spite of its importance in
manufacturing as well as of the protests of all who
have inquired into the consequences of the rapid clear-
ing of our natural woodlands. Thus coal has been
protected, though to many branches of manufacturing
cheap fuel is of first importance. ...And so on, through
the list. s
Protection of this kind is direct discouragement of
manufactures. Nor yet is it encouragement of any in-
dustry, since its effect is, not to make production of
any kind more profitable, but to raise the price of lands
or mines from which these crude products are obtained.
Yet in spite of all this discouragement of manu-
factures, of which the instances I have given are but
samples, protection is still advocated as necessary to
manufactures, and the growth of American manufactures
is claimed as its result.
So long and so loudly has this claim been made that
to-day many of our people believe, what protectionist
writers and speakers constantly assume, that but for
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MANUFACTURES. - 165
protection there would not now be a manufacture of
any importance carried on in the United States, and
that were protection abolished the sole industry that
this great country could carry on would be the raising
of agricultural products for exportation to Europe.
That so many believe this is a striking instance of
our readiness to accept anything that is persistently
dinned into our ears. For that manufactures grow up
without protection, and that the effect of our protective
tariff is to stunt and injure them, can be conclusively
shown from general principles and from common facts.
But first, let me call attention to a confusion of
thought which gives plausibility to the notion that
manufactures should be “encouraged.” Manufactures
grow up as population increases and capital accumu-
lates, and, in the natural order of industry, are best de-
veloped in countries of dense population and accumu-
lated wealth. Seeing this connection, it is easy to mis-
take for cause what is really effect, and to imagine that
manufacturing brings population and wealth. Here, in
substance, is the argument which has been addressed
to the people of the United States from the time when
we became a nation to the present day:
Manufacturing countries are always rich countries.
Countries that produce only raw materials are always poor.
Therefore, if we would be rich we must have manufac-
tures, and in order to get manufactures we must encourage
them.
To many this argument seems plausible, especially as
the taxes for the “encouragement” of the protected in.
dustries are levied in such a way that their payment is
not realized. But I could make as good an argument
to the people of the little town of Jamaica, near which
166 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
I am now living, in support of a subsidy to a theatre
I could say to them:
“All large cities have theatres, and the more theatres
it has, the larger the city. Look at New York | New
York has more theatres than any other city in Amer-
ica, and is consequently the greatest city in America.
Philadelphia ranks next to New York in the number
and size of its theatres, and therefore comes next to
New York in population and wealth. So, throughout
the country, wherever you find large, well-appointed
theatres, you will find large and prosperous towns,
while where there are no theatres the towns are smali.
Is it any wonder that Jamaica is so small and grows so
slowly when it has no theatres at all? People do not
like to settle in a place where they cannot occasionally
go to the theatre. If you want Jamaica to thrive you
must take steps to build a fine theatre, which will at-
tract a large population. Look at Brooklyn ! Brook-
lyn was only a small riverside village before its people
had the enterprise to start a theatre, and see now, since
they began to build theatres, how large a city Brooklyn
has become.”
Modeling my argument on that addressed to Amer-
ican voters by the Presidential candidate of the Repub-
lican party in 1884, I might then drop into “statistics”
and point to the fact that when theatrical represen-
tations first began in this country its population did not
amount to a million; that it was totally destitute of
railroads and without a single mile of telegraph wire.
Such has been our progress since theatres were intro-
duced that the census of 1880 showed that we had 50,-
155,783 people, 97,907 miles of railroad and 291,212 °,
miles of telegraph wires. Or I might go into greater
| THE DEVELOPMENT OF MANUFACTURES. 167
detail, as some protectionist “statisticians” are accus-
tomed to do. I might take the date of the building of
each of the New York theatres, give the population
and wealth of the city at that time, and then, by present-
ing the statistics of population and wealth a few years
later, show that the building of each theatre had been
followed by a marked increase in population and wealth.
I might point out that San Francisco had not a theatre
until the Americans came there, and was consequently
but a-straggling village; that the new comers imme-
diately set up theatres and maintained them more gen-
erously than any other similar population in the world,
and that the Consequence was the marvelous growth
of San Francisco. I might show that Chicago and
Denver and Kansas City, all remarkably good theatre
towns, have also been remarkable for their rapid
growth, and, as in the case of New York, prove statis-
tically that the building of each theatre these cities
contain has been followed by an increase of population
and wealth.
Then, stretching out after protectionist fashion into
the historical argument, I might refer to the fact that
Nineveh and Babylon had no theatres that we know of,
and so went to utter ruin; dilate upon the fondness of
the ancient Greeks for theatrical entertainments con-
ducted at public expense, and their consequent great-
ness in arts and arms; point out how the Romans went
even further than the Greeks in their encouragement of
the theatre, and built at public cost the largest theatre
in the world, and how Rome became the mistress of
the nations. And, to embellish and give point to the
argument, I might perhaps drop into poetry, recalling
Byron's lines:
168 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
“When falls the Coliseum, Rome shall fall;
And when Rome falls—the world !”
Recovering from this, I might cite the fact that in
every province they conquered the Romans established
theatres, as explaining the remarkable facility with
which they extended their civilization and made the
conquered provinces integral parts of their great em-
pire; point out that the decline of these theatres and
the decay of Roman power and civilization went on to-
gether; and that the extinction of the theatre brought
on the night of the Dark Ages. Dwelling then a mo-
ment upon the rudeness and ignorance of that time
when there were no theatres, I might triumphantly
point to the beginning of modern civilization as con-
temporaneous with the revival of theatrical entertain-
ments in miracle plays and court masques. And show-
ing how these plays and masques were always support-
ed by monasteries, municipalities or princes, and how
places where they began became sites of great cities, I
could laud the wisdom of “encouraging infant theat-
ricals.” Then, in the fact that English actors, until re-
cently, styled themselves her Majesty's servants and
that the Lord Chamberlain still has authority over the
English boards and must license plays before they can
be acted, I could trace to a national system of subsidiz-
ing infant theatricals the foundation of England's great-
ness. Coming back to our own times, I could call at
tention to the fact that Paris, where theatres are still
subsidized and actors still draw their salaries from
the public treasury, is the world's metropolis of
fashion and art, steadily growing in population and
wealth, though other parts of the same country which
do not enjoy subsidized theatres are either at a stand-
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MANUFACTURES. 169
still or declining. And finally I could point to the
astuteness of the Mormon leaders, who early in the
settlement of Salt Lake built a spacious theatre, and
whose little village in the sage brush, then hardly as
large as Jamaica, has since the building of this theatre
grown to be a populous and beautiful city, and indig-
nantly ask whether the virtuous people of Jamaica should
allow themselves to be outdone by wicked polygamists.
If such an argument would not induce the Jamai-
cans to tax themselves to “encourage” a theatre,
would it not at least be as logical as arguments that
have induced the American people to tax themselves
to encourage manufactures?
The truth is that manufactures, like theatres, are
the result, not the cause, of the growth of population
and wealth.
If we take a watch, a book, a steam engine, a piece
of dry goods, or the product of any of the industries
which we class as manufactures, and trace the steps
by which the material of which it is composed has
been brought from the condition in which it is afford-
ed by nature into finished form, we will see that to
the carrying on of any manufacturing industry many
other industries are necessary. That an industry of
this kind shall be able to avail itself freely of the prod-
ucts of other industries is a prime condition of its suc-
cessful prosecution. Hardly less important is the ex.
istence of related industries, which aid in economizing
material and utilizing waste, or make easier the pro-
curement of supplies or services, or the sale and dis-
tribution of products. This is the reason why the
more elaborate industries tend within certain limits to
localization, so that we find a particular district, with-
170 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
out any assignable reason of soil, climate, material pro-
ductions, or character of the people, become noted for
a particular manufacture, while different places with-
in that district become noted for different branches,
Thus, in those parts of Massachusetts where the manu-
facture of boots and shoes is largely carried on, distinc-
tions such as those between pegged and sewed goods,
men's and women's wear, coarse and fine, will be found
to characterize the industry of different towns. And
in any considerable city we may see the disposition of
various industries, with their related industries, to
cluster together.
But with this tendency to localization there is also a
tendency which causes industries to arise in their order
wherever population increases. This tendency is due not
only to the difficulty and cost of transportation, but to
differences in taste and to the individuality of demands.
For instance, it will be much more convenient and satis-
factory to me, if I wish to have a boat built, to have it
built where I can talk with the builder and watch its
construction; or to have a coat made where I can try it
on; or to have a book printed where I can readily read
the proofs and consult with the printer. Further than
this, that relation of industries which makes the exist-
ence of certain industries conduce to the economy with
which others can be carried on, not merely causes the
growth of one industry to prepare the way for others,
but to promote their establishment.
Thus the development of industry is of the nature of
an evolution, which goes on with the increase of popu-
lation and the progress of society, the simpler industries
coming first and forming a basis for the more elaborate
OD6S.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MANUFACTURES. 171
The reason that newly settled countries do not man-
ufacture is that they can get manufactured goods
cheaper—that is to say, with less expenditure of labor
—than by manufacturing them. Just as the farmer,
though he may have ash and hickory growing on his
place, finds it cheaper to buy a wagon than to make
one, or to take his wagon to the wheelwright's when it
wants repairing, rather than attempt the job himself, so
in a new and sparsely settled country it may take less
labor to obtain goods from long distances than to man-
ufacture them, even when every natural condition for
their manufacture exists. The conditions for profitably
carrying on any manufacturing industry are not merely
natural conditions. Even more important than climate,
soil, and mineral deposits are the existence of subsidi-
ary industries and of a large demand. Manufacturing
involves the production of large quantities of the same
thing. The development of skill, the use of machinery
and of improved processes, only become possible as large
quantities of the same product are required. If the
small quantities of all the various things needed must be
produced for itself by each small community, they can
only be produced by rude and wasteful methods. But
if trade permits these things to be produced in large
quantities the same labor becomes much more effective,
and all the various wants can be much better supplied.
The rude methods of Savages are due less to igno-
rance than to isolation. A gun and ammunition will
enable a man to kill more game than a bow and arrows,
but a man who had to make his own weapons from the
materials furnished by nature, could hardly make him,
self a gun in a lifetime, even if he understood gun
making. Unless there is a large number of men to be
172 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
\
supplied with guns and ammunition, and the materials
of which these are made can be produced with the .
economy that comes with the production of large quan-
tities, the most effective weapons, taking into account
the labor of producing them, are bows and arrows, not
fire-arms. With a steel axe a tree may be felled with
much less labor than with a stone axe. But a man
who must make his own axe would be able to fell
many trees with a stone axe in the time he would spend
trying to make a steel axe from the ore. We smile
at the savages who for a sheath knife or copper kettle
gladly give many rich furs. Such articles are with us
of little value, because being made in large quantities
the expenditure of labor required for each is very
small, but if made in small quantities, as the savage
would have to make them, the expenditure of labor
would far exceed that needed to obtain the furs. Even
if they had the fullest knowledge of the tools and
methods of civilized industry, men isolated as savages
are isolated, would be forced to resort to the rude tools
and methods of savages. The great advantage which
civilized men have over Savages in settling among
them, is in the possession of tools and weapons made
in that state of society in which alone it is possible to
manufacture them, and that by keeping up communi-
cation with the denser populations they have left behind
them, the settlers are able by means of trade to avail
themselves of the manufacturing advantages of a more
fully developed society. If the first American colonists
had been unable to import from Europe the goods they
required, and thus to avail themselves of the fuller
development of European industry, they must soon
have been reduced to savage tools and weapons. And
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MANUFACTURES. 173
this would have happened to all new settlements in the
westward march of our people had they been cut off
from trade with larger populations.
In new countries the industries that yield the largest
comparative returns are the primary or extractive in-
dustries which obtain food and the raw materials of
manufacture from nature. The reason of this is that
in these primary industries there are not required such
costly tools and appliances, nor the co-operation of so
many other industries, nor yet is production in large
quantities so important. The people of new countries
can therefore get the largest return for their labor by
applying it to the primary or extractive industries, and
exchanging their products for those of the more elabo-
rate industries that can best be carried on where popu-
lation is denser.
As population increases, the conditions under which
the secondary or any more elaborate industries can be
carried on gradually arise, and such industries will be
established—those for which natural conditions are pe.
culiarly favorable, and those whose products are in most
general demand and will least bear transportation,
coming first. Thus in a country having fine forests,
manufactures of wood will arise before manufactures
for which there is no special advantage. The making
of bricks will precede the making of china, the manu-
facture of plowshares that of cutlery, window glass will
be made before telescope lenses, and the coarser grades
of cloth before the finer.
But while we may describe in a general way the con-
ditions which determine the natural order of industry,
yet so many are these conditions and so complex are
their actions and reactions upon one another that no
- 174 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
one can predict with any exactness what in any given
community this natural order of development will be,
or say when it becomes more profitable to manufacture
a thing than to import it. Legislative interference,
therefore, is sure to prove hurtful, and such questions
should be left to the unfettered play of individual en-
terprise, which is to the community what the uncon-
Scious vital activities are to the man. If the time has
come for the establishment of an industry for which
proper natural conditions exist, restrictions upon impor-
tation in order to promote its establishment are needless.
If the time has not come, such restrictions can only di-
vert labor and capital from industries in which the
return is greater, to others in which it must be less, and
thus reduce the aggregate production of wealth. Just
as it is evident that to prevent the people of a new
colony from importing from countries of fuller indus-
trial development would deprive them of many things
they could not possibly make for themselves, so it is evi-
dent that to restrict importations must retard the sym-
metrical development of domestic industries. It may be
that protection applied to one or to a few industries may
sometimes hasten their development at the expense of
the general industrial growth; but when protection is
indiscriminately given to every industry capable of pro-
tection, as it is in the United States, and as is the
inevitable tendency wherever protection is begun, the
result must be to check not merely the general devel-
opment of industry, but even the development of the
very industries for whose benefit the system of protec-
tion is most advocated, by making more costly the prod-
ucts which they must use and repressing the correl-
ative industries with which they interlace.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF MANUFACTURES. 175
To assume, as protectionists do, that economy must
necessarily result from bringing producer and consumer
together in point of space,” is to assume that things
can be produced as well in one place as in another, and
that difficulties in exchange are to be measured solely
by distance. The truth is, that commodities can often
be produced in one place with so much greater facility
than in another that it involves a less expenditure of
labor to bring them long distances than to produce them
On the spot, while two points a hundred miles apart may
be commercially nearer each other than two points ten
miles apart. To bring the producer to the consumer in
point of distance, is, if it increases the cost of production,
not economy but waste.
But this is not to deny that trade as it is carried on
to-day does involve much unnecessary transportation,
and that producer and consumer are in many cases
needlessly separated. Protectionists are right when
they point to the wholesale exportation of the elements
of fertility of our soil, in the great stream of breadstuffs
and meats which pours across the Atlantic, as reckless
profligacy, and fair traders are right when they deplore
the waste involved in English importations of food
while English fields are going out of cultivation. Both
are right in saying that one country ought not to be
made a “draw farm " for another, and that a true econ-
omy of the powers of nature would bring factory and
field closer together. But they are wrong in attributing
these evils to the freedom of trade, or in supposing
* Protectionist arguments frequently involve the additional
assumption that the “home producer” and “home consumer”
are necessarily close together in point of space, whereas, as in the
United States, they may be thousands of miles apart.
176 fHOTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
that the remedy lies in protection. That tariffs are
powerless to remedy these evils may be seen in the fact
that this exhausting exportation goes on in spite of our
high protective tariff, and that internal trade exhibits
the same features. Everywhere that modern civiliza-
tion extends, and with greatest rapidity where its influ-
ences are most strongly felt, population and wealth are
concentrating in huge towns and an exhausting com-
merce flows from country to city. But this ominous
tendency is not natural, and does not arise from too
much freedom; it is unnatural, and arises from restric-
tions. It may be clearly traced to monopolies, of which
the monopoly of material opportunities is the first and
most important. In a word, the Roman system of land
ownership, which in our modern civilization has dis-
placed that of our Celtic and Teutonic ancestors, is pro-
ducing the same effect that it did in the Roman world
—the engorgement of the centres and the impoverish-
ment of the extremities. While London and New
York grow faster than Rome ever did, English fields are
passing out of cultivation as did the fields of Latium,
and in Iowa and Dakota goes on the exhausting culture
that impoverished the provinces of Africa. The same
disease which rotted the old civilization is exhibiting
its symptoms in the new. That disease cannot be
cured by protective tariffs.
CEIAPTER XVII.
PROTECTION AND PRODUCERS.
THE primary purpose of protection is to encourage
producers *—that is to say, to increase the profits of
capital engaged in certain branches of industry.
The protective theory is that the increase a protect-
ive duty causes in the price at which an imported com-
modity can be sold within the country, protects the
home producer (i. e., the man on whose account com-
modities are produced for sale) from foreign competi-
tion, so as to encourage him by larger profits than he
could otherwise get to engage in or increase production.
All the beneficial effects claimed for protection depend
upon its effect in thus encouraging the employing pro-
ducer, just as all the effects produced by the motion of
an engine upon the complicated machinery of a factory
are dependent upon its effect in turning the main driv-
ing wheel. The main driving wheel (so to speak) of
the protective theory is that protection increases the
profits of the protected producer.
But when, assuming this, the opponents of protec-
tion represent the whole class of protected producers
* For want of a better term I have here used the word “pro-
ducers ” in that limited sense in which it is applied to those who
control capital and employ labor engaged in production. The
industries protected by our tariff are (with perhaps some nominal
exceptions) of the kind carried on in this way.
178 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
as growing rich at the expense of their fellow-citizens,
they are contradicted by obvious facts. Business men
well know that in our long-protected industries the
margin of profit is as small and the chances of failure
as great as in any others—if, in fact, those protected
industries are not harder to win success in by reason of
the more trying fluctuations to which they are subject.
The reason why protection in most cases thus fails to
encourage is not difficult to see.
The cost of any protective duty to the people at
large is (1), the tax collected upon imported goods,
plus the profits upon the tax, plus the expense and
profits of smuggling in all its forms; plus the expense
of sometimes trying smugglers of the coarser sort, and
occasionally sending a poor and friendless one to the
penitentiary; plus bribes and moieties received by gov-
ernment officers; and (2), the additional prices that
must be paid for the products of the protected home
industry.
It is from this second part alone that the protected
industry can get its encouragement. But only a part
of this part of what the people at large pay is real en-
couragement. In the first place, it is true of protective
duties, as it is true of direct subsidies, that they cannot
be had for nothing. Just as the Pacific Mail Steam-
ship Company and the various land and bond grant
railways had to expend large sums to secure representa-
tion at Washington, and had to divide handsomely
with the Washington lobby, so the cost of securing
Congressional “recognition” for an infant industry, or
fighting off threatened reductions in its “encourage.
ment,” and looking after every new tariff bill, is a
considerable item. But still more important is the
PROTECTION AND PRODUCERs. . 179
absolute loss in carrying on industries so unprofitable
in themselves that they can be maintained only by sub-
sidies. And to this loss must be added the waste that
seems inseparable from governmental fosterage, for just
in proportion as industries are sheltered from competi-
tion are they slow to avail themselves of improvements
in machinery and methods.” Out of the encourage-
ment which the tariff beneficiaries receive in higher
prices, much must thus be consumed, so that the net
encouragement is only a small fraction of what con-
sumers pay. Taking encouraged producers and taxed
consumers together there is an enormous loss. Hence
in all cases in which duties are imposed for the benefit
of any particular industry the discouragement to indus-
try in general must be greater than the encouragement
of the particular industry. So long, however, as the
one is spread over a large surface and the other over a
small surface, the encouragement is more marked than
the discouragement, and the disadvantage imposed on
all industry does not much affect the few subsidized
industries.
But to introduce a tariff bill into a congress or par-
* This disposition is, of course, largely augmented by the greater
cost of machinery under our protective tariff, which not only in-
creases the capital required to begin, but makes the constant dis-
carding of old machinery and purchase of new, required to keep up
with the march of invention, a much more serious matter. Cases
have occurred in which British manufacturers, compelled by com-
petition to adopt the latest improvements, have actually sold their
discarded machinery to be shipped to the United States and used
by protected Americans. It was his coming across a case of this
kind that led David A. Wells, when he visited Europe as Special
Commissioner of Revenue, to begin to question the usefulness of
our tariff in promoting American industry.
180 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
liament is like throwing a banana into a cage of mon-
keys. No sooner is it proposed to protect one industry
than all the industries that are capable of protection
begin to screech and scramble for it. They are, in
fact, forced to do so, for to be left out of the encour-
aged ring is necessarily to be discouraged. The result
is, as we see in the United States, that they all get
protected, some more and some less, according to the
money they can spend and the political influence they
can exert. Now every tax that raises prices for the
encouragement of one industry must operate to discour-
age all other industries into which the products of that
industry enter. Thus a duty that raises the price of
lumber necessarily discourages the industries which
make use of lumber, from those connected with the
building of houses and ships to those engaged in the
making of matches and wooden toothpicks; a duty
that raises the price of iron discourages the innumerable
industries into which iron enters; a duty that raises the
price of salt discourages the dairyman and the fisher.
man; a duty that raises the price of sugar discourages
the fruit preserver, the maker of sirups and cordials,
and so on. Thus it is evident that every additional in-
dustry protected lessens the encouragement of those al-
ready protected. And since the net encouragement that
tariff beneficiaries can receive as a whole is very much
less than the aggregate addition to prices required to
secure it, it is evident that the point at which protec-
tion will cease to give any advantage to the protected
must be much short of that at which every one is
protected. To illustrate: Say that the total number of
industries is one hundred, of which one-half are capable
of protection. Let us say that of what the protection
PROTECTION AND PRODUCERs. 181
costs, one-fourth is realized by the protected industries.
Then (presuming equality), as soon as twenty-five in-
dustries obtain protection, the protection can be of no
benefit even to them, while, of course, involving a
heavy discouragement to all the rest.
I use this illustration merely to show that there is a
point at which protection must cease to benefit even
the industries it strives to encourage, not that I think
it possible to give numerical exactness to such matters.
But that there is such a point is certain, and that in the
United States it has been reached and passed is also
certain. That is to say, not only is our protective tariff
a dead weight upon industry generally, but it is a dead
weight, upon the very industries it is intended to stimu-
late. (
If there are producers who permanently profit by
protective duties, it is only because they are in some
other way protected from domestic competition, and
hence the profit which comes to them by reason of the
duties does not come to them as producers but as
monopolists. That is to say, the only cases in which
protection can more than temporarily benefit any class of
producers are cases in which it cannot stimulate industry.
For that neither duties nor subsidies can give any
permanent advantage in any business open to home
competition results from the tendency of profits to a
common level. The risk to which protected industries
are exposed from changes in the tariff may at times
keep profits in them somewhat above the ordinary
rate; but this represents not advantage, but the neces-
sity for increased insurance, and though it may consti-
tute a tax upon consumers does not operate to extend
the industry. This element of insurance eliminated,
16
182 -- PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
profits in protected industries can only be kept above
those of unprotected industries by some sort of mon-
opoly which shields them from home competition as the
tariff does from foreign competition. The first effect of
a protective duty is to increase profits in the protected
industry. But unless that industry be in some way
protected from the influx of competitors which such in-
creased profits must attract, this influx must soon bring
these profits to the general level. A monopoly, more
or less complete, which may thus enable certain pro-
ducers to retain for themselves the increased profits
which it is the first effect of a protective duty to
give, may arise from the possession of advantages of
different kinds. ©
It may arise, in the first place, from the possession of
some peculiar natural advantage. For instance, the
only chrome mines yet discovered in the United States,
belonging to a single family, that family have been
much encouraged by the higher prices which the pro-
tective duty on chrome has enabled them to charge
home consumers. In the same way, until the discovery
of new and rich copper deposits in Arizona and Mon-
tana the owners of the Lake Superior copper mines
were enabled to make enormous dividends by the pro-
tective duty on copper, which, so long as home compe-
tition was impossible, shut out the only competition
that could reduce their profits, and enabled them to
get three or four cents more per pound for the copper
they sold in the United States than for the copper they
shipped to Europe.
Or a similar monopoly may be obtained by the pos-
session of exclusive privileges given by the patent
laws. For instance, the combination based on patents
PROTECTION AND PRODUCERs. 183
for making steel have, since home competition with
them was thus shut out, been enabled, by the enormous
duty on imported steel, to add most encouragingly to
their dividends, and the owners of the patented process
used in making paper from wood have been similarly
encouraged by the duty on wood pulp.
Or again, a similar monopoly may be secured by the
concentration of a business requiring large capital and
special knowledge, or by the combination of producers
in a “ring” or “pool” so as to limit home production
and crush home competition. For instance, the pro-
tective duty on quinine, until its abolition in 1879,
resulted to the sole benefit of thiree houses, while a
combination of quarry owners—the Producers Marble
Company—have succeeded in preventing any home
competition in the production of marble, and are thus
enabled to retain to themselves the higher profits which
the protective duty on foreign marble makes possible,
and to largely concentrate in their own hands the busi-
ness of working up marble.
But the higher profits thus obtained in no way en-
courage the extension of such industries. On the con-
trary, they result from the very conditions natural or
artificial which prevent the extension of these indus-
tries. They are, in fact, not the profits of capital en-
gaged in industry, but the profits of ownership of
natural opportunities, of patent rights, or of organiza-
tion or combination, and they increase the value of
ownership in these opportunities, rights, and monopo-
listic combinations, not the returns of capital engaged in
production. Though they may go to individuals or
companies who are producers, they do not go to them
as producers; though they may increase the Income of
184 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
persons who are capitalists, they do not go to them
by virtue of their employment of capital, but by virtue
of their ownership of special privileges.
Of the monopolies which thus get the benefit of
profits erroneously supposed to go to producers, the
most important are those arising from the private
ownership of land. That what goes to the land-owner
in nowise benefits the producer we may readily see.
The two primary factors of production, without which
nothing whatever can be produced, are land and labor.
To these essential factors is added, when production
passes beyond primitive forms, a third factor, capital—
which consists of the product of land and labor (wealth)
used for the purpose of facilitating the production of
more wealth. Thus to production as it goes on in
civilized societies the three factors are land, labor, and
capital, and since land is in modern civilization made a
subject of private ownership, the proceeds of production
are divided between the land-owner, the labor-owner,
and the capital-owner. -
But between these factors of production there exists
an essential difference. Land is the purely passive
factor; labor and capital are the active factors—the
factors by whose application and according to whose
application wealth is brought forth. Therefore, it is
only that part of the produce which goes to labor and
capital that constitutes the reward of producers and
stimulates production. The land-owner is in no sense
a producer—he adds nothing whatever to the sum of
productive forces, and that portion of the proceeds of
production which he receives for the use of natural op-
portunities no more rewards and stimulates production
than does that portion of their crops which superstitious
PhotºCTION AND PRODUCERs. 185
savages might burn up before an idol in thank-offering
for the sunlight that had ripened them. There can be
no labor until there is a man; there can be no capital
until man has worked and saved; but land was here
before man came. To the production of commodities
the laborer fu, dishes human exertion; the capitalist
furnishes the results of human exertion embodied in
forms that may be used to aid further exertion; but
the land-owner furnishes—what? The superficies of
the earth? the latent powers of the soil 7 the ores be-
neath it? the rain? the sunshine? gravitation? the
chemical affinities? What does the land-owner furnish
that involves any contribution from him to the exertion
required in production? The answer must be, nothing!
And hence it is that what goes to the land-owner out of
the results of production is not the reward of producers
and does not stimulate production, but is merely a toll
which producers are compelled to pay to one whom our
laws permit to treat as his own what Nature furnishes.
Now, keeping these principles in mind, let us turn
to the effects of protection. Let us suppose that Eng-
land were to do as the English agriculturist landlords
are very anxious to have her do—go back to the pro-
tective policy and impose a high duty on grain. This
would much increase the price of grain in England, and
its first effect would be, while seriously injuring other
industries, to give much larger profits to English farm-
ers. This increase of profits would cause a rush into
the business of farming, and the increased competition
for the use of agricultural land would raise agricultural
rents, so that the result would be, when industry had
readjusted itself, that though the people of England
would have to pay more for grain, the profits of grain
186 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
producing would not be larger than profits in any other
occupation. The only class that would derive any ben-
efit from the increased price that the people of England
would have to pay for their food would be the agricult.
ural land-owners, who are not producers at all.
Protection cannot add to the value of the land of a
Country as a whole, any more than it can stimulate in-
dustry as a whole; on the contrary, its tendency is to
check the general increase of land values by checking
the production of wealth; but by stimulating a par-
ticular form of industry it may increase the value of a
particular kind of land. And it is instructive to ob.
serve this, for it largely explains the motive in urging
protection, and where its benefits go.
For instance, the duty on lumber has not been asked
for and lobbied for by the producers of lumber—that
is to say, the men engaged in cutting down and sawing
up trees, and who derive their profits solely from that
source—nor has it added to their profits. The parties
who have really lobbied and log-rolled for the imposi-
tion and maintenance of the lumber duty are the owners
of timber lands, and its effect has been to increase the
price of “stumpage,” the royalty which the producer of
lumber must pay to the owner of timber land for the
privilege of cutting down trees. A certain class of
forestallers have made a business of getting possession
of timber lands by all the various “land-grabbing” de-
vices as soon as the progress of population promised to
make them available. Constituting a compact and
therefore powerful interest (three parties in Detroit, for
instance, are said to own ºr of the timber lands in the
great timber State of Michigan), they have been able
to secure a duty on lumber, which, nominally imposed
PROTECTION AND PRODUCERs. 187
for the encouragement of the lumber producer, has
really encouraged only the timber land forestaller, who,
instead of being a producer at all, is merely a black-
mailer of production.*
So it is with many other duties. The effect of the
sugar duty, for instance, is to increase the value of
sugar lands in Louisiana, and our treaty with the
Hawaiian Islands, by which Hawaiian sugar is admit-
ted free of this duty, being equivalent (since the pro-
duction of Hawaiian sugar is not sufficient to supply
the United States) to the payment of a heavy bounty
to Hawaiian sugar growers, has enormously increased
the value of sugar lands in the Hawaiian Islands. So
with the duty on copper and copper ore, which for a
long time enabled American copper companies to keep
up the price of copper in the United States while they
were shipping copper to Europe and selling it there at
a considerably lower price. The benefits of these duties
* When, after the great fire in Chicago a bill was introduced in
Congress permitting the importation free of duty of materials in-
tended for use in the rebuilding of that city, the Michigan timber
land barons went to Washington in a special car and induced the
committee to omit lumber from the bill.
+ A striking illustration of the way American industry has been
encouraged by a duty which enabled the stockholders in a couple of
copper mines to pay dividends of over a hundred per cent. is
afforded by the following case : Some years ago a Dutch ship
arrived at Boston having in her hold a quantity of copper with
which her master proposed to have her resheathed in Boston. But
learning that in this “land of liberty” he would not be permitted
to take the copper from the inside of his ship and employ American
mechanics to nail it on the outside, without paying a duty of forty-
five per cent. On the new copper put on, as well as a duty of four
cents per pound on the old copper taken off, he found it cheaper to
sail in ballast to Halifax, get his ship re-coppered by Canadian
workmen, and then come back to Boston for his return cargo.
188 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
went to companies engaged in producing copper, but it
went to them not as producers of copper but as owners
of copper mines. If, as is largely the case in coal and
iron mining, the work had been carried on by operators
who paid a royalty to the mine owners, the enormous
dividends would have gone to the mine owners and not
to the operators. º
Horace Greeley used to think that he conclusively
disproved the assertion that the duties on iron were
enriching a few at the expense of the many, when he
declared that our laws gave to no one any special
privilege of making iron, and asked why, if the tariff
gave such enormous profits to iron producers as the
free traders said it did, these free traders did not go to
work and make iron. So far as concerned those pro-
ducers who derived no special advantage from patent
rights or combinations, Mr. Greeley was right enough—
the fact that there was no special rush to get into the
business proving that iron producers as producers were
making on the average no more than ordinary profits.
And could iron be made from air, this fact would have
shown what Mr. Greeley seems to have imagined it did,
though it would not have shown that the nation was
not losing greatly by the duty. But iron cannot be
made from air; it can only be made from iron ore.
And though Nature, especially in the United States,
has provided abundant supplies of iron ore, she has not
distributed them equally, but has stored them in large
deposits in particular places. If inclined to take Hor-
ace Greeley's advice to go and make iron, should I
think its price too high, I must obtain access to one of
these deposits, and that a deposit sufficiently near to
other materials and to centres of population. I may
PROTECTION AND PRODUCERS. 189
find plenty of such deposits which no one is using, but
where can I find such a deposit that is free to be used
by me?
The laws of my country do not forbid me from mak-
ing iron, but they do allow individuals to forbid me
from making use of the natural material from which
alone iron can be made—they do allow individuals to
take possession of these deposits of ore which Nature
has provided for the making of iron, and to treat and
hold them as though they were their own private prop-
erty, placed there by themselves and not by God. Con-
sequently these deposits of iron ore are appropriated as
soon as there is any prospect that any one will want to
use them, and when I find one that will suit my pur-
pose I find that it is in the possession of some owner
who will not let me use it until I pay him down in a
purchase price, or agree to pay him in a royalty of So
much per ton, nearly, if not quite, all I can make above
the ordinary return to capital in producing iron.
Thus, while the duty which raises the price of iron
may not benefit producers, it does benefit the dogs-in-
the-manger whom our laws permit to claim as their
own the stores which aeons before man appeared were
accumulated by Nature for the use of the millions who
would one day be called into being—enabling the mo-
nopolists of our iron land to levy heavy taxes on their
fellow-citizens long before they could otherwise have
done so.” So with the duty on coal. It adds nothing
* The royalty paid by iron miners for the privilege of taking the
ore out of the earth in many cases equals and in some cases exceeds
the cost of mining it. The royalties of the Pratt Iron and Coal
Company of Alabama are said to run as high as $10,000 per acre.
In the Chicago Inter-Ocean, a staunch protectionist paper, of Oc.
Aºt
190 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
3.
to the profits of the coal operator who buys the right to
take coal out of the earth, but it does enable a ring of
coal-land and railway owners to levy in many places an
additional black mail upon the use of Nature's bounty.
The motive and effect of many of our duties are well
tober 11, 1885, I find a description of the Colby Iron Mine at Besse-
mer, Michigan. This mine, it is said, is owned by parties who got
it for $1.25 per acre. They lease the privilege of taking out ore
on a royalty of 40 cents per ton to the Colbys, who sub-lease it to
Morse & Co. for 523 cents per ton royalty, who have a contract with
Captain Sellwood to put the ore on the cars for 874 cents per ton.
Sellwood sub-lets this contract for 124 cents per ton, and the sub-
contractors are said to make a profit of 24 cents per ton, as the
work is done by a steam shovel. Deducting transportation, etc.,
the ore brings $2.80 per ton, as mined, of which only 123 cents goes
to the firm who do the actual work of production. The output is 1,200
tons per day, which, according to the Inter-Ocean correspondent,
gives to the owners a net profit of $480 per day ; to the Colbys,
$150 per day; Morse & Co., $1,680; Captain Sellwood, $90 per day;
and the sub-contractors who do the work of mining $30 per day, “a
total net profit from the mine, over and above what profit there may
be in the labor, of $3,240 per day.” The account concludes by say-
ing : “As the product will be at least doubled during the coming
year, you see there will be some fortunes made out of the Colby
mine.” To these fortunes our protective duty on foreign ore un-
doubtedly contributes, but how much does it in this case encourage
production?
In Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, is a hill of magnetic iron ore
nearly pure, which has merely to be quarried out. It is owned by
the Coleman heirs, and has made them So enormously Wealthy that
these are said by some to be the richest people in the United States.
They are producers of iron, smelting their own ore, as well as rail-
way owners and farmers, owning and cultivating by Superintendents
great tracts of valuable land. They, doubtless, have been much
encouraged by the duty on iron which we have maintained for “the
protection of American labor,” but this encouragement comes to
them as owners of this rich gift of Nature to—Mr. Coleman's heirs.
The deposit of iron ore would be worked were there no duty, and
was worked, I believe, before any duty on iron was imposed.
*
PROTECTION AND PRODUCERS. 191
illustrated by the import duty we levy on borax and
boracic acid. We had no duties on borax and boracic
acid (which have important uses in many branches of
manufacture) until it was discovered that in the State
of Nevada nature had provided a deposit of nearly pure
borax for the use of the people of this continent. This
free gift of the Almighty having been reduced to private
ownership, in accordance with the laws of the United
States for such cases made and provided, the enterpris-
ing forestallers at once applied to Congress for (and of
course secured) the imposition of a duty which would
make borax artificially dear and increase the profits of
this monopoly of a natural advantage.
While our manufacturers and other producers have
been caught readily enough with the delusive promise
that protection would increase their profits, and have
used their influence to institute and maintain protective
duties, I am inclined to think that the most efficient
interest on the side of protection in the United States
has been that of those who have possessed themselves
of lands or other natural advantages which they hoped
protection would make more valuable. For it has been
not merely the owners of coal, iron, timber, sugar,
orange, or wine lands, of salt springs, borax lakes, or
copper deposits, who have seen in the shutting out of
foreign competition a quicker demand and higher value
for their lands, but the same feeling has had its influ-
ence upon the holders of city and village real estate,
who, realizing that the establishment of factories or the
working of mines in their vicinity would give value to
their lots, have been disposed to support a policy which
had for its avowed object the transfer of such industries
from other countries to our own.
192 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
To repeat: It is only aſ first that a protective duty
can stimulate an industry. When the forces of produc-
tion have had time to readjust themselves, profits in
the protected industry, unless kept up by obstacles
which prevent further extension of the industry, must
sink to the ordinary level, and the duty losing its power
of further stimulation ceases to yield any advantage
to producers unprotected against home competition.
This is the situation of the greater part of “protected”
American producers. They feel the general injury of
the system without really participating in its special
benefits. -
JHow, then, it may be asked, is it that even these pro-
ducers who are not sheltered by any home protection
are in general so strongly in favor of a protective tariff?
The true reason is to be found in the causes I will
hereafter speak of, which predispose the common mind
to an acceptance of protective ideas. And, while keen
enough as to their individual interests, these producers
are as blind to social interests as any other class. They
have so long heard and been accustomed to repeat, that
free trade would ruin American industry, that it never
occurs to them to doubt it; and the effect of duties
upon so many other products being to enhance the cost
of their own productions, they see, without apprehend-
ing the cause, that were it not for the particular duty
that protects them they could be undersold by foreign
products, and so they cling to the system. Protection
ts necessary to them in many cases, because of the pro-
tection of other industries. But were the whole system
abolished there can be no doubt that American industry
would spring forward with new vigor.
CEIAPTER XVIII.
Tº FFECTS OF PROTECTION ON AMERICAN INDUSTRY.
IF there is one country in the world where the as:
sumption that protection is necessary to the develop-
ment of manufactures and the “diversification of in-
dustry" is conclusively disproved by the most obvious
facts, that country is the United States. The first set-
tlers in America devoted themselves to trade with the
Indians and to those extractive industries which a sparse
population always finds most profitable, the produce of
the forest, of the soil, and of the fisheries, constituting
their staples, while even bricks and tiles were at first
imported from the mother country. But without any
protection and in spite of British regulations intended
to prevent the growth of manufactures in the colonies,
one industry after another took root, as population in-
creased, until at the time of the first Tariff Act, in 1789,
all the more important manufactures, including those of
iron and textiles, had become firmly established. As
up to this time they had grown without any tariff, so
must they have continued to grow with the increase of
population, even if we had never had a tariff.
But the American who contends that protection is
necessary to the diversification of industry must not
merely ignore the history of his country during that
long period before the first tariff of any kind was insti-
17
194 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
tuted, but he must ignore what has been going on ever
since, and is still going on under his eyes.
We need look no further back than the formation of
the Union to see that if it were true that manufacturing
could not grow up in new countries without the pro-
tection of tariffs the manufacturing industries of the
United States would to-day be confined to a narrow
belt along the Atlantic sea-board. Philadelphia, New
York, and Boston were considerable cities, and manu-
factures had taken a firm root along the Atlantic, when
Western New York and Western Pennsylvania were
covered with forests, when Indiana and Illinois were
buffalo ranges, when Detroit and St. Louis were trad-
ing posts, Chicago undreamed of, and the continent
beyond the Mississippi as little known as the interior
of Africa is now. In the United States, the East has
had over the West all the advantages which protection-
ists say make it impossible for a new country to build
up its manufacturing industries against the competition
of an older country—larger capital, longer experience,
and cheaper labor. Yet without any protective tariff
between the West and the East, manufacturing has
steadily moved westward with the movement of popu-
lation, and is moving westward still. This is a fact
that of itself conclusively disproves the protective
theory.
The protectionist assumption that manufactures have
increased in the United States because of protective
tariffs is even more unfounded than the assumption
that the growth of New York after the building of
each new theatre was because of the building of the
theatre. It is as if one should tow a bucket behind a
boat and insist that it helped the boat along because
EFFECTS OF PROTECTION ON AMERICAN INDUSTRY. 195
&
*
she still moved forward. Manufacturing has increased
in the United States because of the growth of popula-
tion and the development of the country; not because
of tariffs, but in spite of them.
That protective tariffs have injured instead of helped
American manufactures is shown by the fact that our
manufactures are much less than they ought to be,
considering our population and development—much
less relatively than they were in the beginning of the
century. Had we continued the policy of free trade
our manufactures would have grown up in natural
hardihood and vigor, and we should now not only be
exporting manufactured goods to Mexico and the West
Indies, South America and Australia, as Ohio is ex-
porting manufactured goods to Kansas, Nebraska, Colo-
rado and Dakota, but we should be exporting manu-
factured goods to Great Britain, just as Ohio is to-day
exporting manufactured goods to Pennsylvania and
New York, where manufactures began before Ohio was
settled. | But so heavily are our manufactures weighted
by a tariff which increases the cost of all their mate-
rials and appliances, that, in spite of our natural ad-
vantages and the inventiveness of our people, our sales
are confined to our protected market, and we can
nowhere compete with the manufactures of other coun-
tries. In spite of the increase of duties with which we
have attempted to keep out foreign importations and
build up our own manufacturing industries, the great
bulk of our importations to-day are of manufactured
goods, while all but a trivial percentage of our exports
consist of raw materials. Even where we import
largely from such countries as Brazil, which have
almost no manufactures of their own, we cannot send
196 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
them in return the manufactured goods they want, but
to pay for what we buy of them must send our raw
materials to Europe.
This is not a natural condition of trade. The United
States have long passed the stage of growth in which
raw materials constitute the only natural exports. We
have now a population of nearly sixty millions, and con-
sume more manufactured goods than any other nation.
We possess unrivaled advantages for manufacturing.
In extent and accessibility our coal deposits far surpass
those of any other civilized country, while we have
reservoirs of natural gas that supply fuel almost with-
out labor. Moreover, we are the first of civilized
nations in the invention and use of machinery, and in
the economy of material and labor. But all these
advantages are neutralized by the wall of protection
we have built along our coasts.
For as long as I can remember, the protectionist press
has been from time to time chronicling the fact that
considerable orders for this, that or the other American
manufacture had been received from abroad, as proving
that protection was at last beginning to bring about
the results promised for it, and that American manu-
facturing industry, so safely guarded during its infancy
by a protective tariff, was now about to enter the mar-
Rets of the world. The statements that have been
made the basis of these congratulations have generally
been true, but the predictions founded upon them have
never been verified, and, while Óur population has
doubled, our exports of manufactured articles have rel-
atively declined. The explanation is this: The higher
rates of wages that have prevailed in the United States,
and the consequent higher standard of general intelli-
EFFECTS OF PROTECTION ON AMERICAN INDUSTRY 197
_*
gence, have stimulated American invention, and we are
constantly making improvements upon the tools, meth- .
ods, and patterns elsewhere in use. These improvements
are constantly starting a foreign demand for American
manufactures which seems to promise large increase.
But before this increase takes place the improvements
are adopted in countries where manufacturing is not
so heavily burdened by taxes on material, and what
should have been peculiarly an American manufacture
is transferred to a foreign country.
Every American who has visited London has doubt-
less noticed, opposite the Parliament House at West-
minster, a shop devoted to the sale of “American
notions.” There are a number of such shops in Lon-
don, and they are also to be found in every town of any
size in the three kingdoms. These shops must sell in
the aggregate quite an amount of American tools and
contrivances, which in part accounts for the fact that
we still export some manufactures. But the American
will be deluded who from the number of these shops
and the interest taken by the people who are constantly
looking in the windows or examining the goods, im-
agines that American manufactures are beginning to
gain a foothold in the Old World. These shops are in
fact curiosity shops, just as are the Chinese and Japan-
ese shops that we find in the larger American cities,
and people go to them to see the ingenious things the
Americans are getting up. But no sooner do these
shops so far popularize an “American notion” that a
considerable demand for it arises, than some English
manufacturer at once begins to make it, or the Ameri-
can inventor, if he holds an English patent, finds more
profit in manufacturing it abroad. Not having the dis.
198 BROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
couragements of American protection to contend with,
he can make it in Great Britain cheaper than in the
United States, and the consequence of the introduction
of an American “notion” is that, instead of its importa-
tion from America increasing, it comes to an end.
This illustrates the history of American manufactures
abroad. One article after another which has been in-
vented or improved in the United States has seemed to
get a foothold in foreign markets only to lose it when
fairly introduced. We have sent locomotives to Russia,
arms to Turkey and Germany, agricultural implements
to England, river steamers to China, sewing machines
to all parts of the world, but have never been able to
hold the trade our inventiveness should have secured.
But it is on the high seas and in an industry in which
we once led the world that the effect of our protective
policy can be most clearly seen.
Thirty years ago ship-building had reached such a
pitch of excellence in this country that we built not
only for ourselves but for other nations. American
ships were the fastest sailers, the largest carriers, and
everywhere got the quickest dispatch and the highest
freights. The registered tonnage of the United States
almost equaled that of Great Britain, and a few years
promised to give us the unquestionable supremacy of
the ocean.
The abolition of the more important British pro-
tective duties in 1846 was followed in 1854 by the re-
peal of the navigation laws, and from thenceforth not
only were British subjects free to buy or build ships
wherever they pleased, but the coasting trade of the
British Isles was thrown open to foreigners. Dire
were the predictions of British protectionists as to the
EFFECTS OF PROTECTION ON AMERICAN INDUSTRY. 199
utter ruin that was thus prepared for British com-
merce. The Yankees were to sweep the ocean, and
“half-starved Swedes and Norwegians” were to drive
the “ruddy, beef-eating English tar” from his own seas
and channels.
While one great commercial nation thus abandoned
protection, the other redoubled it. The breaking out
of our civil war was the golden opportunity of protec-
tion, and the unselfish ardor of a people ready to make
any sacrifice to prevent the dismemberment of their
country was taken advantage of to pile protective taxes
upon them. The ravages of Confederate cruisers and
the consequent high rate of insurance on American
ships would under any circumstances have diminished
our deep-sea commerce; yet this effect was only tem-
porary, and but for our protective policy we should at
the end of the war have quickly resumed our place in
the carrying trade of the world and moved forward to
the lead with more vigor than ever.
But crushed by a policy which prevents Americans
from building, and forbids them to buy ships, our com-
merce, ever since the war, has steadily shrunk, until
American ships which, when we were a nation of
twenty-five millions, ploughed every sea of the globe,
are now, when we number nearly sixty millions, seldom
seen on blue water. In Liverpool docks, where once it
seemed as if every other vessel was American, you must
search the forests of masts to find one. In San Fran-
cisco Bay you may count English ship, and English
ship, and English ship, before you come to an Ameri.
can, while five-sixths of the foreign commerce of New
York is carried on in foreign bottoms. Once no Amer-
ican dreamed of crossing the Atlantic save on an
200 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
American ship; to-day no one thinks of taking one.
It is the French and the Germans who compete with
the British in carrying Americans to Europe and bring-
ing them back. Once our ships were the finest or, the
Ocean. To-day there is not a first-class ocean carrier
under the American flag, and but for the fact that
foreign vessels are absolutely prohibited from carrying
between American ports, ship-building, in which we
once led the world, would now be with us a lost art.
As it is, we have utterly lost our place. . When I was
a boy we confidently believed that American war ships
could outsail, when they could not outfight, anything
that floated, and in the event of war with a commercial
nation we knew that every sea of the globe would
swarm with swift American privateers. To-day, the
ships on which we have wasted millions are, for pur-
poses of modern warfare, as antiquated as Roman gal-
leys. Compared with the vessels of other nations they
can neither fight nor run ; while, as for privateers or
chartered vessels, Great Britain could take from those
greyhounds of the sea which American travel and trade
support, enough fleet ships to Snap up any vessel that
ventured out of an American port.
I do not complain of the inefficiency of our navy.
The maintenance of a navy in time of peace is un-
worthy of the dignity of the Great Republic and of the
place she should aspire to among the nations, and to my
mind the hundreds of millions that during the last
twenty years we have spent upon our navy would have
been as truly wasted had they secured us good ships
But I do complain of the decadence in our ability to
build ships. Our misfortune is not that we have no
navy, but that we lack the swift merchant fleet, the
EFFECTs of PROTECTION ON AMERICAN INDUSTRY. 201
great founderies and shipyards, the skilled engineers
and seamen and mechanics, in which, and not in navies,
true power upon the seas consists. A people in whose
veins runs the blood of Vikings have been driven off
the ocean by-themselves.
Of course the selfish interests that profit, or imagine
they profit by the policy which has swept the Ameri-
can flag from the ocean as no foreign enemy could have
done, ascribe this effect to every cause but the right
one. They say, for instance, that we cannot compete
with other nations in ocean commerce, because they
have an advantage in lower wages and cheaper capital,
in willful disregard of the fact that when the difference
in wages and interest between the two sides of the
Atlantic was far greater than now we not only carried
for ourselves but for other nations, and were rapidly
rising to the position of the greatest of ocean carriers.
The truth is, that if wages are higher with us this is
really to our advantage, while not only can capital now
be had as cheaply in New York as in London, but
American capital is actually being used to run vessels
under foreign flags, because of the taxes which make it
unprofitable to build or run American vessels.
De Tocqueville, fifty years ago, was struck with the
fact that nine-tenths of the commerce between the
United States and Europe and three-fourths of the com-
merce of the New World with Europe was carried in
American ships; that these ships filled the docks of
Havre and Liverpool, while but few English and French
vessels were to be seen at New York. This, he saw,
could only be explained by the fact that “vessels of the
United States can cross the seas at a cheaper rate than
any other vessels in the world.” But, he continues:
202 ºw. PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
“It is difficult to say for what reason the American can trade at
a lower rate than other nations; and one is at, first sight led to
attribute this circumstance to the physical or natural advantages
which are within their reach; but this supposition is erroneous.
The American vessels cost almost as much as our own; they are not
better built, and they generally last for a shorter time, while the
pay of the American sailor is more considerable than the pay on
board European ships. I am of opinion that the true cause of their
superiority must not be sought for in physical advantages but that
it is wholly attributable to their moral and intellectual qualities.
“ * * * The European sailor navigates with prudence; he
only sets sail when the weather is favorable; if an unforeseen acci-
dent befalls him, he puts into port; at night he furls a portion of
his canvas; and when the whitening billows intimate the vicinity
of land, he checks his way and takes an observation of the sea.
But the American neglects these precautions, and braves these
dangers. He weighs anchor in the midst of tempestuous gales; by
night and by day he spreads his sheets to the wind; he repairs as
he goes along such damages as his vessel may have sustained from
the storm; and when at last he approaches the term of his voyage
he darts onward to the shore as if he already descried a port. The
Americans are often shipwrecked, but no trader crosses the sea so
rapidly, and, as they perform the same distance in a shorter time,
they can perform it at a cheaper rate.
“I cannot better explain my meaning than by saying that the
American affects a sort of heroism in his manner of trading, in
which he follows not only a caleulation of his gain, but an impulse
of his nature.”
What the observant Frenchman describes in some.
what extravagant language was a real advantage—an
advantage that attached not merely to the sailing of
ships, but to their designing, their building, and every-
thing connected with them. And what gave this ad-
vantage was not anything in American nature that
differed from other human nature, but the fact that
higher wages and the resulting higher standard of com-
fort and better opportunities developed a greater power
of adapting means to ends. In short, the secret of our
EFFECTS OF PROTECTION ON AMERICAN - INDUSTRY. 203
success upon the ocean (as of all our other successes)
lay in the very things that according to the exponents
of protectionism now shut us out from the ocean.*
—e
* By way of consolation for the manner in which protectionism
has driven American ships from the ocean, Professor Thompson (Po-
litical Economy, p. 216) says:
“If there were no other reason for the policy that seeks to reduce
foreign commerce to a minimum, a sufficient one would be found in
its effect upon the human material it employs. Bentham thought
the worst possible use that could be made of a man was to hang
him ; a worse still is to make a common sailor of him. The life
and the manly character of the sailor has been so admired in song
and prose, and the real excellences of individuals of the profession
have been made so prominent that we forget what the mass of this
class of men are, and what representatives of our civilization and
Christianity we send out to all lands in the tenants of the fore-
Castle.’
There is some truth in this, but what there is is due to protection-
ism in its broader sense. There is no reason in the nature of his
vocation why the sailor should not be as well fed, well paid and well
treated, as intelligent and self-respecting, as any mechanic. That
he is not is at bottom due to the paternal interference of maritime
law with the relations of employer and employed. The law does
not specifically enforce contracts for services on shore, and for any
breach of contract by an employee the employer has only a civil rem-
edy. He cannot restrain the employed of his liberty, coerce him by
violence or duress, or, should he quit work, call on the law to bring
him back, and thus the personal relations of employer and cmployed
are left to the frce play of mutual interest. For services requiring
vigilance and sobriety, and where great loss or danger would result
from a sudden refusal to go on with the work, the employer must
look to the character of the men he employs, and must so pay
and treat them that there will be no danger of their wishing to leave
him. But what on shore is thus left to the self-regulative principle
of freedom is, as to services to be performed on shipboard, attempted
to be regulated on the paternal principle of protectionism. Here
the law steps in to compel the specific performance of contracts,
and not only gives the employer or his representative the right to
restrain the employed of his personal liberty, and by violence or
duress to compel his performance of Services he has contracted for,
204 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
Again, it is said that it is the substitution of steam
for canvas and iron for wood that has led to the decay
of American shipping. This is no more a reason for the
decay of American shipping than is the substitution of
the double top-sail yard for the single top-sail yard.
River steamers were first developed here; it was an
American steamship that first crossed from New York
to Liverpool, and thirty years ago American steamers
were making the “crack” passages. The same skill,
the same energy, the same facility of adapting means to
but if the employed leave the ship the law may be invoked to ar-
rest, imprison, and force him back. The result has been on the
one hand largely to destroy the incentive to proper treatment of
their crews on the part of owners and masters of ships, and on the
other to degrade the character of Seamen. Crews have been largely
obtained by a system of virtual impressment or kidnapping called
in 'long-shore vernacular “shanghaing,” by which men are put
on board ship when drunk or even by force, for the sake of their ad-
vance wages or a bonus called “blood-money,” which the power of
keeping the men on board and compelling them to work enables
the ship-owners safely to pay. The power that must be intrusted to
the master of a ship, on whose skill and judgment depends the
safety of all on board, is necessarily despotic, but while the abuse
of this power has, under a system which enables a brutal captain to
get crews with as much or almost as much facility as a humane
one, been little checked by motives of self-interest, it has been stim.
ulated by the degradation which such a system inevitably produces
in the character of the crews. Various attempts have been made to
remedy this state of things; but nothing can avail much that does
not go to the root of the difficulty and leave the sailor, no matter
what contract he may have signed or what advances have been
paid to or for him, as free to quit a vessel as any mechanic on shore
ls free to quit his employment. Theoretically the law may guard
the rights of one party to a contract as well as those of the other;
but practically the poor and uninfluential are always at a disadvant-
age in appealing to the law. This is a vice which inheres in all
forms of protectionism, from that of absolute monarchy to that of
protective duties.
EFFECTs of PROTECTION ON AMERICAN INDUSTRY. 205
ends which enabled our mechanics to build wooden
ships would have enabled them to continue to build
ships no matter what the change in material. With
free trade we should not merely have kept abreast of
the change from wood to iron, we should have led it.
This we should have done even though not a pound of
iron could have been produced on the whole continent.
In the glorious days of American ship-building Donald
McKay of Boston and William H. Webb of New York
drew the materials for their white-winged racers from
forests that were practically almost as far from those
cities as they were from the Clyde, the Humber, or the
Thames. Had our ship-builders been as free as their
English rivals to get their materials wherever they
could buy them best and cheapest, they could as easily
have built ships with iron brought from England as
they did build them with knees from Florida and
planks from Maine and North Carolina, and spars from
Oregon. Ireland produces neither iron nor coal, but
Belfast has become noted for iron ship-building, and
iron can be carried across the Atlantic almost as cheaply
as across the Irish Sea.
But so far from its being necessary to bring iron
from Great Britain, our deposits of iron and coal are
larger, better, and more easily worked than those of
Great Britain, and before the Revolution we were actu-
ally exporting iron to that country. Had we never
embraced the policy of protection we should to-day
have been the first of iron producers. The advantage
that Great Britain has over us is simply that she has
abandoned the repressive system of protection, while
We have increased it. This difference in policy, while
it has enabled the British producer to avail himself of
* * ~~
18 º
206 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
the advantages of all the world, has handicapped the
American producer and restricted him to the market of
his own country. The ores of Spain and Africa which,
for some purposes, it is necessary to mix with our own
ores, have been burdened with a heavy duty; a heavy
duty has enabled a great steel combination to keep
steel at a monopoly price; a heavy duty on copper has
enabled another combination to get a high price for
American copper at home, while exporting it to Great
Britain for a low price; and to encourage a single
bunting factory the very ensign of an American ship
has been subjected to a duty of 150 per cent. From
keelson to truck, from the wire in her stays to the brass
in her taffrail log, everything that goes to the building,
the fitting, or the storing of a ship is burdened with
heavy taxes. Even should she be repaired abroad she
must pay taxes for it on her return home. Thus has
protection strangled an industry in which with free
trade we might still have led the world. And the in-
jury we have done ourselves has been, in Some degree
at least, an injury to mankind. Who can doubt that
ocean steamers would to-day have been swifter and
better had American builders been free to compete
with English builders?
Though our Navigation Laws, which forbid the
carrying of a pound of freight or a single passenger
from American port to American port on any other
than an American-built vessel, obscure the effects of
protection in our coasting trade, they are just as truly
felt as in our ocean trade. The increased cost of build,
ing and running vessels has, especially as to steamers,
operated to stunt the growth of our coasting trade, and
to check by higher freights the development of other
º
*EFFECTs of PROTECTION ON AMERICAN in DUSTRY. 207
industries. And how restriction strengthens monopoly
is seen in the manner in which the effect of protection
upon our coastwise trade has been to make easier
the extortions of railway syndicates. For instance,
the Pacific Railway pool has for years paid the Pacific
Mail Steamship Company $85,000 a month to keep up
its rates of fare and freight between New York and
San Francisco. It would have been impossible for the
railway ring thus to prevent competition had the trade
between the Atlantic and Pacific been open to foreign
vessels. .
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CHAPTER XIX.
PROTECTION AND WAGES.
WE have sufficiently seen the effect of protection on
the production of wealth. Let us now inquire as to its
effect on wages. This is a question of the distribution
of wealth.
Discussions of the tariff question seldom go further
than the point we have now reached, for though much
is said, in the United States at least, of the effect of
protection on wages, it is as a deduction from what is
asserted of its effect on the production of wealth. Its
advocates claim that protection raises wages; but in so
far as they attempt to prove this it is only by argu-
ments, such as we have examined, that protection in-
creases the prosperity of a country as a whole, from
which it is assumed that it must increase wages. Or
when the claim that protection raises wages is put in
the negative form (a favorite method with Ameri-
can protectionists) and it is asserted that protection
prevents wages from falling to the lower level of other
countries, this assertion is always based on the assump-
tion that protéction is necessary to enable production
to be carried on at the higher level of wages, and that
if it were withdrawn production would so decline, by
reason of the underselling of home, producers by for-
eign producers, that wages must also decline.*
*Here, for instance, taken from the Wew York Tribune during
the last Presidential campaign (1884), is a sample of the arguments
PROTECTION AND WAGES. 209
But although its whole basis has already been over-
thrown, let us (since this is the most important part of
the question) examine directly and independently the
claim that protection raises (or maintains) wages.
Though the question of wages is primarily a question
of the distribution of wealth, no protectionist writer
that I know of ventures to treat it as such, and free-
traders generally stop where protectionists stop, arguing
that protection must diminish the production of wealth,
and (So far as they treat the matter of wages) from this
inferring that protection must reduce wages. For pur-
poses of controversy this is logically sufficient, since,
free trade being natural trade, the onus of proof must
lie upon those who would restrict it. But as my pur-
pose is more than that of controversy, I cannot be con-
tented with showing merely the unsoundness of the
arguments for protection. A true proposition may be
supported by a bad argument, and to satisfy ourselves
thoroughly as to the effect of protection we must trace
its influence on the distribution, as well as on the pro-
duction of wealth. Error often arises from the assump-
—tion that what benefits or injures the whole must in
for protection which are manufactured about election times for the
consumption of “the intelligent and highly paid American work-
ing-man:”
“All workers know that labor in other countries is not paid as
well as it is here. But this difference could not exist if the products
of 50-cent labor in England or Germany or Canada, could be
sold freely in our market, instead of the production of $1 labor
here. Hence, this country compels, the employers of the 50-
cent labor abroad to pay a duty for the privilege of selling their
goods in this market. That duty is called a tariff. If it is made
high enough to fit the difference in rate of wages, so that labor in
this country cannot be degraded toward the level of similar labor
in other countries, it is called a protective tariff. Such a tariff is a
defense of American industry against direct competition with the
underpaid labor of other countries,”
210 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
like manner affect all its parts. Causes which increase
or decrease aggregate wealth often produce the reverse
effect on classes or individuals. The resort to salt in-
stead of kelp for obtaining soda increased the produc-
tion of wealth in Great Britain, but lessened the income
of many Highland landlords. The introduction of
railways, greatly as they have added to aggregate
wealth, ruined the business of many small villages.
Out of wars, destructive to national wealth though they
be, great fortunes arise. Fires, floods, and famines,
while disastrous to the community, may prove profit-
able to individuals, and he who has a contract to fill, or
who has speculated in stocks for a fall, may be en-
riched by hard times.
As, however, those who live by their labor constitute
in all countries the large majority of the people, there
is a strong presumption that no matter who else is
benefited, anything that reduces the aggregate income
of the community must be injurious to working-men.
But that we may leave nothing to presumption, how-
ever strong, let us examine directly the effect of pro-
tective tariffs on wages. *
Whatever affects the production of wealth may at
the same time affect distribution. It is also possible
that increase or decrease in the production of wealth
may, under certain circumstances, alter the proportions
of distribution. But it is only with the first of these
questions that we have now to deal, since the second
goes beyond the question of tariff, and if it shall be:
come necessary to open it, that will not be until after
we have satisfied ourselves as to the tendencies of pro-
tection.
Trade, as we have seen, is a mode of production, and
PROTECTION AND wagºs. 211
the tendency of tariff restrictions on trade is to lessen
the production of wealth. But protective tariffs also
operate to alter the distribution of wealth, by imposing
higher prices on some citizens and giving extra profits'
to others. This alteration of distribution in their favor
is the impelling motive with those most active in pro-
curing the imposition of protective duties and in warn-
ing workmen of the dire calamities that will come on
them if such duties are repealed. But in what way
can protective tariffs affect the distribution of wealth
in favor of labor? The direct object and effect of pro-
tective tariffs is to raise the price of commodities. But
men who work for wages are not sellers of Com-
modities; they are sellers of labor. They sell labor in
order that they may buy commodities. How can in-
crease in the price of commodities benefit them 7
I speak of price in conformity to the custom of
comparing other values by that of money. But money
is only a medium of exchange and a measure of the
comparative values of other things. Money itself rises
and falls in value as compared with other things, vary-
ing between time and time, and place and place. In
reality the only true and final standard of values is
labor—the real value of anything being the amount
of labor it will command in exchange. To speak ex-
actly, therefore, the effect of a protective tariff is to in-
Crease the amount of labor for which certain commodi-
ties will exchange. Hence it reduces the value of labor
just as it increases the value of commodities.
Imagine a tariff that prevented the coming in of
laborers, but placed no restriction on the coming in of
commodities. Would those who have commodities to
sell deem such a tariff for their benefit? Yet to say this
212 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
would be as reasonable as to say that a tariff upon com.
modities is for the benefit of those who have labor to
sell.
It is not true that the products of lower priced labor
will drive the products of higher priced labor out
of any market in which they can be freely sold, since,
as we have already seen, low priced labor does not mean
cheap production, and it is the comparative, not the
absolute, cost of production that determines exchanges.
And we have but to look around to see that even in the
same Occupation, wages paid for labor whose products
sell freely together, are generally higher in large cities
than in small towns, in some districts than in others.
It is true that there is a constant tendency of all
wages to a common level, and that this tendency arises
from competition. But this competition is not the
competition of the goods market; it is the competition
of the labor market. The differences between the
wages paid in the production of goods that sell freely
in the same market cannot arise from checks on the
competition of goods for sale; but manifestly arises
from checks on the competition of labor for employ-
ment. As the competition of labor varies between
employment and employment, or between place and
place, so do wages vary. "The cost of living being
greater in large cities than in Small towns, the higher
wages in the one are not more attractive than the lower
wages in the other, while the differing rates of wages
in different districts are manifestly maintained by the
inertia and friction which retard the flow of population,
or by causes, physical or social, which produce differ-
ences in the intensity of competition in the labor
market.
PROTECTION AND WAGES. 213 -
The tendency of wages to a common level is quickest
in the same Occupation, because the transference of
labor is easiest. There cannot be, in the same place,
such differences in wages in the same industry as may
exist between different industries, sincelabor in the same
industry can transfer itself from employer to employer
with far less difficulty than is involved in changing an
occupation. There are times when we see one em-
ployer reducing wages and others following his exam-
ple, but this occurs too quickly to be caused by the com-
petition of the goods market. It occurs at times when
there is great competition in the labor market, and the
same conditions which enable one employer to reduce
wages enable others to do the same. If it were the com-
petition of the goods market that brought wages to a
level, they could not be raised in one establishment or
in one locality unless at the same time raised in others
that supplied the same market; whereas, at the times :
when wages go up, we see workmen in one establish-
ment or in One locality first demanding an increase, and
then, if they are successful, workmen in other establish-
ments or localities following their example.
If we pass now to a comparison of occupation with
occupation, we see that although there is a tendency
to a common level, which maintains between wages in
different occupations a certain relation, there are, in
the same time and place, great differences of wages.
These differences are notinconsistent with this tendency,
but are due to it, just as the rising of a balloon and the
falling of a stone exemplify the same physical law.
While the competition of the labor market tends to
bring wages in all occupations to a common level,
there are differences between occupations (which may
214 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
be summed up as differences in attraction and differ-
ences in the difficulty of access) that check in various de-
grees the competition of labor and produce different rela-
tive levels of wages. Though these differences exist,
wages in different occupations are nevertheless held in a
certain relation to each other by the tendency to a com-
mon level, so that a reduction of wages in one trade
tends to bring about a reduction in others, not through
the competition of the goods market, but through
that of the labor market. Thus cabinet makers, for
instance, could not long get $2 where workmen in
other trades as easily learned and practised were only
getting $1, since the superior wages would so attract
labor to cabinet making as to increase competition and
bring wages down. But if the cabinet makers pos-
sessed a union strong enough to strictly limit the num-
ber of new workmen entering the trade, is it not clear
that they could continue to get $2 while in other trades
similar labor was only getting $17 As a matter of fact,
trades-unions, by checking the competition of labor,
have considerably raised wages in many occupations,
and have even brought about differences between
the wages of union and non-union men in the same
occupation. And what limits the possibility of thus
raising wages is clearly not the free sale of commodi-
ties, but the difficulty of restricting the competition of
labor.
Do not these facts show that what American work-
men have to fear is not the sale in our goods market of
the products of “cheap foreign labor,” but the trans-
ference to our labor market of that labor itself? Under
the conditions existing over the greater part of the
civilized world, the minimum of wages is fixed by what
PROTECTION AND wages. 215
economists call the “standard of comfort”—that is to
say, the poorer the mode of life to which laborers are
accustomed the lower are their wages and the greater is
their ability to compel a reduction in any labor market
they enter. What, then, shall we say of that sort of
“protection of American working-men” which, while
imposing duties upon goods, under the pretense that
they are made by “pauper labor,” freely admits the
“pauper laborer" himself.
The in-coming of the products of cheap labor is a very
different thing from the in-coming of cheap labor. The
effect of the one is upon the production of wealth, in-
creasing the aggregate amount to be distributed; the
effect of the other is upon the distribution of wealth,
decreasing the proportion which goes to the working
classes. We might permit the free importation of
Chinese commodities without in the slightest degree
affecting wages; but, under our present conditions, the
free immigration of Chinese laborers would lessen wages.
Let us imagine under the general conditions of
modern civilization, one country of comparatively high
wages, and another country of comparatively low
wages. Let us, in imagination, bring these countries
side by side, separating them only by a wall which
permits the free transmission of commodities, but is
impassable for human beings. Can we imagine, as pro-
tectionist notions require, that the high wage country
would do all the importing and the low wage country
all the exporting, until the demand for labor so lessened
in the one country that wages would fall to the level of
the other? That would be to imagine that the former
country would go on pushing its commodities through
this wall and getting back nothing in return. Clearly
216 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
the one country would export no more than it got a
return for, and the other could import no more than it
gave a return for. What would go on between the two
countries is the exchange of their respective productions,
and, as previously pointed out, what commodities passed
each way in this exchange would be determined, not by
the difference in wages between the two countries, nor
yet by differences between them in cost of production,
but by differences in each country in the comparative
cost of producing different things. This exchange of
commodities would go on to the mutual advantage of
both countries, increasing the amount which each ob-
tained, but no matter to what dimensions it grew, how
could it lessen the demand for labor or have any effect
in reducing wages?
Now let us change the supposition and imagine such
a barrier between the two countries as would prevent
the passage of commodities, while permitting the free
passage of men. No goods produced by the lower paid
labor of the one country could now be brought into the
other; but would this prevent the reduction of wages?
Manifestly not. Employers in the higher wage coun-
try, being enabled to get in laborers willing to work
for less, could quickly lower wages.
What we may thus see by aid of the imagination
accords with what we do see as a matter of fact. In
spite of the high duties which shut out commodities
on the pretense of protecting American labor, Ameri-
can workmen in all trades are being forced into combi-
nations to protect themselves by checking the compe-
tition of the labor market. Our protective tariff on
commodities raises the price of commodities, but what
raising there is of wages has been accomplished by
PROTECTION AND WAGES. 217
trades-unions and the Knights of Labor. Break up
these organizations and what would the tariff do to pre-
vent the forcing down of wages in all the now organized
trades?
A scheme really intended for the protection of work-
ing-men from the competition of cheap labor would not
merely prohibit the importation of cheap labor under
contract, but would prohibit the landing of any laborer
who had not sufficient means to raise him above the
necessity of competing for wages, or who did not give
bonds to join some trades-union and abide by its rules.
And if, under such a scheme, any duties on commodi-
ties were imposed, they would be imposed, in preference,
on such commodities as could be produced with small
capital, not on those which require large capital—that
is to say, the effort would be to protect industries in
which workmen can readily engage on their own ac-
count, rather than those in which the mere workman
can never hope to become his own employer.
Our tariff, like all protective tariffs, aims at nothing
of this kind. It shields the employing producer from
competition, but in no way attempts to lessen competi-
tion among those who must sell him their labor; and
the industries it aims to protect are those in which the
mere workman, or even the workman with a small
capital, is helpless—those which cannot be carried on
without large establishments, costly machinery, great
amounts of capital, or the ownership of natural oppor-
tunities which bear a high price.
It is manifest that the aim of protection is to lessen
competition in the selling of commodities, not in the
selling of labor. In no case, save in the peculiar and
exceptional cases I shall hereafter speak of, can a tariff
19
218 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
on commodities benefit those who have labor, not com,
modities, to sell. Nor is there in our tariff any pro-
vision that aims at compelling such employers as it
benefits to share their benefits with their workmen.
While it gives these employers protection in the goods
market it leaves them free trade in the labor market,
and for any protection they need workmen have to Or-
ganize.
I am not saying that any tariff could raise wages. I
am merely pointing out that in our protective tariff
there is no attempt, however inefficient, to do this—that
the whole aim and spirit of protection is not the pro-
tection of the sellers of labor but the protection of the
buyers of labor, not the maintaining of wages but the
maintaining of profits. The very class that profess anx-
iety to protect American labor by raising the price of
what they themselves have to sell, notoriously buy labor
as cheap as they can and fiercely oppose any combina-
tion of workmen to raisewages. The cry of “protection
for American labor” comes most vociferously from news-
papers that lie under the ban of the printers' unions;
from coal and iron lords who, importing “pauper la-
bor” by wholesale, have bitterly fought every effort of
their men to claim anything like decent wages; and
from factory owners who claim the right to dictate the
votes of men. The whole spirit of protection is against
the rights of labor.
This is so obvious as hardly to need illustration, but
there is a case in which it is so clearly to be seen as to
tempt me to reference.
There is one kind of labor in which capital has no
advantage, and that a kind which has been held from
remote antiquity to redound to the true greatness and
PROTECTION AND WAGES. 219
glory of a country—the labor of the author, a species
of labor hard in itself, requiring long preparation, and in
the vast majority of cases extremely meagre in its pecu-
niary returns. What protection have the protectionist
majorities that have so long held sway in Congress given
to this kind of labor 7 While the American manufac-
turer of books—the employing capitalist who puts them
on the market—has been carefully protected from the
competition of foreign manufacturers, the American
author has not only not been protected from the com-
petition of foreign authors, but has been exposed to the
competition of labor for which nothing whatever is paid,
He has never asked for any protection save that of
common justice, but this has been steadily refused,
Foreign-made books have been saddled with a high pro-
tective duty, a force of customs examiners is maintained
in the post-Office, and an American is not even allowed
to accept the present of a book from a friend abroad
without paying a tax for it.” But this is not to protect
the American author, who as an author is a mere la-
borer, but to protect the American publisher, who is a
capitalist. And this capitalist, so carefully protected
* Although a great sum is raised in the United States every year
to send the Bible to the heathen in foreign parts, we impose for the
protection of the home “Bible manufacturer’’ a heavy tax upon
the bringing of Bibles into our country. There have recently been
complaints of the smuggling of Bibles across our northern frontier,
which have doubtless inspired our custom-house officers to renewed
vigilance, since, according to an official advertisement, the following
property seized for violation of the United States revenue laws was
sold at public auction in front of the Custom House, Detroit, on
Saturday, February 6, 1886, at 12 o'clock noon: 1 set silver jew-
elry, 3 bottles of brandy, 7 yards astrachan, 1 silk tidy, 7 books,
1 shawl, 1 sealskin cloak, 4 rosaries, 1 woolen shirt, 2 pairs of mit-
tens, 1 pair of stockings, 1 bottle of gin, 1 Bible,
220 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
as to what he has to sell, has been permitted to compel
the American author to compete with stolen labor.
Congress, which year after year has been maintaining a
heavy tariff, on the hypocritical plea of protecting
American labor, has steadily refused the bare justice
of acceding to an international copyright which would
prevent American publishers from stealing the work
of foreign authors, and enable American authors not
only to meet foreign authors on fair terms at home,
but to get payment for their books when reprinted in
foreign countries. An international copyright, demand-
ed as it is by honor, by morals and by every dictate of
patriotic policy, has always been opposed by the pro-
tective interest.* Could anything more clearly show
that the real motive of protection is always the profit of
the employing capitalist, never the benefit of labor?
What would be thought of the Congressman who
should propose, as a “working-man's measure,” to di-
vide the surplus in the treasury between two or three
railway kings, and who should gravely argue that to
do this would be to raise wages in all occupations, since
the railway kings, finding themselves so much richer,
would at once raise the wages of their employees; which
would lead to the raising of wages on all railways, and
this again to the raising of wages in all occupations.
Yet the contention that protective duties on goods raise
wages involves just such assumptions.
It is claimed that protection raises the wages of labor
—that is to say, of labor generally. It is not merely
contended that it raises wages in the special industries
protected by the tariff. That would be to confess that
*An exception is to be made in favor of Horace Greeley, who
though a protectionist, did advocate an international copyright.
pROTECTION AND WAGES. 221
the benefits of protection are distributed with partiality,
a thing which its advocates are ever anxious to deny.
It is always assumed by protectionists that the benefits
of protection are felt in all industries, and even the
wages of farm laborers (in an industry which in the
United States is not and cannot be protected by the
tariff) are pointed to as showing the results of protec-
tion.
The scheme of protection is, by checking importation
to increase the price of protected commodities so as to
enable the home producers of these commodities to
make larger profits. It is only as it does this, and so
long as it does this, that protection can have any en-
couraging effect at all, and whatever effect it has upon
wages must be derived from this.
I have already shown that protection cannot, except
temporarily, increase the profits of producers as pro-
ducers, but without regard to this it is clear that the
contention that protection raises wages involves two
assumptions: (1) that increase in the profits of em-
ployers means increase in the wages of their workmen;
and (2) that increase of wages in the protected occu-
pations involves increase of wages in all occupations.
To state these assumptions is to show their absurdity.
Is there anyone who really supposes that because an
employer makes larger profits he therefore pays higher
wages?
I rode not long since on the platform of a Brooklyn
horse-car and talked with the driver. He told me,
bitterly and despairingly, of his long hours, hard work
and poor pay—how he was chained to that car, a verier
slave than the horses he drove; and how by turning
himself into this kind of a horse-driving machine he
222 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
could barely keep wife and children, laying by nothing
for a “rainy day.”
I said to him, “Would it not be a good thing if
the Legislature were to pass a law allowing the com-
panies to raise the fare from five to six cents, so as to
enable them to raise the wages of their drivers and
conductors?”
The driver measured me with a quick glance, and
then exclaimed: “They give us more, because they
made more 1 You might raise the fare to six cents or
to sixty cents, and they would not pay us a penny
more. No matter how much they made, we would get
no more, so long as there are hundreds of men waiting
and anxious to take our places. The company would
pay higher dividends or water the stock; not raise our
pay.” .
Was not the driver right? Buyers of labor, like
buyers of other things, pay, not according to what they
can, but according to what they must. There are oc-
casional exceptions, it is true; but these exceptions are
referable to motives of benevolence, which the shrewd
business man keeps out of his business, no matter how
much he may otherwise indulge them. Whether you
raise the profits of a horse-car company or of a manu-
facturer, neither will on that account pay any higher
wages. Employers never give the increase of their
profits as a reason for raising the wages of their work-
men, though they frequently assign decreased profits as
a reason for reducing wages. But this is an excuse, not
a reason. The true reason is that the dull times which
diminish their profits increase the competition of work-
men for employment. Such excuses are given only
when employers feel that if they reduce wages their
PROTECTION AND WAGES. 223
employees will be compelled to submit to the reduc-
tion, since others will be glad to step into their places.
And where trades-unions succeed in checking this com-
petition they are enabled to raise wages. Since my
talk with the driver, the horse-car employees of New
York and Brooklyn, organized into assemblies of the
Knights of Labor and supported by that association,
have succeeded in somewhat raising their pay and
shortening their hours, thus gaining what no increase
in the profits of the companies would have had the
slightest tendency to give them.
No matter how much a protective duty may increase
the profits of employers, it will have no effect in raising
Wages unless it so acts upon competition as to give
Workmen power to compel an increase of wages.
There are cases in which a protective duty may have
this effect, but only to a small extent and for a short
time. When a duty, by increasing the demand for a
certain domestic production, suddenly increases the de-
mand for a certain kind of skilled labor, the wages of
such labor may be temporarily increased, to an extent
and for a time determined by the difficulties of obtaining
skilled laborers from other countries or of the acquire-
ment by new laborers of the needed skill.
But in any industry it is only the few workmen of
peculiar skill who can thus be affected, and even when
by these few such an advantage is gained, it can only be
maintained by trades-unions that limit entrance to the
craft. The cases are, I think, few indeed in which any
increase of wages has thus been gained by even that
small class of workmen who in any protected industry
require such exceptional skill that their ranks cannot
easily be swelled; and the cases are fewer still, if they
224 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
exist at all, in which the difficulties of bringing work.
men from abroad, or of teaching new workmen, have
long sufficed to maintain such increase. As for the
great mass of those engaged in the protected industries,
their labor can hardly be called skilled. Much of it
can be performed by ordinary unskilled laborers, and
much of it does not even need the physical strength of
the adult man, but consists of the mere tending of ma-
chinery, or of manipulations which can be learned by
boys and girls in a few weeks, a few days, or even a few
hours. As to all this labor, which constitutes by far
the greater part of the labor required in the industries
we most carefully protect, any temporary effect which a
tariff might have to increase wages in the way pointed
out would be so quickly lost that it could hardly be
said to come into operation. For an increase in the
wages of such occupations would at once be counter-
acted by the flow of labor from other occupations.
And it must be remembered that the effect of “encour-
aging” any industry by taxation is necessarily to dis-
courage other industries, and thus to force labor into
the protected industries by driving it out of others.
Nor could wages be raised if the bounty which the
tariff aims to give employing producers were given
directly to their workmen. If, instead of laws intended
to add to the profits of the employing producers in
certain industries, we were to make laws by which so
much should be added to the wages of the workmen,
the increased competition which the bounty would
cause would soon bring wages plus the bounty to the
rate at which wages stood without the bounty. The
result would be what it was in England when, during
the early part of this century, it was attempted to im.
PROTECTION AND WAGES. 225
prove the miserable condition of agricultural laborers
by “grants in aid of wages” from parish rates. Just
as these grants were made, so did the wages paid by
the farmers sink.
The car-driver was right. Nothing could raise his
wages that did not lessen the competition of those who
stood ready to take his place for the wages he was get-
ting. If we were to enact that every car-driver should
be paid a dollar a day additional from public funds,
the result would simply be that the men who are
anxious to get places as car-drivers for the wages now
paid would be as anxious to get them at one dollar less.
If we were to give every car-driver two dollars a day,
the companies would be able to get men without pay-
ing them anything, just as where restaurant waiters are
customarily feed by the patrons, they get little or no
wages, and in some cases even pay a bonus for their
places.
But if it be preposterous to imagine that any effect
a tariff may have to raise profits in the protected in:
dustries can raise wages in those industries, what shall
we say of the notion that such raising of wages in the
protected industries would raise wages in all industries 7
This is like saying that to dam the Hudson River
would raise the level of New York Harbor and conse-
quently that of the Atlantic Ocean. Wages, like water,
tend to a level, and unless raised in the lowest and
widest occupations can be raised in any particular oc-
cupation only as it is walled in from competition.
The general rate of wages in every country is mani-
festly determined by the rate in the occupations which
require least special skill, and to which the man who
has nothing but his labor can most easily resort. As
226 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
they engage the greater body of labor these occupations
constitute the base of the industrial organization, and
are to other occupations what the ocean is to its bays.
The rate of wages in the higher occupations can be raised
above the rate prevailing in the lower, only as the
higher occupations are shut off from the inflow of labor
by their greater risk or uncertainty, by their requirement
of superior skill, education or natural ability, or by re-
strictions such as those imposed by trades-unions. And
to secure anything like a general rise of wages, or even
to secure a rise of wages in any occupation upon ingress
to which restrictions are not at the same time placed, it
is necessary to raise wages in the lower and wider oc-
cupations. That is to say, to return to our former illus-
tration, the level of the bays and harbors that open
into it cannot be raised until the level of the ocean is
raised.
If it were evident in no other way, the recognition of
this general principle would suffice to make it clear
that duties on imports can never raise the general rate
of wages. For import duties can only “protect” oc-
cupations in which there is not sufficient labor employed
to produce the supply we need. The labor thus en-
gaged can never be more than a fraction of the labor en-
gaged in producing commodities of which we not only
provide the home supply but have a surplus for export,
and the labor engaged in work that must be done on
the spot.
No matter what the shape or size of an iceberg, the
mass above the water must be very much less than the
mass below the water. So no matter what be the con-
ditions of a country or what the peculiarities of its in-
dustry, that part of its labor engaged in occupations
PROTECTION AND WAG.E.S. 227
that can be “protected” by import duties must always
be small as compared with that engaged in Occupations
that cannot be protected. In the United States, where
protection has been carried to the utmost, the census
returns show that not more than one-twentieth of the
labor of the country is engaged in protected industries.
In the United States, as in the world at large, the low-
est and widest occupations are those in which men apply
their labor directly to nature, and of these agriculture
is the most important. How quickly the rise of wages
in these occupations will increase wages in all occu-
pations was shown in the early days of California,
as afterward in Australia. Had anything happened in
California to increase the demand for cooks or car-
penters or painters, the rise in such wages would have
been quickly met by the inflow of labor from other
occupations, and in this way retarded and finally neu-
tralized. But the discovery of the placer mines, which
greatly raised the wages of unskilled labor, raised wages
in all occupations.
The difference of wages between the United States
and European countries is itself an illustration of this
principle. During our colonial days, before we had any
protective tariff, ordinary wages were higher here than
in Europe. The reason is clear. Land being easy to
obtain, the laborer could readily employ himself, and
wages in agriculture being thus maintained at a higher
level, the general rate of wages was higher. And since
up to the present time it has been easier to obtain land
here than in Europe, the higher rate of wages in agri-
culture has kept up a higher general rate. -
To raise the general rate of wages in the United States
the wages of agricultural labor must be raised. But
228 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
our tariff does not and cannot raise even the price of
agricultural produce, of which we are exporters, not im-
porters. Yet, even had we as dense a population in
proportion to our available land as Great Britain, and
were we, like her, importers not exporters of agricult-
ural productions, a protective tariff upon such produc-
tions could not increase agricultural wages, still less
could it increase wages in other occupations, which
would then have become the widest. This we may see
by the effect of the corn laws in Great Britain, which
was to increase, not the wages of the agricultural laborer,
nor even the profits of the farmer, but the rent of the
agricultural landlord. And even if the differentiation
between land-owner, farmer and laborer had, under the
conditions I speak of, not become as clear here as in
Great Britain, nothing which benefited the farmer would
have the slightest tendency to raise wages, save as it
benefited him, not as an owner of land or an owner of
capital, but as a laborer.
We thus see from theory that protection cannot raise
wages. That it does not, facts show conclusively. This
has been seen in Spain, in France, in Mexico, in England
during protection times, and everywhere that protection
has been tried. In countries where the working classes
have little or no influence upon government it is never
even pretended that protection raises wages. It is only
in countries like the United States, where it is necessary
to cajole the working class, that such a preposterous
plea is made. And here the failure of protection to
raise wages is shown by the most evident facts.
Wages in the United States are higher than in other
countries, not because of protection, but because we have
had much vacant land to overrun. Before we had any
PROTECTION AND WAGES. 229
tariff, wages were higher here than in Europe, and
far higher, relatively to the productiveness of labor,
than they are now after our years of protection. In
spite of all our protection—and, for the last twenty-four
years at least, protectionists have had it all their own
way—the condition of the laboring classes of the United
States has been slowly but steadily sinking to that of
the “pauper labor” of Europe. It does not follow that
this is because of protection, but it is certain that pro-
tection has proved powerless to prevent it.
To discover whether protection has or has not bene-
fited the working classes of the United States it is not
necessary to array tables of figures which only an ex-
pert can verify and examine. The determining facts
are notorious. It is a matter of common knowledge that
those to whom we have given power to tax the Ameri-
can people “for the protection of American industry,”
pay their employees as little as they can, and make no
scruple of importing the very foreign labor against
whose products the tariff is maintained. It is notorious
that wages in the protected industries are, if anything,
lower than in the unprotected industries, and that,
though the protected industries do not employ more
than a twentieth of the working population of the
United States, there occur in them more strikes, more
lock outs, more attempts to reduce wages, than in all
other industries. In the highly protected industries of
Massachusetts, official reports declare that the operative
cannot get a living without the work of wife and chil-
dren. In the highly protected industries of New Jer-
sey, many of the “protected" laborers are children
whose parents are driven by their necessities to find
employment for them by misrepresenting their age so
20
230 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
as to evade the State law. In the highly protected in-
dustries of Pennsylvania, laborers, for whose sake we
are told this high protection is imposed, are working
for sixty-five cents a day, and half-clad women are feed-
ing furnace fires. “Pluck-me stores,” company tene-
ments and boarding-houses, Pinkerton detectives and
mercenaries, and all the forms and evidences of the op-
pression and degradation of labor are, throughout the
country, characteristic of the protected industries.
The greater degradation and unrest of labor in the
protected than in the unprotected industries may in
part be accounted for by the fact that the protected
employers have been the largest importers of “foreign
pauper labor.” But, in some part, at least, it is due
to the greater fluctuations to which the protected in-
dustries are exposed. Being shut off from foreign
markets, Scarcity of their productions cannot be so
quickly met by importation, nor surplus relieved by
exportation, and so with them for much of the time it
is either “a feast or a famine.” These violent fluctua-
tions tend to bring workmen into a state of dependence,
if not of actual peonage, and to depress wages below the
general standard. But whatever be the reason, the fact
is that so far is protection from raising wages in the
protected industries, that the capitalists who carry them
on would soon “enjoy "even lower priced labor than
now, were it not that wages in them are kept up by
the rate of wages in the unprotected industries.
CELAPTER XX.
THE ABOLITION OF PROTECTION.
OUR inquiry has sufficiently shown the futility and
absurdity of protection. It only remains to consider the
plea that is always set up for protection when other ex-
cuses fail—the plea that since capital has been invested
and industry organized upon the basis of protection it
would be unjust and injurious to abolish protective
duties at once, and that their reduction must be gradual
and slow. This plea for delay, though accepted and
even urged by many of those who up to this time have
been the most conspicuous opponents of protection, will
not bear examination. If protection be unjust, if it be
an infringement of equal rights that gives certain citizens
the power to tax other citizens, then anything short of
its complete and immediate abolition involves a continu-
ance of injustice. No One can acquire a vested right in
a wrong; no one can claim property in a privilege. To
admit that privileges which have no other basis than a
legislative Act cannot at any time be taken away by
legislative Act, is to commit ourselves to the absurd
doctrine that has been carried to such a length in Great
Britain, where it is held that a sinecure cannot be abol-
ished without buying out the incumbent, and that be-
cause a man's ancestors have enjoyed the privilege of
living on other people, he and his descendants, to the
remotest time, have acquired a sacred right to live upon
232 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
other people. The true doctrine—of which we ought
never, on any pretense, to yield one iota—is that enun-
ciated in our Declaration of Independence, the self-evi-
dent doctrine that men are endowed by their Creator
with equal and unalienable rights, and that any law or
institution that denies or impairs this natural equality
may at any time be altered or abolished. And no more
Salutary lesson could to-day be taught to capitalists
throughout the world than that justice is an element in
the safety of investments, and that the man who trades ,
upon the ignorance or the enslavement of a people does
So at his own risk. A few such lessons, and every
throne in Europe would topple, and every great standing
army melt away.
Moreover, abolition at once is the only way in which
the industries now protected could be treated with any
fairness. The gradual abolition of protection would
give rise to the same scrambling and pipe-laying and
log-rolling which every tariff change brings about, and
the stronger would save themselves at the expense of
the weaker.
But further than this, the gradual abolition of pro-
tection would not only continue for a long time, though
in a diminishing degree, the waste, loss and injustice
inseparable from the system, but during all this period
the anticipation of coming changes and the uncertainty
in regard to them would continue to inspire insecurity
and depress business; whereas, were protection abol-
ished at once, the shock, whatever it might be, would
soon be over, and exchange and industry could at once
reorganize upon a sure basis. Even on the theory that
the abolition of protection involves temporary disaster,
immediate abolition is as preferable to gradual abolition
THE ABOLITION OF PROTECTION. 233
as amputation at one operation is to amputation by
inches. *
And to the working classes—the classes for whom
those who deplore sudden change profess to have most
concern—the difference would be greater still. It is
always to the relative advantage of the poorer classes
that any change involving disaster should be as sudden
as possible, since the effect of delay is simply to give
the richer classes opportunity to avoid it at the expense
of the poorer.
If there is to be a certain loss to any community,
whether by flood, by fire, by invasion, by pestilence, or
by commercial convulsion, that loss will fall more
lightly on the poor and more heavily on the rich the
shorter the time in which it is concentrated. If the cur-
rency of a country slowly depreciates, the depreciating
currency will be forced into the hands of those least able
to protect themselves, the price of commodities will ad-
vance in anticipation of the depreciation, while the price
of labor will lag along after it; capitalists will have op-
portunity to make secure their loans and to speculate in
advancing prices, and the loss will thus fall with far
greater relative severity upon the poor than upon the
rich. In the same way, if a depreciated currency be
slowly restored to par, the price of labor falls more
quickly than the price of commodities; debtors struggle
along in the endeavor to pay their obligations in an ap-
preciating currency, and those who have the most means
are best able to avoid the disadvantages and avail them-
selves of the speculative opportunities brought about by
the change. But the more suddenly any given change
in the value of currency takes place the more equal will
be its effects.
234 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
So it is with the imposition of public burdens. It is
manifestly to the advantage of , the poorer class that
any great public expense be met at once rather than
spread over years by means of public debts. Thus, if
the expenses of our Civil War had been met by taxation
levied at the time, such taxation must have fallen heav-
ily upon the rich. But by the device of a public debt
—a twin invention to that of indirect taxation—the
cost of the war was not, as was pretended, shifted from
present time to future time (for that would only have
been possible had the means to carry on the war been
borrowed from abroad, which was not the case), but
taxation, which otherwise must have fallen upon in-
dividuals in proportion to their wealth, was changed into
taxation spread over a long series of years and falling
upon individuals in proportion, not to their means, but
to their consumption, thus imposing upon the poor far
greater relative burdens than upon the rich. Whether
the rich would have had the patriotism to support a war
which thus called upon them for sacrifices more com-
mensurate with those of the poor, who in all wars furnish
the far greater portion of “the food for powder,” is an-
other matter; but it is certain that the spreading of the
war taxation over years has not only made the cost of
the war many times greater, but has been to the advan-
tage of the rich and to the disadvantage of the working
classes.
If the abolition of protection is, as protectionists pre-
dict, certain to disorganize trade and industry, then it
is better for all, and especially is it better for the work-
ing classes, that the change should be sharp and short,
If the return to a natural condition of trade and pro.
duction must temporarily throw men out of employ.
THE ABOLITION OF PROTECTION. . 235
ment, then it is better that they should be thrown out
at once and have done with it, than that the same loss
of employment should be spread over a series of years
with a constant depressing effect upon the labor market.
In a sharp but short period of depression the public
purse could, without serious consequences, be drawn
upon to relieve distress, but any attempt to relieve in
that way the less general but more protracted distress
incident to a long period of depression, would tend to
create an army of habitual paupers.
But, in truth, the talk about the commercial convul-
sions and industrial distress that would follow the ab-
olition of protection is as baseless as the story with
which Southern slave-holders during the war attempted
to keep their chattels from running away—that the
Northern armies would sell them to Cuba; as baseless
as the predictions of Republican politicians that the
election of a Democratic President would mean the as-
sumption of the Confederate debt, if not the revival of
the “Lost Cause.”
The real fear that underlies all this talk of the dis-
astrous effects of the sudden abolition of protection was
well exemplified in a conversation a friend of mine had
awhile ago with a large manufacturer, who belongs to
a combination which prevents competition at home
while the tariff prevents competition from abroad. The
manufacturer was inveighing against any meddling with
the tariff, and dilating upon the ruin that would be
brought upon the country by free trade.
“Yes,” said my friend, who had been listening with
an air of sympathetic attention, “I suppose, if the tariff
were abolished, you would have to shut up your works.”
“Well, no; not quite that,” said the manufacturer.
236 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
“We could go ahead, even with free trade; but then—
we couldn't get the same profit.”
The notion that our manufactures would be suspend-
ed and our iron works closed and our coal mines shut
down by the abolition of protection is a notion akin to
that of “the tail wagging the dog.” Where are the
goods to come from which are thus to deluge our mar-
kets, and how are they to be paid for 2 There is not
productive power enough in Europe to supply them,
nor are there ships to transport them, to say nothing of
the effect upon European prices of the demands of sixty
millions of people, who, head for head, consume more
than any other people in the world. And since other
countries are not going to deluge us with the products
of their labor without demanding the products of our
own labor in payment, any increase in our imports from
the abolition of protection would involve a correspond-
ing increase in exports.
The truth is that, the change would not only be
beneficial to our industries at large—four-fifths of
which, at least, are not brought into competition with
imported commodities, but it would be beneficial even
to the “protected" industries. In those that are
‘sheltered by home monopolies, profits would be re-
duced, in those in which the tariff permits the use of
inferior machinery and slovenly methods, better ma-
chinery would have to be provided and better methods
introduced ; but in the great bulk of our manufacturing
industries, the effect would only be beneficial, the re-
duction in the cost of material far more than compen-
sating for the reduction in prices. And with a lower
cost of production foreign markets from which our
manufacturers are now shut out would be opened. If
THE ABOLITION OF PROTECTION. 237
any industry would be “crushed” it could only be
some industry now carried on at national loss.
The increased power which the removal of restric-
tions upon trade would give in the production of wealth
would be felt in all directions. Instead of a collapse
there would be a revivification of industry. Rings
would be broken up, and where profits are now exces-
sive they would come down; but production would go
on under healthier conditions and with greater energy.
American manufacturers would begin to find markets
the whole world over. American ships would again
sail the high seas. The Delaware would ring like the
Clyde with the clash of riveting hammers, and the
United States would rapidly take that first place in the
industrial and commercial world to which her popula-
tion and her natural resources entitle her, but which is
now occupied by England, while legislation and admin-
istration would be relieved of a great cause of corrup-
tion, and all governmental reforms would be made
easier.
CEIAPTER XXI.
INADEQUACY OF THE FREE TRADE ARGUMENT.
THE point we have now reached is that at which
discussions of the tariff question usually end—the ex-
treme limit to which the avowed champions of the op-
posing policies carry their controversy.
We have, in fact, reached the legitimate end of our
inquiry so far as it relates to the respective merits of
protection and free trade. The stream, whose course
our examination has been following, here blends with
other streams, and though it still flows on, it is as part
of a wider and deeper river. As he who would trace
the waters of the Ohio to their final union with the
ocean cannot stop when the Ohio ends, but must still
follow on that mighty Mississippi which unites streams
from far different sources, so, as I said in the begin-
ning, to really understand the tariff question we must
go beyond the tariff question. This we may now see.
So far as relates to questions usually debated between
protectionists and free traders our inquiry is now com-
plete and conclusive. We have seen the absurdity of
protection as a general principle and the fallacy of the
special pleas that are made for it. We have seen that
protective duties cannot increase the aggregate wealth
of the country that enforces them, and have no tendency
to give a greater proportion of that wealth to the work-
ing class. We have seen that their tendencies, on the
INADEQUACY OF THE FREE TRADE ARGUMENT. 289
contrary, are to lessen aggregate wealth, and to foster
monopolies at the expense of the masses of the people.
But although we have directly or inferentially dis-
proved every argument that is made for protection,
although we have seen conclusively that protection is in
its nature inimical to general interests, and that free
trade is in its nature promotive of general interests, yet
if our inquiry were to stop here we should not have ac-
complished the purpose with which we set out. For my
part, did it end here, I would deem the labor I have sofar
spent in writing this book little better than wasted. For
all that we have seen has, with more or less coherence
and clearness, been shown again and again. Yet protec-
tion still retains its hold on the popular mind. And
until something more is shown, protection will retain
this hold.
In exposing the fallacies of protection I have endeav-
ored in each case to show what has made the fallacy
plausible, but it still remains to explain why such ex-
posures produce so little effect. The very conclusive-
ness with which our examination has disproved the
claims of protection will suggest that there must be
something more to be said, and may well prompt the
question, “If the protective theory is really so incon-
gruous with the nature of things and so inconsistent
with itself, how is it that after so many years of discus-
sion it still obtains such wide and strong support?”
Free traders usually attribute the persistence of the
belief in protection to popular ignorance, played upon
by special interests. But this explanation will hardly
satisfy an unbiased mind. Vitality inheres in truth,
not in error. Though accepted error has always the
strength of habit and authority, and the battle against it
240 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
must always be hard at first, yet the tendency of discus-
sion in which error is confronted with truth is to make
the truth steadily clearer. That a theory which seems
wholly false holds its ground in popular belief despite
wide and long discussion, should prompt its opponents
to inquire whether their arguments have really gone
to the roots of popular belief, and whether this belief
does not derive support from truths they have not con-
sidered, or from errors not yet exposed, which still pass
for truths—rather than to attribute its vitality to popu-
lar incapacity to recognize truth.
I shall hereafter show that the protective idea does
indeed derive support from doctrines that have been ac.
tively taught and zealously defended by the very econo-
mists who have assailed it (who, so to speak, have been
vigorously defending protection with the right hand
while raining blows upon it with the left), and from
habits of thought which the opponents no less than the
advocates of protection have failed to call in question.
But what I now wish to point out is the inadequacy of
the arguments which free traders usually rely on to con-
vince working-men that the abolition of protection is for
their interest.
In our examination we have gone as far, and in cer-
tain respects somewhat further than free traders usually
go. But what have we proved as to the main issue?
Merely that it is the tendency of free trade to increase the
production of wealth, and thus to permit of the increase
of wages, and that it is the tendency of protection to
decrease the production of wealth and foster certain
monopolies. But from this it does not follow that
the abolition of protection would be of any benefit to
the working class. The tendency of a brick pushed off
INADEQUACY OF THE FREE TRADE ARGUMENT. 241
a chimney top is to fall to the surface of the ground.
But it will not fall to the surface of the ground if its fall
be intercepted by the roof of a house. The tendency
of anything that increases the productive power of labor
is to augment wages. But it will not augment wages
under conditions in which laborers are forced by compe-
tition to offer their services for a mere living.
In the United States, as in all countries where politi-
cal power is in the hands of the masses, the vital point
in the tariff controversy is as to its effect upon the earn-
ings of “the poor people who have to work.””
But this point lies beyond the limit to which free
traders are accustomed to confine their reasoning. They
prove that the tendency of protection is to reduce the
production of wealth and to increase the price of com-
modities, and from this they assume that the effect of
the abolition of protection would be to increase the earn-
ings of labor. But not merely is such an assumption
logically invalid until it is shown that there is nothing
in existing conditions to prevent the working classes
from getting the benefit of this tendency; but, although
in itself a natural assumption, it is in the minds of “the
poor people who have to work” contradicted by obvi-
Ous facts.
In this is the invalidity of the free trade argument,
and here, and not in the ignorance of the masses, is the
reason why all attempts to convert working-men to the
free-tradeism which would substitute a revenue tariff for
a protective tariff must, save under such conditions as
existed in England forty years ago, utterly fail.
* 1 find this suggestive phrase in a protectionist newspaper
But it well expresses the attitude toward labor of many of the freq
trade writers also.
21
242 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
While both sides have shown the same indisposition
to go to the heart of the controversy, there can be no
question that so far as issue is joined between protec-
tionists and free traders, in current discussion, the free
traders have the best of the argument.
But that the belief in protection has survived long
and wide discussion, that it seems to spring up again
when beaten down and to arise with apparent spontane-
ity in communities such as the United States, Canada
and Australia, that have grown up without tariffs, and
where the system lacks the advantage of inertia and
of enlisted interests, proves that beyond the discussion
there must be something which strongly commends pro-
tection to the popular mind.
This may also be inferred from what protectionists
themselves say. Beaten in argument, the protectionist
usually falls back upon some declaration which implies
that the real grounds of his belief have been untouched,
and which generally takes the form of an assertion that
though free trade may be true in theory it fails in
practice. In such form the assertion is untenable. A
theory is but an explanation of the relation of facts,.
and nothing can be true in theory that is not true in
practice. But free traders really beg the question when
they answer by merely pointing this out. The real
question is, whether the reasoning on which free trad-
ers rely takes into account all existing conditions?
What the protectionist means, or at least the perception
that he appeals to, when he talks in this way of the
difference between theory and fact, is, that the free trade
theory does not take into account all existing facts.
And this is true.
As the tariff question is presented, there are indeed,
INADEQUACY OF THE FREE TRADE ARGUMENT. 243
under existing-social conditions, two sides to the shield,
so that men who only look at one side, closing their eyes
to the other, may continue, with equal confidence, to hold
opposite opinions. And that the distinction between
them may, with not entire inaptness, be described as
that of exclusively regarding theory and that of exclu-
sively regarding facts, we shall see when we have
developed a theory which will embrace all the facts,
and which will explain not only why it is that honest
men have so diametrically differed upon the question
of protection vs. free trade, but why the advocates of
neither policy have been inclined to press on to that
point where honest differences may be reconciled. For
we have reached the place where the Ohio of the tariff
question flows into the Mississippi of the great social
Question. It need not surprise us that both parties to
the controversy, as it has hitherto been conducted,
should stop here, for it would be as rational to expect
any thorough treatment of the social question from the
well-to-do class represented in the English Cobden Club
or the American Iron and Steel Association, or from
their apologists in professorial chairs, as it would be to
look for any thorough treatment of the subject of per-
sonal liberty in the controversies of the slave-holding
Whigs and slave-holding Democrats of forty years ago,
or in the sermons of the preachers whose salaries were
paid by them.
CHAPTER XXII.
THE REAL WEAKNESS OF FREE TRADE.
HOW the abolition of protection would stimulate pro-
duction, weaken monopolies and relieve government of
a great cause of corruption, we have seen.
“But what,” it will be asked, “would be the gain to
working-men 7 Will wages increase?”
For some time, and to some extent, yes. For the
spring of industrial energy consequent upon the re-
moval of the dead weight of the tariff would for a time
make the demand for labor brisker and employment
steadier, and in occupations where they can combine,
workingmen would have better opportunity to reduce
their hours and increase their wages, as, since the abo-
lition of the protective tariff in England, many trades
there have done. But even from the total abolition of
protection, it is impossible to predict any general and
permanent increase of wages or any general and perma-
nent improvement in the condition of the working
classes. The effect of the abolition of protection, great
and beneficial though it must be, would in nature be
similar to that of the inventions and discoveries which
in our time have so greatly increased the production of
wealth, yet have nowhere really raised wages or of
themselves improved the condition of the working
classes.
THE REAL WEAKNESS OF FREE TRADE. 245
Here is the weakness of free trade as it is generally
advocated and understood.
The working-man asks the free trader: “How will the
change you propose benefit me?”
The free trader can only answer: “It will increase
wealth and reduce the cost of commodities.”
But in our own time the working-man has seen wealth
enormously increased without feeling himself a sharer
in the gain. He has seen the cost of commodities great-
ly reduced without finding it any easier to live. He
looks to England, where a revenue tariff has for some
time taken the place of a protective tariff, and there he
finds labor degraded and underpaid, a general standard
of wages lower than that which prevails here, while
such improvements as have been made in the condition
of the working classes since the abolition of protection
are clearly not traceable to that, but to trades-unions,
to temperance and beneficial societies, to emigration, to
education, and to such acts as those regulating the labor
of women and children, and the sanitary conditions of
factories and mines.
And seeing this, the working-man, eventhough he may
realize with more or less clearness the hypocrisy of the
rings and combinations which demand tariff duties for
“the protection of American labor,” accepts the fallacies
of protection, or at least makes no effort to throw them
off, not because of their strength so much as of the
weakness of the appeal which free trade makes to him.
A considerable proportion, at least, of the most intelli-
gent and influential of American working-men are fully
consgious that “protection ” does nothing for labor, but
neither do they see what free trade could do. And so
they regard the tariff question as one of no practical con-
246 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
cern to working-men—an attitude hardly less satisfac.
tory to the protected interests than a thorough belief in
protection. For when an interest is already intrenched
in law and habit of thought, those who are not against
it are for it.
To prove that the abolition of protection would tend
to increase the aggregate wealth is not of itself enough
to evoke the strength necessary to overthrow protec-
tion. To do that, it must be proved that the abolition
of protection would mean improvement in the condition
of the masses.
It is, as I have said, natural to assume that increased
production of wealth would be for the benefit of all, and
to a child, a savage, or a civilized man who lived in his
study and did not read the daily papers, this would
doubtless seem a necessary assumption. Yet, to the
majority of men in civilized society, so far is this as-
Sumption from seeming necessary, that current explana-
tions of the most important social phenomena involve
the reverse.
Without question the most important social phe-
nomena of our time arise from that partial paralysis of
industry which in all highly civilized countries is in
some degree chronic, and which at recurring periods
becomes intensified in widespread and long-continued
industrial depressions. What is the current explanation
of these phenomena? Is it not that which attributes
them to over-production ?
This explanation is positively or negatively support-
ed even by men who attribute to popular ignorance the
failure of the masses to appreciate the benefits of sub-
stituting a revenue tariff for a protective tariff. But So
long as conditions which bring racking anxiety and
THE REAL WEAKNESS OF FREE TRADE. 247
bitter privation to millions are commonly attributed to
the over-production of wealth, is it any wonder that
a reform which is urged on the ground that it would
still further increase the production of wealth should
fail to arouse popular enthusiasm 7
If, indeed, it be popular ignorance that gives persist-
ence to the belief in protection, it is an ignorance that
extends to questions far more important and pressing
than any question of tariff—an ignorance that the ad-
vocates of free trade have done nothing to enlighten,
and that they can do nothing to enlighten until they
explain why it is that in spite of the enormous increase
of productive power that has been going on with ac-
celerating rapidity all this century it is yet so hard for
the mere laborer to get a living.
In this great fact, that increase in wealth and in the
power of producing wealth does not bring any general
benefit in which all classes share—does not for the great
masses lessen the intensity of the struggle to live, lies
the explanation of the popular weakness of free trade.
It is owing to the increasing appreciation of this fact,
and not to accidental causes, that all over the civilized
world the free trade movement has for some time been
losing energy. -
American revenue reformers delude themselves if
they imagine that protection can now be overthrown in
the United States by a movement on the lines of the
Cobden Club. The day for that has passed.
It is true that the British tariff reformers of forty
years ago were enabled on these lines to arouse the
popular enthusiasm necessary to overthrow protection.
But not only did the fact that the British tariff made
food dear enable them to appeal to sympathy and
248 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
imagination with a directness and force impossible
where the commodities affected by a tariff are not of
such prime importance; but the feeling of that time in
regard to such reforms was far more hopeful. The
great social problems which to-day loom so dark on
the horizon of the civilized world were then hardly per-
ceived. In the destruction of political tyranny and
the removal of trade restrictions ardent and generous
spirits saw the emancipation of labor and the eradica-
tion of chronic poverty, and there was a confident belief
that the industrial inventions and discoveries of the
new era which the world had entered would elevate
society from its very foundations. The natural assump-
tion that increase in the general wealth must mean a
general improvement in the condition of the people was
then confidently made.
But disappointment after disappointment has chilled
these hopes, and, just as faith in mere republicanism
has weakened, so the power of the appeal that free
traders make to the masses has weakened with the
decline of the belief that mere increase in the power
of production will increase the rewards of labor. In-
stead of the abolition of protection in Great Britain
being followed, as was expected, by the overthrow of
protection everywhere, it is not only stronger through-
out the civilized world than it was then, but is again
raising its head in Great Britain.
It is useless to tell working-men that increase in the
general wealth means improvement in their condition.
They know by experience that this is not true. The
working classes of the United States have seen the
general wealth enormously increased, and they have
also seen that, as wealth has increased, the fortunes of
THE REAL WEAKNESS OF FIREE TRADE. 249
the rich have grown larger, without its becoming a
whit easier to get a living by labor.
It is true that statistics may be arrayed in such way
as to prove to the satisfaction of those who wish to
believe it, that the condition of the working classes
is steadily improving. But that this is not the fact
working-men well know. It is true that the average
consumption has increased, and that the cheapening of
commodities has brought into common use things that
were once considered luxuries. It is also true that in
many trades wages have been somewhat raised and
hours reduced by combinations among workmen. But
although the prizes that are to be gained in the lottery
of life—or, if any one prefers so to call them, the prizes
that are to be gained by superior skill, energy and
foresight—are constantly becoming greater and more
glittering, the blanks grow more numerous. The man
of superior powers and opportunities may hope to
count his millions where a generation ago he could
have hoped to count his tens of thousands; but to the
ordinary man the chances of failure are greater, the
fear of want more pressing. It is harder for the aver-
age man to become his own employer, to provide for a
family and to guard against contingencies. The anxi-
eties attendant on the fear of losing employment are
becoming greater and greater, and the fate of him who
falls from his place more direful. To prove this it is
not necessary to cite the statistics that show how pau-
perism, crime, insanity and suicide are increasing faster
than our increase in population. Who that reads our
daily papers needs any proof that the increase in the
aggregate of wealth does not mean increased ease of
gaining a living by labor 7
|%
250 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
Here is an item which I take from the papers as I
write. I do not take it because equally striking items
are rare, but because I find a comment on it which I
would also like to quote:
“STARVED TO DEATH IN OHIO.
“DAYTON, O., August 26.-One of the most horrible deaths that
ever occurred in a civilized community was that of Frank Waltz-
man, which happened in this city yesterday morning. He has
seven children and a wife, and was once a prominent citizen of
Xenia, O. He tried his hand at any kind of business where he
could find opportunity, and finally was compelled to shovel gravel
to get a crust for his children. He worked at this all last week,
and on Saturday night was brought home in a wagon, unable to
walk. This morning he was dead. An investigation of the affair
established the fact that the man had starved to death. The
family had been without food for nearly two weeks. His wife
tells a horrible story of his death, saying that while he lay dying
his children surrounded his couch and sobbed piteously for bread.”
And here is the typical comment which the New
York Tribune, shocked for a moment out of its attempt
to convince working-men that the tariff has improved
their condition, makes upon this item :
“STARVED TO DEATH.
“The Tribune, Tuesday, laid before its readers a very sad story of
death by literal starvation, at Dayton, O. The details of this cast
must have struck many thoughtful persons as more resembling thq.
catastrophes we are accustomed to regard as appertaining to Euro-
pean life than those indigenous here. The story is old enough in
general outline. First, a merchant, prospering ; then decline of
business, bankruptcy, and by degrees destitution, until pride and
shame together brought on the culminating disaster. A few years
ago it would have been said that such a fact was impossible in
America, and certainly there was a time when no one with power
and will to work need have starved in any part of this country.
During that period, too, the strong elasticity and recuperative
power of Americans were the world's wonder. No man thought
much of failure in business. The demand for enterprise of all
THE REAL WEAKNESS OF FIREE TRADE. 251
kinds was such that no man of ordinary pluck and energy could
be kept down. Perhaps this ability to recover was not so much a
national peculiarity as an effect of the existing state of Society.
Certainly, as things settle more and more into regular grooves in
the older States, the parallel between American and European
civilization becomes closer, and the Social problems which perplex
those Societies are beginning to overshadow this one also. Compe-
tition in our centres of population narrows more and more the
field of unmoneyed enterprise. It is no longer so easy for those
who fall to rise again. And social conventions fetter men more
and tend to hold them within narrower bounds.
“The poor fellow who starved to death at Dayton the other day
suffered an Old World fate. He was down and could not get up.
He was deprived of his old resources and could not invent new ones.
His large family increased his difficulties. He could not compete
successfully with younger and less handicapped contemporaries, and
so he sank, as thousands have done in the great capitals of Europe,
but as hitherto very fow, it is to be hoped, have sunk in an American
community. Yet this is the tendency of a rapid increase of popu-
lation and wealth. The struggle becomes fiercer all the time ; and
while the exactions of society enslave and hamper the ambitious
increasingly, the average fertility of resource and Swift adapta-
bility decline, just as the average skill of workmen declines with
the perfection of mechanical appliances. Commerce and the arti-
ficial requirements of social tyranny have already educated among
us a class of people whose lives are a perpetual struggle and as
perpetual an hypocrisy. They could live comfortably if they
could give up display, but they cannot do it, and so they make
themselves wretched and demoralize themselves at the same time.
The Sound, healthy American characteristics are being eliminated
in this way, and we are rearing up instead a generation of feeble
folks who may in turn become the parents of such hewers of wood
and drawers of water as the Old World city masses have long
been. And here, as there, our remedy and regeneration must come
from the more vigorous and better-trained products of the country
life.”
I will not ask how regeneration is to come from the
more vigorous products of the country life, when every
census shows a greater and greater proportion of our
252 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
population concentrating in cities, and when country
roads to the remotest borders are filled with tramps. I
merely reprint this article as a sample of the recogni-
tion one meets everywhere, even on the part of those
who formally deny it, of the obvious fact, that it is
becoming harder and harder for the man who has noth-
ing but his own exertions to depend on to get a living
in the United States. This fact destroys the assump-
tion that our protective tariff raises and maintains
wages, but it also makes it impossible to assume that
the abolition of protection would in any way alter the
tendency which as wealth increases makes the struggle
for existence harder and harder. This tendency shows
itself throughout the civilized world, and arises from
the more unequal distribution which everywhere ac-
companies the increase of wealth. How could the abo-
lition of protection affect it? The worst that can, in
this respect, be said of protection is that it somewhat
accelerates this tendency. The best that could be
promised for the abolition of protection is that it might
somewhat restrain it. In England the same tendency
has continued to manifest itself since the abolition of
protection, despite the fact that in other ways great
agencies for the relief and elevation of the masses have
been at work. Increased emigration, the greater diffu-
sion of education, the growth of trades-unions, sanitary
improvements, the better organization of charity, and
governmental regulation of labor and its conditions
have during all these years directly tended to improve
the condition of the working class. Yet the depths
of poverty are as dark as ever, and the contrast be.
tween want and wealth more glaring. The Corn-Law
Reformers thought to make hunger impossible, but
THE REAL WEAKNESS OF FREE TRADE. 253
*,
though the Corn laws have long since been abolished,
starvation still figures in the mortuary statistics of a
country overflowing with wealth. *.
While “statisticians” marshal figures to show to
Dives's satisfaction how much richer Lazarus is becom-
ing, here is what the Congregational clergymen of the
greatest and richest of the world's great cities declare
in their “Bitter Cry of Outcast London".
“While we have been building our churches and Solacing ourselves
with our religion and dreaming that the millennium was coming,
the poor have been growing poorer, the wretched more miserable
and the immoral more corrupt. The gulf has been daily widening
which separates the lowest classes of the community from our
churches and chapels and from all decency and civilization. It is
easy to bring an array of facts which seem to point to the opposite
conclusion. But what does it all amount to? We are simply liv-
ing in a fool's paradise if we imagine that all these agencies com-
bined are doing a thousandth part of what needs to be done. We
must face the facts, and these compel the conclusion that this terri-
ble flood of sin and misery is gaining on us. It is rising every day.”
This is everywhere the testimony of disinterested and
sympathetic observers. Those who are raised above
the fierce struggle may not realize what is going on
beneath them. But whoever chooses to look may see.
And when we take into account longer periods of
time than are usually considered in discussions as to
whether the condition of the working-man has or has
not improved with improvement in productive agencies
and increase in wealth, here is a great broad fact:
Five centuries ago the wealth-producing power of
England, man for man, was small indeed compared
with what it is now. Not merely were all the great
inventions and discoverics which since the introduc-
tion of steam have revolutionized mechanical industry
then undreamed of, but even agriculture was far ruder
254 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
and less productive. Artificial grasses had not been
discovered. The potato, the carrot, the turnip, the beet,
and many other plants and vegetables which the farmer
now finds most prolific, had not been introduced. The
advantages which ensue from rotation of crops were
unknown. Agricultural implements consisted of the
spade, the sickle, the flail, the rude plow and the har-
row. Cattle had not been bred to more than one-half the
size they average now, and sheep did not yield half the
fleece. Roads, where there were roads, were extremely
bad, wheel vehicles scarce and rude, and places a hun-
dred miles from each other were, in difficulties of trans-
portation, practically as far apart as London and Hong
Kong, or San Francisco and New York, are now.
Yet patient students of those times—such men as
Professor Thorold Rogers, who has devoted himself to
the history of prices, and has deciphered the records of
colleges, manors and public offices—tell us that the con-
dition of the English laborer was not only relatively,
but absolutely better in those rude times than it is in
England to-day, after five centuries of advance in the
productive arts. They tell us that the working-man
did not work so hard as he does now, and lived better;
that he was exempt from the harassing dread of being
forced by loss of employment to want and beggary, or
of leaving a family that must apply to charity to avoid
starvation. Pauperism as it prevails in the rich Eng-
land of the nineteenth century was in the far poorer
England of the fourteenth century, absolutely unknown.
Medicine was empirical and superstitious, sanitary
regulations and precautions were all but unknown.
There was frequently plague and occasionally famine,
for, owing to the difficulties of transportation, the
THE REAL WEAKNESS OF FREE TRADE. 255
scarcity of one district could not be relieved by the
plenty of another. But men did not, as they do now,
starve in the midst of abundance; and what is perhaps
the most significant fact of all is that not only were
women and children not worked as they are to-day, but
the eight-hour system, which even the working-classes of
the United States, with all the profusion of labor-saving
machinery and appliances have not yet attained, was
then the common system
If this be the result of five centuries of such increase
in productive power as has never before been known in
the world, what ground is there for hoping that the
mere abolition of protective tariffs would permanently
benefit working-men?
And not merely do facts of this kind prevent us
from assuming that the abolition of protection could
more than temporarily benefit working-men, but they
suggest the question, whether it could more than tem-
porarily increase the production of wealth 7
: Inequality in the distribution of wealth tends to
lessen the production of wealth—on the one side, by
lessening intelligence and incentive among workers;
and, on the other side, by augmenting the number of
idlers and those who minister to them, and by increas-
ing vice, crime and waste. Now, if increase in the
production of wealth tends to increase inequality in
distribution, not only shall we be mistaken in expecting
its full effect from anything which tends to increase
production, but there may be a point at which increased
inequality of distribution will neutralize increased power
of production, just as the carrying of too much sail may
deaden a ship's way.
256 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
Trade is a labor-saving method of production, and
the effect of tariff restrictions upon trade is unquestion-
ably to diminish productive power. Yet, important as
may be the effects of protection in diminishing the
production of wealth, they are far less important than
the waste of productive forces which is commonly
attributed to the very excess of productive power.
The existence of protective tariffs will not suffice to
explain that paralysis of industrial forces which in all
departments of industry seems to arise from an excess of
productive power, over the demand for consumption,
and which is everywhere leading to combinations to re-
strain production. And considering this, can we feel
quite sure that the effect of abolishing protection would
be more than temporarily to increase the production
of wealth?
CEIAPTER XXIII.
THE REAL STRENGTH OF PROTECTION.
THE pleas for protection are contradictory and ab-
surd ; the books in which it is attempted to give it the
semblance of a coherent system are confused and illog-
ical.”
But we all know that the reasons men give for their
conduct or opinions are not always the true reasons, and
that beneath the reasons we advance to others or set
forth to ourselves there often lurks a feeling or percep-
tion which we may but vaguely apprehend or may even
be unconscious of, but which is in reality the determin-
ing factor.
* The latest apology for protection, “Protection vs. Free Trade—
the scientific validity and economic operation of defensive duties in
the United States,” by ex-Governor Henry M. Hoyt, of Pennsyl-
vania (New York, 1886), is hardly below the average in this respect,
yet in the very preface the author discloses his equipment for eco-
nomic investigation by talking of value as though it were a mea-
sure of quantity, and supposing the case of a farmer who has $3,500
worth of produce which he cannot sell or barter. With this begin-
ning it is hardly to be wondered at that the 420 pages of his work
bring him to the conclusion, which he prints in italics, that “the
nearer we come to organizing and conducting our competing indus-
tries as if we were the only nation on the planet, the more we shall
make and the more we shall have to divide among the makers.’ An
asteroid of about the superficial area of Pennsylvania would doubt-
less scem the most desirable of worlds to this protectionist statesman
and philosopher.
258 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
I have been at pains to examine the arguments
by which protection is advocated or defended, and this
has been necessary to our inquiry, just as it is necessary
that an advancing army should first take the outworks
before it can move on the citadel. Yet though these
arguments are not merely used controversially, but
justify their faith in protection to protectionists them-
selves, the real strength of protection must be sought
elsewhere.
One needs but to talk with the rank and file of the
supporters of protection in such a way as to discover
their thoughts rather than their arguments, to see that
beneath all the reasons assigned for protection there is
something which gives it vitality, no matter how clearly
those reasons may be disproved.
The truth is, that the fallacies of protection draw
their real strength from a great fact, which is to them
as the earth was to the fabled Antæus, so that they are
beaten down only to spring up again. This fact is one
which neither side in the controversy endeavors to ex-
plain—which free traders quietly ignore and protec-
tionists quietly utilize; but which is of all social facts
most obvious and important to the working classes—
the fact that as Soon, at least, as a certain stage of social
development is reached, there are more laborers seek-
ing employment than can find it—a surplus which at
recurring periods of industrial depression becomes very
large. Thus the opportunity of work comes to be
regarded as a privilege, and work itself to be deemed
in common thought a good.”
* The getting of work, not the getting of the results of work, is
assumed by protectionist writers to be the end at which a true na-
tional policy should aim, though for obvious reasons they do not
THE REAL STRENGTH OF PROTECTION. 259
Here, and not in the labored arguments which its
advocates make, or in the power of the special interests
which it enlists, lies the real strength of protection.
Beneath all the mental habits I have spoken of as dis-
posing men to accept the fallacies of protection lies one
still more important—the habit ingrained in thought
and speech of looking upon work as a boom.
Protection, as we have seen, operates to reduce the
power of a community to obtain wealth—to lessen the
result which a given amount of exertion can secure. It
“makes more work,” in the sense in which Pharaoh
made more work for the Hebrew brick-makers when he
refused them straw; in the sense in which the spilling
of grease over her floor makes more work for the
housewife, or the rain that wets his hay makes more
work for the farmer.
Yet, when we prove this, what have we proved to
men whose greatest anxiety is to get work; whose idea
of good times is that of times when work is plentiful?
A rain that wets his hay is to the farmer clearly an
injury; but is it an injury to the laborer who gets by
reason of it a day's work and a day's pay that other-
wise he would not have got?
The spilling of grease upon her kitchen floor may
be a bad thing for the housewife; but to the scrubbing
dwell upon this notion. Thus, Professor Thompson says (p. 211,
Political Economy): *
“The [free trade] theory assumes that the chief end of national
as of individual economy is to save labor, whereas the great problem
is how to employ it productively. If buying in the cheapest market
reduce the amount of employment, it will be for the nation that does
it, the dearest of all buying.” Or, again (p. 235): “The national
economy of labor consists, not in getting on with as little as possible,
but in finding remunerative employment for as much of it as pos-
sible.”
260 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
woman who is thereby enabled to earn a needed half.
dollar it may be a godsend. *
Or if the laborers on Pharaoh's public works had
been like thé laborers on modern public works, anxious
only that the job might last, and if outside of them had
been a mass of less fortunate laborers, pressing, strug-
gling, begging for employment in the brick-yards—
would the edict that, by reducing the productiveness
of labor, made more work have really been unpopular?
Let us go back to Robinson Crusoe. In speaking of
him I purposely left out Friday. Our protectionist
might have talked until he was tired without convinc-
ing Crusoe that the more he got and the less he gave in
his exchange with passing ships the worse off he would
be. But if he had taken Friday aside, recalled to his
mind how Crusoe had sold Xury into slavery as soon as
he had no further use for him, even though the poor
boy had helped him escape from the Moors and had
saved his life, and then had whispered into Friday's
ear that the less work there was to do the less need
would Crusoe have of him and the greater the danger
that he might give him back to the cannibals, now that
he was certain to have more congenial companions
—would the idea that there might be danger in a
deluge of cheap goods have seemed so ridiculous to
Friday as it did to Crusoe?
Those who imagine that they can overcome the popu-
lar leaning to protection by pointing out that protec-
tive tariffs make necessary more work to obtain the
same result, ignore the fact that in all civilized coun-
tries that have reached a certain stage of development
the majority of the people are unable to employ them-
selves, and, unless they find some one to give them
THE REAL STRENGTH OF PROTECTION. 261
f
work, are helpless, and, hence, are accustomed to re.
gard work as a thing to be desired in itself, and any-
thing which makes more work as a benefit, not an
injury.
Here is the rock against which “free traders” whose
ideas of reform go no further than “a tariff for revenue
only” waste their strength when they demonstrate that
the effect of protection is to increase work without in-
creasing wealth. And here is the reason why, as we
have seen in the United States, in Canada, and in Aus-
tralia, the disposition to resort to protective tariffs in-
creases as that early stage in which there is no difficulty
of finding employment is passed, and the social phenom-
ena of older countries begin to appear.” O
* The growth of the protective spirit as social development goes
on, which has been very obvious in the United States, is generally
attributed to the influence of the manufacturing interests which
begin to arise. But observation has convinced me that this cause is
inadequate, and that the true explanation lies in habits of thought
engendered by the greater difficulties of finding employment. I am
satisfied, for instance, that protection is far stronger in California
than it was in the earlier days of that State. But the Californian in-
dustries that can be protected by a national tariff are yet insignifi-
cant as compared with industries that cannot be protected. But
when tramps abound and charity is invoked for relief works, one
needs not go far to find an explanation of the growth of a sentiment
which favors the policy of “keeping work in the country.” Noth-
ing can be clearer than that our protective tariff adds largely to the
cost of nearly everything that the American farmer has to buy,
while adding little, if anything, to the price of what he has to sell,
and it has been a favorite theory with those who since the war have
been endeavoring to arouse sentiment against protection that the
attention of the agricultural classes only needed to be called to this
to bring out an overwhelming opposition to protective duties. But
with all the admirable work that has been done in this direction, it
is hard to see any result. The truth is, as may be discovered by
262 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
There never yet lived a man who wanted work for
its own sake. Even the employments, constructive or
destructive, as may be, in which we engage to exercise
our faculties or to dissipate ennui, must to please us
show result. It is not the mere work of felling trees
that tempts Mr. Gladstone to take up his axe as a relief
from the cares of state and the strain of politics. He
could get as much work—in the sense of exertion—
from pounding a sand-bag with a wooden mallet. But
he could no more derive pleasure from this than the
man who enjoys a brisk walk could find like enjoy-
ment in tramping a tread-mill. The pleasure is in the
sense of accomplishment that accompanies the work—
in seeing the chips fly and the great tree bend and
fall.
The natural inducement to the work by which hu-
man wants are supplied is the produce of that work.
But our industrial Organization is such that what large
numbers of men expect to get by work is not the pro-
duce or any proportional share of the produce of their
work, but a fixed sum which is paid to them by those
who take for their own uses the produce of their work.
This sum takes to them the place of the natural induce.
ment to work, and to obtain it becomes the object of
their work.
Now the very fact that without compulsion no one
will work unless he can get Something for it, causes, in
common thought, the idea of wages to become involved
in the idea of work, and leads men to think and speak
talking with farmers, that the average farmer feels that “there are
already too many people in farming,” and hence is not ill-disposed
toward a policy which, though it may increase the prices he has to
pay, claims to “make work” in other branches of industry.
THE REAL STRENGTH OF . PROTECTION. 263
of wanting work when what they really want are the
wages that are to be got by work. But the fact that
these wages are based upon the doing of work, not
upon its productiveness, dissociates the idea of return
to the laborer from the idea of the actual productive-
ness of his labor, throwing this latter idea into the
background or eliminating it altogether.
In our modern civilization the masses of men pos-
sess only the power to labor. It is true that labor is
the producer of all wealth, in the sense of being the
active factor of production ; but it is useless without
the no less necessary passive factor. With nothing to
exert itself upon, labor can produce nothing, and is ab-
solutely helpless. And so, the men who have nothing
but the power to labor must, to make that power of any
use to them, either hire the material necessary to the
exertion of labor, or, as is the prevailing method in our
industrial organization, sell their labor to those who
have the material. Thus it comes that the majority of
men must find some one who will set them to work and
pay them wages, he keeping as his own what their ex-
penditure of labor produces.
We have seen how in the exchange of commodities
through the medium of money the idea arises, almost
insensibly, that the buyer confers an obligation upon
the seller. But this idea attaches to the buying and
selling of labor with greater clearness and far greater
force than to the buying and selling of commodities.
There are several reasons for this. Labor will not
keep. The man who does not sell a commodity to-day
may sell it to-morrow. At any rate he retains the
commodity. But the labor of the man who has stood
idle to-day because no one would hire him cannot be
264. PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
sold to-morrow. The opportunity has gone from the
man himself, and the labor that he might have exerted,
had he found a buyer for it, is utterly lost. The men
who have nothing but their labor are, moreover, the
poorest class—the class who live from hand to mouth
and who are least able to bear loss. Further than this,
the sellers of labor are numerous as compared with
buyers. All men in health have the power of labor,
but under the conditions which prevail in modern civi-
lization only a comparatively few have the means of
employing labor, and there are always, even in the best
of times, some men who find it difficult to sell their
labor and who are thus exposed to privation and anx-
iety, if not to physical suffering.
Hence arises the feeling that the man who employs
another to work is a benefactor to him—a feeling which
even the economists who have made war upon some of
the popular delusions growing out of it have done their
best to foster, by teaching that capital employs and
maintains labor. This feeling runs through all classes,
and colors all our thought and speech. One cannot
read our newspapers without seeing that the notice
of a new building or projected enterprise of any kind
usually concludes by stating that it will give employ-
ment to so many men, as though the giving of employ-
ment, the providing of work, were the measure of its
public advantage, and something for which all should
be grateful. This feeling, strong among employed, is
stronger still among employers. The rich manufac.
turer, or iron worker, or ship-builder, talks and thinks
of the men to whom he has “given employment” as
though he had actually given something which entitled
him to their gratitude, and he is inclined to think, and
THE REAL STRENGTH OF PROTECTION. 265
in most cases does think, that in combining to demand
higher wages or less hours, or in any way endeavoring
to put themselves in the position of freely contracting
parties, they are snapping at the hand that has fed
them, although the obvious fact is that such an em.
ployer's men have given him a greater value than he
has given them, else he could not have grown rich by
employing them.
This habit of looking on the giving of employment
as a benefaction and on work as a boon, lends easy
currency to teachings which assume that work is de-
sirable in itself—something which each nation ought
to try to get the most of and makes a system which
professes to prevent other countries from doing for us
work we might do for ourselves seem like a system
for the enrichment of our own country and the benefit
of its working-classes. It not only indisposes men
to grasp the truth that protection can only operate
to reduce the productiveness of labor; but it indis-
poses them to care anything about that. It is the
need for labor, not the productiveness of labor, that
they are accustomed to look upon as the thing to be
desired.
So confirmed is this habit, that nothing is more com-
mon than to hear it said of a useless construction or
expenditure that “it has done no good, except to pro-
vide employment,” while the most popular argument
for the eight-hour system is that machinery has so
reduced the amount of work to be done that there is
not now enough to go around unless divided into
smaller “takes.”
When men are thus accustomed to think and speak
of work as desirable in itself, is it any wonder that a
12
266 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE. }
system which proposes to “make work” should easily
obtain popularity?
Protectionism viewed in itself is absurd. But it is
no more absurd than many other popular beliefs. Pro-
fessor W. G. Sumner of Yale College, a fair representa-
tive of the so-called free traders who have been vainly
trying to weaken the hold of protectionism in the
United States without disturbing its root, essayed, be-
fore the United States Tariff Commission in 1882, to
bring protectionism to a reductio ad absurdum by declar-
ing that the protectionist theory involved such prop-
ositions as these: that a big standing army would tend
to raise wages by withdrawing men from competition
in the labor market; that paupers in almshouses and
convicts in prisons ought for the same reason to be
maintained without labor; that it is better for the
laboring class that rich people should live in idleness
than that they should work; that trades unions should
prevent their members from lessening the supply of
work by doing too much; and that the destruction of
property in riots must be a good thing for the laboring
class, by increasing the work to be done.
But whoever will listen to the ordinary talk of men
and read the daily newspapers, will find that, so far
from such notions seeming absurd to the common mind,
they are accustomed ideas. Is it not true that the
“good times during the war” are widely attributed to
the “employment furnished by government" in calling
so many men into the army, and to the brisk demand
for commodities caused by their unproductive consump-
tion and by actual destruction? Is it not true that all
over the United States the working-classes are protest.
ing against the employment of convicts in this, that, or
THE REAL STRENGTH OF PROTECTION. 267
the other way, and would much rather have them kept
in idleness than have them “take work from honest
men.”? Is it not true that the rich man who “gives
employment” to others by his lavish waste is univer-
sally regarded as a better friend to the workers than
the rich man who “takes work from those who need
it.” by doing it himself?
In themselves these notions may be what the Pro-
fessor declares them, “miserable fallacies which sin
against common sense,” but they arise from the recog-
nition of actual facts. Take the most preposterous of
them. The burning down of a city is indeed a lessen-
ing of the aggregate wealth. But is the waste involved
in the burning down of a city any more real than the
waste involved in the standing idle of men who would
gladly be at work in building up a city? Where every
one who needed to work could find opportunity, there
it would indeed be clear that the maintenance in idle-
ness of convicts, paupers, or rich men must lessen the
rewards of workers; but where hundreds of thousands
must endure privation because of their inability to find
work, the doing of work by those who can support
themselves, or will be supported without it, seems like
taking the opportunity to work from those who most
need or most deserve it. Such “miserable fallacies”
must continue to sway men's minds until some satisfac-
tory explanation is afforded of the facts that make the
“leave to toil” a boon. To attempt, as do “free-
traders” of Professor Sumner's class, to eradicate pro-
tectionist ideas while ignoring these facts, is utterly
hopeless, What they take for a seedling that may be
pulled up with a vigorous effort, is in reality the shoot
of a tree whose spreading roots reach to the bed-rock
268 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
of Society. A political economy that will recognize no
deeper social wrong than the framing of tariffs on a
protective instead of on a revenue basis, and that, with
• Such trivial exceptions, is but a justification of “things
as they are,” is repellent to the instincts of the masses.
To tell workingmen, as Professor Sumner does, that
“trades-unionism and protectionism are falsehoods,” is
simply to dispose them to protectionism, for whatever
may be said of protection they well know that trades.
unions have raised wages in many vocations, and that
they are the only things that have yet given the work.
ing-classes any power of resisting a strain of competi-
tion that, unchecked, must force them to the maximum
of toil for the minimum of pay. Such free-tradeism
as Professor Sumner represents—and it is this that is
taught in England, and that in the United States has
essayed to do battle with protectionism—must, wherever
the working-classes have political power, give to protec-
tion positive strength.
But it is not merely by indirection that what is known
as the “orthodox political economy” strengthens pro-
tection. While condemning protective tariffs it has
justified revenue tariffs, and its most important teach-
ings have not merely barred the way to such an ex-
planation of social phenomena as would cut the ground
from under protectionism, but have been directly cal-
culated to strengthen the beliefs which render protec-
tion plausible. The teaching that labor depends for
employment upon capital, and that wages are drawn
from capital and are determined by the ratio between
the number of laborers and the amount of capital de-
voted to their employment;-all the teachings, in short,
which have degraded labor to the position of a second-
THE REAL STRENGTH OF PROTECTION. 269
ary and dependent factor in production, have tended
to sanction that view of things which disposes the labor-
ing-class to look with favor upon anything which by
preventing the coming into a country of the produce of
other countries, seems, at least, to increase the require-
ment for work at home.
CELAPTER XXIV.
THE PARADOX.
IF our investigation has as yet led to no satisfactory
conclusion it has at least explained why the controversy
so long carried on between protectionists and free tra-
ders has been so indeterminate. The paradox we have
reached is one toward which all the social problems of
our day converge, and had our examination been of any
similar question it must have come to just such a point.
Take, for instance, the question of the effects of ma-
chinery. The opinion that finds most influential ex-
pression is that labor-saving invention, although it may
sometimes cause temporary inconvenience or even hard-
ship to a few, is ultimately beneficial to all. On the
other hand, there is among workingmen a widespread
belief that labor-saving machinery is injurious to them,
although, since the belief does not enlist those power-
ful special interests that are concerned in the advo-
cacy of protection, it has not been wrought into an elab-
orate system and does not get anything like the same
representation in the organs of public opinion.
Now, should we subject this question to such an ex-
amination as we have given to the tariff question we
should reach similar results. We should find the
motion that invention ought to be restrained as incon-
gruous as the notion that trade ought to be restrained
—as incapable of being carried to its logical conclusions
THE PARADOX. 271
without resulting in absurdity. And while the use
of machinery enormously increases the production of
wealth, examination would show in it nothing to cause
inequality in distribution. On the contrary, we should
see that the increased power given by invention inures
primarily to labor, and that this gain is so diffused by
exchange that the effect of an improvement which in-
creases the power of labor in one branch of industry
must be shared by labor in all other branches. Thus
the direct tendency of labor-saving improvement is to
augment the earnings of labor. Nor is this tendency
neutralized by the fact that labor-saving inventions
generally require the use of capital, since competition,
when free to act, must at length bring the profits of
capital used in this way to the common level. Even
the monopoly of a labor-saving invention, while it can
seldom be maintained for any length of time, cannot
prevent a large (and generally much the largest) part
of the benefits from being diffused.*
From this we might conclude with certainty, that
the tendency of labor-saving improvements is to benefit
all, and especially to benefit the working-class, and
hence might naturally attribute any distrust of their
beneficial effects partly to the temporary displacements
which, in a highly organized Society, any change in the
forms of industry must cause, and partly to the in-
creased wants called forth by the increased ability to
satisfy want.
Yet, while as a matter of theory it is clear that labor-
saving inventions ought to improve the condition of all;
as a matter of fact it is equally clear that they do not.
* For a fuller examination of the effects of machinery see my
Social Problems.
272 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
In countries like Great Britain there is still a large
class living on the verge of starvation, and constantly
slipping over it—a class who have not derived the
slightest benefit from the immense increase of produc-
tive power, since their condition never could have been
any worse than it is—a class whose habitual condition
in times of peace and plenty is lower, harder, more
precarious and more degraded than that of any sav-
ageS.
In countries like the United States, where such a
class did not previously exist, its development has been
contemporaneous with wondrous advances of labor-
saving invention. The laws against tramps which have
been placed upon the statute books of our states, the re-
strictions upon child labor which have been found
necessary, the walking advertisements of our cities, the
growing bitterness of the strife which workingmen are
forced to wage, indicate unmistakably that while dis-
covery and invention have been steadily increasing the
productive power of labor in every department of in-
dustry, the condition of the mere laborer has been
growing worse.
It can be proved that labor-saving invention tends to
benefit labor, but that this tendency is in some way
aborted is even more clearly evident in the facts of to-
day than it was when John Stuart Mill questioned if
mechanical invention had lightened the day's toil of
any human being. That in some places and in Some
occupations there has been improvement in the condi-
tion of labor is true. But not only is such improve.
ment nowhere commensurate with the increase of pro-
ductive power; it is clearly not due to it. It exists
only where it has been won by combinations of work-
THE PARADOX. 273
men or by legal interference. It is trade unions, not
the increased power given by machinery, that have in
many occupations in Great Britain reduced hours and
increased pay; it is legislation, not any improvement in
the general condition of labor, that has stopped the
harnessing of women in mines and the working of little
children in mills and brick-yards. Where such influ-
ences have not been felt, it is not only certain that labor-
saving inventions have not improved the condition of
labor, but it seems as if they had exerted a depressing
effect—operating to make labor a drug instead of to
make it more valuable.
Thus, in relation to the effects of machinery, as in
relation to the effects of tariffs, there are two sides to
the shield. Conclusions to which we are led by a con-
sideration of principles are contradicted by conclusions
we are compelled to draw from existing facts. But,
while discussion may go on interminably between those
who, looking only at one side of the shield, refuse to
consider what their opponents see, yet to recognize the
contradictory aspects of such a question is to realize
the possibility of an explanation that will include both.
The problem we must solve to explain why free
trade or labor-saving invention or any similar cause
fails to produce the general benefits we naturally ex-
pect, is a problem of the distribution of wealth. When
increased production of wealth does not proportionately
benefit the working-classes, it must be that it is accom-
panied by increased inequality of distribution.
In themselves free trade and labor-saving inventions
do not tend to inequality of distribution. Yet it is
possible that they may promote such inequality, not by
virtue of anything inherent in their tendencies, but
12%
274 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
through their effect in increasing production, for, as
already pointed out, increase or decrease in the produc-
tion of wealth may of itself, under certain circum-
stances, alter the proportions of distribution. Let me
illustrate:
Smith, a plumber, and Jones, a gas-fitter, form a
. partnership in the usual way, and go into the business
of plumbing and gas-fitting. In this case whatever
increases or decreases the profits of the firm will affect
the partners equally, and whether these profits be much
or little, the proportion which each takes will be the
S3LO €.
But let us suppose their agreement to be of a kind
occasionally made, that the plumber shall have two-
thirds of the profits on all plumbing done by the firm,
and the gas-fitter two-thirds of the profits on all gas-
fitting. In such case, every job they do will not only
increase or decrease the profits of the firm, but, accord-
ing as it is a job of plumbing or of gas-fitting, will
directly affect the distribution of profits between the
partners.
Or, again, let us suppose that the partners differ in
their ability to take risks. Smith has a family and
must have a steady income, while Jones is a bachelor
who could get along for some time without drawing
from the firm. To better assure Smith of a living, it
is agreed that he shall draw a fixed sum before any
profits are distributed, and, in return for this guaranty,
shall get only a quarter of the profits remaining. In
such a case, increase or decrease of profits would of
itself alter the proportions of distribution. Increase
of profits would affect distribution in favor of Jones,
and might go so far as to raise his share to nearly 75
THE PARADOX. #: 275
*
per cent. and reduce the share of Smith to little over
25 per cent. Decrease of profits on the other hand
would affect distribution in favor of Smith, and might
go so far as to give him 100 per cent., while reducing
Jones's share to nothing. In such a case as this, any
circumstance which affected the amount of profits
would affect the terms of distribution, but not by vir-
tue of anything peculiar to the circumstance. Its real
cause would be something external to, and unconnected
with, such circumstance.
The social phenomena we have to explain resemble
those presented in this last case. The increased in-
equality of distribution which accompanies material
progress is evidently connected with the increased pro-
duction of wealth, and does not arise from any direct
effect of the causes which increase wealth.
Our illustration, however, yet lacks something. In
the case we have supposed, increase of their joint
profits would benefit both partners, though in different
degrees. Even when Smith's share diminished in pro-
portion, it would increase in amount. But in the social
phenomena we are considering, it is not merely that
with increasing wealth the share that some classes ob-
tain is not increased proportionately; it is that it is not
increased absolutely, and that in some cases it is even
absolutely, as well as proportionately, diminished.
To get an illustration that will cover this point as
well, let us therefore take another case. Let us go
back to Robinson Crusoe's island, which may well
serve us as an example of society in its simplest and
therefore most intelligible form.
The discovery of the island which we have heretofore
supposed, involving calls by other ships, would greatly
276 - PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
increase the wealth which the labor of its population of
two could obtain. But it would not follow that in the
increased wealth both would gain. Friday was Crusoe's
slave, and no matter how much the opening of trade
with the rest of the world might increase wealth, he
could only demand the wages of a slave—enough to
maintain him in working ability. So long as Crusoe
himself lived he would doubtless take good care of the
companion of his solitude, but when in the course of
time the island had fully come into the circle of civil-
ized life, and had passed into the possession of some
heir of Crusoe's, or of some purchaser, living probably
in England, and was cultivated with a view to making
it yield the largest income, the gulf between the pro-
prietor who owned it and the slave who worked upon
it would not merely have enormously widened as com-
pared with the time when Crusoe and Friday shared
with substantial equality the joint produce of their
labor, but the share of the slave might have become
absolutely less, and his condition lower and harder.
It is not necessary to suppose positive cruelty or
wanton harshness. The slaves who in the new order
of things took Friday's place might have all their
animal wants supplied—they might have as much to
eat as Friday had, might wear better clothes, be lodged
in better houses, be exempt from the fear of cannibals,
and in illness have the attendance of a skilled physician.
And seeing this, island “statisticians " might collate
figures or devise diagrams to show how much better
off these toilers were than their predecessor, who wore
goatskins, slept in a cave and lived in constant dread
of being eaten, and the conclusions of these gentlemen
might be paraded in all the island newspapers, with a
THE PARADOX. 277
chorus of: “Behold, in figures that cannot lie and dia-
grams that can be measured, how industrial progress
benefits everybody, even the slave l’
But in things of which the statistician takes no ac-
count they would be worse off than Friday. Compelled
to a round of dreary toil, unlightened by variety, un-
dignified by responsibility, unstimulated by seeing re-
sults and partaking of them, their life, as compared with
that of Friday, would be less that of men and more
that of machines.
And the effect of such changes would be the same
upon laborers such as we call free—free, that is to say,
to use their own power to labor, but not free to that
which is necessary to its use. If Friday, instead of
setting Crusoe's foot upon his head, in token that he
was thenceforward his slave, had simply acknowledged
Crusoe's ownership of the island, what would have
been the difference? As he could only live upon Cru-
soe's property on Crusoe's terms, his freedom would
simply have amounted to the freedom to emigrate, to
drown himself in the sea, or to give himself up to the
cannibals. Men enjoying only such freedom—that is
to say, the freedom to starve or emigrate as the alter-
native of getting some One else's permission to labor—
cannot be enriched by improvements that increase the
production of wealth. For they have no more power
to claim any share of it than has the slave. Those who
want them to work must give them what the master
must give the slave if he wants him to work—enough
to support life and strength; but when they can find no
one who wants them to work they must starve, if they
cannot beg. Grant to Crusoe ownership of the island,
and Friday, the free man, would be as much subject to
278 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
his will as Friday, the slave; as incapable of claiming
any share of an increased production of wealth, no
matter how great it might be nor from what cause it
might come.
And what would be true in the case of one man
would be true of any number. Suppose ten thousand
Fridays, all free men, all absolute owners of themselves,
and but one Crusoe, the absolute owner of the island.
So long as his ownership was acknowledged and could
be enforced, would not the one be the master of the ten
thousand as fully as though he were the legal owner of
their flesh and blood 7 Since no one could use his
island without his consent, it would follow that no one
could labor, or even live, without his permission. The
order, “Leave my property” would be a sentence of
death. This owner of the island would be to the other
ten thousand “free men” who lived upon it, their land
lord or land god, of whom they would stand in more
real awe than of any deity that their religion taught
them reigned above. For as a Scottish landlord told
his tenants: “God Almighty may have made the land,
but I own it. And if you don't do as I say, off you
go ! }}
No increase of wealth could enable such “free"
laborers to claim more than a bare living. The open-
ing up of foreign trade, the invention of labor-saving
machines, the discovery of mineral deposits, the intro-
duction of more prolific plants, the growth of skill,
would simply increase the amount their land lord would
charge for the privilege of living on his island, and
could in no wise increase what those who had noth-
ing but their labor could demand. Iſ Heaven itself
rained down wealth upon the island that wealth would
THE PARADOX. - 279
be his. And so, too, any economy that might enable
these mere laborers to live more cheaply would simply
increase the tribute that they could pay and that he
could exact.
Of course, no man could utilize a power like this to
its full extent or for himself alone. A single landlord
in the midst of ten thousand poor tenants, like a single
master amid ten thousand slaves, would be as lonely as
was Robinson Crusoe before Friday came. The human
being is by nature a social animal, and no matter how
selfish such a man might be, he would desire com-
panions nearer his own condition. Natural impulse
would prompt him to reward those who pleased him,
prudence would urge him to interest the more influen-
tial among his ten thousand Fridays in the maintenance
of his ownership, while experience would show him if
calculation did not, that a larger income could be ob-
tained by leaving to superior energy, skill and thrift
some part of what their efforts secured. But while
the single owner of such an island would thus be in-
duced to share his privileges by means of grants, leases,
exemptions or stipends, with a class more or less nu-
merous, who would thus partake with him in the advan-
tages of any improvement that increased the power of
producing wealth, there would yet remain a class, the
mere laborers of only ordinary ability, to whom such
improvement could bring no benefit. And it would
only be necessary to be a little chary in granting per-
mission to work upon the island, so as to keep a small
percentage of the population constantly on the verge of
starvation and begging to be permitted to use their
power to labor, to create a competition in which, bidding
against each other, men would of themselves offer all
280 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
that their labor could procure save a bare living, for the
privilege of getting that.
We can sometimes see principles all the clearer if we
imagine them brought out under circumstances to which
we are not habituated ; but, as a matter of fact, the
Social adjustment which in modern civilization creates
a class who can neither labor nor live save by permis-
sion of others, never could have arisen in this way.
The reader of The Further Adventures of Robinson
Crusoe, as related by De Foe, will remember that
during Crusoe's long absence, the three English rogues,
led by Will Atkins, set up a claim to the ownership of
the island, declaring that it had been given to them by
Robinson Crusoe, and demanding that the rest of the
inhabitants should work for them by way of rent.
Though used in their own countries to the acknowledg-
ment of just such claims, set up in the name of men
gone, not to other lands, but to another world, the
Spaniards, as well as the peaceable Englishmen, laughed
at this demand, and, when it was insisted on, laid Will
Atkins and his companions by the heels until they had
got over the notion that other people should do their
work for them. But if the three English rogues had
got possession of all the fire-arms before asserting their
claim to own the island, the rest of its population might
have been compelled to acknowledge it. Thus a class
of land-owners and a class of non-land-owners would
have been established, to which arrangement the whole
population might in a few generations have become so
habituated as to think it the natural order, and when
they had begun, in course of time, to colonize other
islands, they would have established the same institu-
tion there. Now, what might thus have happened on
THE PARADOX 281
Crusoe's island, had the three English rogues got posses-
sion of all the fire-arms, is precisely what on a larger
scale, did happen in the development of European
civilization, and what is happening in its extension to
other parts of the world. Thus it is that we find in
civilized countries a large class who, while they have
power to labor, are denied any right to the use of the
elements necessary to make that power available, and
who, to obtain the use of those elements, must either
give up in rent a part of the produce of their labor, or
take in wages less than their labor yields. A class thus
helpless can gain nothing from advance in productive
power. Where such a class exists, increase in the
general wealth can only mean increased inequality in
distribution. And though this tendency may be a
little checked as to some of them by trades-unions or
similar combinations which artifically lessen competi-
tion, it will operate to the full upon those outside of
such combinations.
And, let me repeat it, this increased inequality in
distribution does not mean merely that the mass of
those who have nothing but the power to labor do not
proportionately share in the increase of wealth. It
means that their condition must become absolutely, as
well as relatively, worse. It is in the nature of industrial
advance—it is of the very essence of those prodigious
forces which modern invention and discovery are un-
loosing, that they must injure where they do not benefit.
These forces are not in themselves either good or evil.
They bring good or evil according to the conditions
under which they are exerted. In a state of society in
which all men stood upon an equality with relation to
the use of the material universe their effects could be
*
z
282 PROTECTION or FREE TRADE.
only beneficent. But in a state of society in which
some men are held to be the absolute owners of the
material universe, while other men cannot use it without
paying tribute, the blessing these forces might bring
is changed into a curse—their tendency is to destroy
independence, to dispense with skill and convert the
artisan into a “hand,” to concentrate all business and
make it harder for an employee to become his own em-
ployer, and to compel women and children to injurious
and stunting toil. The change industrial progress is
now working in the conditions of the mere laborer, and
which is only somewhat held in check by the opera,
tions of trades-unions, is that change which would
convert a slave who shared the varied occupations and
rude comforts of his goatskin-clothed master into a
slave held as a mere instrument of factory production.
Compare the skilled craftsman of the Qld order with the
operative of the new order, the mere feeder of a machine.
Compare the American farm “help " of an earlier state,
the social equal of his employer, with the cowboy,
whose dreary life is enlivened only by a “round up" or
“drunk,” or with the harvest hand of the “wheat fac-
tory,” who sleeps in barracks or barns, and after a few
months of employment goes on a tramp. Or compare
the poverty of Connemara or Skye with the infinitely
more degraded poverty of Belfast or Glasgow. Do this,
and then say if to those who can only hope to sell their
labor for a subsistence, our very industrial progress has
not a dark side.
And that this must be the tendency of labor-saving
invention or reform in a society where the planet is
held to be private property, and the children that come
into life upon it are denied all right to its use except
THE PARADOX. 283
as they buy or inherit the title of some dead man,
we may see plainly if we imagine labor-saving inven-
tion carried to its farthest imaginable extent. When
we consider that the object of work is to satisfy want,
the idea that labor-saving invention can ever cause want
by making work more productive seems preposterous.
Yet, could invention go so far as to make it possible
to produce wealth without labor, what would be the
effect upon a class who can call nothing their own, save
the power to labor, and who, let wealth be never so
abundant, can get no share of it except by selling this
power? Would it not be to reduce to naught the value
of what this class have to sell; to make them paupers
in the midst of all possible wealth—to deprive them of
the means of earning even a poor livelihood, and to
compel them to beg or starve, if they could not steal?
Such a point it may be impossible for invention ever to
reach, but it is a point toward which modern invention
drives. And is there not in this some explanation of
the vast army of tramps and paupers, and of deaths by
want and starvation in the very midst of plenty 2 .
The abolition of protection would tend to increase
the production of wealth—that is sure. But under
conditions that exist, increase in the production of
wealth may itself become a curse—first to the laboring-
glass, and ultimately to Society at large.
Is it not true, then, it may be asked, that protection,
for the reason at least that it does check that freedom
and extension of trade which are essential to the full
play of modern industrial tendencies, is favorable to
the working-classes? Much of the strength of protec-
tion among workingmen comes, I think, from vague
feelings of this kind. f
284 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
My reply would be negative. Not only has proteo
tion—which is merely the protection of producing cap-
italists against foreign competition in the home market
—tendencies in itself toward monopoly and inequality,
but it is impotent to check the concentrating tenden-
cies of modern inventions and processes. To do this by
“protection "we must not only forbid foreign commerce,
but restrain internal commerce. We must not only
prohibit any new applications of labor-saving inven-
tion, but must prevent the use of the most important
of those already adopted. We must tear up the rail-
way and go back to the canal boat and freight wagon;
cut down the telegraph wire and rely upon the post
horse; substitute the scythe for the reaper, the needle
for the sewing-machine, the hand loom for the factory;
in short, discard all that a century of invention has
given us, and return to the industrial processes of a
hundred years ago. This is as impossible as for the
chicken to go back to the egg. A man may become
decrepit and childish, but once manhood is reached he
cannot again become a child.
No ; it is not in going backward, it is in going for-
ward, that the hope of social improvement lies.
CELAPTER XXV.
THE ROBBER THAT TAKES ALL THAT IS LEFT.
IN itself the abolition of protection is like the driving
off of a robber.
But it will not help a man to drive off one robber, if
another, still stronger and more rapacious, be left to
plunder him.
Labor may be likened to a man who as he carries
home his earnings is waylaid by a series of robbers.
One demands this much, and another that much, but
last of all stands one who demands all that is left, save
just enough to enable the victim to maintain life and
come forth next day to work. So long as this last-
robber remains, what will it benefit such a man to drive
off any or all of the other robbers?
Such is the situation of labor to-day throughout the
civilized world. And the robber that takes all that is
left, is private property in land. Improvement, no
matter how great, and reform, no matter now beneficial
in itself, cannot help that class who deprived of all right
to the use of the material elements, have only the power
to labor—a power as useless in itself as a sail without
wind, a pump without water, or a saddle without a
horse.
I have likened labor to a man beset by a series of
robbers, because there are in every country other things
than private property in land which tend to diminish
286 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
national prosperity and divert the wealth earned by
labor into the hands of non-producers. This is the
tendency of monopoly of the processes and machinery
of production and exchange, the tendency of protect-
ive tariffs, of bad systems of currency and finance, of
Corrupt government, of public debts, of standing ar-
mies, and of wars and preparations for war. But these
things, some of which are conspicuous in one country
and some in another, cannot account for that impover-
ishment of labor which is to be seen everywhere. They
are the lesser robbers, and to drive them off is only to
leave more for the great robber to take.
If the all-sufficient cause of the impoverishment of
labor were abolished, then reform in any of these direc-
tions would improve the condition of labor; but so
long as that cause exists, no reform can effect any per-
manent improvement. Public debts might be abolish-
ed, standing armies disbanded, war and the thought
*of war forgotten, protective tariffs everywhere dis-
carded, government administered with the greatest
purity and economy, and all monopolies, save the
monopoly of land, destroyed, without any permanent
improvement in the condition of the laboring-class. For
the economic effect of all these reforms would simply
be to diminish the waste or increase the production of
wealth, and so long as competition for employment on
the part of men who are powerless to employ them-
selves tends steadily to force wages to the minimum
that gives the laborer but a bare living, this is all the
ordinary laborer can get. So long as this tendency
exists—and it must continue to exist so long as private
property in land exists—improvement (even if possible)
in the personal qualities of the laboring masses, such
THE ROBBER THAT TAKES ALL THAT IS LEFT. 287
as improvement in skill, in intelligence, in temperance
or in thrift, cannot improve their material condition.
Improvement of this kind can only benefit the individ-
ual while it is confined to the individual, and thus
gives him an advantage over the body of Ordinary labor-
ers whose wages form the regulative basis of all other
wages. If such personal improvements become general
the effect can only be to enable competition to force
wages to a lower level. Where few can read and write,
the ability to do so confers a special advantage and
raises the individual who possesses it above the level of
Ordinary labor, enabling him to command the wages of
Special skill. But where all can read and write, the
mere possession of this ability cannot save ordinary
laborers from being forced to as low a position as
though they could not read and write.
And so, where thriftlessness or intemperance pre-
vails, the thrifty or temperate have a special advantage
which may raise them above the conditions of ordinary
labor; but should these virtues become general that
advantage would cease. Let the great body of working-
men so reform or so degrade their habits that it would
become possible to live on one-half the lowest wages
now paid, and that competition for employment which
drives men to work for a bare living must proportion-
ately reduce the level of wages.
I do not say that reforms that increase the intelli-
gence or improve the habits of the masses are even
in this view useless. The diffusion of intelligence
tends to make men discontented with a life of poverty
in the midst of wealth, and the diminution of intem-
perance better fits them to revolt against such a lot.
Public schools and temperance societies are thus pre-
288 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
revolutionary agencies. But they can never abolish
poverty so long as land continues to be treated as pri-
vate property. The worthy people who imagine that
compulsory education or the prohibition of the drink
traffic can abolish poverty are making the same mis-
take that the Anti-Corn Law reformers made when they
imagined that the abolition of protection would make
hunger impossible. Such reforms are in their own
nature good and beneficial, but in a world like this,
tenanted by beings like ourselves, and treated by them
as the exclusive property of a part of their number,
there must, under any conceivable conditions, be a
class on the verge of starvation. •
This necessity inheres in the nature of things; it
arises from the relation between man and the external
universe. Land is the superficies of the globe—that
bottom of the ocean of air to which our physical
structure confines us. It is our only possible standing
place, our only possible workshop, the only reservoir
from which we can draw material for the supply of
our needs. Considering land in its narrow sense, as
distinguished from water and air, it is still the element
necessary to our use of the other elements. Without
land man could not even avail himself of the light and
heat of the sun or utilize the forces that pulse through
matter. And whatever be his essence, man, in his
physical constitution, is but a changing form of matter,
a passing mode of motion, constantly drawn from na-
ture's reservoirs and as constantly returning to them
again. In physical structure and powers he is related
to land as the fountain jet is related to the stream, or
the flame of a gas burner to the gas that feeds it.
Hence, let other conditions be what they may, the
THE ROBBER THAT TAKES ALL THAT IS LEFT. 289
man who, if he lives and works at all, must live and
work on land belonging to another, is necessarily a
slave or a pauper.
There are two forms of slavery—that which Friday
accepted when he placed Crusoe's foot upon his head,
and that which Will Atkins and his comrades attempted
to establish when they set up a claim to.the ownership
of the island and called on its other inhabitants to do
all the work. The one, which consists in making prop-
erty of man, is only resorted to when population is too
sparse to make practicable the other, which consists in
making property of land.
For while population is sparse and unoccupied land
is plenty, laborers are able to escape the necessity of
buying the use of land, or can obtain it on nominal
terms. Hence to obtain slaves—people who will work
for you without your working for them in return—it is
necessary to make property of their bodies or to resort
to predial slavery or serfdom, which is an artificial
anticipation of the power that comes to the land-owner
with denser population, and which consists in confin-
ing laborers to land on which it is desired to utilize
their labor. But as population becomes denser and
land more fully occupied, the competition of non-land-
owners for the use of land obviates the necessity of
making property of their bodies or of confining them to
an estate in order to obtain their labor without return.
They themselves will beg the privilege of giving their
labor in return for being permitted what must be yield-
ed to the slave—a spot to live on and enough of the
produce of their own labor to maintain life.
This, for the owner, is much the more convenient
form of slavery. He does not have to worry about his
13
290 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE. .
slaves—is not at the trouble of whipping them to make
them work, or chaining them to prevent their escape,
or chasing them with blood-hounds when they run
away. He is not concerned with seeing that they are
properly fed in infancy, cared for in sickness or sup-
ported in old age. He can let them live in hovels, let
them work harder and fare worse, than could any half
humane owner of the bodies of men, and this without a
qualm of conscience or any reprobation from public
opinion. In short, when society reaches the point of
development where a brisk competition for the use of
land springs up, the ownership of land gives more profit
with less risk and trouble than does the ownership of
men. If the two young Englishmen I have spoken of
had come over here and bought so many American
citizens, they could not have got from them so much
of the produce of labor as they now get by having
bought land which American citizens are glad to be
allowed to till for half the crop. And so, even if our
laws permitted, it would be foolish for an English duke
or marquis to come over here and contract for ten
thousand American babies, born or to be born, in the
expectation that when able to work he could get out of
them a large return. For by purchasing or fencing in
a million acres of land that cannot run away and do
not need to be fed, clothed or educated, he can, in
twenty or thirty years, have ten thousand full grown
Americans, ready to give him half of all that their
labor can produce on his land for the privilege of sup-
porting themselves and their families out of the other
half. This gives him more of the produce of labor
than he could exact from so many chattel slaves. And
as time goes on and American citizens become moro
THE ROBBER THAT TAKES ALL THAT IS LEFT. 291
plentiful, the ownership of this land will enable him to
get more of them to work for him, and on lower terms.
His speculation in land is as much a speculation in the
growth of men as though he had bought children and
contracted for infants yet to be born. For if infants
ceased to be born and men to grow up in America, his
land would be valueless. The profits on such investment
do not arise from the growth of land or increase of its
capabilities, but from growth of population.
Land in itself has no value. Value arises only from
human labor. It is not until the ownership of land be.
comes equivalent to the ownership of laborers that any
value attaches to it. And where land has a speculative
value it is because of the expectation that the growth
of society will in the future make its ownership equiva-
lent to the ownership of laborers.
It is true that all valuable things have the quality of
enabling their owner to obtain labor or the produce of
labor in return for them or for their use. But with
things that are themselves the produce of labor such
transactions involve an exchange—the giving of an
equivalent of labor-produce in return for labor or its
produce. Land, however, is not the produce of labor;
it existed before man was, and, therefore, when the
ownership of land can command labor or the products
of labor, the transaction, though in form it may be an
exchange, is in reality an appropriation. The power
which the ownership of valuable land gives, is that of
getting human service without giving human service,
a power essentially the same as that power of appro-
priation which resides in the ownership of slaves. It
is not a power of exchange, but a power of blackmail,
such as would be asserted were some men compelled to
292 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
pay other men for the use of the ocean, the air or the
sunlight.
The value of such things as grain, cattle, ships,
houses, goods, or metals is a value of exchange, based
upon the cost of production, and therefore tends to
diminish as the progress of society lessens the amount
of labor necessary to produce such things. But the
value of land is a value of appropriation, based upon
the amount that can be appropriated, and therefore
tends to increase as the progress of society increases
production. Thus it is, as we see, that while all sorts
of products steadily fall in value, the value of land
steadily rises. Inventions and discoveries that in-
crease the productive power of labor lessen the value
of the things that require labor for their production,
but increase the value of land, since they increase the
amount that labor can be compelled to give for its use.
And so, where land is fully appropriated as private
property no increase in the production of wealth, no
economy in its use, can give the mere laborer more than
the wages of the slave. If wealth rained down from
heaven or welled up from the depths of the earth it
could not enrich the laborer. It could merely increase
the value of land.
Nor do we have to appeal to the imagination to see
this. In Western Pennsylvania it has recently been
discovered that if borings are made into the earth com-
bustible gas will force itself up—a sheer donation, as it
were, by Nature, of a thing that heretofore could only
be produced by labor. The direct and natural tend-
ency of this new power of obtaining by boring and
piping what has heretofore required the mining and
retorting of coal is to make labor more valuable and to
# * * --
THE-ROBBER THAT TAKES ALL THAT IS LEFT, 293
increase the earnings of the laborer. But land in Penn-
sylvania being treated as private property, it can have
no such effect. Its effect, in the first place, is to enrich
the owners of the land through which the borings must
be made, who, as legal owners of the whole material
universe above and below their land, can levy a toll
on the use of Nature's gift. In the next place, the cap-
italists who have gone into the business of bringing the
gas in pipes to Pittsburgh and other cities have formed
a combination similar to that of the Standard Oil
Company, by which they control the sale of the natural
gas, and thus over and above the usual returns of cap-
ital make a large profit. Still, however, a residue of
advantage is left, for the new fuel is so much more
easily handled, and produces so much more uniform a
heat, that the glass and iron workers of Pittsburgh find
it more economical than the old fuel, even at the same
cost. But they cannot long retain this advantage. If
it prove permanent, other glass and iron workers will
soon be crowding to Pittsburgh to share in it, and the
result will be that the value of city lots in Pittsburgh
will so increase as finally to transfer this residual advan-
tage to the owners of Pittsburgh land.” And if the
monopoly of the piping company is abolished, or if by
legislative regulation its profits are reduced to the
ordinary earnings of capital, the ultimate result will, in
the same way, be not an advantage to workers, but an
advantage to land-owners.
* The largest owners of Pittsburgh land are an English family
named Schenley, who draw in ground rents a great revenue, thus
(to the gratification of Pennsylvania protectionists) increasing our
exports over our imports, just as though they owned so many Penn-
sylvanians.
294 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
Thus it is that railways cheapen transportation only
to increase the value of land, not the value of labor,
and that when their rates are reduced it is land-owners
not laborers who get the benefit. So it is with all im-
provements of whatever nature. The Federal gov.
ernment has acted the part of a munificent patron to
Washington City. The consequence is that the value
of lots has advanced. If the Federal government were
to supply every Washington householder with free
light, free fuel and free food, the value of lots would
still further increase, and the owners of Washington
“real estate” would ultimately pocket the donation.
The primary factors of production are land and
labor. Capital is their product, and the capitalist is
but an intermediary between the landlord and the
laborer. Hence workingmen who imagine that capital
is the oppressor of labor are “barking up the wrong
tree.” In the first place, much that seems on the sur-
face like oppression by capital is in reality the result
of the helplessness to which labor is reduced by being
denied all right to the use of land. “The destruction
of the poor is their poverty.” It is not in the power of
capital to compel men who can obtain free access to
nature to sell their labor for starvation wages. In the
second place, whatever of the earnings of labor capital-
istic monopolies may succeed in appropriating, they are
merely lesser robbers, who take what, if they were
abolished, land ownership would take.
No matter whether the social organization be simple
or complex, no matter whether the intermediaries be-
tween the owners of land and the owners of, the mere
power to labor be few or many, wherever the available
land has been fully appropriated as the property of
&
THE ROBBER THAT TAKES ALL THAT IS LEFT, 295
'some of the people, there must exist a class, the labor-
ers of ordinary ability and skill, who can never hope to
get more than a bare living for the hardest toil, and who
are constantly in danger of failure to get even that.
We see that class existing in the simple industrial
organization of Western Ireland or the Scottish High-
lands, and we see it, still lower and more degraded, in
the complex industrial organization of the great Brit-
ish cities. In spite of the enormous increase of produc-
"tive power, we have seen it developing in the United
States, just as the appropriation of our land has gone
on. This is as it must be, for the most fundamental of
all human relations is that between man and the planet
he inhabits.
How the recognition of the consequences involved in
the division of men into a class of world owners and a
class who have no legal right to the use of the world
explains many things otherwise inexplicable I cannot
here point out, since I am dealing only with the tariff
question. We have seen why what is miscalled “free
trade”—the mere abolition of protection—can only
temporarily benefit the working-classes, and we have
now reached a position which will enable us to proceed
with our inquiry and ascertain what the effects of true
free trade would be. f
CEIAPTER XXVI.
TRUE FREE TRADE.
“CoME with me,” said Richard Cobden, as John
Bright turned heart-stricken from a new-made grave.
“There are in England women and children dying with
hunger—with hunger made by the laws. Come with
me, and we will not rest until we repeal those laws.”
In this spirit the free trade movement waxed and
grew, arousing an enthusiasm that no mere fiscal re-
form could have aroused. And intrenched though it
was by restricted suffrage and rotten boroughs and
aristocratic privilege, protection was overthrown in
Great Britain.
And there is hunger in Great Britain still, and
women and children yet die of it.
But this is not the failure of free trade. When pro-
tection had been abolished and a revenue tariff substi-
tuted for a protective tariff, free trade had only won an
outpost. That women and children still die of hunger
in Great Britain arises from the failure of the reformers
to go on. Free trade has not yet been tried in Great
Britain. Free trade in its fullness and entirety would
indeed abolish hunger.
This we may now see.
Our inquiry has shown that the reason why the
abolition of protection, greatly as it would increase the
production of wealth, can accomplish no permanent
benefit for the laboring-class, is, that so long as the
TRUE FREE TRADE. 297
land on which all must live is made the property of
some, increase of productive power can only increase the
tribute which those who own the land can demand for
its use. So long as land is held to be the individual
property of but a portion of its inhabitants no possible
increase of productive power, even if it went to the
length of abolishing the necessity of labor, and no im-
aginable increase of wealth, even though it poured
down from heaven or gushed up from the bowels of
the earth, could improve the condition of those who
possess only the power to labor. The greatest imagin-
able increase of wealth could only intensify in the
greatest imaginable degree the phenomena which we
are familiar with as “over-production”—could only
reduce the laboring-class to universal pauperism.
Thus it is, that to make either the abolition of pro-
tection or any other reform beneficial to the working-
class we must abolish the inequality of legal rights to
land, and restore to all their natural and equal rights
in the common heritage.
How can this be done?
Consider for a moment precisely what it is that
needs to be done, for it is here that confusion some-
times arises. To secure to each of the people of a
country his cqual right to the land of that country does
not mean to secure to each an equal piece of land.
Save in an extremely primitive society, where popula-
tion was sparse, the division of labor had made little
progress, and family groups lived and worked in com-
mon, a division of land into anything like equal pieces
would indeed be impracticable. In a state of society
such as exists in civilized countries to-day, it would be
extremely difficult, if not altogether impossible, to
13% *
298 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE,
make an equal division of land. Nor would one such
division suffice. With the first division the difficulty
would only begin. Where population is increasing
and its centres are constantly changing; where differ-
ent vocations make different uses of lands and require
different qualities and amounts of it; where improve.
ments and discoveries and inventions are constantly
bringing out new uses, and changing relative values, a
division that should be equal to-day would soon be-
come very unequal, and to maintain equality a re-
division every year would be necessary.
But to make a re-division every year, or to treat
land as a common, where no one could claim the ex-
clusive use of any particular piece, would only be
practicable where men lived in movable tents and made
no permanent improvements, and would effectually
prevent any advance beyond such a state. No one
would sow a crop or build a house, or open a mine, or
plant an Orchard, or cut a drain, so long as anyone else
could come in and turn him out of the land in which or
on which such improvements must be fixed. Thus it
is absolutely necessary to the proper use and improve-
ment of land that society should secure to the user and
improver safe possession.
This point is constantly raised by those who resent
any questioning of our present treatment of land.
They seek to befog the issue by persistently treating
every proposition to secure equal rights to land as
though it were a proposition to secure an equal division
of land, and attempt to defend private property in land
by setting forth the necessity of securing safe posses.
sion to the improver.
But the two things are essentially different.
TRUE FREE TRADE. 299
In the first place equal rights to land could not be se.
cured by the equal division of land, and in the second
place it is not necessary to make land the private prop-
erty of individuals in order to secure to improvers that
safe possession of their improvements that is needed to
induce men to make improvements. On the contrary,
private property in land, as we may see in any country
where it exists, enables mere dogs-in-the-manger to
levy blackmail upon improvers. It enables the mere
owner of land to compel the improver to pay him for
the privilege of making improvements, and in many
cases it enables him to confiscate the improvements.
Here are two simple principles, both of which are self-
evident : -
T.—That all men have equal rights to the use and
enjoyment of the elements provided by nature.
II.-That each man has an exclusive right to the use
and enjoyment of what is produced by his own labor.
There is no conflict between these principles. On
the contrary they are correlative. To fully secure the
individual right of property in the produce of labor we
must treat the elements of nature as common property.
If any one could claim the sunlight as his property and
could compel me to pay him for the agency of the sun
in the growth of crops I had planted, it would neces.
sarily lessen my right of property in the produce of my
labor. And conversely, where every one is secured the
full right of property in the produce of his labor, no
one can have any right of property in what is not the
produce of labor.
No matter how complex the industrial organization,
nor how highly developed the civilization, there is no
real difficulty in carrying out these principles. All we
300 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
have to do is to treat the land as the joint property of
the whole people, just as a railway is treated as the joint
property of many shareholders, or as a ship is treated
as the joint property of several owners.
In other words, we can leave land now being used in
the secure possession of those using it, and leave land
now unused to be taken possession of by those who wish
to make use of it, on condition that those who thus hold
land shall pay to the community a fair rent for the ex-
clusive privilege they enjoy—that is to say, a rent based
on the value of the privilege the individual receives
from the community in being accorded the exclusive
use of this much of the common property, and which
should have no reference to any improvement he had
made in or on it, or to any profit due to the use of his
labor and capital. In this way all would be placed
upon an equality in regard to the use and enjoyment
of those natural elements which are clearly the com-
mon heritage, and that value which attaches to land,
not because of what the individual user does, but be-
cause of the growth of the community, would accrue
to the community, and could be used for purposes of
common benefit. As Herbert Spencer has said of it:
“Such a doctrine is consistent with the highest state of civiliza-
tion; may be carried out without involving a community of goods,
and need cause no very serious revolution in existing arrangements.
The change required would be simply a change of landlords. Sep-
arate ownership would merge into the joint-stock ownership of the
public. Instead of being in the possession of individuals, the coun-
try would be held by the great corporate body—society. * * *
A state of things so ordered would be in perfect harmony with the
moral law. Under it all men would be equally landlords, all men
would be alike free to become tenants. Clearly, therefore, on such
a system the earth might be inclosed, occupied and cultivated, in
entire subordination to the law of equal freedom.”
TRUE FREE TRADE. * 301
That this simple change would, as Mr. Spencer says,
involve no serious revolution in existing arrangements
is in many cases not perceived by those who think of
it for the first time. It is sometimes said that while
this principle is manifestly just, and while it would be
easy to apply it to a new country just being settled, it
would be exceedingly difficult to apply it to an already
settled country where land had already been divided as
private property, since, in such a country, to take pos-
session of the land as common property and let it out to
individuals would involve a sudden revolution of the
greatest magnitude.
This objection, however, is founded upon the mistaken
idea that it is necessary to do everything at once. But
it often happens that a precipice we could not hope to
climb, and that we might well despair of making a lad-
der long enough and strong enough to scale, may be
surmounted by a gentle road. And there is in this case
a gentle road open to us, which will lead us so far that
the rest will be but an easy step. To make land virtu-
ally the common property of the whole people, and
to appropriate ground rent for public use, there is a
much simpler and easier way than that of formally as-
suming the ownership of land and proceeding to rent
it out in lots—a way that involves no shock, that will
conform to present customs, and that, instead of requir.
ing a great increase of governmental machinery, will
permit of a great simplification of governmental ma-
chinery.
In every well-developed community large sums are
needed for common purposes, and the sums thus needed
increase with social growth, not merely in amount, but
proportionately, since social progress tends steadily
302 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
to devolve on the community as a whole functions
which in a ruder stage are discharged by individuals.
Now, while people are not used to paying rent to gov.
ernment, they are used to paying taxes to government.
Some of these taxes are levied upon personal or mov-
able property; some upon occupations or businesses or
persons (as in the case of income taxes, which are in re-
ality taxes on persons according to income); some upon
the transportation or exchange of commodities, in which
last category fall the taxes imposed by tariffs; and some,
in the United States at least, on real estate—that is to
say, on the value of land and of the improvements
upon it, taken together.
That part of the tax on real estate which is assessed on
the value of land irrespective of improvements is, in its
nature, not a tax, but a rent—a taking for the common
use of the community of a part of the income that prop-
erly belongs to the community by reason of the equal
right of all to the use of land.
Now it is evident that, in order to take for the use of
the community the whole income arising from land,
just as effectually as it could be taken by formally ap-
propriating and letting out the land, it is only necessary
to abolish, one after another, all other taxes now
levied, and to increase the tax on land values till it
reaches, as near as may be, the full annual value of the
land.
Whenever this point of theoretical perfection is
reached, the selling value of land will entirely disap-
pear, and the charge made to the individual by the com-
munity for the use of the common property will become
in form what it is in fact—a rent. But until that point
is reached, this rent may be collected by the simple in:
TRUE FREE TRADE. 303
crease of a tax already levied in all our states, assessed
(as direct taxes are now assessed) upon the selling value
of land irrespective of improvements—a value that can
be ascertained more easily and more accurately than
any other value.
For a full exposition of the effects of this change in
the method of raising public revenues, I must refer the
reader to the works in which I have treated this branch
of the subject at greater length than is here possible.
Briefly, they would be threefold:
In the first place, all taxes that now fall upon the
exertion of labor or use of capital would be abolished.
No one would be taxed for building a house orimprov-
ing a farm or opening a mine, for bringing things in
from foreign countries, or for adding in any way to
the stock of things that satisfy human wants and con-
stitute national wealth. Every one would be free to
make and save wealth; to buy, sell, give or exchange,
without let or hindrance, any article of human produc-
tion the use of which did not involve any public in-
jury. All those taxes which increase prices as things
pass from hand to hand, falling finally upon the con-
sumer, would disappear. Buildings or other fixed im-
provements would be as secure as now, and could be
bought and sold, as now, subject to the tax or ground
rent due to the community for the ground on which
they stood. Houses and the ground they stand on, or
other improvements and the land they are made on,
would also be rented as now. But the amount the
tenant would have to pay would be less than now,
since the taxes now levied on buildings or improve-
ments fall ultimately (save in decaying communities)
on the user, and the tenant would therefore get the
304 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
benefit of their abolition. And in this reduced rent
the tenant would pay all those taxes that he now has to
pay in addition to his rent—any remainder of what he
paid on account of the ground going not to increase
the wealth of a landlord, but to add to a fund in which
the tenant himself would be an equal sharer.
In the second place, a large and constantly increasing
fund would be provided for common uses, without any
tax on the earnings of labor or on the returns of capi-
tal—a fund which in well settled countries would
not only suffice for all of what are now considered
necessary expenses of government, but would leave a
large surplus to be devoted to purposes of general
benefit.
In the third place, and most important of all, the
monopoly of land would be abolished, and land would
be thrown open and kept open to the use of labor,
since it would be unprofitable for any one to hold land
without putting it to its full use, and both the tempt-
ation and the power to speculate in natural opportuni-
ties would be gone. The speculative value of land
would be destroyed as soon as it was known that, no
matter whether land was used or not, the tax would
increase as fast as the value increased; and no one
would want to hold land that he did not use. With
the disappearance of the capitalized or selling value
of land, the premium which must now be paid as pur-
chase money by those who wish to use land would
disappear, differences in the value of land being meas-
ured by what would have to be paid for it to the
community, nominally in taxes but really in rent.
So long as any unused land remained, those who
wished to use it could obtain it, not only without the
TRUE FREE TRADE. 305
payment of any purchase price, but without the pay-
ment of any tax or rent. Nothing would be required
for the use of land till less advantageous land came
into use, and possession thus gave an advantage over
and above the return to the labor and capital expended
upon it. And no matter how much the growth of
population and the progress of society increased the
value of land, this increase would go to the whole com-
munity, swelling that general fund in which the poorest
would be an equal sharer with the richest.
Thus the great cause of the present unequal distri-
bution of wealth would be destroyed, and that one-
sided competition would cease which now deprives
men who possess nothing but power to labor of the
benefits of advancing civilization, and forces wages
to a minimum no matter what the increase of wealth.
Labor, free to the natural elements of production, would
no longer be incapable of employing itself, and compe-
tition, acting as fully and freely between employers as
between employed, would carry wages up to what is
truly their natural rate—the full value of the produce
of labor—and keep them there.
Let us turn again to the tariff question.
The mere abolition of protection—the mere substi-
tution of a revenue tariff for a protective tariff—is
such a lame and timorous application of the free-trade
principle that it is a misnomer to speak of it as free
trade. A revenue tariff is only a somewhat milder re-
striction on trade than a protective tariff.
Free trade, in its true meaning, requires not merely
the abolition of protection but the sweeping away of
all tariffs—the abolition of all restrictions (save those
306 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
imposed in the interests of public health or morals)
on the bringing of things into a country or the carry-
ing of things Out of a country.
But free trade cannot logically stop with the abo-
lition of custom-houses. It applies as well to domestic
as to foreign trade, and in its true sense requires the
abolition of all internal taxes that fall on buying, sell-
ing, transporting or exchanging, on the making of any
transaction or the carrying on of any business, save of
course where the motive of the tax is public safety,
health or morals. -*
Thus the adoption of true free trade involves the
abolition of all indirect taxation of whatever kind, and
the resort to direct taxation for all public revenues.
But this is not all. Trade, as we have seen, is a
mode of production, and the freeing of trade is bene-
ficial because it is a freeing of production. For the
same reason, therefore, that we ought not to tax any
one for adding to the wealth of a country by bringing
valuable things into it, we ought not to tax any one
for adding to the wealth of a country by producing
within that country valuable things. Thus the prin-
ciple of free trade requires that we should not merely
abolish all indirect taxes, but that we should abolish as
well all direct taxes on things that are the produce of
labor; that we should, in short, give full play to the
natural stimulus to production—the possession and en-
joyment of the things produced—by imposing no tax
whatever upon the production, accumulation or pos.
session of wealth (i. e., things produced by labor), leav-
ing every one free to make, exchange, give, spend or
bequeath.
There are thus left as, the only taxes by which in
TRUE FREE TRADE. 307
accordance with the free-trade principle revenue can be
raised, these two classes:
1. Taxes on Ostentation.
Since the motive of ostentation in the use of wealth
is simply to show the ability to expend wealth, and
since this can be shown as well in the ability to pay
a tax, taxes on Ostentation pure and simple, while not
checking the production of wealth, do not even restrain
the enjoyment of wealth. But such taxes, while they
have a place in the theory of taxation, are of no prac-
tical importance. Some trivial amount is raised in
England from taxes on footmen wearing powdered
wigs, taxes on armorial bearings, etc., but such taxes
are not resorted to in this country, and are incapable
anywhere of yielding any considerable revenue.
2. Taxes on the value of land.
Taxes on the value of land must not be confounded
with taxes on land, from which they differ essentially.
Taxes on land—that is to say, taxes levied on land by
quantity or area—apply equally to all land, and hence
fall ultimately on production, since they constitute a
check to the use of land, a tax that must be paid as
the condition of engaging in production. Taxes on
land values, however, do not fall upon all land, but
only upon valuable land, and on that in proportion to
its value. Hence they do not in any degree check the
ability of labor to avail itself of land, and are merely
an appropriation, by the taxing power, of a portion of
the premium which the owner of valuable land can
charge labor for its use. In other words, a tax on land,
according to quantity, could ultimately be transferred
by owners of land to users of ‘land and become a tax
upon production. But a tax on land vaſues, must, as
308 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
is recognized by all economists, fall on the owner of
land and cannot be by him in any way transferred to
the user. The land owner can no more compel those
to whom he may sell or let his land to pay a tax levied
on its value, than he could compel them to pay a
mortgage. -
A tax on land values is of all taxes that which best
fulfills every requirement of a perfect tax. As land
cannot be hidden or carried off, a tax on land values
can be assessed with more certainty and can be col-
1ected with greater ease and less expense than any
other tax, while it does not in the slightest degree
check production or lessen its incentive. It is, in fact,
a tax only in form, being in nature a rent—a taking
for the use of the community of a value that arises
not from Individual exertion but from the growth of
the community. For it is not anything that the indi-
vidual owner or user does that gives value to land.
The value that he creates is a value that attaches to
improvements. This, being the result of individual
exertion, properly belongs to the individual, and can-
not be taxed without lessening the incentive to produc-
tion. But the value that attaches to land itself is a
value arising from the growth of the community and
increasing with Social growth. It, therefore, properly
belongs to the community, and can be taken to the last
penny without in the slightest degree lessening the
incentive to production.
Taxes on land values are thus the only taxes from
which, in accordance with the principle of free trade,
any considerable amount of revenue can be raised, and
it is evident that to carry out the free-trade principle
to the point of abolishing all taxes that hamper or les-
TRUE FREE TRADE. 309
sen production would of itself involve very nearly the
same measures which we have seen are required to
assert the common right to land and place all citizens
upon an equal footing.
To make these measures identically the same, it is
only necessary that the taxation of land values, to
which true free trade compels us to resort for public
revenues, should be carried far enough to take, as near
as might practically be, the whole of the income arising
from the value given to land by the growth of the
community.
But we have only to go one step further to see that
free trade does, indeed, require this, and that the two
reforms are thus absolutely identical.
Free trade means free production. Now fully to free
production it is necessary not only to remove all taxes
on production, but also to remove all other restrictions
on production. True free trade, in short, requires that
the active factor of production, Labor, shall have free
access to the passive factor of production, Land. To
secure this all monopoly of land must be broken up,
and the equal right of all to the use of the natural ele-
ments must be secured by the treatment of the land
as the common property in usufruct of the whole peo-
ple. *.
Thus it is that free trade brings us to the same sim-
ple measure as that which we have seen is necessary
to emancipate labor from its thralldom and to secure
that justice in the distribution of wealth which will
make every improvement or reform beneficial to all
classes.
The partial reform miscalled free trade, which con-
sists in the mere abolition of protection—the mere sub-
310 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
stitution of a revenue tariff for a protective tariff–
cannot help the laboring classes, because it does not
touch the fundamental cause of that unjust and unequal
distribution which, as we see to-day, makes “labor a
drug and population a nuisance” in the midst of such
a plethora of wealth that we talk of over production.
True free trade, on the contrary, leads not only to
the largest production of wealth, but to the fairest dis-
tribution. It is the easy and obvious way of bringing
about that change by which alone justice in distribution
can be secured, and the great inventions and discover-
ies which the human mind is now grasping can be con-
verted into agencies for the elevation of society from
its very foundations.
This was seen with the utmost clearness by that knot
of great Frenchmen who, in the last century, first raised
the standard of free trade. What they proposed was
not the mere substitution of a revenue tariff for a pro-
tective tariff, but the total abolition of all taxes, direct
and indirect, save a single tax upon the value of land—
the impôt unique. They realized that this unification
of taxation meant not merely the removal from com-
merce and industry of the burdens placed upon them,
but that it also meant the complete reconstruction of
Society—the restoration to all men of their natural and
equal rights to the use of the earth. It was because
they realized this, that they spoke of it in terms that
applied to any mere fiscal change, however benefi-
cial, would seem wildly extravagant, likening it, in its
importance to mankind, to those primary inventions
which made the first advances in civilization possible—
the use of money and the adoption of written char.
aCterS.
TRUE FREE TRADE. 311
And whoever will consider how far-reaching are the
benefits that would result to mankind from a measure
which, removing all restrictions from the production of
wealth, would also secure equitable distribution, will
• See that these great Frenchmen were not extravagant.
True free trade would emancipate labor.
CHAPTER XXVII.
THE LION IN THE WAY.
WE may now see why the advocacy of free trade has
been so halting and half-hearted.
It is because the free-trade principle carried to its logi-
cal conclusion would destroy that monopoly of nature's
bounty which enables those who do no work to live in
luxury at the expense of “the poor people who have to
work,” that so-called free traders have not ventured
to ask even the abolition of tariffs, but have endeav-
ored to confine the free-trade principle to the mere
abolition of protective duties. To go further would be
to meet the lion of “vested interests.”
In Great Britain the ideas of Quesnay and Turgot
found a soil in which, at the time, they could only grow in
stunted form. The power of the landed aristocracy was
only beginning to findsomething of a counterpoise in the
growth of the power of capital, and in politics, as in liter-
ature, Labor had no voice. Adam Smith belonged to
that class of men of letters always disposed by strong
motives to view things which the dominant class deem
essential in the same light as they do, and who before
the diffusion of education and the cheapening of books
could have had no chance of being heard on any other
terms. Under the shadow of an absolute despotism
more liberty of thought and expression may sometimes
be enjoyed than where power is more diffused, and
THE LION IN THE WAY. 313
forty years ago it would doubtless have been safer to
express in Russia opinions adverse to serfdom than in
South Carolina to have questioned slavery. And so,
while Quesnay, the favorite physician of the master of
France, could in the palace of Versailles carry his free-
trade propositions to the legitimate conclusion of the
timpôt unique, Adam Smith, had he been so radical,
could hardly have got the leisure to write the Wealth of
Nations or the means to print it.
I am not criticising Adam Smith, but pointing out
conditions which have affected the development of an
idea. The task which Adam Smith undertook—that
of showing the absurdity and impolicy of protective
tariffs—was in his time and place a sufficiently difficult
one, and even if he saw how much further than this
the principles he enunciated really led, the prudence of
the man who wishes to do what may be done in his
day and generation, confident that where he lays the
foundation others will in due time rear the edifice,
might have prompted him to avoid carrying them
further.
However this may be, it is evidently because free
trade really goes so far, that British free traders, so-
called, have been satisfied with the abolition of protec-
tion, and, abbreviating the motto of Quesnay, “Clear
the ways and let things alone,” into “Let things alone,”
have shorn off its more important half. For one step
further—the advocacy of the abolition of revenue tariffs,
as well as of protective tariffs—would have brought them
upon dangerous ground. It is not only, as English
writers intimate to excuse the retaining of a revenue
tariff, that direct taxation could not be resorted to with-
out arousing the British people to ask themselves why
14
314 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
they should continue to support the descendants of royal
favorites, and to pay interest on the vast sums spent dur-
ing former generations in worse than useless wars; but
it is that direct taxation could not be advocated with-
out danger to even more important “vested interests.”
One step beyond the abolition of protective duties, and
the British free-trade movement must have come full
against that fetich which for some generations the Brit-
ish people have been taught to reverence as the very
Ark of the Covenant—private property in land.
For in the British kingdoms (save in Ireland and the
Scottish Highlands) private property in land was not
instituted in the short and easy way in which Will
Atkins endeavored to institute it on Crusoe's island.
It has been the gradual result of a long series of usurpa-
tions and spoliations. In the view of British law there
is to-day but one owner of British soil, the Crown—that
is to say, the British people. The individual landholders
are still in constitutional theory what they once were in
actual fact—mere tenants. The process by which they
have become virtual owners has been that of throwing
upon indirect taxation the rents and taxes they were
once held to pay in return for their lands, while they
have added to their domains by fencing in the com-
mons, in much the same manner as Some of the same
class have recently fenced in large tracts of our own
public domain.
The entire abolition of the British tariff would in-
volve as a necessary consequence the abolition of the
greater part of the internal indirect taxation, and would
thus compel heavy direct taxation, which would fall
not upon consumption but upon possession. The mo-
ment this became necessary, the question of what share
THE LION IN THE WAY. 315
should be borne by the holders of land must inevitably
arise in such a way as to open the whole question of
the rightful ownership of British soil. For not only do
all economic considerations point to a tax on land values
as the proper source of public revenues; but so do all
British traditions. A land tax of four shillings in the
pound of rental value is still nominally enforced in Eng-
land, but being levied on a valuation made in the reign
or William III, it amounts in reality to not much over
a penny in the pound. With the abolition of indirect
taxation this is the tax to which men would naturally
turn. The resistance of landholders would bring up
the question of title, and thus any movement which
went so far as to propose the substitution of direct for
indirect taxation must inevitably end in a demand for
the restoration to the British people of their birthright.
This is the reason why in Great Britain the free trade
principle was aborted into that spurious thing “British
free trade,” which calls a sudden halt to its own princi-
ples, and after demonstrating the injustice and impolicy
of all tariffs, proceeds to treat tariffs for revenue as some-
thing that must of necessity exist.
In assigning these reasons for the failure to carry the
free-trade movement further than the abolition of pro-
tection, I do not, of course, mean to say that such rea-
sons have consciously swayed free traders. I am defi-
nitely pointing out what by them has been in many cases
doubtless only vaguely felt. We imbibe the sympa-
thies, prejudices and antipathies of the circle in which
We move, rather than acquire them by any process of
reasoning. And the prominent advocates of free trade,
the men who have been in a position to lead and edu-
cate public opinion, have belonged to the class in
316 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
which the feelings I speak of hold sway—for that is
the class of education and leisure.
In a society where unjust division of wealth gives
the fruits of labor to those who do not labor, the classes
who control the organs of public education and opinion
—the classes to whom the many are accustomed to look
for light and leading, must be loath to challenge the
primary wrong, whatever it may be. This is inevitable,
from the fact that the class of wealth and leisure, and
consequently of culture and influence, must be, not the
class which loses by the unjust distribution of wealth,
but the class which (at least relatively) gains by it.
Wealth means power and “respectability,” while
poverty means weakness and disrepute. So in such a
society the class that leads and is looked up to, while it
may be willing to tolerate vague generalities and im-
practicable proposals, must frown on any attempt to
trace social evils to their real cause, since that is the
cause that gives their class superiority. On the other
hand, the class that suffers by these evils is, on that
account, the ignorant and uninfluential class, the class
that, from its own consciousness of inferiority, is prone
to accept the teachings and imbibe the prejudices of
the one above it; while the men of superior ability
that arise within it and elbow their way to the front
are constantly received into the ranks of the superior
class and interested in its service, for this is the class
that has rewards to give. Thus it is that social injus-
tice so long endures and is so difficult to make head
against.
Thus it was that in our Southern States while slavery
prevailed, the influence, not only of the slaveholders
themselves, but of churches and colleges, the profes-
THE LION IN THE WAY. 317
sions and the press, condemned so effectually any ques-
tioning of slavery, that men who never owned and
never expected to own a slave were ready to persecute
and ostracize any one who breathed a word against
property in flesh and blood—ready, even, when the
time came, to go themselves and be shot in defence of
the “peculiar institution.”
Thus it was that even slaves believed abolitionists
the worst of human kind, and were ready to join in the
sport of tarring and feathering one. And so, an insti-
tution in which only a comparatively small class were
interested, and which was in reality so unprofitable,
even to them, that now that slavery has been abolished,
it would be hard to find an ex-slaveholder who would
restore it if he could, not only dominated public opinion
where it existed, but exerted such influence at the
North, where it did not exist, that “abolitionist” was
for a long time suggestive of “atheist,” “communist”
and “incendiary.”
The effect of the introduction of steam and labor-sav-
ing machinery upon the industries of Great Britain was
such a development of manufactures as to do away with
all semblance of benefit to the manufacturing classes
from import duties, to raise up a capitalistic power
capable of challenging the dominance of the “landed
interest,” and by concentrating workmen in towns to
make of them a more important political factor. The
abolition of protection in Great Britain was carried,
against the opposition of the agricultural landholders,
by a combination of two elements, capital and labor,
neither of which would, of itself, have been capable of
winning the victory. But, of the two, that which was
represented by the Manchester manufacturers possessed,
318 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
much more effective and independent strength than
that whose spirit breathed in the Anti-Corn Law rhymes.
Capital furnished the leadership, the organizing ability,
and the financial means for agitation, and when it was
Satisfied, the further progress of the free-trade move-
ment had to wait for the growth of a power which, as
an independent factor, is only now beginning to make
its entrance into British politics. Any advance toward
the abolition of revenue duties would not only have
added the strength of the holders of municipal and
mining land to that of the holders of agricultural land,
but would also have arrayed in opposition the very class
most efficient in the free-trade movement. For, save
where their apparent interests come into clear and
strong opposition, as they did in Great Britain upon the
question of protective duties, capitalists as a class share
the feelings that animate landholders as a class. Even
in England, where the division between the three eco-
nomic orders—landholders, capitalists, and laborers—is
clearer than anywhere else, the distinction between
landholders and capitalists is more theoretical than real.
That is to say, the landholder is generally a capitalist
as well, and the capitalist is generally in actuality or ex-
pectation to some extent a landholder, or by the agency
of leases and mortgages is interested in the profits of
landholding. Public debts and the investments based
thereon constitute, moreover, a further powerful agency
in disseminating through the whole “House of Have"
a bitter antipathy to any thing that might bring the
origin of property into discussion.
In the United States the same principles have oper-
ated, though owing to differences in industrial develop-
ment the combinations have been different. Here the
THE LION IN THE WAY. -- 819
interest that could not be “protected” has been the
agricultural, and the active and powerful manufactur-
ing interest has been on the side of protective duties.
And though the “landed interest” here has not been so
well intrenched politically as in Great Britain, yet not
only has land ownership been more widely diffused,
but our rapid growth has interested a larger proportion
of the present population in anticipating, by speculation
based on increasing land values, the power of levying
tribute on those yet to come. Thus private property in
land has been in reality even stronger here than in
Great Britain, while it has been to those interested in
it that the opponents of protection have principally
appealed. Under such circumstances there has been
here even less disposition than in Great Britain to carry
the free-trade principle to its legitimate conclusions, and
free trade has been presented to the American people
in the emasculated shape of a “revenue reform" too
timid to ask for even “British free trade.”
CEIAPTER XXVIII.
FREE TRAL) E AND SOCIALISM.
THROUGHOUT the civilized world, and pre-eminently
in Great Britain and the United States, a power is now
arising which is capable of carrying the principles of
free trade to their logical conclusion. But there are
difficulties in the way of concentrating this power on
such a purpose.
It requires reflection to see that manifold effects
result from a single cause, and that the remedy for a
multitude of evils may lie in one simple reform. As in
the infancy of medicine, men were disposed to think
each distinct symptom called for a distinct remedy, so
when thought begins to turn to social subjects there is a
disposition to seek a special cure for every ill, or else
(another form of the same shortsightedness) to imagine
the only adequate remedy to be something which pre-
supposes the absence of those ills; as, for instance, that
all men should be good, as the cure for vice and crime;
or that all men should be provided for by the State, as
the cure for poverty.
There is now sufficient social discontent and a
sufficient desire for social reform to accomplish great
things if concentrated on one line. But attention is dis-
tracted and effort divided by schemes of reform which
though they may be good in themselves are, with refer.
FREE TRADE AND SOCIALISM. 321
ence to the great end to be attained, either inadequate
or super-adequate.
Here is a traveler who, beset by robbers, has been
left bound, blindfolded, and gagged. Shall we stand in
a knot about him and discuss whether to put a piece
of court-plaster on his cheek or a new patch on his coat,
or shall we dispute with each other as to what road
he ought to take and whether a bicycle, a tricycle, a
horse and wagon, or a railway, would best help him on?
Should we not rather postpone such discussion until we
have cut the man's bonds? Then he can see for him-
self, speak for himself, and help himself. Though with
a scratched cheek and a torn coat, he may get on his feet,
and if he cannot find a conveyance to suit him, he will
at least be free to walk.
Very much like such a discussion is a good deal of
that now going on over “the social problem "- a dis-
cussion in which all sorts of inadequate and impossible
schemes are advocated to the neglect of the simple plan
of removing restrictions and giving Labor the use of its
own powers.
This is the first thing to do. And, if not of itself
sufficient to cure all social ills and bring about the
highest social state, it will at least remove the primary
cause of widespread poverty, give to all the opportu-
nity to use their labor and secure the earnings that are
its due, stimulate all improvement and make all other
reſorms easier.
It must be remembered that reforms and improve-
ments in themselves good may be utterly inefficient to
work any general improvement until some more funda-
mental reform is carried out. It must be remembered
that there is in every work a certain order which must
14%
322 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
be observed to accomplish anything. To a habitable
house a roof is as important as walls; and we express
in a word the end to which a house is built when we
speak of putting a roof over our heads. But we can-
not build a house from roof down; we must build from
foundation up.
. To recur to our simile of the laborer habitually
preyed upon by a series of robbers. It is surely wiser
in him to fight them one by one, than all together.
And the robber that takes all he has left is the one
against whom his efforts should first be directed. For
no matter how he may drive off the other robbers, that
will not avail him except as it may make it easier to get
rid of the robber that takes all that is left. But by
withstanding this robber he will secure immediate re-
lief, and being able to get home more of his earnings
than before, will be able so to nourish and strengthen
himself that he can better contend with robbers—can,
perhaps, buy a gun or hire a lawyer, according to the
method of fighting in fashion in his country.
It is in just such a way as this that Labor must seek
to rid itself of the robbers that now levy upon its earn-
ings. Brute strength will avail little unless guided by
intelligence.
The first attempts of workingmen to improve their
condition are by combining to demand higher wages of
their direct employers. Something can be done in this
way for those within such organizations; but it is after all
very little. For a trades-union can only artificially lessen
competition within the trade; it cannot affect the general
conditions which force men into bitter competition with
each other for the opportunity to gain a living. And
such organizations as the Knights of Labor, which are
FREE TRADE AND SOCIALISM. 323
to trades-unions what the trades-union is to its individ-
ual members, while they give greater power, must en-
counter the same difficulties in their efforts to raise
wages directly. All such efforts have the inherent dis-
advantage of struggling against general tendencies.
They are like the attempts of a man in a crowd to gain
room by forcing back those who press upon him—like
attempts to stop a great engine by the sheer force of
human muscle, without cutting off steam.
This, those who are at first inclined to put faith in
the power of trades-unionism are beginning to see, and
the logic of events must more and more lead them to
see. But the perception that to accomplish large re-
sults general tendencies must be controlled, inclines
those who do not analyze these tendencies into their
causes to transfer faith from some form of the volun-
tary organization of labor to some form of governmental
organization and direction.
All varieties of what is vaguely called socialism rec-
ognize with more or less clearness the solidarity of the
interests of the masses of all countries. Whatever may
be objected to socialism in its extremest forms, it has
at least the merit of lessening national prejudices and
aiming at the disbandment of armies and the suppres-
sion of war. It is thus opposed to the cardinal tenet of
protectionism that the interests of the people of different
“nations” are diverse and antagonistic. But, on the
other hand, those who call themselves socialists, so far
from being disposed to look with disfavor upon govern-
mental interference and regulation, are disposed to sym-
pathize with protection as in this respect in harmony
with Socialism, and to regard free trade, at least as it
has been popularly presented, as involving a reliance
324. PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
on that principle of free competition which to their
thinking means the crushing of the weak.
Let us endeavor, as well as can in brief be done, to
trace the relations between the conclusions to which we
have come and what, with various shades of meaning,
is termed “socialism.” ”
In socialism as distinguished from individualism
there is an unquestionable truth—and that a truth to
which (especially by those most identified with free-
trade principles) too little attention has been paid.
Man is primarily an individual—a separate entity, dif-
fering from his fellows in desires and powers, and re-
quiring for the exercise of those powers and the gratifi-
cation of those desires individual play and freedom.
But he is also a social being, having desires that har-
monize with those of his fellows, and powers that can
only be brought out in concerted action. There is thus
a domain of individual action and a domain of social
action—some things which can best be done when
each acts for himself, and some things which can best
be done when society acts for all its members. And
* The term “socialism’ is used so loosely that it is hard to attach
to it a definite meaning. I myself am classed as a socialist by those
who denounce socialism, while those who profess themselves social-
ists declare me not to be one. For my own part I neither claim nor
repudiate the name, and realizing as I do the correlative truth of
bath principles can no more call myself an individualist or a social-
ist than one who considers the forces by which the planets are held
to their orbits could call himself a centrifugalist or a centripetalist.
The German socialism of the school of Marx (of which the leading
representative in England is Mr. H. M. Hyndman, and the best
exposition in America has been given by Mr. Laurence Gronlund),
seems to me a high-purposed but incoherent mixture of truth and
fallacy, the defects of which may be summed up in its want of radi.
calism—that is to Say, of going to the root.
FREE TRADE AND SOCIALISM. 325
the natural tendency of advancing civilizationistomake
social conditions relatively more important, and more
and more to enlarge the domain of social action. This
has not been sufficiently regarded, and at the present
time, evil unquestionably results from leaving to in-
dividual action functions that by reason of the growth
of society and the development of the arts have passed
into the domain of social action; just as on the other
hand, evil unquestionably results from social inter-
ference with what properly belongs to the individual.
Society ought not to leave the telegraph and the rail-
wāy to the management and control of individuals;
nor yet ought society to step in and collect individual
debts or attempt to direct individual industry.
But while there is a truth in socialism which in-
dividualists forget, there is a school of socialists who in
like manner ignore the truth there is in individualism,
and whose propositions for the improvement of social
conditions belong to the class I have called “super-ade-
Quate.” Socialism in its narrow sense—the socialism
that would have the State absorb capital and abolish
competition—is the scheme of men who, looking upon
Society in its most complex organization, have failed
to see that principles obvious in a simpler stage still
hold true in the more intimate relations that result
from the division of labor and the use of complex
tools and methods, and have thus fallen into fallacies
elaborated by the economists of a totally different
school, who have taught that capital is the employer
and sustainer of labor, and have striven to confuse the
distinction between property in land and property in
labor-products. Their scheme is that of men who,
while revolting from the heartlessness and hopelessness
*\,
326 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
of the “orthodox political economy,” are yet entangled
in its fallacies and blinded by its confusions. Con-
founding “capital” with “means of production,” and ac-
cepting the dictum that “natural wages” are the least
on which competition can force the laborer to live, they
essay to cut a knot they do not see how to unravel, by
making the State the sole capitalist and employer, and
abolishing competition.
The carrying on by government of all production and
exchange, as a remedy for the difficulty of finding em-
ployment on the one side, and for overgrown fortunes
on the other, belongs to the same category as the prescrip-
tion that all men should be good. That if all men were
assigned proper employment and all wealth fairly dis-
tributed, then none would need employment and there
would be no injustice in distribution, is as indisputable
a proposition as that if all were good none would be
bad. But it will not help a man perplexed as to his
path to tell him that the way to get to his journey's end
is to get there.
That all men should be good is the greatest desidera-
tum, but it can only be secured by the abolition of con-
ditions which tempt some and drive others into evil
doing. That each should render according to his
abilities and receive according to his needs, is indeed
the very highest social state of which we can conceive,
but how shall we hope to attain such perfection until
we can first find some way of securing to every man the
opportunity to labor and the fair earnings of his labor.
Shall we try to be generous before we have learned how
to be just?
All schemes for securing equality in the conditions
of men by placing the distribution of wealth in the
*
• ‘FREE TRADE AND SOCIALISM. 327
hands of government have the fatal defect of beginning
at the wrong end. They pre-suppose pure government;
but it is not government that makes society; it is so-
ciety that makes government; and until there is some-
thing like substantial equality in the distribution of
wealth, we cannot expect pure government.
But to put all men on a footing of substantial equal-
ity, so that there could be no dearth of employment, no
“over-production,” no tendency of wages to the min-
imum of subsistence, no monstrous fortunes on the one
side and no army of proletarians on the other, it is not
necessary that the state should assume the ownership
of all the means of production and become the general
employer and universal exchanger; it is necessary only
that the equal rights of all to that primary means of
production which is the source all other means of pro-
duction are derived from, should be asserted. And
this, so far from involving an extension of govern-
mental functions and machinery, involves, as we have
seen, their great reduction. It would thus tend to
purify government in two ways—first by the better-
ment of the social conditions on which purity in gov-
ernment depends, and second, by the simplification of
administration. This step taken, and we could safely
begin to add to the functions of the state in its proper
or co-operative sphere.
There is in reality no conflict between labor and capi-
tal; * the true conflict is between labor and monopoly.
* The great source of confusion in regard to such matters arises
from the failure to attach any definite meaning to terms. It must
always be remembered that nothing that can be classed either as
labor or as land can be accounted capital in any definite use of
the term, and that much that we commonly speak of as capital—
such as solvent debts, government bonds, etc.—is in reality not even
328 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
That a rich employer “squeezes” needy workmen may
be true. But does this squeezing power result from
his riches or from their need 7 No matter how rich an
employer might be, how would it be possible for him to
squeeze workmen who could make a good living for
themselves without going into his employment 7. The
competition of workmen with workmen for employment,
which is the real cause that enables, and even in most
cases forces, the employer to Squeeze his workmen,
arises from the fact that men, debarred of the natural
opportunities to employ themselves, are compelled to
bid against one another for the wages of an employer.
Abolish the monopoly that forbids men to employ
themselves, and capital could not possibly oppress labor.
In no case could the capitalist obtain labor for less
than the laborer could get by employing himself. Once
remove the cause of that injustice which deprives the
laborer of the capital his toil creates, and the sharp dis-
tinction between capitalist and laborer would, in fact,
cease to exist.
They who, seeing how men are forced by competi-
tion to the extreme of human wretchedness, jump to
the conclusion that competition should be abolished,
are like those who, seeing a house burn down, would
prohibit the use of fire.
The air we breathe exerts upon every square inch of
our bodies a pressure of fifteen pounds. Were this
pressure exerted only on one side, it would pin us to the
ground and crush us to a jelly. But being exerted on
all sides, we move under it with perfect freedom. It
wealth—which all true capital must be. For a fuller elucidation
of this, as of similar points, I must refer the reader to my Progress
and Poverty.
FREE TRADE AND SOCIALISM. 329
not only does not inconvenience us, but it serves such
indispensable purposes that, relieved of its pressure, we
should die. *-
So it is with competition. Where there exists a class
denied all right to the element necessary to life and labor,
competition is one-sided, and as population increases
must press the lowest class into virtual slavery, and
even starvation. But where the natural rights of all are
secured, then competition, acting on every hand—be-
tween employers as between employed; between buyers
as between sellers—can injure no one. On the contrary
it becomes the most simple, most extensive, most elastic,
and most refined system of co-operation, that, in the
present stage of social development, and in the domain
where it will freely act, we can rely on for the co-ordi-
nation of industry and the economizing of Social forces.
In short, competition plays just such a part in the
social organism as those vital impulses which are be-
neath consciousness do in the bodily organism. With
it, as with them, it is only necessary that it should be
free. The line at which the state should come in is
that where free competition becomes impossible—a line
analogous to that which in the individual organism
separates the conscious from the unconscious functions.
There is such a line, though extreme Socialists and ex-
treme individualists both ignore it. The extreme in-
dividualist is like the man who would have his hunger
provide him food; the extreme socialist is like the man
who would have his conscious will direct his stomach
how to digest it.
Individualism and socialism are in truth not antag-
onistic but correlative. Where the domain of the one
principle ends that of the other begins. And although
330 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
the motto Laissez faire has been taken as the watch.
word of an individualism that tends to anarchism, and
so-called free traders have made “the law of supply and
demand” a stench in the nostrils of men alive to social
injustice, there is in free trade nothing that conflicts
with a rational socialism. On the contrary, we have but
to carry out the free trade principle to its logical con-
clusions to see that it brings us to such socialism.
The free-trade principle is, as we have seen, the prin-
ciple of free production—it requires not merely the
abolition of protective tariffs, but the removal of all re-
strictions upon production.
Within recent years a class of restrictions on produc-
tion, imposed by concentrations and combinations which
have for their purpose the limiting of production and
the increase of prices, have begun to make themselves
felt and to assume greater and greater importance.
This power of combinations to restrict production
arises in some cases from temporary monopolies granted
by our patent laws, which (being the premium that
society holds out to invention), have a compensatory
principle, however faulty they may be in method.
Such cases aside, this power of restricting produc-
tion is derived, in part, from tariff restrictions. Thus
the American steel makers who have recently limited
their production, and put up the price of rails 40 per
cent. at one stroke, are enabled to do this only by the
heavy duty on imported rails. They are able, by com-
bination, to put up the price of steel rails to the point
at which they could be imported plus the duty, but no
further. Hence, with the abolition of the duty this
power would be gone. To prevent the play of compe-
tition, a combination of the steel workers of the whole
FREE TRADE AND SOCIALISM. 331
world would then be necessary, and this is practically
impossible.
In other part, this restrictive power arises from abil-
ity to monopolize natural advantages. This would be
destroyed if the taxation of land values made it un-
profitable to hold land without using it. In still other
part, it arises from the control of businesses which in
their nature do not admit of competition, such as those
of railway, telegraph, gas, and other similar companies.
I read in the daily papers that half a dozen repre-
sentatives of the “anthracite coal interest” met last even-
ing (March 24, 1886), in an office in New York. Their
conference, interrupted only by a collation, lasted till
three o'clock in the morning. When they separated
they had come to “an understanding among gentle-
men” to restrict the production of anthracite coal and
advance its price.
Now how comes it that half a dozen men, sitting
around some bottles of champagne and a box of cigars
in a New York office, can by an “understanding among
gentlemen” compel Pennsylvania miners to stand idle,
and advance the price of coal along the whole eastern
seaboard? The power thus exercised is derived in
various parts from three sources.
1. From the protective duty on coal. Free trade
would abolish that.
2. From the power to monopolize land, which enables
them to prevent others from using coal deposits which
they will not use themselves. True free trade, as we
have seen, would abolish that.
3. From the control of railways, and the consequent
power of fixing rates and making discriminations in *
transportation.
332 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
The power of fixing rates of transportation, and in
this way of discriminating against persons and places,
is a power essentially of the same nature as that ex-
ercised by governments in levying import duties.
And the principle of free trade as clearly requires the
removal of such restrictions as it requires the removal
of import duties. But here we reach a point where
positive action on the part of government is needed.
Except as between terminal or “competitive” points
where two or more roads meet (and as to these the ten-
dency is, by combination or “pooling,” to do away with
competition), the carrying of goods and passengers by
rail, like the business of telegraph, telephone, gas, water,
or similar companies, is in its nature a monopoly. To
prevent restrictions and discriminations, governmental
control is therefore required. Such control is not
only not inconsistent with the free-trade principle; it
follows from it, just as the interference of government
to prevent and punish assaults upon persons and prop-
erty follows from the principle of individual liberty.
Thus, if we carry free trade to its logical conclusions
we are inevitably led to what monopolists, who wish to
be “let alone” to plunder the public, denounce as “so-
cialism,” and which is, indeed, socialism, in the sense
that it recognizes the true domain of social functions.
Whether businesses in their nature monopolies should
be regulated by law or should be carried on by the com-
munity, is a question of method. It seems to me, how-
ever, that experiences goes to show that better results
can be secured, with less risk of governmental corrup-
tion, by state management than by state regulation.
But the great simplification of government which would
result from the abolition of the present complex and
demoralizing modes of taxation would vastly increase
FREE TRADE AND SOCIALISM, 333
the ease and safety with which either of these methods
could be applied. The assumption by the state of all .
those social functions in which competition will not op-
erate would involve nothing like the strain upon gov-
ernmental powers, and would be nothing like as pro-
vocative of corruption and dishonesty, as our present
method of collecting taxes. The more equal distribu-
tion of wealth that would ensue from the reform which
thus simplified government, would, moreover, increase
public intelligence and purify public morals, and enable
us to bring a higher standard of honesty and ability to
the management of public affairs. We have no right
to assume that men would be as grasping and dishonest
in a social state where the poorest could get an abun-
dant living as they are in the present social state, where -
the fear of poverty begets insane greed.
Thére is another way, moreover, in which true free
trade tends strongly to socialism, in the highest and
best sense of the term. The taking for the use of the
community of that value of privilege which attaches to
the possession of land, would, wherever social develop-
ment has advanced beyond a certain stage, yield rev-
enues even larger than those now raised by taxation,
while there would be an enormous reduction in public
oxpenses consequent, directly and indirectly, upon the
abolition of present modes of taxation. Thus would
be provided a fund, increasing steadily with social
growth, that could be applied to social purposes now
neglected. And among the purposes which will Sug-
gest themselves to the reader by which the surplus in-
come of the community could be used to increase the
sum of human knowledge, the diffusion of elevating
tastes, and the gratification of healthy desires, there is
none more worthy thaf, that of making honorable pro-
334 PROTEC ſIC/N OR FREE TRADE.
vision for those deprived of their natural protectors, or
through no fault of their own incapacitated for the
struggle of life.
We should think it sin and shame if a great steamer,
dashing across the ocean, were not brought to a stop by
a signal of distress from the meanest smack; at the
sight of an infant lashed to a spar, the mighty ship
would round to, and men would spring to launch a
boat in angry seas. Thus strongly does the bond of our
common humanity appeal to us when we get beyond
the hum of civilized life. And yet—a miner is entombed
alive, a painter falls from a scaffold, a brakeman is
crushed in coupling cars, a merchant fails, falls ill and
dies, and organized society leaves widow and children
to bitter want or degrading alms. This ought not to be.
Citizenship in a civilized community ought of itself
to be insurance against such a fate. And having in
mind that the income which the community ought to
obtain from the land to which the growth of the com-
munity gives value is in reality not a tax but the pro-
ceeds of a just rent, an English Democrat (William
Saunders, M. P.) puts in this phrase the aim of true
free trade: “No taxes at all, and a pension to everybody.”
This is denounced as “the rankest socialism " by
those whose notion of the fitness of things is, that the
descendants of royal favorites and blue-blooded thieves
should be kept in luxurious idleness all their lives
long, by pensions wrung from struggling industry,
while the laborcr and his wife, worn out by hard work,
for which they have received scarce living wages, are
degraded by a parish dole, or separated from each other
in a “work-house.”
If this is socialism, then, indeed, is it true that free
trade leads to Socialism.
CEIAPTER XXIX.
PRACTICAL POLITICS.
ON a railway train I once fell in with a Pittsburg
brass band that was returning from a celebration. The
leader and I shared the same seat, and between the
tunes with which they beguiled the night, we got into
a talk which, from politics, touched the tariff. I nei-
ther expressed my own opinions nor disputed his, but
asked him some questions as to how protection bene-
fited labor. His answers seemed hardly to satisfy him-
self, and suddenly he said:
“Look here, stranger, may I ask you a question 7
I mean no offense, but I'd like to ask you a straight-
forward question. Are you a free trader?”
“I am.”
“A real free trader—one that wants to abolish the
tariff 7"
“Yes, a real free trader. I would have trade be-
tween the United States and the rest of the world as
free as it is between Pennsylvania and Ohio.”
“Give me your hand, stranger,” said the band leader,
jumping up. “I like a man who's out and out.”
“Boys,” he exclaimed, turning to some of his bands-
men, “here's a sort of man you never saw; here's a
real free trader, and he ain't ashamed to own it.” And
when the “boys” had shaken hands with me, very
much as they might have shaken hands with the “Liv.
336 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
ing Skeleton” or the “Chinese Giant,” “Do you know,
stranger,” the bandmaster continued, “I’ve been hear.
ing of free traders all my life, but you're the first I
ever met. T've seen men that other people called free
traders, but when it came their turn they always de-
nied it. The most they would admit was that they
wanted to trim the tariff down a little, or fix it up bet-
ter. But they always insisted we must have a tariff,
and I’d got to believe that there were no real free
traders; that they were only a sort of bugaboo.”
My Pittsburg friend was in this respect, I think, no
unfair sample of the great body of the American peo-
ple of this generation. The only free traders most of
them have seen and heard have been anxious to deny
the appellation—or at least to insist that we always
must have a tariff, and to deprecate sudden reductions.
Is it any wonder that the fallacies of protection run
rampant when such is the only opposition they meet?
Dwarfed into mere revenue reform the harmony and
beauty of free trade are hidden; its moral force is lost;
its power to remedy social evils cannot be shown, and
the injustice and meanness of protection cannot be ar-
raigned. The “international law of God” becomes a
mere fiscal question which appeals only to the intellect
and not to the heart, to the pocket and not to the con-
science, and on which it is impossible to arouse the en-
thusiasm that is alone capable of contending with pow-
erful interests. When it is conceded that custom-houses
must be maintained and import duties levied, the aver-
age man will conclude that these duties might as well
be protective, or at least will trouble himself little about
them. When told that they must beware of moving
too quickly, people are not likely to move at all.
PRACTICAL POLITICS. 337
Such advocacy is not of the sort that can compel dis-
cussion, awaken thought, and press forward a great
cause against powerful opposition. Half a truth is not
half so strong as a whole truth, and to minimize such a
principle as that of free trade in the hope of disarming
opposition, is to lessen its power of securing support in
far greater degree than to lessen the antagonism it must
encounter. A principle that in its purity will be grasped
by the popular mind loses its power when befogged by
concessions and enervated by compromises.
But the mistake which such advocates of free trade
make has a deeper root than any misapprehension as to
policy. They are, for the most part, men who derive
their ideas from the emasculated and incoherent political
economy taught in our colleges, or from political tradi-
tions of “states rights" and “strict construction ” now
broken and weak. They do not present free trade in
its beauty and strength because they do not so see it.
They have not the courage of conviction, because they
have not the conviction. They have opinions, but these
opinions lack that burning, that compelling force that
springs from a vital conviction. They see the absurd.
ity and waste of protection, and the illogical character
of the pleas made for it, and these things offend their
sense of fitness and truth; but they do not see that free
trade really means the emancipation of labor, the aboli-
tion of poverty, the restoring to the disinherited of their
birthright. Such free traders are well represented by
journals which mildly oppose protection when no elec-
tion is on, but which at election times are as quiet as
mice. They are in favor of what they call free trade,
as a certain class of good people are in favor of the con-
version of the Jews. When entirely convenient they
338 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
will speak, write, attend a meeting, eat a dinner or give -
a little money for the cause, but they will hardly break
with their party or “throw away” a vote.
Even the most energetic and public-spirited of these
men are at a fatal disadvantage when it comes to a popu-
lar propaganda. They can well enough point out the
abuses of protection and expose its more transparent
Sophistries, but they cannot explain the social phenom-
ena in which protection finds its real strength. All
they can promise the laborer is that production shall be
increased and many commodities cheapened. But how
can this appeal to men who are accustomed to look
upon “over-production” as the cause of widespread
distress, and who are constantly told that the cheapness
of commodities is the reason why thousands have to
suffer for the want of them? And when confronted by
the failure of revenue reform to eradicate pauperism
and abolish starvation—when asked why in spite of the
adoption in Great Britain of the measures he proposes,
wages there are so low and poverty so dire, the free
trader of this type can make no answer that will satisfy
the questioner, even if he can give one satisfactory to
himself. The only answer his philosophy can give—
the only answer he can obtain from the political econ-
omy taught by the “free-trade” text-books—is that the
bitter struggle for existence which crushes men into
pauperism and starvation is of the nature of things.
And whether he attributes this nature of things to
the conscious volition of an intelligent Creator or to
the working of blind forces, the man who either defi-
nitely or vaguely accepts this answer is incapable of
feeling himself or of calling forth in others the spirit of
Cobden's appeal to Bright.
f
PRACTICAL FOLITICS. 339
Thus it is that free trade, narrowed to a mere fiscal
reform, can only appeal to the lower and weaker mo-
tives—to motives that are inadequate to move men in
masses. Take the current free-trade literature. Its
aim is to show the impolicy of protection, rather than
its injustice; its appeal is to the pocket, not to the
sympathies. Yet to begin and maintain great popular
movements it is the moral sense rather than the intellect
that must be appealed to, sympathy rather than self-
interest. For however it may be with any individual,
the sense of justice is with the masses of men keener
and truer than intellectual perception, and unless a
question can assume the form of right and wrong it can-
not provoke general discussion and excite the many to
action. And while material gain or loss impresses us
less vividly the greater the number of those we share it
with, the power of sympathy increases as it spreads
from man to man—becomes cumulative and conta-
gious.
But he who follows the principle of free trade to its
logical conclusion can strike at the very root of protec-
tion; can answer every question and meet every objec-
tion, and appeal to the surest of instincts and the
strongest of motives. He will see in free trade not a
mere fiscal reform, but a movement which has for its
aim and end nothing less than the abolition of poverty,
and of the vice and crime and degradation that flow
from it, by the restoration to the disinherited of their
natural rights and the establishment of society upon the
basis of justice. He will catch the inspiration of a
cause great enough to live for and to die for, and be
moved by an enthusiasm that he can evoke in others.
It is true that to advocate free trade in its fullness
840 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
would excite the opposition of interests far stronger
than those concerned in maintaining protective tariffs.
But on the other hand it would bring to the standard
of free trade, forces without which it cannot succeed.
And what those who would arouse thought have to
fear is not so much opposition as indifference. With-
out opposition that attention cannot be excited, that
energy evoked, that are necessary to overcome the in-
ertia that is the strongest bulwark of existing abuses.
A party can mo more be rallied on a question that no
one disputes than steam can be raised to working pres-
sure in an open vessel.
The working class of the United States, who have
constituted the voting strength of protection, are now
ready for a movement that will appeal to them on be.
half of real free trade. For some years past educative
agencies have been at work among them that have
sapped their faith in protection. If they have not
learned that protection cannot help them, they have at
least become widely conscious that protection does not
help them. They have been awakening to the fact that
there is some deep wrong in the constitution of society,
although they may not see clearly what that wrong is;
they have been gradually coming to feel that to emanci-
pate labor radical measures are needed, although they
may not know what those measures are.
And scattered through the great body thus beginning
to stir and grope are a rapidly increasing number of
men who do know what this primary wrong is—men
who see that in the recognition of the equal right of all to
the element necessary to life and labor is the hope, and
the only hope, of curing social injustice. *
It is to men of this kind that I would particularly
PRACTICAL POLITICS." 341
\
speak. They are the leaven which has in it power to
leaven the whole lump.
To abolish private property in land is an undertak-
ing so great that it may at first seem impracticable.
But this seeming impracticability consists merely in
the fact that the public mind is not yet sufficiently
awakened to the justice and necessity of this great
change. To bring it about is simply a work of arous-
ing thought. How men vote is something we need not
much concern ourselves with. The important thing is
how they think.
Now the chief agency in promoting thought is dis-
cussion. And to secure the most general and most
effective discussion of a principle it must be embodied
in concrete form and presented in practical politics, so
that men, being called to vote on it, shall be forced to
think and talk about it.
The advocates of a great principle should know no
thought of compromise. They should proclaim it in
its fullness, and point to its complete attainment as
their goal. But the zeal of the propagandist needs to
be supplemented by the skill of the politician. While
the one need not fear to arouse opposition, the other
should seek to minimize resistance. The political art,
like the military art, consists in massing the greatest
force against the point of least resistance; and, to bring
a principle most quickly and effectively into prac-
tical politics, the measure which presents it should be
so moderate as (while involving the principle) to secure
the largest support and excite the least resistance.
For whether the first step be long or short is of little
consequence. When a start is once made in a right
direction, progress is a mere matter of keeping on,
342 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
It is in this way that great questions always enter
the phase of political action. Important political bat-
tles begin with affairs of outposts, in themselves of
little moment, and are generally decided upon issue
joined not on the main question, but on some minor
or collateral question. Thus the slavery question in
the United States came into practical politics upon the
issue of the extension of slavery to new territory, and
was decisively settled upon the issue of secession. Re-
garded as an end, the abolitionist might well have
looked with contempt on the proposals of the Republi-
cans, but these proposals were the means of bringing to
realization what the abolitionists would in vain have
sought to accomplish directly.
So with the tariff question. Whether we have a
protective tariff or a revenue tariff is in itself of small
importance, for, though the abolition of protection
would increase production, the tendency to unequal
distribution would be unaffected and would soon neu-
tralize the gain. Yet, what is thus unimportant as an
end, is all-important as a means. Protection is a little
robber, it is true; but it is the sentinel and outpost of
the great robber—the little robber who cannot be routed
without carrying the struggle into the very stronghold
of the great robber. The great robber is so well in-
trenched, and people have so long been used to his ex-
actions, that it is hard to arouse them to assail him
directly. But to help those engaged in a conflict with
this little robber will be to open the easiest way to at-
tack his master, and to arouse a spirit that must push on.
To secure to all the free use of the power to labor
and the full enjoyment of its products, equal rights to
land must be secured.
* PRACTICAL POLITICS. 343
To secure equal rights to land there is in this stage
of civilization but one way. Such measures as peasant
proprietary, or “land limitation,” or the reservation to
actual settlers of what is left of the public domain, do
not tend toward it; they lead away from it. They
can affect only a comparatively unimportant class, and
that temporarily, while their outcome is not to weaken
land-ownership but rather to strengthen it, by interest.
ing a larger number in its maintenance. The only way
to abolish private property in land is by the way of
taxation. That way is clear and straightforward. It
consists simply in abolishing, one after another, all im-
posts that are in their nature really taxes, and resorting
for public revenues to economic rent, or ground value.
To the full freeing of land, and the complete emancipa-
tion of labor, it is, of course, necessary that the whole of
this value should be taken for the common benefit; but
that will inevitably follow the decision to collect from
this source the revenues now needed, or even any con-
siderable part of them, just as the entrance of a victori-
ous army into a city follows the rout of the army that
defended it.
In the United States the most direct way of moving
on property in land is through local taxation, since
that is already to some extent levied upon land values.
And that is doubtless the way in which the final and
decisive advance will be made. But national politics
dominate state politics, and a question can be brought
into discussion much more quickly and thoroughly as
a national than as a local question.
Now to bring an issue into politics it is not necessary
to form a party. Parties are not to be manufactured;
they grow out of existing parties by the bringing for
344 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
ward of issues upon which men will divide. We have
ready to our hand, in the tariff question, a means of
bringing the whole subject of taxation, and, through
it, the whole social question, into the fullest discus-
SIOT).
As we have seen in the inquiry through which we
have passed, the tariff question necessarily opens the
whole social question. Any discussion of it to-day
must go further and deeper than the Anti-Corn Law
agitation in Great Britain, or than the tariff controver-
sies of Whigs and Democrats, for the progress of thought
and the march of invention have made the distribution
of wealth the burning question of our times. The
making of the tariff question a national political issue
must now mean the discussion in every newspaper, on
every stump, and at every cross-roads where two men
meet, of questions of work and wages, of capital and
labor, of the incidence of taxation, of the nature and
rights of property, and of the question to which all these
questions lead—the question of the relation of men to
the planet on which they live. In this way more can
be accomplished for popular economic education in a
year than could otherwise be accomplished in decades.
Therefore it is that I would urge earnest men who
aim at the emancipation of labor and the establishment
of social justice, to throw themselves into the free-trade
movement with might and main, and to force the tariff
question to the front. It is not merely that the free-
trade side of the tariff controversy best consorts with the
interests of labor; it is not merely that until work-
ingmen get over thinking of labor as a poor thing that
needs to be “protected,” and of work as a dole from
gracious capitalists or paternal governments, they cannot
PRACTICAL POLITICS. 345
rise to a sense of their rights; but it is that the move.
ment for free trade is in reality the van of the struggle
for the emancipation of labor. This is the way the bull
must go to untwist his rope. It makes no difference how
timorously the issue against protection is now pre-
sented ; it is still the thin end of the wedge. It makes
no difference how little we can hope at once to do;
social progress is by steps, and the step to which we
should address ourselves is always the next step.”
---
l
* There is no reason why at least the bulk of the revenues needed
nor the national government under our system should not be col-
lected from a percentage on land values, leaving the rest for the
local governments, just as state, county and municipal taxes are
collected on one assessment and by one set of officials. On the
contrary there is, over and above the economy that would thus be
secured, a strong reason for the Collection of national revenues from
land values in the fact that the ground values of great cities and
mineral deposits are due to the general growth of population.
But the total abolition of the tariff need not await any such ad-
justment. The issuance of paper money, a function belonging
properly to the General Government, would, properly used, yield a
considerable income; while independent sources of any needed
amount of revenue could be found in various taxes, which though
not economically perfect, as is the tax on land values, are yet much
less objectionable than taxes on imports. The excise tax on spiritu-
ous liquors ought to be abolished, as it fosters corruption, injuri-
ously affects many branches of manufacture and puts a premium on
adulteration ; but either by a government monopoly, or by license
taxes on retail sales, a large revenue might be derived from the
liquor traffic with much greater advantage to public health and
morals than by the present system. There are also some stamp
taxes which are comparatively uninjurious and can be collectected
easily and cheaply.
But of all methods of raising an independent Federal revenue,
that which would yield the largest return with the greatest ease
and least injury is a tax upon legacies and successions. In a large
population the proportion of deaths is as regular as that of births,
and with proper exemptions in favor of widows, minor children and
346 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
Nor does it matter that those now active in the free.
trade movement have no sympathy with our aims; nor
that they denounce and misrepresent us. It is our
policy to support them, and strengthen them and urgo
them on. No matter how soon they may propose to
stop, the direction they wish to take is the direction
in which we must go if we would reach our goal. In
joining our forces to theirs, we shall not be putting-
ourselves to their use, we shall be making use of
them.
But these men themselves, when fairly started and
borne on by the impulse of controversy, will go further
than they now dream. It is the law of all such move-
ments that they must become more and more radical.
And while we are especially fortunate in the United
States in a class of protectionist leaders who will not
yield an inch until forced to, our political conditions
differ from those of Great Britain in 1846, when, the
laboring class being debarred from political power, a
timely surrender on the part of the defenders of pro-
tection checked for awhile the natural course of the
movement, and thus prevented the demand for the abo-
lition of protection from becoming at once a demand
for the abolition of landlordism. The class that in
dependent relatives, such a tax would bear harshly on no one, and
from the publicity which must attach to the transfer of property by
death or in view of death it is easily collected and little liable to
evasion. The appropriation of land values would of itself strike at
the heart of overgrown fortunes, but until that is aſ cºmplished, a .
tax of this kind would have the incidental advantage of interfering
with their transmission. g
Of all excuses for the continuance of any tariff at all, the most
groundless is that it is necessary to secure Federal revenues. Ever
the income tax, bad as it is, is in all respects better than a tariff.
PRACTICAL POLITICS. 347
Great Britain is only coming into political power has,
with us, political power already.
Yet even in Great Britain the inevitable tendencies
of the free-trade movement may clearly be seen. Not
only has the abolition of protection cleared the ground
for the far greater questions now beginning to enter
British politics; not only has the impulse of the free-
trade agitation led to reforms which are placing political
power in the hands of the many; but the work done
by men who, having begun by opposing protection,
were not content to stop with its abolition, has been
one of the most telling factors in hastening the revolu-
tion now in its incipient stages—a revolution that can-
not stop short of the restoration to the British people
of their natural rights to their native land.
Richard Cobden saw that the agitation of the tariff
question must ultimately pass into the agitation of the
land question, and from what I have heard of him I am
inclined to think that were he in life and vigor to-day,
he would be leading in the movement for the restora-
tion to the British people of their natural rights in their
native land. But, however this may be, the British
free-trade movement left a “remnant” who, like Thomas
Briggs,” have constantly advocated the carrying of free
trade to its final conclusions. And one of the most ef-
fective of the revolutionary agencies now at work in
Great Britain is the Liverpool Financial Reform Asso-
* Author of Property and Taa’ation, etc., and a warm supporter
of the movement for the restoration of their land to the British
people. Mr. Briggs was one of the Manchester manufacturers
active in the Anti-Corn Law movement, and, regarding that victory
as a mere beginning, has always insisted that Great Britain was yet
under the blight of protectionism, and that the struggle for trº
free trade was yet to come.
348 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
ciation, whose Financial Reform Almanac and other
publications are doing so much to make the British
people acquainted with the process of usurpation and
spoliation by which the land of Great Britain has been
made the private property of a class, and British labor
saddled with the support of a horde of aristocratic pau-
pers. Yet the Liverpool Financial Reform Association
is composed of men who, for the most part, would shrink
from any deliberate attack upon property in land. They
are simply free traders of the Manchester school, logical
enough to see that free trade means the abolition of rev-
enue tariffs as well as of protective tariffs. But in
striking at indirect taxation they are of necessity deal-
ing tremendous blows at private property in land, and
Sapping the very foundations of aristocracy, since, in
showing the history of indirect taxation, they are show-
ing how the tenants of the nation's land made them-
selves virtual owners; and in proposing the restoration
of the direct tax upon land values they are making an
issue which will involve the complete restoration of
British land to the British people.
Thus it is that when men take up the principle of
freedom they are led on and on, and that the hearty
advocacy of freedom to trade becomes at length the ad-
vocacy of freedom to labor. And so must it be in the
United States. Once the tariff question becomes a na-
tional issue, and in the struggle against protection, free
traders will be forced to attack indirect taxation. Pro-
tection is so well intrenched that before a revenue tar-
iff can be secured the active spirits of the free-trade
party will have far passed the point when that would
satisfy them; while before the abolition of indirect tax-
ation is reached, the incidence of taxation and the na’
PRACTICAL POLITICS. . 349
ture and effect of private property in land will have
been so well discussed that the rest will be but a matter
of time.
Property in land is as indefensible as property in man.
It is so absurdly impolitic, so outrageously unjust, so
flagrantly subversive of the true right of property, that
it can only be instituted by force and maintained by
confounding in the popular mind the distinction be.
tween property in land and property in things that are
the result of labor. Once that distinction is made clear
—and a thorough discussion of the tariff question must
How make it clear—and private property in land is
doomed.
CEIAPTER XXX.
CONCLUSION.
A WEALTHY citizen whom I once supported, and
called on others to support, for the Presidential chair,
under the impression that he was a Democrat of the
school of Jefferson, has recently published a letter ad-
vising us to steel-plate our coasts, lest foreign navies
come over and bombard us. This counsel of timidity
has for its hardly disguised object the inducing of such
an enormous expenditure of public money as will pre-
vent any demand for the reduction of taxation, and thus
secure to the tariff rings a longer lease of plunder. It
well illustrates the essential meanness of the protection-
ist spirit—a spirit that no more comprehends the true
dignity of the American Republic and the grandeur of
her possibilities than it cares for the material interests
of the great masses of her citizens—“the poor people
who have to work.”
That which is good harmonizes with all things good;
and that which is evil tends to other evil things. Prop-
erly does Buckle, in his History of Civilization, apply the
term “protective " not merely to the system of robbery
by tariffs, but to the spirit that teaches that the many
are born to serve and the few to rule; that props thrones
with bayonets, substitutes small vanities and petty
jealousies for high-minded patriotism, and converts the
CONCLUSION. 351
{
*
*.
flower of European youth into uniformed slaves,
trained to kill each other at the word of command. It
is not accidental that Mr. Tilden, anxious to get rid of
the surplus revenue in order to prevent a demand for
the repeal of protective duties, should propose wasting
it on steel-clad forts, rather than applying it to any pur-
pose of general utility. Fortifications and navies and
standing armies not merely suit the protectionist pur-
pose in requiring a constant expenditure, and develop.
ing a class who look on warlike expenditures as con-
ducive to their own profit and importance, but they
are of a piece with a theory that teaches us that our
interests are antagonistic to those of other nations. .
Unembarrassed by hostile neighbors; unentangled
in European quarrels; already, in her sixty millions of
people the most powerful nation on earth, and rapidly
rising to a position that will dwarf the greatest empires,
the American Republic can afford to laugh to scorn
any suggestion that she should ape the armaments of
Old World monarchies, as she should laugh to scorn
the parallel suggestion that her industries could be
ruined by throwing open her ports to the commerce of
the world.
The giant of the nations does not depend for her
safety upon steel-clad fortresses and armor-plated ships
which the march of invention must within a few years
make, even in war-time, mere useless rubbish ; but in
her population, in her wealth, in the intelligence and
inventiveness and spirit of her people, she has all that
would be really useful in time of need. No nation on
earth would venture wantonly to attack her, and none
could do so with impunity. If we ever again have
a foreign war it will be of our own making. And
352 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
too strong to fear aggression, we ought to be too just
to commit it.
In throwing open our ports to the commerce of the
world we shall far better secure their safety than by
fortifying them with all the “protected” plates that
our steel ring could make. For not merely would
free trade give us again that mastery of the ocean
which protection has deprived us of, and stimulate the
productive power in which real fighting strength lies;
but while steel-clad forts could afford no defense
against the dynamite-dropping balloons and death-deal-
ing air ships which will be the next product of destruc-
tive invention, free trade would prevent their ever be.
ing sent against us. The spirit of protectionism, which
is the real thing that it is sought to defend by steel-
plating, is that of national enmity and strife. The
spirit of free trade is that of fraternity and peace.
A nobler career is open to the American Republic
than the servile imitation of European follies and vices.
Instead of following in what is mean and low, she may
lead toward what is grand and high. This league of
sovereign states, settling their differences by a common
tribunal and opposing no impediments to trade and
travel, has in it possibilities of giving to the world a
more than Roman peace.
What are the real, substantial advantages of this
Union of ours ? Are they not summed up in the abso-
lute freedom of trade which it secures, and the commu-
nity of interests that grows out of this freedom. If our
states were fighting each other with hostile tariſts, and
a citizen could not cross a state boundary line with.
out having his baggage searched, or a book printed
in New York could not be sent across the river to
CONCLUSION. 353
Jersey City without being held in the post-office until
duty was paid, how long would our Union last, or what
would it be worth 2 The true benefits of our Union,
the true basis of the inter-state peace it secures, is that
it has prevented the establishment of state tariffs and
given us free trade over the better part of a conti-
ment.
We may “extend the area of freedom" whenever we
choose to—whenever we apply to our intercourse with
other nations the same principle that we apply to inter-
course between our states. We may annex Canada to
all intents and purposes whenever we throw down the
tariff wall we have built around Ourselves, We need
not ask for any reciprocity; if we abolish our custom
houses and call off our baggage searchers and Bible
confiscators, Canada would not and could not maintain
hers. This would make the two countries practically
one. Whether the Canadians chose to maintain a sepa-
rate Parliament and pay a British lordling for keep-
ing up a mock court at Rideau Hall, need not in the
slightest concern us. The intimate relations that
would come of unrestricted commerce would soon ob-
literate the boundary line; and mutual interest and
mutual convenience would speedily induce the exten-
sion over both countries of the same general laws and
institutions.
And so would it be with our kindred over the sea.
With the abolition of our custom houses and the open-
ing of our ports to the free entry of all good things, the
trade between the British Islands and the United States
would become so immense, the intercourse so intimate,
that we should become one people, and would inevita-
bly so conform currency, and postal system and general
29
354 PROTECTION OR FREE TRADE.
laws that Englishman and Amerigan would feel them.
selves as much citizens of a common country as do
New Yorker and Californian. Three thousand miles
of water are no more of an impediment to this than
are three thousand miles of land. And with relations
so close, ties of blood and language would assert their
power, and mutual interest, general convenience and
fraternal feeling might soon lead to a pact, which, in
the words of our own, would unite all the English
speaking peoples in a league “to establish justice, in-
sure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common
defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the
blessings of liberty.”
Thus would free trade unite what a century ago pro-
tectionism severed, and in a federation of the nations
of English speech—the world-tongue of the future—
take the first step to a federation of mankind.
And upon our relations with all other nations our
repudiation of protection would have a similar tend-
ency. The sending of delegations to ask the trade of
our sister republics of Spanish America avails nothing
so long as we maintain a tariff which repels their trade.
We have but to open our ports to draw their trade to
us and avail ourselves of all their natural advantages.
And more potent than anything clºe would be the
moral influence of our action. The spectacle of a con-
tinental republic such as ours, really putting her faith
in the principle of freedom, would revolutionize the
civilized world.
For, as I have shown, that violation of natural rights
which imposes tariff duties is inseparably linked with
that violation of natural rights which compels the masses
to pay tribute for the privilege of living. The one
CONCLUSION. 355
cannot be abolished without the other. And a republic
wherein the free-trade principle was thus carried to its
conclusion, wherein the equal and unalienable rights
of men were thus acknowledged, would indeed be as a
city set on a hill.
The dangers to the Republic come not from without
but from within. What menaces her safety is no
armada launched from European shores, but the gather-
ing cloud of tramps in her own highways. That Krupp
is casting monstrous cannon, and that in Cherbourg
and Woolwich projectiles of unheard-of destructiveness
are being stored, need not alarm her, but there is black
omen in the fact that Pennsylvania miners are working
for 65 cents a day. No triumphant invader can tread
our soil till the blight of “great estates’ has brought
“failure of the crop of men;” if there be danger that
our cities blaze, it is from torches lit in faction fight,
not from foreign shells.
Against such dangers forts will not guard us, iron-
clads protect us, or standing armies prove of any avail.
They are not to be avoided by any aping of European
protectionism; they come from our failure to be true to
that spirit of liberty which was invoked at the forma-
tion of the Republic. They are only to be avoided by
conforming our institutions to the principle of free-
dom.
For it is true, as was declared by the first National
Assembly of France, that “ignorance, neglect, or contempt
of human rights are the sole causes of public misfortunes
and corruptions of government.”
Here is the conclusion of the whole matter : That
we should do unto others as we would have them do
356. PROTECTION or FREE TRADE.
to us—that we should respect the rights of others as
scrupulously as we would have our own rights re-
spected, is not a mere counsel of perfection to individ-
uals, but it is the law to which we must conform social
institutions and national policy if we would secure the
blessings of abundance and peace.
IN D F X.
American Republic, possibilities
of, 351.
Balance of trade, 121.
origin of the idea, 132.
Bounties, 90, 98, 106, 110.
Briggs, Thomas, 347.
Bright, John, 296.
Buckle, 351.
Capital, not the oppressor of
labor, 294; no conflict between
capital and labor, 327; con-
fusions in regard to, 327.
Carey, H. C., 10, 86.
Coal and iron monopolies, 189,
331.
Cobden Club, opposed to true
free trade, 15.
Cobden, Richard, 296, 347.
Competition, functions and ef-
ſects, 328.
Concentration, causes of tend-
ency to, 176.
Co-operative stores, 73.
Copyright, international, 219.
De Tocqueville, 201.
Distribution, effects of increased
production on, 274.
Drawbacks, 92.
Duties, export and import, com-
pared, 124.
Bºh estates in America, 128,
293.
Evarts, Wm. M., 141.
Exchange, international, gov-
erned by comparative cost of
production, 157.
Export duties, objections to, 125.
Exports, due to other things
than exchange, 126.
“Fair-traders,” 159.
Fortification of our coasts, 351.
Fourier, Charles, 70.
Free trade, a general interest, 13;
not a British invention, 14;
natural trade, 15; British, 15;
in the United States, 16; in
Ireland, 19; in the U. S.,
causes which have prejudiced
workingmen against, 20, 238,
244; and socialism, 321; inade-
quacy of the usual argument for,
238, 244; movement in Eng-
land, 247, 312, 346; true, 296;
why its advocacy has been so
halting, 312; means peace, 351.
Greeley, Horace, 61, 69, 102, 108,
119, 157, 188, 220.
Gronlund, Laurence, 324.
Hoyt, Henry M., 257.
Hyndman, H. M., 324.
Imports, in a profitable trade
jä exceed exports, 125; do
not always imply exports, 126.
Import duties, fall on consumers,
78; claim that they are paid
by foreigners, 93.
Interest, rate of, as reason for
rotection, 154.
Individualism, 324.
Invention, effects of labor-saving,
281.
Ireland, tariffs and industry of, 18;
American remittances to, 127.
358
INDEX.
Iron, effect of the duty on, 160,
189.
Labor, efficiency varies with
wages, 149; value the measure
of embodied, 118, 147; relative
not absolute cost of, determines
exchanges, 157; the true stand-
ard of value, 211; not pro-
tected by tariffs, 218; condi-
tions becoming harder, 249,
275; of itself helpless, 263;
cause of its impoverishment,
285.
Laborer, full meaning of the
term, 75.
Land, value of, increases as wages
fall, 152; effects of private
ownership of, 176, 184, 285;
the passive factor in produc-
tion, 184; monopoly of timber
and mineral lands, 183; influ-
ence of price of, on wages, 227;
monopoly of, gives control of
labor, 277, 295; value of, 290;
how equal rights to, may be
asserted, 297; necessity of se-
cure possession, 298.
Land-owner, not a producer, 185.
Machinery, effects of, 270.
Malthus, 9.
Manufactures, natural develop-
ment of, 163; localization of,
1 º ; large demand necessary to,
171.
Marx, Karl, 324.
Mill, John Stuart, 9, 94.
Middlemen, 70.
Mining royalties, 188.
Money, confusions arising from
use of, 132; fluctuations in the
value of, 211.
Navigation laws, effects of, 206.
Over-production, 246.
Octroi, 71.
Physiocrats, 15, 310, 312.
Political economy, simplicity of,
8; method of, 27; mercantile
system of, 187.
Production, , what it embraces,
66; cost of, not determined by
wages, 147; advantages for,
15; factors of, 184; increase
of, does not benefit all, 246.
Protection reasserting itself in
Great Britain, 3, 112, 159; ends
praiseworthy, 5; general ac-
ceptance, 12; influences it en-
lists, 13; not American, 14, 45;
in the case of Ireland, 18;
causes that dispose Working-
men in its favor, 20, 257; its
Spirit that of enmity, 14, 34,
350; its corrupting tendencies,
35, 84, 100; what it prevents,
49; a world suited to, 57; its
genesis, 76, 82, 137; is boy-
cotting of ourselves, 114, 160;
its real beneficiaries, 177; ef-
fect on prices, 96; effect on
profits, 96, 177; effect upon
other countries, 160; effect on
land values, 186; first asked
for the establishment of new
industries, 103; difference be-
tween protectionist writers and
popular pleas, 107; derives
strength from confusions of
thought arising from the use
of money, 137; effects on
American industry, 193; in-
jurious to the development of
manufactures, 163, 177, 193;
tends to unjust distribution,
252; home market argument,
1.12; balance-of-trade argu-
ment, 121; high-wages' argu-
ment, 145; arguments drawn
from advantages or disadvan-
tages, 154; abolition of, would
stimulate industry, 192, 231;
plea for gradual abolition, 231;
effect on wages, 244; cannot be
abolished in the United States
on the same lines as in Great
Britain, 247; and wages, 208;
cannot protect labor, 215; real
strength of, 257; how it makes
INDEX.
359
work, 258; cannot check con-
centrating tendencies, 283;
strengthened by opponents,
268; its relation to monopoly
of land, 343.
Protective theory, if true, then
universally true, 30; opposed
to natural perceptions and im-
pulses, 38, 64; arbitrary and
shifting character of the pro-
tective unit, 40; inconsistencies
of, 40, 101; applies to smaller
even more than to larger di-
visions, 43; cannot be put in
practice, 99.
Property in 1and, 176, 184, 285,
349; how instituted in Great
Britain, 314.
Public debts, 234.
Quesnay, 15, 312.
Revenue, Federal, possible sources
of, 345.
Rogers, Prof. Thorold, 254.
Sailors, character of, 202,
Savages, their rude methods due
to isolation, 171.
Scully, Wm., American estates
of, 129.
Shipping, American, 198.
Slavery, two forms of, 289; in-
fluence of American on public
opinion, 316.
Smith, Adam, 9,
Smith, E. P., 87.
Socialism, relations of frce trade
to, 322.
Spencer, Herbert, 300.
Sumner, Prof. W. G., 266.
15, 98,115,812.
Tariffs, origin of, 76; first Amer-
ican, 17; are restrictions, not
on foreigners, but on the peo-
ple that impose them, 49, 160;
for revenue, 76; for protection,
88; frequoni, modifications of,
181; Act of 1883, typical blum-
der in, 100.
Tariff question, its importance,
3; not safely to be left to spe-
cialists, 6; not recondite, 7; not
yet thoroughly discussed, 7;
cannot be understood without
going further, 10, 238; para-
dox to which it leads, 270.
Taxation, indirect, a farming of
revenue, 84.
Taxes, direct and indirect, con-
sidered, 77; on ostentation, 307;
on land values, 307 ; Federal,
345.
Thompson, Prof. R. E., 40, 61,
69, 86, 107, 140, 203, 259.
Tobacco and cigars, taxes on, 77.
Trade, nature and function of,
49; a mode of production,
210.
Trades-unions, influence on com-
petition, 214, 223; can do lit-
tle, 323.
Value, the measure of embodied
labor, 118, 147.
Wages, a high standard of, a
proper concernment of the
State, 5; assumption that they
are higher in U. S. because of
tariff, 25; not the determining
factor in cost of production,
147; rate of, as related to land
values, 152, 227; effect of pro-
tection on, 208; tendency to a
common level, 212; governed
by competition in labor mar-
ket, not in goods market, 212;
do not increase with employers'
profits, 22%; in widest occupa-
tions, determine general rate
of, 225; effects of abolition of
protection on, 244.
Wealth, increase of, does not
benefit all classes, 245.
Wells, D. A., 179.
Work, treated by protectionists
as an end, 258; how this feeling
arises, &62.
2 .
THE

LAND QUESTION
WHAT VT /AVVOZVES, AAWD HOW AZOAVE
A 7" CAAW AAE SAE 7'7"ZAZZO
BY
HENRY GEORGE
AUTHOR OF “PROGRESS AND POVERTY,” “social PROBLEMs,” ETC.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal ; that
they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among
these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights,
governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent
of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of
these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.”—DECLARATION of
INDEPENDENCE.
NEW YORK
CHARLES L. WEBSTER & COMPANY
y
1893
CopyRIGHT, 1881,
BY
HENRY GEORGE
PR E F A C E.
THIS book was first published in the early part
of 1881, under the title of “The Irish Land Ques-
tion.” In order to better indicate the general char-
acter of this subject, and to conform to the title
under which it had been republished in other coun-
tries, the title was subsequently changed to “The
Land Question.”
C O N T E N T S.
Chapter I.-Unpalatable Truth, . © º e tº
II.-Distress and Famine, tº & o tº
III.-A Universal Question, . & Qe
IV.-Proposed Remedies, º
V.—Whose Land is it 2
VI.-Landlords' Right is Labor's Wrong,
VII.-The Great-Great-Grandson of Captain Kidd, .
VIII.-The Only Way, the Easy Way,
IX. —Principle the Best Policy,
X.—Appeals to Animosity,
XI.—How to Win,
XII.-In the United States,
XIII.—A Little Island or a Little World,
XIV.-The Civilization that is Possible,
XV.-The Civilization that is, .
XVI.-True Conservatism,
XVII.-“In Hoc Signo Vinces,” º e e
PAGE
I3
I8
24
29
3I
35
42
45
48
5.I
58
6O
, 63
69
77
84
THE
LAND QUESTION.
CHAPTER I.
|UNPALATABLE TRUTH.
In charging the Dublin jury in the Land League
cases, Mr. Justice Fitzgerald told them that the land
laws of Ireland were more favorable to the tenant than
those of Great Britain, Belgium, or the United States.
As a matter of fact, Justice Fitzgerald is right. For
in Ireland certain local customs and the provisions of
the Bright Land Act mitigate somewhat the power of
the landlord in his dealings with the tenant. In Great
Britain, save by custom in a few localities, there are no
such mitigations. In Belgium I believe there are none.
There are certainly none in the United States.
This fact which Justice Fitzgerald cites will be re-
echoed by the enemies of the Irish movement. And it
it a fact well worth the consideration of its friends. For
the Irish movement has passed its first stage, and it is
time for a more definite understanding of what is needed
and how it is to be got.
It is the fashion of Land League orators and sympa-
thizing newspapers in this country to talk as if the dis-
tress and disquiet in Ireland were wholly due to politi-
cal oppression, and our national House of Representa-
tives recently passed, by unanimous vote, a resolution
which censured England for her treatment of Ireland.
But, while it is indeed true that Ireland has been deeply
wronged and bitterly oppressed by England, it is not
true that there is any economic oppression of Ireland
8 . THE LAND QUESTION.
by England now. To whatever cause Irish distress may
be due, it is certainly not due to the existence of laws
which press on industry more heavily in Ireland than
in any other part of the United Kingdom.
And, further than this, the Irish land system, which
is so much talked of as though it were some peculiarly
atrocious system, is essentially the same land system
which prevails in all civilized countries, which we of
the United States have accepted unquestioningly, and
have extended over the whole temperate zone of a new
continent—the same system which all over the civilized
world men are accustomed to consider natural and just.
Justice Fitzgerald is unquestionably right.
As to England, it is well known that the English land-
lords exercise freely all the powers complained of in
the Irish landlords, without even the slight restrictions
imposed in Ireland. -
As to Belgium, let me quote the high authority of th
distinguished Belgian publicist, M. Emile de Laveleye,
of the University of Liege. He says that the Belgian
tenant farmers—for tenancy largely prevails even where
the land is most minutely divided—are rack-rented with
a mercilessness unknown in England or even in Ireland,
and are compelled to vote as their landlords dictate
And as to the United States, let me ask the men who
to applauding audiences are nightly Comparing the
freedom of America with the oppression of Ireland—let
me ask the Representatives who voted for the resolution
of sympathy with Ireland, this simple question : What
would the Irish landlords lose, what would the Irish
tenants gain, if, to-morrow, Ireland were made a State
in the American Union and American law substituted
for English law Ż
I think it will puzzle them to reply. The truth is that
the gain would be to the landlords, the loss to the
tenants. The simple truth is, that, under our laws, the
Irish landlords could rack-rent, distrain, evict, or absent
themselves, as they pleased, and without any restriction
from Ulster tenant-right or legal requirement of com-
pensation for improvements. Under our laws they
could, just as freely as they can now, impose whatever
terms they pleased upon their tenants—whether as to
cultivation, as to improvements, as to game, as to mar-
UNPAZAZABZE 7 rvzºº. 9
riages, as to voting, or as to anything else. For these
powers do not spring from special laws. They are
merely incident to the right of property; they result
simply from the acknowledgment of the right of the
owner of land to do as he pleases with his own—to let
it, or not let it. So far as law can give them to him,
every American landlord has these powers as fully as
any Irish landlord. Can not the American owner of
land make, in letting it, any stipulation he pleases as to
how it shall be used, or improved, or cultivated 2 Can
he not reserve any of his own rights upon it, such as
the right of entry, or of cutting wood, or shooting game,
or catching fish 2 And, in the absence of special agree-
ment, does not American law give him, what the law of
Ireland does not now give him, the ownership at the
expiration of the lease of all the improvements made by
the tenant 2
What single power has the Irish landowner that the
American landowner has not as fully 2 Is not the Amer-
ican landlord just as free as is the Irish landlord to re-
fuse to rent his lands or his houses to any one who does
not attend a certain church or vote a certain ticket 2 Is
he not quite as free to do this as he is free to refuse his
contributions to all but one particular benevolent so-
ciety or political committee Or, if, not liking a cer-
tain newspaper, he chooses to give notice to quit to any
tenant whom he finds taking that newspaper, what law
can be invoked to prevent him 2 There is none. The
property is his, and he can let it, or not let it, as he
wills. And, having this power to let or not let, he has
power to demand any terms he pleases.
That Ireland is a conquered country ; that centuries
ago her soil was taken from its native possessors and
parcelled out among aliens, and that it has been confis-
cated again and again, has nothing to do with the real
question of to-day—no more to do with it than have the
confiscations of Marius and Sylla. England, too, is a
Conquered country ; her soil has been confiscated again
and again ; and, spite of all talk about Saxon and Celt,
it is not probable that, after the admixture of genera-
tions, the division of landholder and non-landholder any
more coincides with distinction of race in the one coun-
try than in the other. That Irish land titles rest on.
IO THE ZAND QUESTION:
force and fraud is true ; but so do land titles in every
country—even to a large extent in our own peacefully
settled country. Even in our most recently settled
States, how much land is there to which title has been
got by fraud and perjury and bribery—by the arts of
the lobbyist or the cunning tricks of hired lawyers, by
double-barrelled shotguns and repeating rifles
The truth is that the Irish land system is simply the
general system of modern civilization. In no essential
feature does it differ from the system that obtains here
—in what we are accustomed to consider the freest
country under the sun. Entails and primogeniture and
family settlements may be in themselves bad things,
and may sometimes interfere with putting the land to
its best use, but their effects upon the relations of land-
lord and tenant are not worth talking about. As for
rack-rent, which is simply a rent fixed at short intervals
by competition, that is in the United States even a more
common way of letting land than in Ireland. In our
cities the majority of our people live in houses rented
from month to month or year to year for the highest
price the landlord thinks he can get. The usual term,
in the newer States, at least, for the letting of agricul-
tural land is from season to season. And that the rent
of land in the United States comes, on the whole, more
closely to the standard of rack, or full competition rent,
there can be, I think, little doubt. That the land of
Ireland is, as the apologists for landlordism say, largely
under-rented (that is, not rented for the full amount the
landlord might get with free competition) is probably
true. Miss C. G. O'Brien, in a recent article in the “Nine-
teenth Century,” states that the tenant-farmers gener-
ally get for such patches as they sublet to their laborers
twice the rent they pay the landlords. And we hear in-
cidentally of many “good landlords,” i.e., landlords not
in the habit of pushing their tenants for as much as they
might get by rigorously demanding all that any one
would give.
These things, as well as the peculiar bitterness of
complaints against middle-men and the speculators who
have purchased encumbered estates and manage them
solely with a view to profit, go to show the truth of the
statement that the land of Ireland has been, by its pres:
OWAVAEAZA 7TA BAEAE 7"R U 7A. If
ent owners, largely underlet, when considered from what
we would deem a business point of view. And this is
but what might be expected. Human nature is about
the same the world over, and the Irish landlords as a
class are no better nor worse than would be other men
under like conditions. An aristocracy such as that of
Ireland has its virtues as well as its vices, and is in-
fluenced by sentiments which do not enter into mere
business transactions—sentiments which must often
modify and soften the calculations of cold self-interest.
But with us the letting of land is as much a business
matter as the buying or selling of wheat or of stocks.
An American would not think he was showing his good-
ness by renting his land for low rates, any more than he
would think he was showing, his goodness by selling
wheat for less than the market price, or stocks for less
than the quotations. So in those districts of France and
Belgium where the land is most subdivided, the peasant
proprietors, says M. de Laveleye, boast to one another
of the high rents they get, just as they boast of the high
prices they get for pigs or for poultry.
The best measure of rent is, of course, its proportion
to the produce. The only estimate of Irish rent as a pro-
portion of which I know is that of Buckle, who puts it
at one-fourth of the produce. In this country I am in-
clined to think one-fourth would generally be considered
a moderate rent. Even in California there is considerable
land rented for one-third the crop, and some that rents.
for one-half the crop ; while, according to a writer in
the “Atlantic Monthly,” the common rent in that great
wheat-growing section of the new Northwest now being
opened up is one-half the crop !
It does not seem to me that Justice Fitzgerald's state-
ment can be disputed, though of course its developments
are not yet as strikingly bad, for this is yet a new coun-
try, and tenants are comparatively few, and land com-
paratively easy to get. The American land system is
really worse for the tenant than the Irish system. For
with us there is neither sentiment nor custom to check
the force of competition or mitigate the natural desire
of the landlord to get all he can.
Nor is there anything in our system to prevent or
check absenteeism, so much complained of in regard to
I2 THE LAND QUESTION.
Ireland. Before the modern era, which has so facilitated
travel and communication, and made the great cities so
attractive to those having money to spend, the preva-
lence of Irish absenteeism may have been due to special
causes, but at the present day there is certainly nothing
peculiar in it. Most of the large English and Scotch
landholders are absentees for the greater part of the
year, and many of them live permanently or for long
intervals upon the Continent. So are our large American
landowners generally absentees. In New York, in San
Francisco, in Washington, Boston, Chicago, and St.
Louis, live men who own large tracts of land which
they seldom or never see. A resident of Rochester is
said to own no less than four hundred farms in different
States, one of which (I believe in Kentucky) comprises
thirty-five thousand acres. Under the plantation sys-
tem of farming and that of stock-raising on a grand
scale, which are developing so rapidly in our new States,
very much of the profits go to professional men and
capitalists who live in distant cities. Corporations
whose stock is held in the East or in Europe own much
greater bodies of land, at much greater distances, than
do the London corporations possessing landed estates
in Ireland. To say nothing of the great land-grant rail-
road companies, the Standard Oil Company probably
owns more acres of Western land than all the London
companies put together own of Irish land. And, al-
though landlordism in its grosser forms is only begin-
ning in the United States, there is probably no Ameri-
can, wherever he may live, who cannot in his immediate
vicinity see some instance of absentee landlordism. The
tendency to concentration born of the new era ushered
in by the application of steam shows itself in this way
as in many others. To those who can live where they
please, the great cities are becoming more and more at-
tractive.
And it is further to be remarked that too much
stress is laid upon absenteeism, and that it might be
prevented without much of the evil often attributed to
it being cured. That is to say, that to his tenantry
and neighborhood the owner of land in Galway or
Kilkenny would be as much an absentee if he lived
in Dublin as if he lived in London, and that, if Irish
A)/SZTAEAESS AAWD AEAM/AVE. 13
landlords were compelled to live in Ireland, all that the
Irish people would gain would be, metaphorically speak-
1ng, the crumbs that fell from the landlords’ tables. For
if the butter and eggs, the pigs and the poultry, of the
Irish peasant must be taken from him and exported to
pay for his landlord's wine and cigars, what difference
does it make to him where the wine is drunk or the
cigars are smoked 2
CHAPTER II.
T)ISTRESS AND FAMINE.
But it will be asked: If the land system which pre-
vails in Ireland is essentially the same as that which
prevails elsewhere, how is it that it does not produce
the same results elsewhere
I answer that it does everywhere produce the same
Áind of results. As there is nothing essentially peculiar
in the Irish land system, so is there nothing essentially
peculiar in Irish distress. Between the distress in Ire-
land and the distress in other countries there may be
differences in degree and differences in manifestation ;
but that is all.
The truth is, that as there is nothing peculiar in the
Irish land system, so is there nothing peculiar in the
distress which that land system causes. We hear a
great deal of Irish emigration, of the millions of sons
and daughters of Erin who have been compelled to
leave their native soil. But have not the Scottish High-
lands been all but depopulated 2 Do not the English
emigrate in the same way, and for the same reasons P
Do not the Germans and Italians and Scandinavians
also emigrate 2 Is there not a constant emigration from
the Eastern States of the Union to the Western—an
emigration impelled by the same motives as that which
sets across the Atlantic 2 Nor am I sure that this is
not in some respects a more demoralizing emigration
than the Irish, for I do not think there is any such
monstrous disproportion of the sexes in Ireland as in
Massachusetts 2 If French and Belgian peasants do
14 7 HE ZAND OUAES7 row.
not emigrate as do the Irish, is it not simply because
they do not have such “long families” ”
There has recently been deep and wide-spread dis-
tress in Ireland, and but for the contributions of charity
many would have perished for want of food. But, to
say nothing of such countries as India, China, Persia,
and Syria, is it not true that within the last few years
there have been similar spasms of distress in the most
highly civilized countries—not merely in Russia and in
Poland, but in Germany and England 2 Yes, even in
the United States.
Have there not been, are there not constantly occur-
ring, in all these countries, times when the poorest
classes are reduced to the direst straits, and large num-
bers are only saved from starvation by charity? -
When there is famine among savages it is because
food enough is not to be had. But this was not the case
in Ireland. In any part of Ireland, during the height
of what was called the famine, there was food enough
for whoever had means to pay for it. The trouble was
not in the scarcity of food. There was, as a matter of
fact, no real scarcity of food, and the proof of it is that
food did not command scarcity prices. During all the
so-called famine, food was constantly exported from
Ireland to England, which would not have been the
case had there been any more true famine in one coun-
try than in the other. During all the so-called famine
a practically unlimited supply of American meat and
grain could have been poured into Ireland, through the
existing mechanism of exchange, so quickly that the re-
lief would have been felt instantaneously. Our send-
ing of supplies in a national war-ship was a piece of
vulgar ostentation, fitly paralleled by their ostentatious
distribution in British gunboats under the nominal su-
perintendence of a royal prince. Had we been bent on
relief, not display, we might have saved our Govern-
ment the expense of fitting up its antiquated war-ship,
the British gunboats their coal, the Lord Mayor his
dinner, and the Royal Prince his valuable time. A
cable draft, turned in Dublin into postal orders, would
have afforded the relief, not merely much more easily
and cheaply, but in less time than it took our war-ship
to get ready to receive her cargo ; for the reason that
P/S7RAESS AAWD FAM/MWAE. 15
so many of the Irish people were starving was, not that
the food was not to be had, but that they had not the
means to buy it. Had the Irish people had money or
its equivalent, the bad seasons might have come and
gone without stinting any one of a full meal. Their
effect would merely have been to determine toward Ire-
land the flow of more abundant harvests.
I wish clearly to bring to view this point. The Irish
famine was not a true famine arising from scarcity of
food. It was what an English writer styled the Indian
famine—a “financial famine,” arising not from scarcity
of food but from the poverty of the people. The ef-
fect of the short crops in producing distress was not so
much in raising the price of food as in cutting off the
accustomed incomes of the people. The masses of the
Irish people get so little in ordinary times that they are
barely able to live, and when anything occurs to inter-
rupt their accustomed incomes they have nothing to
fall back on.
Yet is this not true of large classes in all countries 2
And are not all countries subject to just such famines as
this Irish famine P Good seasons and bad seasons are
in the order of nature, just as the day of Sunshine and
the day of rain, the summer's warmth and the winter's
snow. But agriculture is, on the whole, as certain as
any other pursuit, for even those industries which may
be carried on regardless of weather are subject to alter-
nations as marked as those to which agriculture is liable.
There are good seasons and bad seasons even in fishing
and hunting, while the alternations are very marked in
mining and in manufacturing. In fact, the more highly
differentiated branches of industry which advancing
civilization tends to develop, though less directly de-
pendent upon rain and sunshine, heat and cold, seem
increasingly subject to alternations more frequent and
intense. Though in a country of more diversified in-
dustry the failure of a crop or two could not have such
widespread effects as in Ireland, yet the countries of
more complex industries are liable to a greater variety
of disasters. A war on another continent produces
famine in Lancashire ; Parisian milliners decree a
change of fashion, and Coventry operatives are only
saved from starvation by public alms ; a railroad com-
16 7"HE LAND QUESTION.
bination decides to raise the price of coal, and Pennsyl
vania miners find their earnings diminished by half or
totally cut off; a bank breaks in New York, and in all
the large American cities soup-houses must be opened !
In this Irish famine which provoked the land agita-
tion, there is nothing that is peculiar. Such famines on
a smaller or a larger Scale are constantly occurring.
Nay, more the fact is, that famine, just such famine as
this Irish famine, constantly exists in the richest and
most highly civilized lands. It persists even in “good
times” when trade is “booming ”; it spreads and rages
whenever from any cause industrial depression comes.
It is kept under, or at least kept from showing its worst
phases, by poor-rates and almshouses, by private be-
nevolence and by vast organized charities, but it still
exists, gnawing in secret when it does not openly rage.
In the very centres of civilization, where the machinery.
of production and exchange is at the highest point of
efficiency, where bank-vaults hold millions, and show-
windows flash with more than a prince's ransom, where
elevators and warehouses are gorged with grain, and
markets are piled with all things succulent and tooth-
some, where the dinners of Lucullus are eaten every
day, and, if it be but cool, the very greyhounds wear
dainty blankets—in these centres of wealth and power
and refinement, there are always hungry men and
women and little children. Never the sun goes down
but on human beings prowling like wolves for food, or
huddling together like vermin for shelter and warmth.
“Always with You" is the significant heading under
which a New York paper, in these most prosperous
times, publishes daily the tales of chronic famine ; and
in the greatest and richest city in the world—in that
very London, where the plenty of meat in the butchers'
shops seemed to some Savages the most wondrous of ail
its wonderful sights—in that very London, the mortuary
reports have a standing column for deaths by starva-
tion.
But no more in its chronic than in its spasmodic
forms is famine to be measured by the deaths from
starvation. Perfect, indeed, in all its parts must be the
human machine if it can run till the last bit of availa-
ble tissue be drawn on to feed its fires. It is under
AX/S7RAESS AAWD AWAM/AVE. 17
the guise of disease to which physicians can give less
shocking names, that famine, especially the chronic
famine of civilization, kills. And the statistics of mor-
tality, especially of infant mortality, show that in the
richest communities famine is constantly at its work.
Insufficient nourishment, inadequate warmth and cloth-
ing, and unwholesome surroundings, constantly, in the
very centres of plenty, swell the death rates. What is
this but famine—just such famine as the Irish famine 2
It is not that the needed things are really scarce ; but
that those whose need is direst have not the means to get
them, and, when not relieved by charity, want kills
them in its various ways. When, in the hot midsummer,
little children die like flies in the New York tenement
wards, what is that but famine 2 And those barges
crowded with such children that a noble and tender
charity sends down New York Harbor to catch the fresh
salt breath of the Atlantic—are they not fighting famine
as truly as was our food-laden war-ship and the Royal
Prince's gunboats 2 Alas ! to find famine one has not
to cross the Sea.
There was bitter satire in the cartoon that one of our
illustrated papers published when subscriptions to the
Irish famine fund were being made—a cartoon that
represented James Gordon Bennett sailing away for
Ireland in a boat loaded down with provisions, while a
sad-eyed, hungry-looking, tattered group gazed wist-
fully on them from the pier. The bite and the bitterness
of it, the humiliating sting and satire of it, were in its
truth.
This is “the home of freedom,” and “the asylum
of the oppressed "; our population is yet sparse, our
public domain yet wide ; we are the greatest of food
producers, yet even here there are beggars, tramps,
paupers, men torn by anxiety for the support of their
families, women who know not which way to turn,
little children growing up in such poverty and squalor
that only a miracle can keep them pure. “Always with
you,” even here. What is the week or the day of the
week that our papers do not tell of man or woman who,
* to escape the tortures of want, has stepped out of life
unbidden 2 What is this but famine 7
-- 2
*-
gº
18 ZAZ ZAMD Q0A2SZZOM.
CHAPTER III.
A UNIVERSAL QUESTION.
Let me be understood. I am not endeavoring to ex
cuse or belittle Irish distress. I am merely pointing
out that distress of the same kind exists elsewhere.
This is a fact I want to make clear, for it has hitherto,
in most of the discussions of the Irish Land Question,
been ignored. And without an appreciation of this
fact the real nature of the Irish Land Question is not
understood, nor the real importance of the agitation
SCCI).
What I contend for is this : That it is a mistake to
consider the Irish Land Question as a mere local ques-
tion, arising out of conditions peculiar to Ireland, and
which can be settled by remedies that can have but
local application. On the contrary, I contend that what
has been brought into prominence by Irish distress,
and forced into discussion by Irish agitation, is some-
thing infinitely more important than any mere local
question could be ; it is nothing less than that question
of transcendent importance which is everywhere begin-
ning to agitate, and, if not settled, must soon convulse
the civilized world—the question whether, their politi-
cal equality conceded (for, where this has not already
been, it soon will be), the masses of mankind are to re-
main mere hewers of wood and drawers of water for
the benefit of a fortunate few 2 whether, having escaped
from feudalism, modern Society is to pass into an in-
dustrial Organization more grinding and oppressive,
more heartless and hopeless, than feudalism 2 whether,
amid the abundance their labor creates, the producers
of wealth are to be content in good times with the
barest of livings and in bad times to suffer and to starve 7
What is involved in this Irish Land Question is not a
mere local matter between Irish landlords and Irish
tenants, but the great social problem of modern civili-
zation. What is arraigned in the arraignment of the
claims of Irish landlords is nothing less than the wide-
Aſ -UAVYMERSAZ QUEST/OM. 19
spread institution of private property in land. In the
assertion of the natural rights of the Irish people is the
assertion of the natural rights that, by virtue of his ex-
istence, pertain everywhere to man.
It is probable that the Irish agitators did not at first
perceive the real bearing and importance of the ques-
tion they took in hand. But they—the more intelli-
gent and earnest of them, at least—must now begin to
realize it.* Yet, save, perhaps, on the part of the ultra
Tories, who would resist any concession as the open-
ing of a door that cannot again be shut, there is on all
sides a disposition to ignore the real nature of the ques-
tion, and to treat it as springing from conditions pecu-
liar to Ireland. On the one hand, there is a large
class in England and elsewhere, who, while willing to
concede or even actually desire that something should
be done for Ireland, fear any extension of the agitation
into a questioning of the rights of landowners else-
where. And, on the other hand, the Irish leaders
seem anxious to confine attention in the same way, evi-
dently fearing that, should the question assume a
broader aspect, strong forces now with them might fall
away and, perhaps to a large extent, become directly
and strongly antagonistic. .
But it is not possible to so confine the discussion; no
more possible than it was possible to confine to France
the questions involved in the French Revolution ; no
more possible than it was possible to keep the discus-
sion which arose over slavery in the Territories confined
to the subject of slavery in the Territories. And it is
best that the truth be fully stated and clearly recognized.
He who sees the truth, let him proclaim it, without
asking who is for it or who is against it. This is not
radicalism in the bad sense which so many attach to
the word. This is conservatism in the true sense.
What gives to the Irish land question its supreme sig-
nificance is that it brings into attention and discussion
—nay, that it forces into attention and discussion, not a
* The “Irish World,” which, though published in New York, has ex-
erted a large influence upon the agitation on both sides of the Atlantic,
does realize, and has from the first frankly declared, that the fight must
be against landlordism in toto and everywhere.
2O 7//E ZAND QUEST/ow.
mere Irish question, but a question of world-wide im
portance. -
What has brought the land question to the front in
Ireland, what permits the relation between land and
labor to be seen there with such distinctness—to be seen
even by those who cannot in other places perceive
them—is certain special conditions. Ireland is a coun-
try of dense population, so that competition for the use
of land is so sharp and high as to produce marked ef-
fects upon the distribution of wealth. It is mainly an
agricultural country, so that production is concerned
directly and unmistakably with the soil. Its industrial
Organization is largely that simple one in which an em-
ploying capitalist does not stand between laborer and
landowner, so that the connection between rent and
wages is not obscured. Ireland, moreover, was never con-
quered by the Romans, nor, until comparatively recently,
by any people who had felt in their legal system the ef-
fect of Roman domination. It is the European coun-
try in which primitive ideas as to land tenures have
longest held their sway, and the circumstances of its
conquest, its cruel misgovernment, and the differences
of race and religion between the masses of the people
and those among whom the land was parcelled, have
tended to preserve old traditions and to direct the
strength of Irish feeling and the fervor of Irish imagi-
nation against a system which forces the descendant of
the ancient possessors of the soil to pay tribute for it
to the representative of a hated stranger. It is for
these reasons that the connection between Irish distress
and Irish landlordism is so easily seen and readily real-
ized.
But does not the same relation exist between Eng-
lish pauperism and English landlordism—between
American tramps and the American land system 2 Es-
sentially the same land system as that of Ireland exists
elsewhere, and, wherever it exists, distress of essentially
the same kind is to be seen. And elsewhere, just as
certainly as in Ireland, is the connection between the
two that of cause and effect.
When the agent of the Irish landlord takes from the
Irish cottier for rent his pigs, his poultry, or his potatoes,
or the money that he gains by the Sale of these things, it
A UNIVERSAL QUESTION. 21
is clear enough that this rent comes from the earnings
of labor, and diminishes what the laborer gets. But is
not this in reality just as clear when a dozen middle-
men stand between laborer and landlord 2 Is it not
just as clear when, instead of being paid monthly or
quarterly or yearly, rent is paid in a lumped sum called
purchase money 2 Whence comes the incomes which
the owners of land in mining districts, in manufacturing
districts, or in commercial districts, receive for the use
of their land 2 Manifestly, they must come from the
earnings of labor—there is no other source from which
they can come. From what are the revenues of Trinity
Church corporation drawn, if not from the earnings of
labor 2 What is the source of the income of the Astors, if
it is not the labor of laboring men, women, and children 2
When a man makes a fortune by the rise of real estate,
as in New York and elsewhere many men have done
within the past few months, what does it mean It
means that he may have fine clothes, costly food, a grand
house luxuriously furnished, etc. Now, these things are
not the spontaneous fruits of the soil ; neither do they
fall from heaven, nor are they cast up by the sea. They
are products of labor—can only be produced by labor.
And hence, if men who do no labor get them, it must
necessarily be at the expense of those who do labor.
It may seem as if I were needlessly dwelling upon a
truth apparent by mere statement. Yet, simple as this
truth is, it is persistently ignored. This is the reason
that the true relation and true importance of the ques-
tion which has come to the front in Ireland are so little
realized.
To give an illustration : In his article in the “North
American Review" last year, Mr. Parnell speaks as
though the building up of manufactures in Ireland
would lessen the competition for land. What justifica-
tion for such a view is there either in theory or in fact
Can manufacturing be carried on without land any more
than agriculture can be carried on without land 2 Is
not competition for land measured by price, and, if
Ireland were a manufacturing country, would not the
value of her land be greater than now Had English
clamor for “protection to home industry” not been suf-
fered to secure the strangling of Irish industries in their
22 THE ZAND QUESTION.
infancy, Ireland might now be more of a manufacturing
country with larger population and a greater aggregate
production of wealth. But the tribute which the land-
owners could have taken would likewise have been
greater. Put a Glasgow, a Manchester, or a London in
one of the Irish agricultural counties, and, where the
landlords now take pounds in rent, they would be en-
abled to demand hundreds and thousands of pounds.
And it would necessarily come from the same source—
the ultimate source of all incomes—the earnings of la-
bor. That so large a proportion of the laboring class
would not have to compete with each other for agricul-
tural land is true. But they would have to do what is
precisely the same thing. They would have to compete
with each other for employment—for the opportunity
to make a living. And there is no reason to think that
this competition would be less intense than now. On
the contrary, in the manufacturing districts of England
and Scotland, just as in the agricultural districts of
Ireland, the competition for the privilege of earning a
living forces wages to such a minimum as, even in good
times, will only give a living.
What is the difference 2 The Irish peasant cultivator
hires his little farm from a landlord, and pays rent di-
rectly. The English agricultural laborer hires himself
to an employing farmer who hires the land, and who
out of the produce pays to the one his wages and to the
other his rent. In both cases competition forces the la-
borer down to a bare living as a net return for his work,
and only stops at that point because, when men do not
get enough to live on, they die and cease to compete.
And, in the same way, competition forces the employ-
ing farmer to give up to the landlord all that he has left
after paying wages, save the ordinary returns of capital
—for the profits of the English farmer do not, on the
average, I understand, exceed five or six per cent. And
in other businesses, such as manufacturing, competition
in the same way forces down wages to the minimum of
a bare living, while rent goes up and up. Thus is it
clear that no change in methods or improvements in the
processes of industry lessens the landlord's power of
claiming the lion's share.
I am utterly unable to see in what essential thing the
A UNIVERSAL QUESTION. 23
condition of the Irish peasant would be a whit improved
were Ireland as rich as England, and her industries as
diversified. For the Irish peasant is not to be compared
with the English tenant-farmer, who is really a capital-
ist, but with the English agricultural laborer and the
lowest class of factory operatives. Surely their condi-
tion is not so much better than that of the Irish peasant
as to make a difference worth talking about. On the
contrary, miserable as is the condition of the Irish peas-
antry, sickening as are the stories of their suffering, I am
inclined to think that for the worst instances of human
degradation one must go to the reports that describe
the condition of the laboring poor of England, rather
than to the literature of Irish misery. For there are
three things for which, in spite of their poverty and
wretchedness and occasional famine, the very poorest
of Irish peasants are by all accounts remarkable—the
physical vigor of their men, the purity of their women,
and the strength of the family affections. This, to put
it mildly, cannot be said of large classes of the labor-
ing populations of England and Scotland. In those
rich manufacturing districts are classes stunted and de-
teriorated physically by want and unwholesome employ-
ments; classes in which the idea of female virtue is all
but lost, and the family affections all but trodden out.
But it is needless to compare sufferings and measure
miseries. I merely wish to correct that impression
which leads so many people to talk and write as though
rent and land tenures related solely to agriculture and
to agricultural communities. Nothing could be more er-
roneous. Land is necessary to all production, no mat-
ter what be its kind or form ; land is the standing-place,
the workshop, the storehouse of labor; it is to the hu-
man being the only means by which he can obtain ac-
cess to the material universe or utilize its powers. With-
out land man cannot exist. To whom the ownership
of land is given, to him is given the virtual ownership
of the men who must live upon it. When this neces-
sity is absolute, then does he necessarily become their
absolute master. And just as this point is neared—that
is to say, just as competition increases the demand for
land—just in that degree does the power of taking a
larger and larger share of the earnings of labor increase.
24 THE LAND QUESTION.
It is this power that gives land its value ; this is the
power that enables the owner of valuable land to reap
where he has not sown—to appropriate to himself wealth
which he has had no share in producing. Rent is al-
ways the devourer of wages. The owner of city land
takes, in the rents he receives for his land, the earnings
of labor just as clearly as does the owner of farming
land. And whether he be working in a garret, ten
stories above the street, or in a mining drift thousands
of feet below the earth's surface, it is the competition
for the use of land that ultimately determines what pro-
portion of the produce of his labor the laborer will get
for himself. This is the reason why modern progress
does not tend to extirpate poverty; this is the reason
why, with all the inventions and improvements and
economies which so enormously increase productive
power, wages everywhere tend to the minimum of a
bare living. The cause that in Ireland produces pov-
erty and distress—the ownership by some of the people of
the land on which and from which the whole people must
live—everywhere else produces the same results. It is
this that produces the hideous squalor of London and
Glasgow slums; it is this that makes want jostle luxury
in the street of rich New York, that forces little chil-
dren to monotonous and stunting toil in Massachusetts
mills, and that fills the highways of our newest States
with tramps.
CHAPTER IV.
IPROPOSED REMEDIES.
The facts we have been considering give to the Irish
agitation a significance and dignity that no effort for the
redress of merely local grievances, no struggle for mere
national independence could have. As the cause which
produces Irish distress exists everywhere throughout
modern civilization, and everywhere produces the same
results, the question as to what measures will fully meet
the case of Ireland has for us not merely a speculative
and sentimental interest, but a direct and personal in-
terest.
AA’OA O.S.AE/O RAEMAZZO/ES. 25
For a year and more the English journals and maga-
zines have been teeming with articles on the Irish Land
Question ; but, among all the remedies proposed, even
by men whose reputation is that of clear thinkers and
advanced Liberals, I have seen nothing which shows any
adequate grasp of the subject. And this is true also of
the measures proposed by the agitators, so far as they
have proposed any. They are illogical and insufficient
to the last degree. They neither disclose any clear
principle nor do they aim at any result worth the strug-
le.
g From the most timid to the most radical, these schemes
are restricted to one or more of the following proposi-
tions :
1st. To abolish entails and primogenitures and other
legal difficulties in the way of sales.
2d. To legalize and extend tenant-right.
3d. To establish tribunals of arbitrament which shall
decide upon appeal the rent to be paid.
4th. To have the State buy out the landlords and sell
again on time to the tenants.
The first of these propositions is good in itself. To
make the transfer of land easy would be to remove ob-
stacles which prevent its passing into the hands of those
who would make the most out of it. But, so far as this
will have any effect at all, it will not be toward giving
the Irish tenants more merciful landlords; nor yet will
it be to the diffusion of landed property. Those who
think so shut their eyes to the fact that the tendency of
the time is to concentration.
As for the propositions which look in various forms
to the establishment of tenant-right, it is to be observed
that, in so far as they go beyond giving the tenant Surety
for his improvements, they merely carve out of the es-
tate of the landlord an estate for the tenant. Even if the
proposal to empower the courts, in cases of dispute, to
decide what is a fair rent were to amount to anything
(and the Land Leaguers say it would not), the fixing of
a lower rent as the share of the landlord would merely
enable the tenant to charge a higher price to his suc-
cessor. Whatever might thus be done for present agri-
cultural tenants would be of no use to future tenants,
and nothing whatever would be done for the masses of
26 7 HE ZAND QUESTION.
the people. In fact, that the effect would be to increase
rent in the aggregate there can be no doubt. What-
ever modification might be made in the landlord's de-
mands, the sum which the Outgoing tenant would ask
would be very certain to be all he could possibly get
so that rent in the aggregate, instead of being dimin-
ished, would be screwed up to the full competition or
rack-rent standard.
What seem to be considered the most radical propo-
sitions yet made are those for the creation of a “peas-
ant proprietary "-the State to buy out the landlords
and resell to the tenants, for annual payments extend-
ing over a term of years, and covering principal and in-
terest. Waiving all practical difficulties, and they are
very great, what could thus be accomplished 2 Nothing
real and permanent. For not merely is this, too, but a
partial measure, which could not improve the condition
of the masses of the people or help those most needing
help, but no sooner were the lands thus divided than a
process of concentration would infallibly set in which
would be all the more rapid from the fact that the new
landholders would be heavily mortgaged. The ten-
dency to concentration which has so steadily operated
in Great Britain, and is so plainly showing itself in our
new States, must operate in Ireland, and would imme-
diately begin to weld together again the little patches
of the newly created peasant proprietors. The tendency
of the time is against peasant proprietorships ; it is in
everything to concentration, not to separation. The
tendency which has wiped out the small landowners,
the boasted yeomanry, of England—which in our new
States is uniting the quarter-sections of prečmption and
homestead settlers into great farms of thousands of acres
—is already too strong to be resisted, and is constantly
becoming stronger and more penetrating. For it springs
from the inventions and improvements and economies
which are transforming modern industry—the same in-
fluences which are concentrating population in large
cities, business into the hands of great houses, and for
the blacksmith making his own nails or the weaver work-
ing his own loom substitutes the factory of the great cor-
poration.
That a great deal that the English advocates of peas-
Proposeo REMEDIES. 27
ant proprietorship have to say about the results of their
favorite system in continential Europe is not borne out
by the facts, any one who chooses to look over the tes-
timony may see. But it is useless to discuss that.
Peasant proprietorship in continental Europe is a sur-
vival. It exists only among populations which have not
felt fully the breath of the new era. It continues to
exist only by virtue of conditions which do not obtain
in Ireland. The Irish peasant is not the French or
Belgian peasant. He is in the habit of having very
“long families,” they very short ones. He has become
familiar with the idea of emigrating; they have not.
He can hardly be expected to have acquired those
habits of close economy and careful forethought for
which they are so remarkable ; and there are various
agencies, among which are to be counted the national
schools and the reaction from America, that have roused
in him aspirations and ambitions which would prevent
him from continuing to water his little patch with his
sweat, as do the French and Belgian peasant proprie-
tors, when he could sell it for enough to emigrate.
Peasant proprietorship, like that of France and Belgium,
might possibly have been instituted in Ireland some
time ago, before the railroad and the telegraph and the
national schools and the establishment of the steam
bridge across the Atlantic. But to do it now to any
extent, and with any permanency, seems to me about
as practicable as to go back to handloom weaving in
Manchester. Much more in accordance with modern
tendencies is the notice I have recently seen of the
formation of a company to buy up land in Southern
Ireland, and cultivate it on a large scale ; for to pro-
duction on a large scale modern processes more and
more strongly tend. It is not merely the steam-plow
and harvesting machinery that make the cultivation
of the large field more profitable than that of the small
one ; it is the railroad, the telegraph, the manifold
inventions of all sorts. Even butter and cheese are
now made and chickens hatched and fattened in fac-
tories.
But the fatal defect of all these schemes as remedial
measures is, that they do not go to the cause of the dis-
ease. What they propose to do, they propose to do
28 THE LAWD O UES77ON.
merely for one class of the Irish people—the agricultu.
ral tenants. Now, the agricultural tenants are not sq
large nor so poor a class (among them are in fact many
large capitalist farmers of the English type) as the ag-
ricultural laborers, while besides these there are the
laborers of other kinds—the artisans, operatives, and
poorer classes of the cities. What extension of tenant-
right or conversion of tenant-farmers into partial or
absolute proprietors is to benefit them 2 Even if
the number of owners of Irish soil could thus be in-
creased, the soil of Ireland would still be in the hands
of a class, though of a Somewhat larger class. And the
spring of Irish misery would be untouched. Those who
had merely their labor would be as badly off as now, if
not in some respects worse off. Rent would soon de-
vour wages, and the injustice involved in the present
system would be intrenched by the increase in the num-
ber who seemingly profit by it.
It is that peasant proprietors would strengthen the
existing system that makes schemes for creating them
so popular among certain sections of the propertied
classes of Great Britain. This is the ground on which
these schemes are largely urged. These small land-
owners are desired that they may be used as a buffer
and bulwark against any questioning of the claims of
the larger owners. They would be put forward to resist
the shock of “agrarianism,” just as the women are put
forward in resistance to the process-servers. “What!
do you propose to rob these poor peasants of their little
homesteads 2" would be the answer to any one who pro-
posed to attack the system under which the larger land-
holders draw millions annually from the produce of
labor.
And here is the danger in the adoption of measures
not based upon correct principles. They not only fail
to do any real and permanent good, but they make
proper measures more difficult. Even if a majority of
the people of Ireland were made the owners of the soil,
the injustice to the minority would be as great as now,
and wages would still tend to the minimum, which in
good times means a bare living, and in bad times means
starvation. Even were it possible to cut up the soil of
Ireland into those little patches into which the soil of
tp/roSE LAWD /S 17's 29
France and Belgium is cut in the districts where the
morceſ/ement prevails, this would not be the attainment
of a just and healthy social state. But it would make
the attainment of a just and healthy Social state much
more difficult.
CHAPTER V.
whose LAND IS IT?
What, then, is the true solution of the Irish problem
The answer is as important to other countries as to Ire-
land, for the Irish problem is but a local phase of the
great problem which is everywhere pressing upon the
civilized world.
With the leaders of the Irish movement, the question
is, of course, not merely what ought to be done, but
what can be done. But, to a clear understanding of the
whole subject, the question of principle must necessari-
ly precede that of method. We must decide where we
want to go before we can decide what is the best roa
to take. º
The first question that naturally arises is that of
right. Among whatever kind of people such a matter
as this is discussed, the question of right is sure to be
raised. This, to me, seems a very significant thing; for
I believe it to spring from nothing less than a univer-
sal perception of the human mind—a perception often
dim and vague, yet still a universal perception, that jus-
tice is the Supreme law of the universe, so that, as a
short road to what is best, we instinctively ask what is
right 2
Now, what are the rights of this case ? To whom
rightfully does the soil of Ireland belong 2 Who are
justly entitled to its use and to all the benefits that flow
from its use 2 Let us settle this question clearly and
decisively, before we attempt anything else.
Let me go to the heart of this question by asking an-
Other question : Has or has not the child born in Ire-
land a right to live 2 There can be but one answer, for
no one would contend that it was right to drown Irish
30 7 H.A. ZAND OUAESTrow.
babies, or that any human law could make it right
Well, then, if every human being born in Ireland has a
right to live in Ireland, these rights must be equal. If
each one has a right to live, then no one can have any
better right to live than any other one. There can be
no dispute about this. No one will contend that it would
be any less a crime to drown a baby of an Irish peasant
woman than it would be to drown the baby of the proud-
est duchess, or that a law commanding the one would
be any more justifiable than a law commanding the
other.
Since, then, all the Irish people have the same equal
right to life, it follows that they must all have the same
equal right to the land of Ireland. If they are all in
II eland by the same equal permission of Nature, so that
no one of them can justly set up a superior claim to life
than any other one of them ; so that all the rest of them
could not justly say to any one of them, “You have not
the same right to live as we have ; therefore we will
pitch you out of Ireland into the sea ſ” then they must
all have the same equal rights to the elements which
Nature has provided for the sustaining of life—to air,
to water, and to land. For to deny the equal right to
the elements necessary to the maintaining of life is to
deny the equal right to life. Any law that said, “Cer-
tain babies have no right to the soil of Ireland ; there-
fore they shall be thrown off the soil of Ireland;” would
be precisely equivalent to a law that said, “Certain
babies have no right to live ; therefore they shall be
thrown into the sea.” And as no law or custom or
agreement can justify the denial of the equal right to
life, so no law or custom or agreement can justify the
denial of the equal right to land.
It therefore follows, from the very fact of their exist-
ence, that the right of each one of the people of Ireland
to an equal share in the land of Ireland is equal and in-
alienable : that is to say, that the use and benefit of the
land of Ireland belong rightfully to the whole people of
Ireland, to each one as much as to every other ; to no
one more than to any other—not to some individuals,
to the exclusion of other individuals; not to one class, to
the exclusion of other classes; not to landlords, not
to tenants, not to cultivators, but to the whole people.
AAAVZ) / OR/),S” A*/GAZ7" ZS ZABOA”,S WAEOAVG. 31
“This right is irrefutable and indefeasible. It per-
tains to and springs from the fact of existence, the right
to live. No law, no covenant, no agreement, can bar
it. One generation cannot stipulate away the rights
of another generation. If the whole people of Ireland
were to unite in bargaining away their rights in the
land, how could they justly bargain away the right of
the child who the next moment is born ? No one can
bargain away what is not his ; no one can stipulate
away the rights of another. And if the new-born infant
has an equal right to life, then has it an equal right to
land. Its warrant, which comes direct from Nature,
and which sets aside all human laws or title-deeds, is the
fact that it is born.
Here we have a firm, self-apparent principle from
which we may safely proceed. The land of Ireland
does not belong to one individual more than to another
individual, to one class more than to another class ; to
one generation more than to the generations that come
after. It belongs to the whole people who at the time
exist upon it.
CHAPTER VI.
LANDLORDS' RIGHT IS LABOR's WRONG.
I do not dwell upon this principle because it has not
yet been asserted. I dwell upon it because, although
it has been asserted, no proposal to carry it out has yet
been made. The cry has indeed gone up that the land
of Ireland belongs to the people of Ireland, but there
the recognition of the principle has stopped. To say
that the land of Ireland belongs to the people of Ire.
land, and then merely to ask that rents shall be reduced,
or that tenant-right be extended, or that the State shall
buy the land from one class and sell it to another class,
is utterly illogical and absurd.
Either the land of Ireland rightfully belongs to the
Irish landlords, or it rightfully belongs to the Irish
people ; there can be no middle ground. If it right,
fully belongs to the landlords, then is the whole agita-
32 7 HE ZAND QUEST/OAV.
tion wrong, and every scheme for interfering in any
way with the landlords is condemned. If the land
rightfully belongs to the landlords, then it is nobody
else's business what they do with it, or what rent they
charge for it, or where or how they spend the money
they draw from it, and whoever does not want to live
upon it on the landlords' terms is at perfect liberty to
starve or emigrate. But if, on the contrary, the land
of Ireland rightfully belongs to the Irish people, then
the only logical demand is, not that the tenants shall
be made joint owners with the landlords, not that it be
bought from a smaller class and sold to a larger class,
but that it be resumed by the whole people. To pro-
pose to pay the landlords for it is to deny the right of
the people to it. The real fight for Irish rights must
be made outside of Ireland; and, above all things, the
Irish agitators ought to take a logical position, based
upon a broad, clear principle which can be everywhere
understood and appreciated. To ask for tenant-right
or peasant proprietorship is not to take such a position ;
to concede that the landlords ought to be paid is to
utterly abandon the principle that the land belongs
rightfully to the people. .
To admit, as even the most radical of the Irish agita-
tors seem to admit, that the landlords should be paid
the value of their lands, is to deny the rights of the
people. It is an admission that the agitation is an in-
terference with the just rights of property. It is to ig-
nore the only principle on which the agitation can be
justified, and on which it can gather strength for the
accomplishment of anything real and permanent. To
admit this is to admit that the Irish people have no
more right to the soil of Ireland than any outsider.
For, any outsider can go to Ireland and buy land, if he
will give its market value. To propose to buy out the
landlords is to propose to continue the present injustice
in another form. They would get in interest on the
debt created what they now get in rent. They would
still have a lien upon Irish labor.
And why should the landlords be paid 2 If the land
of Ireland belongs of natural right to the Irish people,
what valid claim for payment can be set up by the land-
lords 2 No one will contend that the land is theirs of
AAAV/D/ OK’A).S.’ Ae/GA/7” ZS ZAAPOA”,S WA’OAVG. 33
natural right, for the day has gone by when men could
be told that the Creator of the universe intended his
bounty for the exclusive use and benefit of a privileged
class of his creatures—that he intended a few to roll in
luxury while their fellows toiled and starved for them.
The claim of the landlords to the land rests not on nat-
ural right, but merely on municipal law—on municipal
law which contravenes natural right. And, whenever
the sovereign power changes municipal law so as to con-
form to natural right, what claim can they assert to com-
pensation ? Some of them bought their lands, it is true;
but they got no better title than the seller had to give.
And what are these titles 2 Titles based on murder and
robbery, on blood and rapine—titles which rest on the
most atrocious and wholesale crimes. Created by force
and maintained by force, they have not behind them the
first shadow of right. That Henry II. and James I. and
Cromwell and the Long Parliament had the power to
give and grant Irish lands is true ; but will any one con-
tend they had the right 2 Will any one contend that in
all the past generations there has existed on the British
Isles or anywhere else any human being, or any num-
ber of human beings, who had the right to say that in the
year 1881 the great mass of Irishmen should be compelled
to pay—in many cases to residents of England, France,
or the United States—for the privilege of living in their
native country and making a living from their native
soil Even if it be said that might makes right; even
if it be contended that in the twelfth, or seventeenth, or
eighteenth century lived men who, having the power,
had therefore the right, to give away the soil of Ireland,
it cannot be contended that their right went further
than their power, or that their gifts and grants are
binding on the men of the present generation. No one
can urge such a preposterous doctrine. And, if might
makes right, then the moment the people get power to
take the land the rights of the present landholders utter-
ly cease, and any proposal to compensate them is a pro-
posal to do a fresh wrong.
Should it be urged that, no matter on what they orig-
inally rest, the lapse of time has given to the legal
owners of Irish land a title of which they cannot now
be justly deprived without compensation, it is sufficient
3
34 THE LAND QUEST/OM.
to ask, with Herbert Spencer, at what rate per annum
wrong becomes right 2 Even the shallow pretence that
the acquiescence of society can vest in a few the exclu-
sive right to that element on which and from which
Nature has ordained that all must live, cannot be urged
in the case of Ireland. For the Irish people have never ac-
quiesced in their spoliation, unless the bound and gagged
victim may be said to acquiesce in the robbery and mal-
treatment which he cannot prevent. Though the memory
of their ancient rights in the land of their country may
have been utterly stamped out among the people of Eng-
land, and have been utterly forgotten among their kin on
this side of the sea, it has long survived among the Irish.
If the Irish people have gone hungry and cold and ignor-
ant, if they have been evicted from lands on which their
ancestors had lived from time immemorial, if they have
been forced to emigrate or to starve, it has not been for the
want of protest. They have protested all they could ;
they have struggled all they could. It has been but su-
perior force that has stifled their protests and made
their struggles vain. In a blind, dumb way, they are pro-
testing now and struggling now, though even if their
hands were free they might not at first know how to
untie the knots in the cords that bind them. But acqui-
esce they never have.
Yet, even supposing they had acquiesced, as in their
ignorance the working classes of such countries as Eng-
land and the United States now acquiesce, in the iniq-
uitous system which makes the common birthright of
all the exclusive property of some. What then 2 Does
such acquiescence turn wrong into right 2 If the
sleeping traveller wake to find a robber with his hand in
his pocket, is he bound to buy the robber off—bound
not merely to let him keep what he has previously
taken, but pay him the full value of all he expected the
sleep of his victim to permit him to get 2 If the stock-
holders of a bank find that for a long term of years their
cashier has been appropriating the lion's share of the
profits, are they to be told that they cannot discharge
him without paying him for what he might have got
had his peculations not been discovered 2
7 HE GREA?'. GREAT-GRAMDSOM OF CAP7. KIDD 35
CHAPTER VII.
THE GREAT-GREAT-GRANDSON OF CAPTAIN KIDD.
I apologize to the Irish landlords and to all other
landlords for likening them to thieves and robbers. I
trust they will understand that I do not consider them
as personally worse than other men, but that I am
obliged to use such illustrations because no others will
fit the case. I am concerned not with individuals, but
with the system. What I want to do is, to point out a
distinction that in the plea for the vested rights of land-
owners is ignored—a distinction which arises from the
essential difference between land and things that are the
produce of human labor, and which is obscured by our
habit of classing them all together as property.
The galleys that carried Caesar to Britain, the accou-
trements of his legionaries, the baggage that they car-
ried, the arms that they bore, the buildings that they
erected ; the scythed chariots of the ancient Britons,
the horses that drew them, their wicker boats and wat-
tled houses—where are they now 2 But the land for
which Roman and Briton fought, there it is still. That
British soil is yet as fresh and as new as it was in the
days of the Romans. Generation after generation has
lived on it since, and generation after generation will
live on it yet. Now, here is a very great difference.
The right to possess and to pass on the ownership of
things that in their nature decay and soon cease to be
is a very different thing from the right to possess and to
pass on the ownership of that which does not decay, but
from which each successive generation must live.
To show how this difference between land and such
other species of property as are properly styled wealth
bears upon the argument for the vested rights of land.
holders, let me illustrate again.
Captain Kidd was a pirate. He made a business of
sailing the seas, capturing merchantmen, making their
crews walk the plank, and appropriating their cargoes.
In this way he accumulated much wealth, which he is
36 7A/E LAND QUEST/OA.
thought to have buried. But let us suppose, for the
sake of the illustration, that he did not bury his wealth,
but left it to his legal heirs, and they to their heirs and
so on, until at the present day this wealth or a part of
it has come to a great-great-grandson of Captain Kidd.
Now, let us suppose that some one—say a great-great-
grandson of one of the ship-masters whom Captain
Kidd plundered, makes complaint, and says: “This
man's great-great-grandfather plundered my great-great-
father of certain things or certain sums, which have
been transmitted to him, whereas but for this wrongful
act they would have been transmitted to me; therefore,
I demand that he be made to restore them.” What would
society answer
Society, speaking by its proper tribunals, and in ac-
cordance with principles recognized among all civilized
nations, would say: “We cannot entertain such a de-
mand. It may be true that Mr. Kidd's great-great-
grandfather robbed your great-great-grandfather, and
that as the result of this wrong he has got things that
otherwise might have come to you. But we cannot in-
quire into occurrences that happened so long ago.
Each generation has enough to do to attend to its own
affairs. If we go to righting the wrongs and reopening
the controversies of our great-great-grandfathers, there
will be endless disputes and pretexts for dispute. What
you say may be true, but somewhere we must draw the
line, and have an end to strife. Though this man’s
great-great-grandfather may have robbed your great-
great-grandfather, he has not robbed you. He came into
possession of these things peacefully, and has held them
peacefully, and we must take this peaceful possession,
when it has been continued for a certain time, as abso-
lute evidence of just title ; for, were we not to do that,
there would be no end to dispute and no secure posses-
sion of anything.
Now, it is this common-sense principle that is ex-
pressed in the statute of limitations—in the doctrine of
vested rights. This is the reason why it is held—and as
to most things held justly—that peaceable possession
for a certain time cures all defects of title.
But let us pursue the illustration a little further :
Let us suppose that Captain Kidd, having established
Z"HE GREAT GREAT-GRANDSON OF CAPT. KIDD. 37
a large and profitable piratical business, left it to his
son, and he to his son, and so on, until the great-great-
grandson, who now pursues it, has come to consider it
the most natural thing in the world that his ships should
roam the Sea, Capturing peaceful merchantmen, making
their crews walk the plank, and bringing home to him
much plunder, whereby he is enabled, though he does
no work at all, to live in very great luxury, and look
down with contempt upon people who have to work.
But at last, let us suppose, the merchants get tired of
having their ships sunk and their goods taken, and sail-
ors get tired of trembling for their lives every time a
sail lifts above the horizon, and they demand of society
that piracy be stopped.
Now, what should society say if Mr. Kidd got indig-
nant, appealed to the doctrine of vested rights, and as-
serted that society was bound to prevent any interfer-
ence with the business that he had inherited, and that,
if it wanted him to stop, it must buy him out, paying
him all that his business was worth—that is to say, at
least as much as he could make in twenty years' success-
ful pirating, so that if he stopped pirating he could still
continue to live in luxury off of the profits of the mer-
chants and the earnings of the sailors 2
What ought Society to say to such a claim as this.
There will be but one answer. We will all say that so-
ciety should tell Mr. Kidd that his was a business to
which the statute of limitations and the doctrine of
vested rights did not apply ; that because his father,
and his grandfather, and his great- and great-great-grand-
father pursued the business of capturing ships and
making their crews walk the plank, was no reason why
he should be permitted to pursue it. Society, we will
all agree, ought to say he would have to stop piracy
and stop it at once, and that without getting a cent for
stopping.
Or supposing it had happened that Mr. Kidd had
sold out his piratical business to Smith, Jones, or Rob-
inson, we will all agree that society ought to say that
their purchase of the business gave them no greater
right than Mr. Kidd had.
We will all agree that that is what society ought to
say. Observe, I do not ask what society would say.
38 THE LAAWD QUESTION.
For, ridiculous and preposterous as it may appear, I
am satisfied that, under the circumstances I have sup-
posed, Society would not for a long time say what we
have agreed it ought to say. Not only would all the
Kidds loudly claim that to make them give up their
business without full recompense would be a wicked
interference with vested rights, but the justice of this
claim would at first be assumed as a matter of course
by all or nearly all the influential classes—the great
lawyers, the able journalists, the writers for the maga-
zines, the eloquent clergymen, and the principal pro-
fessors in the principal universities. Nay, even the
merchants and sailors, when they first began to com-
plain, would be so tyrannized and browbeaten by this
public opinion that they would hardly think of more
than of buying out the Kidds, and, wherever here and
there any one dared to raise his voice in favor of stop-
ping piracy at Once and without compensation, he
would only do so under penalty of being stigmatized
as a reckless disturber and wicked foe of social order.
If any one denies this, if any one says mankind are
not such fools, then I appeal to universal history to
bear me witness. I appeal to the facts of to-day.
Show me a wrong, no matter how monstrous, that
ever yet, among any people, became ingrafted in the
social system, and I will prove to you the truth of what
I say.
The majority of men do not think ; the majority of
men have to expend so much energy in the struggle to
make a living that they do not have time to think.
The majority of men accept, as a matter of course,
whatever is. This is what makes the task of the social
reformer so difficult, his path so hard. This is what
brings upon those who first raise their voices in behalf
of a great truth the sneers of the powerful and the
curses of the rabble, ostracism and martyrdom, the robe
of derision and the crown of thorns.
Am I not right 2 Have there not been states of so-
ciety in which piracy has been considered the most re-
spectable and honorable of pursuits P Did the Roman
populace see anything more reprehensible in a gladia-
torial show than we do in a horse-race 2 Does public
opinion in Dahomey see anything reprehensible in the
7 HE GREAT-GREAT-GRANDSOAV OF CAPT. KIDD. 39
custom of sacrificing a thousand or two human beings
by way of signalizing grand occasions 2 Are there not
states of Society in which, in spite of the natural pro-
portions of the sexes, polygamy is considered a matter
of course 2 Are there not states of society in which it
would be considered the most ridiculous thing in the
world to say that a man's son was more closely related
to him than his nephew 2 Are there not states of so-
ciety in which it would be considered disreputable for
a man to carry a burden while a woman who could stag-
ger under it was around 2–states of society in which
the husband who did not occasionally beat his wife
would be deemed by both sexes a weak-minded, low-
spirited fellow 2 What would Chinese fashionable so-
ciety consider more outrageous than to be told that
mothers should not be permitted to squeeze their daugh-
ters' feet, or Flathead women than being restrained
from tying a board on their infants' skulls 2 How long
has it been since the monstrous doctrine of the divine
right of kings was taught through all Christendom P
What is the slave trade but piracy of the worst
kind 2 Yet it is not long since the slave trade was
looked upon as a perfectly respectable business, afford-
ing as legitimate an opening for the investment of cap-
ital and the display of enterprise as any other. The
proposition to prohibit it was first looked upon as ridic-
ulous, then as fanatical, then as wicked. It was only
slowly and by hard fighting that the truth in regard to
it gained ground. Does not our very Constitution bear
witness to what I say ? Does not the fundamental law
of the nation, adopted twelve years after the enunciation
of the Declaration of Independence, declare that for
twenty years the slave trade shall not be prohibited nor
restricted P Such dominion had the idea of vested in-
terests over the minds of those who had already pro-
claimed the inalienable right of man to life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness
Is it not but yesterday that in the freest and greatest
republic on earth, among the people who boast that
they lead the very van of civilization, this doctrine of
vested rights was deemed a sufficient justification for all
the cruel wrongs of human slavery 2 Is it not but yes-
terday, when whoever dared to say that the rights oi
4O THE LAND QUESTION.
property did not justly attach to human beings; when
whoever dared to deny that human beings could not be
rightfully bought and sold like cattle—the husband torn
from the wife and the child from the mother ; when
whoever denied the right of whoever had paid his
money for him to work or whip his own nigger was
looked upon as a wicked assailant of the rights of prop-
erty 2 Is it not but yesterday when in the South who-
ever whispered such a thought took his life in his hands;
when in the North the abolitionist was held by the
churches as worse than an infidel, was denounced by
the politicians and rotten-egged by the mob P I was
born in a Northern State, I have never lived in the
South, I am not yet gray; but I well remember, as
every American of middle age must remember, how
over and over again I have heard all questionings of
slavery silenced by the declaration that the negroes
were the property of their masters, and that to take
away a man's slave without payment was as much a
crime as to take away his horse without payment. And
whoever does not remember that far back, let him look
over American literature previous to the war, and say
whether, if the business of piracy had been a flourish-
ing business, it would have lacked defenders ? Let him
say whether any proposal to stop the business of piracy
without compensating the pirates would not have been
denounced at first as a proposal to set aside vested
rights 2
But I am appealing to other states of society and to
times that are past merely to get my readers, if I can,
out of their accustomed ruts of thought. The proof of
what I assert about the Kidds and their business is in
the thought and speech of to-day.
Here is a system which robs the producers of wealth
as remorselessly and far more regularly and systemati-
cally than the pirate robs the merchantman. Here is a
system that steadily condemns thousands to far more
lingering and horrible deaths than that of walking the
plank—to death of the mind and death of the soul, as
well as death of the body. These things are undis-
puted. No one denies that Irish pauperism and famine
are the direct results of this land system, and no one
who will examine the subject will deny that the chronic
THE GREA 7. GREAT-GRAAWDSOAV OF CAPT. KIDD 41
pauperism and chronic famine which everywhere mark
our civilization are the results of this system. Yet we
are told—nay, it seems to be taken for granted—that
this system can not be abolished without buying off
those who profit by it. Was there ever more degrading
abasement of the human mind before a fetish 2 Can
we wonder, as we see it, at any perversion of ideas 2
Consider: is not the parallel I have drawn a true one?
Is it not just as much a perversion of ideas to apply the
doctrine of vested rights to property in land, when these
are its admitted fruits, as it was to apply it to property
in human flesh and blood ; as it would be to apply it to
the business of piracy 2 In what does the claim of the
Irish landholders differ from that of the hereditary
pirate or the man who has bought out a piratical bus-
iness 2 “Because I have inherited or purchased the
business of robbing merchantmen,” says the pirate,
“therefore respect for the rights of property must com-
pel you to let me go on robbing ships and making
sailors walk the plank until you buy me out.” “Be-
cause we have inherited or purchased the privilege of
appropriating to ourselves the lion's share of the pro-
duce of labor,” says the landlord, “therefore you must
continue to let us do it, even though poor wretches
shiver with cold and faint with hunger, even though, in
their poverty and misery, they are reduced to wallow
with the pigs.” What is the difference 2
This is the point I want to make clearly and distinctly,
for it shows a distinction that in current thought is over-
looked. Property in land, like property in slaves, is es-
sentially different from property in things that are the
result of labor. Rob a man or a people of money, or
goods, or cattle, and the robbery is finished there and
then. The lapse of time does not, indeed, change
wrong into right, but it obliterates the effects of the
deed. That is done ; it is over ; and, unless it be very
soon righted, it glides away into the past, with the men
who were parties to it, so swiftly that nothing save om-
niscience can trace its effects; and in attempting to
right it we would be in danger of doing fresh wrong.
The past is for ever beyond us. We can neither punish
nor recompense the dead. But rob a people of the
land on which they must live, and the robbery is con-
42 - 7 HE LAND QUESTION.
tinuous. It is a fresh robbery of every succeeding gen,
eration—a new robbery every year and every day; it is
like the robbery which condemns to slavery the children
of the slave. To apply to it the statute of limitations,
to acknowledge for it the title of prescription, is not to
condone the past ; it is to legalize robbery in the pres-
ent, to justify it in the future. The indictment which
really lies against the Irish landlords is not that their
ancestors, or the ancestors of their grantors, robbed the
ancestors of the Irish people. That makes no difference.
“Let the dead bury their dead.” The indictment that
truly lies is that here, now, in the year 1881, they rob
the Irish people. And shall we be told that there can
be a vested right to continue such robbery
CHAPTER VIII.
THE ONLY WAY, THE EASY way.
I have dwelt so long upon this question of compen-
sating landowners, not merely because it is of great
practical importance, but because its discussion brings
clearly into view the principles upon which the land
question, in any country, can alone be justly and finally
settled. In the light of these principles we see that
landowners have no rightful claim either to the land or
to compensation for its resumption by the people, and,
further than that, we see that no such rightful claim can
ever be created. It would be wrong to pay the present
landowners for “their " land at the expense of the
people ; it would likewise be wrong to sell it again to
smaller holders. It would be wrong to abolish the pay-
ment of rent, and to give the land to its present culti-
vators. In the very nature of things, land can not right-
fully be made individual property. This principle is
absolute. The title of a peasant proprietor deserves no
more respect than the title of a great territorial noble.
No sovereign political power, no compact or agreement,
€Ven though consented to by the whole population of
THE ONLY WAY. THE EASY WAY. 43
the globe, can give to an individual a valid title to the ex-
clusive ownership of a square inch of soil. The earth is
an entailed estate—entailed upon all the generations of
the children of men, by a deed written in the constitution
of Nature, a deed that no human proceedings can bar,
and no prescription determine. Each succeeding gen-
eration has but a tenancy for life. Admitting that any
set of men may barter away their own natural rights
(and this logically involves an admission of the right of
suicide), they can no more barter away the rights of their
successors than they can barter away the rights of the
inhabitants of other worlds.
What should be aimed at in the settlement of the
Irish land question is thus very clear. The “three F’s ”
are, what they have already been called, three frauds;
and the proposition to create peasant proprietorship is
no better. It will not do merely to carve out of the es-
tates of the landlords minor estates for the tenants ; it
will not do merely to substitute a larger for a smaller
class of proprietors ; it will not do to confine the settle-
ment to agricultural land, leaving to its present possess-
ors the land of the towns and villages. None of these
lame and impotent conclusions will satisfy the demands
of justice or cure the bitter evils now so apparent. The
only true and just solution of the problem, the only end
worth aiming at, is to make all the land the common
property of all the people.
This principle conceded, the question of method
arises. How shall this be done 2 Nothing is easier.
It is merely necessary to divert the rent which now
flows into the pockets of the landlords into the common
treasury of the whole people. It is not possible to so
divide up the land of Ireland so as to give each family,
still less each individual, an equal share. And, even if
that were possible, it would not be possible to maintain
equality, for old people are constantly dying and new
people constantly being born, while the relative value
of land is constantly changing. But it is possible to
equally divide the rent, or, what amounts to the same
thing, to apply it to purposes of common benefit. This
is the way, and this is the only way, in which absolute
justice can be done. This is the way, and this is the
only way, in which the equal right of every man, woman,
44 THE LAND QUESTION.
and child can be acknowledged and secured. As Her.
bert Spencer says of it: *
Such a doctrine is consistent with the highest state of civilization ;
may be carried out without involving a community of goods, and need
cause no very serious revolution in existing arrangements. The change
required would simply be a change of landlords. Separate ownership
would merge into the joint-stock ownership of the public. Instead of
being in the possession of individuals, the country would be held by
the great corporate body—society. Instead of leasing his acres from
an isolated proprietor, the farmer would lease them from the nation.
Instead of paying his rent to the agent of Sir John or his Grace, he
would pay it to an agent or deputy agent of the community. Stewards
would be public officials instead of private ones, and tenancy the only
land tenure. A state of things so ordered would be in perfect harmony
with the moral law. Under it, all men would be equally landlords; all
men would be alike free to become tenants. . . . Clearly, therefore,
on such a system, the earth might be enclosed, occupied, and cultivated,
in entire subordination to the law of equal freedom. •
Now, it is a very easy thing to thus sweep away all
private ownership of land, and convert all occupiers
into tenants of the State, by appropriating rent. No
complicated laws or cumbersome machinery is neces.
sary. It is only necessary to tax land up to its full
value. Do that, and without any talk about disposses-
sing landlords, without any use of the ugly word “con-
fiscation,” without any infringement of the just rights
of property, the land would become virtually the peo-
ple's, while the landlords would be left the absolute and
unqualified possessors of—their deeds of title and con-
veyance | They could continue to call themselves land-
lords, if they wished to, just as that poor old Bourbon,
the Comte de Chambord, continues to call himself
King of France ; but, as what, under this system, was
paid by the tenant would be taken by the State, it is
pretty clear that middle-men, would not long survive,
and that very soon the occupiers of land would come to
be nominally the owners, though, in reality, they would
be the tenants of the whole people.
How beautifully this simple method would satisfy
every economic requirement ; how, freeing labor and
capital from the fetters that now oppress them (for all
other taxes could be easily remitted), it would enor-
wºg-
* “Social Statics,” Chap. ix., sec. 8,
AbA*/AVC/AP/A 7'AºA2 A3/ES7" POZAC V. 45
mously increase the production of wealth ; how it would
make distribution conform to the law of justice, dry up
the springs of want and misery, elevate Society from its
lowest stratum, and give all their fair share in the bless-
ings of advancing civilization, can perhaps only be fully
shown by such a detailed examination of the whole
social problem as I have made in a book” which I hope
will be read by all the readers of this, since in it I go
Over much ground and treat many subjects which can
not be even touched upon here. Nevertheless, any one
can see that to tax land up to its full rental value would
amount to precisely the same thing as to formally take
possession of it, and then let it out to the highest bid-
ders.
CHAPTER IX.
PRINCIPLE THE BEST POLICY.
We have now seen the point that should be aimed at,
and the method by which it is to be reached. There is
another branch of the subject which practical men must
consider: the political forces that may be marshalled;
the political resistance that must be overcome. It is
One thing to work out such a problem in the closet—to
demonstrate its proper solution to the satisfaction of a
few intelligent readers. It is another thing to solve it in
the field of action, where ignorance, prejudice, and pow-
erful interests must be met.
It can not be that the really earnest men in the Irish
movement are satisfied with any programme yet put
forth. But they are doubtless influenced by the fear
that the avowal of radical views and aims would not
merely intensify present opposition, but frighten away
from their cause large numbers and important influences
now with it. To say nothing of English conservatism,
there is in Ireland a large class now supporting the
movement who are morbidly afraid of anything which
* “Progress and Poverty.”
46 THE ZAAWD ovEszrow.
savors of “communism" or “socialism,” while in the
United States, whence much moral support and pecun-
iary aid have been derived, it is certain that many
of those who are now loudest in their expressions of
sympathy would slink away from a movement which
avowed the intention of abolishing private property in
land. A resolution, expressive of sympathy with the
Irish people in their “struggle for the repeal of oppres-
sive land laws" was, by a unanimous vote of the Na-
tional House of Representatives, flung füll in the face
of the British lion. How many votes would that reso-
lution have got had it involved a declaration of hostil-
ity to the institution of individual property in land 2
I understand all this. Nevertheless, I am convinced
that the Irish land movement would gain, not lose, were
its earnest leaders, disdaining timid counsels, to boldly
avow the principle that the land of Ireland belongs of
right to the whole people of Ireland, and, without both-
ering about compensation to the landholders, to pro-
pose its resumption by the people in the simple way I
have suggested. That, in doing this, they would lose
strength and increase antagonism in some directions is
true, but they would in other directions gain strength
and allay antagonisms. And, while the loss would con-
stantly tend to diminish, the gain would constantly tend
to increase. They would, to use the phrase of Emerson,
have “hitched their wagon to a star.”
I admit, as will be urged by those who would hold
back from such an avowal as I propose, that political
progress must be by short steps rather than by great
leaps; that those who would have the people follow them
readily, and especially those who would enjoy a present
popularity and preferment, must not go too far in ad-
vance ; and that to demand a little at first is often the
surest way to obtain much at last.
So far as personal consideration is concerned, it is
only to earnest men capable of feeling the inspiration
of a great principle that I care to talk, or that I can
hope to convince. To them I wish to point out that
caution is not wisdom when it involves the ignoring of
a great principle ; that it is not every step that involves
progression, but only such steps as are in the right line
and make easier the next ; that there are strong forces
AAE/AVC/P/A 7//E BEST POZ/CY. 47
that wait but the raising of the true standard to rally on
its side. -
Let the time-servers, the demagogues, the compro-
misers, to whom nothing is right and nothing is wrong,
but who are always seeking to find some half-way house
between right and wrong—let them all go their ways.
Any cause which can lay hold of a great truth is the
stronger without them. If the earnest men among the
Irish leaders abandon their present half-hearted illogical
position, and take their stand frankly and firmly upon the
principle that the youngest child of the poorest peasant
has as good a right to tread the soil and breathe the air
of Ireland as the eldest son of the proudest duke, they
will have put their fight on the right line. Present de-
feat will but pave the way for future victory, and each
step won makes easier the next. Their position will not
only be logically defensible, but will prove the stronger
the more it is discussed ; for private property in land,
which never arises from the natural perceptions of men,
but springs historically from usurpation and robbery,
is something so utterly absurd, SO Outrageously unjust,
so clearly a waste of productive forces and a barrier to
the most profitable use of natural opportunities, so
thoroughly opposed to all sound maxims of public pol-
icy, so glaringly in the way of further progress, that it
is only tolerated because the majority of men never
think about it or hear it questioned. Once fairly ar-
raign it, and it must be condemned ; once call upon its
advocates to exhibit its claims, and their cause is lost in
advance. There is to-day no political economist of
standing who dare hazard his reputation by defending
it on economic grounds; there is to-day no thinker of
eminence who either does not, like Herbert Spencer,
openly declare the injustice of private property in land,
or tacitly make the same admission. Once force the
discussion on this line, and the Irish reformers will com-
pel to their side the most active and powerful of the
men who mould thought.
And they will not merely close up their own ranks,
now in danger of being broken ; they will “carry the
war into Africa,” and make possible the most powerful
of political combinations.
It is already beginning to be perceived that the Irish
48 7 H.A. ZAA/D OUAES77OAZ
movement, so far as it has yet gone, is merely in the in-
terest of a class ; that, so far as it has yet voiced any
demand, it promises nothing to the laboring and artisan
classes. Its opponents already see this opportunity for
division, which, even without their efforts, must soon
show itself, and which, now that the first impulse of the
movement is over, will the more readily develop. To
close up its ranks, and hold them firm, so that, even
though they be forced to bend, they will not break and
scatter, it must cease to be a movement looking merely
to the benefit of the tenant-farmer, and become a move-
ment for the benefit of the whole laboring class.
And the moment this is done the Irish land agitation
assumes a new and a grander phase. It ceases to be an
Irish movement ; it becomes but the van of a world-
wide struggle. Count the loss and the gain.
CHAPTER X.
APPEALS TO ANIMOSITY.
The Land League movement, as an Irish movement,
has in its favor the strength of Irish national feeling.
In assuming the radical ground I urge, it would lose
some of this ; for there are doubtless a considerable
number of Irishmen on both sides of the Atlantic who
would shrink at first from the proposal to abolish pri-
vate property in land. But all that is worth having
would soon come back to it. And its strength would
be more compact and intense—animated by a more
definite purpose and a more profound conviction.
But in ceasing to be a movement having relation sim-
ply to Ireland—in proclaiming a truth and proposing a
remedy which apply as well to every other country—it
would allay opposition, which, as a mere local move-
ment, it arouses, and brings to its support powerful
forces.
The powerful landed interest of England is against
the movement anyhow. The natural allies of the Irish
agitators are the English working classes—not merely
the Irishmen and sons of Irishmen who, in the larger
AAEAEAEA ZS 7"O AAV/M OS/Z"Y. 49
English cities, are numerous enough to make some
show and exert some voting power, without being nu-
merous enough to effect any important result—but the
great laboring masses of Great Britain. So long as
merely Irish measures are proposed, they can not gain
the hearty support even of the English radicals; so
long as race prejudices and hatreds are appealed to,
counter prejudices and hatreds must be aroused.
It is the very madness of folly, it is one of those po-
litical blunders worse than crimes, to permit in this
land agitation that indiscriminating denunciation of
England and everything English which is so common
at Land League meetings and in the newspapers which
voice Irish sentiment. The men who do this may be
giving way to a natural sentiment; but they are most
effectually doing the work of the real oppressors of Ire-
land. Were they secret emissaries of the London po-
lice, were they bribed with the gold which the British
oligarchy grinds out of the toil of its white slaves in
mill and mine and field, they could not better be doing
its work. “Divide and conquer” is the golden maxim
of the oppressors of mankind. It is by arousing race
antipathies and exciting national animosities, by ap-
pealing to local prejudices and setting people against
people, that aristocracies and despotisms have been
founded and maintained. They who would free men
must rise above such feelings if they would be success-
ful. The greatest enemy of the people's cause is he
who appeals to national passion and excites old hatreds.
He is its best friend who does his utmost to bury them
out of sight. For that action and reaction are equal and
uniform is the law of the moral as of the physical world.
Herein lies the far-reaching sweep of those sublime
teachings that, after centuries of nominal acceptance,
the so-called Christian world yet ignores, and which
call on us to answer not revilings with revilings, but to
meet hatred with love. “For,” as say the Scriptures
of the Buddhists, “hatred never ceases by hatred at any
time ; hatred ceases by love ; that is an old rule.” To
undiscriminately denounce Englishmen is simply to
arouse prejudices and excite animosities—to separate
forces that ought to be united. To make this the fight
of the Irish people against the English people is to
4. }
5o THE LAND QUESTYOXV,
doom it to failure. To make it the common cause of
the people everywhere against a system which every-
where oppresses and robs them is to make its success
assured. Had this been made to appear, the Irish mem-
bers would not have stood alone when it came to the
final resistance to coercion. Had this been made to ap-
pear, Great Britain would be in a ferment at the pro-
posal to give the Government despotic powers. If the
Irish leaders are wise, they may yet avail themselves of
the rising tide of British democracy. Let the Land
Leaguers adopt the noble maxim of the German So-
cial Democrats. Let them be Land Leaguers first, and
Irishmen afterward. Let them account him an enemy
of their cause who seeks to pander to prejudice and
arouse hate. Let them arouse to a higher love than the
mere love of country; to a wider patriotism than that
which exhausts itself on one little subdivision of the hu-
man race, one little spot on the great earth's surface ;
and in this name, and by this sign, call upon their
brothers, not so much to aid them, as to strike for
themselves.
The Irish people have the same inalienable right to
govern themselves as have every other people ; but the
full recognition of this right need not necessarily in-
volve separation, and to talk of separation first is to
arouse passions that will be utilized by the worst ene-
mies of Ireland. The demand for the full political
rights of the Irish people will be the stronger if it be
made to line with and include the demand for the full
political rights of the unenfranchised British people.
And it must be remembered that all the tendencies of the
time are not to separation, but to integration ; not to
independence, but to interdependence. This is observa-
ble wherever modern influences reach, and in all things.
To attempt to resist it is to attempt to turn back the
tide of progress.
It is not with the English people that the Irish peo-
ple have cause of quarrel. It is with the system that
oppresses both. That is the thing to denounce ; that is
the thing to fight. And it is to be fought most effectu-
ally by uniting the masses against it. Monarchy, aris-
tocracy, landiordism, would get but a new lease of life
by the arousing of sectional passions. The greatest
A/O W 7"O WZAV. 51
blow that could be struck against them would be, scru-
pulously avoiding everything that could excite antago-
nistic popular feeling, to carry this land agitation into
Great Britain, not as a mere Irish question, but as a
home question as well. To proclaim the universal truth
that land is of natural right common property ; to aban-
don all timid and half-way schemes which attempt to
compromise between justice and injustice, and to de-
mand nothing more nor less than a full recognition of
this natural right would be to do this. It would inevi-
tably be to put the British masses upon inquiry ; to put
British landholders upon the defensive, and give them
more than enough to do at home. Both England and
Scotland are ripe for such an agitation, and, once fairly
begun, it can have but one result—the victory of the
popular cause.
CHAPTER XI.
HOW TO WIN.
Nor is it merely the laboring classes of Great Britain
who may thus be brought into the fight, if the true
standard be raised. To demand the nationalization of
land by the simple means I have proposed makes possi-
ble—nay, as the discussion goes on, makes inevitable—
an irresistible combination, the combination of labor
and capital against landlordism. This combination
proved its power by winning the battle of free trade in
1846 against the most determined resistance of the
landed interest. It would be much more powerful now,
and, if it can again be made on the land question, it can
again force the intrenchments of the landed aristocracy.
This combination can not be made on any of the
timid, illogical schemes as yet proposed ; but it can be
made on the broad principle that land is rightfully com-
mon property. Paradoxical as it may seem, it is yet
true that, while the present position of the Irish agita-
tors does involve a menace to capital, the absolute denial
of the right of private property in land would not.
in admitting that the landlords ought to get any rent
52 7 HE ZAAWD OUAES7:/OM.
at all, in admitting that, if the land is taken from them,
they must be paid for it, the Irish agitators give away
their whole case. For in this they admit that the land
really belongs to the landlords, and put property in land
in the same category with other property. Thus they
place themselves in an indefensible position ; thus they
give to the agitation a “communistic” + character, and
excite against it that natural and proper feeling which
strongly resents any attack upon the rights of property
as an attack upon the very foundations of society. It
was doubtless this mistake of the agitators in admitting
the right of private property in land to which Archbishop
McCabe recently alluded in saying that some of the ut-
terances of the agitators excited the solicitude of the
Holy See. For this mistake gives to the agitation the
character of an attack upon the rights of. property. If
the land is really the property of the landlords (and this
is admitted when it is admitted that they are entitled
to any rent or to any compensation), then to limit the
rent which they shall get, or to interfere with their free-
dom to make what terms they please with tenants, is an
attack upon property rights. If the land is rightfully
the landlords', then is any compulsion as to how they
shall let it, or on what terms they shall part with it, a
bad and dangerous precedent, which naturally alarms
capital and excites the solicitude of those who are con-
cerned for good morals and social order. For, if a man
may be made to part with one species of property by
Boycotting or agitation, why not with another ? If a
man's title to land is as . rightful as his title to his
watch, what is the difference between agitation by Land
League meetings and Parliamentary filibustering to
make him give up the one and agitation with a cocked
pistol to make him give up the other ?
But, if it be denied that land justly is, or can be, pri-
vate property, if the equal rights of the whole people to
the use of the elements gratuitously furnished by Na-
ture be asserted without drawback or compromise, then
the essential difference between property in land and
* I use the word in the usual sense in which it is used by the vulgar,
and in which a communist is understood as one who wants to divide up
other people's property.
AyOW 7'O W/AW. 53
property in things of human production is at once
brought out. Then will it clearly appear not only that
the denial of the right of individual property in land
does not involve any menace to legitimate property
rights, but that the maintenance of private property in
land necessarily involves a denial of the right to all other
property, and that the recognition of the claims of the
landlords means a continuous robbery of capital as well
as of labor.
All this will appear more and more clearly as the prac-
tical measures necessary to make land common property
are proposed and discussed. These simple measures
involve no harsh proceedings, no forcible dispossession,
no shock to public confidence, no retrogression to a
lower industrial organization, no loaning of public
money, or establishment of cumbrous commissions.
Instead of doing violence to the rightful sense of prop-
erty, they assert and vindicate it. The way to make
land common property is simply to take rent for the
common benefit. And to do this, the easy way is to
abolish one tax after another, until the whole weight of
taxation falls upon the value of land. When that point
is reached, the battle is won. The hare is caught, killed,
and skinned, and to cook him will be a very easy mat-
ter. The real fight will come on the proposition to con-
solidate existing taxation upon land values. When
that is once won, the landholders will not merely have
been decisively defeated, they will have been routed;
and the nature of land values will be so generally un-
derstood that to raise taxation so as to take the whole
rent for common purposes will be a mere matter of
COUI rSé. -
The political art is like the military art. It consists
in combining the greatest strength against the point of
least resistance. I have pointed out the way in which,
1n the case we are considering, this can be done. And,
the more the matter is considered, the clearer and
clearer will it appear that there is every practical rea-
son, as there is every theoretical reason, why the Irish
reformers should take this vantage-ground of principle.
To propose to put the public burdens upon the land-
holders is not a novel and unheard of thing against
which English prejudice would run as something “new
54 THE LA WD QUESTION:
fangled,” some new invention of modern socialism. On
the contrary, it is the ancient English practice. It
would be but a return, in a form adapted to modern
times, to the system under which English land was orig-
inally parcelled out to the predecessors of the present
holders—the just system, recognized for centuries, that
those who enjoy the common property should bear the
common burdens. The putting of property in land in
the same category as property in things produced by
labor is comparatively modern. In England, as in
Ireland and Scotland, as in fact among every people of
whom we know anything, the land was originally treated
as common property, and this recognition ran all
through the feudal system. The essence of the feudal
system was in treating the landholders not as an owner,
but as a lessee. William the Conqueror did not give away
the land of England as the Church lands were given
away by Henry VIII., when he divided among his syco-
phants the property of the people, which, after the man-
ner of the times, had been set apart for the support of
religious, educational, and charitable institutions. To
every grant of land made by the Conqueror was an-
nexed a condition which amounted to a heavy perpet.
ual tax or rent. One of his first acts was to divide the
soil of England into sixty thousand knights' fees ; and
thus, besides many other dues and obligations, was
thrown upon the landholders the cost of providing and
maintaining the army. All the long, costly wars that
England fought during feudal times involved no public
debt. Public debt, pauperism, and the grinding pov-
erty of the poorer classes came in as the landholders
gradually shook off the obligations on which they had
received their land, an operation culminating in the ab-
olition after the Restoration of the feudal tenures, for
which were substituted indirect taxes that still weigh
upon the whole people. To now reverse this process,
to abolish the taxes which are born by labor and capi-
tal, and to substitute for them a tax on rent, would not
be the adoption of anything new, but a simple going
back to the old plan. In England, as in Ireland, the
movement would appeal to the popular imagination as
a demand for the reassertion of ancient rights.
There are other most important respects in Which this
AyO W 7"O WZAV. 55
measure will commend itself to the English mind. The
tax upon land values or rent is in all economic respects
the most perfect of taxes. No political economist will
deny that it combines the maximum of certainty with
the minimum of loss and cost ; that, unlike taxes upon
capital or exchange or improvement, it does not check
production or enhance prices or fall ultimately upon
the consumer. And, in proposing to abolish all other
taxes in favor of this theoretically perfect tax, the Land
Reformers will have on their side the advantage of
ideas already current, while they can bring the argu-
mentum ad hominem to bear on those who might never
comprehend an abstract principle. Englishmen of all
classes have happily been educated up to a belief in
free trade, though a very large amount of revenue is
still collected from customs. Let the Land Reformers
take advantage of this by proposing to carry out the
doctrine of free trade to its fullest extent. If a revenue
tariff is better than a protective tariff, then no tariff at
all is better than a revenue tariff. Let them propose to
abolish the customs duties entirely, and to abolish as well
harbor dues and lighthouse dues and dock charges, and
in their place to add to the tax on rent, or the value of
land exclusive of improvements. Let them in the same
way propose to get rid of the excise, the various license
taxes, the tax upon buildings, the Onerous and unpopu-
lar income tax, etc., and to saddle all public expenses
on the landlords.
This would bring home the land question to thou-
sands and thousands who have never thought of it be-
fore ; to thousands and thousands who have heretofore
looked upon the land question as something peculiarly
Irish, or something that related exclusively to agricul-
ture and to farmers, and have never seen how, in various
direct and indirect ways, they have to contribute to the
immense sums received by the landlords as rent. It
would be putting the argument in a shape in which
even the most stupid could understand it. It would be
directing the appeal to a spot where even the unimagi-
native are sensitive—the pocket. How long would a
merchant or banker or manufacturer or annuitant re
gard as dangerous and wicked an agitation which pro-
posed to take taxation off of him Even the most prej
56 7A/E LA WD QUESTION.
udiced can be relied on to listen with patience to an
argument in favor of making some one else pay what
they now are paying.
Let me illustrate by a little story what I feel confident
would be the effect of the policy I propose :
Once upon a time I was the Pacific-coast agent of an
Eastern news association, which took advantage of an
opposition telegraph Company to run against the Asso-
ciated Press monopoly. The association in California
consisted of one strong San Francisco paper, to which
telegraphic news was of much importance, and a num-
ber of interior papers, to which it was of minor impor-
tance, if of any importance at all. It became necessary
to raise more money for the expenses of collecting and
transmitting these dispatches, and, thinking it only fair,
I assessed the increased cost to the strong metropolitan
paper. The proprietor of this paper was very indignant.
He appealed to the proprietors of all the other papers,
and they all joined in his protest. I replied by calling
a meeting. At this meeting the proprietor of the San
Francisco paper led off with an indignant speech. He
was seconded by several others, and evidently had the
sympathy of the whole crowd. Then came my turn. I
said, in effect: “Gentlemen, you can do what you please
about this matter. Whatever satisfies you satisfies me.
The only thing fixed is, that more money has to be
raised. As this San Francisco paper pays now a much
lower relative rate than you do, I thought it only fair
that it should pay the increased cost. But, if you think
otherwise, there is no reason in the world why you
should not pay it yourselves.” The debate immediately
took another turn, and in a few minutes my action was
endorsed by a unanimous vote, for the San Francisco
man was so disgusted by the way his supporters left him
that he would not vote at all.
Now, that is just about what will happen to the British
landlords if the question be put in the way I propose.
The British landowners are in numbers but an insignifi-
cant minority. And, the more they protested against
the injustice of having to pay all the taxes, the quicker
would the public mind realize the essential injustice of
private property in land, the quicker would the majority
of the people come to see that the landowners ought not
AyO W 7"O WZAV. 57
only to pay all the taxes, but a good deal more besides.
Once put the question in such a way that the British
workingman will realize that he pays two prices for his
ale and half a dozen prices for his tobacco, because a
landowners' Parliament in the time of Charles II. shook
off their ancient dues to the State, and imposed them in
indirect taxation on him ; once bring to the attention of
the well-to-do Englishman, who grunts as he pays his in-
come tax, the question as to whether the landowner who
draws his income from property that of natural right be-
longs to the whole people ought not to pay it instead of
him, and it will not be long before the absurd injustice
of allowing rent to be appropriated by individuals will
be thoroughly understood. This is a very different thing
from asking the British taxpayer to buy out the Irish
landlord for the sake of the Irish peasant.
I have been speaking as though all landholders would
resist the change which would sacrifice their special inter-
ests to the larger interests of society. But I am satisfied
that to think this is to do landholders a great injustice.
For landholders as a class are not more stupid nor more
selfish than any other class. And as they saw, as they
must see, as the discussion progresses, that they also
would be the gainers in the great social change which
would abolish poverty and elevate the very lowest classes
—the “mudsills” of society, as a Southern Senator ex-
pressively called them during the Slavery discussion—
above the want, the misery, the vice, and degradation in
which they are now plunged, there are many landowners
who would join heartily and unreservedly in the effort
to bring this change about. This I believe, not merely
because my reading and observation both teach me that
low, narrow views of self-interest are not the strongest
of human motives, but because I know that to-day among
those who see the truth I have here tried to set forth, and
who would carry out the reform I have proposed, are many
landholders.” And, if they be earnest men, I appeal to
* Among the warm friends my book “Progress and Poverty” has found
are many landholders—some of them large landholders. As types I may
mention the names of D. A. Learnard, of San Joaquin, a considerable
farmer, who had no sooner read it than he sent for a dozen copies to
circulate among his neighbors; Hiram Tubbs, of San Francisco, the
owner of much valuable real estate in and near that city; and Sir George
58 THE LA WD OUEST/OM.
landholders as confidently as to any other class. There
is that in a great truth that can raise a human soul above
the mists of selfishness.
The course which I suggest is the only course which
can be logically based on principle. It has everything
to commend it. It will concentrate the greatest strength
against the least resistance. And it will be on the right
line. Every step gained will be an advance toward the
ultimate goal; every step gained will make easier the
Ilext.
CHAPTER XII.
IN THE UNITED STATES.
In speaking with special reference to the case of Ire-
land, I have, so far as general principles are concerned,
been using it as a stalking-horse. In discussing the Irish
land question, we really discuss the most vital of Amer-
ican questions. And if we of the United States can not
see the beam in our own eye, save by looking at the
mote in our brother's, then let us look at the mote ; and
let us take counsel together how he may get it out. For,
at least, we shall in this way learn how we may deal
with our own case when we wake up to the conscious-
ness of it.
And never had the parable of the mote and the beam
a better illustration than in the attitude of so many
Americans toward this Irish land question. We de-
nounce the Irish land system We express our sympa-
thy with Ireland We tender our advice by congres-
sional and legislative resolution to our British brethren
across the Sea Truly our indignation is cheap and our
sympathy is cheap, and our advice is very, very cheap
For what are we doing 2 Extending over new soil the
very institution that to them descended from a ruder
and a darker time. With what conscience can we lec-
ture them With all power in the hands of the people,
Grey, of New Zealand, the owner of a good deal of land in that colony.
of which he was formerly governor, as Well, as I understand, of valuable
estates in England, * * &
AV 7"Ay AE UAV/7′EZD STA 7"E.S. 59
with institutions yet plastic, with millions of virgin
acres yet to settle, it should be ours to do more than
vent denunciation, and express sympathy, and give ad-
vice. It should be ours to show the way. This we have
not done ; this we do not do. Out in our new States
may be seen the growth of a system of cultivation worse
in its social effects than that which prevails in Ireland.
In Ireland the laborer has some sort of a home, and
enjoys some of the family affections. In these great
“wheat-manufacturing ” districts the laborer is a nomad,
his home is in his blankets, which he carries around
with him. The soil bears wheat, crop after crop, till its
fertility is gone. It does not bear children. These ma-
chine-worked “grain factories " of the great Republic
of the New World are doing just what was done by the
slave-worked latifundia of the Roman world. Here they
prevent, where there they destroyed, “the crop of
men.” And in our large cities may we not see misery
of the same kind as exists in Ireland 2 If it is less in
amount, is it not merely because our country is yet
newer; because we have yet a wide territory and a sparse
population—conditions past which our progress is rap-
idly carrying us? As for evictions, is it an unheard-of
thing, even in New York, for families to be turned out
of their homes because they can not pay the rent 2 Are
there not many acres in this country from which those
who made homes have been driven by sheriffs' posses, and
even by troops ? Do not a number of the Mussell
Slough settlers lie in Santa Clara jail to-day because a
great railroad corporation set its envious eyes on soil
which they had turned from desert into garden, and they
in their madness tried to resist ejectment 2
And the men on the other side of the Atlantic who
vainly imagine that they may settle the great question
now pressing upon them by free trade in land, or tenant-
right, or some mild device for establishing a peasant
proprietary—they may learn something about their own
case if they will turn their eyes to us.
We have had free trade in land ; we have had in our
American farmer, owning his own acres, using his own
capital, and working with his own hands, Something far
better than peasant proprietorship. We have had, what
no legislation can give the people of Great Britain, vast
60 THE LAND QUESTION.
areas of virgin soil. We have had all of these under
democratic institutions. Yet we have here social disease
of precisely the same kind as that which exists in Ire-
land and England. And the reason is that we have had
here precisely the same cause—that we have made land
private property. So long as this exists, our democratic
institutions are vain, our pretence of equality but cruel
irony, Our public Schools can but sow the seeds of dis-
content. So long as this exists, material progress can
but force the masses of our people into a harder and
more hopeless slavery. Until we in some way make the
land, what Nature intended it to be, common property,
until we in some way secure to every child born among
us his natural birthright, we have not established the
Republic in any sense worthy of the name, and we can
not establish the Republic. Its foundations are quick-
Sand.
CHAPTER XIII.
A LITTLE ISLAND OR A LITTLE WORLD.
Imagine an island girt with ocean ; imagine a little
world Swimming in space. Put on it, in imagination,
human beings. Let them divide the land, share and
share alike, as individual property. At first, while pop-
ulation is sparse and industrial processes rude and prim-
itive, this will work well enough.
Turn away the eyes of the mind for a moment, let
time pass, and look again. Some families will have died
out, some have greatly multiplied ; on the whole, oopu-
lation will have largely increased, and even supposing
there have been no important inventions or improve-
ments in the productive arts, the increase in population,
by causing the division of labor, will have made indus-
try more complex. During this time some of these peo-
ple will have been careless, generous, improvident;
some will have been thrifty and grasping. Some of
them will have devoted much of their powers to think-
ing of how they themselves and the things they see
around them came to be, to inquiries and speculations
A Z/7'7"ZAZ ZSZAAWD OR A Z/7'7"ZAF WORAE/O. 61
as to what there is in the universe beyond their little is-
land or their little world, to making poems, painting pic-
tures, or writing books; to noting the differences in rocks
and trees and shrubs and grasses; to classifying beasts
and birds and fishes and insects—to the doing, in short,
of all the many things which add so largely to the sum
of human knowledge and human happiness, without
much or any gain of wealth to the doer. Others again
will have devoted all their energies to the extending of
their possessions. What, then, shall we see, land hav-
ing been all this time treated as private property
Clearly, we shall see that the primitive equality has
given way to inequality. Some will have very much
more than one of the original shares into which the land
was divided ; very many will have no land at all. Sup-
pose that, in all things save this, our little island or Our
little world is Utopia—that there are no wars or rob-
beries; that the government is absolutely pure and taxes
nominal ; suppose, if you want to, any sort of a cur-
rency ; imagine, if you can imagine such a world or
island, that interest is utterly abolished ; yet inequality
in the ownership of land will have produced poverty and
virtual slavery.
For the people we have supposed are human beings
—that is to say, in their physical natures at least, they
are animals who can only live on land and by the aid of
the products of land. They may make machines which
will enable them to float on the sea, or perhaps to fly in
the air, but to build and equip these machines they must
have land and the products of land, and must constantly
come back to land. Therefore those who own the land
must be the masters of the rest. Thus, if one man has
come to own all the land, he is their absolute master
even to life or death. If they can only live on the land
on his terms, then they can only live on his terms, for
without land they cannot live. They are his absolute
slaves, and so long as his ownership is acknowledged,
if they want to live, they must do in everything as he
wills.
If, however, the concentration of landownership has
not gone so far as to make one or a very few men the
owners of all the land—if there are still so many land-
owners that there is competition between them as well
62 7A/F ZAND QUEST/OM.
as between those who have only their labor—then the
terms on which these non-landholders can live will seem
more like free contract. But it will not be free con-
tract. Land can yield no wealth without the applica-
tion of labor ; labor can produce no wealth without
land. These are the two equally necessary factors of
production. Yet, to say that they are equally necessary
factors of production is not to say that, in the making
of contracts as to how the results of production are di-
vided, the possessors of these two meet on equal terms.
For the nature of these two factors is very different.
Land is a natural element ; the human being must have
his stomach filled every few hours. Land can exist
without labor, but labor can not exist without land.
If I own a piece of land, I can let it lay idle for a year
or for years, and it will eat nothing. But the laborer
must eat every day, and his family must eat. And so,
in the making of terms between them, the landowner
has an immense advantage over the laborer. It is on
the side of the laborer that the intense pressure of com-
petition comes, for in his case it is competition urged
by hunger. And, further than this : As population in-
creases, as the competition for the use of land becomes
more and more intense, so are the owners of land en-
abled to get for the use of their land a larger and larger
part of the wealth which labor exerted upon it pro-
duces. That is to say, the value of land steadily rises.
Now, this steady rise in the value of land brings about
a confident expectation of future increase of value,
which produces among landowners all the effects of a
combination to hold for higher prices. Thus there is a
constant tendency to force mere laborers to take less
and less or to give more and more (put it which way
you please, it amounts to the same thing) of the pro-
ducts of their work for the opportunity to work. And
thus, in the very nature of things, we should see on our
little island or our little world that, after a time had
passed, some of the people would be able to take and
enjoy a superabundance of all the fruits of labor with-
out doing any labor at all, while others would be forced
to work the livelong day for a pitiful living.
But let us introduce another element into the sup-
position. Let us suppose great discoveries and inven-
TAA C/D//ZZZA 7/OM 7 AMA 7" /S POSS/BZÄ. 63
tions—such as the steam engine, the power loom, the
Bessemer process, the reaping machine, and the thou-
sand-and-C me labor-saving devices that are such a marked
feature of our era. What would be the result 2
Manifestly, the effect of all such discoveries and in-
ventions is to increase the power of labor in producing
wealth—to enable the same amount of wealth to be
produced by less labor, or a greater amount with the
same labor. But none of them lessen, or can lessen the
necessity for land. Until we can discover some way of
making Something out of nothing—and that is so far
beyond our powers as to be absolutely unthinkable—
there is no possible discovery or invention which can
lessen the dependence of labor upon land. And, this
being the case, the effect of these labor-saving devices,
land being the private property of some, would simply
be to increase the proportion of the wealth produced
that landowners could demand for the use of their land.
The ultimate effect of these discoveries and inventions
would be not to benefit the laborer, but to make him
more dependent.
And, since we are imagining conditions, imagine la-
bor-saving inventions to go to the farthest imaginable
point, that is to say, to perfection. What then 2 Why
then, the necessity for labor being done away with, all
the wealth that the land could produce would go entire
to the landowners. None of it whatever could be
claimed by any one else. For the laborers there would
be no use at all. If they continued to exist, it would
be merely as paupers on the bounty of the landowners'
CHAPTER XIV.
THE CIVILIZATION THAT IS POSSIBLE.
In the effects upon the distribution of wealth, of mak-
ing land private property, we may thus see an explana-
tion of that paradox presented by modern progress.
The perplexing phenomena of deepening want with in-
creasing wealth, of labor rendered more dependent and
helpless by the very introduction of labor-saving ma-
64 g THE LAND QUEST/OM.
chinery, are the inevitable result of natural laws as fixed
and certain as the law of gravitation. Private property .
in land is the primary cause of the monstrous inequali-
ties which are developing in modern society. It is this,
and not any miscalculation of Nature in bringing into
the world more mouths than she can feed, that gives rise
to that tendency of wages to a minimum—that “iron law
of wages,” as the Germans call it—that, in spite of all
advances in productive power, compels the laboring
classes to the least return on which they will consent to
live. It is this that produces all those phenomena that
are so often attributed to the conflict of labor and capi-
tal. It is this that condemns Irish peasants to rags and
hunger, that produces the pauperism of England and
the tramps of America. It is this that makes the alms-
house and the penitentiary the marks of what we call
high civilization; that in the midst of schools and
churches degrades and brutalizes men, crushes the sweet-
ness out of womanhood and the joy out of childhood.
It is this that makes lives that might be a blessing a pain
and a curse, and every year drives more and more to
seek unbidden refuge in the gates of death. For, a per-
manent tendency to inequality once set up, all the forces
of progress tend to greater and greater inequality.
All this is contrary to Nature. The poverty and mis-
ery, the vice and degradation, that spring from the un-
equal distribution of wealth, are not the results of natural
law; they spring from our defiance of natural law. They
are the fruits of our refusal to obey the supreme law of
justice. It is because we rob the child of his birthright;
because we make the bounty which the Creator intended
for all the exclusive property of some, that these things
come upon us, and, though advancing and advancing,
we chase but the mirage.
When, lit by lightning-flash or friction amid dry
grasses, the consuming flames of fire first flung their
lurid glow into the face of man, how must he have started
back in affright ! When he first stood by the shores of
the sea, how must its waves have said to him, “Thus far
shalt thou go, but no farther ”! Yet, as he learned to
use them, fire became his most useful servant, the Sea
his easiest highway. The most destructive element of
which we know—that which for ages and ages seemed
7A/A2 CAE PAZAZA 7/OAV 7"HA 7" ZS AEOSS/BZE. 65
the very thunderbolt of the angry gods—is, as we are
now beginning to learn, fraught for us with untold
powers of usefulness. Already it enables us to annihi-
late space in our messages, to illuminate the night with
new suns; and its uses are only beginning. And
throughout all Nature, as far as we can see, whatever is
potent for evil is potent for good. “Dirt,” said Lord
Brougham, “is matter in the wrong place.” And so the
squalor and vice and misery that abound in the very
heart of our civilization are but results of the misappli-
cation of forces in their nature most elevating.
I doubt not that whichever way a man may turn to in-
quire of Nature, he will come upon adjustments which
will arouse not merely his wonder, but his gratitude.
Yet what has most impressed me with the feeling that
the laws of Nature are the laws of beneficent intelli-
gence is what I see of the social possibilities involved in
the law of rent. Rent * springs from natural causes.
It arises, as society develops, from the differences in
natural opportunities and the differences in the distribu-
tion of population. It increases with the division of
labor, with the advance of the arts, with the progress of
invention. And thus, by virtue of a law impressed upon
the very nature of things, has the Creator provided that
the natural advance of mankind shall be an advance
toward equality, an advance toward Co-operation, an ad-
vance toward a social state in which not even the weak-
est need be crowded to the wall, in which even for the
unfortunate and the Cripple there may be ample pro-
vision. For this revenue, which arises from the common
property, which represents not the creation of value by
the individual, but the creation by the community as a
whole, which increases just as Society develops, affords
a common fund, which, properly used, tends constantly
to equalize conditions, to open the largest opportunities
for all, and to utterly banish want or the fear of want.
The squalid poverty that festers in the heart of our
civilization, the vice and crime and degradation and rav-
ening greed that flow from it, are the results of a treat-
ment of land that ignores the simple law of justice, a law
* I, of course, use the word “rent” in its economic, not in its com-
mon sense, meaning by it what is commonly called ground rent.
5
66 7 H.A. ZAND QUEST/OM.
so clear and plain that it is universally recognized by
the veriest savages. What is by nature the common
birthright of all, we have made the exclusive property
of individuals ; what is by natural law the common fund,
from which common wants should be met, we give to a
few that they may lord it over their fellows. And so
Some are gorged while some go hungry, and more is
wasted than would suffice to keep all in luxury.
In this nineteenth century, among any people who
have begun to utilize the forces and methods of modern
production, there is no necessity for want. There is no
good reason why even the poorest should not have all
the Comforts, all the luxuries, all the opportunities for
culture, all the gratifications of refined taste that only
the richest now enjoy. There is no reason why any one
should be compelled to long and monotonous labor.
Did invention and discovery stop to-day, the forces of
production are ample for this. What hampers produc-
tion is the unnatural inequality in distribution. And,
with just distribution, invention and discovery would
only have begun.
Appropriate rent in the way I propose, and speculative
rent would be at once destroyed. The dogs in the man-
ger who are now holding so much land they have no
use for, in order to extract a high price from those who
do want to use it, would be at once choked off, and land
from which labor and capital are now debarred under
penalty of a heavy fine would be thrown open to im-
provement and use. The incentive to land monopoly
would be gone. Population would spread where it is
now too dense, and become denser where it is now too
sparse.
Appropriate rent in this way, and not only would nat-
ural opportunities be thus opened to labor and capital,
but all the taxes which now weigh upon production and
rest upon the consumer could be abolished. The
demand for labor would increase, wages would rise,
every wheel of production would be set in motion.
Appropriate rent in this way, and the present expenses
of government would be at once very much reduced—
reduced directly by the saving in the present cumbrous
and expensive schemes of taxation, reduced indirectly
by the diminution in pauperism and in crime. This
7"Ay AE CAP//ZZA 7/OAV 7"HA 7" ZS POSS/B/CAE. 67
simplification in governmental machinery, this elevation
of moral tone which would result, would make it possi-
ble for government to assume the running of railroads,
telegraphs, and other businesses which, being in their
nature monopolies, can not, as experience is showing,
be safely left in the hands of private individuals and
corporations. In short, losing its character as a re-
pressive agency, government could thus gradually pass
into an administrative agency of the great co-operative
association—Society.
For, appropriate rent in this way, and there would be
at once a large surplus over and above what are now
considered the legitimate expenses of government. We
could divide this, if we wanted to, among the whole
community, share and share alike. Or we could give
every boy a small capital for a start when he came of
age, every girl a dower, every widow an annuity, every
aged person a pension, out of this common estate. Or
we could do with our great common fund many, many
things that would be for the common benefit, many,
many things that would give to the poorest what even
the richest can not now enjoy. We could establish free
libraries, lectures, museums, art-galleries, observatories,
gymnasiums, baths, parks, theatres ; we could line our
roads with fruit-trees, and make our cities clean and
wholesome and beautiful ; we could conduct experi-
ments, and offer rewards for inventions, and throw them
open to public use.*
Think of the enormous wastes that now go on : The
waste of false revenue systems, which hamper produc-
tion and bar exchange, which fine a man for erecting a
building where none stood before, or for making two
blades of grass grow where there was but one. The
waste of unemployed labor, of idle machinery, of those
periodical depressions of industry almost as destructive
as war. The waste entailed by poverty, and the vice and
crime and thriftlessness and drunkenness that spring
from it ; the waste entailed by that greed of gain that is
its shadow, and which makes business in large part but a
masked war; the waste entailed by the fret and worry
* A million dollars spent in premiums and experiments would, in all
probability, make aërial navigation an accomplished fact,
68 THE LAND QUEST/OM.
about the mere physical necessities of existence, to
which so many of us are condemned; the waste entailed
by ignorance, by cramped and undeveloped faculties, by
the turning of human beings into mere machinesſ
Think of these enormous wastes, and of the others
which, like these, are due to the fundamental wrong
which produces an unjust distribution of wealth and
distorts the natural development of society, and you will
begin to see what a higher, purer, richer civilization would
be made possible by the simple measure that will assert
natural rights. You will begin to see how, even if no
one but the present landholders were to be considered,
this would be the greatest boon that could be vouch-
safed thern by society, and that, for them to fight it,
would be as if the dog with a tin kettle tied to his tail
should snap at the hand that offered to free him. Even
the greatest landholder As for such landholders as our
working farmers and homestead owners, the slightest
discussion would show them that they had everything
to gain by the change. But even such landholders
as the Duke of Westminster and the Astors would be
gainers. *
For it is of the very nature of injustice that it really
profits no one. When and where was slavery good for
slaveholders ? Did her cruelties in America, her expul-
sions of Moors and Jews, her burnings of heretics, profit
Spain f Has England gained by her injustice toward
Ireland? Did not the curse of an unjust social system
rest on Louis XIV. and Louis XV. as well as on the poor-
est peasant whom it condemned to rags and Starvation
—as well as on that Louis whom it sent to the block 2
Is the Czar of Russia to be envied ?
This we may know certainly, this we may hold to con-
fidently : that which is unjust can really profit no one ;
that which is just can really harm no one. Though all
other lights move and circle, this is the pole-Star by
which we may safely steer.
7A/E CZWZZZZA ZZOAV ZALA 7" ZS. 60
CHAPTER xv.
THE CIVILIZATION THAT IS.
When we think of the civilization that might be, how
poor and pitiful, how little better than utter barbarism,
seems this civilization of which we boast ! Even here,
where it has had the freest field and fullest development 1
Even here !
This is a broad land and a rich land. How wide it is,
how rich it is, how the fifty millions of us already here
are but beginning to Scratch it, a man can not begin to
realize, till he does some thousands of miles of travel-
ling over it. There are a School and a church and a news-
paper in every hamlet; we have no privileged orders,
no legacies of antiquated institutions, no strong and
covertly hostile neighbors, who in fancy or reality oblige
us to keep up great standing armies. We have had the
experience of all other nations to guide us in selecting
what is good and rejecting what is bad. In politics, in
religion, in Science, in mechanism, everything shows
the latest improvements. We think we stand, and in
fact we do stand, in the very van of civilization, Food
here is cheaper, wages higher, than anywhere else.
There is here a higher average of education, of intel-
ligence, of material comfort, and of individual opportu-
nity, than among any other of the great civilized na-
tions. Here modern civilization is at its very best. Yet
even here !
Last winter I was in San Francisco. There are in San
Francisco citizens who can build themselves houses that
cost a million and a half; citizens who can give each of
their children two millions of registered United States
bonds for a Christmas present ; citizens who can send
their wives to Paris to keep house there, or rather to
“keep palace" in a style that outdoes the lavishness of
Russian grand dukes; citizens whose daughters are
golden prizes to the bluest-blooded of English aristo-
crats; citizens who can buy seats in the United States
Senate and leave them empty, just to show their gran
7o THE LAND QUESTION:
deur. There are, also, in San Francisco other citizens
Last winter I could hardly walk a block without meet.
ing a citizen begging for ten cents. And, when a charity
fund was raised to give work, with pick and shovel to
such as would rather work than beg, the applications
were so numerous that, to make the charity fund go as far
as possible, one set of men was discharged after having
been given a few days' work, in order to make room for
another set. This and much else of the same sort I saw
in San Francisco last winter. Likewise in Sacramento,
and in other towns.
Last summer, on the plains, I took from its tired
mother, and held in my arms, a little sun-browned baby,
the youngest of a family of the sturdy and keen Western
New England stock, who alone in their two wagons had
travelled near three thousand miles looking for some
place to locate and finding none, and who were now re-
turning to where the father and his biggest boy could
go to work on a railroad, what they had got by the sale
of their Nebraska farm all gone. And I walked awhile
by the side of long, lank Southwestern men who, after
similar fruitless journeyings way up into Washington
Territory, were going back to the Choctaw Nation.
This winter I have been in New York. New York is
the greatest and richest of American cities—the third
city of the modern world, and moving steadily toward
the first place. This is a time of great prosperity. Never
before were so many goods sold, so much business done.
Real estate is advancing with big jumps, and within the
last few months many fortunes have been made in buy-
ing and selling vacant lots. Landlords nearly everywhere3
are demanding increased rents; asking in some of the
business quarters an increase of three hundred per cent.
Money is so plenty that Government four per cents
sell for I 14, and a bill is passing Congress for refunding
the maturing national debt at three per cent. per annum,
a rate that awhile ago in California was not thought ex-
orbitant per month. All sorts of shares and bonds have
been going up and up. You can sell almost anything if
you give it a high-Sounding Corporate name and issue
well-printed shares of stock. Seats in the Board of
Brokers are worth thirty thousand dollars, and are cheap
at that. There are citizens here who rake in millions at
THE crºzzzza Trow THAT IS. 71
a single operation with as much ease as a faro-dealer
rakes in a handful of chips.
Nor is this the mere seeming prosperity of feverish
speculation. The country is really prosperous. The
crops have been enormous, the demand insatiable. We
have at last a sound currency ; gold has been pouring in.
The railroads have been choked with produce, steel rails
are being laid faster than ever before ; all sorts of fac-
tories are running full time or over time. So prosper-
ous is the country, so good are the times, that, at the
Presidential election a few months since, the determin-
ing argument was that we could not afford to take the
chance of disturbing so much material prosperity by a
political change.
Nevertheless, prosperous as are these times, citizens
of the United States beg you on the streets for ten cents
and five cents, and although you know that there are in
this city two hundred charitable societies, although you
realize that on general principles to give money in this
way is to do evil rather than good, you are afraid to re-
fuse them when you read of men in this great city freez-
ing to death and starving to death. Prosperous as are
these times, women are making overalls for sixty cents
a dozen, and you can hire citizens for trivial sums to
parade up and down the streets all day with advertising
placards on their backs. I get on a horse-car and ride
with the driver. He is evidently a sober, steady man,
as intelligent as a man can be who drives a horse-car all
the time he is not asleep or eating his meals. He tells
me has a wife and four children. He gets home (if a
couple of rooms can be called a home) at two o'clock in
the morning ; he has to be back on his car at nine. Sun-
day he has a couple of hours more, which he has to put
in in sleep, else, as he says, he would utterly break down.
His children he never sees, save when one of them comes
at noon or Supper-time to the horse-car route with some-
thing for him to eat in a tin pail. He gets for his day's
work one dollar and seventy-five cents—a sum that will
buy at Delmonico's a beefsteak and cup of coffee. I say
to him that it must be pretty hard to pay rent and keep
six persons on one dollar and seventy-five cents a day.
He says it is ; that he has been trying for a month to get
enough ahead to buy a new pair of shoes, but he hasn't
72 7 HE LAND QUESTION:
yet succeeded. I ask why he does not leave such a job.
He says, “What can I do 2 There are a thousand men
ready to step into my place l’ And so, in this time of
prosperity, he is chained to his car. The horses that he
drives, they are changed six times during his working-
day. They have lots of time to stretch themselves and
rest themselves and eat in peace their plentiful meals,
for they are worth from one to two hundred dollars each,
and it would be a loss to the company for them to fall ill.
But this driver, this citizen of the United States, he may
fall ill or drop dead, and the company would not lose a
cent. As between him and the beasts he drives, I am
inclined to think that this most prosperous era is more
prosperous for horses than for men.
Our Napoleon of Wall Street, our rising Charlemagne
of railroads, who came to this city with nothing but a
new kind of mouse-trap in a mahogany box, but who
now, though yet in the vigor of his prime, counts his
wealth by hundreds of millions, if it can be counted at
all, is interviewed by a reporter just as he is about to
step aboard his palace-car for a grand combination ex-
pedition into the Southwest. He descants upon the
services he is rendering in welding into one big ma-
chine a lot of smaller machines, in uniting into one vast
railroad empire the separated railroad kingdoms. He
likewise descants upon the great prosperity of the
whole country. Everybody is prosperous and con-
tented, he says: there is, of course, a good deal of mis-
ery in the big cities, but, then, there always is
Yet not alone in the great cities. I ride on the Hud-
son River Railroad on a bitter cold day, and from one
of the pretty towns with Dutch names gets in a consta-
ble with a prisoner, whom he is to take to the Albany
penitentiary. In this case justice has been swift enough,
for the crime, the taking of a shovel, has only been
committed a few hours before. Such coat as the man
has he keeps buttoned up, even in the hot car, for, the
constable says, he has no underclothes at all. He stole
the shovel to get to the penitentiary, where it is warm.
The constable Says they have lots of such cases, and
that even in these good times these pretty country towns
are infested with such tramps. With all our vast organ-
izing, our developing of productive powers and cheap.
7"HE CZWZZZZA 7TWOAW 7A/A 7" ZS. 73
ening of transportation, we are yet creating a class of
utter pariahs. And they are to be found not merely in
the great cities, but wherever the locomotive runs.
Is it real advance in civilization which, on the one
hand, produces these great Captains of industry, and,
on the other, these social outcasts 2
It is the year of grace 1881, and of the Republic the
Iosth. The girl who has brought in coal for my fire is
twenty years old. She was born in New York, and can
neither read nor write. To me, when I heard it, this
seemed sin and shame, and I got her a spelling book.
She is trying what she can, but it is up-hill work. She
has really no time. Last night when I came in, at
eleven, she was not through scrubbing the halls. She
gets four dollars a month. Her shoes cost two dollars
a pair. She says she can sew ; but I guess it is about
as I can. In the natural course of things, this girl will
be a mother of citizens of the Republic.
Underneath are girls who can sew ; they run sewing-
machines with their feet all day. I have seen girls in
Asia carrying water-jugs on their heads and young
women in South America bearing burdens. They were
lithe and strong and symmetrical ; but to turn a young
women into motive power for a sewing-machine is to
weaken and injure her physically. And these girls are
to rear, or ought to rear, citizens of the Republic.
But there is worse and worse than this. Go out into
the streets at night, and you will find them filled with
girls who will never be mothers. To the man who has
known the love of mother, of sister, of sweetheart, wife,
and daughter, this is the saddest sight of all.
The ladies of the Brooklyn churches—they are get-
ting up petitions for the suppression of Mormon polyg-
amy ; they would have it rooted out with pains and
penalties, trampled out, if need be, with fire and sword ;
and their reverend Congressman-elect is going, when
he takes his seat, to introduce a most stringent bill to
that end ; for that a man should have more wives than
One is a burning Scandal in a Christian country. So it
is ; but there are also other burning scandals. As for
Scandals that excite talk, I will spare Brooklyn a com
parison with Salt Lake. But as to ordinary things : I
have walked through the streets of Salt Lake City, by
74 THE LAND QUESZZON.
day and by night, without seeing what in the streets of
New York or Brooklyn excites no comment. Polygamy
is unnatural and wrong, no doubt of that, for Nature
brings into the world something over twenty-two boys
for every twenty girls. But is not a state of society
unnatural and wrong in which there are thousands and
thousands of girls for whom no husband ever offers ? Can
we brag of a state of Society in which one citizen can load
his wife with more diamonds than an Indian chief can put
beads on his squaw, while many other citizens are
afraid to marry lest they can not support a wife—a state
of Society in which prostitution flourishes 2 Polygamy
is bad, but is it not better than that P Civilization is
advancing day by day; never was such progress as we
are making ! Yet divorces are increasing and insanity
is increasing. What is the goal of a civilization that
tends toward free love and the madhouse 2
This is a most highly civilized community. There is
not a bear nor wolf on Manhattan Island, save in a
menagerie. Yet it is easier, where they are worst, to
guard against bears and wolves than it is to guard
against the human beasts of prey that roam this island.
In this highly civilized city every lower window has to
be barred, every door locked and bolted ; even door-
mats, not worth twenty-five cents, you will see chained
to the steps. Stop for a moment in a crowd and your
watch is gone as if by magic ; shirt-studs are taken
from their owners' bosoms, and ear-rings cut from la-
dies' ears. Even a standing army of policemen do not
prevent highway robbery; there are populous districts
that to walk through after nightfall is a risk, and where
you have far more need to go armed and to be wary
than in the backwoods. There are dens into which men
are lured only to be drugged and robbed, sometimes to
be murdered. All the resources of science and inven-
tive genius are exhausted in making burglar proof
strong-rooms and safes, yet, as the steel plate becomes
thicker and harder, so does the burglar's tool become
keener. If the combination lock can not be picked, it
is blown open. If not a crack large enough for the in-
troduction of powder is left, then the air-pump is ap-
plied and a vacuum is created. So that those who in
the heart of civilization would guard their treasures
7A/E CATVZZZZA 7"ZOAV 7"HA 7" ZS. 75
safely must come back to the most barbarous device,
and either themselves, or by proxy, sleeplessly stand
guard. What sort of a civilization is this In what
does civilization essentially consist if not in civility—
that is to say, in respect for the rights of person and of
property 2
Yet this is not all, nor the worst. These are but the
grosser forms of that spirit that in the midst of our civ-
ilization compels every one to stand on guard. What is
the maxim of business intercourse among the most
highly respectable classes P. That if you are Swindled it
will be your own fault ; that you must treat every man
you have dealings with as though he but wanted the
chance to cheat and rob you. Caveat emptor. “Let the
buyer beware.” If a man steal a few dollars he may
stand a chance of going to the penitentiary—I read the
other day of a man who was sent to the penitentiary for
stealing four cents from a horse-car company. But, if
he steal a million by business methods, he is courted and
flattered, even though he steal the poor little savings
which washerwomen and sewing-girls have brought to
him in trust, even though he rob widows and orphans
of the security which dead men have struggled and
stinted to provide.
This is a most Christian city. There are churches
and churches. All sorts of churches, where are preached
all sorts of religions, save that which once in Galilee
taught the arrant socialistic doctrine that it is easier for
a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a
rich man to enter the kingdom of God ; all save that
which once in Jerusalem drove the money-changers
from the temple. Churches of brown and gray and
yellow stone, lifting toward heaven in such noble sym-
metry that architecture seems invocation and benison ;
where, on stained-glass windows, glow angel and apos-
tle, and the entering light is dimmed to a soft glory ;
where such music throbs and supplicates and bursts in
joy as once in St. Sophia ravished the souls of heathen
Northmen; churches where richly cushioned pews let
for the very highest prices, and the auctioneer deter-
mines who shall sit in the foremost seats ; churches out-
side of which on Sunday stand long lines of carriages,
on each carriage a coachman, And there are white.
76 7 HE LA WD QUESTION:
marble churches, so pure and shapely that the stone
seems to have bloomed and flowered—the concrete ex-
pression of a grand, Sweet thought. Churches restful
to the very eye, and into which the weary and heavy-
laden can enter and join in the worship of their Creator
for no larger an admission fee than it costs on the
Bowery to see the bearded lady or the Zulu giant eight
feet high. And then there are mission churches, run
expressly for poor people, where it does not cost a cent.
There is no lack of churches. There are, in fact, more
churches than there are people who care to attend them.
And there are likewise Sunday-schools, and big relig-
ious “book concerns,” and tract societies, and societies
for spreading the light of the Gospel among the heathen
in foreign parts.
Yet, land a heathen on the Battery with money in his
pocket, and he will be robbed of the last cent of it be-
fore he is a day older. “By their fruits shall ye know
them.” I wonder whether they who send missionaries
to the heathen ever read the daily papers. I think I
could take a file of these newspapers, and from their
daily chroniclings match anything that could be told in
the same period of any heathen community—at least,
of any heathen community in a like state of peace and
prosperity. I think I could take a file of these papers,
and match, horror for horror, all that returning mis-
sionaries have to tell—even to the car of Juggernaut or
infants tossed from mothers' arms into the sacred river;
even to Ashantee “customs” or cannibalistic feasts.
I do not say that such things are because of civiliza-
tion, or because of Christianity. On the contrary, I
point to them as inconsistent with civilization, as in-
compatible with Christianity. They show that our civ-
ilization is one-sided and can not last as at present
based ; they show that our so-called Christian com-
munities are not Christian at all. I believe a civiliza-
tion is possible in which all could be civilized—in which
such things would be impossible. But it must be a
civilization based on justice and acknowledging the
equal rights of all to natural opportunities. I believe
that there is in true Christianity a power to regenerate
the world. But it must be a Christianity that attacks
* ~ * ~ *
7"RöA COAVSAEA? MA 7'/S//. *7
them. The religion which allies itself with injustice to
preach down the natural aspirations of the masses is
worse than atheism. •
CHAPTER XVI.
TRUE CONSERVATISM.
There are those who may look on this little book as
very radical, in the bad sense they attach to the word.
They mistake. This is, in the true sense of the word, a
most conservative little book. I do not appeal to prej-
udice and passion. I appeal to intelligence. I do not
incite to strife ; I seek to prevent strife.
That the civilized world is on the verge of the most
tremendous struggle, which, according to the frankness
and sagacity with which it is met, will be a struggle of
ideas or a struggle of actual physical force, calling
upon all the potent agencies of destruction which
modern invention has discovered, every sign of the
times portends. The voices that proclaim the eve of
revolution are in the air. Steam and electricity are not
merely transporting goods and carrying messages.
They are everywhere changing social and industrial or-
ganization ; they are everywhere stimulating thought,
and arousing new hopes and fears and desires and pas-
sions; they are everywhere breaking down the barriers
that have separated men, and integrating nations into
one vast organism, through which the same pulses
throb and the same nerves tingle.
The present situation in Great Britain is full of dan-
gers, of dangers graver and nearer than those who there
are making history are likely to see. Who in France,
a century ago, foresaw the drama of blood so soon to
open 2 Who in the United States dreamed of what
was coming till the cannon-shot rang and the flag fell
on Sumter 2 How confidently we said, “The American
people are too intelligent, too practical, to go to cut-
ting each other's throats” . How confidently we relied
upon the strong common-sense of the great masses,
upon the great business interests, upon the univer-
78 7A/A. f. AMD OUEST/OM.
sai desire to make money! “War does not pay,” we
said, “therefore war is impossible.” A shot rang over
Charleston harbor; a bit of bunting dropped, and, riven
into two hostile camps, a nation sprang to its feet to
close in the death lock.
And to just such a point are events hurrying in Great
Britain to day. History repeats itself, and what hap-
pened a century ago on one side of the English Chan-
nel is beginning again on the other. Already has the
States General met, and the Third Estate put on their
hats. Already Necker is in despair. Already has the
/it de justice been held, and the Tennis Court been
locked, and ball-cartridge been served to the Swiss
Guard | For the moment the forces of reaction tri-
umph. Davitt is snatched to prison; a “Liberal ” gov-
ernment carries coercion by a tremendous majority, and
the most despotic powers are invoked to make possible
the eviction of Irish peasants. The order of Warsaw is
to reign in Ireland, and the upholders of ancient wrong
deem it secure again, as the wave that was mounting
seems sweeping back. Let them wait a little and they
will see. For again the wave will mount, and higher
and higher, and soon the white foam will seethe and
hiss on its toppling crest. It is not true conservatism
which cries “Peace peace ” when there is no peace ;
which, like the ostrich, sticks its head in the sand and
fancies itself secure ; which would compromise matters
by putting more coal in the furnace, and hanging
heavier weights on the safety-valve That alone is
true conservatism which would look facts in the face,
which would reconcile opposing forces on the only
basis on which reconciliation is possible—that of jus-
tice.
I speak again of Great Britain, but I speak with ref-
erence to the whole modern world. The true nature of
the inevitable conflict with which modern civilization
is everywhere beginning to throb, can, it seems to me,
best be seen in the United States, and in the newer
States even more clearly than in the older States.
That intelligent Englishmen imagine that in the de-
mocratization of political institutions, in free trade in
land, or in peasant proprietorship, can be found any
solution of the difficulties which are confronting them,
7% UAE COAWSAZA WA 7/SM. 79
is because they do not see what may be seen in the
United States by whoever will look. That intelligent
Americans imagine that by these questions which are
so menacingly presenting themselves in Europe their
peace is to be unvexed, is because they shut their eyes to
what is going on around them, because they attribute
to themselves and their institutions what is really due
to conditions now rapidly passing away—to the sparse-
ness of population and the cheapness of land. Yet it is
here, in this American Republic, that the true nature of
that inevitable conflict now rapidly approaching which
must determine the fate of modern civilization may be
most clearly seen.
We have here abolished all hereditary privileges and
legal distinctions of class. Monarchy, aristocracy, prel-
acy, we have swept them all away. We have carried
mere political democracy to its ultimate. Every child
born in the United States may aspire to be President.
Every man, even though he be a tramp or a pauper,
has a vote, and one man's vote counts for as much as any
other man's vote. Before the law all citizens are abso-
lutely equal. In the name of the people all laws run.
They are the source of all power, the fountain of all
honor. In their name and by their will all government
is carried on ; the highest officials are but their servants.
Primogeniture and entail we have abolished wherever
they existed. We have and have had free trade in land.
We started with something infinitely better than any
scheme of peasant proprietorship which it is possible to
carry into effect in Great Britain. We have had for
our public domain the best part of an immense conti-
nent. We have had the pre-emption law and the home-
stead law. It has been our boast that here every one who
wished it could have a farm. We have had full liberty
of speech and of the press. We have not merely com-
mon Schools, but high Schools and universities, open to
all who may choose to attend. Yet here the same social
difficulties apparent on the other side of the Atlantic
are beginning to appear. It is already clear that our
democracy is a vain pretence, our make-believe of
equality a sham and a fraud.
Already are the sovereign people becoming but a roi
fainéant, like the Merovingian kings of France, like the
86 7 H.A. LA WD QUEST/OM.
Mikados of Japan. The shadow of power is theirs;
but the substance of power is being grasped and wielded
by the bandit chiefs of the stock exchange, the robber
leaders who organize politics into machines. In any
matter in which they are interested, the little finger
of the great corporations is thicker than the loins of
the people. Is it sovereign States or is it railroad cor-
porations that are really represented in the elective
Senate which we have substituted for an hereditary
House of Lords 2 Where is the count or marquis or
duke in Europe who wields such power as is wielded
by such simple citizens as Our Stanfords, Goulds, and
Vanderbilts 2 What does legal equality amount to,
when the fortunes of some citizens can only be esti-
mated in hundreds of millions, and other citizens have
nothing 2 What does the suffrage amount to when, un-
der threat of discharge from employment, citizens can
be forced to vote as their employers dictate 2 when
votes can be bought on election day for a few dollars
apiece 2 If there are citizens so dependent that they
must vote as their employers wish, so poor that a few
dollars on election day seem to them more than any
higher consideration, then giving them votes simply
adds to the political power of wealth, and universal
suffrage becomes the surest basis for the establishment
of tyranny. “Tyranny " There is a lesson in the
very word. What are our American bosses but the ex-
act antitypes of the Greek tyrants, from whom the
word comes 2 They who gave the word tyrant its mean-
ing did not claim to rule by right divine. They were
simply the Grand Sachems of Greek Tammanys, the
organizers of Hellenic “stalwart machines.”
Even if universal history did not teach the lesson, it
is in the United States already becoming very evident
that political equality can only continue to exist upon
a basis of social equality ; that where the disparity in
the distribution of wealth increases, political democracy
only makes easier the concentration of power, and must
inevitably lead to tyranny and anarchy. And it is al-
ready evident that there is nothing in political de-
mocracy, nothing in popular education, nothing in any
of our American institutions, to prevent the most enor-
mous disparity in the distribution of wealth. Nowhere
7"R UE COMSEAE VA 7T/SM. 81
in the world are such great fortunes growing up as in the
United States. Considering that the average income
of the working masses of our people is only a few hun-
dred dollars a year, a fortune of a million dollars is a
monstrous thing—a more monstrous and dangerous
thing under a democratic government than anywhere
else. Yet fortunes of ten and twelve million dollars are
with us ceasing to be noticeable. We already have
citizens whose wealth can only be estimated in hun-
dreds of millions, and before the end of the century, if
present tendencies continue, we are likely to have for-
tunes estimated in thousands of millions—such mon-
strous fortunes as the world has never seen since the
growth of similar fortunes ate out the heart of Rome.
And the necessary correlative of the growth of such for-
tunes is the impoverishment and loss of independence
on the part of the masses. These great aggregations of
wealth are like great trees, which strike deep roots and
spread wide branches, and which, by sucking up the
moisture from the soil and intercepting the sunshine,
stunt and kill the vegetation around them. When a capi-
tal of a million dollars comes into competition with capi-
tals of thousands of dollars, the smaller capitalists must
be driven out of the business or destroyed. With great
capital nothing can compete Save great capital. Hence,
every aggregation of wealth increases the tendency to
the aggregation of wealth, and decreases the possibility
of the employee ever becoming more than an employee,
compelling him to compete with his fellows as to who
will work cheapest for the great capitalist—a competi-
tion that can have but one result, that of forcing wages
to the minimum at which the supply of labor can be
kept up. Where we are is not so important as in what
direction we are going, and in the United States all ten-
dencies are clearly in this direction. A while ago, and any
journeyman shoemaker could set up in business for him-
self with the savings of a few months. But now the
operative shoemaker could not in a lifetime save enough
from his wages to go into business for himself. And, now
that great capital has entered agriculture, it must be with
the same results. The large farmer, who can buy the
latest machinery at the lowest cash prices and use it to the
best advantage, who can run a straight furrow for miles.
6
82 7"HE LA WD QUEST/OM.
who can make special rates with railroad companies,
take advantage of the market, and sell in large lots for
the least Commission, must drive out the Small farmer
of the early American type just as the shoe factory has
driven out the journeyman shoemaker. And this is
going on to-day.
There is nothing unnatural in this. On the contrary,
it is in the highest degree natural. Social development
is in accordance with certain immutable laws. And the
law of development, whether it be the development of
a solar system, of the tiniest organism, or of a human SO-
ciety, is the law of integration. It is in obedience to
this law—a law evidently as all-compelling as the law of
gravitation—that these new agencies, which so powerfully
stimulate social growth, tend to the specialization and
interdependence of industry. It is in obedience to this
law that the factory is superseding the independent me-
chanic, the large farm is swallowing up the little one,
the big store shutting up the small one, that corpora-
tions are arising that dwarf the State, and that popula-
tion tends more and more to concentrate in cities.
Men must work together in larger and in more closely re-
lated groups. Production must be on a greater Scale. The
only question is, whether the relation in which men are
thus drawn together and compelled to act together shall
be the natural relation of interdependence in equality.
or in the unnatural relation of dependence upon a mas-
ter. If the one, then may civilization advance in what
is evidently the natural order, each step leading to a
higher step. If the other, then what Nature has in-
tended as a blessing becomes a curse, and a condition
of inequality is produced which will inevitably destroy
civilization. Every new invention but hastens the
catastrophe. -
Now, all this we may deduce from natural laws as
fixed and certain as the law of gravitation. And all this
we may see going on to-day. This is the reason why
modern progress, great as it has been, fails to relieve
poverty; this is the secret of the increasing discontent
which pervades every civilized country. Under present
conditions, with land treated as private property, mate-
riai progress is developing two diverse tendencies, two
opposing currents. On the one side, the tendency of
7 'A' UAE COAVSAEAE PA 7/SM. 83
increasing population and of all improvement in the
arts of production is to build up enormous fortunes, to
wipe out the intermediate classes, and to crowd down
the masses to a level of lower wages and greater de-
pendence. On the other hand, by bringing men closer
together, by stimulating thought, by creating new wants,
by arousing new ambitions, the tendency of modern
progress is to make the masses discontented with their
condition, to feel bitterly its injustice. The result can
be predicted just as certainly as the result can be pre-
dicted when two trains are rushing toward each other
On the same track.
This thing is absolutely certain : Private property in
land blocks the way of advancing civilization. The two
can not long coexist. Either private property in land
must be abolished, or, as has happened again and again
in the history of mankind, civilization must again turn
back in anarchy and bloodshed. Let the remaining
years of the nineteenth century bear me witness. Even
now, I believe, the inevitable struggle has begun. It is
not conservatism which would ignore such a tremendous
fact. It is the blindness that invites destruction. He
that is truly conservative let him look the facts in the
face ; let him speak frankly and dispassionately. This
is the duty of the hour. For, when a great social ques-
tion presses for settlement, it is only for a little while
that the voice of Reason can be heard. The masses of
men hardly think at any time. It is difficult even in
sober moments to get them to calmly reason. But when
passion is roused, then they are like a herd of stampeded
bulls. I do not fear that present social adjustments can
continue. That is impossible. What I fear is that the
dams may hold till the flood rises to fury. What I fear
is that dogged resistance on the one side may kindle a
passionate sense of wrong on the other. What I fear
are the demagogues and the accidents.
The present condition of all civilized countries is that
of increasing unstable equilibrium. In steam and elec-
tricity, and all the countless inventions which they typify,
mighty forces have entered the world. If rightly used,
they are our servants, more potent to do our bidding
than the genii of Arabian story. If wrongly used, they,
too, must turn to monsters of destruction. They re-
84 THE LAWD QUEST/6M.
quire and will compel great social changes. That we
may already see. Operating under social institutions
which are based on natural justice, which acknowledge
the equal rights of all to the material and opportunities
of nature, their elevating power will be equally exerted,
and industrial organization will pass naturally into that
of a vast co-operative society. Operating under social
institutions which deny natural justice by treating land
as private property, their power is unequally exerted,
and tends, by producing inequality, to engender forces
that will tear and rend and shatter. The old bottles
can not hold the new wine. This is the ferment which
throughout the civilized world is everywhere beginning.
CHAPTER XVII.
IN HOC SIGNO VINCES.
Let me recapitulate.
What I want to impress upon those who may read
this paper is this: -
The land question is nowhere a mere local question ;
it is a universal question. It involves the great problem
of the distribution of wealth, which is everywhere forc-
ing itself upon attention.
It can not be settled by measures which in their na-
ture can have but local application. It can only be
settled by measures which in their nature will apply
everywhere.
It can not be settled by half-way measures. It can
only be settled by the acknowledgment of equal rights
to land. Upon this basis it can be settled easily and
permanently.
If the Irish reformers take this ground, they will
make their fight the common fight of all the peoples,
they will concentrate strength and divide opposition.
They will turn the flank of the system that oppresses
them, and awake the struggle in its very intrenchments
They will rouse against it a force that is like the force of
rising tides. -
What I urge the men of Ireland to do is to proclaim,
A Hoc S/GAſo v/WCAES. 85
without limitation or evasion, that the land, of natural
right, is the common property of the whole people, aud
to propose practical measures which will recognize thys
right in all countries as well as in Ireland.
What I urge the Land Leagues of the United States to
do is to announce this great principle as of universal
application ; to give their movement a reference to
America as well as to Ireland ; to broaden and deepen
and strengthen it by making it a movement for the re-
generation of the world—a movement which shall con-
centrate and give shape to aspirations that are stirring
among all nations.
Ask not for Ireland mere charity or sympathy. Let
her call be the call of fraternity : “For yourselves, O
brothers, as well as for us !” Let her rallying cry awake
all who slumber, and rouse to a common struggle all
who are oppressed. Let it breathe not old hates; let it
ring and echo with the new hope
In many lands her sons are true to her; under many
skies her daughters burn with the love of her. Lo! the
ages bring their opportunity. Let those who would
honor her bear her banner to the front
The harp and the shamrock, the golden sunburst on
the field of living green ſ emblems of a country without
nationality; standard of a people down-trodden and op-
pressed The hour has come when they may lead the
van of the great world-struggle. Types of harmony and
of ever-springing hope, of light and of lifel The hour
has come when they may stand for something higher
than local patriotism ; something grander than national
independence. The hour has come when they may stand
forth to speak the world's hope, to lead the world's ad-
vance
Torn away by pirates, tending in a strange land a hea-
then master's swine, the slave boy, with the spirit of
Christ in his heart, praying in the snow for those who
had enslaved him, and returning to bring to his op-
pressors the message of the Gospel, returning with good
to give where evil had been received, to kindle in the
darkness a great light—this is Ireland's patron saint.
In his spirit let Ireland's struggle be. Not merely
through Irish vales and hamlets, but into England, into
Scotland, into Wales, wherever our common tongue is
86 7//E ZAND OUAES77OAV.
spoken, let the torch be carried and the word be
preached. And beyond The brotherhood of man
stops not with differences of speech any more than with
seas or mountain chains. A century ago it was ours to
speak the ringing word. Then it was France's. Now it
may be Ireland's, if her sons be true.
But wherever, or by whom, the word must be spoken,
the standard will be raised. No matter what the Irish
leaders do or do not do, it is too late to permanently set-
tle the question on any basis short of the recognition of
equal natural right. And, whether the Land Leagues
move forward or slink back, the agitation must spread
to this side of the Atlantic. The Republic, the true
Republic, is not yet here. But her birth struggle must
soon begin. Already, with the hope of her, men's
thoughts are stirring.
Not a republic of landlords and peasants; not a re-
public of millionaires and tramps; not a republic in
which some are masters and some serve. But a repub-
lic of equal citizens, where competition becomes co-
operation, and the interdependence of all gives true
independence to each ; where moral progress goes
hand-in-hand with intellectual progress, and material
progress elevates and enfranchises even the poorest
and weakest and lowliest. -
And the gospel of deliverance, let us not forget it : it
is the gospel, of love, not of hate. He whom it eman-
cipates will know neither Jew nor Gentile, nor Irishman
nor Englishman, nor German nor Frenchman, nor
European nor American, nor difference of color nor of
race, nor animosities of class nor condition. Let us set
our feet on old prejudices, let us bury the old hates.
There have been “Holy Alliances” of kings. Let us
strive for the Holy Alliance of the people.
Liberty, equality, fraternity Write them on the
banners. Let them be for sign and countersign. With-
out equality, liberty can not be ; without fraternity,
neither equality nor liberty can be achieved.
Liberty—the full freedom of each bounded only by
the equal freedom of every other.
Equality—the equal right of each to the use and en-
joyment of all natural opportunities, to all the essentials
of happy, healthful, human life
AV AIOC S/GAVO IV/AWCES. 87
Fraternity—that sympathy which links together those
who struggle in a noble cause; that would live and let
live; that would help as well as be helped; that, in seek-
ing the good of all, finds the highest good of each
“By this sign shall ye conquer l’”
“ We hold these truths to be self-evident: 7%af al/ men
are created equal; that they are endozwed by their Creator
with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life,
/iberty, and the pursuit of happiness /’’
It is over a century since these words rang out. It is
time to give them their full, true meaning. Let the stand-
ard be lifted that all may see it; let the advance be sounded
that all may hear it. Let those who would fall back, fall
back. Let those who would oppose, oppose. Everywhere
are those who will rally. The stars in their courses fight
against Sisera !
HENRY GEORGE.
NEw York, February 28, 1881.
PROPERTY IN LAND
PROPERTY IN LAND
A PASSAGE-AT-ARMS
BETWEEN THE
DUKE OF ARGYLL AND HENRY GEORGE
NEW YORK
CHARLES L. WEBSTER & COMPANY
1893
C O N TENTS.
I.—“THE PROPHET of SAN FRANCIsco,” by the Duke of Argyll,
in the Nineteenth Century for April, 1884.
II.—“THE REDUCTION TO INIQUITY,” by Henry George, in the
Nineteenth Century for July, 1884, from advance sheets.
PEROPERTY IN LAND.
I.
THE PROPELET OF SAN FRANCISCO.
BY THE DURE OF ARGYLL.
THERE are some advantages in being a citizen—-even
a very humble citizen—in the Republic of Letters. If
any man has ever written anything on matters of serious
concern, which others have read with interest, he will
very soon find himself in contact with curious diversities
of mind. Subtle sources of sympathy will open up be-
fore him in contrast with sources, not less subtle, of an-
tipathy, and both of them are often interesting and in-
structive in the highest degree.
A good many years ago a friend of mine, whose
opinion I greatly value, was kind enough to tell me of
his approval of a little book which I had then lately
published. As he was a man of pure taste, and
naturally much more inclined to criticism than assent,
his approval gave me pleasure. But being a man also
very honest and outspoken, he took care to explain that
his approval was not unqualified. He liked the whole
book except one chapter, “in which,” he added, “it
seems to me there is a good deal of nonsense.”
There was no need to ask him what that chapter was.
I knew it very well. It could be none other than a
8 PROPERTY IN LAND.
chapter called “Law in Politics,” which was devoted to
the question how far, in human conduct and affairs, we
can trace the Reign of Law in the same sense, or in a
sense very closely analogous to that in which we can
trace it in the physical sciences. There were several
things in that chapter which my friend was not predis-
posed to like. In the first place he was an active
politician, and such men are sure to feel the reasoning to
be unnatural and unjust which tends to represent all the
activities of their life as more or less the results of cir-
cumstance. In the second place, he was above all other
things a Free Trader, and the governing idea of that
school is that every attempt to interfere by law with
anything connected with trade or manufacture is a folly
if not a crime. Now, one main object of my “non-
sense” chapter was to show that this doctrine is not true
as an absolute proposition. It drew a line between two
provinces of legislation, in one of which such inter-
ference had indeed been proved to be mischievous, but
in the other of which interference had been equally
proved to be absolutely required. Protection, it was
shown, had been found to be wrong in all attempts to
regulate the value or the price of anything. But Pro-
tection, it was also shown, had been found to be right
and necessary in defending the interests of life, health,
and morals. As a matter of historical fact, it was
pointed out that during the present century there had
been two steady movements on the part of Parliament—
one a movement of retreat, the other a movement of
advance. Step by step legislation had been abandoned
in all endeavors to regulate interests purely economic ;
while, step by step, not less steadily, legislation had been
adopted more and more extensively for the regulation of
ilatters in which those higher interests were concerned.
THE PROPHIET OF SAN FRANCISCO. 9
Moreover, I had ventured to represent both these move-
ments as equally important—the movement in favor of
Protection in one direction being quite as valuable as the
movement against Protection in another direction. It
was not in the nature of things that my friend should
admit this equality, or even any approach to a compari-
son between the two movements. In promoting one of
them he had spent his life, and the truths it represented
were to him the subject of passionate conviction. Of
the other movement he had been at best only a passive
spectator, or had followed its steps with cold and critical
toleration. To place them on anything like the same
level as steps of advance in the science of government,
could not but appear to him as a proposition involving
“a good deal of nonsense.” But critics may them-
selves be criticised ; and sometimes authors are in the
happy position of seeing behind both the praise and the
blame they get. In this case I am unrepentant. I am
firmly convinced that the social and political value of the
principle which has led to the repeal of all laws for the
regulation of price is not greater than the value of the
principle which has led to the enactment of many laws
for the regulation of labor. If the Factory Acts and
many others of the like kind had not been passed we
should for many years have been hearing a hundred
“bitter cries’’ for every one which assails us now, and
the social problems which still confront us would have
been much more difficult and dangerous than they are.
Certain it is that if the train of thought which led up
to this conclusion was distasteful to some minds, it
turned out to be eminently attractive to many others.
And of this, some years later, I had a curious proof.
From the other side of the world, and from a perfect
stranger, there came a courteous letter accompanied by
10 PROPERTY IN LAND.
the present of a book. The author had read mine, and
he sent his own. In spite of prepossessions, he had con-
fidence in a candid hearing. The letter was from Mr.
Henry George, and the book was “Progress and
Poverty.” Both were then unknown to fame ; nor was
it possible for me fully to appreciate the compliment
conveyed until I found that the book was directed to
prove that almost all the evils of humanity are to be
traced to the very existence of landowners, and that by
divine right land could only belong to everybody in
general and to nobody in particular.
The credit of being open to conviction is a great
credit, and even the heaviest drafts upon it cannot well
be made the subject of complaint. And so I could not
be otherwise than flattered when this appeal in the sphere
of politics was followed by another in the sphere of
Science. Another author was good enough to present
me with his book ; and I found that it was directed to
prove that all the errors of modern physical philosophy
arise from the prevalent belief that our planet is a globe.
In reality it is flat. Elaborate chapters, and equally
elaborate diagrams are devoted to the proof. At first I
thought that the argument was a joke, like Archbishop
Whately’s “Historic Doubts.” But I soon saw that
the author was quite as earnest as Mr. Henry George.
Lately I have seen that both these authors have been
addressing public meetings with great success; and con-
sidering that all obvious appearances and the language
of common life are against the accepted doctrine of
Copernicus, it is perhaps not surprising that the popular
audiences which have listened to the two reformers
have evidently been almost as incompetent to detect the
blunders of the one as to see through the logical fallacies
of the other, But the Californian philosopher has one
THE PROPEIET OF SAN FRANCISCO, 11
immense advantage. Nobody has any personal interest
in believing that the world is flat. But many persons
may have an interest, very personal indeed, in believing
that they have a right to appropriate a share in their
neighbor’s vineyard.
There are, at least, a few axioms in life on which we
are entitled to decline discussion. Even the most scep-
tical minds have done so. The mind of Voltaire was
certainly not disposed to accept without question any of
the beliefs that underlay the rotten political system
which he saw and hated. He was one of those who
assailed it with every weapon, and who ultimately over-
threw it. Among his fellows in that work there was a
perfect revelry of rebellion and of unbelief. In the
grotesque procession of new opinions which had begun
to pass across the stage while he was still upon it, this
particular opinion against property in land had been
advocated by the famous “Jean Jacques.” Voltaire
turned his powerful glance upon it, and this is how he
treated it : *
IB. Avez-vous oublié que Jean-Jacques, un des pères de l'Eglise
Moderne, a dit, que le premier qui osa clore et cultiver un terrain fut
l'ennemi du genre humain, qu'il fallait l'exterminer, et que les fruits
sont à tous, et que la terre n'est à personne N'avons-nous pas déjà
examiné ensemble cette belle proposition si utile à la Société?
A. Quel est ce Jean-Jacques 2 Il faut que ce soit quelque Hun, bel
esprit, qui ait &crit cette impertinence abominable, ou quelque mau-
vais plaisant, buffo magro, qui ait woulu rire de ce que le monde en-
tier a de plus sérieux. . .
For my own part, however, I confess that the mock-
ing spirit of Voltaire is not the spirit in which I am
ever tempted to look at the fallacies of Communism.
Apart altogether from the appeal which was made to me
* Dictionnaire Philosophique, 1764, art, “Loi Naturelle,”
12 - PROPERTY IN LAND.
by this author, I have always felt the high interest which
belongs to those fallacies, because of the protean forms
in which they tend to revive and reappear, and because
of the call they make upon us from time to time to ex-
amine and identify the fundamental facts which do really
govern the condition of mankind. Never, perhaps, have
communistic theories assumed a form more curious, or
lent themselves to more fruitful processes of analysis,
than in the writings of Mr. Henry George. These writ-
ings now include a volume on “Social Problems,” pub-
lished recently. It represents the same ideas as those
which inspire the work on “Progress and Poverty.”
They are often expressed in almost the same words, but
they exhibit some development and applications which
are of high interest and importance. In this paper I
shall refer to both, but for the present I can do no more
than group together some of the more prominent feat-
ures of this new political philosophy.
In the first place, it is not a little remarkable to find
one of the most extreme doctrines of Communism advo-
cated by a man who is a citizen of the United States.
We have been accustomed to associate that country with
boundless resources, and an almost inexhaustible future.
It has been for two centuries, and it still is, the land of
refuge and the land of promise to millions of the human
race. And among all the States which are there
“united,” those which occupy the Far West are credited
with the largest share in this abundant present, and this
still more abundant future. Yet it is out of these United
States, and out of the one State which, perhaps, above
all others, has this fame of opulence, that we have a soli-
tary voice, prophesying a future of intolerable woes.
Be declares that all the miseries of the Old World are
already firmly established in the New. He declares that
THE PROPEIET OF SAN FRANCISCO. 13
they are increasing in an ever-accelerating ratio, growing
with the growth of the people, and strengthening with
its apparent strength. He tells us of crowded cities, of
pestilential rooms, of men and women struggling for
employments however mean, of the breathlessness of
competition, of the extremes of poverty and of wealth—
in short, of all the inequalities of condition, of all the
pressures and Suffocations which accompany the struggle
for existence in the oldest and most crowded societies in
the world.
I do not pretend to accept this picture as an accurate
representation of the truth. At the best it is a picture
only of the darkest shadows with a complete omission of
the lights. The author is above all things a Pessimist,
and he is under obvious temptations to adopt this kind
of coloring. He has a theory of his own as to the only
remedy for all the evils of humanity ; and this remedy
he knows to be regarded with aversion both by the intel-
lect and by the conscience of his countrymen. He can
only hope for success by trying to convince Society that
it is in the grasp of some deadly malady. Large allow-
ance must be made for this temptation. Still, after
making every allowance, it remains a most remarkable
fact that such a picture can be drawn by a citizen of the
United States. There can be no doubt whatever that at
least as regards many of the great cities of the Union, it
is quite as true a picture of them as it would be of the
great cities of Europe. And even as regards the popula-
tion of the States as a whole, other observers have re-
ported on the feverish atmosphere which accompanies its
eager pursuit of wealth, and on the strain which is
everywhere manifest for the attainment of standards of
living and of enjoyment which are never reached except
by a very few. So far, at least, we may accept Mr.
14 DROPERTY IN LANI).
George's representations as borne out by independent
evidence.
But here we encounter another most remarkable cir-
cumstance in Mr. George's books. The man who gives
this dark—this almost black—picture of the tendencies
of American progress, is the same man who rejects with
indignation the doctrine that population does everywhere
tend to press in the same way upon the limits of subsist-
ence. This, as is well known, is the general proposition
which is historically connected with the name of Malthus,
although other writers before him had unconsciously felt
and assumed its truth. Since his time it has been almost
universally admitted not as a theory but as a fact, and
one of the most clearly ascertained of all the facts of
economic science. But, like all Communists, Mr.
George hates the very name of Malthus. He admits and
even exaggerates the fact of pressure as applicable to the
people of America. He admits it as applicable to the
people of Europe, and of India, and of China. He
admits it as a fact as applicable more or less obviously to
every existing population of the globe. But he will not
allow the fact to be generalized into a law. He will not
allow this—because the generalization suggests a cause
which he denies, and shuts out another cause which he
asserts. But this is not a legitimate reason for refusing
to express phenomena in terms as wide and general as
their actual occurrence. Never mind causes until we
have clearly ascertained facts; but when these are clearly
ascertained let us record them fearlessly in terms as wide
as the truth demands. If there is not a single popula-
tion on the globe which does not exhibit the fact of
pressure more or less severe on the limits of their actual
subsistence, let us at least recognize this fact in all its
breadth and sweep. The diversities of laws and institu.
THE PROPHET of SAN FRANCISCo. 15
tions, of habits and of manners, are almost infinite.
Yet amid all these diversities this one fact is universal.
Mr. George himself is the latest witness. He sees it to
be a fact—a terrible and alarming fact, in his opinion—
as applicable to the young and hopeful society of the
New World. In a country where there is no monarch,
no aristocracy, no ancient families, no entails of land,
no standing armies worthy of the name, no pensions, no
courtiers, where all are absolutely equal before the law,
there, even there—in this paradise of Democracy, Mr.
George tells us that the pressure of the masses upon the
means of living and enjoyment which are open to them
is becoming more and more severe, and that the inequal-
ities of men are becoming as wide and glaring as in the
oldest societies of Asia and of Europe.
The contrast between this wonderful confirmation of
Malthusian facts, and the vehement denunciation of
Malthusian “law,” is surely one of the curiosities of
literature. But the explanation is clear enough. Mr.
George sees that facts common to so many nations must
be due to some cause as common as the result. But, on
the other hand, it would not suit his theory to admit that
this cause can possibly be anything inherent in the con-
stitution of Man, or in the natural System under which
he lives. From this region, therefore, he steadily averts
his face. There are a good many other facts in human
nature and in human conditions that have this common
and universal character. There are a number of such
facts connected with the mind, another number con-
nected with the body, and still another number connected
with the opportunities of men. But all of these Mr.
George passes over—in order that he may fix attention
upon one solitary fact—namely, that in all nations in-
dividual men, and individual communities of men, have
16 PROPERTY IN LAND.
hitherto been allowed to acquire bits of land and to deal
with them as their own.
The distinction between Natural Law and Positive In-
stitution is indeed a distinction not to be neglected.
But it is one of the very deepest subjects in all philoso-
phy, and there are many indications that Mr. George has
dipped into its abysmal waters with the very shortest of
Sounding lines. Human laws are evolved out of human
instincts, and these are among the gifts of nature.
Reason may pervert them, and Reason is all the more
apt to do so when it begins to spin logical webs out of its
own bowels. But it may be safely said that in direct
proportion as human laws, and the accepted ideas on
which they rest, are really universal, in that same pro-
portion they have a claim to be regarded as really
natural, and as the legitimate expression of fundamental
truths. Sometimes the very men who set up as re-
formers against such laws, and denounce as “ stupid '’”
even the greatest nations which have abided by them,
are themselves unconsciously subject to the same ideas,
and are only working out of them some perverted appli-
cation.
For here, again, we come upon another wonderful
circumstance affecting Mr. George's writings. I have
spoken of Mr. George as a citizen of the United States,
and also as a citizen of the particular State of California.
In this latter capacity, as the citizen of a democratic
government, he is a member of that government, which
is the government of the whole people. Now, what is
the most striking feature about the power claimed by
that government, and actually exercised by it every day ?
* This is the epithet applied by Mr. George to the English people,
because they will persist in allowing what all other nations have
equally allowed.
THE PROPEIET OF SAN FRANCISCO. 17
It is the power of excluding the whole human race abso-
lutely, except on its own conditions, from a large portion
of the earth’s surface—a portion so large that it embraces
no less than ninety-nine millions of acres, or 156,000
square miles of plain and valley, of mountain and of hill,
of lake and river, and of estuaries of the sea. Yet the
community which claims and exercises this exclusive
ownership over this enormous territory is, as compared
with its extent, a mere handful of men. The whole
population of the State of California represents only the
fractional number of 5.5 to the square mile. It is less
than one quarter of the population of London. If the
whole of it could be collected into one place they would
hardly make a black spot in the enormous landscape if it
were swept by a telescope. Such is the little company
of men which claims to own absolutely and exclusively
this enormous territory. Yet it is a member of this
community who goes about the world preaching the
doctrine, as a doctrine of Divine right, that land is to be
as free as the atmosphere, which is the common property
of all, and in which no exclusive ownership can be
claimed by any. It is true that Mr. George does
denounce the conduct of his own Government in the
matter of its disposal of land. But strange to say, he
does not denounce it because it claims this exclusive
ownership. On the contrary, he denounces it because it
ever consents to part with it. Not the land only, but
the very atmosphere of California—to use his own
phraseology—is to be held so absolutely and so ex-
clusively as the property of this community, that it is
never to be parted with except on lease and for such
annual rent as the government may determine. Who
gave this exclusive ownership over this immense terri-
tory to this particular community ? Was it conquest ?
18 pIRO PERTY IN LANI).
And if so, may it not be as rightfully acquired by any
who are strong enough to seize it ! And if exclusive
ownership is conferred by conquest, then has it not been
open to every conquering army, and to every occupying
host in all ages and in all countries of the world, to
establish a similar ownership, and to deal with it as they
please ?
It is at this point that we catch sight of one aspect of
Mr. George's theory in which it is capable of at least a
rational explanation. The question how a comparatively
small community of men like the first gold-diggers of
California and their descendants can with best advantage
use or employ its exclusive claims of ownership over so
vast an area, is clearly quite an open question. It is one
thing for any given political society to refuse to divide
its vacant territory among individual owners. It is quite
another thing for a political society, which for ages has
recognized such ownership and encouraged it, to break
faith with those who have acquired such ownership and
have lived and labored, and bought and sold, and willed
upon the faith of it. If Mr. George can persuade the
State of which he is a citizen, and the Government of
which he is in this sense a member, that it would be
best never any more to sell any bit of its unoccupied
territory to any individual, by all means let him try to
do so, and some plausible arguments might be used in
favor of such a course. But there is a strong presump-
tion against it and him. The question of the best
method of disposing of such territory has been before
every one of our great colonies, and before the United
States for several generations; and the universal instinct
of them all has been that the individual ownership of
iand is the one great attraction which they can hold out
to the settlers whom it is their highest interest to invite
THE PROPHET OF SAN FRANCISCO. 19
and to establish. They know that the land of a country
is never so well “nationalized '' as when it is committed
to the ownership of men whose interest it is to make the
most of it. They know that under no other inducement
could men be found to clear the soil from stifling forests, or
to water it from arid wastes, or to drain it from pestilen-
tial swamps, or to enclose it from the access of wild
animals, or to defend it from the assaults of Savage
tribes. Accordingly their verdict has been unanimous ;
and it has been given under conditions in which they
were free from all traditions except those which they
carried with them as parts of their own nature, in har-
mony and correspondence with the nature of things
around them. I do not stop to argue this question here ;
but I do stop to point out that both solutions of it—the
One quite as much as the other—involve the exclusive
occupation of land by individuals, and the doctrine of
absolute ownership vested in particular communities, as
against all the rest of mankind. Both are equally in-
compatible with the fustian which compares the exclusive
occupation of land to exclusive occupation of the atmos-
phere. Supposing that settlers could be found willing
to devote the years of labor and of skill which are neces-
sary to make wild soils productive, under no other
tenure than that of a long “improvement lease,” pay-
ing of course for some long period either no rent at all,
or else a rent which must be purely nominal ; supposing
this to be true, still equally the whole area of any given
region would soon be in the exclusive possession for long
periods of time of a certain number of individual
farmers, and would not be open to the occupation by the
poor of all the world. Thus the absolute ownership
which Mr. George declares to be blasphemous against
God and Nature, is still asserted on behalf of some mere
20 FROPERTY IN LAND.
fraction of the human race, and this absolute ownership
is again doled out to the members of this small com-
munity, and to them alone, in such shares as it considers
to be most remunerative to itself.
And here again, for the third time, we come upon a
most remarkable testimony to facts in Mr. George's
book, the import and bearing of which he does not ap-
parently perceive. Of course the question whether it is
most advantageous to any given society of men to own
and cultivate its own lands in severalty or in common, is
a question largely depending on the conduct and the
motives and the character of governments, as compared
with the conduct and the character and the motives of
individual men. In the disposal and application of
wealth, as well as in the acquisition of it, are men more
pure and honest when they act in public capacities as
members of a Government or of a Legislature, than
when they act in private capacities toward their fellow-
men 2 Is it not notoriously the reverse ? Is it not
obvious that men will do, and are constantly seen doing,
as politicians, what they would be ashamed to do in
private life 2 And has not this been proved under all
the forms which government has taken in the history of
political societies 2 Lastly, I will ask one other question
—Is it not true that, to say the very least, this inherent
tendency to corruption has received no check from the
democratic constitutions of those many “new worlds”
in which kings were left behind, and aristocracies have
not had time to be established ?
These are the very questions which Mr. George
answers with no faltering voice ; and it is impossible to
disregard his evidence. He declares over and over
again, in language of virtuous indignation, that govern-
ment in the United States is everywhere becoming more
THE PROPEIET OF SAN FRANCISCO. 21
and more corrupt. Not only are the Legislatures cor-
rupt, but that last refuge of virtue even in the worst
societies—the Judiciary—is corrupt also. In none of
the old countries of the world has the very name of
politician fallen so low as in the democratic communities
of America. Nor would it be true to say that it is the
wealthy classes who have corrupted the constituencies.
These—at least to a very large extent—are themselves
corrupt. Probably there is no sample of the Demos
more infected with corruption than the Demos of New
York. Its management of the municipal rates is alleged
to be a system of scandalous jobbery. Now, the won-
derful thing is that of all this Mr. George is thoroughly
aware. He sees it, he repeats it in every variety of form.
Let us hear a single passage : *
It behooves us to look facts in the face. The experiment of popu-
lar government in the United States is clearly a failure. Not that it
is a failure everywhere and in everything. An experiment of this
kind does not have to be fully worked out to be proved a failure.
But, speaking generally of the whole country, from the Atlantic to
the Pacific, and from the Lakes to the Gulf, our government by the
people has in large degree become, is in larger degree becoming,
government by the strong and unscrupulous.
Again, I say that it is fair to remember that Mr. George
is a Pessimist. But while remembering this, and making
every possible allowance for it, we must not less remem-
ber that his evidence does not stand alone. In the
United States, from citizens still proud of their country,
and out of the United States, from representative
Americans, I have been told of transactions from per-
sonal knowledge which conclusively indicated a condition
of things closely corresponding to the indictment of Mr.
George. At all events we cannot be wrong in our con-
* “Social Problems,” p. 22.
22 PROPERTY IN LAND.
clusion that it is not among the public bodies and
Governments of the States of America that we are to
look in that country for the best exhibitions of purity or
of virtue.
Yet it is to these bodies—legislative, administrative,
and judicial, of which he gives us such an account—that
Mr. George would confine the rights of absolute owner-
ship in the soil. It is these bodies that he would consti-
tute the sole and universal landlord, and it is to them he
would confide the duty of assessing and of spending the
rents of everybody all over the area of every State. He
tells us that a great revenue, fit for the support of some
such great rulers as have been common in the Old
World, could be afforded out of one half the “waste and
stealages” of such Municipalities as his own at San Fran-
cisco. What would be the “waste and stealages” of a
governing body having at its disposal the whole agricult-
ural and mining wealth of such States as California and
Texas, of Illinois and Colorado &
But this is not all. The testimony which is borne by
Mr. George as to what the governing bodies of America
now are is as nothing to the testimony of his own writ-
ings as to what they would be —if they were ever to
adopt his system, and if they were ever to listen to his
teaching. Like all Communists, he regards Society not
as consisting of individuals whose separate welfare is to
be the basis of the welfare of the whole, but as a great
abstract Personality, in which all power is to be centred,
and to which all separate rights and interests are to be
subordinate. If this is to be the doctrine, we might at
least have hoped that with such powers committed to
Governments, as against the individual, corresponding
duties and responsibilities, toward the individual, would
have been recognized as an indispensable accompani-
THE PROPHET OF SAN FRANCISCO. 23
ment. If, for example, every political society as a
whole is an abiding Personality, with a continuity of
rights over all its members, we might at least have ex-
pected that the continuous obligation of honor and good
faith would have been recognized as equally binding on
this Personality in all its relations with those who are
subject to its rule. But this is not at all Mr. George's
view. On the contrary, he preaches systematically not
only the high privilege, but the positive duty of re-
pudiation. He is not content with urging that no more
bits of unoccupied land should be ever sold, but he in-
sists upon it that the ownership of every bit already sold
shall be resumed without compensation to the settler who
has bought it, who has spent upon it years of labor, and
who from first to last has relied on the security of the
State and on the honor of its Government. There is no
mere practice of corruption which has ever been alleged
against the worst administrative body in any country
that can be compared in corruption with the desolating
dishonor of this teaching. In olden times, under violent
and rapacious rulers, the Prophets of Israel and of Judah
used to raise their voices against all forms of wrong and
robbery, and they pronounced a special benediction upon
him who sweareth to his own hurt and changeth not.
But the new Prophet of San Francisco is of a different
opinion. Ahab would have been saved all his trouble,
and Jezebel would have been saved all her tortuous in-
trigues if only they could have had beside them the
voice of Mr. Henry George. Elijah was a fool. What
right could Naboth have to talk about the “inheritance
of his fathers” . * His fathers could have no more right
to acquire the ownership of those acres on the Hill of
* 1 Kings 21 ; 3.
24 PROPERTY IN LAND.
Jezreel than he could have to continue in the usurpation
of it. No matter what might be his pretended title, no
man and no body of men could give it :—not Joshua nor
the Judges; not Saul nor David ; not Solomon in all
his glory—could “make sure” to Naboth’s fathers that
portion of God’s earth against the undying claims of the
head of the State, and of the representative of the whole
people of Israel. -
But now another vista of consequence opens up before
us. If the doctrine be established that no faith is to be
kept with the owners of land, will the same principle not
apply to tenancy as well as ownership ! If one genera-
tion cannot bind the next to recognize a purchase, can
one generation bind another to recognize a lease ? If
the one promise can be broken and ought to be broken,
why should the other be admitted to be binding 2 If
the accumulated value arising out of many years, or even
generations, of labor, can be and ought to be appro-
priated, is there any just impediment against seizing that
value every year as it comes to be 2 If this new gospel
be indeed gospel, why should not this Californian form
of “faith unfaithful ?” keep us perennially, and forever
“falsely true” 2
Nay, more, is there any reason why the doctrine of
repudiation should be confined to pledges respecting
either the tenancy or the ownership of land Ž This
question maturally arose in the minds of all who read
with any intelligence “Progress and Poverty” when it
first appeared. But the extent to which its immoral
doctrines might be applied was then a matter of infer-
ence only, however clear that inference might be. If
all owners of land, great and small, might be robbed, and
ought to be robbed of that which Society had from time
immemorial allowed them and encouraged them to ac-
THE PROPEIET OF SAN FRANCISCO. 25
quire and to call their own ; if the thousands of men,
women, and children who directly and indirectly live on
rent, whether in the form of returns to the improver, or
of mortgage to the capitalist, or jointure to the widow,
or portion to the children, are all equally to be ruined by
the confiscation of the fund on which they depend—are
there not other funds which would be all swept into the
same net of envy and of violence 2 In particular, what
is to become of that great fund on which also thousands
and thousands depend—men, women, and children, the
aged, the widow, and the orphan—the fund which the
State has borrowed and which constitutes the Debt of
Nations ? Even in “Progress and Poverty” there were
dark hints and individual passages which indicated the
goal of all its reasoning in this direction. But men’s
intellects just now are so flabby on these subjects, and
they are so fond of shaking their heads when property in
land is compared with property in other things, that
such suspicions and forebodings as to the issue of Mr.
George's arguments would to many have seemed over-
strained. Fortunately, in his later book he has had the
courage of his opinions, and the logic of false premises
has steeled his moral sense against the iniquity of even
the most dishonorable conclusions. All National Debts
are as unjust as property in land ; all such Debts are to
be treated with the sponge. As no faith is due to land-
owners, or to any who depend on their sources of in-
come, so neither is any faith to be kept with bond-
holders, or with any who depend on the revenues which
have been pledged to them. The Jew who may have
lent a million, and the small tradesman who may have
lent his little savings to the State—the trust-funds of
children and of widows which have been similarly lent—
are all equally to be the victims of repudiation. When
26 PROPERTY IN LAND.
we remember the enormous amount of the national debts
of Europe and of the American States, and the vast
number of persons of all kinds and degrees of wealth
whose property is invested in these “promises to pay,”
we can perhaps faintly imagine the ruin which would be
caused by the gigantic fraud recommended by Mr.
George. Take England alone. About seven hundred
and fifty millions is the amount of her Public Debt.
This great sum is held by about 181,721 persons, of
whom the immense majority—about 111,000—receive
dividends amounting to 400l. a year and under. Of
these, again, by far the greater part enjoy incomes of
less than 100l. a year. And then the same principle is
of course applicable to the debt of all public bodies;
those of the Municipalities alone which are rapidly in-
creasing, would now amount to something like 150
millions more.
Everything in America is on a gigantic scale, even its
forms of villainy, and the villainy advocated by Mr.
George is an illustration of this as striking as the Mam-
moth Caves of Kentucky, or the frauds of the celebrated
“Tammany Ring” in New York. The world has
never seen such a Preacher of Unrighteousness as Mr.
Henry George. For he goes to the roots of things, and
shows us how unfounded are the rules of probity, and
what mere senseless superstitions are the obligations
which have been only too long acknowledged. Let us
hear him on National Debts, for it is an excellent speci-
men of his childish logic, and of his profligate con-
clusions:
The institution of public debts, like the institution of private prop-
erty in land, rests upon the preposterous assumption that one gen-
eration may bind another generation. If a man were to come to me
and say, “Here is a promissory note which your great-grandfather
THE PROPHET OF SAN FRANCISCO. 27
gave to my great-grandfather, and which you will oblige me by pay-
ing,” I would laugh at him and tell him that if he wanted to collect
his note he had better hunt up the man who made it : that I had
nothing to do with my great-grandfather's promises.
And if he were to insist upon payment, and to call my attention to
the terms of the bond in which my great-grandfather expressly stip-
ulated with his great-grandfather that I should pay him, I would only
laugh the more, and be more certain that he was a lunatic. To such
a demand any one of us would reply in effect, “My great-grandfather
was evidently a knave or a joker, and your great-grandfather was cer-
tainly a fool, which quality you surely have inherited if you expect
me to pay you money because my great-grandfather promised that I
should do so. He might as well have given your great-grandfather a
draft upon Adam, or a check upon the First National Bank of the
Moon.” -
Yet upon this assumption that ascendants may bind descendants,
that one generation may legislate for another generation, rests the
assumed validity of our land titles and public debts.”
Yet even in this wonderful passage we have not
touched the bottom of Mr. George's lessons in the phil-
Osophy of spoliation. If we may take the property of
those who have trusted to our honor, surely it must be
still more legitimate to take the property of those who
have placed in us no such confidence. If we may fleece
the public creditor, it must be at least equally open to us
to fleece all those who have invested otherwise their
private fortunes. All the other accumulations of in-
dustry must be as rightfully liable to confiscation.
Whenever “the people” see any large handful in the
hands of any one, they have a right to have it—in order
to save themselves from any necessity of submitting to
taxation.
Accordingly we find, as usual, that Mr. George has a
wonderful honesty in avowing what hitherto the unin-
structed world has been agreed upon considering as dis-
* “Social Problems,” pp. 213-14,
28 PROPERTY IN LAND.
honesty. But this time the avowal comes out under
circumstances which are deserving of special notice.
We all know that not many years ago the United States
was engaged in a civil war of long duration, at one time
apparently of doubtful issue, and on which the national
existence hung. I was one of those—not too many in
this country—who held from the beginning of that
terrible contest that “ the North’’ were right in fighting
it. Lord Russell, on a celebrated occasion, said that
they were fighting for “dominion.” Yes’; and for
what else have nations ever fought, and by what else
than dominion, in one sense or another—have great
nations ever come to be 3 The Demos has no greater
right to fight for dominion than Kings; but it has the
same. But behind and above the existence of the Union
as a nation there was the further question involved
whether, in this nineteenth century of the Christian era,
there was to be established a great dominion of civilized
men which was to have negro slavery as its fundamental
doctrine and as the cherished basis of its constitution.
On both of these great questions the people of the
Northern States—in whatever proportions the one or the
other issue might affect individual minds—had before
them as noble a cause as any which has ever called men
to arms. It is a cause which will be forever associated
in the memory of mankind with one great figure—the
figure of Abraham Lincoln, the best and highest repre-
sentative of the American people in that tremendous
crisis. In nothing has the bearing of that people been
more admirable than in the patient and willing submis-
sion of the masses, as of one man, not only to the deso-
lating sacrifice of life which it entailed, but to the heavy
and lasting burden of taxation which was inseparable
from it. It is indeed deplorable—nothing I have ever
THE PROPHET OF SAN FRANCISCO. 29
read in all literature has struck me as so deplorable—than
that at this time of day, when by patient continuance in
well-doing the burden has become comparatively light,
and there is a near prospect of its final disappearance,
one single American citizen should be found who appre-
ciates so little the glory of his country as to express his
regret that they did not begin this great contest by an
act of stealing. Yet this is the case with Mr. Henry
George. In strict pursuance of his dishonest doctrines
of repudiation respecting public debts, and knowing that
the war could not have been prosecuted without funds,
he speaks with absolute bitterness of the folly which led
the Government to “shrink” from at once seizing the
whole, or all but a mere fraction, of the property of the
few individual citizens who had the reputation of being
exceptionally rich. If, for example, it were known that
any man had made a fortune of 200,000l., the Washing-
ton Government ought not to have “shrunk” from tak-
ing the whole—except some 200l., which remainder
might, perhaps, by a great favor, be left for such sup-
port as it might afford to the former owner. And so by
a number of seizures of this kind, all over the States, the
war might possibly have been conducted for the benefit
of all at the cost of a very few.”
It may be worth while to illustrate how this would
have worked in a single instance. When I was in New
York, a few years ago, one of the sights which was
pointed out to me was a house of great size and of great
beauty both in respect to material and to workmanship.
In these respects at least, if not in its architecture, it
* Mr. George's words are these : “If, when we called on men to die
for their country, we had not shrunk from taking, if necessary, nine
hundred and ninety-nine thousand dollars from every millionaire,
We need not have created any debt.”—“Social Problems,” p. 216.
30 PROPERTY IN LAND.
was equal to any of the palaces which are owned by
private citizens in any of the richest capitals of the Old
World. It was built wholly of pure white marble, and
the owner, not having been satisfied with any of the
marbles of America, had gone to the expense of import-
ing Italian marble for the building. This beautiful and
costly house was, I was further told, the property of a
Scotchman who had emigrated to America with no other
fortune and no other capital than his own good brains.
He had begun by selling ribbons. By selling cheap, and
for ready money, but always also goods of the best
quality, he had soon acquired a reputation for dealings
which were eminently advantageous to those who
bought. But those who bought were the public, and so
a larger and a larger portion of the public became eager
to secure the advantages of this exceptionally moderate
and honest dealer. With the industry of his race he had
also its thrift, and the constant turning of his capital on
an ever-increasing scale, coupled with his own limited
expenditure, had soon led to larger and larger savings.
These, again, had been judiciously invested in promoting
every public undertaking which promised advantage to
his adopted country, and which, by fulfilling that
promise, could alone become remunerative. And so by
a process which, in every step of it, was an eminent Ser-
vice to the community of which he was a member, he
became what is called a millionaire. Nor in the
spending of his wealth had he done otherwise than con-
tribute to the taste and splendor of his country, as well
as to the lucrative employment of its people. All
Nature is full of the love of ornament, and the habita-
tions of creatures, even the lowest in the scale of being,
are rich in coloring and in carving of the most exquisite
and elaborate decoration. It is only an ignorant and
THE PROPHET OF SAN FRANCISCO. 31
uncultured spirit which denounces the same love of
ornament in Man, and it is a stupid doctrine which sees
in it nothing but a waste of means. The great mer.
chant of New York had indeed built his house at great
cost ; but this is only another form of saying that he had
spent among the artificers of that city a great sum of
money, and had in the same proportion contributed to
the only employment by which they live. In every
way, therefore, both as regards the getting and the
spending of his wealth, this millionaire was an honor
and a benefactor to his country. This is the man on
whom that same country would have been incited by
Mr. Henry George to turn the big eyes of brutal envy,
and to rob of all his earnings. It is not so much the
dishonesty or the violence of such teaching that strikes
us most, but its unutterable meanness. That a great
nation, having a great cause at stake, and representing
in the history of the world a life-and-death struggle
against barbarous institutions, ought to have begun its
memorable war by plundering a few of its own citizens
—this is surely the very lowest depth which has ever
been reached by any political philosophy.
And not less instructive than the results of this phil-
osophy are the methods of its reasoning, its methods of
illustration, and its way of representing facts. Of these
we cannot have a better example than the passage before
quoted, in which Mr. Henry George explains the right
of nations and the right of individuals to repudiate an
hereditary debt. It is well to see that the man who
defends the most dishonorable conduct on the part of
Governments defends it equally on the part of private
persons. The passage is a typical specimen of the kind
of stuff of which Mr. George's works are full. The
element of plausibility in it is the idea that a man should
32 PROPERTY IN LAND.
not be held responsible for promises to which he was not
himself a consenting party. This idea is presented by
itself, with a careful suppression of the conditions which
make it inapplicable to the case in hand. Hereditary
debts do not attach to persons except in respect to
hereditary possessions. Are these possessions to be kept
while the corresponding obligations are to be denied ?
Mr. George is loud on the absurdity of calling upon him
to honor any promise which his great-grandfather may
have made, but he is silent about giving up any re-
Sources which his great-grandfather may have left.
Possibly he might get out of this difficulty by avowing
that he would allow no property to pass from one
generation to another—not even from father to son—
that upon every death all the savings of every individual
should be confiscated by the State. Such a proposal
would not be one whit more violent, or more destructive
to society, than other proposals which he does avow.
But so far as I have observed, this particular conse-
quence of his reasoning is either not seen, or is kept in
the dark. With all his apparent and occasional honesty
in confronting results however anarchical, there is a good
deal of evidence that he knows how to conceal his hand.
The prominence given in his agitation to an attack on
the particular class of capitalists who are owners of land,
and the total or comparative silence which he maintains
on his desire to rob fundholders of all kinds, and espe-
cially the public creditor, is a clear indication of astrategy
which is more dexterous than honest. And so it may
really be true that he repudiates all hereditary debt be-
cause he will also destroy all hereditary succession in Sav-
ings of any kind. But it must be observed that even
thus he cannot escape from the inconsistency I have
pointed out, as it affects all public debts. These have
THE PROPHIET OF SAN FRANCISCO. 33
all been contracted for the purpose of effecting great
national objects, such as the preservation of national in-
dependence, or the acquisition of national territory, or
the preparations needed for national defence. The State
cannot be disinherited of the benefits and possessions
thus secured, as individuals may be disinherited of their
fathers' gains. In the case of national debts, therefore,
it is quite clear that the immorality of Mr. George's
argument is as conspicuous as the childishness of its
reasoning.
But there are other examples, quite as striking, of the
incredible absurdity of his reasoning, which are im-
mediately connected with his dominant idea about prop-
erty in land. Thus the notion that because all the
natural and elementary substances which constitute the
raw materials of human wealth are substances derived
from the ground, therefore all forms of that wealth must
ultimately tend to concentration in the hands of those
who own the land ; this notion must strike a landowner
as one worthy only of Bedlam. He may not be able at
a moment’s notice to unravel all the fallacies on which it
rests, and he may even be able to see in it the mad
mimicry of logic which deceives the ignorant. But it
does not need to be a landowner to see immediately that
the conclusion is an absurdity. We have only to apply
this notion in detail in order to see more and more
clearly its discrepancy with fact. Thus, for example,
we may put one application of it thus: All houses are
built of materials derived from the soil, of stone, of
lime, of brick, or of wood, or of all three combined.
But of these materials three are not only products of
the soil, but parts of its very substance and material.
Clearly it must follow that the whole value of house
property must end in passing into the hands of those
34 PROPERTY IN LAN i).
who own these materials, quarries of building stone, beds
of brick-earth, beds of lime, and forests. Unfortunately
for landowners, this wonderful demonstration does not,
Somehow, take effect.
But Mr. Henry George's processes in matters of
reasoning are not more absurd than his assumptions in
matters of fact. The whole tone is based on the
assumption that owners of land are not producers, and
that rent does not represent, or represents only in a very
minor degree the interest of capital. Even an American
ought to know better than this ; because, although there
are in some parts of the United States immense areas of
prairie land which are ready for the plough with almost
no preliminary labor, yet even in the New World the
areas are still more immense in which the soil can only
be made capable of producing human food by the hardest
labor, and the most prolonged. But in the old countries
of Europe, and especially in our own, every landowner
knows well, and others ought to know a little, that the
present condition of the soil is the result of generations
of costly improvements, and of renewed and reiterated
outlays to keep these improvements in effective order.
Yet on this subject I fear that many persons are almost
as ignorant as Mr. Henry George. My own experience
now extends over a period of the best part of forty years.
During that time I have built more than fifty home-
steads complete for man and beast ; I have drained and
reclaimed many hundreds, and enclosed some thousands,
of acres. In this sense I have “added house to house
and field to field,” not—as pulpit orators have assumed
in similar cases—that I might “ dwell alone in the land,”
but that the cultivating class might live more comfort-
ably, and with better appliances for increasing the prod-
Yuce of the soil. I know no more animating scene than
THE PROPHET OF SAN FRANCISCO. 35
that presented to us in the essays and journals which
give an account of the agricultural improvements
effected in Scotland since the close of the Civil Wars in
1745. Thousands and thousands of acres have been re-
claimed from bog and waste. Ignorance has given place
to science, and barbarous customs of immemorial
strength have been replaced by habits of intelligence and
of business. In every county the great landowners, and
very often the smaller, were the great pioneers in a proc-
ess which has transformed the whole face of the coun-
try. And this process is still in full career. If I men-
tion again my own case, it is because I know it to be
only a specimen, and that others have been working on
a still larger scale. During the four years since Mr.
George did me the honor of sending to me a book
assuming that landowners are not producers, I find that
I have spent on one property alone the sum of 40,000l.
entirely on the improvement of the soil. Moreover, I
know that this outlay on my own part, and similar out-
lay on the part of my neighbors, so far from having
power to absorb and concentrate in our hands all other
forms of wealth, is unable to secure anything like the
return which the same capital would have won—and won
easily—in many other kinds of enterprise. I am in
possession of authentic information that on one great
estate in England the outlay on improvements purely
agricultural, has, for twenty-one years past, been at the
rate of 35,000l. a year, while including outlay on
churches and schools, it has amounted in the last forty
years to nearly 2,000,000l. sterling. To such outlays
landowners are incited very often, and to a great extent,
by the mere love of seeing a happier landscape and a
more prosperous people. From much of the capital so
invested they often seek no return at all, and from very
36 1PROPERTY IN LAND.
little of it indeed do they ever get a high rate of interest.
And yet the whole—every farthing of it—goes directly
to the public advantage. Production is increased in full
proportion, although the profit on that production is
small to the owner. There has been grown more corn,
more potatoes, more turnips; there has been produced
more milk, more butter, more cheese, more beef, more
mutton, more pork, more fowls, and eggs, and all these
articles in direct proportion to their abundance have been
sold at lower prices to the people. When a man tells
me, and argues on steps of logic which he boasts as ir-
refutable, that in all this, I and others have been serv-
ing no interests but our own—nay, more, that we have
been but making “ the poor poorer” than they were-I
know very well that, whether I can unravel his fallacies
or not, he is talking the most arrant nonsense, and must
have in his composition, howeveringenious and however
eloquent, a rich combination, and a very large percent-
age of the fanatic and of the goose.
And here, again, we have a new indication of these
elements in one great assumption of fact, and that is the
assumption that wealth has been becoming less and less
diffused—“ the rich richer, the poor poorer.” It did
not require the recent elaborate and able statistical
examination of Mr. Giffen to convince me that this
assumption is altogether false. It is impossible for any
man to have been a considerable employer of labor dur-
ing a period embracing one full generation, without his
seeing and feeling abundant evidence that all classes have
partaken in the progress of the country, and no class
more extensively than that which lives by labor. He
must know that wages have more than doubled—some-
times a great deal more—while the continuous remission
-ºf taxes has tended to make, and has actually made almost
THE PROPHET OF SAN FRANCISCO. 37
every article of subsistence a great deal cheaper than it
was thirty years ago. And outside the province of mere
muscular labor, among all the classes who are concerned
in the work of distribution or of manufacture, I have
seen around me, and on my own property, the enormous
increase of those whose incomes must be comfortable
without being large. The houses that are built for their
weeks of rest and leisure, the furniture with which these
houses are provided, the gardens and shrubberies which
are planted for the ornament of them ; all of these in-
dications, and a thousand more, tell of increasing com-
fort far more widely if not universally diffused.
And if personal experience enables me to contradict
absolutely one of Mr. George's assumptions, official ex-
perience enables me not less certainly to contradict
another. Personally I know what private ownership has
done for one country. Officially I have had only too
good cause to know what State ownership has not done
for another country. India is a country in which,
theoretically at least, the State is the only and the uni-
versal landowner, and over a large part of it the State
does actually take to itself a share of the gross produce
which fully represents ordinary rent. Yet this is the
very country in which the poverty of the masses is so
abject that millions live only from hand to mouth, and
when there is any—even a partial—failure of the crops,
thousands and hundreds of thousands are in danger of
actual starvation. The Indian Government is not cor-
rupt—whatever other failings it may have—and the rents
of a vast territory can be far more safe if left to its dis-
posal than they could be left at the disposal of such
popular governments as those which Mr. George has
denounced on the American Continent. Yet somehow
the functions and duties which in more civilized coun-
38 PROPERTY IN LAND.
tries are discharged by the institution of private owner.
ship in land are not as adequately discharged by the Ind-
ian Administration. Moreover, I could not fail to
observe, when I was connected with the Government of
India, that the portion of that country which has most
grown in wealth is precisely that part of it in which the
Government has parted with its power of absorbing rent
by having agreed to a Permanent Settlement. Many
Anglo-Indian statesmen have looked with envious eyes
at the wealth which has been developed in Lower Ben-
gal, and have mourned over the policy by which the
State has been withheld from taking it into the hands of
Government. There are two questions, however, which
have always occurred to me when this mourning has been
expressed—the first is whether we are quite sure that
the wealth of Lower Bengal would ever have arisen if
its sources had not been thus protected ; and the second
is whether even now it is quite certain that any Govern-
ments, even the best, spend wealth better for the public
interests than those to whom it belongs by the natural
processes of acquisition. These questions have never, I
think, been adequately considered. But whatever may
be the true answer to either of them, there is at least one
question on which all English statesmen have been
unanimous—and that is, that promises once given by the
Government, however long ago, must be absolutely kept.
When landed property has been bought and sold and in-
herited in Bengal for some three generations—since 1793
—under the guarantee of the Government that the Rent
Tax upon it is to remain at a fixed amount, no public
man, so far as I know, has ever suggested that the pub-
lic faith should be violated. And not only so, but there
has been a disposition even to put upon the engagement
of the Government an overstrained interpretation, and to
TH E PROPHET OF SAIN FRANCISCO. 39
claim for the landowners who are protected under it an
immunity from all other taxes affecting the same sources
of income. As Secretary of State for India. I had to
deal with this question along with my colleagues in the
Indian Council, and the result we arrived at was
embodied in a despatch which laid down the principles
applicable to the case so clearly that in India it appears
to have been accepted as conclusive. The Land Tax
was a special impost upon rent. The promise was that
this special impost should never be increased ; or, in its
own words, that there should be no “augmentation of
the public assessment in consequence of the improve-
ment of their estates.” It was not a promise that no
other taxes should ever be raised affecting the same
sources of income, provided such taxes were not special,
but affected all other sources of income equally. On
this interpretation the growing wealth of Bengal accruing
under the Permanent Settlement would remain accessible
to taxation along with the growing wealth derived from
all other kinds of property, but not otherwise. There
was to be no confiscation by the State of the increased
value of land, any more than of the increased value of
other kinds of property, on the pretext that this increase
was unearned. On the other hand, the State did not
exempt that increased value from any taxation which
might be levied also and equally from all the rest of the
community. In this way we reconciled and established
two great principles which to shortsighted theorists may
seem antagonistic. One of these principles is that it is
the interest of every community to give equal and abso-
lute security to every one of its members in his pursuit
of wealth ; the other is that when the public interests
demand a public revenue all forms of wealth should be
equally accessible to taxation.
40 PROPERTY IN LAND.
It would have saved us all, both in London and in
Calcutta, much anxious and careful reasoning if we could
only have persuaded ourselves that the Government of
1793 could not possibly bind the Government of 1870. It
would have given us a still wider Inargin if we had been
able to believe that no faith can be pledged to land-
owners, and that we had a divine right to seize not only
all the wealth of the Zemindars of Bengal, but also all the
property derived from the same source which had grown
up since i793, and has now become distributed and
absorbed among a great number of intermediate sharers,
standing between the actual cultivator and the represen-
tatives of those to whom the promise was originally
given. But one doctrine has been tenaciously held by
the “stupid English people” in the government of their
Eastern Empire, and that is, that our honor is the
greatest of our possessions, and that absolute trust in
that honor is one of the strongest foundations of our
power.
In this paper it has not been my aim to argue. A
simple record and exposure of a few of the results
arrived at by Mr. Henry George, has been all that I in-
tended to accomplish. To see what are the practical
consequences of any train of reasoning is so much
gained. And there are cases in which this gain is every-
thing. In mathematical reasoning the “reduction to
absurdity” is one of the most familiar methods of dis-
proof. In political reasoning the “reduction to
iniquity” ought to be of equal value. And if it is not
found to be so with all minds, this is because of a
peculiarity in human character which is the secret of all
its corruption, and of the most dreadful forms in which
that corruption has been exhibited. In pursuing
another investigation I have lately had occasion to
THE PROPEIET OF SAN FRANCISCO. 41
observe upon the contrast which, in this respect, exists
between our moral and our purely intellectual faculties.*
Our Reason is so constituted in respect to certain funda-
mental truths that those truths are intuitively perceived,
and any rejection of them is at once seen to be absurd.
But in the far higher sphere of Morals and Religion, it
would seem that we have no equally secure moorings to
duty and to truth. There is no consequence, however
hideous or cruel its application may be, that men have
been prevented from accepting because of such hideous-
ness or of such cruelty. Nothing, however shocking, is
quite sure to shock them. If it follows from some false
belief, or from some fallacious verbal proposition, they
will entertain it, and sometimes will even rejoice in it
with a savage fanaticism. It is a fact that none of us
should ever forget that the moral faculties of Man do
not as certainly revolt against iniquity as his reasoning
faculties do revolt against absurdity. All history is
crowded with illustrations of this distinction, and it is
the only explanation of a thousand horrors. There has
seldom been such a curious example as the immoral
teachings of Mr. Henry George. Here we have a man
who probably sincerely thinks he is a Christian, and who
sets up as a philosopher, but who is not the least shocked
by consequences which abolish the Decalogue, and deny
the primary obligations both of public and of private
honor. This is a very curious phenomenon, and well
deserving of some closer investigation. What are the
erroneous data—what are the abstract propositions—
which so overpower the Moral Sense, and coming from
the sphere of Speculation dictate such flagitious recom-
mendations in the sphere of Conduct ' To this question
* “Unity of Nature,” chap. x. pp. 440–5.
42 - PROPERTY IN LAND.
I may perhaps return, not with exclusive reference to
the writings of one man, but with reference to the writ-
ings of many others who have tried to reduce to scien-
tific form the laws which govern the social developments
of our race, and who in doing so have forgotten—
strangely forgotten—some of the most fundamental facts
of Nature.
II.
THE “REDUCTION TO INIQUITY.”
BY HENRY GEORGE.
“IN this paper it has not been my aim to argue,”
says the Duke of Argyll, in concluding his article
entitled “The Prophet of San Francisco.” It is gener-
ally waste of time to reply to those who do not argue.
Yet, partly because of my respect for other writings of
his, and partly because of the ground to which he invites
me, I take the first opportunity I have had to reply to
the Duke.
In doing so, let me explain the personal incident to
which he refers, and which he has seemingly misunder-
stood. In sending the Duke of Argyll a copy of “Prog-
ress and Poverty,’” I intended no impertinence, and
was unconscious of any impropriety. Instead, I paid
him a high compliment. For, as I stated in an accom-
panying note, I sent him my book not only to mark my
esteem for the author of “The Reign of Law,” but be-
cause I thought him a man superior to his accidents.
I am still conscious of the profit I derived from “The
Reign of Law,” and can still recall the pleasure it gave
me. What attracted me, however, was not, as the Duke
seems to think, what he styles his “nonsense chapter.”
On the contrary, the notion that it is necessary to impose
restrictions upon labor seems to me strangely incon-
44 PROPERTY IN LAND.
gruous, not only with free trade, but with the idea of
the dominance and harmony of natural laws, which in
preceding chapters he so well develops. Where such
restrictions as Factory Acts seem needed in the interests
of labor, the seeming need, to my mind, arises from pre-
vious restrictions, in the removal of which, and not in
further restrictions, the true remedy is to be sought.
What attracted me in “The Reign of Law” was the
manner in which the Duke points out the existence of
physical laws and adaptations which compel the mind
that thinks upon them to the recognition of creative pur-
pose. In this way the Duke's book was to me useful
and grateful, as I doubt not it has been to many others.
My book, I thought, might, in return, be useful and
grateful to the Duke—might give him something of that
“immense and instinctive pleasure” of which he had
spoken as arising from the recognition of the grand sim-
plicity and unspeakable harmony of universal law. And
in the domain in which I had, as I believed, done some-
thing to point out the reign of law this pleasure is per-
haps even more intense than in that of which he had
written. For in physical laws we recognize only intelli-
gence, and can but trust that infinite wisdom implies in-
finite goodness. But in social laws he who looks may
recognize beneficence as well as intelligence ; may see
that the moral perceptions of men are perceptions of
realities; and find ground for an abiding faith that this
short life does not bound the destiny of the human soul.
I knew the Duke of Argyll then only by his book. I
had never been in Scotland, or learned the character as
a landlord he bears there. I intended to pay a tribute
and give a pleasure to a citizen of the republic of letters,
not to irritate a landowner. I did not think a trumpery
title and a patch of ground could fetter a mind that had
THE ‘‘ REDUCTION TO INIQUITY.” 45
communed with Nature and busied itself with causes and
beginnings. My mistake was that of ignorance. Since
the Duke of Argyll has publicly called attention to it, I
thus publicly apologize. -
The Duke declares it has not been his aim to argue.
This is clear. I wish it were as clear it had not been his
aim to misrepresent. He seems to have written for
those who have never read the books he criticises. But
as those who have done so constitute a very respectable
part of the reading world, I can leave his misrepresenta-
tions to take care of themselves, confident that the in-
credible absurdity he attributes to my reasonings will be
seen, by whoever reads my books, to belong really to
the Duke's distortions. In what I have here to say I
prefer to meet him upon his own ground and to hold to
the main question.* I accept the reduction to iniquity.
Strangely enough, the Duke expresses distrust of the
very tribunal to which he appeals. “It is a fact,” he
tells us, “that none of us should ever forget, that the
moral faculties do not as certainly revolt against iniquity
as the reasoning faculties do against absurdity.” If that
be the case, why, then, may I ask, is the Duke’s whole
article addressed to the moral faculties 2 Why does he
talk about right and wrong, about justice and injustice,
about honor and dishonor ; about my “immoral doc-
trines” and “profligate conclusions,” “the unutterable
meanness of the gigantic villainy” I advocate 2 why style
me “such a Preacher of Unrighteousness as the world
has never seen,” and so on ? If the Duke will permit
* It is unnecessary for me to say anything of India further than to
remark that the essence of nationalization of land is not in the col-
lection of rent by government, but in its utilization for the benefit of
the people. Nor on the subject of public debts is it worth while here
to add anything to what I have said ir “Social Problems.”
46 12ROPERTY IN LAND.
me I will tell him, for in all probability he does not know
—he himself, to paraphrase his own words, being a good
example of how men who sometimes set up as philoso-
phers and deny laws of the human mind are themselves
unconsciously subject to those very laws. The Duke
appeals to moral perceptions for the same reason that
impels all men, good or bad, learned or simple, to appeal
to moral perceptions whenever they become warm in
argument ; and this reason is, the instinctive feeling that
the moral sense is higher and truer than the intellectual
sense ; that the moral faculties do more certainly revolt
against iniquity than the intellectual faculties against
absurdity. The Duke appeals to the moral sense, be-
cause he instinctively feels that with all men its decisions
have the highest sanction ; and if he afterward seeks to
weaken its authority, it is because this very moral sense
whispers to him that his case is not a good one.
My opinion as to the relative superiority of the moral
and intellectual perceptions is the reverse of that stated
by the Duke. It seems to me certain that the moral
faculties constitute a truer guide than the intellectual
faculties, and that what, in reality, we should never for-
get, is not that the moral faculties are untrustworthy,
but that those faculties may be dulled by refusal to heed
them, and distorted by the promptings of selfishness.
So true, so ineradicable is the moral sense, that where
selfishness or passion would outrage it, the intellectual
faculties are always called upon to supply excuse. No
unjust war was ever begun without some pretence of
asserting right or redressing wrong, or, despite them-
selves, of doing some good to the conquered. No petty
thief but makes for himself some justification. It is
doubtful if any deliberate wrong is ever committed, it is
certain no wrongful course of action is ever continued,
THE “ REDUCTION TO INIQUITY.” 4?
without the framing of some theory which may dull or
placate the moral sense.
And while as to things apprehended solely by the in-
tellectual faculties the greatest diversities of perception
have obtained and still obtain among men, and those
perceptions constantly change with the growth of knowl-
edge, there is a striking consensus of moral perceptions.
In all stages of social development, and under all forms
of religion, no matter how distorted by selfish motives
and intellectual perversions, truth, justice, and benevo-
lence have ever been esteemed, and all our intellectual
progress has given us no higher moral ideals than have
obtained among primitive peoples. The very distortions
of the moral sense, the apparent differences in the moral
standards of different times and peoples, do but show
essential unity. Wherever moral perceptions have
differed or do differ the disturbance may be traced to
causes which, originating in selfishness and perpetuated
by intellectual perversions, have distorted or dulled the
moral faculty. It seems to me that the Creator, whom
both the Duke of Argyll and myself recognize behind
physical and mental laws, has not left us to grope our
way in darkness, but has, indeed, given us a light by
which our steps may be safely guided—a compass by
which, in all degrees of intellectual development, the
way to the highest good may be surely traced. But just
as the compass by which the mariner steers his course
over the trackless sea in the blackest night, may be dis-
turbed by other attractions, may be misread or clogged,
so is it with the moral sense. This evidently is not a
world in which men must be either wise or good, but a
world in which they may bring about good or evil as
they use the faculties given them.
I speak of this because the recognition of the suprem.
48 PROPERTY IN LAND.
acy and certainty of the moral faculties seems to me to
throw light upon problems otherwise dark, rather than
because it is necessary here, since I admit even more
unreservedly than the Duke the competence of the
tribunal before which he cites me. I am willing to sub-
mit every question of political economy to the test of
ethics. So far as I can see there is no social law which
does not conform to moral law, and no social question
which cannot be determined more quickly and certainly
by appeal to moral perceptions than by appeal to intel-
lectual perceptions. Nor can there be any dispute be-
tween us as to the issue to be joined. He charges me
with advocating violation of the moral law in proposing
robbery. I agree that robbery is a violation of the
moral law, and is therefore, without further inquiry, to
be condemned.
As to what constitutes robbery, it is, we will both
agree, the taking or withholding from another of that
which rightfully belongs to him. That which rightfully
belongs to him, be it observed, not that which legally
belongs to him. As to what extent human law may
create rights is beside this discussion, for what I propose
is to change, not to violate human law. Such change
the Duke declares would be unrighteous. He thus ap-
peals to that moral law which is before and above all
human laws, and by which all human laws are to be
judged. Let me insist upon this point. Landholders
must elect to try their case either by human law or by
moral law. If they say that land is rightfully property
because made so by human law, they cannot charge
those who would change that law with advocating rob-
bery. But if they charge that such change in human
law would be robbery, then they must show that land is
rightfully property irrespective of human law.
THE “ REDUCTION TO INIQUITY.” 49
For land is not of that species of things to which the
presumption of rightful property attaches. This does
attach to things that are properly termed wealth, and
that are the produce of labor. Such things, in their be-
ginning must have an owner, as they originate in human
exertion, and the right of property which attaches to
them springs from the manifest natural right of every
individual to himself and to the benefit of his own ex-
ertions. This is the moral basis of property, which
makes certain things rightfully property totally irre-
spective of human law. The Eighth Commandment
does not derive its validity from human enactment. It
is written upon the facts of nature and self-evident to
the perceptions of men. If there were but two men in
the world, the fish which either of them took from the
sea, the beast which he captured in the chase, the fruit
which he gathered, or the hut which he erected, would
be his rightful property, which the other could not take
from him without violation of the moral law. But how
could either of them claim the world as his rightful
property ? Or if they agreed to divide the world be-
tween them, what moral right could their compact give
as against the next man who came into the world !
It is needless, however, to insist that property in land
rests only on human enactment, which may, at any time
be changed without violation of moral law. No one
Seriously asserts any other derivation. It is sometimes
said that property in land is derived from appropriation.
But those who say this do not really mean it. Appro-
priation can give no right. The man who raises a cup-
ful of water from a river, acquires a right to that cupful,
and no one may rightfully snatch it from his hand ; but
this right is derived from labor, not from appropriation.
How could he acquire a right to the river, by merely
50 12.ROPERTY IN TAND.
appropriating it ! Columbus did not dream of appro-
priating the New World to himself and his heirs, and
would have been deemed a lunatic had he done so.
Nations and princes divided America between them, but
by “right of strength.” This, and this alone, it is that
gives any validity to appropriation. And this, evidently,
is what they really mean who talk of the right given by
appropriation.
This “right of conquest,” this power of the strong,
is the only basis of property in land to which the Duke
ventures to refer. He does so in asking whether the
exclusive right of ownership to the territory of Cali-
fornia, which, according to him, I attribute to the exist-
ing people of California, does not rest upon conquest,
and “if so, may it not be as rightfully acquired by any
who are strong enough to seize it 7” To this I reply in
the affirmative. If exclusive ownership is conferred by
conquest, then, not merely, as the Duke says, has it
“been open to every conquering army and every oc-
cupying host in all ages and in all countries of the world
to establish a similar ownership ;” but it is now open,
and whenever the masses of Scotland, who have the
power, choose to take from the Duke the estates he now
holds, he cannot, if this be the basis of his claim, con-
sistently complain.
But I have never admitted that conquest or any other
exertion of force can give right. Nor have I ever
asserted, but on the contrary have expressly denied, that
the present population of California, or any other coun-
try, have any exclusive right of ownership in the soil, or
can in any way acquire such a right. I hold that the
present, the past, or the future population of California,
or of any other country, have not, have not had, and
cannot have, any right save to the use of the soil, and
THE “REDUCTION TO INIQUITY.” 51
that as to this their rights are equal. I hold with
Thomas Jefferson, that “the earth belongs in usufruct
to the living, and that the dead have no power or right
over it.” I hold that the land was not created for One
generation to dispose of, but as a dwelling-place for all
generations; that the men of the present are not bound
by any grants of land the men of the past may have
made, and cannot grant away the rights of the men of
the future. I hold that if all the people of California,
or any other country, were to unite in any disposition of
the land which ignored the equal right of one of their
number, they would be doing a wrong ; and that even
if they could grant away their own rights, they are
powerless to impair the natural rights of their children.
And it is for this reason that I hold that the titles to the
ownership of land which the Government of the United
States is now granting are of no greater moral validity
than the land-titles of the British Isles, which rest his-
torically upon the forcible spoliation of the masses.
How ownership of land was acquired in the past can
have no bearing upon the question of how we should
treat land now ; yet the inquiry is interesting, as show-
ing the nature of the institution. The Duke of Argyll
has written a great deal about the rights of landowners,
but has never, I think, told us anything of the historical
derivation of these rights. He has spoken of his own
estates, but has nowhere told us how they came to be his
estates. This, I know, is a delicate question, and on
that account I will not press it. But while a man ought
not to be taunted with the sins of his ancestors, neither
ought he to profit by them. And the general fact is,
that the exclusive ownership of land has everywhere had
its beginnings in force and fraud, in selfish greed and
unscrupulous cunning. It Originated, as all evil institu.
52 TROPERTY IN LAND.
tions originate, in the bad passions of man, not in their
perceptions of what is right or their experience of what
is wise. “ Human laws,” the Duke tells us, “are
evolved out of human instincts, and in direct proportion
as the accepted ideas on which they rest are really
universal, in that same proportion have they a claim to
be regarded as really natural, and as the legitimate ex-
pression of fundamental truths.” If he would thus
found on the widespread existence of exclusive property
in land an argument for its righteousness, what, may I
ask him, will he say to the much stronger argument that
might thus be made for the righteousness of polygamy
or chattel slavery But it is a fact, of which I need
hardly more than remind him, though less well-informed
people may be ignorant of it, that the treatment of land
as individual property is comparatively recent, and by at
least nine hundred and ninety-nine out of every thousand
of those who have lived on this world, has never been
dreamed of. It is only within the last two centuries
that it has, by the abolition of feudal tenures, and the
suppression of tribal customs, fully obtained among our
own people. In fact, even among us it has hardly yet
reached full development. For not only are we still
spreading over land yet unreduced to individual owner-
ship, but in the fragments of common rights which yet
remain in Great Britain, as well as in laws and customs,
are there survivals of the older system. The first and
universal perception of mankind is that declared by the
American Indian Chief, Black Hawk: “The Great Spirit
has told me that land is not to be made property like
other property. The earth is our mother l’’ And this
primitive perception of the right of all men to the use of
the soil from which all must live, has never been obscured
save by a long course of usurpation and oppression.
THE “ REDUCTION TO INIQUITY.” 53
But it is needless for me to discuss such questions with
the Duke. There is higher ground on which we may
meet. He believes in an intelligent Creator ; he sees in
Nature contrivance and intent ; he realizes that it is only
by conforming his actions to universal law that man can
master his conditions and fulfil his destiny.
Let me, then, ask the Duke to look around him in the
richest country of the world, where art, science, and the
power that comes from the utilization of physical laws
have been carried to the highest point yet attained, and
note how few of this population can avail themselves
fully of the advantages of civilization. Among the
masses the struggle for existence is so intense that the
Duke himself declares it necessary by law to restrain
parents from working their children to disease and
death !
Let him consider the conditions of life involved in
such facts as this—conditions, alas, obvious on every
side, and then ask himself whether this is in accordance
with the intent of Nature ?
The Duke of Argyll has explained to me in his
“Reign of Law” with what nice adaptations the feathers
on a bird’s wing are designed to give it the power of
flight : he has told me that the claw on the wing of a
bat is intended for it to climb by. Will he let me ask
him to look in the same way at the human beings around
him 8 Consider, O Duke the little children growing
up in city slums, toiling in mines, working in noisome
rooms; the young girls chained to machinery all day or
walking the streets by night ; the women bending over
forges in the Black Country or turned into beasts of
burden in the Scottish Highlands; the men who all life
long must spend life's energies in the effort to maintain
life Consider them as you have considered the bat and
54 PROPERTY IN LAND.
the bird. If the hook of the bat be intended to climb
by and the wing of the bird be intended to fly by, with
what intent have human creatures been given capabilities
of body and mind which under conditions that exist in
such countries as Great Britain only a few of them can
use and enjoy 7
They who see in Nature no evidences of conscious,
planning intelligence may think that all this is as it must
be ; but who that recognizes in His works an infinitely
wise Creator can for a moment hesitate to infer that the
wide difference between obvious intent and actual ac-
complishment is due, not to the clash of natural laws,
but to our ignoring them 2 Nor need we go far to con-
firm this inference. The moment we consider in the
largest way what kind of an animal man is, we see in the
most important of social adjustments a violation of
Nature’s intent sufficient to account for want and misery
and aborted development.
Given a ship sent to sea with abundant provisions for
all her company. What must happen if some of that
company take possession of the provisions and deny to
the rest any share ?
Given a world so made and ordered that intelligent
beings placed upon it may draw from its substance an
abundant supply for all physical needs. Must there not
be want and misery in such a world if some of those
beings make its surface and substance their exclusive
property and deny the right of the others to its use ?
Here, as on any other world we can conceive of, two and
two make four, and when all is taken from anything
nothing remains. What we see clearly would happen
on any other world, does happen on this.
The Duke sees intent in Nature. So do I. That
which conforms to this intent is natural, wise, and
THE “REDUCTION TO INIQUITY.” 55
righteous. That which contravenes it is unnatural,
foolish, and iniquitous. In this we agree. Let us then
bring to this test the institution which I arraign and he
defends.
Place, stripped of clothes, a landowner's baby among
a dozen workhouse babies, and who that you call in can
tell the one from the others ? Is the human law which
declares the one born to the possession of a hundred
thousand acres of land, while the others have no right to
a single square inch, conformable to the intent of Nature
or not ? Is it, judged by this appeal, natural or un-
natural, wise or foolish, righteous or iniquitous ! Put
the bodies of a duke and a peasant on a dissecting table,
and bring, if you can, the surgeon who, by laying bare
the brain or examining the viscera, can tell which is
duke and which is peasant 4 Are not both land animals
of the same kind, with like organs and like needs Is
it not evidently the intent of Nature that both shall live
on land and use land in the same way and to the same
degree ? Is there not, therefore, a violation of the in-
tent of Nature in human laws which give to one more
land than he can possibly use, and deny any land to the
other ?
Let me ask the Duke to consider, from the point of
view of an observer of Nature, a landless man—a being
fitted in all his parts and powers for the use of land,
compelled by all his needs to the use of land, and yet
denied all right to land. Is he not as unnatural as a bird
without air, a fish without water And can anything
more clearly violate the intent of Nature than the
human laws which produce such anomalies :
I call upon the Duke to observe that what Nature
teaches us is not merely that men were equally intended
to live on land, and to use land, and therefore had
§6 PROPERTY IN LAND.
originally equal rights to land, but that they are now
equally intended to live on and use land, and, therefore,
that present rights to land are equal. It is said that fish
deprived of light will, in the course of generations, lose
their eyes, and, within certain narrow limits, it is certain
that Nature does conform some of her living creatures
to conditions imposed by man. In such cases the intent
of Nature may be said to have conformed to that of
man, or rather to embrace that of man. But there is no
such conforming in this case. The intent of Nature,
that all human beings should use land, is as clearly seen
in the children born to-day as it could have been seen in
any past generation. How foolish, then, are those who
say that although the right to land was originally equal,
this equality of right has been lost by the action or
sufferance of intermediate generations. How illogical
those who declare that, while it would be just to assert
this equality of right in the laws of a new country where
people are now coming to live, it would be unjust to
conform to it the laws of a country where people long
have lived ? Has Nature anywhere or in anything
shown any disposition to conform to what we call vested
interests 2 Does the child born in an old country differ
from the child born in a new country'
Moral right and wrong, the Duke must agree with
me, are not matters of precedent. The repetition of a
wrong may dull the moral sense, but will not make it
right. A robbery is no less a robbery the thousand
millionth time it is committed than it was the first time.
This they forgot who declaring the slave trade piracy
still legalized the enslavement of those already enslaved.
This they forget who admitting the equality of natural
rights to the soil declare that it would be unjust now to
a sºrt them. For, as the keeping of a man in slavery is
THE “ REDUCTION TO INIQUITY.” 5?
as much a violation of natural right as the seizure of his
remote ancestor, so is the robbery involved in the
present denial of natural rights to the soil as much a
robbery as was the first act of fraud or force which
violated those rights. Those who say it would be unjust
for the people to resume their natural rights in the land
without compensating present holders, confound right
and wrong as flagrantly as did they who held it a
crime in the slave to run away without first paying his
owner his market value. They have never formed a
clear idea of what property in land means. It means
not merely a continuous exclusion of some people from
the element which it is plainly the intent of Nature that
all should enjoy, but it involves a continuous confiscation
of labor and the results of labor. The Duke of Argyll
has, we say, a large income drawn from land. But is
this income really drawn from land 2 Were there no
men on his land what income could the Duke get from
it, save such as his own hands produced 3 Precisely as
if drawn from slaves, this income represents an appro-
priation of the earnings of labor. The effect of permit-
ting the Duke to treat this land as his property, is to
make so many other Scotsmen, in whole or in part, his
serfs—to compel them to labor for him without pay, or
to enable him to take from them their earnings without
return. Surely, if the Duke will look at the matter in
this way, he must see that the iniquity is not in abolish-
ing an institution which permits one man to plunder
others, but in continuing it. He must see that any claim
of iandowners to compensation is not a claim to payment
for what they have previously taken, but to payment for
what they might yet take, precisely as would be the claim
of the slaveholder—the true character of which appears
in the fact that he would demand more compensation for
58 - PROPERTY IN LAND.
a strong slave, out of whom he might yet get much
work, than for a decrepit one, out of whom he had
already forced nearly all the labor he could yield.
In assuming that denial of the justice of property in
land is the prelude to an attack upon all rights of prop-
erty, the Duke ignores the essential distinction between
land and things rightfully property. The things which
constitute wealth, or capital (which is wealth used in
production), and to which the right of property justly
attaches, are produced by human exertion. Their
substance is matter, which existed before man, and which
man can neither create nor destroy ; but their essence—
that which gives them the character of wealth—is labor
impressed upon or modifying the conditions of matter.
Their existence is due to the physical exertion of man,
and, like his physical frame, they tend constantly to re-
turn again to Nature’s reservoirs of matter and force.
Land, on the contrary, is that part of the external uni-
verse on which and from which alone man can live ; that
reservoir of matter and force on which he must draw for
all his needs. Its existence is not due to man, but is
referable only to that Power from which man himself
proceeds. It continues while he comes and goes, and
will continue, so far as we can see, after he and his
works shall disappear. Both species of things have
value, but the value of the one species depends upon
the amount of labor required for their production ; the
value of the other upon the power which its reduction
to ownership gives of commanding labor or the results of
labor without paying any equivalent. The recognition
of the right of property in wealth, or things produced
by labor, is thus but a recognition of the right of each
human being to himself and to the results of his own ex-
ertions; but the recognition of a similar right of prop.
THE “REDUCTION TO INIQUITY.” 59
erty in land is necessarily the impairment and denial of
this true right of property.
Turn from principles to facts. Whether as to national
strength or national character, whether as to the number
of people or as to their physical and moral health,
whether as to the production of wealth or as to its equi-
table distribution, the fruits of the primary injustice in-
volved in making the land, on which and from which a
whole people must live, the property of but a portion of
their number, are everywhere evil and nothing but evil.
If this seems to any too strong a statement, it is only
because they associate individual ownership of land with
permanence of possession and security of improvements.
These are necessary to the proper use of land, but so far
from being dependent upon individual ownership of
land, they can be secured without it in greater degree
than with it. This will be evident upon reflection.
That the existing system does not secure permanence of
possession and security of improvements in anything like
the degree necessary to the best use of land, is obvious
everywhere, but especially obvious in Great Britain,
where the owners of land and the users of land are for
the most part distinct persons. In many cases the users
of land have no security from year to year, a logical
development of individual ownership in land so fla-
grantly unjust to the user and so manifestly detrimental
to the community, that in Ireland, where this system
most largely prevailed, it has been deemed necessary for
the State to interfere in the most arbitrary manner. In
other cases, where land is let for years, the user is often
hampered with restrictions that prevent improvement
and interfere with use, and at the expiration of the lease
he is not merely deprived of his improvements, but is
frequently subjected to a blackmail calculated upon the
60 PROPERTY IN LAND.
inconvenience and loss which removal would cost him.
Wherever I have been in Great Britain, from Land’s
End to John O'Groat’s, and from Liverpool to Hull, I
have heard of improvements prevented and production
curtailed from this cause—in instances which run from
the prevention of the building of an outhouse, the paint-
ing of a dwelling, the enlargement of a chapel, the
widening of a street, or the excavation of a dock, to the
shutting up of a mine, the demolition of a village, the
tearing up of a railway track, or the turning of land from
the support of men to the breeding of wild beasts. I
could cite case after case, each typical of a class, but it is
unnecessary. How largely use and improvement are
restricted and prevented by private ownership of land
may be appreciated only by a few, but specific cases are
known to all. How insecurity of improvement and
possession prevents the proper maintenance of dwellings
in the cities, how it hampers the farmer, how it fills the
shopkeeper with dread as the expiration of his lease
draws nigh, have been, to some extent at least, brought
out by recent discussions, and in all these directions
propositions are being made for State interference more
or less violent, arbitrary, and destructive of the sound
principle that men should be left free to manage their
own property as they deem best.
Does not all this interference and demand for inter-
ference show that private property in land does not pro-
duce good results, that it does not give the necessary
permanence of possession and security of improvements :
Is not an institution that needs such tinkering funda-
mentally wrong ' That property in land must have
different treatment from other property, all, or nearly
all, are now agreed. Does not this prove that land
ought not to be made individual property at all ; that to
THE “REDUCTION TO INIQUITY.” 61
treat it as individual property is to weaken and endanger
the true rights of property 2
The Duke of Argyll asserts that in the United States
we have made land private property because we have
found it necessary to secure settlement and improve-
ment. Nothing could be further from the truth. The
Duke might as well urge that our protective tariff is a
proof of the necessity of “protection.” We have made
land private property because we are but transplanted
Europeans, wedded to custom, and have followed it in
this matter more readily, because in a new country the
evils that at length spring from private property in land
are less obvious, while a much larger portion of the peo-
ple seemingly profit by it—those on the ground gaining
at the expense of those who come afterward. But so
far from this treatment of land in the United States hav-
ing promoted settlement and reclamation, the very re-
verse is true. What it has promoted is the scattering of
population in the country and its undue concentration in
cities, to the disadvantage of production and the lessen-
ing of comfort. It has forced into the wilderness
families for whom there was plenty of room in well-
Settled neighborhoods, and raised tenement houses amid
vacant lots, led to waste of labor and capital in roads and
railways not really needed, locked up natural opportuni.
ties that otherwise would have been improved, made
tramps and idlers of men who, had they found it in
time, would gladly have been at work, and given to our
agriculture a character that is rapidly and steadily
decreasing the productiveness of the soil.
As to political corruption in the United States, of
which I have spoken in “Social Problems,” and to
which the Duke refers, it springs, as I have shown in that
book, not from excess but from deficiency of democracy,
62 PROPERTY IN LAN D.
and mainly from our failure to recognize the equality of
natural rights as well as of political rights. In compar-
ing the two countries, it may be well to note that the
exposure of abuses is quicker and sharper in the United
States than in England, and that to some extent abuses
which in the one country appear in naked deformity, are
in the other hidden by the ivy of custom and respecta-
bility. But be this as it may, the reforms I propose, in-
stead of adding to corruptive forces, would destroy pro-
lific sources of corruption. Our “protective” tariff, our
excise taxes, and demoralizing system of local taxation,
would, in their direct and indirect effects, corrupt any
government, even if not aided by the corrupting effects
of the grabbing for public lands. But the first step I
propose would sweep away these corruptive influences,
and it is to governments thus reformed, in a state of
society in which the reckless struggle for wealth would
be lessened by the elimination of the fear of want, that
I would give, not the management of land or the direc-
tion of enterprise, but the administration of the funds
arising from the appropriation of economic rent.
The Duke styles me a Pessimist. But, however
pessimistic I may be as to present social tendencies, I
have a firm faith in human nature. I am convinced that
the attainment of pure government is merely a matter of
conforming social institutions to moral law. If we do
this, there is, to my mind, no reason why in the proper
sphere of public administration we should not find men
as honest and as faithful as when acting in private
capacities.
But to return to the reduction to iniquity. Test the
institution of private property in land by its fruits in any
country where it exists. Take Scotland. What, there,
are its results & That wild beasts have supplanted human
THE “ REDUCTION To INIQUITY.” 63
beings: that glens which once sent forth their thousand
fighting men are now tenanted by a couple of game-
keepers; that there is destitution and degradation that
would shame savages; that little children are stunted and
starved for want of proper nourishment ; that women
are compelled to do the work of animals; that young
girls who ought to be fitting themselves for wifehood
and motherhood are held to the monotonous toil of
factories, while others, whose fate is sadder still, prowl
the streets ; that while a few Scotsmen have castles and
palaces, Inore than a third of Scottish families live in
one room each, and more than two thirds in not more
than two rooms each ; that thousands of acres are kept
as playgrounds for strangers, while the masses have not
enough of their native soil to grow a flower, are shut out
even from moor and mountain ; dare not take a trout
from a loch or a salmon from the sea
If the Duke thinks all classes have gained by the
advance in civilization, let him go into the huts of the
Highlands. There he may find countrymen of his, men
and women the equals in natural ability and in moral
character of any peer or peeress in the land, to whom
the advance of our wondrous age has brought no gain.
He may find them tilling the ground with the crockit
spade, cutting grain with the sickle, threshing it with
the flail, winnowing it by tossing it in the air, grinding
it as their forefathers did a thousand years ago. He may
see spinning-wheel and distaff yet in use, and the smoke
from the fire in the centre of the hut ascending as it can
through the thatch, that the precious heat, which costs
so much labor to procure, may be economized to the
utmost. These human beings are in natural parts and
powers just such human beings as may be met at a royal
levee, at a gathering of scientists, or inventors, or cap-
64. PROPERTY IN LAND.
tains of industry. That they so live and so work, is not
because of their stupidity, but because of their poverty—
the direct and indisputable result of the denial of their
natural rights. They have not merely been prevented
from participating in the “general advance,” but are
positively worse off than were their ancestors before
commerce had penetrated the Highlands or the modern
era of labor-saving inventions had begun. They have
been driven from the good land to the poor land. While
their rents have been increased, their holdings have been
diminished, and their pasturage cut off. Where they
once had beasts, they cannot now eat a chicken or keep a
donkey, and their women must do work once done by
animals. With the same thoughtful attention he has
given to “the way of an eagle in the air,” let the Duke
consider a sight he must have seen many times—a Scot-
tish woman toiling uphill with a load of manure on her
back. Then let him apply “the reduction to iniquity.”
Let the Duke not be content with feasting his eyes
upon those comfortable houses of the large farmers
which so excite his admiration. Let him visit the
bothies in which farm servants are herded together like
cattle, and learn, as he may learn, that the lot of the
Scottish farm servant—a lot from which no industry or
thrift can release him—is to die in the workhouse or in
the receipt of a parish dole if he be so unfortunate as to
outlive his ability to work. Or let him visit those poor
broken-down creatures who, enduring everything rather
than accept the humiliation of the workhouse, are eking
out their last days upon a few shillings from the parish,
supplemented by the charity of people nearly as poor as
themselves. Let him consider them, and if he has
imagination enough, put himself in their place. Then
let him try “the reduction to iniquity.”
THE ‘‘ REDUCTION TO INIQUITY.” 65
Let the Duke go to Glasgow, the metropolis of Scot-
iand, where, in underground cellars and miserable rooms,
he will find crowded together families who (some of
them, lest they might offend the deer) have been driven
from their native soil into the great city to compete
with each other for employment at any price, to have
their children debauched by daily contact with all that
is vile. Let him some Saturday evening leave the dis-
tricts where the richer classes live, wander for awhile
through the streets tenanted by working people, and
note the stunted forms, the pinched features. Vice,
drunkenness, the recklessness that comes when hope
goes, he will see too. How should not such conditions
produce such effects & But he will also see, if he chooses
to look, hard, brave, stubborn struggling—the work-
man, who, do his best, cannot find steady employment ;
the bread-winner stricken with illness ; the widow
straining to keep her children from the workhouse. Let
the Duke observe and reflect upon these things, and then
apply the reduction to iniquity.
Or, let him go to Edinburgh, the “modern Athens,”
of which Scotsmen speak with pride, and in buildings
from whose roofs a bowman might strike the spires of
twenty churches, he will find human beings living as he
would not keep his meanest dog. Let him toil up the
stairs of one of those monstrous buildings, let him enter
one of those “dark houses,” let him close the door, and
in the blackness think what life must be in such a place.
Then let him try the reduction to iniquity. And if he
go to that good charity (but, alas, how futile is Charity
without Justice () where little children are kept while
their mothers are at work, and children are fed who
would otherwise go hungry, he may see infants whose
limbs are shrunken from want of nourishment. Per-
66 PROPERTY IN LANT).
haps they may tell him, as they told me, of that little
girl, barefooted, ragged, and hungry, who, when they
gave her bread, raised her eyes and clasped her hands,
and thanked our Father in Heaven for His bounty to
her. They who told me that never dreamed, I think, of
its terrible meaning. But I ask the Duke of Argyll,
did that little child, thankful for that poor dole, get
what our Father provided for her ? Is He so niggard ;
If not, what is it, who is it, that stands between such
children and our Father’s bounty ? If it be an institu-
tion, is it not our duty to God and to our neighbor to
rest not till we destroy it ! If it be a man, were it not
better for him that a millstone were hanged about his
neck and he were cast into the depths of the sea 7
There can be no question of over-population—no pre-
tence that Nature has brought more men into being than
she has made provision for. Scotland Surely is not
over-populated. Much land is unusued ; much land is
devoted to lower uses, such as the breeding of game and
the raising of cattle, that might be devoted to higher
uses ; there are mineral resources untouched ; the wealth
drawn from the sea is but a small part of what might be
drawn. But it is idle to argue this point. Neither in
Scotland, nor in any other country, can any excess of
population over the power of nature to provide for then,
be shown. The poverty so painful in Scotland is mani-
festly no more due to over-population than the crowding
of two thirds of the families into houses of one or two
rooms is due to want of space to build houses upon.
And just as the crowding of people into insufficient lodg-
ings is directly due to institutions which permit men to
hold vacant land needed for buildings until they can
force a monopoly price from those wishing to build, so is
the poverty of the masses due to the fact that they are
THE ‘‘REDUCTION TO INIQUITY.” 6?
in like manner shut out from the opportunities Nature
has provided for the employment of their labor in the
satisfaction of their wants.
Take the Island of Skye as illustrating on a small scale
the cause of poverty throughout Scotland. The people
of Skye are poor—very poor. Is it because there are
too many of them An explanation lies nearer—an ex-
planation which would account for poverty no matter
how small the population. If there were but one man
in Skye, and if all that he produced, save enough to give
him a bare living, were periodically taken from him and
carried off, he would necessarily be poor. That is the
condition of the people of Skye. With a population of
some seventeen thousand there are, if my memory serves
me, twenty-four landowners. The few proprietors who
live upon the island, though they do nothing to produce
wealth, have fine houses, and live luxuriously, while the
greater portion of the rents are carried off to be spent
abroad. It is not merely that there is thus a constant
drain upon the wealth produced ; but that the power of
producing wealth is enormously lessened. As the people
are deprived of the power to accumulate capital, produc-
tion is carried on in the most primitive style, and at the
greatest disadvantage.
If there are really too many people in Scotland, why
not have the landlords emigrate & They are not merely
best fitted to emigrate, but would give the greatest
relief. They consume most, waste most, carry off most,
while they produce least. As landlords, in fact, they
produce nothing. They merely consume and destroy.
Economically considered, they have the same effect upon
production as bands of robbers or pirate fleets. To
national wealth they are as weavils in the grain, as rats
in the storehouse, as ferrets in the poultry yard.
58 f’RODERTY IN 1...ANI).
The Duke of Argyll complains of what he calls my
“assumption that owners of land are not producers, and
that rent does not represent, or represents in a very
minor degree, the interest of capital.” The Duke will
justify his complaint if he will show how the owning of
land can produce anything. Failing in this, he must
admit that though the same person may be a laborer,
capitalist, and landowner, the owner of land, as an
owner of land, is not a producer. And surely he knows
that the term “rent’’ as used in political economy, and
as I use it in the books he criticises, never represents the
interest on capital, but refers alone to the sum paid for
the use of the inherent capabilities of the soil.
As illustrating the usefulness of landlords, the Duke
Says :
“My own experience now extends over the best part offorty years.
During that time I have built over fifty homesteads, complete for
man and beast. I have drained and reclaimed many hundreds, and
enclosed some thousands of acres. In this sense I have added house
to house, and field to field, not—as pulpit orators have assumed in
similar cases—that I might dwell alone in the land, but that the
cultivating class may live more comfortably and with better appli-
ances for increasing the produce of the soil.’’
And again he says that during the last four years he
has spent on one property £40,000 in the improvement
of the soil.
I fear that in Scotland the Duke of Argyll has been
“hiding his light under a bushel,” for his version of the
way in which he has “added house to house, and field
to field'’ differs much from that which common Scots-
men give. But this is a matter into which I do not wish
to enter. What I would like to ask the Duke is, how
he built the fifty homesteads and reclaimed the thou-
sands of acres 2 Not with his own hands, of course ;
THE “REDUCTION TO INIQUITY.” 69
but with his money. Where, then, did he get that
money : Was is not taken as rent from the cultivators
of the soil ' And might not they, had it been left to
them, have devoted it to the building of homesteads and
the improvement of the soil as well as he Z Suppose the
Duke spends on such improvements all he draws in rent,
minus what it costs him to live, is not the cost of his
living so much waste so far as the improvement of the
land is concerned ? Would there not be a considerably
greater fund to devote to this purpose if the Duke got
no rent, and had to work for a living 2
But all Scottish landholders are not even such im-
provers as the Duke. There are landlords who spend
their incomes in racing, in profligacy, in doing things
which when not injurious are quite as useless to man or
beast, as the works of that English Duke, recently dead,
who spent millions in burrowing underground like a
mole. What the Scottish landlords call their “improve-
ments” have, for the most part, consisted in building
castles, laying out pleasure grounds, raising rents, and
evicting their kinsmen. But the encouragement given
to agriculture, by even such improving owners as the
Duke of Argyll, is very much like the encouragement
given to traffic by the Duke of Bedford, who keeps two
or three old men and women to open and shut gates he
has erected across the streets of London. That much
the greater part of the incomes drawn by landlords is as
completely lost for all productive purposes as though it
were thrown into the sea, there can be no doubt. But
that even the small part which is devoted to reproduc-
tive improvement is largely wasted, the Duke of Argyll
himself clearly shows in stating, what I have learned
from other sources, that the large outlays of the great
landholders yield little interest, and in many cases no in,
70 PROPERTY IN LAND.
terest at all. Clearly, the stock of wealth would have
been much greater had this capital been left in the hands
of the cultivators, who, in most cases, suffer from lack
of capital, and in many cases have to pay the most
usurious interest.
In fact, the plea of the landlords that they, as land-
lords, assist in production, is very much like the plea of
the slaveholders that they gave a living to the slaves.
And I am convinced that if the Duke of Argyll will
consider the matter as a philosopher rather than as a
landlord, he will see the gross inconsistency between the
views he expresses as to negro slavery and the position
he assumes as to property in land.
In principle the two systems of appropriating the
labor of other men are essentially the same. Since it is
from land and on land that man must live, if he is to
live at all, a human being is as completely enslaved when
the land on which he must live is made the property of
another as when his own flesh and blood are made the
property of that other. And at least, after a certain
point in social development is reached, the slavery that
results from depriving men of all legal right to land is,
for the very reason that the relation between master and
slave is not so direct and obvious, more cruel and more
demoralizing than that which makes property of their
bodies.
And turning to facts, the Duke must see, if he will
look, that the effects of the two systems are substantially
the same. He is, for instance, an hereditary legislator,
with power in making laws which other Scotsmen, who
have little or no voice in making laws, must obey under
penalty of being fined, imprisoned, or hanged. He has
this power, which is essentially that of the master to
compel the slave, not because any one thinks that Nature
THE “ REDUCTION TO INIQUITY.” 71
gives wisdom and patriotism to eldest sons more than to
younger sons, or to some families more than to other
families, but because as the legal owner of a considerable
part of Scotland, he is deemed to have greater rights in
making laws than other Scotsmen, who can live in their
native land only by paying some of the legal owners of
Scotland for the privilege.
That power over men arises from ownership of land as
well as from ownership of their bodies the Duke may
see in varied manifestations if he will look. The power
of the Scottish landlords over even the large farmers,
and, in the smaller towns, over even the well-to-do shop-
keepers and professional men, is enormous. Even where
it is the custom to let on lease, and large capital is re-
quired, competition, aided in many cases by the law of
hypotheca, enable the landlord to exert a direct power
over even the large farmer. That many substantial
farmers have been driven from their homes and ruined
because they voted or were supposed to have voted
against the wishes of their landlords is well known. A
man whose reputation was that of the best farmer in
Scotland was driven from his home in this way a few
years since for having politically offended his landlord.
In Leeds (England) I was told of a Scottish physician
who died there lately. He had been in comfortable
practice in a village on the estate of a Scottish duke.
Because he voted for a Liberal candidate, word was
given by the landlord's agent that he was no longer to
be employed, and as the people feared to disobey the
hint, he was obliged to leave. He came to Leeds, and
not succeeding in establishing himself, pined away, and
would have died in utter destitution but that some
friends he had made in Leeds wrote to the candidate for
supporting whom he had been boycotted, who came to
72 PROPERTY IN LAN ID.
Leeds, provided for his few days of life, and assumed
the care of his children. I mention to his honor the
name of that gentleman as it was given to me. It was
Sir Sydney Waterlew. *
During a recent visit to the Highlands I was over
and over again told by well-to-do men that they did not
dare to let their opinions be known or to take any action
the landlords or their agents might dislike. In one town
such men came to me by night and asked me to speak,
but telling me frankly that they did not dare to apply for
a hall, requested me to do that for myself, as I was be-
yond the tyranny they feared. If this be the condition
of the well-to-do, the condition of the crofters can be
imagined. One of them said to me, “We have feared
the landlord more than we have feared God Almighty ;
we have feared the factor more than the landlord, and
the ground officer more than the factor.” But there is
a class lower still even than the crofters—the cotters—
who, on forty-eight hours’ notice, can be turned out of
what by courtesy are called their homes, and who are at
the mercy of the large farmers or tacksmen, who in
turn fear the landlord or agent. Take this class, or the
class of farm servants who are kept in bothies. Can the
Duke tell me of any American slaves who were lodged
and fed as these white slaves are lodged and fed, or who
had less of all the comforts and enjoyments of life 2
The slaveholders of the South never, in any case that
I have heard of, interfered with the religion of the
slaves, and the Duke of Argyll will doubtless admit that
this is a power which one man ought not to have over
another. Yet he must know that at the disruption of
the Scottish Church, some forty years ago, Scottish pro-
prietors not merely evicted tenants who joined the Free
Church (and in many cases eviction meant ruin and
THE “ REDUCTION TO INIQUITY.” 73
death), but absolutely refused sites for churches and even
permission for the people to stand upon the land and
worship God according to the dictates of their con-
science. Hugh Miller has told, in “The Cruise of the
Betsy,” how one minister, denied permission to live on
the land, had to make his home on the sea in a small
boat. Large congregations had to worship on mountain
roadsides without shelter from storm and sleet, and even
on the seashore, where the tide flowed around their knees
as they took the communion. But perhaps the slavish-
ness which has been engendered in Scotland by land
monopoly is not better illustrated than in the case where,
after keeping them off his land for more than six years,
a Scottish Duke allowed a congregation the use of a
gravel-pit for purposes of worship, whereupon they sent
him a resolution of thanks
In the large cities tyranny of this kind cannot, of
course, be exercised, but it is in the large cities that the
slavery resulting from the reduction of land to private
ownership assumes the darkest shades. Negro slavery
had its horrors, but they were not so many or so black as
those constantly occurring in such cities. Their own
selfish interests, if not their human sympathies or the
restraint of public opinion, would have prevented the
owners of negro slaves from lodging and feeding and
working them as many of the so-called free people in
the centres of civilization are lodged and fed and
worked.
With all allowance for the prepossessions of a great
landlord, it is difficult to understand how the Duke of
Argyll can regard as an animating scene the history of
agricultural improvement in Scotland since 1745. From
the date mentioned, and the fact that he is a High-
lander, I presume that he refers mainly to the High-
74 PROPERTY IN LAND.
lands. But as a parallel to calling this history “animat-
ing,” I can think of nothing so close as the observation
of an economist of the Duke’s school, who, in an ac-
count of a visit to Scotland, a generation or so ago, spoke
of the pleasure with which, in a workhouse, he had seen
“both sexes and all ages, even to infants of two and
three years, earning their living by picking oakum,” or
as the expression of pride with which a Polish noble, in
the last century, pointed out to an English visitor some
miserable-looking creatures who, he said, were samples
of the serfs, any one of whom he could kick as he
pleased
“Thousands and thousands of acres,” says the Duke,
“have been reclaimed from barren wastes; ignorance
has given place to science, and barbarous customs of
immemorial strength have been replaced by habits of in-
telligence and business.” This is one side of the
picture, but unfortunately there is another side—chief-
tains taking advantage of the reverential affection of
their clansmen, and their ignorance of a foreign language
and a foreign law, to reduce those clansmen to a con-
dition of virtual slavery ; to rob them of the land which
by immemorial custom they had enjoyed ; to substitute
for the mutual tie that bound chief to vassal and vassal
to chief, the cold maxims of money-making greed ; to
drive them from their homes that sheep might have
place, or to hand them over to the tender mercies of a
great farmer.
“There has been grown,” says the Duke, “more
corn, more potatoes, more turnips ; there has been pro-
duced more milk, more butter, more cheese, more beef,
more mutton, more pork, more fowls and eggs.” But
what becomes of them : The Duke must know that the
ordinary food of the common people is meal and
THE “ REDUCTION TO INIQUITY.” 75
potatoes; that of these many do not get enough ; that
many would starve outright if they were not kept alive
by charity. Even the wild meat which their fathers
took freely, the common people cannot now touch. A
Highland poor-law physician, whose district is on the
estate of a prominent member of the Liberal party, was
telling me recently of the miserable poverty of the peo-
ple among whom his official duties lie, and how in-
sufficient and monotonous food was beginning to produce
among them diseases like the pellegria in Italy, when I
asked him if they could not, despite the gamekeepers,
take for themselves enough fish and game to vary their
diet. “They never think of it,” he replied ; “they are
too cowed. Why, the moment any one of them was
even suspected of cultivating a taste for trout or grouse,
he would be driven off the estate like a mad dog.”
Besides the essays and journals referred to by the Duke
of Argyll, there is another publication, which any one
wishing to be informed on the subject may read with
advantage, though not with pleasure. It is entitled
“Highland Clearances,” and is published in Inverness
by A. McKenzie. There is nothing in savage life more
cold-bloodedly atrocious than the warfare here recorded
as carried on against the clansmen by those who were
their hereditary protectors. The burning of houses :
the ejection of old and young ; the tearing down of
shelters put up to shield women with child and tender
infants from the bitter night blast ; the threats of similar
treatment against all who should give them hospitality ;
the forcing of poor helpless creatures into emigrant ships
which carried them to strange lands and among a people
of whose tongue they were utterly ignorant, to die in
many cases like rotten sheep or to be reduced to utter
degradation. An animating scene truly Great dis-
76 PROPERTY IN LAND.
tricts once peopled with a race, rude it may be and
slavish to their chiefs, but still a race of manly virtues,
brave, kind, and hospitable—now tenanted only by sheep
or cattle, by grouse or deer | No one can read of the
atrocities perpetrated upon the Scottish people, during
what is called “the improvement of the Highlands,”
without feeling something like utter contempt for men
who, lions abroad, were such sheep at home that they
suffered these outrages without striking a blow, even if
an ineffectual one. But the explanation of this reveals
a lower depth in the “reduction to iniquity.” The rea-
son of the tame submission of the Highland people to
outrages which should have nerved the most timid is to
be found in the prostitution of their religion. The
Highland people are a deeply religious people, and dur-
ing these evictions their preachers preached to them that
their trials were the visitations of the Almighty and must
be submitted to under the penalty of eternal damna-
tion |
I met accidentally in Scotland, recently, a lady of the
small landlord class, and the conversation turned upon
the poverty of the Highland people. “Yes, they are
poor,” she said, “but they deserve to be poor ; they are
so dirty. I have no sympathy with women who won’t
keep their houses neat and their children tidy.”
I suggested that neatness could hardly be expected
from women who every day had to trudge for miles with
creels of peat and seaweed on their backs.
“Yes,” she said, “they do have to work hard. But
that is not so sad as the hard lives of the horses. Did
you ever think of the horses They have to work all
their lives—till they can’t work any longer. It makes
me sad to think of it. There ought to be big farms
where horses should be turned out after they had worked
THE “ REDUCTION TO INIQUITY.” **
Some years, so that they might have time to enjoy them-
selves before they died.”
“But the people º’’ I interposed. “They, too, have
to work till they can’t work longer.”
“Oh, yes!” she replied, “but the people have
souls, and even if they do have a hard time of it here,
they will, if they are good, go to heaven when they die,
and be happy hereafter. But the poor beasts have no
souls, and if they don’t enjoy themselves here, they have
no chance of enjoying themselves at all. It is too
had l’” .
The woman was in sober earnest. And I question if
she did not fairly represent much that has been taught
in Scotland as Christianity. But at last, thank God
the day is breaking, and the blasphemy that has been
preached as religion will not be heard much longer.
The manifesto of the Scottish Land Restoration League,
calling upon the Scottish people to bind themselves
together in solemn league and covenant for the extirpa-
tion of the sin and shame of landlordism is a lark’s note
in the dawn. :
As in Scotland so elsewhere. I have spoken par-
ticularly of Scotland only because the Duke does so.
But everywhere that our civilization extends the same
primary injustice is bearing the same evil fruits. And
everywhere the same spirit is rising, the same truth is
beginning to force its way.
4 . .
THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
AN
OPEN LETTER TO POPE LEO XIII.
BY
EIENERY GEORGE
WITH ENCYCLICAL LETTER OF POPE LEO XIII.
ON THE CONDITION OF LABOR
NEW YORK
CHARLES L. WEBSTER & COMPANY
1893
CopyRIGHT, 1881,
BY
HENRY GEORGE
THE CONDITION OF LABOR
An Open Letter to Pope Leo XIII.
To POPE LEO XIII.
Your Holiness:
I have read with care your Encyclical letter
on the condition of labor, addressed, through the
Patriarchs, Primates, Archbishops and Bishops of your
faith, to the Christian World.
Since its most strikingly pronounced condemnations
are directed against a theory that we who hold it
know to be deserving of your support, I ask permission
to lay before your Holiness the grounds of our belief,
and to set forth some considerations that you have
unfortunately overlooked. The momentous serious-
ness of the facts you refer to, the poverty, suffering
and Seething discontent that pervade the Christian
world, the danger that passion may lead ignorance in
a blind struggle against social conditions rapidly be-
coming intolerable, are my justification.
I.
Our postulates are all stated or implied in your
Encyclical. They are the primary perceptions of
4. THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
human reason, the fundamental teachings of the
Christian faith :
We hold : That—
This world is the creation of God.
The men brought into it for the brief period of their
earthly lives are the equal creatures of His bounty,
the equal subjects of His provident care.
By his constitution man is beset by physical wants,
on the satisfaction of which depend not only the
maintenance of his physical life but also the develop-
ment of his intellectual and spiritual life. -
God has made the satisfaction of these wants
dependent on man’s own exertions, giving him the
power and laying on him the injunction to labor—a
power that of itself raises him far above the brute,
since we may reverently say that it enables him to
become as it were a helper in the creative work.
God has not put on man the task of making bricks
without straw. With the need for labor and the power
to labor He has also given to man the material for
labor. This material is land—man physically being
a land animal, who can live only on and from land,
and can use other elements, such as air, Sunshine and
water, only by the use of land.
Being the equal creatures of the Creator, equally
entitled under His providence to live their lives and
satisfy their needs, men are equally entitled to the use
of land, and any adjustment that denies this equal
use of land is morally wrong.
As to the right of ownership, we hold: That—
Being created individuals, with individual wants
and powers, men are individually entitled (subject of
OPEN LETTER TO POPE LEO XIIIs 5
course to the moral obligations that arise from such re-
lations as that of the family) to the use of their own
powers and the enjoyment of the results.
There thus arises, anterior to human law, and
deriving its validity from the law of God, a right of
private ownership in things produced by labor—a right
that the possessor may transfer, but of which to de-
prive him without his will is theft.
This right of property, originating in the right of
the individual to himself, is the only full and complete
right of property. It attaches to things produced by
labor, but cannot attach to things created by God.
Thus, if a man take a fish from the ocean he acquires
a right of property in that fish, which exclusive right
he may transfer by sale or gift. But he cannot obtain
a similar right of property in the ocean, so that he
may sell it or give it or forbid others to use it.
Or, if he set up a windmill he acquires a right of
property in the things such use of wind enables him
to produce. But he cannot claim a right of property
in the wind itself, so that he may sell it or forbid
others to use it.
Or, if he cultivate grain he acquires a right of prop-
erty in the grain his labor brings forth. But he cannot
obtain a similar right of property in the sun which
ripened it or the soil on which it grew. For these
things are of the continuing gifts of God to all genera-
tions of men, which all may use, but none may claim
as his alone.
To attach to things created by God the same right of
private ownership that justly attaches to things pro-
duced by labor is to impair and deny the true rights
of property. For a man who out of the proceeds of
6 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
his labor is obliged to pay another man for the use of
Ocean or air or sunshine or soil, all of which are to
men involved in the single term land, is in this de.
prived of his rightful property and thus robbed.
As to the use of land, we hold : That—
While the right of ownership that justly attaches to
things produced by labor cannot attach to land, there
may attach to land a right of possession. As your
Holiness says, “God has not granted the earth to man-
kind in general in the sense that all without distinction
can deal with it as they please,” and regulations
necessary for its best use may be fixed by human laws.
But such regulations must conform to the moral law
—must secure to all equal participation in the advan-
tages of God’s general bounty. The principle is the
same as where a human father leaves property equally
to a number of children. Some of the things thus
left may be incapable of common use or of specific
division. Such things may properly be assigned to
some of the children, but only under condition that
the equality of benefit among them all be preserved.
In the rudest social state, while industry consists in
hunting, fishing, and gathering the spontaneous fruits
of the earth, private possession of land is not necessary.
But as men begin to cultivate the ground and expend
their labor in permanent works, private possession of
the land on which labor is thus expended is needed to
secure the right of property in the products of labor.
For who would sow if not assured of the exclusive
possession needed to enable him to reap f who would
attach costly works to the soil without such exclusive
OPEN LETTER TO POPE LEO XIII. 7
possession of the soil as would enable him to secure
the benefit 2
This right of private possession in things created by
God is however very different from the right of private
ownership in things produced by labor. The one is
limited, the other unlimited, save in cases when the
dictate of self-preservation terminates all other rights.
The purpose of the one, the exclusive possession of
land, is merely to secure the other, the exclusive
ownership of the products of labor; and it can never
rightfully be carried so far as to impair or deny this.
While anyone may hold exclusive possession of land so
far as it does not interfere with the equal rights of
others, he can rightfully hold it no further.
Thus Cain and Abel, were there only two men on
earth, might by agreement divide the earth between
them. Under this compact each might claim exclusive
right to his share as against the other. But neither
could rightfully continue such claim against the next
man born. For since no one comes into the world
without God’s permission, his presence attests his
equal right to the use of God's bounty. For them to
refuse him any use of the earth which they had
divided between them would therefore be for them to
commit murder. And for them to refuse him any
use of the earth, unless by laboring for them or by
giving them part of the products of his labor he bought
it of them, would be for them to commit theft.
God’s laws do not change. Though their applica-
tions may alter with altering conditions, the same
principles of right and wrong that hold when men
are few and industry is rude also hold amid teeming
8 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
populations and complex industries. In our cities of
millions and our states of scores of millions, in a
civilization where the division of labor has gone so
far that large numbers are hardly conscious that they
are land users, it still remains true that we are all
land animals and can live only on land, and that land
is God’s bounty to all, of which no one can be
deprived without being murdered, and for which no
one can be compelled to pay another without being
robbed. But even in a state of society where the
elaboration of industry and the increase of permanent
improvements have made the need for private posses-
sion of land widespread, there is no difficulty in
conforming individual possession with the equal right
to land. For as soon as any piece of land will yield
to the possessor a larger return than is had by similar
labor on other land a value attaches to it which is
shown when it is sold or rented. Thus, the value of
the land itself, irrespective of the value of any
improvements in or on it, always indicates the precise
value of the benefit to which all are entitled in its
use, as distinguished from the value which as producer
or successor of a producer belongs to the possessor in
individual right.
To combine the advantages of private possession
with the justice of common ownership it is only
necessary therefore to take for common uses what
value attaches to land irrespective of any exertion of
labor on it. The principle is the same as in the case
referred to, where a human father leaves equally to his
children things not susceptible of specific division or
common use. In that case such things would be Sold
or rented and the value equally applied.
OPEN LETTER TO POPE LEO XIII. 9
It is on this common sense principle that we, who
term ourselves single tax men, would have the com-
munity act.
We do not propose to assert equal rights to land by
keeping land common, letting any one use any part
of it at any time. We do not propose the task,
impossible in the present state of society, of dividing
land in equal shares; still less the yet more impossible
task of keeping it so divided.
We propose, leaving land in the private possession
of individuals, with full liberty on their part to
give, sell or bequeath it, simply to levy on it for public
uses a tax that shall equal the annual value of the land
itself, irrespective of the use made of it or the
improvements on it. And since this would provide
amply for the need of public revenues, we would
accompany this tax on land values with the repeal of
all taxes now levied on the products and processes of
industry—which taxes, since they take from the
earnings of labor, we hold to be infringements of the
right of property.
This we propose, not as a cunning device of human
ingenuity, but as a conforming of human regulations
to the will of God.
God cannot contradict himself nor impose on his
creatures laws that clash.
If it be God’s command to men that they should
not steal—that is to say, that they should respect the
right of property which each one has in the fruits of
his labor ;
And if He be also the Father of all men, who in His
common bounty has intended all to have equal
opportunities for sharing;
10 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
Then, in any possible stage of civilization, how-
ever elaborate, there must be some way in which
the exclusive right to the products of industry may be
reconciled with the equal right to land.
If the Almighty be consistent with Himself, it
cannot be, as say those socialists referred to by you,
that in order to secure the equal participation of men
in the opportunities of life and labor we must ignore
the right of private property. Nor yet can it be, as
you yourself in the Encyclical seem to argue, that
to secure the right of private property we must
ignore the equality of right in the opportunities of
life and labor. To say the one thing or the other
is equally to deny the harmony of God’s laws.
But, the private possession of land, subject to the
payment to the community of the value of any special
advantage thus given to the individual, satisfies both
laws, securing to all equal participation in the bounty
of the Creator and to each the full ownership of the
products of his labor.
Nor do we hesitate to say that this way of securing
the equal right to the bounty of the Creator and the
exclusive right to the products of labor is the way
intended by God for raising public revenues. For we
are not atheists, who deny God; nor semi-atheists,
who deny that He has any concern in politics and
legislation.
It is true as you say—a salutary truth too often
forgotten—that “man is older than the state, and he
holds the right of providing for the life of his body
prior to the formation of any state.” Yet, as you too
perceive, it is also true that the state is in the divinely
OPEN LETTER TO POPE LEO XIII. 11
appointed order. For He who foresaw all things and
provided for all things, foresaw and provided that
with the increase of population and the development
of industry the organization of human society into
states or governments would become both expedient
and necessary.
No sooner does the state arise than, as we all know,
it needs revenues. This need for revenues is small
at first, while population is sparse, industry rude and
the functions of the state few and simple. But with
growth of population and advance of civilization the
functions of the state increase and larger and larger
revenues are needed.
Now, He that made the world and placed man in
it, He that preordained civilization as the means
whereby man might rise to higher powers and become
more and more conscious of the works of his Creator,
must have foreseen this increasing need for state
revenues and have made provision for it. That is to
say: The increasing need for public revenues with
social advance, being a natural, God-ordained need,
there must be a right way of raising them—some way
that we can truly say is the way intended by God.
It is clear that this right way of raising public revenues
must accord with the moral law.
Hence:
It must not take from individuals what rightfully
belongs to individuals.
It must not give some an advantage over others,
as by increasing the prices of what some have to sell
and others must buy.
It must not lead men into temptation, by requiring
12 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
trivial oaths, by making it profitable to lie, to swear
falsely, to bribe or to take bribes.
It must not confuse the distinctions of right and
wrong, and weaken the sanctions of religion and the
state by creating crimes that are not sins, and punish.
ing men for doing what in itself they have an un-
doubted right to do.
It must not repress industry. It must not check
commerce. It must not punish thrift. It must offer
no impediment to the largest production and the
fairest division of wealth.
Let me ask your Holiness to consider the taxes on
the processes and products of industry by which
through the civilized world public revenues are
collected—the Octroi duties that surround Italian
cities with barriers; the monstrous customs duties
that hamper intercourse between so-called Christian
states; the taxes on Occupations, on earnings, on
investments, on the building of houses, on the culti-
vation of fields, on industry and thrift in all forms.
Can these be the ways God has intended that govern-
ments should raise the means they need & Have any
of them the characteristics indispensable in any plan
we can deem a right one
All these taxes violate the moral law. They take
by force what belongs to the individual alone; they
give to the unscrupulous an advantage over the
scrupulous; they have the effect, may are largely in-
tended, to increase the price of what some have to
sell and others must buy; they corrupt government;
they make oaths a mockery; they shackle commerce;
they fine industry and thrift; they lessen the wealth
OPEN LETTER TO POPE LEO XIII. 13
that men might enjoy, and enrich some by impoverish-
ing others.
Yet what most strikingly shows how opposed to
Christianity is this system of raising public revenues
is its influence on thought.
Christianity teaches us that all men are brethren ;
that their true interests are harmonious, not an-
tagonistic. It gives us, as the golden rule of life, that
we should do to others as we would have others do
to us. But out of the system of taxing the products
and processes of labor, and out of its effects in increas-
ing the price of what some have to sell and others
must buy, has grown the theory of “protection,”
which denies this gospel, which holds Christ ignorant
of political economy and proclaims laws of national
well-being utterly at variance with His teaching. This
theory sanctifies national hatreds; it inculcates a
universal war of hostile tariffs; it teaches peoples
that their prosperity lies in imposing on the pro-
ductions of other peoples restrictions they do not wish
imposed on their own; and instead of the Christian
doctrine of man’s brotherhood it makes injury of
foreigners a civic virtue.
“By their fruits you shall know them.” Can any-
thing more clearly show that to tax the products and
processes of industry is not the way God intended
public revenues to be raised ?
But to consider what we propose—the raising of
public revenues by a single tax on the value of land
irrespective of improvements—is to see that in all
respects this does conform to the moral law.
Let me ask your Holiness to keep in mind that the
value we propose to tax, the value of land irrespective
14 "THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
of improvements, does not come from any exertion
of labor or investment of capital on or in it—the
values produced in this way being values of improve-
ment which we would exempt. The value of land
irrespective of improvement is the value that attaches
to land by reason of increasing population and social
progress. This is a value that always goes to the
owner as owner, and never does and never can go to
the user; for if the user be a different person from the
owner he must always pay the owner for it in rent or
in purchase money; while if the user be also the
owner, it is as owner, not as user, that he receives it,
and by selling or renting the land he can, as owner,
continue to receive it after he ceases to be a user.
Thus, taxes on land irrespective of improvement can-
not lessen the rewards of industry, nor add to prices,”
*As to this point it may be well to add that all economists are
agreed that taxes on land values irrespective of improvement or
use—or what in the terminology of Political Economy is styled
rent, a term distinguished from the ordinary use of the word rent
by being applied solely to payments for the use of land itself—
must be paid by the owner and cannot be shifted by him on the
user. To explain in another way the reason given in the text
Price is not determined by the will of the seller or the will of the
buyer, but by the equation of demand and supply, and therefore
as to things constantly demanded and constantly produced rests
at a point determined by the cost of production—whatever tends
to increase the cost of bringing fresh quantities of such articles
to the consumer increasing price by checking supply, and what
ever tends to reduce such cost decreasing price by increasing
supply. Thus taxes on wheat or tobacco or cloth add to the
price that the consumer must pay, and thus the cheapening in
the cost of producing steel which improved processes have made
in recent years has greatly reduced the price of steel. But land
has no cost of production, since it is created by God, not pro-
duced by man. Its price therefore is fixed—1 (monopoly rent),
where land is held in close monopoly, by what the owners can
extract from the users under penalty of deprivation and con-
sequently of starvation, and amounts to all that common labor
can earn on it beyond what is necesstry to life ; 2 (economic
rent proper), where there is no special monopoly, by what the
OPEN LETTER TO POPE LEO XIII. - 15
nor in any way take from the individual what belongs
to the individual. They can only take the value that
attaches to land by the growth of the community, and
which therefore belongs to the community as a whole.
To take land values for the state, abolishing all taxes
on the products of labor, would therefore leave to the
laborer the full produce of labor; to the individual all
that rightfully belongs to the individual. It would
impose no burden on industry, no check on commerce,
no punishment on thrift; it would secure the largest
production and the fairest distribution of wealth, by
leaving men free to produce and to exchange as they
please, without any artificial enhancement of prices;
and by taking for public purposes a value that cannot
be carried off, that cannot be hidden, that of all values
is most easily ascertained and most certainly and
particular land will yield to common labor over and above what
may be had by like expenditure and exertion on land having no
special advantage and for which no rent is paid ; and, 3 (specu-
lative rent, which is a species of monopoly rent, telling particu-
larly in selling price), by the expectation of future increase of
value from social growth and improvement, which expectation
causing land owners to withhold land at present prices has the
same effect as combination.
Taxes on land values or economic rent can therefore never be
shifted by the land owner to the land user, since they in no wise
increase the demand for land or enable land owners to check
supply by withholding land from use. Where rent depends on
mere monopolization, a case I mention because rent may in this
way be demanded for the use of land even before economic or
natural rent arises, the taking by taxation of what the land-
Owners were able to extort from labor could not enable them to
extort any more, since laborers, if not left enough to live on,
will die. So, in the case of economic rent proper, to take from
the land owners the premiums they receive, would in no way
increase the superiority of their land and the demand for it.
While so far as price is affected by speculative rent, to compel
the land owners to pay taxes on the value of land whether they
were getting any income from it or not, would make it more
difficult for them to withhold land from use ; and to tax the
...' value would not merely destroy the power but the desire
to do S0,
16 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
cheaply collected, it would enormously lessen the
number of officials, dispense with oaths, do away with
temptations to bribery and evasion, and abolish man-
made crimes in themselves innocent.
But, further : That God has intended the state
to obtain the revenues it needs by the taxation of
land values is shown by the same order and degree of
evidence that shows that God has intended the milk
of the mother for the nourishment of the babe.
See how close is the analogy. In that primitive
condition ere the need for the state arises there are no
land values. The products of labor have value, but
in the sparsity of population no value as yet attaches
to land itself. But as increasing density of population
and increasing elaboration of industry necessitate the
organization of the state, with its need for revenues,
value begins to attach to land. As population still
increases and industry grows more elaborate, so the
needs for public revenues increase. And at the same
time and from the same causes land values increase.
The connection is invariable. The value of things
produced by labor tends to decline with social develop-
ment, since the larger scale of production and the
improvement of processes tend steadily to reduce
their cost. But the value of land on which popu-
lation centers goes up and up. Take Rome or
Paris or London or New York or Melbourne.
Consider the enormous value of land in such cities as
compared with the value of land in sparsely settled
parts of the same countries. To what is this due : Is it
not due to the density and activity of the populations
of those cities—to the very causes that require great
OPEN LETTER, TO POPE LEO XIII. 17
public expenditure for streets, drains, public buildings,
and all the many things needed for the health, con-
venience and safety of such great cities? See how
with the growth of such cities the one thing that
steadily increases in value is land; how the opening of
roads, the building of railways, the making of any
public improvement, adds to the value of land. Is it
not clear that here is a natural law—that is to say a
tendency willed by the Creator? Can it mean anything
else than that He who ordained the state with its
needs has in the values which attach to land provided
the means to meet those needs?
That it does mean this and nothing else is confirmed
if we look deeper still, and inquire not merely as to
the intent, but as to the purpose of the intent. If we
do so we may see in this natural law by which land val-
ues increase with the growth of society not only such a
perfectly adapted, provision for the needs of society
as gratifies our intellectual perceptions by showing us
the wisdom of the Creator, but a purpose with regard
to the individual that gratifies our moral perceptions
by opening to us a glimpse of His beneficence.
Consider: Here is a natural law by which as society
advances the one thing that increases in value island—
a natural law by virtue of which all growth of popula-
tion, all advance of the arts, all general improvements
of whatever kind, add to a fund that both the
commands of justice and the dictates of expediency
prompt us to take for the common uses of society.
Now, since increase in the fund available for the
common uses of society is increase in the gain that
goes equally to each member of society, is it not clear
18 THE CONDITION OF i.ABOR.
that the law by which land values increase with social
advance while the value of the products of labor do
not increase, tends with the advance of civilization to
make the share that goes equally to each member
of society more and more important as compared with
what goes to him from his individual earnings, and
thus to make the advance of civilization lessen rel-
atively the differences that in a ruder social state
must exist between the strong and the weak, the
fortunate and the unfortunate? Does it not show the
purpose of the Creator to be that the advance of man
in civilization should be an advance not merely to
larger powers but to a greater and greater equality,
instead of what we, by our ignoring of His intent, are
making it, an advance towards a more and more
monstrous inequality ?
That the value attaching to land with social growth
is intended for social needs is shown by the final
proof. God is indeed a jealous God in the sense that
nothing but injury and disaster can attend the effort
of men to do things other than in the way He has
intended; in the sense that where the blessings He
proffers to men are refused or misused they turn to
evils that scourge us. And just as for the mother
to withhold the provision that fills her breast with
the birth of the child is to endanger physical health,
so for society to refuse to take for social uses the pro-
vision intended for them is to breed social disease.
For refusal to take for public purposes the increasing
values that attach to land with social growth is to
necessitate the getting of public revenues by taxes
that lessen production, distort distribution and corrupt
OfEN LETTER TO POP15. LEO XIII. 19
Society. It is to leave some to take what justly
belongs to all; it is to forego the only means by which
it is possible in an advanced civilization to combine
the security of possession that is necessary to improve-
ment with the equality of natural opportunity that
is the most important of all natural rights. It is thus
at the basis of all social life to set up an unjust
inequality between man and man, compelling some
to pay others for the privilege of living, for the chance
of working, for the advantages of civilization, for the
gifts of their God. But it is even more than this.
The very robbery that the masses of men thus suffer
gives rise in advancing communities to a new robbery.
For the value that with the increase of population
and social advance attaches to land being suffered
to go to individuals who have secured ownership of
the land, it prompts to a forestalling of and speculation
in land wherever there is any prospect of advancing
population or of coming improvement, thus produc-
ing an artificial scarcity of the natural elements of
life and labor, and a strangulation of production that
shows itself in recurring spasms of industrial depression
as disastrous to the world as destructive wars. It is
this that is driving men from the old countries to the
new countries, only to bring there the same curses.
It is this that causes our material advance not merely
to fail to improve the condition of the mere worker,
but to make the condition of large classes positively
worse. It is this that in our richest Christian countries
is giving us a large population whose lives are harder,
more hopeless, more degraded than those of the
veriest Savages. It is this that leads so many men
to think that God is a bungler and is constantly
20 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
bringing more people into His world than He has
made provision for; or that there is no God, and that
belief in Him is a superstition which the facts of life
and the advance of science are dispelling.
The darkness in light, the weakness in strength,
the poverty amid wealth, the seething discontent
foreboding civil strife, that characterize our civilization
of to-day, are the natural, the inevitable results of our
rejection of God’s beneficence, of our ignoring of His
intent. Were we on the other hand to follow His
clear, simple rule of right, leaving scrupulously to the
individual all that individual labor produces, and
taking for the community the value that attaches to
land by the growth of the community itself, not
merely could evil modes of raising public revenues
be dispensed with, but all men would be placed on an
equal level of opportunity with regard to the bounty
of their Creator, on an equal level of opportunity
to exert their labor and to enjoy its fruits. And then,
without drastic or restrictive measures the forestalling
of land would cease. For then the possession of land
would mean only security for the permanence of its
use, and there would be no object for any one to get
land or to keep land except for use; nor would his
possession of better land than others had confer any
unjust advantage on him, or unjust deprivation on
them, since the equivalent of the advantage would be
taken by the state for the benefit of all.
The Right Reverend Dr. Thomas Nulty, Bishop
of Meath, who sees all this as clearly as we do, in
pointing out to the clergy and laity of his diocese *
* Letter addressed to the Clergy and Laity of the Diocese
of Meath, Ireland, April 2, 1881:
OPEN LETTER TO POPE LEO XIII. 21
the design of Divine Providence that the rent of
land should be taken for the community, says:
“I think, therefore, that I may fairly infer, on the
strength of authority as well as of reason, that the
people are and always must be the real owners of the
land of their country. This great social fact appears
to me to be of incalculable importance, and it is
fortunate, indeed, that on the strictest principles of
justice it is not clouded even by a shadow of
uncertainty or doubt. There is, moreover, a charm
and a peculiar beauty in the clearness with which
it reveals the wisdom and the benevolence of the
designs of Providence in the admirable provision He
has made for the wants and the necessities of that
state of social existence of which He is author, and
in which the very instincts of nature tell us we are
to spend our lives. A vast public property, a great
national fund, has been placed under the dominion
and at the disposal of the nation to supply itself
abundantly with resources necessary to liquidate the
expenses of its government, the administration of its
laws and the education of its youth, and to enable it
to provide for the suitable sustentation and support
of its criminal and pauper population. One of the
most interesting peculiarities of this property is that
its value is never stationary; it is constantly progressive
and increasing in a direct ratio to the growth of the
population, and the very causes that increase and
multiply the demands made on it increase proportion-
ately its ability to meet them.”
There is, indeed, as Bishop Nulty says, a peculiar
beauty in the clearness with which the wisdom and
benevolence of Providence are revealed in this great
social fact, the provision made for the common needs
of society in what economists call the law of rent.
Of all the evidence that natural religion gives,
it is this that most clearly shows the existence of a
22 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
beneficent God, and most conclusively silences the
doubts that in our days lead so many to materialism.
For in this beautiful provision made by natural law
for the social needs of civilization we see that God
has intended civilization; that all our discoveries and
inventions do not and cannot outrun. His forethought,
and that steam, electricity and labor saving appliances
only make the great moral laws clearer and more
important. In the growth of this great fund, increasing
with Social advance—a fund that accrues from the
growth of the community and belongs therefore to
the community—we see not only that there is no need
for the taxes that lessen wealth, that engender corrup-
tion, that promote inequality and teach men to deny
the gospel; but that to take this fund for the purpose
for which it was evidently intended would in the
highest civilization secure to all the equal enjoyment of
God’s bounty, the abundant opportunity to satisfy their
wants, and would provide amply for every legitimate
need of the state. We see that God in His dealings
with men has not been a bungler or a niggard; that
He has not brought too many men into the world;
that He has not neglected abundantly to supply them;
that He has not intended that bitter competition of
the masses for a mere animal existence and that
monstrous aggregation of wealth which characterize
our civilization; but that these evils which lead so
many to say there is no God, or yet more impiously
to say that they are of God's ordering, are due to our
denial of His moral law. We see that the law of
justice, the law of the Golden Rule, is not a mere
counsel of perfection, but indeed the law of social
life. We see that if we were only to observe it
OPEN LETTER, TO POPE LEO XIII. 23
there would be work for all, leisure for all, abundance
for all; and that civilization would tend to give to the
poorest not only necessaries, but all comforts and
reasonable luxuries as well. We see that Christ was
not a mere dreamer when He told men that if they
would seek the kingdom of God and its right doing
they might no more worry about material things than
do the lilies of the field about their raiment; but that
He was only declaring what political economy in the
light of modern discovery shows to be a sober truth.
Your Holiness, even to see this is deep and lasting
joy. For it is to see for one’s self that there is a God
who lives and reigns, and that He is a God of justice
and love—Our Father who art in Heaven. It is to
open a rift of sunlight through the clouds of our
darker questionings, and to make the faith that trusts
where it cannot see a living thing.
II.
Your Holiness will see from the explanation I have
given that the reform we propose, like all true re-
forms, has both an ethical and an economic side. By
ignoring the ethical side, and pushing our proposal
merely as a reform of taxation, we could avoid the
objections that arise from confounding ownership
with possession and attributing to private property in
land that security of use and improvement that can be
had even better without it. All that we seek practi-
cally is the legal abolition, as fast as possible, of taxes
on the products and processes of labor, and the con.
sequent concentration of taxation on land values
irrespective of improvements. To put our proposals
24 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
in this way would be to urge them merely as a
matter of wise public expediency.
There are indeed many single tax men who do put
our proposals in this way; who seeing the beauty of
our plan from a fiscal standpoint do not concern them-
selves farther. But to those who think as I do, the
ethical is the more important side. Not only do we
not wish to evade the question of private property in
land, but to us it seems that the beneficent and far-
reaching revolution we aim at is too great a thing to
be accomplished by “intelligent self-interest,” and can
be carried by nothing less than the religious con-
Science.
Hence we earnestly seek the judgment of religion.
This is the tribunal of which your Holiness as the
head of the largest body of Christians is the most
august representative.
It therefore behooves us to examine the reasons
you urge in support of private property inland—if they.
be sound to accept them, and if they be not sound
respectfully to point out to you wherein is their error.
To your proposition that “Our first and most fun-
damental principle when we undertake to alleviate the
condition of the masses must be the inviolability of
private property” we would joyfully agree if we could
only understand you to have in mind the moral
element, and to mean rightful private property, as
when you speak of marriage as ordained by God’s
authority we may understand an implied exclusion of
improper marriages. Unfortunately, however, other
expressions show that you mean private property in
general and have expressly in mind private property
in land. This confusion of thought, this non-distri-
OPEN LETTER TO POPE LEO XIII. 25
bution of terms, runs through your whole argument,
leading you to conclusions so unwarranted by your
premises as to be utterly repugnant to them, as when
from the moral sanction of private property in the
things produced by labor you infer something entirely
different and utterly opposed, a similar right of pro-
perty in the land created by God.
Private property is not of one species, and moral
sanction can no more be asserted universally of it than
of marriage. That proper marriage conforms to the
law of God does not justify the polygamic, or poly-
andric or incestuous marriages that are in some
countries permitted by the civil law. And as there
may be immoral marriage so may there be im-
moral private property. Private property is that
which may be held in ownership by an individual, or
that which may be held in ownership by an individual
with the sanction of the state. The mere lawyer, the
mere servant of the state, may rest here, refusing to
distinguish between what the state holds equally law-
ful. Your Holiness, however, is not a servant of
the state, but a servant of God, a guardian of morals.
You know, as said by St. Thomas of Aquin, that
“Human law is law only in virtue of its accordance
with right reason and it is thus manifest that it flows
from the eternal law. And in so far as it deviates
from right reason it is called an unjust law. In such
case it is not law at all, but rather a species of
violence.”
Thus, that any species of property is permitted by
he state does not of itself give it moral sanction.
The state has often made things property that are not
justly property, but involve violence and robbery.
26 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
For instance, the things of religion, the dignity and
authority of offices of the church, the power of ad-
ministering her Sacraments and controlling her tempo-
ralities have often by profligate princes been given
as Salable property to courtiers and concubines. At
this very day in England an atheist or a heathen may
buy in open market, and hold as legal property, to be
Sold, given or bequeathed as he pleases, the power of
appointing to the cure of Souls, and the value of these
legal rights of presentation is said to be no less than
4217,000,000. .
Or again: Slaves were universally treated as property
by the customs and laws of the classical nations, and
were so acknowledged in Europe long after the ac-
ceptance of Christianity. At the beginning of this
century there was no Christian nation that did not,
in her colonies at least, recognize property in slaves,
and slave ships crossed the seas under Christian flags.
In the United States, little more than thirty years
ago, to buy a man gave the same legal ownership as
to buy a horse, and in Mohammedan countries law
and custom yet make the slave the property of his
captor or purchaser. -
Yet your Holiness, one of the glories of whose
pontificate is the attempt to break up slavery in its
last strongholds, will not contend that the moral sanction
that attaches to property in things produced by labor
can, or ever could, apply to property in slaves.
Your use, in so many passages of your Encyclical, of
the inclusive term “property” or “private” property,
of which in morals nothing can be either affirmed or
denied, makes your meaning, if we take isolated
sentences, in many places ambiguous. But reading
OPEN LETTER TO POPE LEO XIII. 27
it as a whole, there can be no doubt of your intention
that private property in land shall be understood when
you speak merely of private property. With this
interpretation, I find that the reasons you urge for
private property in land are eight. Let us consider
them in order of presentation. You urge:
1. That what is bought with rightful property is
nightful property. (5.)*
Clearly, purchase and sale cannot give, but can only
transfer ownership. Property that in itself has no
moral sanction does not obtain moral sanction by
passing from seller to buyer. -
If right reason does not make the slave the property
of the slave hunter it does not make him the property
of the slave buyer. Yet your reasoning as to private
property in land would as well justify property in
slaves. To show this it is only needful to change in your
argument the word land to the word slave. It would
then read :
“It is surely undeniable that when a man engages
in remunerative labor the very reason and motive of
his work is to obtain property, and to hold it in his own
private possession.
“If one man hire out to another his strength or his
industry he does this for the purpose of receiving
in return what is necessary for food and living; he
thereby expressly proposes to acquire a full and legal
right, not only to the remuneration, but also to the
disposal of that remuneration as he pleases.
“Thus, if he lives sparingly, saves money and invests
his savings for greater security in a slave, the slave in
* To facilitate references the paragraphs of the Encyclical are
indicated by number. !
28 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
such a case is only his wages in another form; and con-
sequently a workingman’s slave thus purchased should
be as completely at his own disposal as the wages he
receives for his labor.”
Nor in turning your argument for private property
in land into an argument for private property in men
am I doing a new thing. In my own country, in my
own time, this very argument, that purchase gave
ownership, was the common defense of slavery. It
was made by statesmen, by jurists, by clergymen, by
bishops; it was accepted over the whole country by
the great mass of the people. By it was justified
the separation of wives from husbands, of children
from parents, the compelling of labor, the appropriation
of its fruits, the buying and selling of Christians by
Christians. In language almost identical with yours
it was asked, “Here is a poor man who has worked
hard, lived sparingly, and invested his savings in a
few slaves. Would you rob him of his earnings by
liberating those slaves?” Or it was said: “Here is
a poor widow; all her husband has been able to leave
her is a few negroes, the earnings of his hard toil.
Would you rob the widow and the orphan by freeing
these negroes?” And because of this perversion of
reason, this confounding of unjust property rights
with just property rights, this acceptance of man's
law as though it were God’s law, there came on our
nation a judgment of fire and blood.
The error of our people in thinking that what in
itself was not rightfully property could become rightful
property by purchase and sale is the same error into
which your Holiness falls. It is not merely formally
the same; it is essentially the same. Private property
OPEN LETTER TO POPIE 1,EO XIII. 29
in land, no less than private property in slaves, is a
violation of the true rights of property. They are
different forms of the same robbery; twin devices
by which the perverted ingenuity of man has sought
to enable the strong and the cunning to escape God's
requirement of labor by forcing it on others.
What difference does it make whether I merely
own the land on which another man must live or
own the man himself? Am I not in the one case as
much his master as in the other ? Can I not compel
him to work for me? Can I not take to myself as
much of the fruits of his labor; as fully dictate his
actions? Have I not over him the power of life and
death? For to deprive a man of land is as certainly
to kill him as to deprive him of blood by opening
his veins, or of air by tightening a halter around his
neck.
The essence of slavery is in empowering one man
to obtain the labor of another without recompense.
Private property in land does this as fully as chattel
slavery. The slave owner must leave to the slave
enough of his earnings to enable him to live. Are
there not in so called free countries great bodies of
workingmen who get no more ? How much more of
the fruits of their toil do the agricultural laborers of
Italy and England get than did the slaves of our
Southern States? Did not private property in land
permit the land owner of Europe in ruder times
to demand the jus prima noctis & Does not the
same last outrage exist to-day in diffused form in the
immorality born of monstrous wealth on the one
hand and ghastly poverty on the other ?
In what did the slavery of Russia consist but in giv-
30 THE CONIDITION OF f, ABOR.
ing to the master land on which the serf was forced to
live 2 When an Ivan or a Catherine enriched their
favorites with the labor of others they did not give men,
they gave land. And when the appropriation of land has
gone so far that no free land remains to which the
landless man may turn, then without further violence the
more insidious form of labor robbery involved in priv-
ate property in land takes the place of chattel slavery,
because more economical and convenient. For under
it the slave does not have to be caught or held, or to
be fed when not needed. He comes of himself,
begging the privilege of serving, and when no longer
wanted can be discharged. The lash is unnecessary;
hunger is as efficacious. This is why the Norman con.
querors of England and the English conquerors of
Ireland did not divide up the people, but divided the
land. This is why European slave ships took their
cargoes to the New World, not to Europe.
Slavery is not yet abolished. Though in all Christian
countries its ruder form has now gone, it still exists in
the heart of our civilization in more insidious form,
and is increasing. There is work to be done for the
glory of God and the liberty of man by other soldiers
of the cross than those warrior monks whom, with the
blessing of your Holiness, Cardinal Lavigerie is send-
ing into the Sahara. Yet, your Encyclical employs
in defense of one form of slavery the same fallacies
that the apologists for chattel slavery used in defense
of the other
The Arabs are not wanting in acumen. Your
Encyclical reaches far. What shall your warrior
monks say, if when at the muzzle of their rifles they
demand of some Arab slave merchant his miserable
OPEN LETTER TO POPE LBO XIII. 31
caravan, he shall declare that he bought them with
his savings, and producing a copy of your Encyclical,
shall prove by your reasoning that his slaves are conse-
quently “only his wages in another form,” and ask
if they who bear your blessing and own your
authority propose to “deprive him of the liberty of
disposing of his wages and thus of all hope and
possibility of increasing his stock and bettering his
condition in life 2 ”
2. That private property in land proceeds from
man's gift of reason. (6–7.)
In the second place your Holiness argues that man
possessing reason and forethought may not only ac-
Quire ownership of the fruits of the earth, but also of
the earth itself, so that out of its products he may
make provision for the future.
Reason, with its attendant forethought, is indeed
the distinguishing attribute of man ; that which raises
him above the brute, and shows, as the Scriptures de
clare, that he is created in the likeness of God. And
this gift of reason does, as your IIoliness points out,
involve the need and right of private property in
whatever is produced by the exertion of reason and
its attendant forethought, as well as in what is pro-
duced by physical labor. In truth, these elements of
man's production are inseparable, and labor involves
the use of reason. It is by his reason that man differs
from the animals in being a producer, and in this
sense a maker. Of themselves his physical powers
are slight, forming as it were but the connection
by which the mind takes hold of material things, so as to
utilize to its will the mott ºr and forces of nature. It
32 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
is mind, the intelligent reason, that is the prime
mover in labor, the essential agent in production.
The right of private ownership does therefore in-
disputably attach to things provided by man’s reason
and forethought. But it cannot attach to things pro-
vided by the reason and forethought of God!
To illustrate: Let us suppose a company travelling
through the desert as the Israelites travel ed from
Egypt. Such of them as had the forethought to
provide themselves with vessels of water would ac-
quire a just right of property in the water so carried,
and in the thirst of the waterless desert those who had
neglected to provide themselves, though they might
ask water from the provident in charity, could not de-
mand it in right. For while water itself is of the
providence of God, the presence of this water in such
vessels, at such place, results from the providence of
the men who carried it. Thus they have to it an ex-
clusive right.
But suppose others use their forethought in push-
ing ahead and appropriating the springs, refusing when
their fellows come up to let them drink of the water
save as they buy it of them. Would such forethought
give any right 2
Your Holiness, it is not the forethought of carrying
water where it is needed, but the forethought of seiz-
ing springs, that you seek to defend in defending the
private ownership of land
Let me show this more fully, since it may be worth
while to meet those who say that if private property
in land be not just, then private property in the
products of labor is not just, as the material of these
products is taken from land. It will be seen on con-
O1215 N LETTER TO POPE LEO XIII. 33
sideration that all of man's production is analogous to
such transportation of water as we have supposed. In
growing grain, or smelting metals, or building houses,
or weaving cloth, or doing any of the things that con-
stitute producing, all that man does is to change in
place or form pre-existing matter. As a producer
man is merely a changer, not a creator; God alone
creates. And since the changes in which man's pro-
duction consists inhere in matter so long as they per-
sist, the right of private ownership attaches the
accident to the essence, and gives the right of owner-
ship in that natural material in which the labor of
production is embodied. Thus water, which in its
original form and place is the common gift of God
to all men, when drawn from its natural reservoir and
brought into the desert, passes rightfully into the
ownership of the individual who by changing its
place has produced it there.
But such right of ownership is in reality a mere
right of temporary possession. For though man may
take material from the storehouse of nature and change
it in place or form to suit his desires, yet from the
moment he takes it, it tends back to that storehouse
again. Wood decays, iron rusts, stone disintegrates
and is displaced, while of more perishable products,
some will last for only a few months, others for only
a few days, and some disappear immediately on use.
Though, so far as we can see, matter is eternal and
force forever persists; though we can neither annihi-
late nor create the tiniest mote that floats in a sun-
beam or the faintest impulse that stirs a leaf, yet in the
ceaseless flux of nature, man's work of moving and com-
bining constantly passes away. Thus the recognition
34 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
of the ownership of what natural material is embodied
in the products of man never constitutes more than
temporary possession—never interferes with the
reservoir provided for all. As taking water from one
place and carrying it to another place by no means
lessens the store of water, since whether it is drunk or
spilled or left to evaporate, it must return again to the
natural reservoirs—so is it with all things on which man
in production can lay the impress of his labor.
Hence, when you say that man’s reason puts it
within his right to have in stable and permanent pos-
session not only things that perish in the using, but
also those that remain for use in the future, you are
right in so far as you may include such things as
buildings, which with repair will last for generations,
with such things as food or firewood, which are de-
stroyed in the use. But when you infer that man
can have private ownership in those permanent things
of nature that are the reservoirs from which all must
draw, you are clearly wrong. Man may indeed hold
In private ownership the fruits of the earth produced
by his labor, since they lose in time the impress of
that labor, and pass again into the natural reservoirs
from which they were taken, and thus the ownership
of them by one works no injury to others. But he
cannot so own the earth itself, for that is the reservoir
from which must constantly be drawn not only the
material with which alone men can produce, but even
their very bodies.
The conclusive reason why man cannot claim owner-
ship in the earth itself as he can in the fruits that
he by labor brings forth from it, is in the facts stated
OPEN LETTER TO POP15. DEO XIII. 35
by you in the very next paragraph (7), when you
truly say:
“Man’s needs do not die out, but recur; satisfied
to-day they demand new supplies to-morrow. Mature
therefore owes to man a storehouse that shall never
fail, the daily supply of his daily wants. And this
he finds only in the inexhaustible fertility of the earth.”
By man you mean all men. Can what nature owes
to all men be made the private property of some men,
from which they may debar all other men?
Let me dwell on the words of your Holiness,
“Wature, therefore, owes to man a storehouse that shall
never fail.” By Nature you mean God. Thus your
thought, that in creating us, God himself has incurred
an obligation to provide us with a storehouse that shall
never fail, is the same as is thus expressed and carried
to its irresistible conclusion by the Bishop of Meath :
“God was perfectly free in the act by which He
created us; but having created us He bound himself
by that act to provide us with the means necessary for
our subsistence. The land is the only source of this
kind now known to us. The land, therefore, of every
country is the common property of the people of that
country, because its real owner, the Creator who made
it, has transferred it as a voluntary gift to them.
‘Terram autem dedit filiis hominum.” Now, as every
individual in that country is a creature and child of
God, and as all His creatures are equal in His sight,
any settlement of the land of a country that would
exclude the humblest man in that country from his
share of the common inheritance would be not only
an injustice and a wrong to that man, but, moreover,
be AN IMPIOUS RESISTANCE TO THE BENEvol.INT INTEN-
TIONS OF HIS CREATOR.”
36 THE CONDITION OF LAROR.
3. That private property in land deprives no one
of the use of land. (8.)
Your own statement that land is the inexhaustible
storehouse that God owes to man must have aroused
in your Holiness's mind an uneasy questioning of
its appropriation as private property, for, as though
to reassure yourself, you proceed to argue that its
ownership by some will not injure others. You say
in substance, that even though divided among private
owners the earth does not cease to minister to the
needs of all, since those who do not possess the soil can
by selling their labor obtain in payment the produce
of the land. g
Suppose that to your Holiness as a judge of morals
one should put this case of conscience:
“I am one of several children to whom Our father
left a field abundant for our support. As he assigned
no part of it to any one of us in particular, leaving
the limits of our separate possession to be fixed by
ourselves, I being the eldest took the whole field in
exclusive ownership. But in doing so I have not de-
prived my brothers of their support from it, for I
have let them work for me on it, paying them from
the produce as much wages as I would have had to
pay strangers. Is there any reason why my con-
science should not be clear?”
What would be your answer? Would you not tell
him that he was in mortal sin, and that his excuse
added to his guilt? Would you not call on him to
make restitution and to do penance %
Or, suppose that as a temporal prince your Holi.
ness were ruler of a rainless land, such as Egypt,
where there were no springs or brooks, their want
being supplied by a bountiful river like the Nile,
OPEN LETTER TO POPE LEO XIII. 37
Supposing that having sent a number of your subjects
to make fruitful this land, bidding them do justly and
prosper, you were told that some of them had set up
a claim of ownership in the river, refusing the others
a drop of water, except as they bought it of them ;
and that thus they had become rich without work,
while the others, though working hard, were so im-
poverished by paying for water as to be hardly able
to exist?
Would not your indignation wax hot when this was
told 3
Suppose that then the river owners should send to
you and thus excuse their action:
“The river, though divided among private owners
ceases not thereby to minister to the needs of all, for
there is no one who drinks who does not drink of the
water of the river. Those who do not possess the
water of the river contribute their labor to get it; so
that it may be truly said that all water is supplied
either from one’s own river, or from some laborious
industry which is paid for either in the water, or in
that which is exchanged for the water.”
Would the indignation of your Holiness be abated .
Would it not wax fiercer yet for the insult to your
intelligence of this excuse?
I do not need more formally to show your Holiness
that between utterly depriving a man of God’s gifts
and depriving him of God's gifts unless he will buy
them, is merely the difference between the robber
who leaves his victim to die and the robber who puts
him to ransom. But I would like to point out how
your statement that “the earth though divided among
private owners ceases not thereby to minister to the
needs of all” overlooks the largest facts,
38 . THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
From your palace of the Vatican the eye may rest
on the expanse of the Campagna, where the pious toil
of religious congregations and the efforts of the state
are only now beginning to make it possible for men
to live. Once that expanse was tilled by thriving
husbandmen and dotted with smiling hamlets. What
for centuries has condemned it to desertion ? History
tells us. It was private property in land; the growth
of the great estates of which Pliny saw that ancient
Italy was perishing; the cause that, by bringing
failure to the crop of men, let in the Goths and Van-
dals, gave Roman Britain to the worship of Odin and
Thor, and in what were once the rich and populous
provinces of the East shivered the thinned ranks and
palsied arms of the legions on the cimiters of Moham-
medan hordes, and in the sepulchre of our Lord and
in the Church of St. Sophia trampled the cross to
rear the crescent
If you will go to Scotland, you may see great tracts
that under the Gaelic tenure, which recognized the
right of each to a foothold in the soil, bred sturdy
men, but that now, under the recognition of private
property in land, are given up to wild animals. If you
go to Ireland, your Bishops will show you, on lands
where now only beasts graze, the traces of hamlets that
when they were young priests, were filled with honest,
kindly, religious people.*
* Let any one who wishes visit this diocese and see with his own
eyes the vast and boundless extent of the fairest land in Europe
that has been ruthlessly depopulated since the commencement of
the present century, and which is now abandoned to a loneliness
and solitude more depressing than that of the prairie or the
wilderness. Thus has this land system actually exercised the
power of life and death on a vast scale, for which there is no
parallel even in the dark records of slavery.—Bishop Wully's letter
to the Clergy and Laity of the Diocese of Meath,
OPEN LETTER TO POPE LEO XIII. 39
If you will come to the United States, you will find
in a land wide enough and rich enough to support in
comfort the whole population of Europe, the growth
of a sentiment that looks with evil eye on immigration,
because the artificial scarcity that results from pri-
vate property in land makes it seem as if there is
not room enough and work enough for those already
here.
Or go to the Antipodes, and in Australia as in Eng-
land, you may see that private property in land is
operating to leave the land barren and to crowd the
bulk of the population into great cities. Go wherever
you please where the forces loosed by modern invention
are beginning to be felt and you may see that private
property in land is the curse, denounced by the prophet,
that prompts men to lay field to field till they
“alone dwell in the midst of the earth.”
To the mere materialist this is sin and shame. Shall
we to whom this world is God’s world—we who hold
that man is called to this life only as a prelude to a
higher life—shall we defend it
4. That Industry expended on land gives owner-
ship in the land itself. (9–10)
Your Holiness next contends that industry expended
on land gives a right to ownership of the land, and
that the improvement of land creates benefits indis-
tinguishable and inseparable from the land itself.
This contention, if valid, could only justify the
ownership of land by those who expend industry on
it. It would not justify private property in land
as it exists. On the contrary, it would justify
a gigantic no-rent declaration that would take land
40 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
from those who now legally own it, the landlords, and
turn it over to the tenants and laborers. And if it
also be that improvements cannot be distinguished
and separated from the land itself, how could the
landlords claim consideration even for improvements
they had made 2
But your Holiness cannot mean what your words
imply. What you really mean, I take it, is that the
original justification and title of land ownership is in
the expenditure of labor on it. But neither can this
justify private property in land as it exists. For is it
not all but universally true that existing land titles do
not come from use, but from force or fraud?
Take Italy | Is it not true that the greater part of
the land of Italy is held by those who so far from
ever having expended industry on it have been mere
appropriators of the industry of those who have 7
Is this not also true of Great Britain and of other
countries? Even in the United States, where the
forces of concentration have not yet had time to fully
operate and there has been some attempt to give land
to users, it is probably true to-day that the greater
part of the land is held by those who neither use it
nor propose to use it themselves, but merely hold it
to compel others to pay them for permission to use it.
And if industry give ownership to land what are the
limits of this ownership ! If a man may acquire the
ownership of several square miles of land by grazing
sheep on it, does this give to him and his heirs the
ownership of the same land when it is found to con-
tain rich mines, or when by the growth of population
and the progress of society it is needed for farming,
for gardening, for the close occupation of a great
OPEN LETTER TO POPE LEO XIII. 41
city ? Is it on the rights given by the industry of
those who first used it for grazing cows or growing
potatoes that you would found the title to the land
now covered by the city of New York and having a
value of thousands of millions of dollars ?
But your contention is not valid. Industry expended
On land gives ownership in the fruits of that in-
dustry, but not in the land itself, just as industry ex-
pended on the ocean would give a right of ownership
to the fish taken by it, but not a right of ownership
in the ocean. Nor yet is it true that private owner-
ship of land is necessary to secure the fruits of labor on
land; nor does the improvement of land create benefits
indistinguishable and inseparable from the land itself.
That secure possession is necessary to the use and
improvement of land I have already explained, but
that ownership is not necessary is shown by the fact
that in all civilized countries land owned by one person
is cultivated and improved by other persons. Most
of the cultivated land in the British Islands, as in Italy
and other countries, is cultivated not by owners but
by tenants. And so the costliest buildings are erected
by those who are not owners of the land, but who have
from the owner a mere right of possession for a time
on condition of certain payments. Nearly the whole
of London has been built in this way, and in New
York, Chicago, Denver, San Francisco, Sydney and
Melbourne, as well as in continental cities, the owners
of many of the largest edifices will be found to be
different persons from the owners of the ground. So
far from the value of improvements being inseparable
from the value of land, it is in individual transactions
constantly separated. For instance, one-half of the
42 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
land on which the immense Grand Pacific Hotel in
Chicago stands was recently separately sold, and in
Ceylon it is a not infrequent occurrence for one person
to own a fruit tree and another to own the ground in
which it is implanted.
There is, indeed, no improvement of land, whether
it be clearing, plowing, manuring, cultivating, the
digging of cellars, the opening of wells or the building
of houses, that so long as its usefulness continues
does not have a value clearly distinguishable from the
value of the land. Forland having such improvements
will always sell or rent for more than similar land
without them.
If, therefore, the state levy a tax equal to what the
land irrespective of improvement would bring, it will
take the benefits of mere ownership, but will leave the
full benefits of use and improvement, which the
prevailing system does not do. And since the holder,
who would still in form continue to be the owner,
could at any time give or sell both possession and
improvements, subject to future assessment by the
state on the value of the land alone, he will be perfectly
free to retain or dispose of the full amount of property
that the exertion of his labor or the investment of
his capital has attached to or stored up in the land.
Thus, what we propose would secure, as it is im-
possible in any other way to secure, what you properly
say is just and right—“that the results of labor should
belong to him who has labored.” But private property
in land—to allow the holder without adequate payment
to the state to take for himself the benefit of the value
that attaches to land with social growth and improve-
ment—does take the results of labor from him who
OPEN LETTER TO POPE LEO XIII. 43
has labored, does turn over the fruits of one man’s
labor to be enjoyed by another. For labor, as the
active factor, is the producer of all wealth. Mere
ownership produces nothing. A man might own a
world, but so sure is the decree that “by the sweat of
thy brow shalt thou eat bread,” that without labor he
could not get a meal or provide himself a garment.
Hence, when the owners of land, by virtue of their
ownership and without laboring themselves, get the
products of labor in abundance, these things must
come from the labor of others, must be the fruits
of others’ sweat, taken from those who have a right to
them and enjoyed by those who have no right to them.
The only utility of private ownership of land as dis-
tinguished from possession is the evil utility of giving
to the owner products of labor he does not earn. For
until land will yield to its owner some return beyond
that of the labor and capital he expends on it—that is
to say, until by sale or rental he can without expendi-
ture of labor obtain from it products of labor, owner-
ship amounts to no more than security of possession,
and has no value. Its importance and value begin only
when, either in the present or prospectively, it will
yield a revenue—that is to say, will enable the owner
as owner to obtain products of labor without exertion
on his part, and thus to enjoy the results of others’ labor.
What largely keeps men from realizing the robbery
involved in private property in land is that in the most
striking cases the robbery is not of individuals, but of
the community. For, as I have before explained, it is
impossible for rent in the economic sense—that value
which attaches to land by reason of social growth and
improvement—to go to the user. It can go only to the
44 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
owner or to the community. Thus those who pay
enormous rents for the use of land in such centres as
London or New York are not individually injured.
Individually they get a return for what they pay, and
must feel that they have no better right to the use of
such peculiarly advantageous localities without paying
for it than have thousands of others. And so, not
thinking or not caring for the interests of the com-
munity, they make no objection to the system.
It recently came to light in New York that a man
having no title whatever had been for years collecting
rents on a piece of land that the growth of the city had
made very valuable. Those who paid these rents had
never stopped to ask whether he had any right to them.
They felt that they had no right to land that so many
others would like to have, without paying for it,
and did not think of, or did not care for, the rights of all.
5. That private property in land has the support
of the common opinion of mankind, and has conduced
to peace and tranquility, and that it is sanctioned by
Divine Law. (11.)
Even were it true that the common opinion of man-
kind has sanctioned private property in land, this would
no more prove its justice than the once universal prac-
tice of the known world would have proved the justice
of slavery.
But it is not true. Examination will show that
wherever we can trace them the first perceptions of
mankind have always recognized the equality of right
to land, and that when individual possession became
necessary to secure the right of ownership in things
produced by labor some method of securing equality,
OP15)N LETTER TO POPE LEO XIII. 45
sufficient in the existing state of social development,
was adopted. Thus, among some peoples, land used
for cultivation was periodically divided, land used for
pasturage and wood being held in common. Among
others, every family was permitted to hold what land
it needed for a dwelling and for cultivation, but the
moment that such use and cultivation stopped any one
else could step in and take it on like tenure. Of the
same nature were the land laws of the Mosaic code. The
land, first fairly divided among the people, was made
inalienable by the provision of the jubilee, under
which, if sold, it reverted every fiftieth year to the
children of its original possessors.
Private property in land as we know it, the attach-
ing to land of the same right of ownership that justly
attaches to the products of labor, has never grown up
anywhere save by usurpation or force. Like slavery,
it is the result of war. It comes to us of the modern
world from your ancestors, the Romans, whose civili-
zation it corrupted and whose empire it destroyed.
It made with the freer spirit of the northern
peoples the combination of the feudal system, in
which, though subordination was substituted for equal-
ity, there was still a rough recognition of the principle
of common rights in land. A fief was a trust, and to
enjoyment was annexed some obligation. The sover-
eign, the representative of the whole people, was the
only owner of land. Of him, immediately or medi-
ately, held tenants, whose possession involved duties
or payments, which, though rudely and imperfectly,
embodied the idea that we would carry out in the
single tax, of taking land values for public uses. The
crown lands maintained the sovereign and the civil
46 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
list; the church lands defrayed the cost of public wor-
ship and instruction, of the relief of the sick, the
destitute and the wayworn ; while the military tenures
provided for public defense and bore the costs of war.
A fourth and very large portion of the land remained
in common, the people of the neighborhood being free
to pasture it, cut wood on it, or put it to other common
UlSeS.
In this partial yet substantial recognition of common
rights to land is to be found the reason why, in a time
when the industrial arts were rude, wars frequent,
and the great discoveries and inventions of our time
unthought of, the condition of the laborer was devoid
of that grinding poverty which despite our marvellous
advances now exists. Speaking of England, the
highest authority on such subjects, the late Professor
Thorold Rogers, declares that in the thirteenth
century there was no class so poor, so helpless, so
pressed and degraded as are millions of Englishmen
in our boasted nineteenth century; and that, save in
times of actual famine, there was no laborer so poor
as to fear that his wife and children might come to
want even were he taken from them. Dark and
rude in many respects as they were, these were the
times when the cathedrals and churches and religious
houses whose ruins yet excite our admiration were
built; the times when England had no national debt,
no poor law, no standing army, no hereditary paupers,
no thousands and thousands of human beings rising in
the morning without knowing where they might lay
their heads at night.
With the decay of the feudal system, the system of
private property in land that had destroyed Rome was
OPEN LETTER TO POPſ, f, EO XIII. 47
extended. As to England, it may briefly be said that
the crown lands were for the most part given away to
favorites; that the church lands were parcelled among
his courtiers by Henry VIII., and in Scotland grasped
by the nobles; that the military dues were finally re-
mitted in the seventeenth century, and taxation on
consumption substituted; and that by a process be-
ginning with the Tudors and extending to our own
time all but a mere fraction of the commons were en-
closed by the greater land owners; while the same
private ownership of land was extended over Ireland
and the Scottish Highlands, partly by the sword and
partly by bribery of the chiefs. Even the military
dues, had they been commuted, not remitted, would
to-day have more than sufficed to pay all public ex-
penses without one penny of other taxation.
Of the New World, whose institutions but continue
those of Europe, it is only necessary to say that to the
parcelling out of land in great tracts is due the back-
wardness and turbulence of Spanish America; that to
the large plantations of the Southern States of the
Union was due the persistence of slavery there, and
that the more northern settlements showed the earlier
English feeling, land being fairly well divided and
the attempts to establish manorial estates coming to
little or nothing. In this lies the secret of the more
vigorous growth of the northern states. But the idea
that land was to be treated as private property had
been thoroughly established in English thought before
the colonial period ended, and it has been so treated
by the United States and by the several States.
And though land was at first sold cheaply, and
then given to actual settlers, it was also sold in large
48 THE CON101TION OF DABOR.
quantities to speculators, given away in great tracts
for railroads and other purposes, until now the
public domain of the United States, which a genera-
tion ago seemed illimitable, has practically gone.
And this, as the experience of other countries shows,
is the natural result in a growing community of
making land private property. When the possession
of land means the gain of unearned wealth, the strong
and unscrupulous will secure it. But when, as we
propose, economic rent, the “unearned increment of
wealth,” is taken by the state for the use of the com-
munity, then land will pass into the hands of users
and remain there, since no matter how great its value,
its possession will only be profitable to users. S.
As to private property in land having conduced to
the peace and tranquility of human life, it is not neces-
sary more than to allude to the notorious fact that
the struggle for land has been the prolific source
of wars and of law suits, while it is the poverty en-
gendered by private property in land that make the
prison and the workhouse the unfailing attributes of
what we call Christian civilization.
Your Holiness intimates that the Divine Law gives
its sanction to the private ownership of land, quoting
from Deuteronomy, “Thou shalt not covet thy neigh-
bor’s wife, nor his house, nor his field, nor his man-
servant, nor his maid-servant, nor his ox, nor his ass,
nor anything which is his.”
If, as your IIoliness conveys, this inclusion of the
words, “nor his field,” is to be taken as sanctioning
private property in land as it exists to-day, then,
but with far greater force, must the words, “his man-
servant, nor his maid-servant,” be taken to Sanction
OPTEN LETTER TO POPE LEO XIII. 49
chattel slavery; for it is evident from other provisions
of the same code that these terms referred both to
bondsmen for a term of years and to perpetual slaves.
But the word “field” involves the idea of use and
improvement, to which the right of possession and
ownership does attach without recognition of prop-
erty in the land itself. And that this reference to
the “field” is not a sanction of private property in
land as it exists to-day is proved by the fact that the
Mosaic code expressly denied such unqualified owner-
ship in land, and with the declaration, “the land
also shall not be sold forever, because it is mine, and
you are strangers and sojourners with me,” provided
for its reversion every fiftieth year; thus, in a way
adapted to the primitive industrial conditions of the
time, securing to all of the chosen people a foothold
in the soil.
Nowhere in fact throughout the Scriptures can the
slightest justification be found for the attaching to
land of the same right of property that justly attaches
to the things produced by labor. Everywhere is it
treated as the free bounty of God, “the land which
the Lord thy God giveth thee.”
6. That fathers should provide for their children
and that private property in land is necessary to
enable them to do so. (14–17.)
With all that your Holiness has to say of the
Sacredness of the family relation we are in full accord.
But how the obligation of the father to the child can
justify private property in land we cannot see. You
reason that private property in land is necessary to the
y
50 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
discharge of the duty of the father, and is therefore
requisite and just, because—
“It is a most sacred law of nature that a father
must provide food and all necessities for those whom
he has begotten ; and similarly nature dictates that a
man’s children, who carry on as it were and continue
his own personality, should be provided by him with
all that is needful to enable them honorably to keep
themselves from want and misery in the uncertain-
ties of this mortal life. Now in no other way can a
father effect this except by the ownership of profitable
property, which he can transmit to his children by
inheritance.” (14.)
Thanks to Him who has bound the generations of
men together by a provision that brings the tenderest
love to greet our entrance into the world and soothes
our exit with filial piety, it is both the duty and the
joy of the father to care for the child till its powers
mature, and afterwards in the natural order it becomes
the duty and privilege of the child to be the stay of
the parent. This is the natural reason for that rela-
tion of marriage, the ground work of the sweetest,
tenderest and purest of human joys, which the Catho-
lic Church has guarded with such unremitting
vigilance.
We do, for a few years, need the providence of our
fathers after the flesh. But how small, how transient,
how narrow is this need, as compared with our constant
need for the providence of Him in whom we live,
move and have our being—Our Father who art in
Heaven It is to Him, “the giver of every good and
perfect gift,” and not to our fathers after the flesh,
that Christ taught us to pray, “Give us this day our
daily bread.” And how true it is that it is through
OPEN LETTER TO POPE LEO XIII. 51
Him that the generations of men exist. Let the mean
temperature of the earth rise or fall a few degrees, an
amount as nothing compared with differences produced
in our laboratories, and mankind would disappear as
ice disappears under a tropical sun, would fall as the
leaves fall at the touch of frost. Or, let for two or
three seasons the earth refuse her increase, and how
many of our millions would remain alive
The duty of fathers to transmit to their children
profitable property that will enable them to keep
themselves from want and misery in the uncertainties
of this mortal lifel What is not possible cannot be a
duty. And how is it possible for fathers to do that ?
Your Holiness has not considered how mankind really
lives from hand to mouth, getting each day its daily
bread; how little one generation does or can leave
another. It is doubtful if the wealth of the civilized
world all told amounts to anything like as much as one
year's labor, while it is certain that if labor were to
stop and men had to rely on existing accumulation, it
would be only a few days ere in the richest countries
pestilence and famine would stalk.
The profitable property your Holiness refers to, is
private property in land. Now profitable land, as all
economists will agree, is land superior to the land that
the ordinary man can get. It is land that will yield an
income to the owner as owner, and therefore that will
permit the owner to appropriate the products of labor
without doing labor, its profitableness to the individual
involving the robbery of other individuals. It is there-
fore possible only for some fathers to leave their chil-
dren profitable land. What therefore your Holiness
practically declares is, that it is the duty of all fathers
52 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
to struggle to leave their children what only the few
peculiarly strong, lucky or unscrupulous can leave ;
and that, a something that involves the robbery of
others—their deprivation of the material gifts of God.
This anti-Christian doctrine has been long in practice
throughout the Christian world. What are its results 2
Are they not the very evils set forth in your Encycli-
cal ? Are they not, so far from enabling men to keep
themselves from want and misery in the uncertainties
of this mortal life, to condemn the great masses of
men to want and misery that the natural conditions
of our mortal life do not entail; to want and misery
deeper and more widespread than exist among heathen
Savages? Under the regime of private property in
land and in the richest countries not five per cent. of
fathers are able at their death to leave anything
substantial to their children, and probably a large
majority do not leave enough to bury them Some
few children are left by their fathers richer than it is
good for them to be, but the vast majority not only are
left nothing by their fathers, but by the system that
makes land private property are deprived of the bounty
of their Heavenly Father; are compelled to sue others
for permission to live and to work, and to toil all their
.ives for a pittance that often does not enable them
to escape starvation and pauperism.
What your Holiness is actually, though of course
inadvertently, urging, is that earthly fathers should
assume the functions of the IIeavenly Father. It is
not the business of one generation to provide the
succeeding generation with “all that is needful to
enable them honorably to keep themselves from want
and misery.” That is God’s business. We no more
OPEN LETTER TO POPE LEO XIII. 53
create our children than we create our fathers. It is
God who is the Creator of each succeeding generation
as fully as of the one that preceded it. And, to
recall your own words (7), “Nature [God] therefore
owes to man a storehouse that shall never fail, the
daily supply of his daily wants. And this he finds
only in the inexhaustible fertility of the earth.” What
you are now assuming is, that it is the duty of men
to provide for the wants of their children by appropri-
ating this storehouse and depriving other men's chil-
dren of the unfailing supply that God has provided
for all.
The duty of the father to the child—the duty pos-
sible to all fathers | Is it not so to conduct him-
self, so to nurture and teach it, that it shall come to
manhood with a sound body, well developed mind,
habits of virtue, piety and industry, and in a state of
society that shall give it and all others free access to
the bounty of God, the providence of the All-Father ?
In doing this the father would be doing more to
secure his children from want and misery than is
possible now to the richest of fathers—as much more
as the providence of God surpasses that of man. For
the justice of God laughs at the efforts of men to
circumvent it, and the subtle law that binds humanity
together poisons the rich in the sufferings of the poor.
Even the few who are able in the general struggle to
leave their children wealth that they fondly think
will keep them from want and misery in the uncer-
tainties of this mortal life—do they succeed ? Does
experience show that it is a benefit to a child to place
him above his fellows and enable him to think God’s
law of labor is not for him : Is not such wealth
54 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
oftener a curse than a blessing, and does not its expecta-
tion often destroy filial love and bring dissensions and
heart burnings into families? And how far and how
long are even the richest and strongest able to exempt
their children from the common lot? Nothing is more
certain than that the blood of the masters of the world
flows to-day in lazzaroni and that the descendants of
kings and princes tenant slums and workhouses.
But in the state of society we strive for, where the
monopoly and waste of God’s bounty would be done
away with and the fruits of labor would go to the
laborer, it would be within the ability of all to make
more than a comfortable living with reasonable labor.
And for those who might be crippled or incapacitated,
or deprived of their natural protectors and bread
winners, the most ample provision could be made out
of that great and increasing fund with which God in
his law of rent has provided society—not as a matter
of niggardly and degrading alms, but as a matter
of right, as the assurance which in a Christian state
society owes to all its members.
Thus it is that the duty of the father, the obligation
to the child, instead of giving any support to private
property in land, utterly condemnsit, urging us by the .
most powerful considerations to abolish it in the
simple and efficacious way of the single tax.
This duty of the father, this obligation to chil-
dren, is not confined to those who have actually chil-
dren of their own, but rests on all of us who have
come to the powers and responsibilities of manhood.
For did not Christ set a little child in the midst of
the disciples, saying to them that the angels of such
little ones always behold the face of His father; saying
OPEN LETTER, TO POPE LEO XIII. 55
to them that it were better for a man to hang a
millstone about his neck and plunge into the utter-
most depths of the sea than to injure such a little
one &
And what to-day is the result of private property in
land in the richest of so called Christian countries 2
Is it not that young people fear to marry; that married
people fear to have children; that children are driven
out of life from sheer want of proper nourishment and
care, or compelled to toil when they ought to be at
school or at play; that great numbers of those
who attain maturity enter it with under-nourished
bodies, overstrained nerves, undeveloped minds—
under conditions that foredoom them, not merely to
suffering, but to crime; that fit them in advance for
the prison and the brothel ?
If your Holiness will consider these things we are
confident that instead of defending private property
in land you will condemn it with anathema
7. That the private ownership of land stimulates
*ndustry, increases wealth, and attaches men to the
soil and to their country. (51.)
The idea, as expressed by Arthur Young, that “the
magic of property turns barren sands to gold’ springs
from the confusion of ownership with possession, of
which I have before spoken, that attributes to private
property in land what is due to security of the products
of labor. It is needless for me again to point out
that the change we propose, the taxation for public
uses of land values, or economic rent, and the aboli-
tion of other taxes, would give to the user of land far
greater security for the fruits of his labor than the
56 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
present system and far greater permanence of posses-
sion. Nor is it necessary further to show how it
would give homes to those who are now homeless and
bind men to their country. For under it every one
who wanted a piece of land for a home or for produc-
tive use could get it without purchase price and hold
it even without tax, since the tax we propose would
not fall on all land, nor even on all land in use, but
only on land better than the poorest land in use, and
is in reality not a tax at all, but merely a return to the
state for the use of a valuable privilege. And even
those who from circumstances or occupation did not
wish to make permanent use of land would still have
an equal interest with all others in the land of their
country and in the general prosperity.
But I should like your Holiness to consider how
utterly unnatural is the condition of the masses in the
richest and most progressive of Christian countries;
how large bodies of them live in habitations in which
a rich man would not ask his dog to dwell; how the
great majority have no homes from which they are
not liable on the slightest misfortune to be evicted ;
how numbers have no homes at all, but must seek
what shelter chance or charity offers. I should like
to ask your Holiness to consider how the great majority
of men in such countries have no interest whatever in
what they are taught to call their native land, for
which they are told that on occasions it is their duty
to fight or to die. What right, for instance, have the
majority of your countrymen in the land of their birth?
Can they live in Italy outside of a prison or a poor-
house except as they buy the privilege from some of
the exclusive owners of Italy: Cannot an English.
OPEN LETTER TO POPE LEO XIII. ã7
man, an American, an Arab or a Japanese do as much 3
May not what was said centuries ago by Tiberius
Gracchus be said to-day : “Men of Rome / you are
called the lords of the world, yet have no right to a
square foot of its soil / The wild beasts have their
dens, but the soldiers of Italy have only water and air /?'
What is true of Italy is true of the civilized world—
is becoming increasingly true. It is the inevitable
effect as civilization progresses of private property in
land.
8. That the right to possess private property in land
is from Nature, not from man; that the state has no
night to abolish it, and that to take the value of land
ownership in taxation would be unjust and cruel to
the private owner. (51).
This, like much else that your Holiness says, is
masked in the use of the indefinite terms private
property and private owner—a want of precision in
the use of words that has doubtless aided in the con-
fusion of your own thought. But the context leaves
no doubt that by private property you mean private
property in land, and by private owner, the private
owner of land.
The contention, thus made, that private property
in land is from nature, not from man, has no other
basis than the confounding of ownership with
possession and the ascription to property in land
of what belongs to its contradictory, property in the
proceeds of labor. You do not attempt to show for
it any other basis, nor has any one else ever attempted
to do so. That private property in the products of
labor is from nature is clear, for nature gives such
58 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
things to labor and to labor alone. Of every article
of this kind, we know that it came into being as nature's
response to the exertion of an individual man or of
individual men—given by nature directly and ex-
clusively to him or to them. Thus there inheres in
such things a right of private property, which originates
from and goes back to the source of ownership, the
maker of the thing. This right is anterior to the
state and superior to its enactments, so that, as we
hold, it is a violation of natural right and an injustice
to the private owner for the state to tax the processes
and products of labor. They do not belong to Caesar.
They are things that God, of whom nature is but an
expression, gives to those who apply for them in the
way. He has appointed—by labor.
But who will dare trace the individual ownership of
land to any grant from the Maker of land ' What
does nature give to such ownership? how does she in
any way recognize it? Will any one show from
difference of form or feature, of stature or complexion,
from dissection of their bodies or analysis of their
powers and needs, that one man was intended by
nature to own land and another to live on it as his
tenant? That which derives its existence from man
and passes away like him, which is indeed but the
evanescent expression of his labor, man may hold
and transfer as the exclusive property of the individual;
but how can such individual ownership attach to land,
which existed before man was, and which continues to
exist while the generations of men come and go—the
unfailing storehouse that the Creator gives to man for
“the daily supply of his daily wants?”
Clearly, the private ownership of land is from the
OPEN LETTER TO POPE I,EO XIII. 59
state, not from nature. Thus, not merely can no
objection be made on the score of morals when it is
proposed that the state shall abolish it altogether, but
insomuch as it is a violation of natural right, its exist-
ence involving a gross injustice on the part of the
state, an “impious violation of the benevolent inten-
tion of the Creator,” it is a moral duty that the state
so abolish it.
So far from there being anything unjust in taking
the full value of land ownership for the use of the
community, the real injustice is in leaving it in private
hands—an injustice that amounts to robbery and
murder.
And when your Holiness shall see this I have no fear
that you will listen for one moment to the impudent
plea that before the community can take what God
intended it to take, before men who have been disin-
herited of their natural rights can be restored to them,
the present owners of land shall first be compensated.
For not only will you see that the single tax will
directly and largely benefit small land owners, whose
interests as laborers and capitalists are much greater
than their interests as land owners, and that though
the great landowners—or rather the propertied class
in general among whom the profits of land ownership
are really divided through mortgages, rent charges,
etc.—would relatively lose, they too would be absolute
gainers in the increased prosperity and improved
morals; but more quickly, more strongly, more per-
emptorily than from any calculation of gains or losses
would your duty as a man, your faith as a Christian,
forbid you to listen for one moment to any such palter-
ing with right and wrong.
60 THE & JNDITION OF LABOR.
Where the state takes some land for public uses it is
only just that those whose land is taken should be com-
pensated, otherwise some land owners would be treated
more harshly than others. But where, by a measure
affecting all alike, rent is appropriated for the benefit
of all, there can be no claim to compensation. Com-
pensation in such case would be a continuance of the
same injustice in another form—the giving to land
owners in the shape of interest of what they before
got as rent. Your Holiness knows that justice and in-
justice are not thus to be juggled with, and when you
fully realize that land is really the storehouse that God
owes to all His children, you will no more listen to
any demand for compensation for restoring it to them
than Moses would have listened to a demand that
Pharaoh should be compensated before letting the
children of Israel go.
Compensated for what? For giving up what has
been unjustly taken & The demand of land owners
for compensation is not that. We do not seek to spoil
the Egyptians. We do not ask that what has been
unjustly taken from laborers shall be restored. We
are willing that bygones should be bygones and to
leave dead wrongs to bury their dead. We propose
to let those who by the past appropriation of land
value have taken the fruits of labor to retain what they
have thus got. We merely propose that for the future
such robbery of labor shall cease—that for the fu-
ture, not for the past, landholders shall pay to
the community the rent that to the community is
justly due.
OPEN LETTER TO POPE LEO XIII. 61
III.
I have said enough to show your Holiness the injus-
tice into which you fall in classing us, who in seeking
virtually to abolish private property in land seek more
fully to secure the true rights of property, with those
whom you speak of as socialists, who wish to make all
property common. But you also do injustice to the
socialists.
There are many, it is true, who feeling bitterly the
monstrous wrongs of the present distribution of wealth
are animated only by a blind hatred of the rich and a
fierce desire to destroy existing social adjustments.
This class is indeed only less dangerous than those
who proclaim that no social improvement is needed
or is possible. But it is not fair to confound with
them those who, however mistakenly, propose definite
schemes of remedy.
The socialists, as I understand them, and as the
term has come to apply to anything like a definite
theory and not to be vaguely and improperly used to
include all who desire Social improvement, do not, as
you imply, seek the abolition of all private property.
Those who do this are properly called communists.
What the socialists seek is the state assumption
of capital (in which they vaguely and erroneously
include land), or more properly speaking, of large
capitals, and state management and direction of at
least the larger operations of industry. In this way
they hope to abolish interest, which they regard as a
wrong and an evil; to do away with the gains of ex-
changers, speculators, contractors and middlemen,
which they regard as waste; to do away with the
wage system and Secure general co-operation; and
62 THE CONDIT ION OF LABOR.
to prevent competition, which they deem the
fundamental cause of the impoverishment of labor.
The more moderate of them, without going so far,
go in the same direction, and seek some remedy or
palliation of the worst forms of poverty by govern-
ment regulation. The essential character of socialism
is that it looks to the extension of the functions of the
state for the remedy of social evils; that it would
substitute regulation and direction for competition;
and intelligent control by organized society for the
free play of individual desire and effort.
Though not usually classed as Socialists, both the
trades unionists and the protectionists have the same
essential character. The trades unionists seek the
increase of wages, the reduction of working hours and
the general improvement in the condition of wage-
workers, by organizing them into guilds or associa-
tions which shall fix the rates at which they will sell
their labor; shall deal as one body with employers in
case of dispute; shall use on Occasion their necessary
weapon, the strike; and shall accumulate funds for
such purposes and for the purpose of assisting mem-
bers when on a strike, or (sometimes) when out of em-
ployment. The protectionists seek by governmental
prohibitions or taxes on imports to regulate the in
dustry and control the exchanges of each country, so,
as they imagine, to diversify home industries and pre-
vent the competition of people of other countries.
At the opposite extreme are the anarchists, a
term which, though frequently applied to mere vio-
lent destructionists, refers also to those who, seeing the
many evils of too much government, regard govern-
ment in itself as evil, and believe that in the absence
OPEN LETTER TO POPE LEO XIII. 63
of coercive power the mutual interests of men would
secure voluntarily what co-operation is needed.
Differing from all these are those for whom I would
speak. Believing that the rights of true property are
sacred, we would regard forcible communism as
robbery that would bring destruction. But we would
not be disposed to deny that voluntary communism
might be the highest possible state of which men
can conceive. Nor do we say that it cannot be
possible" for mankind to attain it, since among the
early Christians and among the religious orders of the
Catholic church we have examples of communistic
societies on a small scale. St. Peter and St. Paul,
St. Thomas of Aquin and Fra Angelico, the illus.
trious orders of the Carmelites and Franciscans, the
Jesuits, whose heroism carried the cross among the
most savage tribes of American forests, the societies
that wherever your communion is known have
deemed no work of mercy too dangerous or too re-
pellent—were or are communists. Knowing these
things we cannot take it on ourselves to say that a
social condition may not be possible in which an all-
embracing love shall have taken the place of all other
motives. But we see that communism is only
possible where there exists a general and intense re-
ligious faith, and we see that such a state can be
reached only through a state of justice. For before a
man can be a saint he must first be an honest man.
With both anarchists and socialists, we, who for
want of a better term have come to call ourselves single
tax men, fundamentally differ. We regard them as err-
ing in opposite directions—the one in ignoring the
social nature of man, the other in ignoring his individual
64 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
nature. While we see that man is primarily an
individual, and that nothing but evil has come or can
come from the interference by the state with things
that belong to individual action, we also see that he
is a social being, or, as Aristotle called him, a political
animal, and that the state is requisite to social advance,
having an indispensable place in the natural order.
Looking ou the bodily organism as the analogue of
the Social organism, and on the proper functions
of the state as akin to those that in the human
organism are discharged by the conscious intelligence,
while the play of individual impulse and interest
performs functions akin to those discharged in the
bodily organism by the unconscious instincts and
involuntary motions, the anarchists seem to us like
men who would try to get along without heads and
the socialists like men who would try to rule the
wonderfully complex and delicate internal relations of
their frames by conscious wili.
The philosophical anarchists of whom I speak are
few in number, and of little practical importance. It
is with socialism in its various phases that we have to
do battle.
With the socialists we have some points of agree-
ment, for we recognize fully the social nature of man
and believe that all monopolies should be held and gov-
erned by the state. In these, and in directions
where the general health, knowledge, comfort and con-
venience might be improved, we, too, would extend
the functions of the state.
But it seems to us the vice of socialism in all its de-
grees is its want of radicalism, of going to the root. It
takes its theories from those who have sought to justify
OP1.N. f. ETTER TO POff f, EO XIII. 65
the impoverishment of the masses, and its advocates
generally teach the preposterous and degrading doc-
trine that slavery was the first condition of labor. It
assumes that the tendency of wages to a minimum is the
natural law, and seeks to abolish wages; it assumes that
the natural result of competition is to grind down
workers, and seeks to abolish competition by restrictions,
prohibitions and extensions of governing power. Thus
mistaking effects for causes, and childishly blaming
the stone for hitting it, it wastes strength in striving
for remedies that when not worse are futile. Associat-
ed though it is in many places with democratic aspira-
tion, yet its essence is the same delusion to which the
Children of Israel yielded when against the protest of
their prophet they insisted on a king; the delusion
that has everywhere corrupted democracies and en-
throned tyrants—that power over the people can be
used for the benefit of the people; that there may be
devised machinery that through human agencies will
secure for the management of individual affairs more
wisdom and more virtue than the people themselves
possess.
This superficiality and this tendency may be seen
in all the phases of socialism.
Take, for instance, protectionism. What support
it has, beyond the mere selfish desire of sellers to
compel buyers to pay them more than their goods are
worth, springs from such superficial ideas as that pro-
duction, not consumption, is the end of effort; that
money is more valuable than money’s worth, and to
sell more profitable than to buy; and above all from a
desire to limit competition, springing from an unan-
alyzing recognition of the phenomena that necessarily
}
€6 THE CONDITION OF i,A13OR.
follow when men who have the need to labor are
deprived by monopoly of access to the natural and
indispensable element of all labor. Its methods
involve the idea that governments can more wisely
direct the expenditure of labor and the investment of
capital than can laborers and capitalists, and that the
men who control governments will use this power for
the general good and not in their own interests. They
tend to multiply officials, restrict liberty, invent crimes.
They promote perjury, fraud and corruption. And
they would, were the theory carried to its logical
conclusion, destroy civilization and reduce mankind
to savagery.
Take trades unionism. While within narrow lines
trades unionism promotes the idea of the mutuality
of interests, and often helps to raise courage and
further political education, and while it has enabled
limited bodies of workingmen to improve somewhat
their condition, and gain, as it were, breathing space,
yet it takes no note of the general causes that deter-
mine the conditions of labor, and strives for the eleva-
tion of only a small part of the great body by means
that cannot help the rest. Aiming at the restriction
of competition—the limitation of the right to labor,
its methods are like those of an army, which even
in a righteous cause are subversive of liberty and
liable to abuse, while its weapon, the strike, is
destructive in its nature, both to combatants and non-
combatants, being a form of passive war. To apply
the principle of trades unions to all industry, as some
dream of doing, would be to enthrall men in a caste
System.
Or take even such moderate measures as the limita-
OPEN LETTER TO POPE LEO XIII. 67
tion of working hours and of the labor of women and
children. They are superficial in looking no further
than to the eagerness of men and women and little
children to work unduly, and in proposing forcibly to
restrain overwork while utterly ignoring its cause, the
sting of poverty that forces human beings to it. And
the methods by which these restraints must be
enforced, multiply officials, interfere with personal
liberty, tend to corruption, and are liable to abuse.
As for thorough going socialism, which is the more
to be honored as having the courage of its convictions,
it would carry these vices to full expression. Jump-
ing to conclusions without effort to discover causes, it
fails to see that oppression does not come from the
nature of capital, but from the wrong that robs labor
of capital by divorcing it from land, and that cre-
ates a fictitious capital that is really capitalized monop-
oly. It fails to see that it would be impossible for
capital to oppress labor were labor free to the natural
material of production ; that the wage system in
itself springs from mutual convenience, being a form
of co-operation in which one of the parties prefers a
certain to a contingent result; and that what it calls
the “iron law of wages” is not the natural law of
wages, but only the law of wages in that unnatural
condition in which men are made helpless by being
deprived of the materials for life and work. It fails
to see that what it mistakes for the evils of competi-
tion are really the evils of restricted competition—
are due to a one sided competition to which men
are forced when deprived of land. While its meth-
ods, the organization of men into industrial armies,
the direction and control of all production and ex-
68 THE CONDITION OF TABOR.
change by governmental or semi-governmental bu-
reaus, would, if carried to full expression, mean
Egyptian despotism.
We differ from the socialists in our diagnosis of the
evil and we differ from them as to remedies. We have
no fear of capital, regarding it as the natural hand-
maiden of labor; we look on Interest in itself as
natural and just ; we would set no limit to accumula-
tion, nor impose on the rich any burden that is not
equally placed on the poor; we see no evil in com-
petition, but deem unrestricted competition to be as
necessary to the health of the industrial and social
organism as the free circulation of the blood is to the
health of the bodily organism—to be the agency where-
by the fullest co-operation is to be secured. We would
simply take for the community what belongs to the
community, the value that attaches to land by the
growth of the community; leave sacredly to the indi-
vidual all that belongs to the individual; and, treat-
ing necessary monopolies as functions of the state,
abolish all restrictions and prohibitions save those
required for public health, safety, morals and con-
venience. w
But the fundamental difference—the difference I
ask your Holiness specially to note, is in this: socialism
in all its phases looks on the evils of our civilization as
springing from the inadequacy or inharmony of
natural relations, which must be artificially organized
or improved. In its idea there devolves on the state
the necessity of intelligently organizing the industrial
relations of men; the construction, as it were, of a great
machine whose complicated parts shall properly work
together under the direction of human intelligence.
OPEN LETTER TO POPE LEO XIII. 69
This is the reason why socialism tends towards atheism.
Failing to see the order and symmetry of natural law,
it fails to recognize God.
On the other hand, we who call ourselves single tax
men (a name which expresses merely our practical
propositions) see in the social and industrial relations
of men not a machine which requires construction,
but an organism which needs only to be suffered to
grow. We see in the natural social and industrial
laws such harmony as we see in the adjustments of the
human body, and that as far transcends the power of
man’s intelligence to order and direct as it is beyond
man's intelligence to order and direct the vital move-
ments of his frame. We see in these social and indus-
trial laws so close a relation to the moral law as must
spring from the same Authorship, and that proves the
moral law to be the sure guide of man where his intelli-
gence would wander and go astray. Thus, to us, all that
is needed to remedy the evils of our time is to do justice
and give freedom. This is the reason why our beliefs
tend towards, may are indeed the only beliefs consistent
with a firm and reverent faith in God, and with the
recognition of His law as the Supreme law which men
must follow if they would secure prosperity and avoid
destruction. This is the reason why to us political
economy only serves to show the depth of wisdom
in the simple truths which common people heard
gladly from the lips of Him of whom it was said with
wonder, “Is not this the Carpenter of Nazareth ''”
And it is because that in what we propose—the
securing to all men of equal natural opportunities for
the exercise of their powers and the removal of all
legal restriction on the legitimate exercise of those
70 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
powers—we see the conformation of human law to the
moral law, that we hold with confidence not merely
that this is the sufficient remedy for all the evils you
so strikingly portray, but that it is the only possible
remedy.
Nor is there any other. The organization of man
is such, his relations to the world in which he is placed
are such—that is to say, the immutable laws of God
are such, that it is beyond the power of human in-
genuity to devise any way by which the evils born of
the injustice that robs men of their birthright can be
removed otherwise than by doing justice, by opening
to all the bounty that God has provided for all.
Since man can live only on land and from land,
since land is the reservoir of matter and force from
which man's body itself is taken, and on which he must
draw for all that he can produce, does it not irresistibly
follow that to give the land in ownership to some men
and to deny to others all right to it is to divide man-
kind into the rich and the poor, the privileged and the
helpless? Does it not follow that those who have no
rights to the use of land can live only by selling their
power to labor to those who own the land 2 Does it
not follow that what the socialists call “the iron law
of wages,” what the political economists term “the
tendency of wages to a minimum,” must take from the
landless masses—the mere laborers, who of themselves
have no power to use their labor—all the benefits of
any possible advance or improvement that does not
alter this unjust division of land. For having no
power to employ themselves, they must, either as
labor Sellers or land renters, compete with one another
for permission to labor. This competition with one
OPEN LETTER TO POPE LEO XIII. 71
another of men shut out from God’s inexhaustible store-
house has no limit but starvation, and must ultimately
force wages to their lowest point, the point at which
life can just be maintained and reproduction carried
OIl.
This is not to say that all wages must fall to this
point, but that the wages of that necessarily largest
stratum of laborers who have only ordinary knowledge,
skill and aptitude must so fall. The wages of
special classes, who are fenced off from the pressure of
competition by peculiar knowledge, skill or other
causes, may remain above that ordinary level. Thus,
where the ability to read and write is rare its posses-
sion enables a man to obtain higher wages than the
ordinary laborer. But as the diffusion of education
makes the ability to read and write general this
advantage is lost. So when a vocation requires special
training or skill, or is made difficult of access by
artificial restrictions, the checking of competition tends
to keep wages in it at a higher level. But as the prog-
ress of invention dispenses with peculiar skill, or
artificial restrictions are broken down, these higher
wages sink to the ordinary level. And so, it is only
so long as they are special that such qualities as indus-
try, prudence and thrift can enable the ordinary laborer
to maintain a condition above that which gives a mere
living. Where they become general, the law of
competition must reduce the earnings or savings of such
qualities to the general level—which, land being
monopolized and labor helpless, can be only that at
which the next lowest point is the cessation of life.
Or, to state the same thing in another way: Land
being necessary to life and labor, its owners will be
72 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
able, in return for permission to use it, to obtain
from mere laborers all that labor can produce, save
enough to enable such of them to maintain life as are
wanted by the land owners and their dependents.
Thus, where private property in land has divided
society into a land owning class and a landless class,
there is no possible invention or improvement,
whether it be industrial, social or moral, which, so
long as it does not affect the ownership of land, can
prevent poverty or relieve the general conditions of
mere laborers. For whether the effect of any inven-
tion or improvement be to increase what labor can
produce or to decrease what is required to support the
laborer, it can, so soon as it becomes general, result
only in increasing the income of the owners of land,
without at all benefiting the mere laborers. In no
event can those possessed of the mere ordinary power
to labor, a power utterly useless without the means
necessary to labor, keep more of their earnings than
enough to enable them to live.
How true this is we may see in the facts of to-day.
In our own time invention and discovery have enor-
mously increased the productive power of labor, and at
the same time greatly reduced the cost of many things
ecessary to the support of the laborer. Have these
improvements anywhere raised the earnings of the
mere laborer ? Have not their benefits mainly gone
to the owners of land—enormously increased land
values?
I say mainly, for some part of the benefit has gone
to the cost of monstrous standing armies and warlike
preparations; to the payment of interest on great public
debts; and, largely disguised as interest on fictitious
OPEN LETTER TO POPE LEO XIII. 73
capital, to the owners of monopolies other than that of
land. But improvements that would do away with
these wastes would not benefit labor; they would sim-
ply increase the profits of land owners. Were stand-
ing armies and all their incidents abolished, were all
monopolies other than that of land done away with,
were governments to become models of economy,
were the profits of speculators, of middlemen, of all
sorts of exchangers saved, were every one to become
so strictly honest that no policemen, no courts, no
prisons, no precautions against dishonesty would be
needed—the result would not differ from that which
has followed the increase of productive power.
Nay, would not these very blessings bring starva-
tion to many of those who now manage to live? Is it
not true that if there were proposed to-day, what all
Christian men ought to pray for, the complete dis-
bandment of all the armies of Europe, the greatest
fears would be aroused for the consequences of throw-
ing on the labor market so many unemployed
laborers?
The explanation of this and of similar paradoxes
that in our time perplex on every side may be easily
seen. The effect of all inventions and improvements
that increase productive power, that save waste and
economize effort, is to lessen the labor required for a
given result, and thus to save labor, so that we speak
of them as labor Saving inventions or improvements.
Now, in a natural state of society where the rights of
all to the use of the earth are acknowledged, labor
Saving improvements might go to the very utmost
that can be imagined without lessening the demand
for men, since in such natural conditions the demand
74. THE • CONDITION OF LABOR.
for men lies in their own enjoyment of life and the
strong instincts that the Creator has implanted in
the human breast. But in that unnatural state of
society where the masses of men are disinherited of
all but the power to labor when opportunity to labor
is given them by others, there the demand for them
becomes simply the demand for their services by those
who hold this opportunity, and man himself becomes
a commodity. Hence, although the natural effect of
labor saving improvement is to increase wages, yet in
the unnatural condition which private ownership of
the land begets, the effect, even of such moral im-
provements as the disbandment of armies and the Sav-
ing of the labor that vice entails, is by lessening the
commercial demand, to lower wages and reduce mere
laborers to starvation or pauperism. If labor Saving
inventions and improvements could be carried to the
very abolition of the necessity for labor, what would
be the result 2 Would it not be that land owners
could then get all the wealth that the land was
capable of producing, and would have no need at all
for laborers, who must then either starve or live as
pensioners on the bounty of the land owners? w
Thus, so long as private property in land continues
—so long as some men are treated as owners of the
earth and other meu can live on it only by their suffer-
ance—human wisdom can devise no means by which
the evils of our present condition may be avoided.
Nor yet could the wisdom of God.
By the light of that right reason of which St.
Thomas speaks we may see that even He, the Al-
mighty, so long as His laws remain what they are,
OPEN LETTER TO POPE LEO XIII. 75
could do nothing to prevent poverty and starvation
while property in land continues.
How could He? Should he infuse new vigor into
the sunlight, new virtue into the air, new fertility
into the soil, would not all this new bounty go to the
owners of the land, and work not benefit, but rather
injury, to mere laborers? Should He open the minds
of men to the possibilities of new substances, new ad-
justments, new powers, could this do any more to
relieve poverty than steam, electricity and all the num-
berless discoveries and inventions of our time have
done? Or, if He were to send down from the heavens
above or cause to gush up from the subterranean
depths, food, clothing, all the things that satisfy man’s
material desires, to whom under our laws would all
these belong? So far from benefiting man, would not
this increase and extension of His bounty prove but a
curse, enabling the privileged class more riotously
to roll in wealth, and bringing the disinherited class
to more widespread starvation or pauperism 2
IV.
Believing that the social question is at bottom a
religious question, we deem it of happy augury to the
world that in your Encyclical the most influential of all
religious teachers has directed attention to the condi-
tion of labor. -
But while we appreciate the many wholesome
truths you utter, while we feel, as all must feel, that
you are animated by a desire to help the suffering and
oppressed, and to put an end to any idea that the
Church is divorced from the aspiration for liberty and
76 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
progress, yet it is painfully obvious to us that one
fatal assumption hides from you the cause of the evils
you see, and makes it impossible for you to propose
any adequate remedy. This assumption is, that pri-
vate property in land is of the same nature and has
the same sanctions as private property in things pro-
duced by labor. In spite of its undeniable truths and
its benevolent spirit, your Encyclical shows you to be
involved in such difficulties as a physician called to
examine one suffering from disease of the stomach
would meet should he begin with a refusal to consider
the stomach.
Prevented by this assumption from seeing the true
cause, the only causes you find it possible to assign for
the growth of misery and wretchedness are the destrue-
tion of workingmen's guilds in the last century, the
repudiation in public institutions and laws of the
ancient religion, rapacious usury, the custom of work-
ing by contract, and the concentration of trade.
Such diagnosis is manifestly inadequate to account
for evils that are alike felt in Catholic countries, in
Protestant countries, in countries that adhere to the
Greek communion and in countries where no religion
is professed by the state; that are alike felt in old
countries and in new countries; where industry is
simple and where it is most elaborate; and amid all
varieties of industrial customs and relations.
iłut the real cause will be clear if you will consider
that since labor must find its workshop and reservoir
in land, the labor question is but another name for the
land question, and will re-examine your assumption
that private property in land is necessary and right.
See how fully adequate is the cause I have pointed
OPEN LETTER TO POPE DEO XIII. 77
out. The most important of all the material relations
of man is his relation to the planet he inhabits, and
hence, the “impious resistance to the benevolent inten-
tions of his Creator,” which, as Bishop Nulty says, is
involved in private property in land, must produce
evils wherever it exists. But by virtue of the law,
“unto whom much is given, from him much is required,”
the very progress of civilization makes the evils pro-
duced by private property in land more widespread
and intense.
What is producing throughout the civilized world
that condition of things you rightly describe as intoler-
able is not this and that local error or minor mistake.
It is nothing less than the progress of civilization itself;
nothing less than the intellectual advance and the ma-
terial growth in which our century has been so
pre-eminent, acting in a state of society based on private
property in land; nothing less than the new gifts that
in our time God has been showering on man, but
which are being turned into scourges by man’s “im-
pious resistance to the benevolent intention of his
Creator.”
The discoveries of science, the gains of invention,
have given to us in this wonderful century more than
has been given to men in any time before ; and, in a
degree so rapidly accelerating as to suggest geometrical
progression, are placing in our hands new material
powers. But with the benefit comes the obligation.
In a civilization beginning to pulse with steam and
electricity, where the sun paints pictures and the phono-
graph stores speech, it will not do to be merely as just
as were our fathers. Intellectual advance and material
advance require corresponding moral advance. ISnowl-
78 THE CON }) iTION OF i,ABOR.
edge and power are neither good nor evil. They are
not ends but means—evolving forces that if not con-
trolled in orderly relations must take disorderly and
destructive forms. The deepening pain, the increasing
perplexity, the growing discontent for which, as you
truly say, some remedy must be found and quickly
found, mean nothing less than that forces of destruction
swifter and more terrible than those that have shattered
every preceding civilization are already menacing ours
—that if it does not quickly rise to a higher moral level;
if it does not become in deed as in word a Christian
civilization, on the wall of its splendor must flame the
doom of Babylon : “Thou art weighed in the balance
and found wanting !”
One false assumption prevents you from seeing
the real cause and true significance of the facts
that have prompted your Encyclical. And it fatally
fetters you when you seek a remedy.
You state that you approach the subject with confi-
dence, yet in all that greater part of the Encyclical
(19–67) devoted to the remedy, while there is an
abundance of moral reflections and injunctions,
excellent in themselves but dead and meaningless
as you apply them, the only definite practical
proposals for the improvement of the condition of
labor are:
1. That the State should step in to prevent over-
work, to restrict the employment of women and
children, to secure in workshops conditions not un-
favorable to health and morals, and, at least where
there is danger of insufficient wages provoking strikes,
to regulate wages (39–40).
Of EN LETTER TO fºop E. f.EO XIII. 79
2. That it should encourage the acquisition of
property (in land) by workingmen (50–51).
3. That workingmen's associations should be
formed (52–67).
These remedies so far as they go are socialistic,
and though the Encyclical is not without recognition
of the individual character of man and of the priority
of the individual and the family to the state, yet the
whole tendency and spirit of its remedial suggestions
lean unmistakably to socialism—extremely moderate
socialism it is true : Socialism hampered and emas-
culated by a supreme respect for private possessions;
yet socialism still. But, although you frequently use
the ambiguous term “private property” when the con-
text shows that you have in mind private property in
land, the one thing clear on the surface and becom-
ing clearer still with examination is that you insist
that whatever else may be done, the private owner-
ship of land shall be left untouched.
I have already referred generally to the defects
that attach to all socialistic remedies for the evil con-
dition of labor, but respect for your Holiness dictates
that I should speak specifically, even though briefly,
of the remedies proposed or suggested by you.
Of these, the widest and strongest are that the
state should restrict the hours of labor, the employ-
ment of women and children, the unsanitary condi-
tions of workshops, etc. Yet how little may in this
way be accomplished.
A strong, absolute ruler might hope by such regula-
tions to alleviate the conditions of chattel slaves. But
the tendency of our times is towards democracy, and
8() THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
democratic states are necessarily weaker in paternal.
ism, while in the industrial slavery, growing out of
private ownership of land, that prevails in Christen-
dom to-day, it is not the master who forces the slave
to labor, but the slave who urges the master to let
him labor. Thus the greatest difficulty in enforcing
such regulations comes from those whom they are in-
tended to benefit. It is not, for instance, the masters
who make it difficult to enforce restrictions on child
labor in factories, but the mothers, who, prompted by
poverty, misrepresent the ages of their children even
to the masters, and teach the children to misrepresent.
But while in large factories and mines regulations
as to hours, ages, etc., though subject to evasion and
offering opportunities for extortion and corruption,
may be to some extent enforced, how can they have
any effect in those far wider branches of industry
where the laborer works for himself or for small
employers ?
All such remedies are of the nature of the remedy
for overcrowding that is generally prescribed with
them—the restriction under penalty of the number
who may occupy a room and the demolition of unsani-
tary buildings. Since these measures have no ten-
dency to increase house accommodation or to augment
ability to pay for it, the overcrowding that is forced
back in some places goes on in other places and to a
worse degree. All such remedies begin at the wrong
end. They are like putting on brake and bit to hold
in quietness horses that are being lashed into frenzy;
they are like trying to stop a locomotive by holding
its wheels instead of shutting off steam ; like attempt.
ing to cure smallpox by driving back its pustules,
OPEN LETTER TO POPE DEO XIII. 81
Men do not overwork themselves because they like
it; it is not in the nature of the mother's heart to
send children to work when they ought to be at play;
it is not of choice that laborers will work in dangerous
and unsanitary conditions. These things, like over-
crowding, come from the sting of poverty. And so
long as the poverty of which they are the ex-
pression is left untouched, restrictions such as you
endorse can have only partial and evanescent results.
The cause remaining, repression in one place can only
bring out its effects in other places, and the task you
assign to the state is as hopeless as to ask it to lower
the level of the ocean by bailing out the sea.
Nor can the state cure poverty by regulating
wages. It is as much beyond the power of the
state to regulate wages as it is to regulate the rates of
interest. Usury laws have been tried again and
again, but the only effect they have ever had has
been to increase what the poorer borrowers must pay,
and for the same reasons that all attempts to lower
by regulation the price of goods have always resulted
merely in increasing them. The general rate of
wages is fixed by the ease or difficulty with which
labor can obtain access to land, ranging from the full
earnings of labor, where land is free, to the least on
which laborers can live and reproduce, where land is
fully monopolized. Thus, where it has been com-
paratively easy for laborers to get land, as in the
United States and in Australasia, wages have been
higher than in Europe and it has been impossible to
get European laborers to work there for wages that
they would gladly accept at home; while as monopoli.
zation goes on under the influence of private property
82 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
in land, wages tend to fall, and the social conditions of
Europe to appear. Thus, under the partial yet sub-
stantial recognition of common rights to land, of which
I have spoken, the many attempts of the British
parliaments to reduce wages by regulation failed
utterly. And so, when the institution of private
property in land had done its work in England, all
attempts of Parliament to raise wages proved unavail-
ing. In the beginning of this century it was even
attempted to increase the earnings of laborers by
grants in aid of wages. But the only result was to
lower commensurately what wages employers paid.
The state could only maintain wages above the ten-
dency of the market (for as I have shown labor de-
prived of land becomes a commodity), by offering
employment to all who wish it; or by lending its
sanction to strikes and supporting them with its
funds. Thus it is, that the thorough going social-
ists who want the state to take all industry into its
hands are much more logical than those timid social-
ists who propose that the state should regulate private
industry—but only a little. \
The same hopelessness attends your suggestion that
working people should be encouraged by the state
in obtaining a share of the land. It is evident that
by this you mean that, as is now being attempted
in Ireland, the state shall buy out large land owners
in favor of small ones, establishing what is known as
peasant proprietors. Supposing that this can be done
even to a considerable extent, what will be ac-
complished save to substitute a larger privileged class
for a smaller privileged class? What will be done for
OPEN if TTER TO POPE II: O XIII. 83
the still larger class that must remain, the laborers of
the agricultural districts, the workmen of the towns,
the proletarians of the cities? Is it not true, as Pro-
fessor De Laveleye says, that in such countries as
Belgium, where peasant proprietary exists, the tenants,
for there still exist tenants, are rackrented with a
mercilessness unknown in Ireland Ž Is it not true
that in such countries as Belgium the condition of the
mere laborer is even worse than it is in Great Britain,
where large ownerships obtain' And if the state
attempts to buy up land for peasant proprietors will
not the effect be, what is seen to-day in Ireland, to in-
crease the market value of land and thus make it more
difficult for those not so favored, and for those who
will come after, to get land 8 How, moreover, on the
principle which you declare (36), that “to the state
the interests of all are equal, whether high or low,”
will you justify state aid to one man to buy a bit of
land without also insisting on state aid to another
man to buy a donkey, to another to buy a shop, to
another to buy the tools and materials of a trade—
state aid in short to everybody who may be able to
make good use of it or thinks that he could And
are you not thus landed in communism—not the com-
munism of the early Christians and of the religious
orders, but communism that uses the coercive power
of the state to take rightful property by force from
those who have, to give to those who have not ?
For the state has no purse of Fortunatus; the state
cannot repeat the miracle of the loaves and fishes;
all that the state can give, it must get by some form
or other of the taxing power. And whether it gives
or lends money, or gives or lends credit, it cannot give
84 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
to those who have not, without taking from those who
have.
But aside from all this, any scheme of dividing up
land while maintaining private property in land is
futile. Small holdings cannot co-exist with the treat-
ment of land as private property where civilization is
materially advancing and wealth augments. We may
see this in the economic tendencies that in ancient
times were the main cause that transformed world-
conquering Italy from a land of small farms to a land
of great estates. We may see it in the fact that while
two centuries ago the majority of English farmers
were owners of the land they tilled, tenancy has been
for a long time the all but universal condition of the
English farmer. And now the mighty forces of steam
and electricity have come to urge concentration. It is
in the United States that we may see on the largest
scale how their power is operating to turn a nation of
land owners into a nation of tenants. The principle is
clear and irresistible. Material progress makes land
more valuable, and when this increasing value is left
to private owners land must pass from the ownership
of the poor into the ownership of the rich, just as dia-
monds so pass when poor men find them. What the
British government is attempting in Ireland is to
build snow houses in the Arabian desert to plant
bananas in Labrador
There is one way, and only one way, in which
working people in our civilization may be secured a
share in the land of their country, and that is the way
that we propose—the taking of the profits of land
ownership for the community.
OPEN LETTER TO POPE LEO XIII. 85
As to workingmen's associations, what your Holi-
ness seems to contemplate is the formation and encour-
agement of societies akin to the Catholic sodalities,
and to the friendly and beneficial societies, like the
Odd Fellows, which have had a large extension in
English speaking countries. Such associations may
promote fraternity, extend social intercourse and pro-
vide assurance in case of sickness or death, but if they
go no further they are powerless to affect wages even
among their members. As to trades unions proper, it
is hard to define your position, which is, perhaps, best
stated as one of warm approbation provided that they
do not go too far. For while you object to strikes;
while you reprehend societies that “do their best to get
into their hands the whole field of labor and to force
workingmen either to join them or to starve;” while
you discountenance the coercing of employers and
seem to think that arbitration might take the place of
strikes; yet you use expressions and assert principles
that are all that the trade unionist would ask, not
merely to justify the strike and the boycott, but even
the use of violence where only violence would suffice.
For you speak of the insufficient wages of workmen
as due to the greed of rich employers; you assume the
moral right of the workman to obtain employment
from others at wages greater than those others are will-
ing freely to give ; and you deny the right of any one to
work for such wages as he pleases, in such a way as
to lead Mr. Stead, in so widely read a journal as the
Review of Reviews, to approvingly declare that you
regard “blacklegging,” i. e., the working for less than
union wages, as a crime.
To men conscious of bitter injustice, to men steeped
86 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
in poverty yet mocked by flaunting wealth, such words
mean more than I can think you realize.
When fire shall be cool and ice be warm, when
armies shall throw away lead and iron, to try con-
clusions by the pelting of rose leaves, such labor
associations as you are thinking of may be possible.
But not till then. For labor associations can do
nothing to raise wages but by force. It may be force
applied passively, or force applied actively, or force
held in reserve, but it must be force. They must
coerce or hold the power to coerce employers; they
must coerce those among their own members dis-
posed to straggle; they must do their best to get into
their hands the whole field of labor they seek to
occupy and to force other workingmen either to join
them or to starve. Those who tell you of trades
unions bent on raising wages by moral suasion alone
are like those who would tell you of tigers that live
On Oranges.
The condition of the masses to-day is that of men
pressed together in a hall where ingress is open and
more are constantly coming, but where the doors for
egress are closed. If forbidden to relieve the gen-
eral pressure by throwing open those doors, whose
bars and bolts are private property in land, they can
only mitigate the pressure on themselves by forcing
back others, and the weakest must be driven to the
wall. This is the way of labor unions and trade
guilds. Even those amiable societies that you rec-
ommend would in their efforts to find employment for
their own members necessarily displace others.
For even the philanthropy which, recognizing the
evil of trying to help labor by alms, seeks to help
OPEN LETTER TO POPE LEO XIII. 87
men to help themselves by finding them work,
becomes aggressive in the blind and bitter struggle
that private property in land entails, and in helping
one set of men injures others. Thus, to minimize the
bitter complaints of taking work from others and
lessening the wages of others in providing their own
beneficiaries with work and wages, benevolent so-
cieties are forced to devices akin to the digging of
holes and filling them up again. Our American So-
cieties feel this difficulty, General Booth encounters
it in England, and the Catholic societies which your
Holiness recommends must find it, when they are
formed.
Your Holiness knows of, and I am sure honors,
the princely generosity of Baron Hirsch towards his
suffering co-religionists. But, as I write, the New
York newspapers contain accounts of an immense
meeting held in Cooper Union, in this city, on the
evening of Friday, September 4, in which a number
of Hebrew trades unions protested in the strong-
est manner against the loss of work and reduction of
wages that is being effected by Baron Hirsch's
generosity in bringing their own countrymen here
and teaching them to work. The resolution unani-
mously adopted at this great meeting thus concludes:
“We now demand of Baron Hirsch himself that
he release us from his ‘charity’ and take back the
millions, which, instead of a blessing, have proved a
curse and a source of misery.”
Nor does this show that the members of these
Hebrew labor unions—who are themselves immi-
grants of the same class as those Baron IIirsch is
striving to help, for in the next generation they lose
88 THE CONDITION OH LABOR.
with us their distinctiveness—are a whit less gen-
erous than other men.
Labor associations of the nature of trade guilds or
unions are necessarily selfish; by the law of their being
they must fight for their own hand, regardless of who
is hurt; they ignore and must ignore the teaching of
Christ that we should do to others as we would have
them do to us, which a true political economy shows is
the only way to the full emancipation of the masses.
They must do their best to starve workmen who do
not join them, they must by all means in their power
force back the “blackleg"—as the soldier in battle
must shoot down his mother's son if in the opposing
ranks. And who is the blackleg : A fellow creature
seeking work—a fellow creature in all probability
more pressed and starved than those who so bitterly
denounce him, and often with the hungry pleading
faces of wife and child behind him.
And, in So far as they succeed, what is it that trades
guilds and unions do but to impose more restrictions
on natural rights; to create “trusts” in labor; to add
to privileged classes other somewhat privileged classes;
and to press the weaker closer to the wall?
I speak without prejudice against trades unions,
of which for years I was an active member. And
in pointing out to your Holiness that their principle
is selfish and incapable of large and permanent
benefits, and that their methods violate natural rights
and work hardship and injustice, I am only saying
to you what, both in my books and by word of
mouth, I have said over and over again to them.
Nor is what I say capable of dispute. Intelligent
trades unionists know it, and the less intelligent
OPEN LETTER TO POPE LEO XIII. 89
vaguely feel it. And even those of the classes of
wealth and leisure who, as if to head off the demand
for natural rights, are preaching trades unionism to
working men, must needs admit it.
Your Holiness will remember the great London
dock strike of two years ago, which, with that of
other influential men, received the moral support of
that Prince of the Church whom we of the English
speech hold higher and dearer than any prelate has
been held by us since the blood of Thomas A'Becket
stained the Canterbury altar.
In a volume called “The Story of the Dockers'
Strike,” written by Messrs. H. Lewellyn Smith and
Vaughan Nash, with an introduction by Sydney
Buxton, M. P., which advocates trades unionism as the
solution of the labor question, and of which a large
number were sent to Australia as a sort of official
recognition of the generous aid received from there
by the strikers, I find in the summing up, on pages
164–5, the following: º
“If the settlement lasts, work at the docks will be
more regular, better paid, and carried on under better
conditions than ever before. All this will be an
unqualified gain to those who get the benefit from it.
But another result will undoubtedly be to contract the
field of employment and lessen the number of those
for whom work can be found. The lower class casual
will, in the end, find his position more precarious
than ever before, in proportion to the increased regu-
larity of work which the “fitter” of the laborers will
secure. The effect of the organization of dock labor,
as of all classes of labor, will be to squeeze out tºe
pesiduum. The loafer, the cadger, the failure in the
industrial race—the members of ‘Class 13° of Mr.
Charles Booth's hierarchy of social classes—will be no
90 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
gainers by the change, but will rather find another
door closed against them, and this in many cases the
last door to employment.”
I am far from wishing that your Holiness should
join in that pharisaical denunciation of trades
unions common among those who, while quick to
point out the injustice of trades unions in denying
to others the equal right to work, are themselves
supporters of that more primary injustice that denies
the equal right to the standing place and natural
material necessary to work. What I wish to point out
is that trades unionism, while it may be a partial
paliative, is not a remedy; that it has not that moral
character which could alone justify one in the position
of your Holiness in urging it as good in itself. Yet,
So long as you insist on private property in land
what better can you do?
W.
In the beginning of the Encyclical you declare that
the responsibility of the apostolical office urges your
IIoliness to treat the question of the condition of labor
“expressly and at length in order that there may be no
mistake as to the principles which truth and justice
dictate for its settlement.” But, blinded by one false
assumption, you do not see even fundamentals.
You assume that the labor question is a question
between wage-workers and their employers. But
working for wages is not the primary or exclusive occu-
pation of labor. Primarily men work for themselves
without the intervention of an employer. And the
primary source of wages is in the earnings of labor,
OPEN LETTER TO POPE LEO XIII. 91
the man who works for himself and consumes his
own products receiving his wages in the fruits of his
labor. Are not fishermen, boatmen, cab drivers,
peddlers, working farmers—all, in short, of the many
workers who get their wages directly by the sale of
their services or products without the medium of an
employer, as much laborers as those who work for the
specific wages of an employer ? In your consideration
of remedies you do not seem even to have thought of
them. Yet in reality the laborers who work for
themselves are the first to be considered, since what
men will be willing to accept from employers depends
manifestly on what they can get by working for them-
selves.
You assume that all employers are rich men, who
might raise wages much higher were they not so
grasping. But is it not the fact that the great
majority of employers are in reality as much pressed
by competition as their workmen, many of them
constantly on the verge of failure? Such employers
could not possibly raise the wages they pay, however
they might wish to, unless all others were compelled
to do so.
You assume that there are in the natural order two
classes, the rich and the poor, and that laborers naturally
belong to the poor.
It is true as you say that there are differences in
capacity, in diligence, in health and in strength, that
may produce differences in fortune. These, however,
are not the differences that divide men into rich and
poor. The natural differences in powers and aptitudes
are certainly not greater than are natural differences
in stature. But while it is only by selecting giants
92 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
and dwarfs that we can find men twice as tall as others,
yet in the difference between rich and poor that exists
to-day we find some men richer than other men by the
thousand fold and the million fold.
Nowhere do these differences between wealth and
poverty coincide with differences in individual powers
and aptitudes. The real difference between rich and
poor is the difference between those who hold the toll
gates and those who pay toll ; between tribute re-
ceivers and tribute yielders.
In what way does nature justify such a difference?
In the numberless varieties of animated Lature we find
some species that are evidently intended to live on
other species. But their relations are always marked
by unmistakable differences in size, shape or organs.
To man has been given dominion over all the other
living things that tenant the earth. But is not this
mastery indicated even in externals, so that no one can
fail on sight to distinguish between a man and one of
the inferior animals. Our American apologists for
slavery used to contend that the black skin and wooly
hair of the negro indicated the intent of nature that
the black should serve the white; but the difference
that you assume to be natural is between men of the
same race. What difference does nature show between
such men as would indicate her intent that one should
live idly yet be rich, and the other should work hard yet
be poor? If I could bring you from the United States
a man who has $200,000,000, and one who is glad
to work for a few dollars a week, and place them
side by side in your ante-chamber, would you be able
to tell which was which, even were you to call in
the most skilled anatomist' Is it not clear that
OPEN LETTER TO POPE LEO XIII. 93
God in no way countenances or condones the di-
vision of rich and poor that exists to-day, or in
any way permits it, except as having given them free
will he permits men to choose either good or evil, and
to avoid heaven if they prefer hell. For is it not clear
that the division of men into the classes rich and poor
has invariably its origin in force and fraud; invariably
involves violation of the moral law ; and is really a
division into those who get the profits of robbery
and those who are robbed; those who hold in exclusive
possession what God made for all, and those who are
deprived of His bounty . Did not Christ in all His
utterances and parables show that the gross difference
between rich and poor is opposed to God's law Ż
Would he have condemned the rich so strongly as he
did, if the class distinction between rich and poor
did not involve injustice—was not opposed to God’s
intent 7
It seems to us that your Holiness misses its real signi-
ficance in intimating that Christ, in becoming the son of
a carpenter and Himself working as a carpenter, showed
merely that “there is nothing to be ashamed of in
seeking one's bread by labor.” To say that is almost
like saying that by not robbing people He showed that
there is nothing to be ashamed of in honesty . If you
will consider how true in any large view is the classifi-
cation of all men into workingmen, beggarmen and
thieves, you will see that it was morally impossible
that Christ during His stay on earth should have been
anything else than a workingman, since He who came
to fulfil the law must by deed as well as word obey
God’s law of labor.
See how fully and how beautifully Christ's life
94. THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
on earth illustrated this law. Entering our earthly
life in the weakness of infancy, as it is appointed that
all should enter it, He lovingly took what in the
natural order is lovingly rendered, the sustenance,
secured by labor, that one generation owes to its
immediate successors. Arrived at maturity, He earned
His own subsistence by that common labor in which
the majority of men must and do earn it. Then
passing to a higher—to the very highest–sphere of
labor, Ile earned His subsistence by the teaching of
moral and spiritual truths, receiving its material
wages in the love offerings of grateful hearers, and
not refusing the costly spikenard with which Mary
anointed His feet. So, when He chose His dis-
ciples, He did not go to land owners or other mo-
nopolists who live on the labor of others, but to
common laboring men. And when He called them to
a higher sphere of labor and sent them out to teach
moral and spiritual truths, He told them to take, with-
out condescension on the one hand or sense of
degradation on the other, the loving return for such
labor, saying to them that the “laborer is worthy of
his hire,” thus showing, what we hold, that all labor
does not consist in what is called manual labor, but
that whoever helps to add to the material, intellectual,
moral or spiritual fullness of life is also a laborer.”
* Nor should it be forgotten that the investigator, the philoso-
pher, the teacher, the artist, the poet, the priest, though not
engaged in the production of wealth, are not only engaged in the
production of utilities and satisfactions to which the production
of wealth is only a means, but by acquiring and diffusing knowl-
edge, stimulating mental powers and elevating the moral Sense,
may greatly increase the ability to produce wealth. For man
does not live by bread alone. * * * He who by any exertion of
mind or body adds to the aggregate of enjoyable wealth, increases
the sum of human knowledge, or gives to human life higher eleva-
OPEN f,ETTER TO POPE LEO XIII. 95
In assuming that laborers, even ordinary manual
laborers, are naturally poor, you ignore the fact that
labor is the producer of wealth, and attribute to
the natural law of the Creator an injustice that
comes from man’s impious violation of His benevolent
intention. In the rudest stage of the arts it is possible,
where justice prevails, for all well men to earn a living.
With the labor-saving appliances of our time, it should
be possible for all to earn much more. And so, in
saying that poverty is no disgrace, you convey
an unreasonable implication. For poverty ought to
be a disgrace, since in a condition of social justice, it
would, where unsought from religious motives or un-
imposed by unavoidable misfortune, imply recklessness
or laziness.
The sympathy of your Holiness seems exclusively
directed to the poor, the workers. Ought this to be
so 2 Are not the rich, the idlers, to be pitied also :
By the word of the Gospel it is the rich rather than
the poor who call for pity, for the presumption is that
they will share the fate of Dives. And to any one
who believes in a future life the condition of him who
wakes to find his cherished millions left behind must
seem pitiful. But even in this life, how really pitiable
are the rich. The evil is not in wealth in itself—in
its command over material things; it is in the possession
tion or greater fullness—he is, in the large meaning of the words,
a “producer,” a “working man,” a “ laborer,” and is honestly
earning honest wages. But he who without doing aught to make
mankind richer, wiser, better, happier, lives on the toil of others—
he, no matter by what name of honor he may be called, or how
lustily the priests of Mammon may swing their censers before
him, is in the last analysis but a beggarman or a thief.-Protec-
tion or Free Trade, pp. 74-75.
96 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
of wealth while others are steeped in poverty; in being
raised above touch with the life of humanity, from
its work and its struggles, its hopes and its fears, and
above all, from the love that sweetens life, and the
kindly sympathies and generous acts that strengthen
faith in man and trust in God. Consider how the rich
see the meaner side of human nature; how they are
surrounded by flatterers and sycophants; how they find
ready instruments not only to gratify vicious impulses,
but to prompt and stimulate them; how they must
constantly be on guard lest they be swindled; how
often they must suspect an ulterior motive behind
kindly deed or friendly word; how if they try to be
generous they are beset by shameless beggars and
scheming impostors; how often the family affections
are chilled for them, and their deaths anticipated with
the ill-concealed joy of expectant possession. The
worst evil of poverty is not in the want of material
things, but in the stunting and distortion of the
higher qualities. So, though in another way, the
possession of unearned wealth likewise stunts and
distorts what is noblest in man. -
God’s commands cannot be evaded with impunity.
If it be God's command that men shall earn their bread
by labor, the idle rich must suffer. And they do. See
the utter vacancy of the lives of those who live for
pleasure; see the loathsome vices bred in a class who
surrounded by poverty are sated with wealth. See
that terrible punishment of ennui, of which the poor
know so little that they cannot understand it; see the
pessimism that grows among the wealthy classes—
that shuts out God, that despises men, that deems
OPEN LETTER TO POPE LEO XIII. 97
existence in itself an evil, and fearing death yet
longs for annihilation.
When Christ told the rich young man who sought
Him to sell all he had and to give it to the poor, He
was not thinking of the poor, but of the young man.
And I doubt not that among the rich, and especially
among the self-made rich, there are many who at
times at least feel keenly the folly of their riches and
fear for the dangers and temptations to which these
expose their children. But the strength of long habit,
the promptings of pride, the excitement of making
and holding what has become for them the counters
in a game of cards, the family expectations that have
assumed the character of rights, and the real difficulty
they find in making any good use of their wealth,
bind them to their burden, like a weary donkey to his
pack, till they stumble on the precipice that bounds
this life.
Men who are sure of getting food when they shall
need it eat only what appetite dictates. But with the
sparse tribes who exist on the verge of the habitable
globe life is either a famine or a feast. Enduring
hunger for days, the fear of it prompts them to gorge
like anacondas when successful in their quest of game.
And so, what gives wealth its curse is what drives men
to seek it, what makes it so envied and admired—the
fear of want. As the unduly rich are the corollary of
the unduly poor, so is the soul-destroying quality of
riches but the reflex of the want that embrutes and
degrades. The real evil lies in the injustice from
which unnatural possession and unnatural deprivation
both spring.
But this injustice can hardly be charged on individ-
98 THE CONI)ITION OF LABOR.
uals or classes. The existence of private property in
land is a great social wrong from which society at large
suffers, and of which the very rich and the very poor
are alike victims, though at the opposite extremes.
Seeing this, it seems to us like a violation of Christian
charity to speak of the rich as though they individually
were responsible for the sufferings of the poor. Yet,
while you do this, you insist that the cause of
monstrous wealth and degrading poverty shall not be
touched. Here is a man with a disfiguring and
dangerous excrescence. One physician would kindly,
gently, but firmly remove it. Another insists that it
shall not be removed, but at the same time holds up
the poor victim to hatred and ridicule. Which is
right? -
In seeking to restore all men to their equal and
natural rights we do not seek the benefit of any class,
but of all. For we both know by faith and see by fact
that injustice can profit no one and that justice must
benefit all.
Nor do we seek any “futile and ridiculous equality.”
We recognize, with you, that there must always be
differences and inequalities. In so far as these are
in conformity with the moral law, in so far as they
do not violate the command, “Thou shalt not steal,”
we are content. We do not seek to better God’s work;
we seek only to do His will. The equality we would
bring about is not the equality of fortune, but the
equality of natural opportunity; the equality that
reason and religion alike proclaim—the equality in
usufruct of all His children to the bounty of Our
Father who art in Heaven.
And in taking for the uses of Society what we
OPEN LETTER TO POPE LEO XIII. 99
clearly see is the great fund intended for society in
the divine order, we would not levy the slightest tax
on the possessors of wealth, no matter how rich they
might be. Not only do we deem such taxes a violation
of the right of property, but we see that by virtue of
beautiful adaptations in the economic laws of the
Creator, it is impossible for any one honestly to ac-
quire wealth, without at the same time adding to the
wealth of the world.
To persist in a wrong, to refuse to undo it, is always
to become involved in other wrongs. Those who
defend private property in land, and thereby deny
the first and most important of all human rights,
the equal right to the material substratum of life,
are compelled to one of two courses. Either they
must, as do those whose gospel is “Devil take the
hindermost,” deny the equal right to life, and by
some theory like that to which the English
clergyman Malthus has given his name, assert that
nature (they do not venture to say God) brings into
the world more men than there is provision for ; or,
they must, as do the socialists, assert as rights what in
themselves are wrongs. -
Your Holiness in the Encyclical gives an example of
this. Denying the equality of right to the material
basis of life, and yet conscious that there is a
right to live, you assert the right of laborers to em-
ployment and their right to receive from their
employers a certain indefinite wage. No such rights
exist. No one has a right to demand employment of
another, or to demand higher wages than the other is
willing to give, or in any way to put pressure on
100 THE CONI) [TION OF LABOR.
another to make him raise such wages against his will.
There can be no better moral justification for such
demands on employers by workingmen than there
would be for employers demanding that workingmen
shall be compelled to work for them when they do
not want to and to accept wages lower than they are
willing to take. Any seeming justification springs
from a prior wrong, the denial to workingmen of
their natural rights, and can in the last analysis only
rest on that supreme dictate of self-preservation that
under extraordinary circumstances makes pardonable
what in itself is theft, or sacrilege or even murder.
A fugitive slave with the bloodhounds of his pur-
suers baying at his heels would in true Christian
morals be held blameless if he seized the first horse
he came across, even though to take it he had to
knock down the rider. But this is not to justify
horse-stealing as an ordinary means of traveling.
When his disciples were hungry Christ permitted
them to pluck corn on the Sabbath day. But He
never denied the sanctity of the Sabbath by asserting
that it was under ordinary circumstances a proper time
to gather corn.
He justified David, who when pressed by hunger
committed what ordinarily would be sacrilege, by
taking from the temple the loaves of proposition.
But in this He was far from saying that the robbing
of temples was a proper way of getting a living.
In the Encyclical however you commend the appli-
cation to the ordinary relations of life, under normal
conditions, of principles that in ethics are only to
be tolerated under extraordinary conditions. You
are driven to this assertion of false rights by your
OPEN LETTER TO POPE LEO XIII. 101
denial of true rights. The natural right which each
man has is not that of demanding employment or
wages from another man; but that of employing
himself—that of applying by his own labor to the
inexhaustible storehouse which the Creator has in the
land provided for all men. Were that storehouse open,
as by the single tax we would open it, the natural de-
mand for labor would keep pace with the supply, the
man who sold labor and the man who bought it
would become free exchangers for mutual advantage,
and all cause for dispute between workman and em-
ployer would be gone. For then, all being free to em-
ploy themselves, the mere opportunity to labor would
cease to seem a boon; and since no one would work for
another for less, all things considered, than he could
earn by working for himself, wages would necessarily
rise to their full value, and the relations of workman
and employer be regulated by mutual interest and
convenience.
This is the only way in which they can be satisfac-
torily regulated.
Your Holiness seems to assume that there is some
just rate of wages that employers ought to be willing
to pay and that laborers should be content to receive,
and to imagine that if this were secured there would
be an end of strife. This rate you evidently think of
as that which will give workingmen a frugal living,
and perhaps enable them by hard work and strict
economy to lay by a little something.
• But how can a just rate of wages be fixed without
the “higgling of the market” any more than the just
price of corn or pigs or ships or paintings can be so
fixed ? And would not arbitrary regulation in the
102 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
one case as in the other check that interplay that most
effectively promotes the economical adjustment of
productive forces? Why should buyers of labor, any
more than buyers of commodities, be called on to pay
higher prices than in a free market they are com-
pelled to pay ? Why should the sellers of labor be
content with anything less than in a free market they
can obtain' Why should workingmen be content
with frugal fare when the world is so rich & Why
should they be satisfied with a life time of toil and
stinting, when the world is so beautiful? Why should
not they also desire to gratify the higher instincts, the
finer tastes? Why should they be forever content to
travel in the steerage when others find the cabin
more enjoyable?
Nor will they. The ferment of our time does not
arise merely from the fact that workingmen find it
harder to live on the same scale of comfort. It is also
and perhaps still more largely due to the increase
of their desires with an improved scale of comfort.
This increase of desire must continue. For working-
men are men. And man is the unsatisfied animal.
He is not an ox, of whom it may be said, so much
grass, so much grain, so much water, and a little salt,
and he will be content. On the contrary, the more
he gets the more he craves. When he has enough
food then he wants better food. When he gets a
shelter then he wants a more commodious and tasty
one. When his animal needs are satisfied then men-
tal and spiritual desires arise. <e
This restless discontent is of the nature of man—of
that nobler nature that raises him above the animals by
so immeasurable a gulf, and shows him to be indeed
OPEN LETTER TO POPE IEO XIII. 103
created in the likeness of God. It is not to be quar-
relled with, for it is the motor of all progress. It is
this that has raised St. Peter’s dome and on dull, dead
canvass made the angelic face of the Madonna to
glow; it is this that has weighed suns and analyzed
stars, and opened page after page of the wonderful
works of creative intelligence; it is this that has
narrowed the Atlantic to an ocean ferry and trained
the lightning to carry our messages to the remotest
lands; it is this that is opening to us possibilities
beside which all that our modern civilization has as
yet accomplished seem small. Nor can it be repressed
save by degrading and imbruting men; by reducing
Europe to Asia.
, Hence, short of what wages may be earned when
all restrictions on labor are removed and access to
natural opportunities on equal terms secured to all, it
is impossible to fix any rate of wages that will be
deemed just, or any rate of wages that can prevent
workingmen striving to get more. So far from it
making workingmen more contented to improve their
condition a little, it is certain to make them more dis-
contented.
Nor are you asking justice when you ask employers
to pay their workingmen more than they are compelled
to pay—more than they could get others to do the
work for. You are asking charity. For the surplus
that the rich employer thus gives is not in reality
wages, it is essentially alms.
In speaking of the practical measures for the im-
provement of the condition of labor which your Holi-
ness suggests, I have not mentioned what you place
104. THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
much stress upon—charity. But there is nothing
practical in such recommendations as a cure for
poverty, nor will any one so consider them. If it
were possible for the giving of alms to abolish poverty
there would be no poverty in Christendom.
Charity is indeed a noble and beautiful virtue,
grateful to man and approved by God. But charity .
must be built on justice. It cannot supersede justice.
What is wrong with the condition of labor through
the Christian world is that labor is robbed. And
while you justify the continuance of that robbery it is
idle to urge charity. To do so—to commend charity
as a substitute for justice, is indeed something akin in
essence to those heresies, condemned by your prede-
cessors, that taught that the Gospel had superseded
the law, and that the love of God exempted men from
moral obligations.
All that charity can do where injustice exists is here
and there to somewhat mollify the effects of injustice.
It cannot cure them. Nor is even what little it can
do to mollify the effects of injustice without evil.
For what may be called the superimposed, and in this
sense, secondary virtues, work evil where the funda-
mental or primary virtues are absent. Thus sobriety
is a virtue and diligence is a virtue. But a sober aud
diligent thief is all the more dangerous. Thus
patience is a virtue. But patience under wrong is the
condoning of wrong. Thus it is a virtue to seek
knowledge and to endeavor to cultivate the mental
powers. But the wicked man becomes more cap-
able of evil by reason of his intelligence. Devils we
always think of as intelligent.
And thus that pseudo charity that discards and
OPEN LETTER TO POPE LEO XIII. 105
denies justice works evil. On the one side, it demor-
alizes its recipients, outraging that human dignity
which as you say “God himself treats with reverence,”
and turning into beggars and paupers men who to be-
come self supporting, self respecting citizens only need
the restitution of what God has given them. On
the other side, it acts as an anodyne to the consciences
of those who are living on the robbery of their fellows,
and fosters that moral delusion and spiritual pride
that Christ doubtless had in mind when he said it was
easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle
than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven.
For it leads men steeped in injustice, and using their
money and their influence to bolster up injustice, to
think that in giving alms they are doing something
more than their duty towards man and deserve to be
very well thought of by God, and in a vague way to
attribute to their own goodness what really belongs to
God’s goodness. For consider: Who is the All-pro-
vider ? Who is it that as you say, “owes to man a
storehouse that shall never fail,” and which “he finds
only in the inexhaustible fertility of the earth.” Is it
not God? And when, therefore, men, deprived of
the bounty of their God, are made dependent on the
bounty of their fellow creatures, are not these crea-
tures, as it were, put in the place of God, to take
credit to themselves for paying obligations that you
yourself say God owes?
But worse perhaps than all else is the way in which
this substituting of vague injunctions to charity for the
clear-cut demands of justice opens an easy means for
the professed teachers of the Christian religion of all
branches and communions to placate Mammon while
106 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
persuading themselves that they are serving God.
Had the English clergy not subordinated the teaching
of justice to the teaching of charity—to go no further
in illustrating a principle of which the whole history
of Christendom from Constantine's time to our own is
witness—the Tudor tyranny would never have arisen,
and the separation of the Church been averted; had the
clergy of France never substituted charity for justice,
the monstrous iniquities of the ancient regime would
never have brought the horrors of the Great Revolu-
tion; and in my own country had those who should
have preached justice not satisfied themselves with
preaching kindness, chattel slavery could never have
demanded the holocaust of our civil war.
No, your Holiness; as faith without works is dead,
as men cannot give to God His due while denying to
their fellows the rights He gave them, so charity
unsupported by justice can do nothing to solve the
problem of the existing condition of labor. Though
the rich were to “bestow all their goods to feed the
poor and give their bodies to be burned,” poverty
would continue while property in land continues.
Take the case of the rich man to-day who is hon-
estly desirous of devoting his wealth to the improve-
ment of the condition of labor. What can he do?
Bestow his wealth on those who need it ! He may
help some who deserve it, but will not improve gene-
ral conditions. And against the good he may do will
be the danger of doing harm.
Build churches 2 Under the shadow of churches
poverty festers and the vice that is born of it breeds.
Build schools and colleges' Save as it may lead
men to see the iniquity of private property in land,
OPEN LETTER TO POPE LEO XIII. 107
increased education can effect nothing for mere la-
borers, for as education is diffused the wages of edu-
cation sink. - -
Establish hospitals? Why, already it seems to la-
borers that there are too many seeking work, and to
save and prolong life is to add to the pressure.
Build model tenements? Unless he cheapens house
accommodations he but drives further the class he
would benefit, and as he cheapens.house accommoda-
tion he brings more to seek employment and cheapens
wages.
Institute laboratories, scientific schools, workshops
for physical experiments & He but stimulates inven-
tion and discovery, the very forces that, acting on a
society based on private property in land, are crush-
ing labor as between the upper and the nether mill-
Stone.
Promote emigration from places where wages are
low to places where they are somewhat higher? If
he does, even those whom he at first helps to emi-
grate will soon turn on him to demand that such emi-
gration shall be stopped as reducing their wages.
Give away what land he may have, or refuse to
take rent for it, or let it at lower rents than the mar-
ket price & He will simply make new land owners or
partial land owners; he may make some individuals
the richer, but he will do nothing to improve the
general condition of labor.
Or, bethinking himself of those public spirited citi-
zens of classic times who spent great sums in improv-
ing their native cities, shall he try to beautify the
city of his birth or adoption ? Let him widen and
straighten narrow and crooked streets, let him build
108 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
parks and erect fountains, let him open tramways and
bring in railroads, or in any way make beautiful and
attractive his chosen city, and what will be the result
Must it not be that those who appropriate God’s
bounty will take his also 2 Will it not be that the
value of land will go up, and that the net result of
his benefactions will be an increase of rents and a
bounty to land owners? Why, even the mere an-
nouncement that he is going to do such things will
start speculation and send up the value of land by
leaps and bounds.
What, then, can the rich man do to improve the
condition of labor?
He can do nothing at all except to use his strength
for the abolition of the great primary wrong that robs
men of their birthright. The justice of God laughs
at the attempts of men to substitute anything else
for it.
If when in speaking of the practical measures your
Holiness proposes, I did not note the moral injunc-
tions that the Encyclical contains, it is not because we
do not think morality practical. On the contrary it
seems to us that in the teachings of morality is to be
found the highest practicality, and that the question,
What is wise ? may always safely be subordinated to
the question, What is right ! But your IIoliness in
the Encyclical expressly deprives the moral truths you
state of all real bearing on the condition of labor,
just as the American people, by their legalization of
chattel slavery, used to deprive of all practical mean-
ing the declaration they deem their fundamental
charter, and were accustomed to read solemnly on
OPEN 1, ETTER, TO POf’ī; f, EO XIII. 109
every national anniversary. That declaration asserts
that “We hold these truths to be self evident that
all men are created equal and are endowed by their
Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among
these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
But what did this truth mean on the lips of men who
asserted that one man was the rightful property of
anotherman who had bought him ; who asserted that the
slave was robbing the master in running away, and
that the man or the woman who helped the fugitive
to escape, or even gave him a cup of cold water in
Christ's name, was an accessory to theft, on whose
head the penalties of the state should be visited ?
Consider the moral teachings of the Encyclical:
You tell us that God owes to man an inexhaustible
storehouse which he finds only in the land. Yet you
support a system that denies to the great majority
of men all right of recourse to this storehouse.
You tell us that the necessity of labor is a conse-
quence of original sin. Yet you support a system
that exempts a privileged class from the necessity for
labor and enables them to shift their share and much
more than their share of labor on others.
You tell us that God has not created us for the
perishable and transitory things of earth, but has
given us this world as a place of exile and not as our
true country. Yet you tell us that some of the exiles
have the exclusive right of ownership in this place of
common exile, so that they may compel their fellow
exiles to pay them for sojourning here, and that this
exclusive ownership they may transfer to other
exiles yet to come, with the same right of excluding
their fellows.
110 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
You tell us that virtue is the common inheritance
of all; that all men are children of God the common
Father; that all have the same last end; that all are
redeemed by Jesus Christ; that the blessings of
nature and the gifts of grace belong in common to
all, and that to all except the unworthy is promised
the inheritance of the Kingdom of Heaven Yet in
all this and through all this you insist as a moral duty
on the maintenance of a system that makes the reser-
voir of all God’s material bounties and blessings to
man the exclusive property of a few of their num-
ber—you give us equal rights in heaven, but deny us
equal rights on earth !
It was said of a famous decision of the Supreme
Court of the United States made just before the civil
war, in a fugitive slave case, that “it gave the law to
the North and the nigger to the South.” It is thus
that your Encyclical gives the gospel to laborers and
the earth to the landlords. Is it really to be won-
dered at that there are those who sneeringly say “The
priests are ready enough to give the poor an equal
share in all that is out of sight, but they take precious
good care that the rich shall keep a tight grip on all
that is within sight.”
Herein is the reason why the working masses all
over the world are turning away from organized re-
ligion.
And why should they not ? What is the office of
religion if not to point out the principles that ought
to govern the conduct of men towards each other; to
furnish a clear, decisive rule of right which shall
guide men in all the relations of life—in the work-
OPEN LETTER TO POPE LEO XIII. 111
shop, in the mart, in the forum and in the senate, as
well as in the church; to supply, as it were, a com-
pass by which amid the blasts of passion, the aberra-
tions of greed and the delusions of a short-sighted
expediency men may safely steer? What is the use
of a religion that stands palsied and paltering in the
face of the most momentous problems? What is
the use of a religion that whatever it may promise for
the next world can do nothing to prevent injustice in
this? Early Christianity was not such a religion,
else it would never have encountered the Roman
persecutions; else it would never have swept the
Roman world. The sceptical masters of Rome, tol-
erant of all gods, careless of what they deemed vulgar
superstitions, were keenly sensitive to a doctrine
based on equal rights; they feared instinctively a re-
ligion that inspired slave and proletarian with a new
hope; that took for its central figure a crucified car-
penter; that taught the equal fatherhood of God and
the equal brotherhood of men; that looked for the
speedy reign of justice, and that prayed, “Thy King-
dom come on Earth /?”
To-day, the same perceptions, the same aspirations,
exist among the masses. Man is, as he has been
called, a religious animal, and can never quite rid
himself of the feeling that there is some moral gov-
ernment of the world, some eternal distinction be-
tween wrong and right ; can never quite abandon the
yearning for a reign of righteousness. And to-day,
men who, as they think, have cast off all belief in re-
ligion, will tell you, even though they know not what
it is, that with regard to the condition of labor some-
112 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
thing is wrong! If theology be, as St. Thomas of
Aquin held it, the sum and focus of the Sciences, is it
not the business of religion to say clearly and fear-
lessly what that wrong is? It was by a deep impulse
that of old when threatened and perplexed by gen-
eral disaster men came to the Oracles to ask, In what
have we offended the gods? To-day, menaced by
growing evils that threaten the very existence of soci-
ety, men, conscious that something is wrong, are put-
ting the same question to the ministers of religion.
What is the answer they get? Alas, with few ex-
ceptions, it is as vague, as inadequate, as the answers
that used to come from heathen oracles.
Is it any wonder that the masses of men are losing
faith ?
Let me again state the case that your Encyclical
presents:
What is that condition of labor which as you truly
say is “the question of the hour,” and “fills every
mind with painful apprehension ?” Reduced to its
lowest expression it is the poverty of men willing to
work. And what is the lowest expression of this
phrase ? It is that they lack bread—for in that one
word we most concisely and strongly express all the
manifold material satisfactions needed by humanity,
the absence of which constitutes poverty.
Now what is the prayer of Christendom—the uni-
versal prayer: the prayer that goes up daily and
hourly wherever the name of Christ is honored; that
ascends from your Holiness at the high altar of St.
Peter's, and that is repeated by the youngest child
| \ {
OPEN LETTER TO POPE LEO XIII. 113
that the poorest Christian mother has taught to lisp a
request to her Father in Heaven? It is, “Give us
this day our daily bread l’”
Yet where this prayer goes up, daily and hourly, men
lack bread. Is it not the business of religion to say
why? If it cannot do so, shall not scoffers mock its
ministers as Elias mocked the prophets of Baal, say-
ing, “Cry with a louder voice, for he is a god; and per-
haps he is talking, or is in an inn, or on a journey or
perhaps he is asleep, and must be awaked!” What
answer can those ministers give & Either there is no
God, or He is asleep, or else He does give men their
daily bread, and it is in some way intercepted.
Here is the answer, the only true answer: If men
lack bread it is not that God has not done His part
in providing it. If men willing to labor are cursed
with poverty, it is not that the storehouse that God
owes men has failed; that the daily supply. He has
promised for the daily wants of His children is not
here in abundance. It is, that impiously violating
the benevolent intentions of their Creator, men have
made land private property, and thus given into the
exclusive ownership of the few the provision that a
bountiful Father has made for all.
Any other answer than that, no matter how it may
be shrouded in the mere forms of religion, is practi.
cally an atheistical answer.
I have written this letter not alone for your Holi-
ness, but for all whom I may hope it to reach. But
in sending it to you personally, and in advance of
publication, I trust that it may be by you person-
$
114 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
ally read and weighed. In setting forth the grounds
of our belief and in pointing out considerations which
it seems to us you have unfortunately overlooked, I
have written frankly, as was my duty on a matter of
Such momentous importance, and as I am sure you
would have me write. But I trust I have done so
without offence. For your office I have profound
respect, for yourself personally the highest esteem.
And while the views I have opposed seem to us
erroneous and dangerous, we do not wish to be un-
derstood as in the slighest degree questioning either
your sincerity or intelligence in adopting them. For
they are views all but universally held by the pro-
fessed religious teachers of Christendom, in all com-
munions and creeds, and that have received the
sanction of those looked to as the wise and learned.
Under the conditions that have surrounded you, and
under the pressure of so many high duties and
responsibilities, culminating in those of your present
exalted position, it is not to be expected that you
should have hitherto thought to question them. But
I trust that the considerations herein set forth may
induce you to do so, and even if the burdens and
cares that beset you shall now make impossible the
careful consideration that should precede expression
by one in your responsible position I trust that what
I have written may not be without use to others.
And, as I have said, we are deeply grateful for
your Encyclical. It is much that by so conspicuously
calling attention to the condition of labor, you have
recalled the fact forgotten by so many that the social
evils and problems of our time directly and pressingly
OPEN LETTER TO POPE LEO XIII. 115
concern the Church. It is much that you should thus
have placed the stamp of your disapproval on that
impious doctrine which directly and by implication
has been so long and so widely preached in the name
of Christianity, that the sufferings of the poor are
due to mysterious decrees of Providence which men
may lament but cannot alter. Your Encyclical will
be seen by those who carefully analyze it to be
directed not against socialism, which in moderate form
you favor, but against what we in the United States
call the single tax. Yet we have no solicitude for
the truth save that it shall be brought into discussion,
and we recognize in your Holiness’ Encyclical a most
efficient means of promoting discussion, and of pro-
moting discussion along the lines that we deem of
the greatest importance—the lines of morality and re-
ligion. In this you deserve the gratitude of all who
would follow truth, for it is of the nature of truth
always to prevail over error where discussion goes on.
And the truth for which we stand has now made
such progress in the minds of men that it must be
heard; that it can never be stifled; that it must go on
conquering and to conquer. Far off Australia leads
the van, and has already taken the first steps towards
the single tax. In Great Britain, in the United States,
and in Canada, the question is on the verge of prac-
tical politics and soon will be the burning issue of
the time. Continental Europe cannot long linger be-
hind, Faster than ever the world is moving.
Forty years ago slavery seemed stronger in the
United States than ever before, and the market price
of slaves—both working slaves and breeding slaves—
116 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
was higher than it had ever been before, for the title of
the owner seemed growing more secure. In the
shadow of the Hall where the equal rights of man
had been solemnly proclaimed, the manacled fugitive
was dragged back to bondage, and on what to
American tradition was our Marathon of freedom,
the slave master boasted that he would yet call the
roll of his chattels.
Yet forty years ago, though the party that was to
place Abraham Lincoln in the Presidential chair had
not been formed, and nearly a decade was yet to pass
ere the signal gun was to ring out, slavery, as we may
now see, was doomed.
To-day a wider, deeper, more beneficent revolution
is brooding, not over one country, but over the world.
God’s truth impels it, and forces mightier than He
has ever before given to man urge it on. It is no
more in the power of vested wrongs to stay it than it
is in man’s power to stay the sun. The stars in their
courses fight against Sisera, and in the ferment of to-
day, to him who hath ears to hear, the doom of
industrial slavery is sealed.
Where shall the dignitaries of the Church be in
the struggle that is coming, nay that is already here ?
On the side of justice and liberty, or on the side of
wrong and slavery 7 with the delivered when the tim-
brels shall sound again, or with the chariots and the
horsemen that again shall be engulfed in the sea?
As to the masses, there is little fear where they will
be. Already, among those who hold it with religious
fervor, the single tax counts great numbers of Cath-
olics, many priests, secular and regular, and at least
OPEN LETTER TO POPE LEO XIII. 117
some bishops, while there is no communion or denomi-
nation of the many into which English speaking
Christians are divided where its advocates are not to
be found.
Last Sunday evening in the New York church that
of all churches in the world is most richly endowed, I
saw the cross carried through its aisles by a hundred
choristers, and heard a priest of that English branch
of the Church that three hundred years since was sep-
arated from your obedience, declare to a great congre-
gation that the labor question was at bottom a relig-
ious question; that it could only be settled on the
basis of moral right; that the first and clearest of
rights is the equal right to the use of the physical
basis of all life; and that no human titles could
set aside God’s gift of the land to all men.
And as the Cross moved by, and the choristers sang,
“Raise ye the Christian's war-cry—
The Cross of Christ the Lord l’’
men to whom it was a new thing bowed their heads,
and in hearts long steeled against the Church, as the
willing handmaid of oppression, rose the “God wills
it!” of the grandest and mightiest of crusades.
Servant of the Servants of God! I call you by the
strongest and sweetest of your titles. In your hands
more than in those of any living man lies the power
to say the word and make the sign that shall end
an unnatural divorce, and marry again to religion all
that is pure and high in social aspiration
Wishing for your Holiness the chiefest of all bless-
ings, that you may know the truth and be freed by
118 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
the truth; wishing for you the days and the strength
that may enable you by the great service you may
render to humanity to make your pontificate through
all coming time most glorious; and with the profound
respect due to your personal character and to your ex-
alted office, I am,
Yours sincerely,
FIENRY GEORGE.
NEw York, September 11, 1891.
APPENDIX
fººmsºmºsºma
ENCYCLICAL LETTER
OF
POPE LEO XIII.
ON
THE CONDITION OF LABOR
OFFICIAL TRANSLATION
To our Venerable Brethren, all Patriarchs, Primates,
Archbishops, and Bishops of the Catholic World,
in grace and communion with the Apostolic See,
Pope Leo XIII.
VENERABLE BRETHREN, HEALTH AND APOSTOLIC
BENEDICTION.
1. It is not surprising that the spirit of revolutionary
change, which has so long been predominant in the
nations of the world, should have passed beyond
politics and made its influence felt in the cognate field
of practical economy. The elements of a conflict are
unmistakable : the growth of industry, and the sur-
prising discoveries of science ; the changed relations of
masters and workmen ; the enormous fortunes of indi-
viduals, and the poverty of the masses; the increased
self-reliance and the closer mutual combination of the
working population ; and, finally, a general moral
deterioration. The momentous seriousness of the pre-
sent state of things just now fills every mind with
painful apprehension ; wise men discuss it ; practical
men propose schemes; popular meetings, legislatures,
and sovereign princes, all are occupied with it—and
there is nothing which has a deeper hold on public
attention. ---
2. Therefore, Venerable Brethren, as on former
occasions, when it seemed opportune to refute false
teaching, We have addressed you in the interest of the
Church and of the common weal, and have issued
Letters on Political Power, on Human Liberty, on the
Christian Constitution of the State, and on similar sub-
jects, so now we have thought it useful to speak on the
CONDITION OF LABOR. It is a matter on Whigh We
122 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
have touched once or twice already. But in this Letter
the responsibility of the Apostolic office urges Us to
treat the question expressly and at length, in order
that there may be no mistake as to the principles
which truth and justice dictate for its settlement. The
discussion is not easy, nor is it free from danger. It is
not easy to define the relative rights and the mutual
duties of the wealthy and of the poor, of capital and of
labor. And the danger lies in this, that crafty agi-
tators constantly make use of these disputes to pervert
men’s judgments and to stir up the people to sedition.
3. But all agree, and there can be no question what-
ever, that some remedy must be found, and quickly
found, for the misery and wretchedness which press so
heavily at this moment on the large majority of the
very poor. The ancient workmen’s Guildes were de-
stroyed in the last century, and no other organization
took their place. Public institutions and the laws have
repudiated the ancient religion. Hence by degrees it
has come to pass that Working-Men have been given
over, isolated and defenseless, to the callousness of em-
ployers, and the greed of unrestrained competition.
The evil has been increased by rapacious Usury, which,
although more than once condemned by the Church, is
nevertheless, under a different form but with the same
guilt, still practiced by avaricious and grasping men.
And to this must be added the custom of working by
contract, and the concentration of so many branches
of trade in the hands of a few individuals, so that a
small number of very rich men have been able to lay
upon the masses of the poor a yoke little better than
slavery itself.
4. To remedy these evils the Socialists, working on
the poor man’s envy of the rich, endeavor to destroy
private property, and maintain that individual posses-
sions should become the common property of all, to be
administered by the State or by municipal bodies.
They hold that, by thus transferring property from
private persons to the community, the present evil state
of things will be set to rights, because each citizen will
then have his equal share of whatever there is to enjoy.
But their proposals are so clearly futile for all practi.
ENCYCLICAL LETTER OF POPE LEO XIII. 123
cal purposes, that if they were carried out the working-
man himself would be among the first to suffer. More-
over they are emphatically unjust, because they would
rob the lawful possessor, bring the State into a sphere
that is not its own, and cause complete confusion in
the community.
5. It is surely undeniable that, when a man engages
in remunerative labor, the very reason and motive of
his work is to obtain property, and to hold it as his own
private possession. If one man hires out to another his
strength or his industry, he does this for the purpose
of receiving in return what is necessary for food and
living ; he thereby expressly proposes to acquire a full
and real right, not only to the remuneration, but also
to the disposal of that remuneration as he pleases.
Thus, if he lives sparingly, saves money, and invests
his savings, for greater security, in land, the land in
such a case is only his wages in another form ; and con-
sequently, a working man’s little estate thus purchased
should be as completely at his own disposal as the
wages he receives for his labor. But it is precisely in
this power of disposal that ownership consists, whether
the property be land or movable goods. The Socialists,
therefore, in endeavoring to transfer the possessions of
individuals to the community, strike at the interests of
every wage-earner, for they deprive him of the liberty
of disposing of his wages, and thus of all hope and pos-
sibility of increasing his stock and of bettering his con-
dition in life.
6. What is of still greater importance, however, is
that the remedy they propose is manifestly against jus-
tice. For every man has by nature the right to possess
property as his own. This is one of the chief points of
distinction between man and the animal creation. For
the brute has no power of self-direction, but is gov-
erned by two chief instincts, which keep his powers
alert, move him to use his strength, and determine him
to action without the power of choice. These instincts
are self-preservation and the propagation of the species.
Both can attain their purpose by means of things which
are close at hand ; beyond their surroundings the brute
creation cannot go, for they are moved to action by
124 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
sensibility alone, and by the things which sense per-
ceives. But with man it is different indeed. He pos-
sesses, on the one hand, the full perfection of animal
nature, and therefore he enjoys, at least as much as the
rest of the animal race, the fruition of the things of the
body. But animality, however perfect, is far from
being the whole of humanity, and is indeed humanity’s
humble handmaid, made to serve and obey. It is the
mind, or the reason, which is the chief thing in us who
are human beings ; it is this which makes a human
being human, and distinguishes him essentially and
completely from the brute. And on this account—viz.,
that man alone among animals possesses reason—it must
be within his right to have things not merely for tem-
porary and momentary use, as other living beings have
them, but in stable and permanent possession ; he must
have not only things which perish in the using, but
also those which, though used, remain for use in the
future.
7. This becomes still more clearly evident if we
consider man's nature a little more deeply. For man,
comprehending by the power of his reason things in-
numerable, and joining the future with the present—
being, moreover, the master of his own acts—governs
himself by the foresight of his counsel, under the eter-
nal law and the power of God, Whose Providence gov-
erns all things; wherefore it is in his power to exercise
his choice not only on things which regard his present
welfare, but also on those which will be for his advant-
age in time to come. Hence man not only can possess
the fruits of the earth, but also the earth itself; for of
the products of the earth he can make provision for the
future. Man’s needs do not die out, but recur; satis-
fied to-day, they demand new supplies to-morrow. Na-
ture, therefore, owes to man a storehouse that shall
never fail, the daily supply of his daily wants. And this
he finds only in the inexhaustible fertility of the earth.
8. Nor must we, at this stage, have recourse to the
State. Man is older than the State ; and he holds the
right of providing for the life of his body prior to the
formation of any State. And to say that God has given
the earth to the use and enjoyment of the universal hu-
FNCYCLICAL LETTER OF POPE LEO XIII. 125
man race is not to deny that there can be private prop-
erty. For God has granted the earth to mankind in
general ; not in the sense that all without distinction
can deal with it as they please, but rather that no part
of it has been assigned to any one in particular, and
that the limits of private possession have been left to
be fixed by man’s own industry and the laws of indi-
vidual peoples. Moreover the earth, though divided
among private owners, ceases not thereby to minister
to the needs of all ; for there is no one who does not
live on what the land brings forth. Those who do not
possess the soil, contribute their labor ; so that it may
be truly said that all human subsistence is derived either
from labor on one’s own land, or from some laborious
industry which is paid for either in the produce of the
land itself or in that which is exchanged for what the
land brings forth.
9. Here, again, we have another proof that private
ownership is according to nature's law. For that which
is required for the preservation of life, and for life’s
well being, is produced in great abundance by the earth,
but not until man has brought it into cultivation and
lavished upon it his care and skill. Now, when man
thus spends the industry of his mind and the strengt
of his body in procuring the fruits of nature, by that
act he makes his own that portion of nature’s field
which he cultivates—that portion on which he leaves,
as it were, the impress of his own personality ; and it
cannot but be just that he should possess that portion as
his own, and should have a right to keep it without
molestation.
10. These arguments are so strong and convincing
that it seems surprising that certain obsolete opinions
should now be revived in opposition to what is here laid
down. We are told that it is right for private persons
to have the use of the soil and the fruits of their land,
but that it is unjust for any one to possess as owner
either the land on which he has built or the estate
which he has cultivated. But those who assert this do
not perceive that they are robbing man of what his own
labor has produced. For the soil which is tilled and
cultivated with toil and skill utterly changes its con-
126 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
dition; it was wild before, it is now fruitful ; it was
barren, and now it brings forth in abundance. That
which has thus altered and improved it becomes so
truly part of itself as to be in great measure indistin-
guishable and inseparable from it. Is it just that the
fruit of a man's sweat and labor should be enjoyed by
another? As effects follow their cause, so it is just and
right that the results of labor should belong to him who
has labored.
11. With reason, therefore, the common opinion of
mankind, little affected by the few dissentients who
have maintained the opposite view, has found in the
study of nature, and in the law of Nature herself, the
foundation of the division of property, and has conse-
crated by the practice of all ages the principle of pri-
vate ownership, as being pre-eminently in conformity
with human nature, and as conducing in the most un-
mistakable manner to the peace and tranquility of hu-
man life. The same principle is confirmed and enforced
by the civil laws—laws which, as long as they are just,
derive their binding force from the law of nature. The
authority of the Divine Law adds its sanction, forbid-
ding us in the gravest terms even to covet that which is
another's:–Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife;
mor his house, nor his field, nor his man-servant, nor his
maid-servant, nor his 02, nor his ass, nor anything
awhich is his.”
12. The rights here spoken of, belonging to each in-
dividual man, are seen in a much stronger light if they
are considered in relation to man’s social and do-
mestic obligations.
13. In choosing a state of life, it is indisputable that
all are at full liberty either to follow the counsel of
Jesus Christ as to the virginity, or to enter into the
bonds of marriage. No human law can abolish the
natural and primitive right of marriage, or in any way
limit the chief and principal purpose of marriage,
ordained by God’s authority from the beginning : In-
crease and multiply. Thus we have the Family; the
“society” of a man’s own household ; a society limited
* Deuteronomy v., 21. t Genesis i., 28.
BNCYCLICAL LETTER OF POPE £50 XIIl 197
indeed in numbers, but a true “society,” anterior to
every kind of State or nation, with rights and duties of
its own, totally independent of the commonwealth.
14. That right of property, therefore, which has been
proved to belong naturally to individual persons, must
also belong to a man in his capacity of head of a family;
nay, such a person must possess this right so much the
more clearly in proportion as his position multiplies
his duties. For it is a most sacred law of nature that
a father must provide food and all necessaries for those
whom he has begotten ; and, similarly, nature dictates
that a man’s children, who carry on, as it were, and
continue his own personality, should be provided by
him with all that is needful to enable them honorably
to keep themselves from want and misery in the un-
certainties of this mortal life. Now, in no other way
can a father effect this except by the ownership of
profitable property, which he can transmit to his chil-
dren by inheritance. A family, no less than a State, is,
as We have said, a true society, governed by a power
within itself, that is to say by the father. Wherefore,
provided the limits be not transgressed which are pre-
scribed by the very purposes for which it exists, the
Family has at least equal rights with the State in the
choice and pursuit of those things which are needful
to its preservation and its just liberty.
15. We say, at least equal rights ; for since the
domestic household is anterior both in idea and in fact
to the gathering of men into a commonwealth, the
former must necessarily have rights and duties which
are prior to those of the latter, and which rest more
immediately on nature. If the citizens of a State—that
is to say, the Families—on entering into association and
fellowship, experienced at the hands of the State hin-
drance instead of help, and found their rights attacked
instead of being protected, such association were rather
to be repudiated than sought after.
16. The idea, then, that the civil government should,
at its own discretion, penetrate and pervade the family
and the household, is a great and pernicious mistake.
True, if a family finds itself in great difficulty, utterly
friendless, and without prosnect of help, it is right
128 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
that extreme necessity be met by public aid ; for each
family is a part of the commonwealth. In like man-
ner, if within the walls of the household there occur
grave disturbance of mutual rights, the public power
must interfere to force each party to give the other
what is due ; for this is not to rob citizens of their
rights, but justly and properly to safeguard and
strengthen them. But the rulers of the State must go
no further : nature bids them stop here. Paternal
authority can neither be abolished by the State, nor
absorbed ; for it has the same source as human life
itself. “The child belongs to the father,” and is, as it
were, the continuation of the father’s personality ;
and, to speak with strictness, the child takes its place
in civil society not in its own right, but in its quality
as a member of the family in which it is begotten.
And it is for the very reason that “the child belongs to
the father ” that, as St. Thomas of Aquin says, “be-
fore it attains the use of free-will, it is in the power
and care of its parents.” The Socialists, therefore, in
setting aside the parent and introducing the providence
of the State, act against natural justice, and threaten
the very existence of family life.
17. And such interference is not only unjust, but it
is quite certain to harass and disturb all classes of
citizens and to subject them to odious and intolerable
slavery. It would open the door to envy, to evil speak-
ing, and to quarreling ; the sources of wealth would
themselves run dry, for no one would have any interest
in exerting his talents or his industry; and that ideal
equality of which so much is said would in reality be
the levelling down of all to the same condition of misery
and dishonor.
18. Thus it is clear that the main tenet of Socialism,
the community of goods, must be utterly rejected ; for
it would injure those whom it is intended to benefit, it
would be contrary to the natural rights of mankind, and
it would introduce confusion and disorder into the com-
monwealth. Our first and most fundamental principle,
therefore, when we undertake to alleviate the condition
*St. Thomas, Summa Theologica, 2a 2aº Q. x. Art. 12,
BNCYCLICAL LETTER OF POPE LEO XIII. 129
of the masses, must be the inviolability of private prop-
erty. This laid down, We go on to show where W.
must find the remedy that We seek.
19. We approach the subject with confidence, and in
the exercise of the rights which belong to Us. For no
practical solution of this question will ever be found
without the assistance of Religion and of the Church.
It is We who are the chief guardian of Religion and the
chief dispenser of what belongs to the Church, and We
must not by silence neglect the duty which lies upon
Us. Doubtless this most serious question demands the
attention and the efforts of others besides Ourselves—
of the rulers of States, of employers of labor, of the
wealthy, and of the working population themselves for
whom We plead. But We affirm without hesitation,
that all the striving of men will be vain if they leave
out the Church. It is the Church that proclaims from
the Gospel those teachings by which the conflict can be
put an end to, or at the least made far less bitter ; the
Church uses its efforts not only to enlighten the mind,
but to direct by its precepts the life and conduct of
men ; the Church improves and ameliorates the condi-
tion of the workingman by numerous useful organiza-
tions; does its best to enlist the services of all ranks in
discussing and endeavoring to meet, in the most prac-
tical way, the claims of the working classes; and acts
on the decided view that for these purposes recourse
should be had, in due measure and degree, to the help
of the law and of State authority.
20. Let it be laid down, in the first place, that
humanity must remain as it is. It is impossible to re-
duce human society to a level. The Socialists may do
their utmost, but all striving against nature is vain.
There naturally exist among mankind innumerable
differences of the most important kind ; people differ
in capability, in diligence, in health, and in strength ;
and unequal fortune is a necessary result of inequality
in condition. Such inequality is far from being dis-
advantageous either to individuals or to the com-
munity ; social and public life can only go on by the
help of various kinds of capacity and the playing of
many parts; and each man, as a rule, chooses the part
130 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
which peculiarly suits his case. As regards bodily
labor, even had man never fallen from the state of in-
2.0cence, he would not have been wholly unoccupied ;
but that which would then have been his free choice
and his delight, became afterwards compulsory, and
the painful expiation of his sin. Cursed be the earth in
thy work ; in thy labor thou shalf eat of it all the days
of thy life.” In like manner, the other pains and hard-
ships of life will have no end or cessation on this earth ;
for the consequences of sin are bitter and hard to bear,
and they must be with man as long as life lasts. To
suffer and to endure, therefore, is the lot of humanity;
let men try as they may, no strength and no artifice
will ever succeed in banishing from human life the ills
and troubles which beset it. If any there are who pre-
tend differently—who hold out to a hard-pressed people
freedom from pain and trouble, undisturbed repose,
and constant enjoyment—they cheat the people and
impose upon them, and their lying promises will only
make the evil worse than before. There is nothing
more useful than to look at the world as it really is—
and at the same time to look elsewhere for a remedy to
its troubles.
21. The great mistake that is made in the matter now
under consideration is to possess one’s self of the idea
that class is naturally hostile to class ; that rich and
poor are intended by nature to live at war with one an-
other. So irrational and so false is this view, that the
exact contrary is the truth. Just as the symmetry of
the human body is the result of the disposition of the
members of the body, so in a state it is ordained by
nature that these two classes should exist in harmony
and agreement, and should, as it were, fit into one an-
other, so as to maintain the equilibrium of the body
politic. Each requires the other ; capital cannot do
without labor, nor labor without capital. Mutual
agreement results in pleasantness and good order ; per-
petual conflict necessarily produces confusion and out-
rage. Now, in preventing such strife as this, and in
making it impossible, the efficacy of Christianity is
*Genesis iii., 17.
ENCYCí, ICAL LETTER OF POPE LEO XIII. 131
marvelous and manifold. First of all, there is nothing
more powerful than Religion (of which the Church is
the interpreter and guardian) in drawing rich and poor
together, by reminding each class of its duties to the
other, and especially of the duties of justice. Thus
Religion teaches the laboring man and the workman to
carry out homestly and well all equitable agreements
freely made ; never to injure capital, or to outrage the
person of an employer ; never to employ violence in re-
presenting his own cause, or to engage in riot or disor-
der; and to have nothing to do with men of evil prin-
ciples, who work upon the people with artful promises, .
and raise foolish hopes which usually end in disaster
and in repentance when too late. Religion teaches the
rich man and the employer that their work people are
not their slaves ; that they must respect in every man
his dignity as a man and as a Christian ; that labor is
nothing to be ashamed of, if we listen to right reason and
to Christian philosophy, but is an honorable employ-
ment, enabling a man to sustain his life in an upright
and creditable way ; and that it is shameful and in-
human to treat men like chattels to make money by,
or to look upon them merely as so much muscle or phy-
sical power. Thus, again, Religion teaches that, as
among the workman’s concerns are Religion herself and
things spiritual and mental, the employer is bound to
see that he has time for the duties of piety ; that he be
not exposed to corrupting influences and dangerous oc-
casions ; and that he be not led away to neglect his
home and family or to squander his wages. Then,
again, the employer must never tax his work people be-
yond their strength, nor employ them in work unsuited
to their sex or age. His great and principal obliga-
tion is to give to every one that which is just. Doubt-
less before we can decide whether wages are adequate,
many things have to be considered ; but rich men
and masters should remember this—that to exercise
pressure for the sake of gain upon the indigent and the
destitute, and to make one’s profit out of the need of
another is condemned by all laws, human and divine.
To defraud any one of wages that are his due is a crime
which cries to the avenging anger of Heaven. Behold,
132 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
the hire of the laborers . . . which by fraud hath
been kept back by you, crieth , and the cry of them hath
entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth.* Finally,
the rich must religiously refrain from cutting down the
workman’s earnings, either by force, by fraud, or by
usurious dealing ; and with the more reason because
the poor man is weak and unprotected, and because his
slender means should be sacred in proportion to their
scantiness. -
22. Were these prospects carefully obeyed and fol-
lowed, would not strife die out and cease ?
23. But the Church, with Jesus Christ for its Master
and Guide, aims higher still. It lays down precepts
yet more perfect, and tries to bind class to class in
friendliness and good understanding. The things of
this earth cannot be understood or valued rightly with-
out taking into consideration the life to come, the life
that will last for ever. Exclude the idea of futurity,
and the very notion of what is good and right would
perish ; nay, the whole system of the universe would
become a dark and unfathomable mystery. The great
truth which we learn from Nature herself is also the
grand Christain dogma on which Religion rests as on
its base—that when we have done with this present life
then shall we really begin to live. God has not created
us for the perishable and transitory things of earth,
but for things heavenly and everlasting ; He has given
us this world as a place of exile, and not as our true
country. Money, and the other things which men call
good and desirable—we may have them in abundance,
or we may want them altogether ; as far as eternal hap-
piness is concerned, it is no matter ; the only thing
that is important is to use them aright. Jesus Christ,
when he redeemed us with plentiful redemption, took
not away the pains and sorrows which in such large
proportion make up the texture of our mortal life ; He
transformed them into motives of virtue and occasions
of merit ; and no man can hope for eternal reward un-
less he follow in the blood-stained footprints of his
Saviour. If we suffer with Him, we shall also reign
* St. James V., 4.
ENCYCLICAL LETTER OF POPE LEO XIII. 133
with Him.” His labors and his sufferings, accepted by
His own free-will, have marvelously sweetened all suf-
fering and all labor. And not only by his example,
but by His grace and by the hope of everlasting recom-
pense, He has made pain and grief more easy to endure ;
for that which is at present momentary and light of our
tribulation, worketh for us above measure eacceedingly
an etermal weight of glory.
24. Therefore those whom fortune favors are warned
that freedom from sorrow and abundance of earthly
riches are no guarantee of the beatitude that shall
never end, but rather the contrary ; I that the rich
should tremble at the threatenings of Jesus Christ—
threatenings so strange in the mouth of Our Lord ; Ś
and that a most strict account must be given to the
Supreme Judge for all that we possess. The chiefest
and most excellent rule for the right use of money is
one which the heathen philosophers indicated, but
which the Church has traced out clearly, and has not
only made known to men’s minds, but has impressed
upon their lives. It rests on the principle that it is
one thing to have a right to the possession of money,
and another to have a right to use money as one pleases.
Private ownership, as we have seen, is the natural
right of man ; and to exercise that right, especially as
members of society, is not only lawful, but absolutely
necessary. It is lawful, says St. Thomas of Aquin, for
a man to hold private property ; and it is also necessary
for the carrying on of human life. || But if the question
be asked, How must one’s possessions be used ? the
Church replies without hesitation in the words of the
same holy Doctor : Man should not consider his out-
ward possessions as his own, but as common to all, so as to
share them without difficulty when others are in need.
Whence the Apostle saith, Command the rich of this
world . . . to give with ease, to communicate." True
no one is commanded to distribute to others that which
is required for his own necessities and those of his
household ; nor even to give away what is reasonably
*Timothy ii. 12. t 2 Corinthians iv. 17. f St. Matthew xix. 23, 24,
§ St. Luke vi. 24, 25. | 2a 28° Q. lxvi. Art. 3,
* 2a2ae Q. lxv. Art. 2,
134 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
required to keep up becomingly his condition in life;
for mo one ought to live unbecomingly.” But when
necessity has been supplied, and one's position fairly
considered, it is a duty to give to the indigent out of
that which is over. That which remaineth, give alms.{
It is a duty, not of justice (except in extreme cases),
but of Christian charity—a duty which is not enforced
by human law. But the laws and judgments of men
must give place to the laws and judgments of Christ
the true God, Who in many ways urges on his fol-
lowers the practice of almsgiving—It is more blessed fo
give than to receive , ſ and Who will count a kindness
done or refused to the poor as done or refused to Him-
self—as long as you did it to one of My least brethren,
Ayou did it to Me. § Thus, to sum up what has been
said: Whoever has received from the Divine bounty a
large share of blessings, whether they be external and
corporeal or gifts of the mind, has received them for
the purpose of using them for the perfecting of his
own nature, and, at the same time, that he may em-
ploy them, as the minister of God’s Providence, for the
benefit of others. He that hath a talent, says St.
Gregory the Great, let him see that he hide it not ; he
that hath abundance, let him arouse himself to mercy and
generosity; he that hath art and skill, let him do his best
to share the use and utility thereof with his neighbor. ||
25. As for those who do not possess the gifts of for-
tune, they are taught by the Church that, in God’s sight
poverty is no disgrace, and that there is nothing to be
ashamed of in seeking one’s bread by labor. This is
strengthened by what we see in Christ Himself, Who
whereas He was rich, for our sakes became poor;" and
Who, being the Son of God, and God Himself, chose to
seem and to be considered the son of a carpenter—nay,
did not disdain to spend a great part of His life as a car-
penter Himself. Is not this the carpenter, the Son of
Mary 2 * From the contemplation of this Divine ex-
ample it is easy to understand that the true dignity and
excellence of man lies in his moral qualities, that is, in
* Ibid. Q. xxxii. Art, 6. t St. Luke xi. 41. f Acts xx. 35.
§ St. Matthew xxv. 40. || St. Gregory the Great, Hom. ix. in Evangel. n. 7.
* 2 Corinthians viii. 9, * St. Mark vi. 3,
ENCYCLICAL LETTER OF POPE LEO XIII. 135
virtue ; that virtue is the common inheritance of all,
equally within the reach of high and low, rich and
poor; and that virtue, and virtue alone, wherever
found, will be followed by the rewards of everlasting
happiness. Nay, God Himself seems to incline more to
those who suffer evil; for Jesus Christ calls the poor
blessed; * He lovingly invites those in labor and grief
to come to Him for solace; f and He displays the ten-
derest charity to the lowly and the oppressed. These
reflections cannot fail to keep down the pride of those
who are well off, and to cheer the spirit of the afflicted ;
to incline the former to generosity and the latter to
tranquil resignation. Thus the separation which pride
would make tends to disappear, nor will it be difficult
to make rich and poor join hands in friendly concord.
26. But, if Christian precepts prevail, the two
classes will not only be united in the bonds of friend-
ship but also in those of brotherly love. For they will
understand and feel that all men are the children of
the common Father, that is, of God ; that, all have the
same last end, which is God Himself, Who alone can
make either men or angels absolutely and perfectly
happy; that all and each are redeemed by Jesus Christ
and raised to the dignity of children of God, and are
thus united in brotherly ties both with each other and
with Jesus Christ, the firstborn among many brethern;
that the blessings of nature and the gifts of grace be-
long in common to the whole human race, and that to
all, except to those that are unworthy, is promised the
inheritance of the Kingdom of Heaven. If sons, heirs
also; heirs indeed of God, and co-heirs of Christ. I
27. Such is the scheme of duties and of rights which
is put forth to the world by the Gospel. Would it not
seem that strife must quickly cease were society pene-
trated with ideas like these ?
28. But the Church, not content with pointing out
the remedy, also applies it. For the Church does its
utmost to teach and to train men, and to educate them ;
* St Matthew v. 3: “Blessed are the poor in spirit.”
f Ibid. xi. 28: “Comé to Me all you thal labor and are burdened, and I will
refresh you.”
tRomans viii. 17.
136 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
and by means of its Bishops and Clergy it diffuses its
salutary teachings far and wide. It strives to influence
the mind and heart so that all may willingly yield
themselves to be formed and guided by the command-
ments of God. It is precisely in this fundamental and
principal matter, on which everything depends, that
the Church has a power peculiar to itself. The agencies
which it employs are given it for the very purpose of
reaching the hearts of men, by Jesus Christ Himself,
and derive their efficiency from God. They alone can
touch the innermost heart and conscience, and bring
men to act from a motive of duty, to resist their
passions and appetites, to love God and their fellow-
men with a love that is unique and supreme, and
courageously to break down every barrier which stands
in the way of a virtuous life.
29. On this subject We need only recall for one mo-
ment the examples written down in history. Of these
things there cannot be the shadow of doubt ; for in-
stance, that civil society was renovated in every part b
the teachings of Christianity; that in the strength of
that renewal the human race was lifted up to better
things—nay, that it was brought back from death to
life, and to so excellent a life that nothing more perfect
had been known before, or will come to pass in the ages
that have yet to be. Of this beneficent transformation
Jesus Christ was at once the first cause and the final
purpose ; as from Him all came, so to Him all was to
be referred. For when, by the light of the Gospel mes-
sage, the human race came to know the grand mystery
of the Incarnation of the Word and the redemption of
man, the life of Jesus Christ, God and Man, penetrated
every race and nation, and impregnated them with
His faith, His precepts, and His laws. And if Society
is to be cured now, in no other way can it be cured
but by a return to the Christian life and Christian in-
stitutions. When a society is perishing, the true advice
to give to those who would restore it is, to recall it to
the principles from which it sprung ; for the purpose
and perfection of an association is to aim at and to
attain that for which it was formed ; and its operation
should be put in motion and inspired by the end and
ENCYCLICAL LETTER OF POPE LEO XIII. 137
object which originally gave it its being. So that to
fall away from its primal constitution is disease ; to go
back to it is recovery. And this may be asserted with
the utmost truth both of the State in general and of
that body of its citizens—by far the greater number—
who sustain life by labor.
30. Neither must it be supposed that the solicitude of
the Church is so occupied with the spiritual concerns
of its children as to neglect their interests temporal
and earthly. Its desire is that the poor, for example,
should rise above poverty and wretchedness, and should
better their condition in life; and for this it strives. By
the very fact that it calls men to virtue and forms them
to its practice, it promotes this in no slight degree.
Christian morality, when it is adequately and completely
practiced, conduces of itself to temporal prosperity, for
it merits the blessing of that God Who is the source of
all blessings; it powerfully restrains the lust of posses-
sion and the lust of pleasure—twin plagues, which too
often make a man without self-restraint miserable in the
midst of abundance *; it makes men supply by economy
for the want of means, teaching them to be content
with frugal living, and keeping them out of the reach
of those vices which eat up not merely small incomes,
but large fortunes, and dissipate many a goodly inherit-
al) C6.
31. Moreover, the Church intervenes directly in the
interest of the poor, by setting on foot and keeping up
many things which it sees to be efficacious in the relief
of poverty. Here again it has always succeeded so well
that it has even extorted the praise of its enemies. Such
was the ardor of brotherly love among the earliest
Christians that numbers of those who were better off de-
prived themselves of their possessions in order to re-
lieve their brethren ; whence neither was there any one
needy among themf. To the order of Deacons, insti-
tuted for that very purpose, was committed by the
Apostles the charge of the daily distributions ; and the
Apostle Paul, though burdened with the solicitude of
* “ The root of all evils is cupādāty.”–1 Tim. vi. 10,
f Acts iv. 34,
138 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
all the churches, hesitated not to undertake laborious
journeys in order to carry the alms of the faithful to
the poorer Christians. Tertullian calls these contribu-
tions, given voluntarily by Christians in their assem-
blies, deposits of piety; because, to cite his words, they
were employed in feeding the needy, in burying them,
&n the support of boys and girls destitute of means and
deprived of their parents, in the care of the aged and in
the relief of the shipwrecked.*
32. Thus by degrees came into existence the patri-
mony which the church has guarded with religious care
as the inheritance of the poor. Nay, to spare them the
shame of begging, the common Mother of rich and
poor has exerted herself to gather, together funds for
the support of the needy. The Church has stirred up
everywhere the heroism of charity, and has established
Congregations of Religious and many other useful in-
stitutions for help and mercy, so that there might be
hardly any kind of suffering which was not visited and
relieved. At the present day there are many who, like
the heathen of old, blame and condemn the Church for
this beautiful charity. They would substitute in its
place a system of State-organized relief. But no human
methods will ever supply for the devotion and self-
sacrifice of Christian charity. Charity, as a virtue, be-
ſongs to the Church ; , for it is no virtue, unless it is
drawn from the Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ ; and he
who turns his back on the Church cannot be near to
Christ.
33. It cannot, however, be doubted that to attain the
purpose of which We treat, not only the Church, but
all human means must conspire. All who are con-
cerned in the matter must be of one mind and must
act together. It is in this, as in the Providence which
governs the world ; results do not happen save where
all the causes coöperate.
34. Let us now, therefore, inquire what part the
State should play in the work of remedy and relief.
35. By the State We here understand, not the partic-
ular form of government which prevails in this or that
* Apologia Sécunda, xxxix.
ENCYCLICAL LETTER OF POPE LEO XIII. 139
nation, but the State as rightly understood; that is to
say, any government conformable in its institutions to
right reason and natural law, and to those dictates of
the Divine wisdom which We have expounded in the
Encyclical on the Christian Constitution of the State.
The first duty, therefore, of the rulers of the S ate
should be to make sure that the laws and institutions,
the general character and administration of the com-
monwealth, shall be such as to produce of themselves
public well-being and private prosperity. This is the
proper office of wise statesmanship and the work of the
heads of the State. Now, a State chiefly prospers and
flourishes by morality, by well regulated family life, by
respect for religion and justice, by the moderation and
equal distribution of public burdens, by the progress of
the arts and of trade, by the abundant yield of the
land—by everything which makes the citizens better
and happier. Here, then, it is in the power of a ruler
to benefit every order of the State, and amongst the
rest to promote in the highest degree the interests of
the poor ; and this by virtue of his office, and without
being exposed to any suspicion of undue interference—
for it is the province of the commonwealth to consult
for the common good. And the more that is done for
the working population by the general laws of the
country, the less need will there be to seek for particular
means to relieve them.
36. There is another and a deeper consideration which
must not be lost sight of. To the State the interests of
all are equal, whether high or low. The poor are
members of the national community equally with the
rich ; they are real component parts, living parts,
which make up, through the family, the living body;
and it need hardly be said that they are by far the
majority. It would be irrational to neglect one portion
of the citizens and to favor another ; and therefore the
public administration must duly and solicitously pro-
wide for the welfare and the comfort of the working
people, or else that law of justice will be violated
which ordains that each shall have his due. To cite
the wise words of St. Thomas of Aquin : As the part
and the whole are in a certain sense identical, the part
140 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
may in some sense claim what belongs to the whole.*
Among the many and grave duties of rulers who would
do their best for the people, the first and chief is to act
with strict justice—with that justice which is called in
the Schools distributive—towards each and every class.
37. But although all citizens, without exception, can
and ought to contribute to that common good in which
individuals share so profitably to themselves, yet it is
not to be supposed that all can contribute in the same
way and to the same extent. No matter what changes
may be made in forms of government, there will always
be differences and inequalities of condition in the State:
Society cannot exist or be conceived without them.
Some there must be who dedicate themselves to the
work of the commonwealth, who make the laws, who
administer justice, whose advice and authority govern
the nation in times of peace, and defend it in war.
Such men clearly occupy the foremost place in the
State, and should be held in the foremost estima-
tion, for their work touches most nearly and effect-
ively the general interests of the community. Those
who labor at a trade or calling do not promote the
general welfare in such a fashion as this ; but they
do in the most important way benefit the nation,
though less directly. We have insisted that, since it is
the end of society to make men better, the chief good
that Society can be possessed of is Virtue. Neverthe-
less, in all well constituted States it is a by no means
unimportant matter to provide those bodily and exter-
nal commodities, the use of which is necessary to virtu-
ous action. # And in the provision of material well
being, the labor of the poor—the exercise of their skill
and the employment of their strength in the culture of
the land and the workshops of trade—is most efficacious
and altogether indispensable. Indeed, their coöpera-
tion in this respect is so important that it may be truly
said that it is only by the labor of the workingman
that States grow rich. Justice, therefore, demands
that the interests of the poorer population be carefully
* 2a 2aº Q. lxi. Art 1 ad 2.
f St. Thomas of Aquin. De Regimăne Principium, I. cap. 15,
FNCYCLICA1, f.ETTER OF POPE LEO XIII. 141
watched over by the Administration, so that they who
contribute so largely to the advantage of the commu-
nity may themselves share in the benefits they create—
that being housed, clothed, and enabled to support life,
they may find their existence less hard and more
endurable. It follows that whatever shall appear to be
conducive to the well being of those who work should
receive favorable consideration. Let it not be feared
that solicitude of this kind will injure any interest; on
the contrary, it will be to the advantage of all ; for it
cannot but be good for the commonwealth to secure
from misery those on whom it so largely depends.
38. We have said that the State must not absorb the
individual or the family; both should be allowed free
and untrammelled action as far as is consistent with
the common good and the interest of others. Never-
theless, rulers should anxiously safeguard the com-
munity and all its parts; the community, because the
conservation of the community is so emphatically the
business of the supreme power that the safety of the
commonwealth is not only the first law, but it is a
Government’s whole reason of existence; and the parts,
because both philosophy and the gospel agree in laying
down that the object of the administration of the State
should be, not the advantage of the ruler but the bene-
fit of those over whom he rules. The gift of authority
is from God, and is, as it were, a participation of the
highest of all sovereignties; and it should be exercised
as the power of God is exercised—with a fatherly
solicitude which not only guides the whole, but reaches
to details as well.
39. Whenever the general interest of any particular
class suffers, or is threatened with, evils which can in
no other way be met, the public authority must step in
to meet them. Now, among the interests of the pub-
lic, as of private individuals, are these : that peace and
good order should be maintained ; that family life
should be carried on in accordance with God’s laws and
those of nature ; that religion should be reverenced and
obeyed ; that a high standard of morality should prevail
in public and private life; that sanctity of justice should
be respected, and that no one should injure another
142 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
with impunity; that the members of the commonwealth
should grow up to man’s estate strong and robust, and
capable, if need be, of guarding and defending their
country. If by a strike, or other combination of work-
men, there should be imminent danger of disturbance
to the public peace; or if circumstances were such
that among the laboring population the ties of family
life were relaxed; if Religion were found to suffer
through the workmen not having time and opportunity
to practice it; if in workshops and factories there were
danger to morals through the mixing of the sexes or
from any occasion of evil; or if employers laid burdens
upon the workmen which were unjust, or degraded
them with conditions that were repugnant to their
dignity as human beings; finally, if health were en-
dangered by excessive labor, or by work unsuited to sex
or age—in these cases, there can be no question that,
within certain limits, it would be right to call in the
help and authority of the law. The limits must be de-
termined by the nature of the occasion which calls for
the law’s interference—the principle being this, that
the law must not undertake more, or go further, than
is required for the remedy of the evil or the removal of
the danger.
40. Rights must be religiously respected wherever
they are found ; and it is the duty of the public au-
thority to prevent and punish injury, and to protect
each one in the possession of his own. Still, when
there is question of protecting the rights of individuals,
the poor and helpless have a claim to special consider-
ation. The richer population have many ways of pro-
tecting themselves, and stand less in need of help from
the State ; those who are badly off have no resources of
their own to fall back upon, and must chiefly rely upon
the assistance of the State. And it is for this reason
that wage-earners, who are undoubtedly among the
weak and necessitous, should be specially cared for and
protected by the commonwealth.
41. Here, however, it will be advisable to advert ex-
pressly to one or two of the more important details. It
must be borne in mind that the chief thing to be se-
cured is the safeguarding, by legal enactment and
15 NCYCLICAL LETTER OF POPE LEO XIII. 143
policy, of private property. Most of all is it essential
in these times of covetous greed, to keep the multitude
within the line of duty ; for if all may justly strive to
better their condition, yet neither justice nor the com-
mon good allows any one to seize that which belongs
to another, or, under the pretext of futile and ridicu-
lous equality, to lay hands on other people’s fortunes.
It is most true that by far the larger part of the people
who work prefer to improve themselves by honest labor
rather than by doing wrong to others. But there are
not a few who are imbued with bad principles and are
anxious for revolutionary change, and whose great pur-
pose it is to stir up tumult and bring about a policy of
violence. The authority of the State should intervene
to put restraint upon these disturbers, to save the
workmen from their seditious arts, and to protect law-
ful owners from spoliation.
42. When work people have recourse to a strike, it isfre-
quently because the hours of labor are too long, or the
work too hard, or because they consider their wages insuf-
ficient. The grave inconvenience of this not uncommon
occurrence should be obviated by public remedial meas-
ures; for such paralysis of labor not only affects the mas-
ters and their work people, but is extremely injurious to
trade, and to the general interests of the public ; more-
over, on such occasions, violence and disorder are gen-
erally not far off, and thus it frequently happens that
the public peace is threatened. The laws should be
beforehand, and prevent these troubles from arising ;
they should lend their influence and authority to the
removal in good time of the causes which lead to con-
flicts between masters and those whom they employ.
43. But if the owners of property must be made
secure, the Workman, too, has property and possessions
in which he must be protected ; and, first of all, there
are his spiritual and mental interests. Life on earth,
however good and desirable in itself, is not the final
purpose for which man is created ; it is only the way
and the means to that attainment of truth, and that
practice of goodness in which the full life of the soul
consists. It is the soul which is made after the image
and likeness of God ; it is in the soul that Sovereignty
144 THE CONDITION OF f, ABOR.
resides, in virtue of which man is commanded to rule
the creatures below him, and to use all the earth and
the ocean for his profit and advantage. Fill the earth
and subdue it, and rule over the fishes of the sea, and
the fowls of the air, and all living creatures which move
wpon the earth.* In this respect all men are equal ;
there is no difference between rich and poor, master
and servant, ruler and ruled, for the same is lord over
all. # No man may outrage with impunity that human
dignity which God Himself treats with reverence, nor
stand in the way of that higher life which is the prep-
aration for the eternal life of Heaven. Nay, more ; a
man has here no power over himself. To consent to
any treatment which is calculated to defeat the end and
purpose of his being is beyond his right ; he cannot
give up his soul to servitude ; for it is not man’s own
rights which are here in question, but the rights of
God, most sacred and inviolable.
44. From this follows the obligation of the cessation
of work and labor on Sundays and certain festivals.
This rest from labor is not to be understood as mere
idleness; much less must it be an occasion of spending
money and of vicious excess, as many would desire it
to be ; but it should be rest from labor consecrated by
religion. Repose united with religious observance dis-
poses man to forget for a while the business of this
daily life, and to turn his thoughts to heavenly things
and to the worship which he so strictly owes to the
Eternal Deity. It is this, above all, which is the reason
and motive of the Sunday rest ; a rest sanctioned by
God’s great law of the ancient covenant, Remember thou
ſceep holy the Sabbath Day, and taught to the world by
His own mysterious “rest * after the creation of man ;
He rested on the seventh day from all His work which
He had done. §
45. If we turn now to things exterior and corporeal,
the first concern of all is to save the poor workers from
the cruelty of grasping speculators, who use human
beings as mere instruments for making money. It is
neither justice nor humanity so to grind men down
* Genesis i. 28. f Romans x. 12. f Exod. xx. 8. § Genesis ii. 2.
ENCYCLICAL LETTER OF #2OPE LEO XIII. 145
with excessive labor as to stupefy their minds and
wear out their bodies. Man’s powers, like his general
nature, are limited, and beyond these limits he cannot
go. His strength is developed and increased by use and
exercise, but only on condition of due intermission and
proper rest. Daily labor, therefore, must be so regu-
lated that it may not be protracted during longer hours
than strength admits. How many and how long the
intervals of rest should be, will depend on the nature
of the work, on circumstances of time and place, and
on the health and strength of the workman. Those
who labor in mines and quarries, and in work within
the bowels of the earth, should have shorter hours in
proportion as their labor is more severe and more try-
ing to health. Then, again, the season of the year
must be taken into account ; for not unfrequently a
kind of labor is easy at one time which at another is in-
tolerable or very difficult. Finally, work which is
suitable for a strong man cannot reasonably be re-
quired from a woman or a child. And, in regard to chil-
dren, great care should be taken not to place them in
workshops and factories until their bodies and minds
are sufficiently mature. For just as rough weather de-
stroys the buds of Spring, so too early an experience of
life’s hard work blights the young promise of a child’s
powers, and makes any real education impossible.
Women, again, are not suited to certain trades; for a
woman is by nature fitted for home work, and, it is that
which is best adapted at once to preserve her modesty
and to promote the good bringing up of children and
the well being of the family. As a general principle it
may be laid down that a workman ought to have leis-
ure and rest in proportion to the wear and tear of his
strength ; for the waste of strength must be repaired
by the cessation of work. &
46. In all agreements between masters and work
people there is always the condition, expressed or un-
derstood, that there be allowed proper rest for soul and
body. To agree in any other sense would be against
what is right and just ; for it can never be right or just
to require on the one side, or to promise on the other,
y
146 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
the giving up of those duties which a man owes to his
God and to himself. -
47. We now approach a subject of very great import-
ance, and one on which, if extremes are to be avoided,
right ideas are absolutely necessary. Wages, we are
told, are fixed by free consent ; and, therefore, the em-
ployer, when he pays what was agreed upon, has done
his part and is not called upon for anything further.
The only way, it is said, in which injustice could hap-
pen would be if the master refused to pay the whole of
the wages, or the workman would not complete the
work undertaken ; when this happens the State should
intervene, to see that each obtains his own—but not
under any other circumstances.
48. This mode of reasoning is by no means convincing
to a fair-minded man, for there are important considera-
tions which it leaves out of view altogether. To labor
is to exert one’s self for the sake of procuring what is
necessary for the purposes of life, and most of all for
self-preservation. In the sweat of thy brow thou shall
eat bread.* Therefore a man’s labor has two notes or
characters. First of all, it is personal, for the exertion
of individual power belongs to the individual who puts
it forth, employing this power for that personal profit
for which it was given. Secondly, man’s labor is neces-
sary, for without the results of labor a man cannot live;
and self-conservation is a law of Nature, which it is
wrong to disobey. Now, if we were to consider labor
merely so far as it is personal, doubtless it would be
within the workman’s right to accept any rate of wages
whatever ; for in the same way as he is free to work or
. not, so he is free to accept a small remuneration or even
none at all. But this is a mere abstract supposition ;
the labor of the workingman is not only his personal
attribute, but it is necessary; and this makes all the
difference. The preservation of life is the bounden
duty of each and all, and to fail therein is a crime. It
follows that each one has a right to procure what is re-
quired in order to live, and the poor can procure it in
no other way than by work and wages.
—-y
* Genesis iii. 19.
ENOYoi.10AL LETTER OF POPE LEO XIII. 147
49. Let it be granted then that, as a rule, Work-
man and employer should make free agreements, and
in particular should freely agree as to wages ; never-
theless, there is a dictate of nature more imperious and
more ancient than any bargain between man and man,
that the remuneration must be enough to support the
wage-earner in reasonable and frugal comfort. If
through necessity or fear of a worse evil the workman
accepts harder conditions because an employer or a
contractor will give him no better, he is the victim of
force and injustice. In these and similar questions,
however—such as, for example, the hours of labor in
different trades, the sanitary precautions to be ob-
served in factories and workshops, etc.—in order to
supersede undue interference on the part of the State,
especially as circumstances, times, and localities differ
so widely, it is advisable that recourse be had to Soci-
eties or Boards such as We shall mention presently, or
to some other method of safeguarding the interests of
wage earners; the State to be asked for approval and
protection.
50. If a workman's wages be sufficient to enable him
to maintain himself, his wife, and his children in rea-
sonable comfort, he will not find it difficult, if he is a
sensible man, to study economy; and he will not fail,
by cutting down expenses, to put by a little prop-
erty; nature and reason would urge him to this. We
have seen that this great Labor question cannot be
solved except by assuming as a principle that private
ownership must be held sacred and inviolable. The
law, therefore, should favor ownership, and its policy
should be to induce as many of the people as possible
to become owners.
51. Many excellent results will follow from this; and
first of all, property will certainly become more equit-
ably divided. For the effect of civil change and re-
volution has been to divide society into two widely dif-
fering castes. On the one side, there is the party
which holds the power because it holds the wealth ;
which has in its grasp all labor and all trade, which
manipulates for its own benefit and its own purposes
all the sources of supply, and which is powerfully rep-
148 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
resented in the councils of the State itself. On the
other side there is the needy and powerless multitude,
sore and suffering, and always ready for disturbance.
If working people can be encouraged to look forward
to obtaining a share in the land, the result will be that
the gulf between vast wealth and deep poverty will be
bridged over, and the two orders will be brought
nearer together. Another consequence will be the
greater abundance of the fruits of the earth. Men al-
ways work harder and more readily when they work on
that which is their own; nay, they learn to love the very
soil which yields in response to the labor of their hands,
not only food to eat, but an abundance of good things
for themselves and those that are dear to them. It is
evident how such a spirit of willing labor would add to
the produce of the earth and to the wealth of the com-
munity. And a third advantage would arise from this:
men would cling to the country in which they were
born; for no one would exchange his country for a
foreign land if his own afforded him the means of liv-
ing a tolerable and happy life. These three important
benefits, however, can only be expected on the condi-
tion that a man’s means be not drained and exhausted
by excessive taxation. The right to possess private
property is from nature, not from man; and the State
has only the right to regulate its use in the interests of
the public good, but by no means to abolish it alto-
gether. The State is therefore unjust and cruel if, in
the name of taxation, it deprives the private owner of
more than is just.
52. In the last place—employers and workmen may
themselves effect much in the matter of which We
treat, by means of those institutions and organizations
which afford opportune assistance to those in need, and
which draw the two orders more closely together.
Among these may be enumerated : Societies for mutual
help ; various foundations established by private per-
sons for providing for the workman, and for his widow
or his orphans, in sudden calamity, in sickness, and in
the event of death ; and what are called “patronages”
or institutions for the care of boys and girls, for young
people and also for those of more mature age.
ENCYCLICAL LETTER OF POPE LEO XIII. 149
53. The most important of all are Workmen’s Asso-
ciations; fol these virtually include all the rest. His-
tory attests what excellent results were effected by the
Artificers’ Guilds of a former day. They were the
means not only of many advantages to the workmen,
but in no small degree of the advancement of art, as
numerous monuments remain to prove. Such associa-
tions should be adapted to the requirements of the
age in which we live—an age of greater instruction, of
different customs, and of more numerous requirements
in daily life. It is gratifying to know that there are
actually in existence not a few Societies of this nature,
consisting either of workmen alone or of workmen and
employers together ; but it were greatly to be desired
that they should multiply and become more effective.
We have spoken of them more than once ; but it will be
well to explain here how much they are needed, to
show that they exist by their own right, and to enter
into their organization and their work.
54. The experience of his own weakness urges man to
call in help from without. We read in the pages of Holy
Writ: It is better that two should be together than one ;
for they have the advantage of their society. If one fall
he shall be supported by the other. Woe to him that is
alone, for when he falleth he hath none to lift him up.”
And further : A brother that is helped by his brother is
like a strong city. # It is this natural impulse which
unites men in civil society; and it is this also which makes
them band themselves together in associations of citizen
with citizen ; associations which, it is true, cannot be
called societies in the complete sense of the word, but
which are societies nevertheless.
55. These lesser societies and the society which consti-
tutes the State differ in many things, because their im-
mediate purpose and end is different. Civil society ex-
ists for the common good, and therefore is concerned
with the interests of all in general, and with individual
interests in their due place and proportion. Hence it
is called public society, because by its means, as St.
Thomag of Aquin says, Men communicate with one an-
r −-
* Ecclesiastes iv. 9, 10. f Proverbs xviii, 19,
150 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
other in the setting up of a commonwealth.* But the
societies which are formed in the bosom of the State
are called private, and justly so, because their immediate
purpose is the private advantage of the associates. Wow
a private socie/y, says St. Thomas again, is one which is
formed for the purpose of carrying out private business ;
as when two or three enter into a partnership with the
view of trading in conjunction. Particular societies,
then, although they exist within the State, and are
each a part of the State, nevertheless cannot be pro-
hibited by the State absolutely and as such. For to
enter into “society' of this kind is the natural right of
man; and the State must protect natural rights, not de-
stroy them ; and if it forbids its citizens to form asso-
ciations, it contradicts the very principle of its own ex-
istence ; for both they and it exist in virtue of the same
principle, viz., the natural propensity of man to live in
society.
56. There are times, no doubt, when it is right that the
law should interfere to prevent association; as when men
join together for purposes which are evidently bad, un-
just, or dangerous to the State. In such cases the pub-
lic authority may justly forbid the formation of asso-
ciations, and may dissolve them when they already ex-
ist. But every precaution should be taken not to
violate the rights of individuals and not to make un-
reasonable regulations under the pretense of public
benefit. For laws only bind when they are in accord-
ance with right reason, and therefore with the eternal
law of God.[
57. And here we are reminded of the Confraternities,
Societies, and Religious Orders, which have arisen by the
Church’s authority and the piety of the Christian people.
The annals of every nation down to our own times testify
to what they have done for the human race. It is indis-
putable, on grounds of reason alone, that such associa-
tions, being perfectly blameless in their objects, have the
* Contra impugnantes Dei cultum et religionem, Cap. II. + Ibid].
fHuman law is law only in virtue of its accordance with right reason: and
thus it is manifest that it flown from the etermal law, And in so far as at deviates
from right º'eason it is called an unjust law; in such case it is not law at all,
but rather a species of violence.—St. Thomas of Aquin, Summa Theologicq, la
* Q. &ciii, Art. iii,
ENCYCLICAL LETTER OF POPE LEO XIII. 151
sanction of the law of nature. On their religious side
they rightly claim to be responsible to the Church alone.
The administrators of the State, therefore, have no
rights over them, nor can they claim any share in their
management ; on the contrary, it is the State's duty to
respect and cherish them, and, if necessary, to defend
them from attack. It is notorious that a very different
course has been followed, more especially in our own
times. In many places the State has laid violent hands
on these communities, and committed manifold injustice
against them ; it has placed them under the civil law,
taken away their rights as corporate bodies, and robbed
them of their property. In such property the Church
had her rights, each member of the body had his or
her rights, and there were also the rights of those
who had founded or endowed them for a definite pur-
pose, and of those for whose benefit and assistance they
existed. Wherefore We cannot refrain from complain-
ing of such spoliation as unjust and fraught with evil
results; and with the more reason because, at the very
time when the law proclaims that association is free to
all, We see that Catholic societies, however peaceable
and useful, are hindered in every way, whilst the utmost
freedom is given to men whose objects are at once hurt-
ful to Religion and dangerous to the State.
58. Associations of every kind, and especially those
of workingmen, are now far more common than for-
merly. In regard to many of these there is no need at
present to inquire whence they spring, what are their
objects, or what means they use. But there is a good
deal of evidence which goes to prove that many of these
societies are in the hands of invisible leaders, and are
managed on principles far from compatible with Chris-
tianity and the public well being ; and that they do
their best to get into their hands the whole field of
labor and to force workmen either to join them or to
starve. Under these circumstances Christian workmen
must do one of two things: either join Associations in
which their religion will be exposed to peril, or form
associations among themselves—unite their forces and
courageously shake off the yoke of an unjust and in-
tolerable oppression, No one who does not wish to
152 'T & C CONDITION OF LABOR.
expose man’s chief good to extreme danger will hesitate
to say that the second alternative must by all means be
adopted.
59. Those Catholics are worthy of all praise—and there
are not a few—who, understanding what the times re-
quire, have, by various enterprises and experiments,
endeavored to better the condition of the working
people without any sacrifice of principle. They have
taken up the cause of the workingman, and have striven
to make both families and individuals better off ; to
infuse the spirit of justice into the mutual relations of
employer and employed ; to keep before the eyes of
both classes the precepts of duty and the laws of the
Gospel—that Gospel which, by inculcating self-re-
straint, keeps men within the bounds of moderation, and
tends to establish harmony among the divergent in-
terests and various classes which compose the State. It
is with such ends in view that We see men of eminence
meeting together for discussion, for the promotion of
united action, and for practical work. Others, again,
strive to unite working people of various kinds into
associations, help them with their advice and their
means, and enable them to obtain honest and profitable
work. The Bishops, on their part, bestow their ready
good will and support ; and with their approval and
guidance many members of the clergy, both secular and
regular, labor assiduously on behalf of the spiritual and
mental interests of the members of Associations. And
there are not wanting Catholics possessed of affluence
who have, as it were, cast in their lot with the wage-
earners, and who have spent large sums in founding
and widely spreading Benefit and Insurance Societies;
by means of which the workingman may without diffi-
culty acquire by his labor not only many present ad-
vantages, but also the certainty of honorable support
in time to come. How much this multiplied and earn-
est activity has benefited the community at large is
too well known to require Us to dwell upon it. We
find in it the grounds of the most cheering hape for
the future ; provided that the Associations We have
described continue to grow and spread, and are well
and wisely administered, Iſet the State watch over
ENCYCLICAL LETTER OF POPE LEO XIII. 153
these Societies of citizens united together in the exer-
cise of their right ; but let it not thrust itself into their
peculiar concerns and their organization ; for things
move and live by the soul within them, and they may
be killed by the grasp of a hand from without.
60. In order that an Association may be carried on
with unity of purpose and harmony of action, its or-
ganization and government must be firm and wise.
All such Societies, being free to exist, have the further
right to adopt such rules and organization as may best
conduce to the attainment of their objects. We do not
deem it possible to enter into definite details on the
subject of organization : this must depend on national
character, on practice and experience, on the nature
and scope of the work to be done, on the magnitude of
the various trades and employments, and on other cir-
cumstances of fact and of time—all of which must be
carefully weighed.
61. Speaking summarily, we may lay it down as a
general and perpetual law, that Workmen’s Associa-
tions should be so organized and governed as to furnish
the best and most suitable means for attaining what is
aimed at, that is to say, for helping each individual
member to better his condition to the utmost in body,
mind, and property. It is clear that they must pay
special and principal attention to piety and morality,
and that their internal discipline must be directed pre-
cisely by these considerations; otherwise they entirely
lose their special character, and come to be very little
better than those Societies which take no account of
Religion at all. What advantage can it be to a Work-
man to obtain by means of a Society all that he re-
quires, and to endanger his soul for want of spiritual
food 2 What doth it profit a man if he gain the whole
world and suffer the loss of his own soul ?” This, as
Our Lord teaches, is the note or character that dis-
tinguishes the Christian from the heathen. After all
these things do the heathens seek. . . . Seek ye first
the Kingdom of God and His justice, and all these
things shall be added unto you. | Let our associations,
*-- ~-- - --N
* St, Matthew xvi. 26, f St. Matthew yi, 32, 88,
154 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
then, look first and before all to God ; let religious in-
struction have therein a foremost place, each one being
carefully taught what is his duty to God, what to be-
lieve, what to hope for, and how to work out his salva-
tion ; and let all be warned and fortified with especial
solicitude against wrong opinions and false teaching.
Let the workingman be urged and led to the worship
of God, to the earnest practice of religion, and, among
other things, to the sanctification of Sundays and fes-
tivals. Let him learn to reverence and love Holy
Church, the common Mother of us all ; and so to obey
the precepts and to frequent the Sacraments of the
Church, those Sacraments being the means ordained by
God for obtaining forgiveness of sin and for leading a
holy life.
62. The foundations of the organization being laid
in Religion, we next go on to determine the relations of
the members one to another, in order that they may
live together in concord and go on prosperously and
successfully. The offices and charges of the Society
should be distributed for the good of the Society itself,
and in such manner that difference in degree or position
should not interfere with unanimity and goodwill.
Office bearers should be appointed with prudence and
discretion, and each one’s charge should be carefully
marked out ; thus no member will suffer wrong. Let
the common funds be administered with the strictest
honesty, in such way that a member receive assistance
in proportion to his necessities. The rights and duties
of employers should be the subject of careful consider-
ation as compared with the rights and duties of the em-
ployed. If it should happen that either a master or a
workman deemed himself injured, nothing would be
more desirable than that there should be a committee
composed of honest and capable men of the Association
itself, whose duty it should be, by the laws of the Asso-
ciation, to decide the dispute. Among the purposes
of a Society should be to try to arrange for a continuous
supply of work at all times and seasons; and to create
a fund from which the members may be helped in their
necessities, not only in cases of accident, but also in
Bickness, old age, and misfortune,
ENCYCLICAL LETTER OF POPE LEO XIII. 155
63. Such rules and regulations, if obeyed willingly
by all, will sufficiently insure the well-being of poor
people; whilst such mutual Associations among Cath-
olics are certain to be productive, in no small degree,
of prosperity to the State. It is not rash to conjecture
the future from the past. Age gives way to age, but
the events of one century are wonderfully like those of
another ; for they are directed by the Providence of
God, who overrules the course of history in accordance
with His purposes in creating the race of man. We
are told that it was cast as a reproach on the Christians
of the early ages of the Church, that the greater num-
ber of them had to live by begging or by labor. Yet,
destitute as they were of wealth and influence, they
ended by winning over to their side the favor of the
rich and the good will of the powerful. They showed
themselves industrious, laborious, and peaceful, men of
justice, and, above all, men of brotherly love. In the
presence of such a life and such an example prejudice
disappeared, the tongue of malevolence was silenced,
and the lying traditions of ancient superstition yielded
little by little to Christian truth. :
64. At this moment the condition of the working
population is the question of the hour ; and nothin
can be of higher interest to all classes of the State than
that it should be rightly and reasonably decided. But
it will be easy for Christian workingmen to decide it
right if they form Associations, choose wise guides, and
follow the same path which with so much advantage to
themselves and the commonwealth was trod by their
fathers before them. Prejudice, it is true, is mighty,
and so is the love of money; but if the sense of what
is just and right be not destroyed by depravity of heart,
their follow citizens are sure to be won over to a kindly
feeling towards men whom they see to be so industrious
and so modest, who so unmistakably prefer honesty to
lucre, and the sacredness of duty to all other considera-
tions.
65. And another great advantage would result from
the state of things We are describing : there would be
so much more hope and possibility of recalling to a
sense of their duty those workingmen who have either
156 THE CONDITION OF LABOR.
given up their faith altogether, or whose lives are at
variance with its precepts. These men, in most cases,
feel that they have been fooled by empty promises and
deceived by false appearances. They cannot but per-
ceive that their grasping employers too often treat them
with the greatest in humanity and hardly care for them
beyond the profit their labor brings; and if they belong
to an Association, it is probably one in which there ex-
ists, in place of charity and love, that intestine strife
which always accompanies unresigned and irreligious
poverty. Broken in spirit and worn down in body,
how many of them would gladly free themselves from
this galling slavery But human respect, or the dread
of starvation, makes them afraid to take the step. To
such as these Catholic Associations are of incalculable
service, helping them out of their difficulties, inviting
them to companionship, and receiving the repentant to
a shelter in which they may securely trust.
66. We have now laid before you, Venerable Breth-
ren, who are the persons and what are the means, by
which this most difficult question must be solved.
Every one must put his hand to the work which falls
to his share, and that at once and immediately, lest
the evil which is already so great may by delay become
absolutely beyond remedy. Those who rule the State
must use the law and the institutions of the country ;
masters and rich men must remember their duty ; the
poor whose interests are at stake, must make every
lawful and proper effort ; and since Religion alone, as
We said at the beginning, can destroy the evil at its
root, all men must be persuaded that the primary thing
needful is to return to real Christianity, in the absence
of which all the plans and devices of the wisest will be
of little avail.
67. As far as regards the Church, its assistance will
never be wanting, be the time or the occasion what it
may ; and it will intervene with the greater effect in
proportion as its liberty of action is the more unfet-
tered : let this be carefully noted by those whose office
it is to provide for the public welfare. Every minister
of holy Religion must throw into the conflict all the
energy of his mind and all the strength of his endu-
ENCYCLICAL LETTER OF POPE LEO XIII. 157
rance ; with your authority Venerable Brethren, and
by your example, they must never cease to urge upon
all men of every class, upon the high as well as the
lowly, the Gospel doctrines of Christian life ; by every
means in their power they must strive for the good of
the people ; and above all they must earnestly cherish
in themselves, and try to arouse in others, Charity, the
mistress and queen of virtues. For the happy results
we all long for must be chiefly brought about by the
plenteous outpouring of Charity ; of that true Christ-
ian Charity which is the fulfilling of the whole Gospel
law, which is always ready to sacrifice itself for others’
sake, and which is man’s surest antidote against worldly
pride and immoderate love of self ; that Charity
whose office is described and whose Godlike features
are drawn by the Apostle St. Paul in these words :
Charity is patient, is kind . . . seeketh m0t her
own . . . . suffereth all things . . . endureth
all things.” • *
68. On each one of you, Venerable Brethren, and on
your Clergy and people, as an earnest of God’s mercy
and a mark of our affection, We lovingly in the Lord
bestow the Apostolic Benediction.
Given at St. Peter's, in Rome, the fifteenth day of
May, 1891, the fourteenth year of Our Pontificate.
LEO XIII., POPE.
* I Corinthians xiii. 4-7.
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PROPERTY IN LAND. A Controversy with the
Duke of Argyll.
Paper, 20 cents.
THE CONDITION OF LABOR. An Open Letter
to Pope Leo XIII.
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A PERPLEXED
PHILOSOPHER
BEING
A.W. EXAMINATION OF /l/R. HERBERT SPEWCER'S VA RIO US UTTER-
ANCES ON THE LAND QUESTION, WITH SOME INCIDEWTAL
REFERENCE 7"O HIS SPAWTHE TWC PHILOSOPHP
BY
HENRY GEORGE
Just for a handful of silver he left us,
Just for a ribbon to stick in his coat–
Found the one gift of which fortune bereft us,
Lost all the others she lets us devote.
:k :k :k Sk :k :k :k :k :: :k
Blot out his name, then, record one lost soul more,
One task more declined, one more footpath untrod,
One more triumph for devils, and sorrow for angels,
One wrong more to man, one more insult to God I
- Robert Browning.
NEW YORK
CHARLES L. WEBSTER & COMPANY
1892
Copyright, 1892,
By HENRY GEORGE.
(All rights reserved.)
CONTENTS.
PAGE
INTRODUCTION.
The reason for this examination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
PART I – IDECLARATION,
Chapter I — “Social Statics " — The right to land . . . . . . . . . 15
II — The incongruous passage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
III — “Social Statics " — The right of property . . . . . . . 32
IV — Mr. Spencer’s confusion as to rights. . . . . . . . . . 43
V — Mr. Spencer’s confusion as to value . . . . . . . . . . 51
VI – From “Social Statics '' to “Political Institutions '' . . . . 62
PART II – REPUIDIATION.
Chapter I — Letter to the St. James’s Gazette. . . . . . . . . . . 73
II – “The Man versus the State ’’ . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
III — Letter to the Times . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
IV — This apology examined . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
W – Second letter to the Times . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
VI — More letters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
I’ART III – RECANTATION.
Chapter I — The fate of “Social Statics” . . . . . . . . . . . 131
II — The place of “Justice ’’ in the synthetic philosophy . . . . 135
III — The synthetic philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . , 138
IV — The idea of justice in the synthetic philosophy . . . . . 165
V — Mr. Spencer’s task * e º 'º a tº * * * . . . 173
VI – “The rights to the uses of natural media '' . . . . . . . 179
VII — “Justice ’’ on the right to light and air . . . . . . . . 192
VIII — “Justice ’’ on the right to land . . . . . . . . . . . . 202
IX – “Justice ’” — The right of property . . . . . . . . . . 226
X — The right of property and the right of taxation . . . . . 243
XI — Compensation . . . . * * * * * * * . . 255
XII — “Justice ’” — The land question . . . . . . . . . . . 284
XIII — Principal Brown . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 300
CONCLUSION.
The moral of this examination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 313
iii
INTRODUCTION.
THE REASON FOR THIS EXAMINATION.
No consecrated absurdity would have stood its ground in this world if the
man had not silenced the objection of the child. — Michelet.
INTRODUCTION.
THE REASON FOR THIS EXAMINATION,
ALTHOUGH he stands for much that is yet in dis-
pute, there can be no question that at the present
time –1892— Herbert Spencer, of all his contempo-
raries, holds the foremost place in the intellectual
world, and through a wider circle than any man
now living, and perhaps than any man of our century,
is regarded as a profound, original and authoritative
thinker — by many indeed as the greatest thinker the
world has ever yet seen.
So large is the field over which Mr. Spencer's writ-
ings have ranged, so many are the special branches
of knowledge he has laid under contribution, so diffi-
cult to the ordinary mind are the abstractions in
which he has dealt and the terminology in which
they are couched, that this great reputation is with
the large majority of the intelligent men who accept
it more a matter of faith than of reason. But this
rather adds to than detracts from the popular esti-
mate; for what to us is vague often seems on that
account the greater, and what we have no means of
measuring, all the more profound. Nor does Mr.
Spencer's standing as one of the greatest, to many the
very greatest, of philosophers, lack substantial basis
in the opinions of those deemed competent to gauge
intellectual power.
4 INTRODUCTION.
John Stuart Mill styled him “one of the acutest
metaphysicians of recent times, one of the most vig-
orous as well as the boldest thinker that English
speculation has yet produced.” Professor Ray Lan-
caster spoke of him as “an acute observer and ex-
perimentalist versed in physics and chemistry, but
above all, thoroughly instructed in scientific methods.”
Richard A. Proctor characterized him as the “clear-
est of thinkers.” G. H. Lewes said “it is question-
able whether any thinker of finer calibre has appeared
in our century,” and that “he alone of all British
thinkers has organized a philosophy.” Professor
David Masson deemed him “the one of all our think-
ers who has founded for himself the largest new
scheme of a systematic philosophy.” Dr. McCosh,
who fundamentally differed from him, said “his bold
generalizations are always instructive, and some of
them may in the end be established as the profound-
est laws of the knowable universe.” St. George
Mivart, who as a Catholic is also at variance in impor-
tant matters, says “we cannot deny the title of phi-
losopher to such a thinker as Mr. Spencer, who does
genuinely bind together different and hitherto alien
subjects, and that by a clear and wide though neither
an all-comprehensive nor a spiritual hypothesis, the
principle of evolution.” Professor Tyndall calls
him “the apostle of the understanding.” His “pro-
found and vigorous writings” have been likened by
Professor Huxley to “the embodiment of the spirit
of Descartes in the knowledge of our own day.”
Darwin spoke of him as “our great philosopher,”
greeted him as “the great expounder of the principle
of evolution,” and wrote to him that “every one
THE REASON FOR THIS EXAMINATION. 5
with eyes to see and ears to hear ought to bow their
knee to you.” Professor Stanley Jevons ranked his
work with the “Principia” of Newton. John Fiske,
representing unquestionably the opinion of large num-
bers of intelligent and influential men, declares it to
be of the calibre of that of Aristotle and Newton, but
“as far surpassing their work in its vastness of per-
formance as the railway surpasses the sedan-chair or
as the telegraph surpasses the carrier pigeon.” Pres-
ident Barnard in the same strain said, “his philoso-
phy is the only philosophy that satisfies an earnestly
inquiring mind,” adding that “we have in Herbert
Spencer not only the profoundest thinker of our time,
but the most capacious and powerful intellect of all
time. Aristotle and his master were not more beyond
the pygmies who preceded them than he is beyond
Aristotle. Kant, Hegel, Fichte and Schelling are
gropers in the dark by the side of him.” -'
Such estimates are not unquestioned, and opinions
of a different kind might be cited from men of high
standing. But the current of general thought,
swelled by the wonderful scientific achievements of
our time, has run powerfully, almost irresistibly, in
favor of ideas with which Mr. Spencer is identified,
absorbing, intimidating and driving back opposition
even where it seemed most firmly intrenched, until to
question them has come largely to be looked upon as
evidence not merely of unscientific beliefs, but of
ignorance and superstition. Whatever may be the
verdict of the future, the man who is regarded as the
great philosopher of evolution has within his own
time won an acceptance and renown such as no pre-
ceding philosopher ever personally enjoyed. Thus,
6 INTRODUCTION.
these estimates represent the view that has had the
largest currency and produced the greatest effect, and
that gives the weight of high authority to any decla-
ration of Mr. Spencer's on a subject that has engaged
his attention. Such a declaration, made with the
utmost deliberation, in his latest, and as he and his
admirers deem, his ripest and most important work, I
propose in what follows to examine.
I do not propose to discuss Mr. Spencer's philoso-
phy or review his writings, except as embraced in or
related to his teachings on one subject. That, while
a subject of the first practical importance, is one
where no special knowledge, no familiarity with met-
aphysical terminology, no wrestling with abstractions,
is needed, and one where the validity of the reasoning
may be judged for himself by any one of ordinary
powers and acquirements.
My primary object is to defend and advance a
principle in which I see the only possible relief from
much that cnthralls and degrades and distorts, turning
light to darkness and good to evil, rather than to
gauge a philosopher or weigh a philosophy. Yet the
examination I propose must lead to a decisive judg-
ment upon both. As Mr. Spencer's treatment of this
principle began with his first book and ends with his
last, we have in it a cross section of his teachings,
traversing the open plain of obvious facts and com-
mon perceptions, in which we who have no more than
ordinary knowledge and powers may test for our-
selves his intellectual ability, and, what is even more
important, his intellectual honesty. For to whatever
extent we may elsewhere separate ability and honesty,
respecting the talent while distrusting the man, such
THE REASON FOI& THIS EXAMINATION. 7
separation cannot be made in the field of philosophy.
Since philosophy is the search for truth, the philoso-
pher who in his teachings is swerved by favor or by
fear forfeits all esteem as a philosopher.
Nor is the connection,between the practical prob-
lems that are forcing themselves on our civilization
and the deepest questions with which speculative
philosophy deals, merely personal or accidental. It
belongs to the nature of the human mind, to our rela-
tions to the universe in which we awake to conscious-
ness. And just as in “Progress and Poverty” the
connection that developed as I went along carried me
from an inquiry into economic phenomena to consid-
erations that traversed Mr. Spencer's theory of social
evolution and raised such supreme questions as the
existence of God and the immortality of man, so now
I find a similar connection asserting itself between
Mr. Spencer's utterances on the most important of
social questions and the views on wider and deeper
subjects that have given him such a great reputation.
It is this—that a question of the utmost practical
importance thus leads to questions beside which in our
deeper moments the practical sinks into insignifi-
cance; that the philosopher whose authority is now
invoked to deny to the masses any right to the
physical basis of life in this world is also the phi-
losopher whose authority darkens to many all hope of
life hereafter—that has made it seem to me worth
while to enter into an examination which in its form
must be personal, and that will lead me to treat at
greater length than I would otherwise be inclined to
those utterances of Mr. Spencer which I propose to
discuss.
8 INTRODUCTION.
I shall not ask the reader to accept anything from
me. All I ask of him is to judge for himself Mr.
Spencer's own public declarations. The respect for
authority, the presumption in favor of those who
have won intellectual reputation, is within reason-
able limits, both prudent and becoming. But it
should not be carried too far, and there are some
things especially as to which it behooves us all to use
our own judgment and to maintain free minds. For
not only does the history of the world show that
undue deference to authority has been the potent
agency through which errors have been enthroned and
superstitions perpetuated, but there are regions of
thought in which the largest powers and the greatest
acquirements cannot guard against aberrations or as-
sure deeper insight. One may stand on a box and
look over the heads of his fellows, but he no better
sees the stars. The telescope and the microscope re-
veal depths which to the unassisted vision are closed.
Yet not merely do they bring us no nearer to the
cause of suns and animalcula, but in looking through
them the observer must shut his eyes to what lies
about him. That intension is at the expense of ex-
tension is seen in the mental as in the physical
sphere. A man of special learning may be a fool as
to common relations. And that he who passes for
an intellectual prince may be a moral pauper there
are examples enough to show.
As we must go to the shoemaker if we would be
well shod and to the tailor if we would be well clad,
so as to special branches of knowledge must we rely
on those who have studied them. But while yield-
ing to reputation the presumption in its favor, and
THE REASON FOR THIS EXAMINATION. 9
to authority the respect that is its due, let us not too
much underrate our own powers in what is concerned
with common facts and general relations. While we
may not be scientists or philosophers, we too are men.
Let us remember that there is no religious supersti-
tion that has not been taught by professed teachers
of religious truth; that there is no vulgar economic
fallacy that may not be found in the writings of pro-
fessors; no social vagary current among “the igno-
rant” whose roots may not be discovered among “the
educated and cultured.” The power to reason cor-
rectly on general subjects is not to be learned in
schools, nor does it come with special knowledge. It
results from care in separating, from caution in com-
bining, from the habit of asking ourselves the mean-
ing of the words we use and making sure of one step
before building another on it—and above all, from
loyalty to truth.
Giving to Mr. Spencer, therefore, the presumption
that is due to his great reputation, but at the same
time using his own reason, let the reader consider the
matter I shall lay before him.
Herbert Spencer's last volume, “Justice,” contains
his latest word on the land question — the question
in which, as I believe, lies the only solution of all
the vexed and threatening social and political prob-
lems of our time. Accompanied, as it has been, by
the withdrawal of earlier utterances, it places him
definitely on the side of those who contend that the
treatment of land as private property cannot equi-
tably be interfered with, a position the reverse of that
he once ably asserted.
10 INTRODUCTION.
While the opinions of a man of such wide reputa-
tion and large influence, on a question already pass-
ing into the domain of practical politics and soon to
become the burning question of the time, are most
worthy of attention, they derive additional importance
from the fact of this change. For a change from a
clearly reasoned opinion to its opposite carries the
implication of fair and full consideration. And if
the reasons for such a change be sufficient and there
be no suspicion of ulterior motive, the fact that a man
now condemns opinions he once held adds to the ad-
miration that previously we may have entertained for
him the additional admiration we must feel for one
who has shown that he would rather be right than
be consistent.
What gives additional interest to the matter is that
Mr. Spencer makes no change in his premises, but
only in his conclusion, and now, in Sustaining private
property in land, asserts the same principle of equal
liberty from which he originally deduced its con-
demnation. How he has been led to this change
becomes, therefore, a most interesting inquiry, not
merely from the great importance of the subject it-
self, but from the light it must throw on the logical
processes of so eminent a philosopher.
Since no one else has attempted it, it seems incum-
bent on me to examine this change and its grounds.
For not only do I hold the opinions which Mr.
Spencer now controverts, but I have been directly and
indirectly instrumental in giving to his earlier con-
clusions a much greater circulation than his own
books would have given them. It is due, therefore,
that I should make his rejection of these conclusions
TEIE REASON FOR TELIS EXAMINATION. 11
as widely known as I can, and thus correct the
mistake of those who couple us together as holding
views he now opposes.
To fairly weigh Mr. Spencer's present opinion on
the land question, and to comprehend his reasons for
the change, it is necessary to understand his previous
position. Beginning, therefore, with his first declar-
ation, I propose to trace his public expressions on this
subject to the present time, and, that no injustice may
be done him, to print them in full. In what follows
the reader will find what Mr. Spencer has published
on the land question from 1850 to 1892, and, by the
difference in type, may readily distinguish his utter-
ances from my comments.
I.
II.
III,
IV,
V.
VI,
IE’ A TERT T.
D E O L A R A TI O N.
“SOCIAL STATICS.” — THE RIGHT TO LAND.
THE IN CONGRUOUS PASSAGE.
“SOCIAL STATICS.”— THE RIGHT OF PROPERTY.
MR. SPENCER'S CONFUSION AS TO RIGHTS.
MIR. SIPENCER'S CONFUSION AS TO VALUE.
EROM “SOCIAL STATICS” TO “POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS.”
Our social edifice may be constructed with all possible labor and ingenuity,
and be strongly cramped together with cunningly-devised enactments, but if
there be no rectitude in its component parts, if it is not built on upright
principles, it will assuredly tumble to pieces. . . . Not as adventitious,
therefore, will the wise man regard the faith that is in him, not as something
which may be slighted, and made subordinate to calculations of policy; but as
the supreme authority to which all his actions should bend. The highest truth
conceivable by him he will fearlessly utter; and will endeavor to get embodied
in fact his purest idealisms : knowing that, let what may come of it, he is thus
playing his appointed part in the world — knowing that, if he can get done
the thing he aims at — well ; if not — well also ; though not so well. — Her-
bert Spencer, 1850.
CHAPTER I.
“SOCIAL STATICS ’’ — THE RIGHT TO LAND.
IN his first book, “Social Statics,” published in
1850, Mr. Spencer essayed to discover some fixed
principle that might serve as a starting-point in po-
litical ethics and afford a surer guide than shifting
notions of expediency or the vague formula of the
greatest good to the greatest number. He found it
in the principle that “every man may claim the full-
est liberty to exercise his faculties compatible with
the possession of like liberty by every other man.”
Or, as he otherwise puts it, that “every man has
freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes
not the equal freedom of any other man.”
The first deduction he makes from this “first prin-
ciple * is the equal right to life and personal liberty,
and the second, the equal right to the use of the
earth. *.
This first deduction he treats briefly in Chapter
VIII., “The Rights of Life and Personal Liberty,”
saying, “These are such evident corollaries from our
first principle as scarcely to need a separate state-
ment.”
The second deduction, only next in importance to
the rights to life and personal liberty, and indeed in-
volved in them, he treats at length in a chapter
which I give in full:
16 I).ECLARATION.
CHAPTER IX. — THE RIGHT TO THE USE OF THE EARTH.
§ 1. Given a race of beings having like claims to
pursue the objects of their desires — given a world
adapted to the gratification of those desires — a world
into which such beings are similarly born, and it un-
avoidably follows that they have equal rights to the use
of this world. For if each of them “has freedom to do
all that he wills provided he infringes not the equal
freedom of any other,” then each of them is free to use
the earth for the satisfaction of his wants, provided he
allows all others the same liberty. And conversely, it is
manifest that no one, or part of them, may use the earth
in such a way as to prevent the rest from similarly using
it ; seeing that to do this is to assume greater freedom
than the rest, and consequently to break the law.
§ 2. Equity, therefore, does not permit property in
land. For if one portion of the earth’s surface may
justly become the possession of an individual, and may
be held by him for his sole use and benefit, as a thing
to which he has an exclusive right, then other portions
of the earth's surface may be so held; and eventually
the whole of the earth's surface may be so held; and
our planet may thus lapse altogether into private hands.
Observe now the dilemma to which this leads. Suppos-
ing the entire habitable globe to be so enclosed, it follows
that if the land-owners have a valid right to its surface,
all who are not land-owners have no right at all to its
surface. Hence, such can exist on the earth by suffer-
ance only. They are all trespassers. Save by the per-
mission of the lords of the soil, they can have no room
for the soles of their feet. Nay, should the others think
fit to deny them a resting-place, these landless men might
equitably be expelled from the earth altogether. If,
then, the assumption that land can be held as property,
involves that the whole globe may become the private
domain of a part of its inhabitants; and if, by conse-
quence, the rest of its inhabitants can then exercise their
faculties — can then exist even — only by consent of the
land-owners; it is manifest, that an exclusive possession
“SOCIAL STATICS ’’—THE RIGHT TO LAND. 17
of the soil necessitates an infringement of the law of
equal freedom. For, men who cannot “live and move
and have their being ” without the leave of others, can-
not be equally free with those others. -
§ 3. Passing from the consideration of the possible
to that of the actual, we find yet further reason to deny
the rectitude of property in land. It can never be pre-
tended that the existing titles to such property are legiti-
mate. Should any one think so, let him look in the
chronicles. Violence, fraud, the prerogative of force, the
claims of Superior cunning — these are the sources to
which those titles may be traced. The original deeds
were written with the sword, rather than with the pen :
not lawyers, but soldiers, were the conveyancers: blows
were the current coin given in payment; and for seals,
blood was used in preference to wax. Could valid claims
be thus constituted 2 Hardly. And if not, what be-
comes of the pretensions of all subsequent holders of
estates so obtained ? Does sale or bequest generate a
right where it did not previously exist 2 Would the
original claimants be nonsuited at the bar of reason,
because the thing stolen from them had changed hands 2
Certainly not. And if one act of transfer can give no
title, can many ? No: though nothing be multiplied for-
ever, it will not produce one. Even the law recognizes
this principle. An existing holder must, if called upon,
substantiate the claims of those from whom he pur-
chased or inherited his property; and any flaw in the
original parchment, even though the property should have
had a score intermediate owners, quashes his right.
“But Time,” say some, “is a great legalizer. Imme-
morial possession must be taken to constitute a legiti-
mate claim. That which has been held from age to age
as private property, and has been bought and Sold as
such, must now be considered as irrevocably belonging
to individuals.” To which proposition a willing assent
shall be given when its propounders can assign it a defi-
nite meaning. To do this, however, they must find
satisfactory answers to such questions as, How long does
it take for what was originally a wrong to grow into a
right 2 At what rate per annum do invalid claims
18 DECLARATION.
become valid 2 If a title gets perfect in a thousand
years, how much more than perfect will it be in two thou-
sand years ? — and so forth. For the solution of which
they will require a new calculus.
Whether it may be expedient to admit claims of a cer-
tain standing, is not the point. We have here nothing
to do with considerations of conventional privilege or
legislative convenience. We have simply to inquire
what is the verdict given by pure equity in the matter.
And this verdict enjoins a protest against every existing
pretension to the individual possession of the soil; and
dictates the assertion, that the right of mankind at large
to the earth's surface is still valid; all deeds, customs, and
laws notwithstanding.
§ 4. Not only have present land-tenures an indefen-
sible origin, but it is impossible to discover any mode in
which land can become private property. Cultivation is
commonly considered to give a legitimate title. He who
has reclaimed a tract of ground from its primitive wild-
ness, is supposed to have thereby madg it his own. But
if his right is disputed, by what system of logic can he
vindicate it 2 Let us listen a moment to his pleadings.
“Hallo, you Sir,” cries the cosmopolite to some back-
woodsman, smoking at the door of his shanty, “by what
authority do you take possession of these acres that you
have cleared; round which you have put up a snake-
fence, and on which you have built this log house?”
“By what authority ? I squatted here because there
was no one to say may — because I was as much at liberty
to do so as any other man. Besides, now that I have cut
down the wood, and ploughed and cropped the ground,
this farm is more mine than yours, or anybody's ; and I
mean to keep it.”
“Ay, so you all say. But I do not yet see how you
have substantiated your claim. When you came here you
found the land producing trees — sugar-maples, perhaps;
or may be it was covered with prairie-grass and wild
strawberries. Well, instead of these you made it yield
wheat, or maize, or tobacco. Now I want to understand
how, by exterminating one set of plants, and making the
soil bear another set in their place, you have constituted
yourself lord of this soil for all succeeding time.”
“SOCIAL STATICS ’’—TEHE RIGHT TO LAND. 19
“Oh, those natural products which I destroyed were
of little or no use; whereas I caused the earth to bring
forth things good for food — things that help to give life
and happiness.”
“Still you have not shown why such a process makes
the portion of earth you have so modified yours. What
is it that you have done 2 You have turned over the
soil to a few inches in depth with a Spade or a plough ;
you have scattered over this prepared surface a few
seeds; and you have gathered the fruits which the sun,
rain, and air, helped the soil to produce. Just tell me,
if you please, by what magic have these acts made you
sole owner of that vast mass of matter, having for its
base the surface of your estate, and for its apex the
centre of the globe 2 all of which it appears you would
monopolize to yourself and your descendants forever.”
“Well, if it isn't mine, whose is it 2 I have dispos-
sessed nobody. When I crossed the Mississippi yonder,
I found nothing but the silent woods. If some one else
had settled here, and made this clearing, he would have
had as good a right to the location as I have. I have
done nothing but what any other person was at liberty
to do had he come before me. Whilst they were un-
reclaimed, these lands belonged to all men — as much
to one as to another — and they are now mine simply
because I was the first to discover and improve them.”
“You say truly, when you say that “whilst they were
unreclaimed these lands belonged to all men.” And it is
my duty to tell you that they belong to all men still;
and that your ‘improvements' as you call them, cannot
vitiate the claim of all men. You may plough and har-
row, and sow and reap; you may turn over the soil as
often as you like ; but all your manipulations will fail to
make that Soil yours, which was not yours to begin with.
Let me put a case. Suppose now that in the course of
your wanderings you come upon an empty house, which
in spite of its dilapidated state takes your fancy; Sup-
pose that with the intention of making it your abode
you expend much time and trouble in repairing it — that
you paint and paper, and whitewash, and at considerable
cost bring it into a habitable state. Suppose further,
that on some fatal day a stranger is announced, who
turns out to be the heir to whom this house has been
20 DECLARATION.
bequeathed; and that this professed heir is prepared
with all the necessary proofs of his identity; what be-
comes of your improvements 2 Do they give you a valid
title to the house ? Do they quash the title of the
original claimant ’’’
« No.”
“Neither then do your pioneering operations give you
a valid title to this land. Neither do they quash the
title of its original claimants —the human race. The
world is God’s bequest to mankind. All men are joint
heirs to it; you amongst the number. And because you
have taken up your residence on a certain part of it, and
have subdued, cultivated, beautified that part — im-
proved it as you say, you are not therefore warranted in
appropriating it as entirely private property. At least
if you do so, you may at any moment be justly expelled
by the lawful owner — Society.”
“Well, but surely you would not eject me without
making some recompense for the great additional value
I have given to this tract, by reducing what was a wilder-
ness into fertile fields. You would not turn me adrift
and deprive me of all the benefit of those years of toil it
has cost me to bring this spot into its present state.”
“Of course not : just as in the case of the house, you
would have an equitable title to compensation from the
proprietor for repairs and new fittings, so the community
cannot justly take possession of this estate, without pay-
ing for all that you have done to it. This extra worth
which your labor has imparted to it is fairly yours; and
although you have, without leave, busied yourself in
bettering what belongs to the community, yet no doubt
the community will duly discharge your claim. But ad-
mitting this, is quite a different thing from recognizing
your right to the land itself. It may be true that you
are entitled to compensation for the improvements this
enclosure has received at your hands; and at the same
time it may be equally true that no act, form, proceeding,
or ceremony, can make this enclosure your private prop-
erty.”
5. It does indeed at first sight seem possible for
the earth to become the exclusive possession of individ-
uals by some process of equitable distribution. “Why,”
“social, STATICs”—THE RIGHT TO LAND, 21
it may be asked, “should not men agree to a fair sub-
division ? If all are co-heirs, why may not the estate
be equally apportioned, and each be afterwards perfect
master of his own share ?”
To this question it may in the first place be replied,
that such a division is vetoed by the difficulty of fixing
the values of respective tracts of land. Variations in
productiveness, different degrees of accessibility, advan-
tages of climate, proximity to the centres of civilization
—these, and other such considerations, remove the prob-
lem out of the sphere of mere mensuration into the
region of impossibility.
But, waiving this, let us inquire who are to be the al-
lottees. Shall adult males, and all who have reached
twenty-one on a specified day, be the fortunate individ-
uals 2 If so, what is to be done with those who come
of age on the morrow 2 Is it proposed that each man,
woman, and child, shall have a section ? If so, what be-
comes of all who are to be born next year 2 And what
will be the fate of those whose fathers sell their estates
and squander the proceeds 2 These portionless ones
must constitute a class already described as having no
right to a resting-place on earth—as living by the suf-
ferance of their fellow-men — as being practically serfs.
And the existence of such a class is wholly at variance
with the law of equal freedom.
Until, therefore, we can produce a valid commission
authorizing us to make this distribution — until it can
be proved that God has given one charter of privileges
to one generation, and another to the next — until we
can demonstrate that men born after a certain date are
doomed to slavery, we must consider that no such allot-
ment is permissible.
§ 6. Probably some will regard the difficulties insep-
arable from individual ownership of the soil, as caused
by pushing to excess a doctrine applicable only within
rational limits. This is a very favorite style of thinking
with some. There are people who hate anything in the
shape of exact conclusions; and these are of them. Ac-
cording to such, the right is never in either extreme, but
always half way between the extremes. They are con-
tinually trying to reconcile Yes and No. Ifs and buts,
22 - DECLARATION.
and excepts, are their delight. They have so great a
faith in “the judicious mean’” that they would scarcely
believe an oracle, if it uttered a full-length principle.
Were you to inquire of them whether the earth turns on
its axis from East to West, or from West to East, you
might almost expect the reply — “A little of both,” or
“Not exactly either.” It is doubtful whether they would
assent to the axiom that the whole is greater than its
part, without making some qualification. They have a
passion for compromises. To meet their taste, Truth
must always be spiced with a little Error. They cannot
conceive of a pure, definite, entire, and unlimited law.
And hence, in discussions like the present, they are
constantly petitioning for limitations — always wishing
to abate, and modify, and moderate — ever protesting
against doctrines being pursued to their ultimate conse-
quences.
But it behooves such to recollect, that ethical truth is
as exact and as peremptory as physical truth; and that
in this matter of land-tenure, the verdict of morality
must be distinctly yea or may. Either men have a right
to make the soil private property, or they have not.
There is no medium. We must choose one of the two
positions. There can be no half-and-half opinion. In
the nature of things the fact must be either one way or
the other. .
If men have not such a right, we are at once delivered
from the several predicaments already pointed out. If
they have such a right, then is that right absolute,
sacred, not on any pretence to be violated. If they have
such a right, then is his Grace of Leeds justified in
warning-off tourists from Ben Mac Dhui, the Duke of
Atholl in closing Glen Tilt, the Duke of Buccleuch in
denying sites to the Free Church, and the Duke of
Sutherland in banishing the Highlanders to make room
for sheep-walks. If they have such a right, then it
would be proper for the sole proprietor of any kingdom
— a Jersey or Guernsey, for example — to impose just
what regulations he might choose on its inhabitants —
to tell them that they should not live on his property,
unless they professed a certain religion, spoke a particu-
lar language, paid him a specified reverence, adopted an
authorized dress, and conformed to all other conditions
“SOCIAL STATICS ’’—THE RIGHT TO LAND. 23
he might see fit to make. If they have such a right,
then is there truth in that tenet of the ultra-Tory school,
that the land-owners are the only legitimate rulers of a
country — that the people at large remain in it only by
the land-owners’ permission, and ought consequently to
submit to the land-owners' rule, and respect whatever in-
stitutions the land-owners set up. There is no escape
from these inferences. They are necessary corollaries
to the theory that the earth can become individual prop-
erty. And they can only be repudiated by denying that
theory.
§ 7. After all, nobody does implicity believe in
landlordism. We hear of estates being held under the
king, that is, the state; or of their being kept in trust
for the public benefit ; and not that they are the in-
alienable possessions of their nominal owners. More-
over, we daily deny landlordism by our legislation. Is
a canal, a railway, or a turnpike road to be made 2 we
do not scruple to seize just as many acres as may be
requisite; allowing the holders compensation for the
capital invested. We do not wait for consent. An Act
of Parliament supersedes the authority of title deeds,
and serves proprietors with notices to quit, whether they
will or not. Dither this is equitable, or it is not. Either
the public are free to resume as much of the earth's sur.
face as they think fit, or the titles of the land-owners
must be considered absolute, and all national works must
be postponed until lords and squires please to part with
the requisite slices of their estates. If we decide that
the claims of individual ownership must give way, then
we imply that the right of the nation at large to the soil
is supreme — that the right of private possession only
exists by general consent — that general consent being
withdrawn it ceases — or, in other words, that it is no
right at all.
$ 8. “But to what does this doctrine, that men are
equally entitled to the use of the earth, lead 2 Must we
return to the times of unenclosed wilds, and subsist on
roots, berries, and game 2 Or are we to be left to the
management of Messrs. Fourier, Owen, Louis Blanc,
and Co. 2 ”
24 DECLARATION.
Neither. Such a doctrine is consistent with the high-
est state of civilization; may be carried out without
involving a community of goods; and need cause no very
serious revolution in existing arrangements. The change
required would simply be a change of landlords. Sepa-
rate ownerships would merge into the joint-stock owner-
ship of the public. Instead of being in the possession of
individuals, the country would be held by the great cor-
porate body –Society. Instead of leasing his acres from
an isolated proprietor, the farmer would lease them from
the nation. Instead of paying his rent to the agent of
Sir John or his Grace, he would pay it to an agent or
deputy-agent of the community. Stewards would be
public officials instead of private ones; and tenancy the
only land-tenure.
A state of things so ordered would be in perfect har-
mony with the moral law. Under it all men would be
equally landlords; all men would be alike free to become
tenants. A, B, C, and the rest, might compete for a
vacant farm as now, and one of them might take that
farm, without in any way violating the principles of pure
equity. All would be equally free to bid; all would be
equally free to refrain. And when the farm had been
let to A, B, or C, all parties would have done that which
they willed — the one in choosing to pay a given sum to
his fellow-men for the use of certain lands — the others
in refusing to pay that sum. Clearly, therefore, on such
a system, the earth might be enclosed, occupied, and
cultivated, in entire subordination to the law of equal
freedom.
§ 9. No doubt great difficulties must attend the re-
sumption, by mankind at large, of their rights to the
sqil. The question of compensation to existing proprie-
tors is a complicated one — one that perhaps cannot be
settled in a strictly equitable manner. Had we to deal
with the parties who originally robbed the human race
of its heritage, we might make short work of the matter.
But, unfortunately, most of our present land-owners are
men who have, either mediately or immediately — either
by their own acts, or by the acts of their ancestors —
given for their estates, equivalents of honestly-earned
wealth, believing that they were investing their savings
“SOCIAL STATICS ’’ — THE RIGHT TO LAND. 25
in a legitimate manner. To justly estimate and liqui-
date the claims of such, is one of the most intricate prob-
lems society will one day have to solve. But with this
perplexity and our extrication from it, abstract morality
has no concern. Men having got themselves into the
dilemma by disobedience to the law, must get out of it as
well as they can ; and with as little injury to the landed
class as may be.
Meanwhile, we shall do well to recollect, that there
are others besides the landed class to be considered. In
our tender regard for the vested interests of the few, let
us not forget that the rights of the many are in abeyance;
and must remain so, as long as the earth is monopolized
by individuals. Let us remember, too, that the injustice
thus inflicted on the mass of mankind, is an injustice of
the gravest nature. The fact that it is not so regarded,
proves nothing. In early phases of civilization even
homicide is thought lightly of. The Suttees of India,
together with the practice elsewhere followed of sacri-
ficing a hecatomb of human victims at the burial of a
chief, shows this ; and probably cannibals consider the
slaughter of those whom “the fortune of war” has made
their prisoners, perfectly justifiable. It was once also
universally supposed that slavery was a natural and quite
legitimate institution — a condition into which some
were born, and to which they ought to submit as to a
Divine ordination; nay, indeed, a great proportion of
mankind hold this opinion still. A higher social devel-
opment, however, has generated in us a better faith, and
we now to a considerable extent recognize the claims of
humanity. But our civilization is only partial. It may
by-and-by be perceived, that Equity utters dictates to
which we have not yet listened ; and men may then
learn, that to deprive others of their rights to the use of
the earth, is to commit a crime inferior only in wicked-
ness to the crime of taking away their lives or personal
liberties.
§ 10, Briefly reviewing the argument, we see that
the right of each man to the use of the earth, limited
only by the like rights of his fellow-men, is immediately
deducible from the law of equal freedom. We see that
the maintenance of this right necessarily forbids private
26 DECLARATION.
property in land. On examination all existing titles to
such property turn out to be invalid; those founded on
reclamation inclusive. It appears that not even an equal
apportionment of the earth amongst its inhabitants could
generate a legitimate proprietorship. We find that if
pushed to its ultimate consequences, a claim to exclusive
possession of the soil involves a land-owning despotism.
We further find that such a claim is constantly denied
by the enactments of our legislature. And we find
lastly, that the theory of the co-heirship of all men to
the soil, is consistent with the highest civilization; and
that, however difficult it may be to embody that theory
in fact, Equity sternly commands it to be done.
Briefly stated, the argument of this chapter is —
1. The equal right of all men to the use of land
springs from the fact of their existence in a world
adapted to their needs, and into which they are simi-
larly born.
2. Equity, therefore, does not permit private prop-
erty in land, since that would involve the right of
some to deny to others the use of land.
3. Private property in land, as at present existing,
can show no original title valid in justice, and such
validity cannot be gained either by sale or bequest,
or by peaceable possession during any length of
time.
4. Nor is there any mode by which land can justly
become private property. Cultivation and improve-
ment can give title only to their results, not to the
land itself.
5. Nor could an equitable division of land with
the consent of all, even if it were not impossible
that such a division could be made, give valid title to
private property in land. For the equal right to the
use of land would attach to all those thereafter born,
“SOCIAL STATICS ’’—THE RIGHT TO LAND. 27
irrespective of any agreement made by their prede-
cessors.
6. There can be no modification of this dictate of
equity. Either all men have equal rights to the use
of the land, or some men have the just right to en-
slave others and deprive them of life.
7. As a matter of fact, nobody does really believe
in private property in land. An Act of Parliament,
even now, supersedes title-deeds. That is to say,
the right of private ownership in land only exists by
general consent ; that being withdrawn, it ceases.
8. But the doctrine that all men are equally en-
titled to the use of land does not involve communism
or socialism, and need cause no serious change in exist-
ing arrangements. It is not necessary that the state
should manage land: it is only necessary that rent,
instead of going, as now, to individuals, should be
taken by society for common purposes.
9. There may be difficulty in justly liquidating
the claims of existing land-owners, but men having
got themselves into a dilemma must get out of it as
well as they can. The landed class are not alone
to be considered. So long as the treatment of land
as private property continues, the masses suffer from
an injustice only inferior in wickedness to depriving
them of life or personal liberty.
10. However difficult it may be to embody in fact
the theory of the co-heirship of all men to the soil,
equity sternly demands it to be done.
CHAPTER II.
THE IN CONGRUOTUS PASSAGE.
ALTHOUGH this chapter shows that Mr. Spencer
had not fully thought out the question, and saw no
way to secure equality in the use of land, save the
clumsy one of having the state formally resume land
and let it out in lots to suit, the argument is clear and
logical, except in one place. This one weak and con-
fusing spot is the beginning of Section 9:
No doubt great difficulty must attend the resumption
by mankind at large, of their rights to the soil. The
question of compensation to existing proprietors is a
complicated one — one that perhaps cannot be settled in
a strictly equitable manner. Had we to deal with the
parties who originally robbed the human race of its heri-
tage, we might make short work of the matter. But, un-
fortunately, most of our present land-owners are men who
have either mediately or immediately — either by their
own acts, or by the acts of their ancestors — given for
their estates equivalents of honestly earned wealth, be-
lieving that they were investing their savings in a legit-
imate manner. To justly estimate and liquidate the
claims of such is one of the most intricate problems
society will one day have to solve.
Taken by itself, this passage seems to admit that
existing land-owners should be compensated for the
land they hold whenever society shall resume land
for the benefit of all. Though this is diametrically
opposed to all that has gone before and all that
THE INCONGRUOUS PASSAGE. 29
follows after, it is the sense in which it has been gen-
erally understood. It is the sense in which I under-
stood it when, in quoting from “Social Statics” in
“Progress and Poverty,” I spoke of it as a careless
concession, which Mr. Spencer on reflection would
undoubtedly reconsider. For after even such a man
as John Stuart Mill could say, “The land of every
country belongs to the people of that country; the
individuals called land-owners have no right in moral-
ity and justice to anything but the rent, or compen-
sation for its salable value,” the English writers had
seemed to me afflicted with a sort of color-blindness
on the subject of compensation. And that this afflic-
tion had suddenly befallen Mr. Spencer also was the
only explanation of this passage that then occurred to
me. Nor, if it means compensation for land, is there
any other explanation; for all along Mr. Spencer
has been insisting on the natural, inalienable and
equal right of all men to the use of land. He has
not only denied the validity of all existing claims to
the private ownership of land, but has declared that
there is no possible way in which land can become
private property. He has mercilessly and scornfully
exposed the fallacy on which the notion of compensa-
tion to land-owners is based — the idea that change
of hands and lapse of time can turn wrong into right,
make valid claims originally invalid, and deprive the
human race of what in the nature of things is, not
at any one time, but at all times, their inalienable
heritage. Nothing but moral color-blindness can ex-
plain how a writer who has just asserted all this
can in the same breath propose to compensate land-
lords.
30 DECLARATION.
But a more careful reading of this chapter leads me
now to think that the apparent inconsistency of these
sentences may arise from careless statement, and that
what Mr. Spencer was really thinking of was the
compensation of land-owners, not for their land, but
for their improvements.
In the context Mr. Spencer has scouted the idea of
force, or acquiescence, or voluntary partition, or un-
opposed appropriation, or cultivation, or improvement,
or sale or bequest, or lapse of time, giving any title
to private property in land. But he realizes, as we
all do (see especially the last two paragraphs of
Section 4), that should the community resume for
all the inalienable right to the use of land, there
would remain to holders of improvements made in
good faith an equitable claim for those improve-
ments.
It is evident throughout “Social Statics” that no
idea of the possibility of securing equal rights to land
in any other way than that of the state taking posses-
sion of the land and renting it out had dawned on
Mr. Spencer. And since in all settled countries the
land thus taken possession of by the state would be
land to which in large part improvements of various
kinds had in good faith been inseparably attached, the
matter of determining what equitable compensation
should be paid to owners on account of these improve-
ments naturally seemed to him a delicate and difficult
task — one, in fact, incapable of more than an approx-
imation to justice.
Keeping this in mind, it is clear that a few interpo-
lations, justified by the context, and indeed made
necessary by it, will remove all difficulty. Let me
THE IN CONGR.UOUS PASSAGE. 31
print these sentences again with such interpolations,
which I will distinguish by italics:
The question of compensation to existing proprietors
for their improvements is a complicated one — one that
perhaps cannot be settled in a strictly equitable manner.
Had we to deal with the parties who originally robbed
the human race of its heritage, we might make short
work of the matter, for their improvements we should be
under no obligation to regard. But, unfortunately, most
of our present land-holders are men who have, either
mediately or immediately — either by their own acts or
the acts of their ancestors — given for their estates,
which include many inseparable improvements, equiva-
lents of homestly earned wealth, believing that they were
investing their savings in a legitimate manner. To
justly estimate and liquidate the claims of such for
these improvements is one of the most intricate problems
society will one day have to solve.
Thus understood, these sentences become coherent
with their context. And that this was what Mr.
Spencer had in mind is supported by his more recent
utterances; for while he has allowed these sentences
to be understood as meaning compensation to land-
owners for their land, yet in the only places where he
has stated in terms what the compensation he has
proposed is to be for, he has, as will hereafter be seen,
spoken of it as “compensation for the artificial value
given by cultivation,” or by some similar phrase
showed that what was in his mind was merely com-
pensation for improvements. I therefore gladly make
what honorable amend I can for having so misunder-
stood him as to imagine that in “Social Statics” he
intended to give any countenance to the idea that it
was incumbent on men, when taking possession of
their heritage, to pay any compensation to existing
land-owners for the value of that heritage.
CHAPTER III.
“SOCIAL STATICS ’’— THE RIGHT OF PROPERTY.
THE chapter of “Social Statics” on “The Right to
the Use of the Earth” is followed by a chapter on
“The Right of Property.” For the reason that Mr.
Spencer has since referred to this chapter as to be
taken in connection with what was said in the pre-
ceding one, it is also worth while to reprint it in full:
CHAPTER X. — THE RIGHT OF PRO PERTY.
§ 1. The moral law, being the law of the social state,
is obliged wholly to ignore the ante-social state. Con-
stituting, as the principles of pure morality do, a code
of conduct for the perfect man, they cannot be made to
adapt themselves to the actions of the uncivilized man,
even under the most ingenious hypothetical conditions —
cannot be made even to recognize those actions so as
to pass any definite sentence upon them. Overlooking
this fact, thinkers, in their attempts to prove some of
the first theorems of ethics, have commonly fallen into
the error of referring back to an imaginary state of Sav-
age wildness, instead of referring forward to an ideal
civilization, as they should have done; and have, in con-
sequence, entangled themselves in difficulties arising out
of the discordance between ethical principles and the
assumed premises. To this circumstance is attributable
that vagueness by which the arguments used to estab-
lish the right of property in a logical manner, are char-
acterized. Whilst possessed of a certain plausibility,
they yet cannot be considered conclusive; inasmuch as
they suggest questions and objections that admit of no
... -->
“SOCIAL STATICS ’’—THE RIGHT OF PROPERTY. 33
satisfactory answers. Let us take a sample of these
arguments, and examine its defects.
“Though the earth and all inferior creatures,” says
Locke, “be common to all men, yet every man has a
property in his own person : this nobody has a right to
but himself. The labor of his body, and the work of his
hands, we may say are properly his. Whatever then he
removes out of the state that nature hath provided and
left it in, he hath mixed his labor with, and joined to it
something that is his own, and thereby makes it his
property. It being by him removed from the common
state nature hath placed it in, it hath by this labor some-
thing annexed to it that excludes the common right of
other men. For this labor being the unquestionable
property of the laborer, no man but he can have a right
to what that is once joined to, at least when there is
enough and as good left in common for others.”
If inclined to cavil, one might in reply to this observe,
that as, according to the premises, “the earth and all
inferior creatures " — all things, in fact, that the earth
produces — are “common to all men,” the consent of all
men must be obtained before any article can be equi-
tably “removed from the common state nature hath
placed it in.” It might be argued that the real question
is overlooked, when it is said, that, by gathering any
natural product, a man “hath mixed his labor with it,
and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby
made it his property;” for that the point to be debated
is, whether he had any right to gather, or mix his labor
with that, which, by the hypothesis, previously belonged
to mankind at large. The reasoning used in the last
chapter to prove that no amount of labor, bestowed by
an individual upon a part of the earth's surface, can nul-
lify the title of Society to that part, might be similarly
employed to show that no one can, by the mere act of
appropriating to himself any wild unclaimed animal or
fruit, supersede the joint claims of other men to it. It
may be quite true that the labor a man expends in
catching or gathering, gives him a better right to the
thing caught or gathered, than any one other man; but
the question at issue is, whether by labor so expended,
he has made his right to the thing caught or gathered,
greater than the pre-existing rights of all other men put
34 DECLARATION.
together. And unless he can prove that he has done this,
his title to possession cannot be admitted as a matter of
right, but can be conceded only on the ground of com-
We]]I6]] Cé.
Further difficulties are suggested by the qualification,
that the claim to any article of property thus obtained,
is valid only “when there is enough and as good left in
common for others.” A condition like this gives birth
to such a host of queries, doubts, and limitations, as
practically to neutralize the general proposition entirely.
It may be asked, for example — How is it to be known
that enough is “left in common for others” 7 Who can
determine whether what remains is “as good" as what
is taken 2 How if the remnant is less accessible 2 If
there is not enough “left in common for others,” how
must the right of appropriation be exercised ? Why, in
such case, does the mixing of labor with the acquired
object, cease to “exclude the common right of other
men " ? Supposing enough to be attainable, but not all
equally good, by what rule must each man choose ? Out
of which inquisition it seems impossible to liberate the
alleged right, without such mutilations as to render it,
in an ethical point of view, entirely valueless.
Thus, as already hinted, we find, that the circum-
stances of savage life, render the principles of abstract
morality inapplicable; for it is impossible, under ante-
social conditions, to determine the rightness or wrong-
ness of certain actions by an exact measurement of the
amount of freedom assumed by the parties concerned.
We must not expect, therefore, that the right of prop-
erty can be satisfactorily based upon the premises afforded
by such a state of existence.
§ 2. But, under the system of land-tenure pointed
out in the last chapter, as the only one that is consistent
with the equal claims of all men to the use of the earth,
these difficulties disappear; and the right of property
obtains a legitimate foundation. We have seen that,
without any infraction of the law of equal freedom, an
individual may lease from society a given surface of soil,
by agreeing to pay in return a stated amount of the pro-
duce he obtains from that soil. We found that, in doing
this, he does no more than what every other man is
“SOCIAL STATICs” — THE RIGHT OF PROPERTY. 35
equally free with himself to do — that each has the same
power with himself to become the tenant — and that the
rent he pays accrues alike to all. Having thus hired a
tract of land from his fellow-men, for a given period,
for understood purposes, and on specified terms — hav-
ing thus obtained, for a time, the exclusive use of that
land by a definite agreement with its owners, it is mani-
fest that an individual may, without any infringement
of the rights of others, appropriate to himself that por-
tion of produce which remains after he has paid to man-
kind the promised rent. He has now, to use Locke's
expression, “mixed his labor with ” certain products of
the earth; and his claim to them is in this case valid,
because he obtained the consent of society before so ex-
pending his labor; and having fulfilled the condition
which society imposed in giving that consent — the pay-
ment of rent — society, to fulfil its part of the agree-
ment, must acknowledge his title to that surplus which
remains after the rent has been paid. “Provided you
deliver to us a stated share of the produce which by culti-
vation you can obtain from this piece of land, we give
you the exclusive use of the remainder of that produce : ”
these are the words of the contract; and in virtue of
this contract, the tenant may equitably claim the sup-
plementary share as his private property: may so claim
it without any disobedience to the law of equal free-
dom; and has therefore a right so to claim it.
Any doubt that may be felt as to the fact that this is
a logical deduction from our first principle, that every
man has freedom to do all that he wills provided he in-
fringes not the equal freedom of any other man, may be
readily cleared up by comparing the respective degrees
of freedom assumed in such a case by the occupier and
the members of society with whom he bargains. As
was shown in the preceding chapter, if the public alto-
gether deprive any individual of the use of the earth,
they allow him less liberty than they themselves claim ;
and by so breaking the law of equal freedom, commit a
wrong. If, conversely, an individual usurps a given
portion of the earth, to which, as we have seen, all other
men have as good a title as himself, he breaks the law by
assuming more liberty than the rest. But when an in-
dividual holds land as a tenant of society, a balance is
36 DECLARATION.
maintained between these extremes, and the claims of
both parties are respected. A price is paid by the one,
for a certain privilege granted by the other. By the
fact of the agreement being made, it is shown that such
price and privilege are considered to be equivalents.
The lessor and the lessee have both, within the pre-
scribed limits, done that which they willed : the one in
letting a certain holding for a specified sum ; the other
in agreeing to give that sum. And so long as this con-
tract remains intact, the law of equal freedom is duly
observed. If, however, any of the prescribed conditions
be not fulfilled, the law is necessarily broken, and the
parties are involved in one of the predicaments above
named. If the tenant refuses to pay the rent, then he
tacitly lays claim to the exclusive use and benefit of the
land he occupies — practically asserts that he is the sole
owner of its produce; and consequently violates the
law, by assuming a greater share of freedom than the
rest of mankind. If, on the other hand, society take
from the tenant that portion of the fruits obtained by the
culture of his farm which remains with him after the
payment of rent, they virtually deny him the use of
the earth entirely (for by the use of the earth we mean
the use of its products), and in so doing, claim for them-
selves a greater share of liberty than they allow him.
Clearly, therefore, this surplus produce equitably re-
mains with the tenant : society cannot take it without
trespassing upon his freedom ; he can take it without
trespassing on the freedom of Society. And as, accord-
ing to the law, he is free to do all that he wills, provided
he infringes not the equal freedom of any other, he is
free to take possession of such surplus as his property.
§ 3. The doctrine that all men have equal rights to
the use of the earth, does indeed, at first sight, seem to
countenance a species of social organization at variance
with that from which the right of property has just
been deduced; an organization, namely, in which the
public, instead of letting out the land to individual
members of their body, shall retain it in their own
hands; cultivate it by joint-stock agency; and share the
produce : in fact, what is usually termed Socialism or
Communism.
“SOCIAL STATICS”—THE RIGHT OF PROPERTY. 37
Plausible though it may be, such a scheme is not capa-
ble of realization in strict conformity with the moral
law. Of the two forms under which it may be pre-
sented, the one is ethically imperfect; and the other,
although correct in theory, is impracticable.
Thus, if an equal portion of the earth's produce is
awarded to every man, irrespective of the amount or
quality of the labor he has contributed toward the
obtainment of that produce, a breach of equity is com-
mitted. Our first principle requires, not that all shall
have like shares of the things which minister to the
gratification of the faculties, but that all shall have like
freedom to pursue those things — shall have like scope.
It is one thing to give to each an opportunity of acquir-
ing the objects he desires; it is another, and quite a dif-
ferent thing, to give the objects themselves, no matter
whether due endeavor has or has not been made to
obtain them. The one we have seen to be the primary
law of the Divine scheme ; the other, by interfering
with the ordained connection between desire and gratifi-
cation, shows its disagreement with that scheme. Nay
more, it necessitates an absolute violation of the prin-
ciple of equal freedom. For when we assert the entire
liberty of each, bounded only by the like liberty of all,
we assert that each is free to do whatever his desires
dictate, within the prescribed limits — that each is free,
therefore, to claim for himself all those gratifications,
and sources of gratification, attainable by him within
those limits — all those gratifications, and sources of
gratification, which he can procure without trespassing
upon the spheres of action of his neighbors. If, there-
fore, out of many starting with like fields of activity,
one obtains, by his greater strength, greater ingenuity,
or greater application, more gratification and sources of
gratification than the rest, and does this without in any
way trenching upon the equal freedom of the rest, the
moral law assigns him an exclusive right to all those
extra gratifications and sources of gratification; nor can
the rest take from him without claiming for themselves
greater liberty of action than he claims, and thereby
violating that law. Whence it follows, that an equal
apportionment of the fruits of the earth amongst all, is
not consistent with pure justice.
38 T) ECLARATION.
If, on the other hand, each is to have allotted to him a
share of produce proportionate to the degree in which
ho has aided production, the proposal, whilst it is
abstractedly just, is no longer practicable. Were all
men cultivators of the soil, it would perhaps be possible
to form an approximate estimate of their several claims.
But to ascertain the respective amounts of help given
by different kinds of mental and bodily laborers, toward
procuring the general stock of the necessaries of life, is
an utter impossibility. We have no means of making
such a division save that afforded by the law of supply
and demand, and this means the hypothesis excludes.”
§ 4. An argument fatal to the communist theory, is
suggested by the fact, that a desire for property is one
of the elements of our nature. Repeated allusion has
been made to the admitted truth, that acquisitiveness is
an unreasoning impulse quite distinct from the desires
whose gratifications property secures — an impulse that
is often obeyed at the expense of those desires. And if
a propensity to personal acquisition be really a com-
ponent of man’s constitution, then that cannot be a right
form of society which affords it no scope. Socialists do
indeed allege that private appropriation is an abuse of
this propensity, whose normal function, they say, is to
impel us to accumulate for the benefit of the public at
large. But in thus attempting to escape from one diffi-
culty, they do but entangle themselves in another. Such
an explanation overlooks the fact that the use and abuse
of a faculty (whatever the etymology of the words may
imply) differ only in degree; whereas their assumption
is, that they differ in kind. Gluttony is an abuse of the
desire for food; timidity, an abuse of the feeling which
in moderation produces prudence; servility, an abuse of
the sentiment that generates respect; obstimacy, of that
from which firmness springs: in all of which cases we
find that the legitimate manifestations differ from the
illegitimate ones, merely in quantity, and not in quality.
So also with the instinct of accumulation. It may be
quite true that its dictates have been, and still are, fol-
lowed to an absurd excess; but it is also true that no
1. These inferences do not at all militate against joint-stock systems of pro-
duction and living, which are in all probability what Socialism prophesies.
“SOCIAL STATICs "--THE RIGHT OF PROPERTY. 39
change in the state of society will alter its nature and
its office. To whatever extent moderated, it must still
be a desire for personal acquisition. Whence it follows
that a system affording opportunity for its exercise must
ever be retained ; which means, that the system of pri-
vate property must be retained ; and this presupposes
a right of private property, for by right we mean that
which harmonizes with the human constitution as
divinely ordained.
§ 5. There is, however, a still more awkward dilemma
into which M. Proudhon and his party betray them-
selves. For if, as they assert, “all property is robbery”
—if no one can equitably become the exclusive pos-
sessor of any article — or as we say, obtain a right to it,
then, amongst other consequences, it follows, that a man
can have no right to the things he consumes for food. .
And if these are not his before eating them, how can
they become his at all ? As Locke asks, “when do they
begin to be his 2 when he digests 2 or when he eats 2 or
when he boils 2 or when he brings them home 2 " If no
previous acts can make them his property, neither can
any process of assimilation do it ; not even their absorp-
tion into the tissues. Wherefore, pursuing the idea, we
arrive at the curious conclusion, that as the whole of his
bones, muscles, skin, etc., have been thus built up from
nutriment not belonging to him, a man has no property
in his own flesh and blood — can have no valid title to
himself — has no more claim to his own limbs than he
has to the limbs of another — and has as good a right to
his neighbor’s body as to his own | Did we exist after
the same fashion as those compound polyps, in which a
number of individuals are based upon a living trunk
common to them all, such a theory would be rational
enough. But until Communism can be carried to that
extent, it will be best to stand by the old doctrine.
§ 6. Further argument appears to be unnecessary.
We have seen that the right of property is deducible
from the law of equal freedom — that it is presupposed
by the human constitution — and that its denial involves
absurdities.
Were it not that we shall frequently have to refer to
40 DECLARATION.
the fact hereafter, it would be scarcely needful to show
that the taking away another's property is an infringe-
ment of the law of equal freedom, and is therefore
wrong. If A appropriates to himself something belong-
ing to B, one of two things must take place: either B
does the like to A, or he does not. If A has no prop-
erty, or if his property is inaccessible to B, B has evi-
dently no opportunity of exercising equal freedom with
A, by claiming from him something of like value; and
A has therefore assumed a greater share of freedom than
he allows B, and has broken the law. If again, A’s
property is open to B, and A permits B to use like free-
dom with himself by taking an equivalent, there is no
violation of the law; and the affair practically becomes
one of barter. But such a transaction will never take
place save in theory; for A has no motive to appropriate
B’s property with the intention of letting B take an
equivalent: seeing that if he really means to let B have
what B thinks an equivalent, he will prefer to make the
exchange by consent in the ordinary way. The only
case simulating this, is one in which A takes from B a
thing that B does not wish to part with ; that is, a thing
for which A can give B nothing that B thinks an equiv-
alent; and as the amount of gratification which B has
in the possession of this thing, is the measure of its
value to him, it follows that if A cannot give B a thing
which affords B equal gratification, or in other words
what he thinks an equivalent, then A has taken from
B what affords A satisfaction, but does not return to B
what affords B satisfaction; and has therefore broken
the law by assuming the greater share of freedom.
Wherefore we find it to be a logical deduction from the
law of equal freedom, that no man can rightfully take
property from another against his will.
There is in this, it will be observed, no modification
whatever of the strenuous assertion in Chapter IX.
of the equal, natural and inalienable right of all men
to the use of land. On the contrary, so strongly,
so uncompromisingly, does Mr. Spencer insist on the
ethical invalidity of private property in land that
“SOCIAL STATICs " —THE RIGHT OF PROPERTY. 41
he makes the formal consent of the community and
the payment of rent to it a condition precedent to the
individual right of property in things produced by
labor. And, since no formal consent of this kind
can be given until society has been well organized, he
even goes to the length of denying that there can
be any full right of property, or, indeed, any applica-
tion of the principles of abstract morality, in any
social condition lower than the civilized.
In brief, the argument of this chapter is —
1. That the right of the individual to his labor
does not give individual property in the product
of labor, because labor can produce only by using
land, which does not belong to any individual, but
to all. :
2. But under the system of land-tenure previously
set forth as the only just one, in which the organized
society assigns the use of a portion of land to an in-
dividual and collects rent from him for it, the con-
ditions of the equal liberty of all are complied with,
and the individual acquires a right of property in
what remains of the product of his labor after paying
I'ent.
3. This system, under which the social organization
would let land to individuals and collect rent from
them, does not countenance the system under which
it would carry on production and divide the product
among its members, since, the powers and application
of men being different, this would give to some more
than they are entitled to, and to others less.
4. This communistic or socialistic system is also
condemned by the natural desire to acquire individual
property.
42 DECLARATION.
5. The denial of individual property may be
brought into the awkward dilemma of a denial of
the right of the individual to himself.
6. The right of property having thus been estab-
lished, the appropriation by one of property belonging
to another is a denial of the law of equal freedom.
CHAPTER IV.
MR. SPENCER'S CONFUSION AS TO RIGHTS.
MY purpose in quoting Chapter X. is to show what
were the views on the land question expressed by
Mr. Spencer in “Social Statics.” It may, however,
be worth while, in passing, to clear up the confusion
in which he here entangles the right to the products
of labor with the right to land. This confusion he
has not yet escaped from, as it is still to be seen in
his latest book, “Justice,” where, though evidently
anxious to minimize the land question, he still as-
sumes that to justify the right of property in things
produced from nature the consent of all men must be
obtained or inferred.
Nor is it the right of property alone that is
thus confused. Mr. Spencer really puts himself
in the same dilemma that, in Section 5, he pro-
poses to Proudhon ; for if, as in this chapter he
asserts, no one can equitably become the exclusive
possessor of any natural substance or product
until the joint rights of all the rest of mankind
have been made over to him by some species of
Quit claim —
Then amongst other consequences, it follows that a
man can have no right to the things he consumes for
food. And if these are not his before eating them, how
44 DECLARATION.
can they become his at all ? As Locke asks, “when do
they begin to be his 2 when he digests 2 or when he
eats 2 or when he boils 2 or when he brings them
home 2 " If no previous acts can make them his prop-
erty, neither can any process of assimilation do it; not
even in their absorption into the tissues. Wherefore,
pursuing the idea, we arrive at the curious conclusion,
that, as the whole of his bones, muscles, skin, etc., have
thus been built up from nutriment not belonging to
him, a man has no property in himself — has no more
claim to his own limbs than he has to the limbs of
another—and has as good a right to his neighbor's
body as to his own.
The fact is, that without noticing the change, Mr.
Spencer has dropped the idea of equal rights to land,
and taken up in its stead a different idea — that of
joint rights to land. That there is a difference may
be seen at once. For joint rights may be and often
are unequal rights.
The matter is an important one, as it is the source
of a great deal of popular confusion. I.et me, there-
fore, explain it fully.
When men have equal rights to a thing, as for
instance, to the rooms and appurtenances of a club of
which they are members, each has a right to use all
or any part of the thing that no other one of them is
using. It is only where there is use or some indica-
tion of use by one of the others that even politeness
dictates such a phrase as “Allow me !” or “If you
please !”
But where men have joint rights to a thing, as for
instance, to a sum of money held to their joint credit,
then the consent of all the others is required for the
use of the thing or of any part of it, by any one of
them.
MR. SPENCER's CONFUSION AS TO RIGHTS. 45
Now, the rights of men to the use of land are not
joint rights: they are equal rights.
Were there only one man on earth, he would have
a right to the use of the whole earth or any part of
the earth.
When there is more than one man on earth, the
right to the use of land that any one of them would
have, were he alone, is not abrogated: it is only lim-
ited. The right of each to the use of land is still a
direct, original right, which he holds of himself, and
not by the gift or consent of the others; but it has
become limited by the similar rights of the others,
and is therefore an equal right. His right to use the
earth still continues; but it has become, by reason of
this limitation, not an absolute right to use any part
of the earth, but (1) an absolute right to use any
part of the earth as to which his use does not conflict
with the equal rights of others (i.e., which no one
else wants to use at the same time), and (2) a co-equal
right to the use of any part of the earth which he
and others may want to use at the same time.
It is, thus, only where two or more men want to
use the same land at the same time that equal rights
to the use of land come in conflict, and the adjust-
ment of society becomes necessary.
If we keep this idea of equal rights in mind — the
idea, namely, that the rights are the first thing, and
the equality merely their limitation — we shall have
no difficulty. It is through forgetting this that Mr.
Spencer has been led into confusion.
In Chapter IX., “The Right to the Use of the
Earth,” he correctly apprehends and states the right
to the use of land as an equal right. He says:
46 DECLARATION.
Each of them is free to use the earth for the satisfac-
tion of his wants,
Provided he allows all others the same liberty.
Here, in the first clause, is the primary right; in
the second clause, the proviso or limitation.
But in the next chapter, “The Right of Property,”
he has, seemingly without noticing it himself, substi-
tuted for the idea of equal rights to land the idea of
joint rights to land. He says (Section 1):
No amount of labor bestowed by an individual upon a
part of the earth's surface can nullify the title of society
to that part, . . . no one can, by the mere act of appro-
priating to himself any wild, unclaimed animal or fruit,
supersede the joint claims of other men to it. It may be
quite true that the labor a man expends in catching or
gathering, gives him a better right to the thing caught
or gathered, than any one other man ; but the question
at issue is, whether by labor so expended he has made
his right to the thing caught or gathered, greater than
the pre-existing rights of all other men put together.
And unless he can prove that he has done this, his title
to possession cannot be admitted as a matter of right,
but can be conceded only on the ground of convenience.
Here the primary right—the right by which “each
of them is free to use the earth for the satisfaction
of his wants’’ — has been dropped out of sight, and
the mere proviso has been swelled into the importance
of the primary right, and has taken its place.
What Mr. Spencer here asserts, without noticing
his change of position, is not that the rights of men
to the use of land are equal rights, but that they are
joint rights. And, from this careless shifting of
ground, he is led, not only into hypercritical ques-
tioning of Locke's derivation of the right of property,
MR. SPENCER's CONFUSION AS TO RIGHTS. 47
but into the assumption that a man can have no right
to the wild berries he has gathered on an untrodden
prairie, unless he can prove the consent of all other
men to his taking them. This reductio ad absurdum
is a deduction from the idea of joint rights to land,
whereas the deduction from the equality of rights to
land would be that under such circumstances a man
would have a right to take all the berries he wanted,
and that all other men together would have no right
to forbid him. Indeed, so great is Mr. Spencer's con-
fusion, and so utterly unable does he become to as-
sume a clear and indisputable right of property, that
he has to cut the knot into which he has tangled the
subject, and finds no escape but in the preposterous
declaration that the dictates of ethics have no appli-
cation to, and do not exist in, any social state except
that of the highest civilization.
Locke was not in error. The right of property
in things produced by labor — and this is the only
true right of property — springs directly from the
right of the individual to himself, or as Locke ex-
presses it, from his “property in his own person.”
It is as clear and has as fully the sanction of equity
in any savage state as in the most elaborate civiliza-
tion. Labor can, of course, produce nothing without
land; but the right to the use of land is a primary
individual right, not springing from society, or de-
pending on the consent of society, either expressed
or implied, but inhering in the individual, and result-
ing from his presence in the world. Men must have
rights before they can have equal rights. Each man
has a right to use the world because he is here and
wants to use the world. The equality of this right
48 DECLARATION.
is merely a limitation arising from the presence of
others with like rights. Society, in other words, does
not grant, and cannot equitably withhold from any
individual, the right to the use of land. That right
exists before society and independently of society,
belonging at birth to each individual, and ceasing
only with his death. Society itself has no original
right to the use of land. What right it has with
regard to the use of land is simply that which is
derived from and is necessary to the determination
of the rights of the individuals who compose it.
That is to say, the function of society with regard to
the use of land only begins where individual rights
clash, and is to secure equality between these clash-
ing rights of individuals.
What Locke meant, or at least the expression that
will give full and practical form to his idea, is simply
this: That the equal right to life involves the equal
right to the use of natural materials; that, conse-
quently, any one has a right to the use of such natural
opportunities as may not be wanted by any one else;
and that the result of his labor, so expended, does of
right become his individual property against all the
world. For, where one man wants to use a natural
opportunity that no one else wants to use, he has a
right to do so, which springs from and is attested by
the fact of his existence. This is an absolute, un-
limited right, so long and in so far as no one else
wants to use the same natural opportunity. Then,
but not till then, it becomes limited by the similar
rights of others. Thus no question of the right of
any one to use any natural opportunity can arise
until more than one man wants to use the same
MR. SPENCER's CONFUSION AS TO RIGHTS. 49
natural opportunity. It is only then that any
question of this right, any need for the action of
society in the adjustment of equal rights to land,
can come up.
Thus, instead of there being no right of property
until society has so far developed that all land has
been properly appraised and rented for terms of
years, an absolute right of property in the things
produced by labor exists from the beginning —is
coeval with the existence of man.
In the right of each man to himself, and his right
to use the world, lies the sure basis of the right of
property. This Locke saw — just as the first man
must have seen it. But Mr. Spencer, confused by
a careless substitution of terms, has lost his grasp on
the right of property and has never since recovered it.
Getting rid of the idea of joint rights we see that
the task of securing, in an advanced and complex
civilization, the equal rights of all to the use of land
is much simpler and easier than Mr. Spencer and the
land nationalizationists suppose ; that it is not neces-
sary for society to take land and rent it out. For so
long as only one man wants to use a natural opportu-
nity it has no value; but as soon as two or more want
to use the same natural opportunity, a value arises.
Hence, any question as to the adjustment of equal
rights to the use of land occurs only as to valuable
land ; that is to say, land that has a value irrespective
of the value of any improvements in or on it. As to
land that has no value, or to use the economic phrase,
bears no rent, whoever may choose to use it has not
only an equitable title to all that his labor may pro-
duce from it, but society cannot justly call on him
50 I) ECLARATION.
for any payment for the use of it. As to land that
has a value, or, to use the economic phrase in the
economic meaning, bears rent, the principle of equal
freedom requires only that this value, or economic
rent, be turned over to the community. Hence the
formal appropriation and renting out of land by the
community is not necessary: it is only necessary
that the holder of valuable land should pay to the
community an equivalent of the ground value, or eco-
nomic rent; and this can be assured by the simple
means of collecting an assessment in the form of a
tax on the value of land, irrespective of improve-
ments in or on it.
In this way all members of the community are
placed on equal terms with regard to natural oppor-
tunities that offer greater advantages than those any
one member of the community is free to use, and
are consequently sought by more than one of those
having equal rights to use the land. And, since the
value of land arises from competition and is constantly
fixed by competition, the question of who shall use
this superior land desired by more than one is virtu-
ally decided by competition, which settles clashing
individual desires by determining at once both who
shall be accorded the use of the superior land, and
who will make the most productive use of it. In
this way all, including the user of the superior natural
opportunity, obtain their equal shares of the superi-
ority, by the taking of its value for their common
uses; while all the difficulties of state rental of land
and of determining and settling for the value of im-
provements are avoided. This is the single tax
System.
CHAPTER W. .
MR. SPENCER'S CONFUSION AS TO VALUE.
IT seems strange that a man who has touched on
so many branches of knowledge, and written so
largely on sociology, should even to this time have
neglected the primary principles of political economy.
But the failure to distinguish between equal rights
and joint rights, which has so confused Mr. Spencer,
is allied with a failure to comprehend the nature of
rent. In “Social Statics " he assumes that all land
ought to pay rent to the state, and on this assump-
tion, joined with and perhaps giving rise to his trans-
mutation of equal rights into joint rights, he bases
important conclusions as to the right of property.
In his latest book, “Justice,” he is not only no clearer
in this but shows plainly — what in “Social Statics”
is only to be surmised — his failure to appreciate the
nature of the fundamental economic concept—value.
Thus, in the chapter in “Justice ’’ entitled “The
Right of Property,” he speaks (Section 55) of weap-
ons, instruments, dress and decorations as “things in
which the value given by labor bears a specially large
relation to the value of the raw material,” and thus
continues:
When with such articles we join huts, which, however,
being commonly made by the help of fellow men who
receive reciprocal aid, are thus less distinctly products
52 I) ECLARATION.
of an individual’s labor, we have named about all the
things in which, at first, the worth given by effort is
great in comparison with the inherent worth ; for the
inherent worth of the wild food gathered or caught is
more obvious than the worth of the effort spent in obtain-
ing it. And this is doubtless the reason why, in the
rudest Societies, the right of property is more definite in
respect of personal belongings than in respect of other
things.
Passing the queer notion that things made by two
or more men are less distinctly products of an indi-
vidual’s labor than things made by one man, we have
here the idea that there is an inherent value in the
materials and spontaneous products of nature — i.e.,
land in the economic category — a value underived
from labor and independent of it. The slightest
acquaintance with economic literature, the slightest
attempt to analyze the meaning of the term, would
have shown Mr. Spencer the preposterousness of this
idea.
The word “value” in English speech has two
meanings. One is that of usefulness or utility, as
when we speak of the value of the ocean to man,
the value of fresh air, the value of the compass in
navigation, the value of the stethescope in the diag-
nosis of disease, the value of the antiseptic treatment
in surgery; or, when having in mind the intrinsic
merits of the mental production itself, its quality of
usefulness to the reader or to the public, we speak of
the value of a book. In this sense of utility there
*8 inherent worth or intrinsic value — a quality or
qualities belonging to the thing itself, which give it
usefulness to man.
The other sense of the word “value” — the sense
MR. SPENCER's CONFUSION AS TO VALUE. 53
in which Mr. Spencer uses it when he says that the
value given by labor bears a specially large ratio to
the value of the raw materials, or when, later on, he
substitutes the word “worth '' as synonymous in such
use for “value” — is that of exchangeability. In this
sense value or worth means not utility, not any
quality inhering in the thing itself, but a quality
which gives to the possession of a thing the power of
obtaining other things in return for it or for its use.
Thus we speak of the value of gold as greater than
that of iron; of a book bound in cloth as being more
valuable than a book bound in paper; of the value
of a copyright or a patent; of the lessening in the
value of steel by the Bessemer process, or in that of
aluminium by the improvements in extraction now
going on.
Value in this sense — the usual sense — is purely
relative. It exists from and is measured by the
power of obtaining things for things by exchan-
ging them. It is therefore absurd to speak in this
sense of inherent worth or intrinsic value. Air has
the intrinsic quality of utility, or value in use, to
the very highest degree; for without an abundant
supply of it we could not live a minute. But air has
no value whatever in the sense of value in exchange.
We speak of a man of worth, or a worthy man, when
we mean a man whose inherent qualities entitle him
to esteem; but, when we speak of a man who is
worth so and so much, or of a wealthy man, we speak
of him in certain external relations, purely relative,
which give him the power of obtaining things by
exchange. A worthy man may retain his worthi-
ness through all changes of external conditions; but
54 DECLARATION.
a wealthy man is in this the creature of external con-
ditions: the same man, in nothing changed, may
through external circumstances be wealthy to-day
and poverty-stricken to-morrow.
Now, what gives to anything the quality of ex-
changeability for other things — the quality of worth
in exchange, or value 2 — for, having explained the
other sense of the word “value,” I will in subsequent
use confine it to its common and proper sense, that of
value in exchange.
That a thing has value, and may be exchanged for
other things, is not because of its weight, or color,
or divisibility, or any other quality inherent in the
thing itself. Nor yet is it because of its utility to
man. Utility is necessary to value, for nothing can
be valuable unless it has the quality of gratifying
some physical or mental desire of man, though it be
but a fancy or whim. But utility of itself does not
give value. Air, which has the highest utility, has
no value, while diamonds, which have very little
utility, have great value.
If we ask ourselves the reason of such variations
in the quality of value; if we inquire what is the
attribute or condition concurring with the presence,
absence, or degree of value attaching to anything —
we see that things having some form of utility or
desirability, are valuable or not valuable, as they are
hard or easy to get. And, if we ask further, we may
see that with most of the things that have value this
difficulty or ease of getting them, which determines
value, depends on the amount of labor which must
be expended in producing them; i.e., bringing them
into the place, form and condition in which they are
MR. SPENCER's CONFUSION AS TO VALUE. 55
desired. Thus air, which is of the highest utility,
since it is at every instant necessary to our existence,
can be had without labor. It is the substance of
that ocean, enveloping the surface of the globe, in
which we are constantly immersed. So far from
requiring labor to get it, it forces itself upon us,
requiring labor, when we are so disposed, to keep it
away. Hence air, in spite of its high utility, has no
value. Large and pure diamonds, on the contrary,
since they are found only in few places and require
much search and toil to get, can be had only with
great labor. Hence, although they have very low
utility, since they gratify only the sense of beauty
and the desire for ostentation, they have very high
value. Thus gold, weight for weight, is more valu-
able than silver, and much more valuable than iron,
simply because it requires on the average more labor
to get a given quantity of gold than to get the same
quantity of silver, and much more than to get the
same quantity of iron. 9 &
That as to such things as these the quality of
value is derived from the labor required to produce
them; and that, consequently, as to them at least,
there is no such thing as inherent value — becomes
clearer still when we consider how their value is
affected by the increase or decrease of the require-
ment for labor.
Iron as compared to gold used to be much more
valuable than it is now. Why? Because improved
processes in smelting have lessened the labor of pro-
ducing it. A few years since aluminium was more
valuable than gold, because it took more labor to get
it. Labor-saving improvements have already lowered
56 DECLARATION.
the value of aluminium to less than that of silver,
and little more than that of copper; and it is alto-
gether likely that continued improvement will ere
long bring it to that of iron. So the value of steel
has been greatly lessened by the introduction of the
Bessemer and other processes. So the value of
beaver skins, of whalebone, of ivory, etc., has been
increased by the growing scarcity of the animals
from which they are derived, and the greater labor
needed to obtain them. So, too, the improvement in
transportation has lessened the value of things where
it was a considerable item in the labor required for
their production. And so, too, customs duties and
other indirect taxes add to the value of things on
which they fall, because their effect is to increase the
amount of labor required to get such things.
It is thus seen, with regard at least to the greater
number of valuable things, that there cannot be
inherent or intrinsic value; and that value is simply
an expression of the labor required for the production
of such a thing. But there are some things as to
which this is not so clear. Land is not produced by
labor; yet land, irrespective of any improvements
that labor has made on it, often has value. And so
value frequently attaches to the forms of the eco-
nomic term “land’’ that we commonly speak of as
natural products, such as trees in their natural state,
ore in the vein, stone or marble in the quarry, or
sand or gravel in the bed.
Yet a little examination will show that such facts
are but exemplifications of the general principle, just
as the rise of a balloon and the fall of a stone both
exemplify the universal law of gravitation.
MR. SPENCER's CONFUSION AS TO VALUE. 57
To illustrate: Let us suppose a man accidentally
to stumble on a diamond. Without the expenditure
of labor, for his effort has been merely that of stoop-
ing down to pick it up, an action in itself a gratifi-
cation of curiosity, he has here a great value. But
what causes this value 2 Clearly, it springs from the
fact that, as a rule, to get such a diamond will require
much expenditure of labor. If any one could pick
up diamonds as easily as in this case, diamonds would
have no value.
Or, here is a grove of natural trees, which, as they
stand, and before the touch of labor, have a consider-
able value, so that a lumberman will gladly pay for
the privilege of cutting them. But has not this value
the same cause as in the case of the diamond — the
fact that to get such lumber ordinarily (or to speak
exactly, to get the last amount of such lumber that
the existing demand requires) the lumberman must
go so far that the cost of transportation will equal
what he is willing to pay for these trees 2
In the naturally wooded sections of the United
States trees had at first not merely no value, but
were deemed an incumbrance, to get rid of which the
settler had to incur the labor of felling and burning.
Then lumber had no value except the cost of work-
ing it up after it had been felled; for the work of
felling had for object the getting rid of the tree. But
soon, as clearing proceeded, the desire to get rid of
trees so far slackened, as compared with the desire to
get lumber, that trees were felled simply for the
purpose of getting the lumber. Then the value of
lumber increased, for the labor of felling trees had to
be added to it; but trees themselves had as yet no
58 DECLARATION.
value. As clearing still proceeded and the demand
for lumber grew with growing population, it became
necessary to go farther and farther to get trees.
Then transportation began to be a perceptible ele-
ment in the labor of getting lumber, and trees that
had been left standing began to have a value, since
by using them the labor of transportation would be
saved. And, as the requirement for lumber has com-
pelled the lumbermen to go farther and farther, the
value of the trees remaining has increased. But this
value is not inherent in the trees: it is a value hav-
ing its basis in labor, and representing a saving of
labor that must otherwise be incurred. The reason
that the tree at such place has a value is, that obtain-
ing it there secures the same result as would the
labor of transporting a similar amount of lumber
from the greater distance to which resort must be
made to satisfy the demand for lumber.
And so with the value which attaches to ore
or sand or gravel. Such value is always relative
to the labor required to obtain such things from
points of greater distance or of less abundant de-
posits, to which in the existing demand resort is
necessary.
We thus see the cause and nature of land values,
or, to use the economic term, of rent. No matter
how fertile it may be, no matter what other desirable
quality it may have, land has no value until, whether
by reason of quality or location, the relation between
it and the most advantageous land to which labor
may have free access gives to its use an advantage
equivalent to the saving of labor. Or, to state in
another way that accepted theory which is sometimes
MR. SPENCER's CONFUSION AS TO VALUE. 59
styled Ricardo's theory of rent, and which John
Stuart Mill called the pons asinorum of political
economy: it is, that the rent of land is determined
by the excess of the produce it will yield over that
which the same application can obtain from the least
productive land in use.
To grasp this principle is to see that land has no
inherent value; that value can never attach to all
land, but only to some land, and may arise on par-
ticular land either by reason of production being
extended to inferior land, or by reason of the devel-
opment of superior productiveness in special local-
ities.
Thus the phenomena of value are at bottom illus-
trations of one principle. The value of everything
produced by labor, from a pound of chalk or a paper
of pins to the elaborate structure and appurtenances
of a first-class ocean steamer, is resolvable on analy-
sis into an equivalent of the labor required to repro-
duce such a thing in form and place; while the value
of things not produced by labor, but nevertheless
susceptible of ownership, is, in the same way, resolv-
able into an equivalent of the labor which the owner-
ship of such a thing enables the owner to obtain or
Så Ve.
The reason why in rude societies value attaches
mainly or wholly to things produced by labor, and
there is little or no value to land — or, to use Mr.
Spencer's phrase, “the reason why in the rudest
societies the right of property is more definite in
respect of personal belongings than in respect of
other things” — is not, as he puts it, that weapons,
implements, dress, decorations, and huts are “about
60 DECLARATION.
all the things in which, at first, the worth given by
effort is great in comparison with the inherent worth;
for the inherent worth of the wild food gathered or
caught is more obvious than the worth of the effort
spent in obtaining it.” It is that labor products
always cost effort, and hence have value from the
first; while land costs no effort, and in such societies
the growth of population and the development of the
arts have as yet attached little or no special advan-
tages to the use of particular pieces of land, which at
a later stage are equivalent to a saving of effort.
Thus, in the absence of the artificial scarcity pro-
duced by monopoly, land of practically like quality
is easy to obtain and has no value.
For in a sparse population and a rude state of
the arts, those differences in productiveness between
particular pieces of land, which are so marked in
our great cities that land on one side of a street may
have twice the value of land on the other side, do
not exist. Even differences in the original qualities
of land, that with us give rise to enormous differences
in value, would, with the hunter or herdsman, or
even with the agriculturist, be of no moment. Who,
until production had passed even the agricultural
stage, could have imagined that in the soil of
Western Pennsylvania lurked differences that would
some time give to one spot a value hundreds of thou-
sand times greater than that of seemingly the same
kind of land around it; or that a narrow strip in
Nevada might be worth millions, while the land
about it was worth nothing at all? *
It is this confusion of Mr. Spencer as to rent and
value that has led him into confusion as to the
MR. SPENCER's CONFUSION AS TO VALUE. 61
right of property; and that, at first at least, pre-
vented him from seeing that to secure the equal
rights of men to land, it is not necessary that society
should take formal possession of land and let it out,
and, consequently, that the difficulties he anticipated
in taking possession of improved land were imaginary.
CHAPTER VI.
FROM “SOCIAL STATICS ’’ TO “POLITICAL INSTI-
TUTIONs.”
BUT the crudities and seeds of error in Mr.
Spencer's treatment of the land question in “Social
Statics” were of little moment beside its sterling
merit. It was a clear, and, if we except or explain
the one incongruous passage, an unfaltering assertion
of a moral truth of the first importance — a truth at
that time ignored. If Mr. Spencer had not mastered
all the details of its application, he had at least seen
and stated the fundamental principle that all men
have natural, equal and inalienable rights to the use
of land; that the right of ownership which justly
attaches to things produced by labor cannot attach to
land; that neither force, nor fraud, nor consent, nor
transfer, nor prescription can give validity to private
property in land; and that equal rights to land are
still valid, “all deeds, customs, and laws notwith-
standing,” and must remain valid “until it can be
demonstrated that God has given one charter of
privileges to one generation and another to the
next.”
He had, moreover, shown that the practical recog-
nition of these equal rights, even in the rude way he
proposed, involved no community of goods and noth-
ing like socialism or communism; but that it may be
“SOCIAL STATICs.” To “POLITICAL INSTITUTIONs.” 63
carried out in a way that “need cause no very serious
revolution in existing arrangements,” and would be
“consistent with the highest civilization.”
And this was in England, where the whole struc-
ture of society — social, political and industrial—
was based on and embedded in private ownership of
land, and in the year 1850, when, except by a few
“dreamers,” no one thought of making any distinc-
tion between property in land and property in other
things, and by the vast majority of men of all classes
and conditions private property in land was looked
on as something that always had existed, and, in the
nature of things, always must exist.
But beyond the warnings that this was no way
to success, which he doubtless received from friends,
there is no reason to think that this revolutionary
utterance of Mr. Spencer in “Social Statics'
brought him the slightest unpleasant remonstrance
at the time or for years after. If “Sir John and his
Grace”—by which phrase Mr. Spencer had personified
British landed interests — ever heard of the book, it
was to snore, rather than to swear. So long as they feel
secure, vested wrongs are tolerant of mere academic
questioning; for those who profit by them, being the
class of leisure and wealth, are also the class of lib-
eral education and tastes, and often find a pleasing
piquancy in radicalism that does not go beyond their
own circles. A clever sophist might freely declaim
in praise of liberty at the table of a Roman emperor,
Voltaire, Rousseau and the encyclopedists were the
fashionable fad in the drawing-rooms of the French
aristocracy. And at the beginning of this century,
and for years afterwards, a theoretical abolitionist,
64 DECLARATION.
provided he did not talk in the hearing of the serv-
ants, might freely express his opinion of slavery
among the cultured slaveholders of our Southern
states. Thomas Jefferson declared his detestation of
slavery, and, despite amendment, “writ large” his con-
demnation of it in the Declaration of Independence
itself. Yet that declaration was signed by slavehold-
ers and read annually by slaveholders, and Jefferson
himself never became unpopular with slaveholders.
But when the “underground railway ” got into oper-
ation; when Garrison and his colleagues came with
their demand for immediate, unconditional emancipa-
tion, then the feeling changed, and the climate of the
South began to grow hot for any one even suspected
of doubting the justice of the “peculiar institution.”
So it was with private property in land for over
thirty years after “Social Statics" was written. One
of the first to congratulate me on “Progress and Pov-
erty,” when only an author's edition of a few hundred
copies had been printed, and it seemed unlikely to
those who knew the small demand for works on eco-
nomic questions that there would ever be any more,
was a very large landowner. He told me that he had
been able freely to enjoy what he was pleased to term
the clear logic and graceful style of my book, because
he knew that it would only be read by a few philoso-
phers, and could never reach the masses or “do any
harm.”
For a long time this was the fate of Mr. Spencer's
declaration against private property in land. It
doubtless did good work, finding here and there a
mind where it bore fruit. But the question had not
passed beyond, and Mr. Spencer's book did not bring
“SOCIAL STATICs.” TO “POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS.” 65
it beyond, the point of extremely limited academic
discussion.
Though it brought Mr. Spencer the appreciation of
a narrow circle, and thus proved the beginning of his
literary career, “Social Statics” had but a small and
slow circulation. The first and only English edi-
tion, as is usual with books for which no large sale is
expected, was printed directly from type, without
making stereotype plates. As Mr. Spencer tells us
in the preface to his recent “revision and abridg-
ment,” it took some ten years to sell that, after which,
the sale not being enough to justify republication,
which, in the absence of stereotype plates, would have
involved the cost of setting up the type again, the
book went out of print in England, without having
attracted any general attention. This was but in the
nature of things; for the class that profits by any wrong
which affects the distribution of wealth must be the
wealthy class, and consequently the class whose views
dominate the existing organs of opinion. And until
recently private property in land has been the sacred
white elephant of English respectability, not even
to be named without a salaam. The conspiracy of
silence was therefore all that such a book could expect
until it began to make way among the masses, and
that neither the style of “Social Statics' nor the
price at which it was published was calculated for.
A similar fate to that which “Social Statics' met in
England befell a very similar book, covering much the
same ground – “The Theory of Human Progres-
sion,” by Patrick Edward Dove, published a little
before “Social Statics,” but in the same year, and
also asserting the equal right to the use of land.
66 DECLAIRATION.
While Dove is not so elaborate as Spencer, he is
clearer in distinctly disclaiming the idea of compen-
sation, and in proposing to take ground rent for
public purposes by taxation, abolishing all other
taxes. His book must have done some good work
on the minds it reached, but it passed out of print
and was practically forgotten.
“Social Statics,” however, had a happier fate in
passing over to the United States. Among those
early attracted by Mr. Spencer's writings was the
late Professor E. L. Youmans, who in 1861–62 sought
his acquaintance and entered into correspondence with
him. Professor Youmans's tireless energy, backed
by the resources of the strong publishing house of
D. Appleton & Co. of New York, with which he was
connected, was thenceforward devoted to the task of
popularizing Mr. Spencer and his teachings in the
United States. Through the efforts of Professor
Youmans, D. Appleton & Co. arranged with Mr.
Spencer for the publication of his books, and in
1864, making stereotype plates, they re-issued “Social
Statics,” and from that time forward kept it in print;
and as may be seen, both from the preface of 1877 in
their edition of “Social Statics” and from the preface
to the abridgment of 1892, such English demand as
existed was supplied by the sending-over of sheets
printed by them " — a more economical arrangement
than that of printing a book of small circulation on
* A number of years passed — some ten, I think — before the
edition was exhausted; and as the demand seemed not great
enough to warrant the setting up of type for a new edition, it was
decided to import an edition from America, where the work had
been stereotyped. After this had been disposed of a third edition
was similarly imported. — Preface to “Social Statics Abridged
and Revised,” 7892.
“SOCIAL STATICS ’’ TO “POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS.” 67
both sides of the Atlantic. Thus in a larger sphere
it continued to circulate, mainly in the United States
(where Mr. Spencer's reputation, aided by the active
work of Professor Youmans, grew first in popular
estimation), and to some small extent at least in
Great Britain. But the radical utterances on the land
question that it contained gave no evidence of attract-
ing active interest or passing for more than an aca-
demic opinion.
Between 1850 and 1882, during the greater part of
which time Mr. Spencer was engaged in developing
his evolution philosophy, nothing more that I am
aware of was heard from him on the land question.
But “Social Statics,” in the United States at least,
increased in circulation as Mr. Spencer's reputation
grew, and its declarations continued to stand for his
opinions without even a suggestion of change. Sev-
eral prefaces, or notes, were from time to time added,
but none indicating any modification of views with
regard to the land question. The last of these was
dated January 17, 1877. In this, certain changes in
Mr. Spencer's opinions as to teleological implications,
the political status of women, the useful effects of
war, etc., are noted, but there is no modification of the
radical utterances as to the tenure of land. On the
contrary, he says:
To the fundamental ethical principle expressing in its
abstract form what we know as justice I still adhere.
I adhere also to the derivative principles formulated in
what are commonly called personal rights, of this or that
special kind.
In “Political Institutions,” which, after some mag-
azine publications of chapters, was finally published
68 DECLARATION.
in book form in the early part of 1882, Mr. Spencer
again spoke of the tenure of land, and in a way that
would lead any one acquainted with his previous fuller
treatment of the subject to understand that he still
adhered to all that he had said in “Social Statics.”
“Political Institutions,” like the other divisions of
“The Principles of Sociology” to which it belongs, is
“in part a retrospect and in part a prospect.” First
explaining in accordance with his general theory how
social institutions have been evolved, Mr. Spencer
proceeds to indicate what he thinks will be the course
of their further evolution. In the chapter on “Prop-
erty,” after some pages of examination he says, (Sec-
tion 539):
Induction and deduction uniting to show as they do
that at first land is common property, there presents
itself the question — How did the possession of it be-
come individualized ? There can be jittle doubt of the
general nature of the answer. Force, in one form or
other, is the sole cause adequate to make the members of
a society yield up their joint claim to the area they
inhabit. Such force may be that of an external aggressor
or that of an internal aggressor : but in either case it
implies militant activity.
Having thus repeated in a form adapted to the
character of the book the declaration of “Social Stat-
ics” that the original deeds to private property in
land were written with the sword, he proceeds to
develop it, showing by the way a comprehension of
the fact that the feudal tenures did not recognize the
private property in land which has grown up since,
or, as he phrases it, that “the private land-ownership
established by militancy is an incomplete one,” being
“SOCIAL STATICS” TO “POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS.” 69
qualified by the claims of serfs and other dependants,
and by obligations to the crown or state, and saying:
In our own case the definite ending of these tenures
took place in 1660; when for feudal obligations (a burden
on landowners) was substituted a beer-excise (a burden
on the community).
From this, in a passage which will hereafter appear,'
he proceeds to consider what is likely to be the future
evolution of land tenure. Saying that “ownership
established by force does not stand on the same foot-
ing as ownership established by contract,” he likens
individual property in land to property in slaves, and
intimates that as the one has disappeared so the other
will doubtless disappear, to make place for land-
holding “by virtue of agreements between individuals
as tenants and the community as land-owner, . . . .
after making full allowance for the accumulated value
artificially given.”
This is a re-statement of what was said in Section 9
of “Social Statics,” where, speaking of the once uni-
versal assumption that slavery was natural and right
and the better faith that had been generated, he
adds:
It may by-and-by be perceived that equity utters
decrees to which we have not yet listened, and men may
then learn that to deprive others of their rights to the
use of the earth is to commit a crime inferior only in
wickedness to the crime of taking away their lives or
personal liberty. *
Thus, in so far as was consistent with the very dif-
ferent scope and character of the book, Mr. Spencer
*-------- - - - - -----
1 See Mr. Spencer's letter to the Times, pp. 98–9.
70 DECLARATION.
repeated in March, 1882, the views on the land ques-
tion that he had set forth in 1850. And in this con-
nection the words I have italicized are noteworthy as
showing what was really meant in that incongruous
passage in “Social Statics” previously discussed.
With this re-assertion in “Political Institutions”
of the views on the land question set forth in “Social
Statics' we must draw a line in our review.
IPA ERT II.
R. E. P. U D I A TI O N.
I. LETTER TO THE ST. JAMESPS GAZETTE.
II. “THE MAN VERSUS THE STATE. **
III. LETTER TO THE TIMES.
IV. THIS APOLOGY EXAMINED.
V. SECOND LETTER TO THE TIMES.
VI. MORE LETTERS.
There are people who hate anything in the shape of exact conclusions;
and these are of them. According to such, the right is never in either
extreme, but always half way between the extremes. They are continually
trying to reconcile Yes and No. Ifs and buts, and excepts, are their delight.
They have so great a faith in “the judicious mean’” that they would scarcely
believe an oracle, if it uttered a full-length principle. Were you to enquire
of them whether the earth turns on its axis from east to west, or from West
to east, you might almost expect the reply — “A little of both,” or “Not
exactly either.” It is doubtful whether they would assent to the axiom that
the whole is greater than its part, without making some qualification.— JHerbert
Spencer, 1850.
CHAPTER I.
LETTER TO THE ST. JAMES's GAZETTE.
WITH the early years of the last decade a marked
change in common thought began to show itself;
and the doctrine of natural, inalienable and equal
rights to land, which Mr. Spencer had avowed
as it were in academic groves, began to stir in the
hearts and minds of common men, and to make way
among the great disinherited. Vaguely and blindly,
the land question had come to the front in Ireland,
and in this form forced its way into British politics.
And “Progress and Poverty,” first published in the
United States in 1879, had begun, by the close of
1882, to circulate in Great Britain as no economic
work had ever circulated before, re-inforcing what
Herbert Spencer had said of the ethical injustice of
private property in land with the weight of political
economy and the proposal of a practical measure for
restoring equal rights. Everywhere, in short, that
the English language is spoken, the idea of natural
rights to the use of land, that in 1850 seemed dead,
was beginning to revive with a power and in a form
that showed that the struggle for its recognition had
at last begun.
Believing in Mr. Spencer's good faith, deeming him
not a mere prater about justice, but one who ardently
desired to carry it into practice, we who sought to
74 REPUDIATION.
promote what he himself had said that equity sternly
commanded naturally looked for some word of sym-
pathy and aid from him, the more so as the years had
brought him position and influence, the ability to
command attention, and the power to affect a large
body of admirers who regard him as their intellectual
leader.
But we looked in vain. When the Justice that
in the academic cloister he had so boldly invoked
came forth into the streets and market-places, to raise
her standard and call her lovers, Mr. Spencer, instead
of hastening to greet her, did his best to get out of
her way, like the young wife in the old story, who
charmed the by-standers with her invocations to
Death to take her rather than her elderly husband,
but who, when Death rapped at the door and asked,
“Who calls me?” quickly replied, “The gentleman
in the next room l’’
In March, 1882, when Mr. Spencer issued “Politi-
cal Institutions,” and even in August of the same
year, when he left England for a visit to the United
States, there was on the surface of English society
nothing to indicate that such views as he had ex-
pressed in “Social Statics” were any nearer attract-
ing popular attention and arousing feeling than in
1850, for the Irish land movement was considered what
it indeed was in the main, – not an attack on private
property in land, but an effort of Irish tenants to
become land-owners or to get better terms. But
when Mr. Spencer returned, towards the close of
November, it was to find that the days of contemptu-
ous tolerance on the part of Sir John and his Grace
had gone, and that all that was deemed “respecta-
LETTER TO THE ST. JAMES's GAZETTE. 75
ble” in English society had become roused to the
wickedness of those who denied the validity of
private property in land.
To explain the change that had taken place in this
brief interval I must refer to my own books.
“Progress and Poverty" was received by the
English press, as all such books are at first, in silence
or with brief derision. Messrs. Kegan Paul, Trench
& Co., who first published it in England, in sheets
brought from the United States, were on publication
able to sell only twenty copies in all the three king-
doms. But ere long it began to make its way, and
when, towards the close of August, 1882, a sixpenny
edition was issued, it began to sell in tens and scores
of thousands, “in the alleys and back streets of
England,” the Quarterly Review said – “audibly wel-
comed there as a glorious gospel of justice.”
Hardly was this cheap edition out and beginning
to circulate, when, conjoining with it my pamphlet on
“The Irish Land Question,” which had also been pub-
lished in England in cheap form, the Times, on Sep-
tember 11, 1882, gave to “Progress and Poverty” a
long and fair review. At once the silence of the
press was broken, and from the quarterlies to the
comic papers the British journals began to teem with
notices and references, most of them naturally of a
kind that made the Duke of Argyll seem mild when
he called me “such a preacher of unrighteousness as
the world has never seen,” and spoke of my “im-
moral doctrines” and “profligate conclusions,” the
* Now published under the name of “The Land Question,” since
its effort is to show that the Irish Land Question is simply the uni-
versal land question.
76 REPUDIATION.
“unutterable meanness of the gigantic villainy” I
advocated, and so on.
And from being regarded in this way in the very
society in which as a great philosopher he had come
to be an honored member, it was evident that Mr.
Spencer could not escape if he adhered to his views.
For although “Social Statics” was little known in
England, the quotations I had made from it, both
in “Progress and Poverty” and in “The Irish Land
Question * were bringing those views into sharp
prominence.
This was the situation as Mr. Spencer found it on
his return from the United States. The burning ques-
tion — a question beside which that of chattel slavery
was almost small — had been raised in England. And
he must either stand for the truth he had seen, and
endure social Ostracism for it, or he must deny it.
“Blessed are ye when men shall revile you, and
persecute you, and say all manner of evil against
you!” For this to the man who has striven to up-
root a great wrong — a wrong that by the fact of its
hitherto unquestioned existence has necessarily en-
listed on its side all the powerful influences that
dominate the organs of opinion and rule society—is
the sure sign that the day he has hoped for is at hand.
When, in 1850, Mr. Spencer had said that the rent
of land could be collected by an agent or deputy
agent of the community, quite as well as by an
agent of Sir John or his Grace, he must have known
that if ever his proposition attracted the attention of
the interests he thus personified he would be de-
nounced in all the established organs of opinion, and
in “polite society’ regarded as a robber. Then, I
LETTER TO THE ST. JAMES's GAZETTE. 77
am inclined to think he would have hailed with joy
such indications of the progress of thought. But in
1882, he no sooner found that Sir John and his Grace
had been aroused by such a proposition and were
likely to hear that he had made it, than he hastened
to get the evidence out of their sight, and as far as
he could to deny it. At once, it seems from what
he tells us in 1892, he “resolved not again to import
a supply” of “Social Statics,” and took the first
opportunity to write a letter.
The Edinburgh Review, for January, 1883, in an
article entitled “The Nationalization of the Land,” re-
viewed “Progress and Poverty”—as fairly, it seemed
to me, as could be expected, but of course adversely.
In doing so it referred to what Mr. Spencer had said
on the land question in “Social Statics,” giving him
credit for proposing to indemnify land-owners, and
quoting with that interpretation the incongruous
sentences in Section 9. In concluding it said:
Writers like Mr. George and Mr. Herbert Spencer
are at war not only with the first principles of political
economy and of law, of social order and domestic life,
but with the elements of human nature. . . . To attack
the rights of private property in land is to attack prop-
erty in its most concrete form. If landed property is
not secure, no property can be protected by law, and the
transmission of wealth, be it large or small, is extin-
guished. With it expires the perpetuity of family life,
and that future which cheers and ennobles the labor of
the present with the hopes of the future. These are
the doctrines of communism, fatal alike to the welfare
of society and to the moral character of man.
1 Ten years ago, after all copies of the third edition had been
sold, I resolved not again to import a supply to meet the still con-
tinued demand. — Preface to “Social Statics, Abridged and Re-
vised,” 1892. -
78 REPUDIATION.
This brought out from Mr. Spencer a letter to the
St. James's Gazette of London, an able Tory journal.
Since he was writing on the subject, here was an
opportunity for Mr. Spencer to correct the misappre-
hension (as I now think it to be) that he had in
“Social Statics' proposed to compensate land-owners
for their land. And, if he wished to defend himself
against the charge of attacking property rights and
upholding the doctrines of communism, here was an
opportunity for him to show, for all of us as well as
for himself, that the denial of the justice of private
property in land involves no denial of true property
rights. Or if he chose to do so, here was a chance
for him straightforwardly to recant, to apologize to
land-owners, and to plead that he was young and
foolish when he asserted, as quoted by the Edin-
burgh, that “equity does not permit property in
land, and that the right of mankind to the earth's
surface is still valid, all deeds, customs, and laws
notwithstanding.”
But, instead of manfully defending the truth he
had uttered, or straightforwardly recanting it, Mr.
Spencer sought to shelter himself behind ifs and
buts, perhapses and it-may-bes, and the implication
of untruths. Here is his letter:
To the Editor of the St. James's Gazette :
During my absence in America, there appeared in the
St. James's Gazette (27th of October, 1882) an arti-
cle entitled “Mr. Herbert Spencer's Political Theories.”
Though, when it was pointed out to me after my return,
I felt prompted to say something in explanation of my
views, I should probably have let the matter pass had I
not found that elsewhere such serious misapprehensions
of them are being diffused that rectification seems
imperative.
LETTER TO THE ST. JAMES's GAZETTE. 79
Before commenting on the statements of your con-
tributor, I must devote a paragraph to certain more
recent statements which have far less justification. In
old days among the Persians, the subordination of subject
to ruler was so extreme that, even when punished, the
subject thanked the ruler for taking notice of him.
With like humility I suppose that now, when after I
have been publishing books for a third of a century
“the leading critical organ ” has recognized my exist-
ence, I Ought to feel thankful, even though the recog-
nition draws forth nothing save blame. But such ela-
tion as I might otherwise be expected to feel is checked
by two facts. One is that the Edinburgh Review has
not itself discovered me, but has had its attention drawn
to me by quotations in the work of Mr. Henry George
— a work which I closed after a few minutes on finding
how visionary were its ideas. The other is that, though
there has been thus made known to the reviewer a book
of mine published thirty-two years ago, which I have
withdrawn from circulation in England, and of which I
have interdicted translations, he is apparently unconscious
that I have written other books, sundry of them politi-
cal; and especially he seems not to know that the last
of them, “Political Institutions,” contains passages con-
cerning the question he discusses. Writers in critical
journals which have reputations to lose usually seek out
the latest version of an author's views; and the more
conscientious among them take the trouble to ascertain
whether the constructions they put on detached pas-
sages are warranted or not by other passages. Had the
Edinburgh reviewer read even the next chapter to the
one from which he quotes, he would have seen that, so
far from attacking the right of private property, as he
represents, my aim is to put that right upon an unques-
tionable basis, the basis alleged by Locke being unsatis-
factory. He would have further seen that, so far from
giving any countenance to communistic doctrines, I have
devoted four sections of that chapter to the refutation
of them. Had he dipped into the latter part of the
work, or had he consulted the more recently published
“Study of Sociology" and “Political Institutions,” he
would not have recklessly coupled me with Mr. George
as upholding “the doctrines of communism, fatal alike
80 REPUDIATION.
to the welfare of society and to the moral character of
man’; for he would have discovered the fact (familiar
to many, though unknown to him) that much current
legislation is regarded by me as communistic, and is for
this reason condemned as socially injurious and individ-
ually degrading.
The writer of the article in the St. James’s Gazette
does not represent the facts correctly when he says that
the view concerning ownership of land in “Social Stat-
ics '' is again expounded in “Political Institutions " —
“not so fully, but with as much confidence as ever.” In
this last work I have said that, “though industrialism
has thus far tended to individualize possession of land,
while individualizing all other possession, it may be
doubted whether the final stage is at present reached.”
Further on I have said that “at a stage still more
advanced, it may be that private ownership of land will
disappear”; and that “it seems possible that the primi-
tive ownership of land by the community . . . will be
revived.” And yet again I have said that “perhaps the
right of the community to the land, thus tacitly asserted,
will, in time to come, be overtly asserted.” Now it
seems to me that the words I have italicised imply no
great “confidence.” Contrariwise, I think they show
quite clearly that the opinion conveyed is a tentative
one. The fact is, that I have here expressed myself in
a way much more qualified than is usual with me;
because I do not see how certain tendencies, which are
apparently conflicting, will eventually work out. The
purely ethical view of the matter does not obviously
harmonize with the political and the politico-economical
views; some of the apparent incongruities being of the
kind indicated by your contributor. This is not the
place to repeat my reasons for thinking that the present
system will not be the ultimate system. Nor do I pro-
pose to consider the obstacles, doubtless great, which
stand in the way of change. All which I wish here to
point out is that my opinion is by no means a positive
one ; and, further, that I regard the question as one to
be dealt with in the future rather than at present.
These two things the quotations I have given above
prove conclusively. I am, etc.,
HERBERT SPENCER.
LETTER TO THE ST. JAMES's GAZETTE. 81
Mr. Spencer has had much to say of the unfair-
ness of his critics. But this reply is not merely
unfair; it is dishonest, and that in a way that makes
flat falsehood seem manly.
From this letter the casual reader would under-
stand that the Edinburgh reviewer, on the strength
of detached passages, had charged Mr. Spencer with
attacking the right of private property and upholding
socialism, in a sense unwarranted by the context and
disproved by the next chapter; and that the pas-
sage quoted from “Political Institutions” covers the
same ground and disproves the constructions put on
“Social Statics.”
The fact is, that the Edinburgh Review had not
charged either Mr. Spencer or myself with more than
attacking private property in land. This we had
both unquestionably done, not only in the passages
it had quoted, but in many others. It had made no
misconstruction whatever. What it had said of
“attacking the right of private property " and “up-
holding the doctrines of communism '' was a mere
rhetorical flourish, made as an inference from, and
by way of reply to, our denial of the right of private
property in land. Mr. Spencer ignores the real
charge and assumes the mere inference to be the
charge. Thus, changing the issue, he cites the next
chapter as if it disproved the Edinburgh's charge.
This chapter (Chapter X., “The Right of Property”)
which has been given in full, contains nothing to
lessen the force of the attack on private property in
land made in the preceding chapter. On the contrary,
in this chapter he reiterates his attack on private
property in land, and seeks a basis for property by
82 REPUDIATION.
carrying the idea that the community should control
land to the length of absurdity.
Nor was the writer in the St. James's unjustified
in taking the reference to land in “Political Insti-
tutions” to be a briefer indorsement of the views
more fully set forth in “Social Statics; ” for “Politi-
cal Institutions” refers to private property in land
as established by force, says that it does not stand on
the same basis as ownership established by contract,
likens it to slavery and predicts its abolition—ex-
pressions which, in the absence of any modification
of the views elaborately asserted in “Social Statics,”
could be taken in no other way than as indorsing
them. The passages Mr. Spencer quotes no more
modify the view of land ownership set forth in
“Social Statics” than Lord Lytton’s “Coming Race"
controverts Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations.” In
“Social Statics.” Mr. Spencer declares what ought to
be done; in the passage he quotes from “Political
Institutions” he is prognosticating as to what it
is likely will be done. By now substituting prognos-
tication for declaration of right, Mr. Spencer seeks
to convey the false impression that the Edinburgh
reviewer has been guilty of carelessness, and the
writer in the St. James’s of misrepresentation, and
that he himself has never gone further than to express
the guarded opinion that at some time, a great way
off, men may substitute a common ownership of land
for private ownership.
Mr. Spencer is more than unfair, too, in assuming
that the charge of upholding communism, etc., is
applicable to me, though not to him. For, although
my book was too visionary for him to read, he had at
LETTER TO THE ST. JAMES's GAZETTE. 83
least read the Edinburgh's article, and knew that the
charge against me had no other ground than that
against him — the denial of the moral validity of
private property in land.
Even what he says about such a plain matter of
fact as the withdrawal of “Social Statics’ from circu-
lation in England conveys untruth.
The grievance that Mr. Spencer here alleges is
that the Edinburgh Review had commented on a book
“published thirty-two years ago, which I have with-
drawn from circulation in England, and of which I
have interdicted translations.” What is to be under-
stood from this, and what Mr. Spencer evidently
intended to have understood, is that he had, pre-
sumably years before, withdrawn “Social Statics”
from circulation — not in the mere territory of Eng-
land, as distinguished from Scotland, Ireland or the
United States, but — in English. To make sure of
this understanding, he adds that he has interdicted
translations — which means, not in other places, but
in other languages than English. Now the truth is,
that at the time he thus wrote, that book was being
published by his arrangement in the United States,
as it had been for years before, and continued to be
for years afterwards; and that up to this very time
he had been importing it into England, and circulat-
ing it there. The only filament of truth in this
statement, which though made incidentally is of
prime importance to his purpose, is, as we now dis-
cover from his own utterance in 1892, that at this
very time, or possibly a few weeks previous, he had
resolved not again to import any more copies of
“Social Statics" into England from the United
84 REPUDIATION.
States, though still keeping the book in circulation
there, to be bought by whomsoever would buy
As for the rest of this letter, the admirers of Mr.
Spencer may decide for themselves what kind of
ethical views they are that will not harmonize with
political economy, and what kind of political economy
it is that will not harmonize with ethics, and what they
think of an ethical teacher who, on a question that
involves the health and happiness, nay, the very life
and death of great bodies of men, shelters himself
behind such phrases as, “it may be doubted,” “it
may be,” “it seems possible,” and so on, and en-
deavors to make them show that he regards the
matter of right as one to deal with in the future
and not at present.
This letter is not a withdrawal or a recantation of
what Mr. Spencer had said against private property
in land. It does not rise to that dignity. It is merely
an attempt to avoid responsibility and to placate by
subterfuge the powerful landed interests now aroused
to anger. But it does indicate that a moral change
had come over Mr. Spencer since he wrote “Social
Statics.”
In several places in that book occurs the strong,
idiomatic phrase, “a straight man.” This letter to
the St. James's is not the letter of a straight man.
But as hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue,
so the very crookedness of this letter indicates Mr.
Spencer's reluctance to flatly deny the truth to which
he had borne witness. He no more wanted to deny
it than Simon Peter to deny his Lord. But the times
had changed since he wrote “Social Statics.” From
an unknown man, printing with difficulty an unsal-
LETTER TO THE ST. JAMES's GAZETTE. 85
able book, he had become a popular philosopher, to
whom all gratifications of sense, as of intellect, were
open." He had tasted the sweets of London society,
and in the United States, from which he had just
returned, had been hailed as a thinker beside whom
Newton and Aristotle were to be mentioned only to
point his superiority. And, while the fire in the hall
of the High Priest was warm and pleasant, “society”
had become suddenly aroused to rage against those
who questioned private property in land. So when
the St. James's and the Edinburgh, both of them
chosen organs of Sir John and his Grace, accused
Herbert Spencer of being one of these, it was to him
like the voices of the accusing damsels to Peter.
Fearing, too, that he might be thrust out in the cold,
he, too, sought refuge in an alibi.
* His recreations have been systematic — concerts, operas,
theatres, billiards, Salmon-fishing, yachting, city rambles, and
country excursions; and it has been his fixed rule, when work grew
burdensome, to strike his tasks abruptly and go away for pleasure
and amuse himself till work itself again became attractive and
enjoyable. — Preface, by Professor E. L. Youmams, to “Herbert
Spencer on the Americans and the Americans on Herbert Spencer,
being a full report of his interview amal of the proceedings at the
ſº Banquet of Nov. 9, 1882.” New York : D. Apple-
tom dº Co. -
CHAPTER II.
“THE MAN VERSUS THE STATE.”
MR. SPENCER's letter to the St. James's Gazette
seems to have produced the effect he intended, and
though in the United States, D. Appleton & Co. con-
tinued to advertise and sell “Social Statics,” and to
send to Mr. Spencer his royalties upon it;" in Eng-
land, Sir John and his Grace were satisfied that he
had been much maligned by garbled extracts from
an early work that he had since suppressed.
But Mr. Spencer himself seems to have felt that
to make his position among the adherents of the
House of Have quite comfortable, he must do some-
thing positive as well as negative. So we find his
next work to be one which the Liberty and Property
Defence League, a society formed in London for
defending private property in land, have ever since
been active in pushing.
In 1884 Mr. Spencer issued four magazine articles,
“The New Toryism,” “The Coming Slavery,” “The
Sins of Legislators,” and “The Great Political Su-
perstition,” which were then published in a volume
entitled “The Man versus the State,” and have since
1 The American people have returned the compliment by pur-
chasing more than a hundred thousand of his books reprinted in
this country, and upon every volume of which he has been paid as
if he had been an American author. — Professor E. L. Youmams :
“Herbert Spencer on the Americans and the Americans on
Herbert Spencer.”
“THE MAN VERSUS THE STATE.” 87
been used (1892) to fill out the revised edition of
* Social Statics.”
These essays are strongly individualistic, condemn-
ing even bitterly any use of governmental powers or
funds to regulate the conditions of labor or alleviate
the evils of poverty. In this Mr. Spencer was continu-
ing and accentuating a line begun in “Social Statics,”
and, in the view of those who think as I do, was in the
main right; for governmental interferences and regu-
lations and bonuses are in their nature restrictions
on freedom, and cannot cure evils that primarily flow
from denials of freedom.
But what in these essays marks a new departure,
what makes their individualism as short-sighted as
socialism, and brutal as well, is that they assume that
nothing at all is needed, in the nature either of palli-
ative or remedy; that they utterly ignore the primary
wrong from which proceed the evils that socialism
blindly protests against. In them Mr. Spencer is like
one who might insist that each should swim for him-
self in crossing a river, ignoring the fact that some
had been artificially provided with corks and others
artificially loaded with lead. He is like the preachers
who thundered to slaves, “Thou shalt not steal l’” but
had no whisper against the theft involved in their
enslavement. . 3-
The burden of these essays is, “If any would not
work, neither should he eat l” This is declared to be
a tenet of the Christian religion, justified by science,
as indeed, though much ignored by Christians and by
scientists, it is. -
To whom does Mr. Spencer refer as the idlers who
yet eat?
88 IRISL’UI) IATION.
“Why, of course,” the reader of “Social Statics”
would say, “he refers to Sir John and his Grace,
and to the land-holding dukes to whom in ‘Social
Statics’ he refers by name — to them and their class,
pre-eminently. For they never work, and take pride
that their fathers and grandfathers and great-grand-
fathers never worked. Yet they eat, whoever else
goes hungry, and that of the best.”
But the reader of “Social Statics '' would be
wrong. Mr. Spencer does not refer to them, nor
allude to them, nor seem to think of them. The
people on whom he would enforce the command “If
any would not work, neither should he eat!” are
not the fashionable idlers, whose only occupation is
to kill time and “get an appetite,” but the poor idlers
who say they have no work. “Say, rather, that they
either refuse work or quickly turn themselves out of
it!” cries the indignant philosopher, regardless now
of what he once insisted on — that these men are dis-
inherited; robbed by unjust law of their birthright, of
their rightful share in the element without which no
man can work ; dependent, therefore, on others for
leave to work, and often not getting that leave.
In 1850, while condemning the socialistic pallia-
tives for poverty, Mr. Spencer at the same time recog-
nized the truth that prompts them. He was not con-
tent to show the futility of such attempts to assuage
the evils of undeserved poverty without pointing out
the giant wrong from which undeserved poverty
springs. He began his enumeration of the evils of
over-government, not as now, by merely denouncing
what is done in kindly though misplaced efforts to
help the down-trodden, but by recognizing the pri-
“THE MAN VERSUS THE STATE.” 89
mary wrong. Beginning this enumeration (page 293,
“Social Statics') he says:
As the first item on the list there stands that gigantic
injustice inflicted on nineteen-twentieths of the com-
munity by the usurpation of the soil — by the breach of
their rights to the use of the earth. For this the civil
power is responsible — has itself been a party to the
aggression — has made it legal, and still defends it as
right.
And of the moral truth involved in theories that
in “The Man versus the State ’’ he unreservedly de-
nounces, he says (“Social Statics,” pp. 345–46):
Erroneous as are these poor-law and communist theo-
ries — these assertions of a man’s right to a maintenance
and of his right to have work provided for him — they
are, nevertheless, nearly related to a truth. They are
unsuccessful efforts to express the fact, that whoso is
born on this planet of ours thereby obtains some inter-
est in it — may not be summarily dismissed again — may
not have his existence ignored by those in possession.
In other words, they are attempts to embody that thought
which finds its legitimate utterance in the law — all men
have equal rights to the use of the Earth. The preva-
lence of these crude ideas is natural enough. A vague
perception that there is something Wrong about the
relationship in which the great mass of mankind stand
to the soil and to life, was sure eventually to grow up.
After getting from under the grosser injustice of sla-
very men could not help beginning in course of time,
to feel what a monstrous thing it was that nine people
out of ten should live in the world on sufferance, not
having even standing room, save by allowance of those
who claimed the earth's surface. Could it be right that
all these human beings should not only be without claim
to the necessaries of life — should not only be denied the
use of those elements from which such necessaries are
obtainable — but should further be unable to exchange
their labor for such necessaries, except by leave of their
more fortunate fellows 7 Could it be that the majority
90 REPUDIATION.
had thus no better title to existence than one based upon
the good-will or convenience of the minority ? Could it
be that these landless men had “been mis-sent to this
earth, where all the seats were already taken " ? Surely
not. And if not, how ought matters to stand 2 To all
which questions, now forced upon men’s minds in more
or less definite shapes, there come, amongst other answers,
these theories of a right to a maintenance and a right of
labor. Whilst, therefore, they must be rejected as un-
tenable, we may still recognize in them the imperfect
utterance of the moral sense in its efforts to express
equity.
The wrong done to the people at large, by robbing
them of their birthright — their heritage in the earth —
is, indeed, thought by some a sufficient excuse for a poor
law, which is regarded by such as an instrumentality
for distributing compensation. There is much plausi-
bility in this construction of the matter. But . . . why
organize a diseased state 2 Sometime or other this
morbid constitution of things, under which the greater
part of the body politic is cut off from direct access to
the source of life, must be changed.
Of anything like this there is in “The Man versus
the State ’’ no word. Mr. Spencer again takes up his
parable against government interference; but he takes
it up with every reference to the gigantic injustice
inflicted upon nineteen-twentieths of his countrymen
omitted; with everything excluded that might be
offensive to the rich and powerful.
Nor does he shrink from misrepresenting those who
stand for the truth he has now virtually, though not
openly, abandoned. In his letter to the St. James's
Gazette he declared that he had not read my work ;
but in “The Coming Slavery" occurs this:
Communistic theories, partially indorsed by one Act
of Parliament after another, and tacitly if not avowedly
favored by numerous public men seeking supporters, are
*
“THE MAN VERSUS THE STATE.” 91
being advocated more and more vociferously by popular
leaders, and urged on by organized societies. There is
the movement for land nationalization which, aiming at
a system of land-tenure, equitable in the abstract, is, as
all the world knows, pressed by Mr. George and his
friends with avowed disregard for the just claims of
existing owners, and as the basis of a scheme going
more than half-way to state-Socialism.
And in “The Sins of Legislators” this:
And now this doctrine [that society as a whole has an
absolute right over the possessions of each member],
which has been tacitly assumed, is being openly pro-
claimed. Mr. George and his friends, Mr. Hyndman and
his supporters, are pushing the theory to its logical issue.
They have been instructed by examples, yearly increas-
ing in number, that the individual has no rights but
what the community may equitably over-ride; and they
are now saying — “It shall go hard, but we will better
the instruction, and abolish individual rights altogether.”
Charity requires the assumption that when Mr.
Spencer wrote these passages he had not read anything
I had written ; and that up to the present time when
he has again reprinted them he has not done so.
For in nothing I have ever written or spoken is there
any justification for such a characterization. I am not
even a land nationalizationist, as the English and Ger-
man and Australian land nationalizationists well know.
I have never advocated the taking of land by the state
or the holding of land by the state, further than
needed for public use; still less the working of land
by the state. From my first word on the subject I
have advocated what has come to be widely known
as “the single tax; ” i.e., the raising of public revenues
by taxation on the value of land irrespective of the
improvements on it — taxation which, as fast as pos-
92 REPUDIATION.
sible and as far as practicable, should be made to
absorb economic rent and take the place of all other
taxes. And among the reasons I have always urged
for this has been the simplification of government
and the doing away of the injustice of which govern-
ments are guilty in taking from individuals property
that rightfully belongs to the individual. I have not
gone so far as Mr. Spencer in limiting the functions
of government, for I believe that whatever becomes
a necessary monopoly becomes a function of the
state; and that the sphere of government begins
where the freedom of competition ends, since in no
other way can equal liberty be assured. But within
this line I have always opposed governmental inter-
ference. I have been an active, consistent, and abso-
lute free-trader, and an opponent of all schemes that
would limit the freedom of the individual. I have
been a stauncher denier of the assumption of the right
of society to the possessions of each member, and a
clearer and more resolute upholder of the rights of
property than has Mr. Spencer. I have opposed every
proposition to help the poor at the expense of the
rich. I have always insisted that no man should be
taxed because of his wealth, and that no matter how
many millions a man might rightfully get, Society
should leave to him every penny of them.
All this would have been evident to Mr. Spencer
if he had read any one of my books before writing
about me. But he evidently prefers the easier method
which Parson Wilbur, in Lowell’s “Biglow Papers,”
was accustomed to take with “a print called the Lib-
erator, whose heresies,” he said, “I take every proper
opportunity of combating, and of which, I thank
God, I have never read a single line.”
“THE MAN VERSUS THE STATE.” 93
To do him justice, I do not think Mr. Spencer had
any desire to misrepresent me. He was prompted to
it by the impulse that always drives men to abuse
those who adhere to a cause they have betrayed, as
the readiest way of assuring Sir John and his Grace
that no proposal to disturb their rentals would in
the future come from him.
Another thing, however, is to be noticed here —
the admission that the movement for land nationaliza-
tion is “aiming at a system of land-tenure equitable
in the abstract.” Mr. Spencer has not reached the
point of utterly denying the truth he had seen. The
abolition of private property in land he still admits
is equitable in the abstract.
Now, what is meant by equitable in the abstract 7
Let “Social Statics,” page 64, tell us:
\
For what does a man really mean by saying of a thing
that it is “theoretically just,” or “true in principle,” or
“abstractedly right " ? Simply that it accords with
what he, in some way or other, perceives to be the estab-
lished arrangements of Divine rule. When he admits
that an act is “theoretically just,” he admits it to be
that which, in strict duty, should be done. By “true
in principle,” he means in harmony with the conduct
decreed for us. The course which he calls “abstractedly
right,” he believes to be the appointed way to human
happiness. There is no escape. The expressions mean
this, or they mean nothing.
CHAPTER III.
IETTER TO THE TIMES.
No one can boldly utter a great truth, and then,
when the times have become ripe for it, and his
utterance voices what is burning in hearts and con-
Sciences, whisper it away. So despite his apology
to landlords in the St. James's Gazette, and the pains
he had taken to make his peace with them in “The
Man versus the State,” what he had said on the land
question in “Social Statics” came up again to trouble
Mr. Spencer.
But for a long time his position on the land ques-
tion was almost as dual as that of Dr. Jekyll and
Mr. Hyde. In his personal circle it was doubtless
assumed that he was a staunch supporter of private
property in land, and if his earlier opinions were
known there it was understood that he was sorry for
them. And he had become, if not an active member,
at least a valued ally of the Liberty and Property
Defence League. But in a wider circle what he had
written against private property in land was telling
with increasing force. For to this wider circle his St.
James's apology had hardly reached, and even when
known was not deemed a recantation of the opinions
deliberately expressed in “Social Statics,” which he
still, through D. Appleton & Co., continued to pub-
lish, without any modification whatever. The steady
LETTER TO THE TIMES. 95
growth of the movement that began with the publica-
tion of “Progress and Poverty” everywhere enlisted
active men in the propagation of the idea of the
equality of rights to land and called wide attention
to what he had said on that subject. They naturally
seized on the argument against the justice of private
property in land in Chapter IX. of “Social Statics,”
and spread it broadcast, as the utterance of one now
widely esteemed the greatest of philosophers. Of all
else that Mr. Spencer has written, there is nothing
that has had such a circulation as has thus been
given to this chapter. It was printed and is still
being printed by many American newspapers," and
was issued in tract form for free distribution in the
United States, Canada and Australia; editions of hun-
dreds of thousands being issued at a time,” many of
which must have reached Great Britain, even if it was
not reprinted there.
This wide circulation of his condemnation of
private property in land did not, it is probable, much
trouble Mr. Spencer, since it did not reach his Lon-
don circle. But in November, 1889 – six years
after his letter to the St. James's Gazette — some
echoes of it made their way into the Times, the very
journalistic centre of high English respectability.
The matter thus got into the Times: Mr. John
Morley, Member of Parliament for Newcastle, being
* Even as I write I am constantly receiving, especially from the
West, copies of papers which contain Chapter IX. of “Social
Statics,” and which in ignorance of all he has since said, continue
to speak of Mr. Spencer as an advocate of equal rights to land.
2 About the time I ran for Mayor of New York (1SS6) on a
platform which attracted great attention to the idea of equal rights
to land, one enthusiastic advocate of the idea, Mr. W. J. Atkinson,
himself printed some 500,000 copies.
96 REPUDIATION.
in that city, was interviewed by some of his con-
stituents, representing a labor organization. Among
other questions land nationalization was brought up ;
Mr. John Laidler, a bricklayer, speaking for it. Mr.
Morley expressing dissent, Mr. Laidler cited the
authority of Mr. Spencer in support of the ideas that
land had been made private property by force and
fraud, and should be appropriated by the community
for the benefit of all. The Times of November 5th
contained a report of this interview.
This report in the Times aroused Mr. Spencer at
once. For although he had no objection to the cir-
culation of his radical utterances in America, where
through D. Appleton & Co. he was still publishing
and advertising “Social Statics,” it was evidently
quite a different matter to him that they should be
known in the pleasant circle wherein with Sir John
and his ‘Grace and the peers and judges of the
Liberty and Property Defence League he was per-
sonally dwelling. He promptly sent this letter to the
Times. It appeared on the 7th.
To the Editor of the Times.
SIR : During the interview between Mr. Morley and
some of his constituents, reported in your issue of the
5th inst., I was referred to as having set forth certain
opinions respecting land ownership. Fearing that, if I
remain silent, many will suppose I have said things
which I have not said, I find it needful to say something
in explanation.
Already within these few years I have twice pointed out
that these opinions (made to appear by those who have
circulated them widely different from what they really
are, by the omission of accompanying opinions) were
set forth in my first work, published forty years ago;
and that, for the last twelve or fifteen years, I have
refrained from issuing new editions of that work and
LETTER, TO THE TIMES. 97
have interdicted translations, because, though I still
adhere to its general principles, I dissent from some of
the deductions.
The work referred to — “Social Statics " — was in-
tended to be a system of political ethics — absolute
political ethics, or that which ought to be, as distinguished
from relative political ethics, or that which is at present
the nearest practicable approach to it. The conclusion
reached concerning land ownership was reached while
seeking a valid basis for the right of property, the basis
assigned by Locke appearing to me invalid. It was
argued that a satisfactory ethical warrant for private
ownership could arise only by contract between the
community, as original owner of the inhabited area, and
individual members, who became tenants, agreeing to
pay certain portions of the produce, or its equivalent in
money, in consideration of recognized claims to the rest.
And in the course of the argument it was pointed out
that such a view of land ownership is congruous With
existing legal theory and practice; since in law every
land-owner is held to be a tenant of the Crown — that is,
of the community, and since, in practice, the Supreme
right of the community is asserted by every Act of
Parliament which, with a view to public advantage,
directly or by proxy takes possession of land after making
due compensation.
All this was said in the belief that the questions raised
were not likely to come to the front in our time or for
many generations; but, assuming that they would some-
time come to the front, it was said that, supposing
the community should assert overtly the supreme right
which is now tacitly asserted, the business of compensa-
tion of land-owners would be a complicated one —
One that perhaps cannot be settled in a strictly equitable
manner. . . . Most of our present land-owners are men who have,
either mediately or immediately, either by their own acts or by the
acts of their ancestors, given for their estates equivalents of honestly
earned wealth, believing that they were investing their savings in a
legitimate manner. To justly estimate and liquidate the claims of
such is one of the most intricate problems society will one day have
to solve.
To make the position I then took quite clear, it is
needful to add that, as shown in a succeeding chapter,
98 REPUDIATION.
the insistence on this doctrine, in virtue of which “the
right of property obtains a legitimate foundation,” had
for one of its motives the exclusion of Socialism and
Communism, to which I was then as profoundly averse
as I am now.
Investigations made during recent years into the
various forms of social organization, while writing the
“Principles of Sociology,” have in part confirmed and in
part changed the views published in 1850. Perhaps I
may be allowed space for quoting from “Political
Institutions ° a paragraph showing the revised conclu-
sions arrived at :
At first sight it seems fairly inferable that the absolute owner-
ship of land by private persons must be the ultimate state which
industrialism brings about. But though industrialism has thus far
tended to individualize possession of land while individualizing all
other possession, it may be doubted whether the final stage is at
present reached. Ownership established by force does not stand
on the same footing as OWnership established by contract ; and
though multiplied sales and purchases, treating the two ownerships
in the same Way, have tacitly assimilated them, the assimilation
may eventually be denied. The analogy furnished by assumed
rights of possession over human beings helps us to recognize this
possibility. For, while prisoners of War, taken by force and held
as property in a vague way (being at first much on a footing with
other members of a household) were reduced more definitely to the
form of property when the buying and selling of slaves became
general ; and, while it might centuries ago have been thence inferred
that the ownership of man by man was an ownership in course
of being permanently established, yet we see that a later stage of
civilization, reversing this process, has destroyed ownership of man
by man. Similarly, at a stage still more advanced, it may be that
private ownership of land will disappear. As that primitive free-
dom of the individual which existed before War established coercive
institutions and personal slavery comes to be re-established as
militancy declines, so it seems possible that the primitive ownership
of land by the community, which, with the development of coercive
institutions, lapsed in large measure or wholly into private owner-
ship, will be revived as industrialism further develops. The régime
of contract, at present so far extended that the right of property in
movables is recognized only as having arisen by exchange of ser-
vices or products under agreements, or by gift from those who had
acquired it under such agreements, may be further extended so far
that the products of the soil will be recognized as property only by
virtue of agreements between individuals as tenants and the com-.
munity as land-owner. Even now, among ourselves, private owner-
ship of land is not absolute. In legal theory land-owners are
directly or indirectly tenants of the Crown (which in our day is
LETTER, TO THE TIMES. 99
equivalent to the state, or, in other words, the community); and
the community from time to time resumes possession after making
due compensation. Perhaps the right of the community to the
land, thus tacitly asserted, will in time to come be overtly asserted
and acted upon after making full allowance for the accumulated
value artificially given. . . . There is reason to suspect that, while
private possession of things produced by labor will grow even more
definite and sacred than at present, the inhabited area, which can-
not be produced by labor, will eventually be distinguished as some-
thing which may not be privately possessed. As the individual,
primitively owner of himself, partially or wholly loses ownership of
himself during the militant régime, but gradually resumes it as the
industrial régime develops, SO possibly the communal proprietor-
ship of land, partially or wholly merged in the ownership of domi-
nant men during evolution of the militant type, will be resumed as
the industrial type becomes fully evolved (pp. 643–646).
The use of the words “possible,” “possibly,” and
“perhaps' in the above extracts shows that I have no
positive opinion as to what may hereafter take place.
The reason for this state of hesitancy is that I cannot
see my way toward reconciliation of the ethical require-
ments with the politico-economical requirements. On
the one hand, a condition of things under which the
owner of, say, the Scilly Isles might make tenancy of
his land conditional upon professing a certain creed or
adopting prescribed habits of life, giving notice to quit
to any who did not submit, is ethically indefensible.
On the other hand, “nationalization of the land,” effected
after compensation for the artificial value given by culti-
vation, amounting to the greater part of its value, would
entail, in the shape of interest on the required purchase-
money, as great a sum as is now paid in rent, and indeed
a greater, considering the respective rates of interest
on landed property and other property. Add to which,
there is no reason to think that the substituted form of
administration would be better than the existing form
of administration. The belief that land would be better
managed by public officials than it is by private owners
is a very wild belief.
What the remote future may bring forth there is no
saying; but with a humanity anything like that we now
know, the implied reorganization would be disastrous.
I am, etc., HERBERT SPENCER.
ATHENAEUM CLUB, Nov. 6. -
CHAPTER IV.
THIS APOLOGY EXAMINED.
To drop into one of Mr. Spencer's favorite methods
of illustration:
“I am told,” said the respectable grandmother,
with a big stick in her hand, “that you are the boy
who broke down my fence and told all the other boys
that they were at liberty to go into my orchard and
take my apples.”
“It is not true,” replied the trembling small boy;
“I didn’t do it. And I didn’t mean to do it. And
when I did it I was only trying to mend your fence,
which I found was weak. And the reason I did it
was to keep bad boys out. And I have always said
you ought to be paid for your apples. And I won't
do it again And I am certain your apples would
give boys stomach-ache.”
This letter to the Times repeats the same line of
excuse made six years before in the St. James’s
Gazette. Emboldened by the success of that apol-
ogy, for no one seems to have thought it worth while
to point out its misstatements, Mr. Spencer under-
takes to face down the Newcastle bricklayer in the
same way, and with even bolder crookedness.
The question in issue is a question of fact —
whether, as asserted by Mr. Laidler, Mr. Spencer had
in “Social Statics” advocated land nationalization,
and incidentally, whether he had declared that the
THIS APOLOGY EXAMINED. . 101
land had been made private property by force and
fraud. Without venturing specifically to deny this,
Mr. Spencer denies it by implication, and gives an
impression thus expressed editorially by the Times
on the 9th of November:
So without denying that he did once say something of
the sort, he (Mr. Spencer) explains that it was forty
years ago, and that for the last fifteen years he has been
doing all that he can to suppress the book in which he
said it, and that he never meant his words to have any
bearing upon practical questions.
Put into straightforward English, what Mr. Spencer
says in this letter to the Times is —
That he had not favored land nationalization.
That he had been made to appear to have done so
by quotations from “Social Statics” divested of their
qualifying context.
That for the last twelve or fifteen years he had
stopped the publication of that work.
That “Social Statics” was not intended to suggest
practical political action.
That what was said therein of land-ownership was
said in the effort to find a valid basis for the right of
property, and to exclude socialism and communism ;
that it involved no departure from the existing legal
theory and practice; was said in the belief that the
land question would not come to the front for many
generations, and admitted the right of the land-owners
to compensation.
That his present conclusions are, that while pos-
sibly the community may some time resume land after
due compensation to land-owners, he has no positive
opinion as to whether it will or not.
102 REPUDIATION.
That as to this he cannot harmonize ethics with
political economy, for while a condition may be im-
agined under which private land ownership might be
injurious, its abolition would require the payment to
land-owners of as great and indeed a greater sum than
is now paid in rent; would involve the management
of land by public officials, and that with humanity
anything like that we now know, this would be dis-
astrous.
All this, so far as it relates to the question in issue,
is simply not true.
Mr. Spencer, in “Social Statics,” did condemn pri-
vate property in land, did advocate the resumption of
land by the community, did unequivocally and unre-
servedly, and with all his force, declare for what is
now called land-nationalization. That he did so does
not rest on any forcing of words, any wresting of
sentences from their context. It is the burden of all
he says on the subject, and of the most vital part of
the book. In the whole volume there is no word in
modification of the opinions so strongly and clearly
expressed in the full quotations I have made.
Nor is it true that the conclusion of “Social Statics”
concerning land ownership “was reached while seek
ing a valid basis for the right of property.” It was
reached as a primary corollary of the first principle:
the freedom of every man to do all that he wills pro-
vided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other
man, and was deduced directly from the facts of
human existence :
Given a race of beings having like claims to pursue
the objects of their desires — given a world adapted to
the gratification of those desires — a world into which
THIS APOLOGY EXAMINED. 103
such beings are similarly born, and it unavoidably fol-
lows that they have equal rights to the use of this world.
Mr. Spencer's questioning of Locke's derivation of
the right of property, so far from being the cause of
his denial of the validity of private property in land,
grows, as we have seen, out of his idea that the only
right to land is that of the community. What he has
to say against socialism and communism, instead of
being a motive for his advocacy of land nationaliza-
tion, is brought in to strengthen land nationalization
by showing that it does not involve either. And so,
what Mr. Spencer gives the Times to understand as
to the congruity of the view of land ownership taken
in “Social Statics” with existing legal theory and
practice, is so flagrantly untrue that one wonders at
its audacity.
As to what Mr. Spencer says of the intent of
“Social Statics,” the only intelligible meaning that
can be put on it is that which the editor of the Times
put, “That he never meant his words to have any
bearing upon practical questions.”
The exact phraseology is —
The work referred to — “Social Statics” — was in-
tended to be a system of Political Ethics — absolute
political ethics, or that which ought to be, as distin-
guished from relative political ethics, or that which is
at present the nearest practical approach to it.
If this means anything, it means that “Social
Statics” was written to set forth a system of political
ethics that cannot be carried into conduct now, and
that no one is under any obligation to try to carry
into conduct.
104 IREPUDIATION.
The applications of ethics, like the applications of
mechanics, or chemistry, or any other science or body
of laws, must always be relative, in the sense that one
principle or law is to be taken in consideration with
other principles or laws: so that conduct that would
have the sanction of ethics where one is beset by
robbers or murderers might be very different from the
conduct that ethics would sanction under normal and
peaceful conditions. In the “Data of Ethics,” one
of the more recent of the works which set forth the
Spencerian Philosophy, written long after “Social
Statics,” this distinction between pure ethics and
applied ethics is, by one of the confusions that in
that philosophy pass for definitions, converted into a
distinction between absolute ethics and relative ethics.
Yet, if there be any sort of ethics that has no rela-
tion to conduct here and now, the best term for it is
Pickwickian ethics. -
But the question here is not a question of defini-
tion. It is a question of fact.
Now, however Mr. Spencer's opinions and wishes
may have changed since “Social Statics" was writ-
ten, that book still shows that, when he wrote it, his
intention in exposing the iniquity of private property
in land was to arouse public opinion to demand its
abolition. In “Social Statics” he denounced not
only private property in land: he denounced slavery,
then in the United States and other countries, a still-
living thing; he denounced protection; he denounced
restrictions on the right of free speech, the denial
to women of equal rights, the coercive education of
children, the then existing restrictions on the fran-
chise, the cost and delays of legal proceedings, the
THIS APOLOGY EXAMINED. 105
maintenance of poor laws, the establishment of state
schools, government colonization, etc. Were all
these pleas for reforms, some of which Mr. Spencer
has lived to see accomplished, and others of which he
is still advocating, Pickwickian also 2
If Mr. Spencer, in what he had to say on the land
question in “Social Statics,” was talking mere ab-
stract political ethics — something totally different
from practical ethics — what did he mean by declar-
ing that “Equity does not permit property in land”?
What did he mean by saying that pure equity
“enjoins a protest against every existing pretension
to the individual possession of the soil, and dictates
the assertion that the right of mankind at large to
the earth's surface is still valid — all deeds, customs,
and laws notwithstanding ”? What did he mean by
scornfully sneering at those who “are continually
trying to reconcile yes and no,” and who delight
“in ifs, buts, and excepts”? What did he mean by
saying, “In this matter of land-tenure the verdict of
morality must be either yea or nay. Either men
have a right to make the soil private property or
they have not. There is no medium ”? What did he
mean in pointing out that what is now called land
nationalization “need cause no very serious revolu-
tion in existing arrangements,” and that “equity
sternly commands it to be done " ? What did he
mean by putting, “as the first item on the list” of
the injuries which government at the time he wrote
was doing, “that gigantic injustice inflicted on nine-
teen-twentieths of the community by the usurpation
of the soil — by the breach of their rights to the use
of the earth’? What did he mean by saying that
106 REPUDIATION.
the only plausible defence of the poor laws was
“the wrong done to people at large by robbing them
of their birthright — their heritage in the earth " —
by asking, “Why organize a diseased state 7” — by
declaring, “Some time or other this morbid constitu-
tion of things, under which the greater part of the
body politic is cut off from direct access to the source
of life, must be changed.”
Did it all relate to the sort of ethics that has no
bearing on practical questions 2
Whatever may be the ethical views of Mr. Spencer
now that his eyes have been put out, and he has been
set to grind in the house of the lords of the Philis-
tines, the young Samson of “Social Statics” with
locks as yet unshorn by the social Delilah knew noth-
ing of any such ethics. Not merely in what I have
quoted, but throughout the book, from first page to
last, the burden of “Social Statics” is the necessity,
the sacred duty of destroying abuses that fetter the
equal liberty of men. He sees, indeed — as who does
not? — that before liberty can truly reign men must
be fit for liberty; and he realizes that there may be
social conditions in which liberty might temporarily
work ill; but he insists again and again that where-
ever there is any yearning for liberty, any perception
of the wrong done by its denial, there the time has
come for the struggle against injustice to be made,
and that the way to fit men for the enjoyment of
rights is to destroy wrongs. The central thought
of the book, that permeates all its parts, is that of
a divinely-appointed order, which men are bound .
to obey — a God-given law, as true in the social
sphere as the laws of physics are true in the physi-
THIS APOLOGY EXAMINED. 107
cal sphere, to which all human regulations must be
made to conform ; and that this law is the law of
equal freedom — the law from which is deduced the
condemnation of private property in land. For those
who palter with expediency; for those who would
dally with wrong; for those who say that a thing is
right in the abstract, but that practical considerations
forbid its being carried into effect — Mr. Spencer,
from the first page of “Social Statics” to the last, has
nothing but the utmost contempt and scorn.
Here is one extract from the close of the introduc-
tion to “Social Statics (pp. 51, 56, 60–65) which
will show how widely different were the ethics taught
in “Social Statics” from what the author of the
Spencerian philosophy, in 1889, told the Times they
WeI'e :
And yet, unable as the imperfect man may be to
fulfil the perfect law, there is no other law for
him. One right course only is open ; and he must
either follow that or take the consequences. The con-
ditions of existence will not bend before his perversity;
nor relax in consideration of his weakness. Neither,
when they are broken, may any exception from penal-
ties be hoped for. “Obey or suffer,” are the ever-repeated
alternatives. Disobedience is sure to be convicted. And
there are no reprieves. . . .
Our social edifice may be constructed with all possible
labor and ingenuity, and be strongly cramped together
with cunningly-devised enactments, but if there be no
rectitude in its component parts — if it is not built on
upright principles, it will assuredly tumble to pieces.
As well might we seek to light a fire with ice, feed cattle
on stones, hang our hats on cobwebs, or otherwise disre-
gard the physical laws of the world, as go contrary to
its equally imperative ethical laws.
Yes, but there are exceptions, say you. We cannot
always be strictly guided by abstract principles, Pru-
108 IREPUI) LATION.
dential considerations must have some weight. It is
Inecessary to use a little policy.
Very specious, no doubt, are your reasons for advocat-
ing this or the other exception. But if there be any
truth in the foregoing argument, no infraction of the
law can be made with impunity. Those cherished
schemes by which you propose to attain some desired
good by a little politic disobedience, are all delusive. . . .
The reasons for thus specially insisting on implicit
obedience will become apparent as the reader proceeds.
Amongst the conclusions inevitably following from an
admitted principle, he will most likely find several for
which he is hardly prepared. Some of these will seem
strange ; others impracticable ; and it may be one or
two wholly at variance with his ideas of duty. Never-
theless, should he find them logically derived from a
fundamental truth, he will have no alternative but to
adopt them as rules of conduct, which ought to be fol-
lowed without exception. If there be any weight in the
considerations above set forth, then, no matter how
seemingly inexpedient, dangerous, injurious even, may
be the course which morality points out as “abstractedly
right,” the highest wisdom is in perfect and fearless
submission.
And these are the paragraphs with which (pp. 517,
518,) “Social Statics” closes:
Not as adventitious, therefore, will the wise man re-
gard the faith that is in him — not as something which
may be slighted, and made subordinate to calculations
of policy; but as the Supreme authority to which all his
actions should bend. The highest truth conceivable
by him he will fearlessly utter; and will endeavor to
get embodied in fact his purest idealisms : knowing that,
let what may come of it, he is thus playing his appointed
part in the World — knowing that, if he can get done the
thing he aims at — well: if not — well also ; though not
so well.
And thus, in teaching a uniform, unquestioning obedi-
ence, does an entirely abstract philosophy become one
with all true religion. Fidelity to conscience — this is
the essential precept inculcated by both. No hesitation,
THIS APOLOGY EXAMINED. 109
no paltering about probable results, but an implicit
submission to what is believed to be the law laid down
for us. We are not to pay lip homage to principles
which our conduct wilfully transgresses. We are not
to follow the example of those who, taking “Domine
dirige mos” for their motto, yet disregard the directions
given, and prefer to direct themselves. We are not to
be guilty of that practical atheism, which, seeing no
guidance for human affairs but its own limited foresight,
endeavors itself to play the god, and decide what will
be good for mankind, and what bad. But, on the con-
trary, we are to search out with a genuine humility the
rules ordained for us — are to do unfalteringly, without
speculating as to consequences, whatsoever these require;
and we are to do this in the belief that then, when there
is perfect sincerity — when each man is true to himself
— when every one strives to realize what he thinks the
highest rectitude — then must all things prosper.
Could there be any sadder commentary upon the
Herbert Spencer who in 1889 wrote this letter to the
Times 2
I am not objecting that Mr. Spencer has changed
his opinions. Such change might be for the better or
might be for the worse, but it would at least be
within his right. What I point out is that in this
letter to the Times, as in his previous letter to the
St. James's Gazette, Mr. Spencer does what is not
within his right, what a straight man could not do —
misstates what he previously did say.
And while Mr. Spencer, in this letter to the Times,
is thus untruthful in regard to what he had taught in
“Social Statics,” he is equally untruthful in regard
to his suppression of that book. His words are —
For the last twelve or fifteen years I have refrained
from issuing new editions of that work, and have inter-
dicted translations.
110 REPUDIATION.
The plain meaning of this is, that for twelve or
fifteen years prior to 1889 Mr. Spencer had stopped
the publication of “Social Statics.” There is no
other honest construction. And this is the way in
which it was understood. The Times, in its editorial
comment on Mr. Spencer's letter, taking it to mean
that “for the last fifteen years he had been doing all
he could to suppress the book; ” and Mr. Frederick
Greenwood, who also commented on the letter, taking
it to mean that “for the last fifteen years he had not
allowed it to appear in any language.”
As a matter of fact, this is not true. “Social
Statics” was still being printed by Mr. Spencer's
authorized publishers, D. Appleton & Co. of New
York. The only scintilla of truth in this denial is
that, as he has since (in 1892) stated, he had seven
years before this resolved that he would import no
more copies into England. As for the “interdiction
of translations,” I suppose this means that the book
bore originally the usual English formula. “Rights of
translation reserved ’’; for, judging from its, going out
of print in England, and its never having been pirated
in the United States, it is not likely that any further
interdiction was needed to prevent its translation.
That Mr. Spencer should have continued the pub-
lication of “Social Statics” for years after he had
told the readers of the St. James's and the Times that
he had suppressed it, I can only account for on the
ground that he did not care to deprive himself of
what revenue he was drawing from its sale, and had
really no objection to the circulation of his attacks
on landlordism, so long as his London friends did not
hear of it. Certain it is, that he could have with-
THIS APOLOGY EXAMINED. 111
drawn it at any time. Appleton & Co. are not book
pirates, but honorable gentlemen, who publish Mr.
Spencer's works under arrangement with their author,
and even in the absence of a copyright law would
certainly have ceased printing “Social Statics,” if he
had requested. To any one who knows them this
needs no proof. But as a matter of fact, in 1885,
when the controversy between Mr. Spencer and Mr.
Frederic Harrison appeared in the Nineteenth Cen-
tury, the Messrs. Appleton, thinking there would
be a large American sale for it in book form, made
plates and printed an edition." They had barely
published this when they suppressed it, as was under-
stood, on a cabled request from Mr. Spencer. Not
another copy went out. The copies printed were
destroyed and the plates melted, although a rival
firm did publish the controversy, and sell a consider-
able number. Or, if he had preferred that, D. Apple-
ton & Co. would at any time have printed in “Social
Statics” any retraction or modification of its expres-
sions on the land question he had wished. But,
while the preface prefixed to the book in 1864, and
the note to Chapter IV. — a reply to Professor
Sidgwick, inserted in 1875 — and the additional pref-
ace added in 1877, did set forth the modifications
of Mr. Spencer's opinions about various other matters,
they contain nothing to show any change of his opin-
ions on the land question; and the book has con-
tinued to be published up to 1892 without any such
modification.
1 “The Nature and Reality of Religion. A Controversy between
Frederic Harrison and Herbert Spencer. With an Introduction,
Notes, and an Appendix on the Religious Value of the Unknow-
able, by Count D’Alviella.” New York : D. Appleton & Co., 1, 3
and 5 bond Street. 1885.
112 IREPUDIATION.
It is, of course, not for me to object that Mr.
Spencer did not withdraw “Social Statics” in the
only place where it was being published, or that he
did not insert a retraction or modification of its utter-
ances on the land question — although to me the won-
der is that when, on his return to England in 1882,
he seems to have definitely made up his mind to take
the side of landlordism if pressed to it, he did not
melt every plate and buy up every copy he could.
I am only comparing Mr. Spencer's statements in
the Times with the facts, because of the evidence
the comparison gives of the character of the man, and
because of the light it throws on the change in his
opinions on the land question.
For this letter to the Times not only shows Mr.
Spencer's intense desire to be counted on the side of
“vested interests” in the struggle over the land ques-
tion that was beginning, but it also shows how he
was intending to join formally the ranks of the de-
fenders of private property in land without the hu-
miliation of an open recantation of what he had said
in “Social Statics.” By aid of double-barrelled ethics
and philosophic legerdemain Mr. Spencer evidently
hopes to keep some reputation for consistency and yet
uphold private property in land. As compared with
the apology in the St. James's Gazette, the new
matter in this apology in the Times consists in the
conversion of what he said in “Social Statics' (Sec-
tion 7, Chapter IX.) as illustrating that “after all
nobody does implicitly believe in landlordism,” into
a conformity with “existing legal theory and prac-
tice”; in the assumption that the compensation of
which he had spoken (Section 9) meant compensation
THIS APOLOGY EXAMINED. 113
satisfactory to landlords; and boldest of all (for this
in Chapter X., Section 3, he had expressly denied), in
the assumption that the recognition of equal rights
to land means the administration and management of
land by public officials.
I should like also to call the attention of those
who put faith in Mr. Spencer's philosophic acumen
to the manner in which in this letter he withdraws
to the Scilly Isles, and to the conditioning of the
tenancy of land upon “professing a certain creed or
adopting prescribed habits of life,” his condemnation
of private property in land, as ethically indefensible.
They have their choice between intellectual incapacity
and intellectual dishonesty. What logical difference
is there between a small island and a large island?
between the exaction of rent in personal services and
the exaction of rent in money? Is it ethically defen-
sible to deny to men their birthright, to permit them
to live on the earth only on condition that they shall
give up for the privilege all that their labor can pro-
duce save the barest living, to reduce them to straits
that compel their children to grow up in squalor and
vice and degradation worse than any heathenism, and
to pass out of life in thousands before they are fairly
in it ; yet ethically indefensible to compel them to pro-
fess a certain creed or adopt prescribed habits of living?
Ought it not be clear even to a philosopher's appren-
tice that if English landlords to-day do not prescribe
the creed or habits of their tenants, it is only because
they do not care to, but prefer generally to exercise
their power in taking money rent? If the Duke of
Westminster wanted to have a thousand retainers,
clad in his livery, follow him to St. James's ; if the
114 REPUDIATION.
Duke of Norfolk cared to permit no one but Catho-
lics to live on his estates; if the Duke of Argyll chose
to have a buffoon at his elbow in cap and bells, they
could have any of these things as readily, in fact
even more readily, than could any Earl or Duke
of the olden time. And so indeed could any of our
great American land-owners. Did Mr. Spencer never
see in London newspapers offers of employment,
conditioned on the profession of a certain creed? Did
he never, in passing to and from the Athenaeum Club,
see coachmen and footmen dressed in fantastic liver-
ies and “sandwich men’’ clad ridiculously and shame-
fully 2 Does he not know that in the British Isles
in his own time men are driven off the land to give
place to wild beasts or cattle 2 And does he not
know that the power of forbidding the use of his land
gives to every land-owner the same powers of pre-
scribing the conditions under which he will permit its
use as any owner of the Scilly Isles possibly could
have 2
The view we thus get of Mr. Spencer's mental
progress and processes is interesting both philosoph-
ically and psychologically. As, however, we shall find
the lines of escape thus indicated amplified in
“Justice,” there is no need of examining them now.
But what he here says on the matter of compensation
has a special interest as throwing light on what he
really meant in that incongruous passage in Section
9, Chapter IX., of “Social Statics,” of which I have
spoken. In this letter to the Times the only passage
from “Social Statics” that is quoted, or indeed more
than vaguely alluded to, is this. That Mr. Spencer
intends the Times and its readers to understand this
THIS APOLOGY EXAMINED. 115
as a recognition in “Social Statics” of the justice of
the claim of land-owners to compensation for their
land is clear, for he carefully leaves out all mention
of the closely-linked sentences that immediately fol-
low the passage he quotes:
But with this perplexity and our extrication from it
abstract morality has no concern. Men having got them-
selves into this dilemma by disobedience to law, must get
out of it as well as they can, and with as little injury to
the landed class as may be.
Meanwhile we shall do well to recollect that there are
others beside the landed class to be considered. In our
tender regard for the vested interests of the few, let us
not forget that the rights of the many are in abeyance,
and must remain so as long as the earth is monopolized
by individuals. Let us remember, too, that the injustice
thus inflicted on the masses of mankind is an injustice
of the gravest nature . . . inferior only in wickedness to
the crime of taking away their lives or personal liberties.
But while it is clear that Mr. Spencer wishes the
Times and its readers to understand that he not only
is, but always was, as good a compensationist as land-
lords could desire, he falls later on into an expression
that again shows, as does the passage in “Political
Institution,” that the explanation I have put upon
that seemingly incongruous passage in “Social Stat-
ics" is the one really intended. In the last part of
the letter he speaks of “compensation for the artificial
value given by cultivation amounting to the greater part
of its value.” Not compensation for land, but com-
pensation only for improvements. But this would
never satisfy land-owners, and so, without respect for
the axiom that the whole is greater than its part, he
proceeds to assert that compensation for this part
116 IREPUDIATION.
will equal, and indeed exceed, the value of all they
now get.
Thus we see both what the question of compensa-
tion had really been in Mr. Spencer's own mind, and
how he now proposes to settle it, so that he may
henceforward take the side of existing landlordism.
CHAPTER V.
SECOND LETTER TO THE TIMES.
IN his letter to the Times Mr. Spencer had surely
abased himself enough to have been let alone by
those whose favor he had so dearly sought. But even
those who profit by apostasy often like to show their
contempt for the apostate. Though the Times itself
accepted his apology, it added some contemptuous
reproof, and gave place to letters from Mr. Green-
wood, Professor Huxley and Sir Louis Mallet that
must have been extremely galling to a renowned
philosopher.
Here is the pertinent part of what the Times
said: Q.
So, without denying that he did once say something
of the sort, he explains that it was forty years ago, that
for the last fifteen years he has been doing all he can to
suppress the book in which he said it, and that he never
meant his words to have any bearing upon practical ques-
tions. He was in fact engaged in constructing a system
of “absolute political ethics, or that which ought to be,”
and he feels distinctly aggrieved by the transfer of his
opinions from that transcendental sphere to the very
different one in which Mr. Laidler and his friends are
accustomed to dwell. . . . What Mr. Spencer said in his
youth and inexperience he has unsaid in his maturer
years and with more deliberate judgment. . . .
Were we asked to point a moral for philosophers, we
should bid them beware of meddling with the absolute.
Forty years ago Mr. Spencer set forth in search of “ab-
118 REPUIDIATION.
solute political ethics,” and constructed his system to
his own satisfaction. But it turns out to have been the
most relative of things after all, since for the last fifteen
years it has ceased to be absolute even to the mind that
conceived it. . . . Mr. Spencer settled that which ought to
be, as regards land ownership, but a quarter of a century
later we find him endeavoring, much to the credit of his
modesty and candor, to suppress his own version of the
absolute. He does not seem, however, to have abandoned
the original quest, for he gives us his revised conclusions
as to the absolute ethics of land-tenure, which appear to
us to contain some of the original identical flaws which
were to be found in the older version.
The communication from Mr. Frederick Greenwood,
an able high-Tory journalist, was published by the
Times on the 9th, under the heading “A Caution to
Social Philosophers.” Characterizing Mr. Spencer's
letter to the Times as “a heavy lesson to political
philosophers,” Mr. Greenwood points out that “no
matter how sorry Mr. Spencer may be for having
misled so many poor men who habitually hang on the
authority of great men like himself,” yet the very
quotation he makes from his “Political Institutions”
contains the same seeds of error in its admission that
“ownership established by force does not stand on
the same footing as ownership established by con-
tract,” and in its admission that “the assimilation of
the two ownerships may eventually be denied.”
Sir Louis Mallet's letter, published on November
12th, was to similar effect. He pointed out that Mr.
Spencer still admitted an analogy between private
property in land and slavery, which, of course, to Sir
Louis seemed dangerous and wicked.
Professor Huxley came at the philosopher in a
bull-headed way that must have seemed very unkind.
SECOND LETTER TO THE TIMES. 119
Speaking in the name of those “to whom absolute
political ethics and a priori politics are alike stum-
bling-blocks,” and expressing the certainty that his
friend, Mr. Spencer, would be the last person willingly
to abet the tendency to sanction popular acts of
injustice by antiquarian or speculative arguments,
he asked him for a categorical answer to the question
whether according to “absolute political ethics,” A.
B., who has bought a piece of land in England, as he
might buy a cabbage, has a moral as well as a legal
right to his land or not? -
And he follows with these pertinent questions:
If he does not, how does “absolute political ethics”
deduce his right to compensation ?
If he does, how does “absolute political ethics”
deduce the state’s right to disturb him 2
By this time Mr. Spencer must have wished he
had not written to the Times, though it is a striking
evidence of the little knowledge of “Social Statics”
in England (a fact on which Mr. Spencer had evi-
dently calculated), that in none of these letters, or
in those that followed, do any of the “hecklers,”
with the one exception of Mr. Laidler, seem to have
any knowledge of what Mr. Spencer had really said
in that book — a knowledge that would have roused
their ire to a far higher pitch, and enabled them to
ask still harder questions.
The reader may wonder why in an attempt to deny
his utterances in “Social Statics,” Mr. Spencer should
have printed the passage from “Political Institutions,”
which is in reality a re-affirmation of them. The only
explanation I can offer is that he felt that he must
120 REPUIDIATION.
print something, and had absolutely nothing else to
print. For there is no word in all his works up to
this time (“Justice” being yet to come) that gives
the slightest evidence of any modification of the views
set forth in “Social Statics.” And since he had six
years before successfully referred to this passage, as
though it indicated a modification of his views, he
probably felt safe in so using it a second time.
Thinking that it would suffice to settle Mr. Laidler,
he evidently did not calculate on its provoking a
“fire in the rear,” from his own friends, the adhe-
rents of landlordism, when he was giving up every-
thing real, and only striving to save a semblance of
consistency.
Mr. Spencer conveniently ignored the letters of
Mr. Greenwood and Sir Louis Mallet, but he did
make a pretence of answering Professor Huxley, in a
letter published in the Times, November 15th.
Here is the letter, which, although the first para-
graph only is pertinent to the task I have in mind, I
give in full, in order to guard against Mr. Spencer's
controversial habit of saying that his utterances have
been garbled :
To the Editor of The Times.
SIR : As Professor Huxley admits that his friend A. B.'s
title to his plot of land is qualified by the right of the
state to dispossess him if it sees well — as, by implica-
tion, he admits that all land-owners hold their land sub-
ject to the supreme ownership of the state, that is, the
community — as he contends that any force or fraud by
which land was taken in early days does not affect the
titles of existing owners, and a fortiori does not affect
the superior title of the community — and as, conse-
quently, he admits that the community, as Supreme
owner with a still valid title, may resume possession if
SECOND LETTER TO THE TIME3. 121
it thinks well, he seems to me to leave the question
standing very much where it stood; and since he, as I
suppose, agrees with me that any such resumption,
should a misjudgment lead to it, ought to be accompa-
nied by due compensation for all artificial value given to
land, I do not see in what respect we disagree on the
land question. I pass, therefore, to his comments on
absolute political ethics.
“Your treatment is quite at variance with physiological prin-
ciples” would probably be the criticism passed by a modern practi-
tioner on the doings of a Sangrado, if we suppose one to have
survived. “Oh, bother your physiological principles’’ might be the
reply. “I have got to cure this disease, and my experience tells
me that bleeding and frequent draughts of hot water are needed.”
“Well,” would be the rejoinder, “if you do not kill your patient,
you will at any rate greatly retard his recovery, as you would prob-
ably be aware had you read Professor Huxley’s “Lessons on Ele-
mentary Physiology,’ and the more elaborate books on the subject
which medical students have to master.”
This imaginary conversation will sufficiently suggest
that, before there can be rational treatment of a disor-
dered state of the bodily functions, there must be a con-
ception of what constitutes their ordered state : know-
ing what is abnormal implies knowing what is normal.
That Professor Huxley recognizes this truth is, I suppose,
proved by the inclusion of physiology in that course of
medical education which he advocates. If he says that
abandonment of the Sangrado treatment was due, not to
the teachings of physiology, but to knowledge empirically
gained, then I reply that if he expands this statement
so as to cover all improvements in medical treatment he
suicidally rejects the teaching of physiological princi-
ples as useless.
Without insisting upon that analogy between a society
and an organism which results from the interdependence
of parts performing different functions — though I be-
lieve he recognizes this — I think he will admit that
conception of a social state as disordered implies con-
ception of an ordered social state. We may fairly
assume that, in these modern days at least, all legisla-
tion aims at a better; and the conception of a better
is not possible without conception of a best. If there is
rejoicing because certain diseases have been diminished
122 REPUDIATION.
by precautions enforced, the implied ideal is a state in
which these diseases have been extinguished. If par-
ticular measures are applauded because they have de-
creased criminality, the implication is that the absence
of all crime is a desideratum. Hence, however much a
politician may pooh-pooh social ideals, he cannot take
steps toward bettering the social state without tacitly
entertaining them. And though he may regard absolute
political ethics as an airy vision, he makes bit by bit
reference to it in everything he does. I simply differ
from him in contending for a consistent and avowed
reference, instead of an inconsistent and unacknowl-
edged reference.
Even Without any such strain on the imagination as
may be required to conceive a community consisting
entirely of honest and honorable men — even without
asking whether there is not a set of definite limits to
individual actions which such men would severally
insist upon and respect — even without asserting that
these limits must, in the nature of things, result when
men have severally to carry on their lives in proximity
with one another, I should have thought it sufficiently
clear that our system of justice, by interdicting murder,
assault, theft, libel, etc., recognizes the existence of such
limits and the necessity for maintaining them ; and I
should have thought it manifest enough that there must
exist an elaborate system of limits or restraints on
conduct, by conformity to which citizens may co-operate
without dissension, Such a system, deduced as it may
be from the primary conditions to be fulfilled, is what
I mean by absolute political ethics. The complaint of
Professor Huxley that absolute political ethics does not
show us what to do in each concrete case seems to be
much like the complaint of a medical practitioner who
should speak slightingly of physiological generalizations,
because they did not tell him the right dressing for a
wound or how best to deal with varicose veins. I can-
not here explain further, but any one who does not
understand me may find the matter discussed at length
in a chapter on “Absolute and Relative Ethics” con-
tained in the “Data of Ethics.”
It appears to me somewhat anomalous that Professor
SECOND LETTER, TO THE TIMES. 123
Huxley, who is not simply a biologist but is familiar
with science at large, and who must recognize the reign
of law on every hand, should tacitly assume that there
exists one group of lawless phenomena — Social phenom-
ena. For if they are not lawless — if there are any
natural laws traceable throughout them, then our aim
should be to ascertain these and conform to them, well
knowing that non-conformity will inevitably bring pen-
alties. Not taking this view, however, it would seem as
though Professor Huxley agrees with the mass of “prac-
tical "politicians, who think that every legislative meas-
ure is to be decided by estimation of probabilities un-
guided by a priori conclusions. Well, had they habitu-
ally succeeded, one might not wonder that they should
habitually ridicule abstract principles; but the astound-
ing accumulation of failures might have been expected
to cause less confidence in empirical methods. Of the
18,110 public Acts passed between 20 Henry III. and the
end of 1872, Mr. Janson, Vice-President of the Law
Society, estimates that four-fifths have been wholly or
partially repealed, and that in the years 1870–72 there
were repealed 3,532 Acts, of which 2,759 were totally
repealed. Further, I myself found, on examining the
books for 1881–83, that in those years there had been
repealed 650 Acts belonging to the present reign, besides
many of preceding reigns. Remembering that Acts
which are repealed have been doing mischief, which
means loss, trouble, pain to great numbers — remember-
ing, thus, the enormous amount of suffering which this
helter-skelter legislation has inflicted for generations
and for centuries, I think it would be not amiss to ask
whether better guidance may not be had, even though it
should come from absolute political ethics.
I regret that neither space nor health will permit me
to discuss any of the questions raised by Sir Louis
Mallet. And here, indeed, I find myself compelled to
desist altogether. In so far as I am concerned, the
controversy must end with this letter.
I am, etc.,
HERBERT SPENCER.
ATHENACUM CLUB, Nov. 13.
124 REPUDIATION.
Really, this “Answer to Professor Huxley’’ is no
answer at all. What Mr. Spencer virtually says is:
“I admit all that the land-owners may want me to
admit. Let us change the subject.”
Yet even in thus changing the subject, he is obliged
to give up the distinction he had made between abso-
lute political ethics and relative political ethics, for his
long-drawn explanation to Professor Huxley means,
if it means anything at all, that absolute political
ethics do have a bearing on practical political conduct.
CHAPTER VI.
MORE LETTERS.
WITH this Mr. Spencer endeavored to withdraw,
and no wonder. But letters from Mr. Greenwood,
Professor Huxley, and a number of new participants,
including Auberon Herbert for the defence, continued
to appear in the Times for some time longer, and
Messrs. Greenwood and Huxley succeeded in drag-
ging from him another brief confession.
Professor Huxley made him give up his illustra-
tion from physiological principles, and Mr. Green-
wood, pressing him as to whether, as averred by Mr.
Laidler, he had ever said that to right one wrong
it takes another, first made him declare that he did
not remember to have said it, and then, pressing him
still farther, made him declare he had not said it
and to repudiate it if he had.
Although this is a mere side-issue, perhaps it may
be worth while, even at this late date, to vindicate
Mr. Laidler and refresh Mr. Spencer's memory. In
“Social Statics,” Chapter XXI., “The Duty of the
State,” Section 8, may be found the doctrine which
Mr. Laidler referred to, when, in citing Mr. Spencer
against Mr. Morley's objection to land nationaliza-
tion, he said, as reported by the Times —
Mr. Spencer has said that the land had been taken by
force and fraud. That gentleman had also said that to
right one wrong it takes another.
126 REPUDIATION.
This in effect, if not in exact words, Mr. Spencer
certainly does say in Chapter XXI., Section 8, in com-
bating the doctrine of non-resistance. He declares all
coercion immoral in itself, but (using the same terms
in the same sense as Mr. Laidler) justifies govern-
ment when “it uses wrong to put down wrong.”
He adds:
The principle of non-resistance is not ethically true,
but only that of non-aggression . . . . We may not care-
lessly abandon our rights. We may not give away our
birthright for the sake of peace. . . . We may not be
passive under aggression. In due maintenance of our
claim is involved the practicability of all our duties. . . .
If we allow ourselves to be deprived of that without
which we cannot fulfil the Divine will, we virtually
negative that will.
I thus take the trouble to refresh Mr. Spencer's
memory and vindicate Mr. Laidler, for, although the
latter gentleman was allowed one letter in the Times,
it was afterwards that the question was raised by
Mr. Greenwood, and I do not suppose that Mr.
Lardler got another chance, the Times speaking of
him contemptuously, as a Mr. Laidler, and printing
his letter in smaller type, although it was he who
first brought out Mr. Spencer, and provoked the
whole discussion. -
Mr. Laidler's letter, of which neither party to the
controversy seemed to care to take notice, was pub-
lished by the Times on the same day as Mr. Spencer's
second letter. He said —
To the Editor of the Times.
SIR : As one of the deputation of members of the
Newcastle Labor Electoral Organization who recently
waited upon Mr. John Morley, M. P., to ascertain his
MORE LETTERS. 127
opinion on certain political and social topics, I was
intrusted by my fellow-members of the deputation with
the question of the nationalization of the land, and this
subject I discussed with Mr. Morley. In doing so, I
sought to back up my position by quoting the ninth
chapter of “Social Statics,” by Mr. Herbert Spencer,
and I certainly thought I had a good case when I found
on my side the most distinguished authority of our time.
To my great surprise, I now find that in the letters
which he has addressed to you, Mr. Herbert Spencer
appears to be very anxious to repudiate the doctrines
which he preached so eloquently in 1850. Now, although
it is a common thing for the politician of to-day to
repudiate principles and deductions which he formerly
warmly espoused and to adopt others which he once
emergetically condemned, one does not expect the same
vacillation on the part of a distinguished philosopher
like Mr. Herbert Spencer. I find it difficult to under-
stand his position, which seems to be this — that while
adhering to his general principles he abandons certain
deductions therefrom. Now, to my mind, the ninth
chapter of “Social Statics,” which deals with “The
Right to the Use of the Earth,” seems as true, as logical,
and as unanswerable an argument in favor of the nation-
alization of the land as it doubtless appeared to Mr.
Herbert Spencer on the day it was written. Let us
trace the course of his argument through the ten sec-
tions of which the chapter is composed.
Giving a short abstract of these ten sections of
Chapter IX. Mr. Laidler continued —
In the foregoing digest, beyond one or two connect-
ing words, the language is that of Mr. Herbert Spencer
himself. Does it not constitute an unanswerable argu-
ment in favor of the nationalization of the land 2 If the
author would permit it to be reprinted, what an admira-
ble tract the ninth chapter of “Social Statics" would be
for the propagation of socialistic principles | But he
* Mr. Laidler uses the term socialistic in the vague way in
which it is so commonly used in England, and doubtless means
land nationalization principles.
128 - REPUDIATION.
now seems to repudiate the offspring of his own genius !
We have, however, a right to ask that, instead of a
vague repudiation in general terms, Mr. Herbert Spen-
cer should tell us specifically what deductions he has
abandoned and why he has abandoned them. We might
then endeavor to answer his answers to his own propo-
sitions.
Yours,
JOHN LAIDLER, Bricklayer.
How far Mr. Spencer has tried to answer his own
propositions, we shall see in “Justice.”
L' A TERT III.
R. E. C. A N T A TI O N.
THE FATE OF “ SOCIAL STATICS.”
THE PLACE OF “ JUSTICE * IN THE SYNTHETIC PHI-
LOSOPHY.
THE SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY.
THE IIDEA OF JUSTICE IN THE SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY.
MR. SPENCER’S TASK.
“THE RIGHTS TO THE USES OF NATURAL MEDIA.”
“JUSTICE * ON THE RIGHT TO LIGHT AND AIR.
“ JUSTICE * ON THE RIGHT TO LAND.
“JUSTICE * – THE RIGHT OF PROPERTY.
THE RIGHT OF PROPERTY AND THE RIGHT OF TAXATION.
COMPENSATION.
“JUSTICE’” — THE LAND QUESTION.
PRINCIPAL BROWN.
Equity therefore does not permit property in land. . . . Not only have
present land-tenures an indefensible origin, but it is impossible to discover
any mode in which land can become private property. . . . Ethical truth is
as exact and as peremptory as physical truth ; and that in this matter of land-
tenure the verdict of morality must be distinctly aye or may. Either men
have a right to make the soil private property, or they have not. There is no
medium. We must choose one of the two positions. There can be no half-
and-half opinion. In the nature of things the fact must be either one way
or the other.— Herbert Spencer, 1850.
CHAPTER I.
THE FATE OF “social, STATICS.”
WE now come to the purpose for which the pre-
ceding lengthy examination has been made : the
consideration of Mr. Spencer's present opinions on
the land question, as set forth with all the weight
of the “Synthetic Philosophy’ in its author's most
recent volume, “Justice,” which bears date of June,
1891, and was published somewhat later in that year.
But it will be best to break the chronological
order, and record here the fate of “Social Statics.”
Even after Mr. Spencer had made the Times and
Mr. Greenwood believe that he had suppressed it
years before, that book still continued to be published
by Mr. Spencer's authorized publishers, D. Appleton
& Co., and their edition of “Justice,” published in
October, 1891, contains an advertisement of it in its
original form. But now, at last, it has been done
for. It has not been killed outright; that would be
mercy compared with its present fate. It has — and
I cannot but feel that “Progress and Poverty,’” the
Edinburgh reviewer, and Mr. John Laidler of New-
castle, have been innocent causes of its fate — it has
been disembowelled, stuffed, mummified, and then set
up in the gardens of the Spencerian Philosophy,
where it may be viewed with entire complacency by
Sir John and his Grace.
132 RECANTATION.
Soberly, the original volume has with this year been
withdrawn from publication, to give place to a new
“Social Statics,” dated January, 1892, and published
in February. This volume, which is, of course, now
to pass in the publisher's lists as “Social Statics,” has
for full title, “Social Statics, abridged and revised,
together with ‘The Man versus the State.’” It con-
sists of disjointed fragments of the old “Social
Statics,” which, in order to make some approach to
the bulk of the original, is padded out with the
magazine articles before referred to. In the preface
Mr. Spencer says:
My first intention was to call this volume, or, rather,
part of a volume, “Fragments from Social Statics,” and
afterwards, “Selections from Social Statics.” Both of
these titles, however, seemed to indicate a much less
coherent assemblage of parts than it contains. On the
other hand, to call it an abridgment is somewhat mis-
leading, since the word fails to imply that large and
constructively important parts are omitted. No title,
however, appears appropriate, and I have at length de-
cided that Social Statics, abridged and revised, is the
least inappropriate.
If appropriateness was what Mr. Spencer sought,
it does seem as if a title much less inappropriate
might have been found. For the only discernible
principle of revision is the chopping-out of all that
might imply a God or offend vested interests, in the
same fashion that Russian censors revise distasteful
works, the result being a Hamlet from which not
only Hamlet himself, but the Ghost, the Queen
Mother, and Ophelia, have gone. The “First Prin-
ciple '' is left, but everything large or small relating
to land is omitted. The only allusion to land is in
THE FATE OF “SOCIAL STATICS.” 133
the cavilling at Locke, which is retained, and that
what was originally Section 3, Chapter X., now con-
verted into a chapter, headed “Socialism,” is left by
careless editing to begin, as in the original :
The doctrine that all men have equal rights to the use
of the earth seems at first sight to countenance a species
of social organization at variance with that from which
the right of property has just been deduced.*
The foot-note indicated by this asterisk is:
* Referring to an omitted part of the last chapter, the *: of which,
with modifications, will now be found in Part IV. of the Principles of
Ethics.
Thus revised, “Social Statics” no further con-
cerns us. All that Mr. Spencer originally said about
the relation between men and the earth having now
been definitely withdrawn, we are referred for his
present opinions to the book we are about to
consider.
But the advertising of the revised “Social Statics'
is worth noting, as by some blunder it lays before
the American reader what was originally intended
for English circulation only, and brings to mind the
fiction about the suppression of “Social Statics,”
which did duty in the St. James's Gazette and the
London Times. Here is the advertisement as pub-
lished at the head of D. Appleton & Co.'s announce-
ments in May, 1892: -
2
S00IAL STATIGS, BY HERBERT SPENCER. New and revised
edition, including “The Man versus the State,” a series of
essays on political tendencies heretofore published separately.
12mo. 420 pages. Cloth, $2.00.
Having been much annoyed by the persistent quotation from the
old edition of “Social Statics,” in the face of repeated warnings,
of views which he had abandoned, and by the misquotation of
others which he still holds, Mr. Spencer some ten years ago stopped
134 RECANTATION.
the sale of the book in England and prohibited its translation.
But the rapid spread of communistic theories gave new life to these
misrepresentations; hence Mr. Spencer decided to delay no longer
a statement of his mature opinions on the rights of individuals
and the duty of the State.
This is a queer statement to come from D. Appleton
& Co., who have been publishing and advertising the
old edition of “Social Statics” up to this year, with-
out the slightest warning to purchasers that the
author had changed his views otherwise than as
stated in the prefaces and notes, which, as I have
before said, made no reference to any change on the
land question. It is strange to hear from them, that
the annoyed Mr. Spencer ten years ago stopped the
sale of his book in England, when it had not been
in print for over twenty years, serenely leaving it to
be sold in the only country where it was in print,
and that he also at the same time prohibited its trans-
lation. Why is Mr. Spencer so careful of what
Englishmen in the little home island and even the
“foreigner’’ may read, yet so careless of what is read
by Americans, Canadians and Australians ? And
why have D. Appleton & Co., for nearly ten years,
been passing off on their great constituency a book
that is author would not allow to be sold in his own
home or in foreign countries? These are questions
this advertisement suggests but does not answer.
CHAPTER II.
THE PLACE OF “JUSTICE * IN THE SYNTHETIC
PHILOSOPHY.
“JUSTICE,” to which we are to look for Mr.
Spencer's present opinions on the land question, is
esteemed by its author his most important book.
This volume, the full title of which is, “The
Ethics of Social Life — Justice,” is also entitled
“Part IV. of Ethics.” It is the tenth of the pon-
derous volumes already published, which are adver-
tised as “Spencer's Synthetic Philosophy.” The
grand divisions of this Synthetic Philosophy, as now
advertised, are: “First Principles,” “The Principles
of Biology,” “The Principles of Psychology,” “Prin-
ciples of Sociology,” and “Principles of Morality.”
Of these five grand divisions, the “Principles of
Morality,” as it is styled in the advertisements, or
“Principles of Ethics,” as it is styled in the title-
page of the book itself, is the grand division to which
“Justice ’’ belongs in the Spencerian scheme. The
first volume of this grand division, “The Data of
Ethics,” has been already published. Volume II.,
“The Inductions of Ethics,” and Volume III., “The
Ethics of Individual Life,” have not yet appeared,"
Mr. Spencer, as he states in the preface to “Justice,”
preferring to hasten this volume, as most important.
After these two deferred volumes have been com-
* They have been published since this was put in plate.
136 RECANTATION.
pleted, there are, as he also tells us, two more
volumes, “The Ethics of Social Life — Negative
Benevolence,” and “The Ethics of Social Life —
Positive Benevolence,” to which he will turn his
attention, thus completing his full philosophical
scheme.
This scheme of “Synthetic Philosophy” is the
most pretentious that ever mortal man undertook,
since it embraces no less than an explanation to man-
kind, without recourse to the hypothesis of Originating
Intelligence, of how the world and all that is in it
contained, including we ourselves, our motives, feel-
ings, powers, instincts, habits and customs, came to
be. Of this large scheme, the ethical part is the
most important, being, as Mr. Spencer tells us, “that
to which I regard all the preceding parts as subsidi-
ary.” And of this most important part, he also tells
us that this volume, “The Ethics of Social Life —
Justice,” is the most important.
Thus “Justice,” which so far as it treats of the
land question we are about to consider, is by its
author deemed the very summit and cap-stone of his
whole philosophy.
And that, indeed, it must be, follows from the
supreme importance of its subject-matter. For it
treats of right and wrong, of what should and what
should not be, in those social relations of men from
which spring the most fiercely debated practical
questions of our time — questions that involve the
happiness or misery, the physical, mental and moral
development of vast populations, the advance of civ-
ilization or its retrogression. As to the principles of
right and wrong in individual relations there is little
THE PLACE OF “JUSTICE.” 137
if any dispute; and not merely through Christendom,
but “from Paris to Pekin,” mankind are substantially
agreed as to what constitutes good or bad. It is
when we come to the social relations of men — to
those social adjustments which prescribe and control
rights of ownership, which affect the production, dis-
tribution, accumulation and enjoyment of wealth,
which are the main ground of legislation, and which
over and above the injunctions of individual moral-
ity throw around men a perfect network of shalls
and shall nots, that we reach the befogged and debat-
able land — the region of burning questions.
It is where the philosopher thus passes from the
region of mere curious speculation into the arena
where, for men living and men yet to come, the
issues of want or plenty, of ignorance or enlighten-
ment, of slavery or freedom, must be decided, that
the ordinary apprehension may best apply to his
teachings the tests of usefulness and sincerity. That
the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and that the
tree is best known by its fruit, are maxims not to be
disregarded in philosophy. What matters the teach-
ing of any philosophy as to the origin of things,
compared with its teaching on matters that affect the
fullness, happiness and nobleness of life 2 And how
shall we tell whether the philosopher be an earnest
man or a mere prater, so readily and so clearly as by
noting whether he takes the side of wronger or of
wronged, the undeservedly rich or the undeservedly
poor 7 Thus, “Justice ’’ is not merely the roof and
crown of the Spencerian Synthetic Philosophy; it is
its touchstone as well.
CHAPTER III.
THE SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY.
I WISH to keep close to the land question. But
to fairly understand Mr. Spencer's views on the land
question as expressed in “Justice,” and to discover
what ground there may be for the changes they show,
it is necessary to get some idea of the system of which
it is the crown.
“Justice ’’ is in fact the real revision of “Social
Statics” in the new light of the system of philoso-
phy which its author has since elaborated. Both
books go over the same ground, that of social eco-
nomics, and the title of one might serve for that of
the other. This ground it was that first attracted
Mr. Spencer, and he went over it forty-two years
ago in the temper of a social reformer. He now re-
turns to these living, burning questions of the time
with the reputation of a great philosopher, after
assiduous years spent in what purports to be a wider
and deeper survey. For of the philosophy which he
has in the meantime elaborated it is claimed not only
that “it is more logically complete than any other
system,” but that “it is more practical than any other,
because it bears immediately upon common experi-
ence, takes hold of the living questions of the time,
throws light upon the course of human affairs, and
THE SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. 139
gives knowledge that may serve both for public and
individual guidance.” "
I speak of Herbert Spencer in “Social Statics”
as a social reformer, to distinguish his attitude at that
time from his present attitude. But he was not con-
tent in that book to advocate empirical remedies for
the disorder, waste and wrong that he beheld about
him. He saw that expediency offered no sure guide ;
that such was the infirmity of human powers, and
such, in the complexity of social actions and reactions,
was the impossibility of calculating results, that legis-
lation based on mere policy was constantly bringing
to naught the best-laid schemes, constantly entan-
gling men in blind ways, constantly resulting in the
unforeseen and unwished. The burden of “Social
Statics” is that there is a better guide in social affairs
than the calculations of expediency; that what men
should look to is not results but principles; that the
moral sense may be trusted where the intellect is
certain to go astray. Its central idea is that the
universe bespeaks to us its origin in an intelligence
of which justice must be an attribute ; that there is
in human affairs a divinely appointed order to which,
if it would prosper, society must conform ; that
there is an eternal rule of right, by which, despite all
perturbations of the intellect, social institutions may
be safely measured.
This rule of right, as expressed in the first prin-
ciple of “Social Statics” — this “law of equal lib-
erty,’” that “each has freedom to do all that he wills
* E. L. Youmans, M.D., “Herbert Spencer and the Doctrine
of Evolution,” Popular Science Library. D. Appleton & Co.,
New York,
140 RECANTATION.
provided that he infringes not the equal freedom of
any other” — what is it indeed but an expression in
primary essential of the Golden Rule 7 What Mr.
Spencer declared in “Social Statics” is in fact what
the National Assembly of France declared in 1789,
“That ignorance, neglect or contempt of human
rights are the sole causes of public misfortunes and
corruptions of government.” And with clearer vision
than the French Assembly, he saw and did not hesi-
tate to assert that the most important of human rights
from the neglect and contempt of which society to-
day suffers, is the natural and equal right to the use
of the planet.
It is its protest against materialism, its assertion
of the supremacy of the moral law, its declaration of
God-given rights that are above all human enact-
ments, that despite whatever it may contain of crudity
and inconsistency make “Social Statics” a noble
book, and in the deepest sense a religiously minded
book.
In the course Mr. Spencer thus entered in his early
manhood there was work enough to have engaged
the greatest powers for the longest lifetime; but
work that would have involved a constant and bitter
contest with the strongest forces— forces that have
at their disposal not only the material things that
make life pleasant, but present honor as well. Mr.
Spencer did not continue the struggle that in “Social
Statics” he began. He turned from the field of
social reform to the field of speculative philosophy,
in which he has won great reputation and authority.
It is the scheme of philosophy thus developed that
forms the basis of “Justice,” as the ideas of a
TEIE SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. 141
living God, of a divinely appointed order, and of an
eternal distinction between right and wrong, just
and unjust, form the basis of “Social Statics.”
In its earlier volumes this philosophy was styled
“Spencer's Evolutionary Philosophy.” This title
has since been abandoned for the less definite but
more ambitious one of “Spencer's Synthetic Philoso-
phy.” Since synthesis is the opposite of analysis, the
putting together, instead of taking apart — a synthetic
philosophy is a philosophy which explains the world
(a term which in the philosophic sense includes all
of which we can become conscious), not by the pro-
cess of taking things apart and seeing of what they
are composed; but by assuming an Original principle
or principles, and from that starting-point mentally
building up the world, thus showing how it came to
be. The Book of Genesis embodies probably the
oldest synthetic philosophy we have record of. Mr.
Spencer's is the latest.
Spencer’s “Synthetic Philosophy’ is in the main
a fusion and extension of two hypotheses — the neb-
ular hypothesis of the formation of celestial bodies,
and what is best known as the Darwinian hypothesis
of the development of species, with a bridging over of
such gulfs as the passage from the inorganic to the or-
ganic, and from matter and motion to mind, and some
infusion of what I take to be Kantian metaphysics.
Though Mr. Spencer objects to the characterization, I
can only describe this philosophy as materialistic, since
it accounts for the world and all it contains, includ-
ing the human ego, by the interactions of matter and
motion, without reference to any such thing as intel-
ligence, purpose or will, except as derived from them.
142 IRECANTATION.
It does not, of course, any more than other material-
istic philosophies, pretend to explain what matter
and motion are, or how they came to be. That, for
it, is the unknowable, while it only deals with what
may be known by men. But within the region of
the knowable, all things to it have come to be, or are
coming to be, by the interactions of matter and mo-
tion, in a process which it terms “evolution,” and
which it describes as “an integration of matter, and
concomitant dissipation of motion, during which the
matter passes from an indefinite, incoherent homo-
geneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity, and
during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel
transformation.” -
After evolution has reached its limit and all the
motion is dissipated, comes a temporary equilibrium,
and then dissolution sets in, by the integration of
motion and the dissipation of matter, so that, accord-
ing to the Synthetic Philosophy, the universe goes
on, so far as we can see, to infinity, like one of those
disks boys play with, which by means of a twisted
string is made to spin around one way, then to come
to a momentary stop, and then spin back the other
way, the process continuing so long as the boy will
gently extend and then gently bring together his
hands. What is it that supplies the force furnished
in the case of the toy by the boy's hands? And has
it, like the boy's hands, conscious will behind it 2
This to the Spencerian Synthetic Philosophy is the
unknowable.
This unknowable is not God, though Mr. Spencer
presents it to the religious sentiment as something
with which it may be satisfied, and some of his fol-
THE SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. 143
lowers, and sometimes even he himself, speak of it in
ways that suggest identity. In “Social Statics,” how-
ever, Mr. Spencer frequently uses the term God, but
he certainly never thought that he knew God in the
sense of comprehending Him, or that it was possible
for man so to know Him. And if the unknowable
of his philosophy means that —
Being above all beings! Mighty One,
Whom none can comprehend and none explore
Who fill’st existence with Thyself alone —
Embracing all, supporting, ruling o'er —
Being whom we call God, and know no more!"
—why should he, with the development of his philoso-
phy have abandoned the use of the old term for that
which beneath the myths and fables and creeds by
which men have endeavored to formulate spiritual per-
ceptions has been always recognized as apparent to
the human soul yet transcending human knowledge?
This unknowable must be distinguished from the
unknown. It is that which not only is not, but never
can be known in any way; that which not merely we
cannot comprehend, but of which we can know nothing
at all, even of its intelligence or non-intelligence, its
consciousness or non-consciousness, its nature or its
attributes. It is difficult indeed to see how we may
predicate even existence of it, as we may of an un-
known person or unknown thing. For this requires
at least some knowledge. But of the unknowable we
lack the capacity of knowing anything whatever. Air
is unknowable directly to our sense of sight; we can-
not directly see air. But by its resistance, its weight,
its chemical and other qualities, it is knowable by our
* Derzhavin, Bowring's translation.
144 TECANTATION.
other faculties; and it is indirectly knowable even to
our sight, through the moving of leaves, the motion
of watery surfaces, etc.; while if air were unknow-
able, we could not be conscious of it in any possible
way. It would be precisely the same to us as no air.
By the constitution of the human mind it is im-
possible for us in attempting to trace back the line
of causation to find any stopping place until we reach
that which thinks and wills — that to which the
volition is akin which to our consciousness is an
originating element in the trains of sequences that we
ourselves set in motion, or at least modify and divert.
Thus any materialistic or mechanical philosophy must
either beg the question by assuming the eternity of
matter and motion, or admit something behind them
which it must take for granted and leave out of its
explanation, simply denying that it can be recognized
as intelligence or will apart from matter and motion,
i.e. spirit. If the unknowable in the Spencerian
Philosophy means anything more than the vacuum
that is thus left where a spiritual First Cause is
denied, it seems to mean what by some metaphysicians
is styled “the thing in itself.”
This “thing in itself” is in metaphysical language
the noumenon as distinguished from the phenomenon:
the thing as it really is, as distinguished from the
thing as it is recognized in its qualities by the per-
cipient being. But this, if not another name for
spirit, really amounts to vacancy. Such idea of “the
thing in itself” as opposed to the thing as known
in phenomena, seems to come from the habit, to
which our use of language leads, of associating in-
dependent existence with qualities to which we give
THE SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. 145
independent names. Thus no man ever saw white
except as a white thing. But as things have other
colors we can readily separate the idea white from the
idea thing. Forgetting, since we are only dealing
with words, that the abstraction of one color implies
its replacement by another color, and the abstraction
of all colors would render the thing non-existent so
far at least as our sight is concerned, we may men-
tally separate the idea of color, and imagine the thing
in other respects as remaining. Extending the pro-
cess of abstraction to all other qualities, we may fancy
that we have still remaining the idea of the thing
separated from all idea of its qualities. But what we
have remaining is really only a verbal simulacruma,
that sounds like something, and may be written or
parsed, but which on analysis consists of negations,
and means really no thing or nothing. This, as
well as I can understand it, is that “thing in itself,”
of which, in some part, or in some aspects, Mr.
Spencer's unknowable seems to consist.
But if the Spencerian philosophy is thus indefinite
as to what precedes or underlies matter and motion,
it certainly shows no lack of definiteness from the
appearance of matter and motion onward. With
matter and motion begins its knowable, and from
thenceforward, without pause or break, it builds up
the whole universe by the integration of the one, and
the dissipation of the other, in the mode described as
evolution, without recourse to any other element.
In this elimination of any spiritual element lies, it
seems to me, the essential characteristie of the Spen-
cerian philosophy. It is not, as is largely supposed,
the evolution philosophy, but an evolution philosophy;
146 RECANTATION.
that is to say, its rejection of any spiritual element
in its account of the genesis of things does not follow
from its acceptance of the principle of evolution; but
the peculiarity of its teachings as to evolution arises
from its ignoring of the spiritual element, from its
assumption that, matter and motion given, their inter-
actions will account for all that we see, feel or know.
In reality the Spencerian idea of evolution differs as
widely from that held by such evolutionists as Alfred
Russell Wallace, St. George Mivart, or Joseph Le
Conte, as it differs from the idea of special and direct
creation. It is only when this is recognized that the
real point of issue raised by or perhaps rather around
the doctrine of evolution is seen. We all see that the
oak is evolved from the acorn, the man from the child.
And that it is intended for the evolution of something
is the only intelligible account that we can make for
ourselves of the universe. Thus in some sense we
all believe in evolution, and in some sense the vast
majority of men always have. And even the evolu-
tion of man from the animal kingdom offers no real
difficulty so long as this is understood as only the
form or external of his genesis. To me, for instance,
who, possibly from my ignorance of such branches,
am unable to see the weight of the evidence of man's
descent from other animals, which many specialists in
natural science deem conclusive, it yet appears ante-
cedently probable that externally such might have
been his descent. For it seems better to accord
with the economy manifested through nature, to
think that when the soul of man first took encase-
ment in physical body on this earth it should have
taken the form nearest to its needs, rather than that
THE SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. 147
inorganic matter should be built up. And while I
cannot conceive how, even in illimitable time, the
animal could of itself turn into the man, it is easy
for me to think that if the spirit of man passed into
the body of a brute the animal body would soon
assume human shape.
Let me illustrate the distinction I wish to point
Out :
Here is a locomotive of the first class, or a great
Corliss engine, capable on the pressure of a child's
finger of exerting to definite ends a mighty force.
How did it come to be 2
“It came to be,” some one might answer, “from
the integrations of matter and motion. This matter
existed, not to go further back than is necessary, in
ores of iron and copper and zinc, and in the wood
of trees. Iły motion acting on matter these materials
were transported, separated, combined and adjusted,
until integrated into this definite, coherent heteroge-
neity that you see.”
Such answer would not satisfy me. I would in-
deed see that it was quite true that from the first
wresting of the ores from their beds, to the last touch
of file or emery paper, every step in this construction
involved the action of motion on matter; but I would
know that this was not all, and that what so ordered
and directed the action of motion on matter as to
bring this construction into being was the intelligence
and volition of man. And I would reply, “You do
not go deep enough : what this construction really
bespeaks is something you have omitted; something
to which matter is but the material, and motion the
tool — the intelligence, consciousness and freedom of
human will.”
148 |RECANTATION.
Or, here is a picture. Let it be a reproduction of
a Madonna of Raphael's, such as are made or might
be made by self-feeding presses. Shall any one ex-
plain the impression of grace and beauty and loving
purity that it produces on him who contemplates it, by
explaining on the undulatory theory of light how im-
pressions of color are produced on the retina of the
eye 2 Or shall he account for its genesis by telling
me that by integrations of matter and motion certain
pigments have become disposed on paper in a certain
way ? Should he attempt to do so I would say to
him, “You are telling me merely of the medium
through which in this picture soul speaks to soul; you
are merely telling me of the means by which the
thought of the painter found expression in outward
form.”
But suppose he should answer —
“You delude yourself. I have investigated the
matter, and have been to the place where such pic-
tures as this are brought forth. I saw no painter; I
saw only a series of revolving cylinders, through
which an endless roll of paper was drawn by steel
fingers. By the automatic motion of this machinery
one cylinder impressed on the paper some patches of
one color, and another some patches of another color,
till at last, by such successive actions of motion on
matter, a picture like this came forth.”
Would I be any more convinced that such a pic-
ture could have come to be without that power, essen-
tially different from matter and motion, which we
feel in ourselves and recognize in other men, which
draws a deep gulf between man and all other animals;
that power which plans, contrives, and by using
THE SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. 149
matter and motion creates; that power in short which
we call spirit? Would I not say to him, “What you
tell me of the way this picture was brought forth by
no means lessens my certainty that it could prima-
rily have originated only in the mind and soul of
a painter, but only shows me in the automatic working
of the presses of which you speak a higher expression
of the same power of using tools to body forth thought
that was shown in the use of palette and brush. In
this reproduction, as in each and all of the various
processes and machines by which it was brought to
be, I see a manifestation of the same essential thing
that the original picture would show to me — origi-
nating will, adapting mind; in short, not matter and
motion, but spirit, or soul.
And of what moment would be the question
whether this picture came into existence by the
direct action of human will upon the paper, or indi-
rectly through its action upon automatic machinery,
as compared with the question whether its existence
involved human action or not 7
It is on this vital point of the existence or non-
existence of spirit as a prime motor that the real
issue raised by theories of evolution comes. Such
evolutionism as is represented by the men of whom I
have spoken, sees in evolution only a mode in which
the creative spirit works. Such evolutionism as is
formulated in the Spencerian philosophy eliminates
spirit from its hypothesis, and takes into account
only matter and motion.
Here is where all materialistic or mechanical theo-
ries of the universe ultimately fail. The belief in
God, that is to say, in a Spiritual Originator, has no
150 RECANTATION.
such utterly inadequate and ridiculous genesis as that
which we shall shortly see Mr. Spencer gives for it.
It springs from the same primary ineradicable percep-
tion that universally leads men, whenever they see
in a thing destitute of life the evidence of adap-
tation involving choice, to attribute it to man.
No civilized man, after inspection, ever took the
rudest huts raised by savages for the structures of
lower animals. No savage who might at a distance
have thought a ship a bird, or a steamer a marine
monster, ever failed on closer view to know that
it was of man's building. No wandering Bedouin
ever attributed to natural forces ruins so vast that
they transcended his ideas of man's ability. On the
contrary, so clear is the impress and testimony of
that creative power which so widely and unmistak-
ably distinguishes man from all other animals, that
rude peoples invariably attribute constructions which
they deem beyond man's ability, to genii, fairies or
demons —beings possessing powers of the same kind
as man, but in larger degree. And they do this for
the same reason that they attribute the bringing into
being of the highest of adaptations, those that embody
life, to a highest of spiritual beings — the Great
Spirit, or God. And when our larger knowledge
shows us no wavering or confusion in the line which
marks conscious adaptation, so that to the specialist
the chipping of a flint taken from a long buried
river-drift, or the scratching on a tusk of a pre-
glacial animal, shows the same unmistakable evidence
of man’s work as does the engine or the picture, how
shall we otherwise interpret the evidences of design
similar in kind but infinitely higher in degree which
THE SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. 151
nature on every hand reveals than as indicating the
work of God 2 ---
But to return again to our illustration: If when,
to him who contends that the engine or the picture
has come to be by the integrations of matter and
motion, I say that such structures unmistakably be-
speak man's work, suppose he should reply to me:
“What is man's work but the interaction of matter
and motion ? What is man's hand but a certain
arrangement of matter? What is the force it exerts
but a dissipation of motion? Did they, too, not exist
in an indefinite, incoherent homogeneous shape in
the primordial mass 2 Do they not come to man
from unnumbered transmutations in the food he eats,
the water he drinks, the air he breathes; to pass from
him into other numberless mutations? If you think
man is not included in matter and motion, shut off
even for a little while his supplies of matter and
motion, and where is your man 7"
“Your explanation no better satisfies me than
before,” I would reply. “While it may be true as
far as it goes, it is inadequate and false in omitting
an essential factor, and that a factor which is not
last but first. Matter and motion acting to all eter-
nity could not bring forth such a structure as this.
I know, from all my experience of how things come
to be, that this structure had its primary genesis in
thought ; that in all its parts, and as a combined
whole, it was thought out before it was worked out.
I grant you that, at least normally, our perceptions
of thought in others are dependent on our percep-
tions of matter and motion. But I too think. And I
know from perceptions that are even closer and truer
152 REC ANTATION.
than my perceptions of matter and motion, that
thought is something different from matter and
motion, and from any combination of them. I think
when my body is still, when my eyes are shut, even
when my senses are locked from the external world
by sleep. And though I can only look out, not in ;
though I cannot tell you what I myself am, any
more than you can tell me what matter and motion
are ; although I can no more tell you how I came to
be than you can tell me how matter and motion came
to be, nor in what way this, that I feel is I, is em-
bodied in a material frame, I do feel directly, and
know from its capacities, that it is something different
from and superior to the matter and motion of that
frame, and that it endures while they change. And
so your explanation of the genesis of things that
excludes everything but matter and motion, is to me
as superficial as if you were to explain a Caesar or
Shakespeare by the food he ate ; an “In Memoriam'
by pen and ink; or my recognition of my friend's
voice, and our communication of thought through
the telephone, by the copper wire and the current of
electricity.
“So clear, so certain, am I that what I can recognize,
better than I can define, as spirit, is alone competent
to produce things in which I see conscious, willing
intelligence, that if you were to show me a brush
that seemed of itself to paint pictures, a pen that
seemed of itself to write intelligible words, or even
an animal that seemed to show that power which is the
essential characteristic of man, I could only account
for it as a manifestation of spirit acting in a way
unfamiliar to me — if not spirit in a human body,
THE SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. 153
playing a trick upon me, then spirit in some other
form. And this would be the conclusion of all men.”
While less acute thinkers profess to sneer at the
evidence from design, Schopenhauer, whose great
ability certainly entitles him to high rank among
atheistic philosophers, is only able to avoid the con-
clusion of an Originating Intelligence by eliminating
intelligence from will, and assuming that bare will,
or desire unconjoined with intelligence, directly origi-
nates, just as the will to make a bodily movement
brings about that movement without knowledge or
consciousness of how it is brought about."
1 Schopenhauer’s explanation of the origin of species is in inter-
esting contrast to that of the evolutionary hypothesis, and to my
mind comes closer to the truth. According to him the numberless
forms and adaptations of animated nature, instead of proceeding
from slow modifications, by which various creatures have been
adapted to their conditions, are the expression of the desire or col-
lective volition of the animal. I quote from the chapter on Com-
parative Anatomy in “The Will in Nature,” Bohn translation:
Every animal form is a longing of the will to live which is roused
by circumstances. For instance, the will is seized with a longing to
live on trees, to hang on their branches, to devour their leaves,
without contention with other animals and without ever touching
the ground. This longing presents itself throughout endless time
in the form (or Platonic idea) of the sloth. It can hardly walk
at all, being only adapted for climbing; helpless on the ground it
is agile on trees and looks itself like a moss-clad bough in order to
escape the notice of its pursuers. . .*
The universal fitness for their ends, the obviously intentional
design of all the parts of the organism of the lower animals with-
out exception, proclaim too distinctly for it ever to have been
seriously questioned, that here no forces of Nature acting by
chance and without plan have been at work, but a will. . . . [That]
no organ interferes with another, each rather assisting the others
and none remaining unemployed; also that no subordinate organ
would be better suited to another mode of existence, while the life
which the animal really leads is determined by the principal organs
alone, but on the contrary each part of the animal not only cor-
responds to every other part, but also to its mode of life: its claws
for instance are invariably adapted for seizing the prey which its
teeth are suited to tear and break, and its intestinal canal to digest;
154 RECANTATION.
But within the sphere in which we can trace ori-
gination does it anywhere appear that will without
intelligence can accomplish anything 2 So far as
its limbs are constructed to convey it where that prey is to be
found, and no organ ever remains unemployed . . . added to the
circumstance that no organ required for its mode of life is ever .
wanting in any animal, and that all, even the most heterogeneous,
harmonize together and are as it were calculated for a quite
specially determined way of life, for the element in which the
prey dwells, for the pursuit, the overcoming, the crushing and
digesting of that prey — all this, we say, proves that the animal’s
structure has been determined by the mode of life by which the
animal desired to find its sustenance, and not vice versa. It also
proves that the result is exactly the same as if a knowledge of that
mode of life and of its outward conditions had preceded the
structure, and as if therefore every animal had chosen its equip-
ment before it assumed a body; just as a sportsman before starting
chooses his whole equipment, gun, powder, shot, pouch, hunting-
knife and dress, according to the game he intends chasing. He
does not take aim at the Wild boar because he happens to have a
rifle; he took the rifle with him and not a fowling-piece, because he
intended to hunt the wild boar. The ox does not butt because it
happens to have horns; it has horns because it intends to butt.
Now to render this proof complete we have the additional circum-
stance that in many animals, during the time they are growing,
the effort of the will to which a limb is destined to minister, mani-
fests itself before the existence of the limb itself, its employment
thus anticipating its existence. Young he-goats, rams, calves, for
instance, butt with their bare polls before they have any horns;
the young boar tries to gore on either side, before its tusks are
fully developed which would respond to the intended effect, while
on the other hand it neglects to use the smaller teeth it already has
in its mouth and with which it might really bite. Thus its mode
of defending itself does not adapt itself to the existing weapons,
but vice versa.
. . . Behold the countless varieties of animal shapes. How en-
tirely is each of them the mere image of its volition, the evident ex-
pression of the strivings of the will which constitute its character!
Their difference in shape is only the portrait of their difference in
character. . . . Each particular striving of the will presents itself
in a particular modification of shape. The abode of the prey there-
fore has determined the shape of its pursuer . . . and no shape is
rejected by the will to live as too grotesque to attain its ends. . . .
As the will has equipped itself with every organ and every weapon,
offensive as well as defensive, so has it likewise provided itself in
every animal shape with an intellect, as a means of preservation
for the individual and the species. . . . I}easts of prey do not hunt
nor foxes thieve because they have more intelligence ; on the con-
trary they have more intelligence, just as they have stronger teeth
and claws, because they wished to live by hunting and thieving.
THE SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. 155
we can see clearly, is it not always true that where
volition without commensurate intelligence seems to
result in accomplishment it is because the needed
intelligence has been supplied by another will. Thus
an engine-driver desires his train to move forward or
backward, fast or slow, and by a motion that seems
directly responsive to his will, his desire takes effect
through the pulling of a lever. He may know noth-
ing of the adjustments of the machine that in re-
sponse to his will thus converts heat into motion,
and utterly lack the intelligence needed to construct
it. But that knowledge and intelligence were none
the less necessary to this moving of the train. If
not conjoined with his will they were conjoined with
other wills — the wills that have constructed a ma-
chine by which a train may be moved on the pulling
of a lever. The little intelligence needed in use
proves the great intelligence exerted in construction.
So a lady at the opera puts her glass to her eyes
and turns a screw as she wishes to make what she
sees appear nearer. She may not know how many
lenses her glass contains ; still less their nature and
properties; and is utterly without the knowledge
required for making such glasses. But that she may
accomplish at will results requiring such knowledge
is because others possess it.
So, if we look through any part of the wide field
in which human advance has brought volition nearer
to result and lessened the knowledge and intelli-
gence required by the will to use, we find its reason
in the greater knowledge and intelligence shown in
adaptation. If the ordinary ship-master of to-day
can with the aid of a quadrant, a nautical almanac
156 RECANTATION.
and a table of logarithms learn from the heavens his
position on the trackless ocean, it is because of the
high intelligence and tireless studies of others. If
girls who know only how to strike a key and inter-
pret a click, or put a peg in a hole, can talk with
each other hundreds of miles apart, it is because of
discoverers, inventors and constructors.
If, then, in the only field in which we can see ori-
gination taking place, we find that the originator is
always intelligent, conscious will, and if we find that
where the will that uses an adapation does not pos-
sess the knowledge or intelligence necessary to ori-
ginate it, another will or wills conjoined with deeper
knowledge and wider intelligence has done so, what
is the reasonable inference as to adaptations of a
higher kind, the genesis of which we cannot see, and
which so far transcend the knowledge and intelli-
gence of the creatures that through them are enabled
to give their own wills effect?
What are our bodies but a more perfect adjust-
ment of parts, such as we see in machines 2 what are
our eyes but a more perfect adjustment of lenses,
such as we see in opera-glasses 2 If, then, my hand
closes when I will to grasp, without any knowledge
on my part of the correlated movements that must
necessarily intervene; if when I merely will to look,
the lenses of my eyes are by delicate and complex
machinery directed to the position and adapted to
the distance; if all through animal and even vegetable
nature I may see utilizations of knowledge and adap-
tations of intelligence transcending, not merely the
powers of their users, but the highest human knowl-
edge and intelligence, shall I infer that these utiliza-
THE SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. 157
tions and adaptations come without knowledge and
intelligence? or shall I regard them as evidences of
a deeper knowledge and wider intelligence, which,
since we find intelligence and knowledge invariably
associated with consciousness, must pertain to a
higher consciousness 2
But to come back to the Book of Genesis that is
offered to us in Mr. Spencer's Synthetic Philosophy.
First — if we will insist upon a first — comes the
unknowable; then force; then from force, matter and
motion. Matter first appears, permeated with motion,
in a state of indefinite, incoherent homogeneity, from
which a principle which is styled “the instability of
the homogeneous” starts the “integration of matter
and concomitant dissipation of motion,” called evolu-
tion, “during which the matter passes from an indefi-
nite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent
heterogeneity, and during which the retained motion
undergoes a parallel transformation.”
This is in brief the whole story:
Matter revolving in accordance with the nebular
hypothesis gives rise to nebulous aggregations; these
to suns, which throw off revolving satellites, that
in the course of time cool into earths, on the crust
of which continuing evolution separates gases and
differentiates the strata of inorganic matter. By the
multiplying effects of motion acting on matter, the
earth becomes fitted for life; and from the differences
in the physical mobilities and chemical activities in
the segregations of matter produce in colloid or jelly-
like substances, such as starch, the beginnings of life,
which is defined as “the definite combination of het-
erogeneous changes, both simultaneous and successive,
158 IRECANTATION.
in correspondence with external co-existences and se-
quences.” And then by forces of various kinds, but
all derived from motion, and being its mechanical
equivalents, all the forms of life, vegetable and ani-
mal, proceed.
By this process of evolution man was finally de-
veloped from a lower animal — he himself, with all
his attributes and social institutions, being like every-
thing else an outcome of this process, which, acting
through survival of the fittest, heredity and the press-
ure of conditions, has been and is moulding him into
harmony with those conditions.
Of primitive man we have much and very definite
information from Mr. Spencer. He was smaller and
less powerful, especially in the lower limbs, than
man is now, but had a larger abdomen and came
earlier to maturity. He was wavering and incon-
stant; he had no surprise or curiosity or ingenuity;
his imagination was reminiscent only, not construc-
tive ; he lacked abstract ideas, was without notion of
definiteness and truth, or of benevolence, equity or
duty; he was unable to think even of a single law,
much less of law in general; had neither the habit
of expressing things definitely, nor the habit of test-
ing assertions, nor a due sense of contrast between
fact and fiction; and for him to deliberately weigh
evidence was impossible. He was a cannibal; was
entirely promiscuous in his sexual relations; had no
idea of any other life or of any supernatural exist-
ences or powers, and no care for, no sympathy with,
and no idea of the goodness or badness of acts toward
any of his fellows, except so far as female primi-
tive man was concerned with her offspring during
infancy.
THE SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. 159
How this sorry monster, this big-bellied, short-
legged, bad lot of an ancestor of ours managed to
avoid the fate of the Kilkenny cats, and keep in
existence, we are not definitely informed; but it
seems from the Synthetic Philosophy that he did,
and went on evoluting.
Various processes of his further evolution are in
the Synthetic Philosophy described. Seeing shadows
cast by the sun, the primitive man took them for
other selves, which, aided by his dreams, brought
him to a belief in doubles, more extensive even than
that which Mr. Stead has expounded in his “Real
Ghost Stories '' and “More Ghost Stories.” This led
him to believe in another life, and his fear of chiefs
and efforts to propitiate them after they were dead
evolved the idea of God. Some regard for others,
and some crude notion of property, was also evolved
by fear of reprisal from others when he injured them
or took their belongings, and by the punishment in-
flicted by chiefs. Cannibalism declined as the prac-
tice of slavery grew, and it became more profitable
to work a captive than to eat him. But primi-
tive man was not only a cannibal, he was a trophy-
taker, given to the practice of gathering human
heads and jaw bones as evidences of his prowess.
This led to mutilations of the living, or self-mutila-
tions, as marks of respect or deference, and this
again led to the giving of presents; and this in
its turn evolved on the one side into political and
ecclesiastical revenues, and on the other into a
greater respect for property, and a recognition of
value, and finally into barter, and then trade. In
similar ways all our perceptions, feelings, instincts and
160 TECANTATION.
habits have arisen. As for the mooted question,
whether we have innate ideas or whether all our ideas
are derived from experience, the solution of the Syn-
thetic Philosophy is, that while all our ideas are origi-
nally derived from experience, they are of two kinds
— those which the experience of our ancestors has
registered in our inherited nervous system, and which
therefore seem to us original, or innate, and those
which we ourselves derive from experience.
Such, in brief, is the scheme of philosophy that
in the interval between the publication of “Social
Statics" and the publication of “Justice ’’ Mr.
Spencer has developed; and which it is the purpose
of the last book to apply to the moral questions gone
over in the first.
Of the inadequacy of such a philosophy to account
for human progress or coherently to marshal the great
facts of human life and human history I have already
treated at some length in Book X. of “Progress and
Poverty,” entitled, “The Law of Human Progress.”
But what we are now concerned with is the question,
Where in such a philosophy is a basis for moral ideas
to be found?
I cannot see, nor can I find that Mr. Spencer has
been able to. Though still continuing to condemn
Bentham, as he did in “Social Statics,” all his efforts
to obtain something like a moral sanction reach no
further than expediency.
And how can it be otherwise 2 If, in all We are and
think and feel, we are but passing phases of the
interactions of matter and motion 7 — if behind the
force manifested in matter and motion is nothing but
the unknowable, and before us nothing but dissipa-
THE SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. 161
tion — personal dissipation when we die, and the
matter and motion of which alone we are com-
posed seek other forms; and then a death of the
race, followed by a dissipation of the globe 7 — why
should we not eat, drink, and be merry to the limit
of opportunity and digestion ? If our ideas of God
and of a future life come merely from the blunders
of savages so stupid that they took shadows for
other selves and dreams for realities? if we would
still be eating each other had it not been discovered
that man might use man more profitably as a laborer
than as food? if what we call the promptings of
conscience are merely inherited habits, the results
of the fear of punishment transmitted through the
nervous system 7 — why should I not lie whenever I
may find it convenient and safe to lie? why should
I avoid any omission or commission that will bring no
legal or social or personal penalty or inconvenience?
why should I refrain from selling my ability, what-
ever it may be, to any cause or interest that has
power to give me what I desire, whether it be wealth
or honor 2
Mr. Spencer's philosophy makes no distinction
between motives and results, nor does it admit of any.
If it has any gospel, it is the gospel of results, and
the results that it treats as to be sought are only re-
sults that make life pleasurable. Temperance, chas-
tity, probity, industry, public spirit, generosity, love
They have in this philosophy no promise and no
reward, save as they may directly or indirectly add to
the pleasure of the individual. For the self-sacrifice
of the hero, the devotion of the saint, the steadfast-
ness of the martyr; for the spirit that ennobles the
162 FECANTATION.
annals of mankind, that has led and yet leads so
many to endure discomfort, want, pain, death, for the
love of the true and the pure and the good; for the
noble hope of doing something to break the chains of
the captive, to open the eyes of the blind, to make
life for those who may come after fuller, nobler, hap-
pier; for the faith that has led men to dare all things
and suffer all things; it has no breath of stimulation
or praise. In the cold glare that it takes for light,
such men are fools. For it knows no more of human
will as a factor in the advance of mankind than it
does of the Divine Will. To it what conditions exist,
and what conditions will exist, are determined by the
irresistible grind of forces that in the last analysis
are resolvable into the integration of matter and the
dissipation of motion. Its fatalism eliminates free-
will. Environment and heredity are everything,
human volition nothing. Carry this philosophy to
its legitimate conclusion, and the man is a mere
automaton who thinks he is a free agent only because
he does not feel the strings that move him. That I
am a man is because I have been evolved from the
brute, as the bowlder is rounded from the rock; as the
brute, my ancestor, was evolved from colloid, and
colloid from indefinite, incoherent homogeneous mat-
ter. And that I am this or that kind of a man, with
such and such powers, tastes, habits, ways of think-
ing, feeling, perceiving, acting, is simply the result
of the external influences that registered in my an-
cestors the nerve impressions transmitted to me, and
that have continued to mould me. Social institu-
tions, the outgrowth of a similar evolution in which
free-will had no part, will continue their evolution
THE SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. 163
without help or hindrance from anything which is
really choice or volition of mine.
Extremes sometimes curiously meet. The philos-
ophy of Schopenhauer, which in deriving everything
from will is the antipodes of the Spencerian philos-
ophy, and which, like the philosophies of India, of
which it is a European version, holds existence an
evil, and looks for relief only to the renunciation of
the will to live, would, if it were generally accepted,
produce among the European races the same social
lethargy, the same hopelessness of reform, the same
readiness to bow before any tyrant, that have so long
characterized the masses of India. It seems to me
that the essential fatalism of the philosophy of ‘Mr. .
Spencer would have a similar result."
1 In “Progress and Poverty,’” Book X., Chapter I., I say:
The practical outcome of this theory is in a sort of hopeful fatal-
ism, of which current literature is full. In this view, progress is
the result of forces which work slowly, steadily and remorselessly,
for the elevation of man. War, slavery, tyranny, superstition,
famine and pestilence, the want and misery which fester in mod-
ern civilization, are the impelling causes which drive man on, by
eliminating poorer types and extending the higher; and hereditary
transmission is the power by which advances are fixed, and past
advances made the footing for new advances. The individual is
the result of changes thus impressed upon and perpetuated through
a long series of past individuals, and the social organization takes
its form from the individuals of which it is composed. Thus,
while this theory is, as Herbert Spencer says 1 — “radical to a
degree beyond anything which current radicalism conceives;” in-
asmuch as it looks for changes in the very nature of man; it is at
the same time “conservative to a degree beyond anything con-
ceived by current conservatism,” inasmuch as it holds that no
change can avail save these slow changes in men’s natures. Philos-
ophers may teach that this does not lessen the duty of endeavoring
to reform abuses, just as the theologians who taught predestinari-
anism insisted on the duty of all to struggle for salvation; but, as
generally apprehended, the result is fatalism — “do what we may,
the mills of the gods grind on regardless either of our aid or our
hindrance.”
Some years after this was written I had a curious illustration of
its truth. Talking one day with the late E. L. Youmans, the great
* “The Study of Sociology " — Conclusion.
164 RECANTATION.
And as the pessimistic philosophy of the one seems
to flow from the abandonment of action for mere
speculation, and from the Satiety and ennui which
under certain conditions accompany it, so the evolu-
tionary philosophy of the other seems to be such as
might result from the abandonment of a noble pur-
pose — from a turning from the thorny path which an
attack upon vested wrongs must open, to embrace the
pleasanter ways of acquiescence in things as they are.
It is not for me to say what is cause and what
is effect; but the correspondence of Mr. Spencer's
philosophy, which ignores the spiritual element and
knows nothing of duty, with his own attitude as shown
in his letters to the St. James's Gazette and the Times
and in “The Man versus the State,” is very striking.
In “Justice ’’ we shall see more of this correspond-
€IlC6.
popularizer of Spencerianism in the United States, a man of warm
and generous sympathies, whose philosophy seemed to me like an
ill-fitting coat he had accidentally picked up and put on, he fell into
speaking with much warmth of the political corruption of New
York, of the utter carelessness and selfishness of the rich, and
of their readiness to submit to it, or to promote it wherever it
served their money-getting purposes to do so. He became so indig-
nant as he went on that he raised his voice till he almost shouted.
Alluding to a conversation some time before, in which I had
affirmed and he had denied the duty of taking part in politics, I
said to him, “What do you propose to do about it 2 ”
Of a sudden his manner and tone were completely changed, as
remembering his Spencerianism, he threw himself back, and re-
plied, with something like a sigh, “Nothing! You and I can do
nothing at all. It’s all a matter of evolution. We can only wait
for evolution. Perhaps in four or five thousand years evolution
may have carried men beyond this state of things. But we can do
nothing.”
CHAPTER IV.
THE IDEA OF JUSTICE IN THE SYNTHETIC
PEIILOSOPHY.
As the culminating development of his evolution-
ary or synthetic philosophy, Mr. Spencer now comes
to treat of those social-economic questions that in-
volve the idea of justice, in a book which he entitles
“Justice.”
But what is justice?
It is the rendering to each his due. It pre-supposes
a moral law, and its corollaries, natural rights which
are self-evident. But where in a philosophy that
denies spirit, that ignores will, that derives all the
qualities and attributes of man from the integration
of matter and the dissipation of motion, can we find
any basis for the idea of justice?
“Justice,” says Montesquieu, “is a relation of con-
gruity which really subsists between two things. This
relation is always the same, whatever being considers
it, whether it be God, or an angel, or lastly a man.”
This, too, in “Social Statics,” was Mr. Spencer's con-
ception. Justice he tells us there means equalness —
that is to say, a relation of congruity or equality which
is always the same, and always apprehensible by men,
no matter what be their condition of development or
degree of knowledge. As the basis of all his reasoning
he postulates an inherent moral sense, which “none
but those committed to a preconceived theory can fail
166 RECANTATION.
to recognize "—a perception that bears to morality the
same relationship that the perception of the primary
laws of quantity bear to mathematics; and which
enables us to recognize an “eternal law of things,” a
“Divine order,” in which, and not in any notions of
what is expedient either for the individual or for all
individuals, we may find a sure guide of conduct, the
apprehension of right and wrong. And this it seems
to me is necessarily and universally involved in the
idea of justice, so that when a man, whatever be his
theories, thinks of right or wrong, just or unjust, he
thinks of a relation, like that of odd and even, or
more and less, which is always and everywhere to be
seen by whoever will look.
But this self-evidence of natural rights the Syn-
thetic Philosophy denies. It admits the existence of
natural rights — that is to say, rights which pertain to
the individual man as man, and are consequently
equal; but it derives the genesis of these rights, or
at least their apprehension by man, from this process
of his gradual evolution, by virtue of which they
evolve, or he becomes conscious of them, after a cer-
tain amount of “social discipline,” and not before. If
such rights exist before, it must be potentially, or in
some such way as the Platonic ideas. But as this
would involve an appointed order; and hence intelli-
gent will, to which we must attribute equity; and
hence God; it seems inconsistent with Mr. Spencer's
present view — not necessarily with that part which
derives our physical constitutions from lower animals
and primarily from the integrations of matter and
motion — for this is a mere matter of external form,
and that our bodies come, somehow, “from the dust
JUSTICE IN THE SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. 167
of the earth '' as the Scriptures put it, is as clear
as that ice comes from water — but with that part
which gives to the ego the same genesis, and accounts
for our mental and moral qualities by variation,
survival of the fittest, the pressure of conditions,
social discipline and heredity of acquired character-
istics.
Mr. Spencer realizes this inconsistency, for, aban-
doning altogether his original derivation and expla–
nation of justice, he proceeds in “Justice ’’ to make
another derivation and explanation in accordance
with his new philosophy, devoting to this the first
eight chapters, or something more than a fifth of the
book. With its validity or invalidity, its coherency
or incoherency, I am not here concerned; my object
being merely to show how he arrives at the concep-
tion of justice and what it is, so that we may judge
the teachings of “Justice ’’ from its own avowed
standpoint.
To present Mr. Spencer's argument as intelligibly
as I can, I will make a synopsis of the first eight
chapters of “Justice,” as far as possible in his own
words, but without quotation marks, employing
smaller type where the exact words can be used at
some length.
These chapters are —
1. – Animal Ethics.
During immaturity, benefits received must be in-
versely proportioned to capacities possessed. After
maturity, benefits must vary directly as worth, meas-
ured by fitness for the conditions of existence. The
ill-fitted must suffer the evils of unfitness, and the
well-fitted prove their fitness.
168 RECANTATION.
2. — Sub-Human Justice.
The law of sub-human justice is that each individ-
ual shall receive the benefits and the evils of its own
nature and its consequent conduct.
3. — Human Justice.
Each individual ought to receive the benefits and
the evils of his own nature and consequent conduct,
neither being prevented from having whatever good his
actions normally bring him, nor allowed to shoulder
off this evil on other persons.
4. — The Sentiment of Justice.
Our feeling that we ourselves ought to have free-
dom to receive the results of our own nature and con-
sequent actions, and which prompts maintenance of
the sphere for this free play, results from inheritances
of modifications produced by habit, or from more
numerous survivals of individuals having nervous
structures which have varied in fit ways, and from
the tendency of groups formed of members having
this adaptation to survive and spread. Recognition
of the similar freedom of others is evolved from the
fear of retaliation, from the punishment of inter-
ference prompted by the interests of the chief, from
fear of the dead chief's ghost, and from fear of God,
when dead-chief-ghost worship grows into God wor-
ship, and, finally, by the sympathy evolved by grega-
riousness. -
5. – The Idea of Justice.
It emerges and becomes definite from experiences,
generation after generation, which provoke resent-
ment and reactive pains, until finally there arises a
conception of a limit to each kind of activity up to
which there is freedom to act. But it is a long time
before the general nature of the limit common to all
cases can be conceived. On the one hand there is
JUSTICE IN THE SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. 169
the positive element, implied by each man’s recog-
nition of his claims to unimpeded activities and
the benefits they bring; on the other hand there is
the negative element implied by the consciousness of
limits which the presence of other men having like
claims necessitates. Inequality is suggested by the
one, for if each is to receive the benefits due his own
nature and consequent conduct, then, since men dif-
fer in their powers, there must be differences in the
results. Equality is suggested by the other, since
bounds must be set to the doings of each to avoid
quarrels, and experience shows that these bounds are
on the average the same for all. Unbalanced appre-
ciation of the one is fostered by war, and tends to
Social organization of the militant type, where in-
equality is established by authority, an inequality
referring, not to the natural achievement of greater
rewards by greater merits, but to the artificial appor-
tionment of greater rewards to greater merits. Un-
balanced appreciation of the other tends to such
theories as Bentham's greatest happiness principle,
and to communism and socialism. The true concep-
tion is to be obtained by noting that the equality
concerns the mutually limited spheres of action which
must be maintained if associated men are to co-oper-
ate harmoniously, while the inequality concerns the
results which each may achieve by carrying on his
actions within the implied limits. The two may be
and must be simultaneously asserted.
6. – The Formula of Justice.
It must be positive in so far as it asserts for each
that, since he is to receive and suffer the good and
evil of his own actions, he must be allowed to act.
And it must be negative in so far as, by asserting this
of every one, it implies that each can be allowed to
act only under the restraint imposed by the presence
of others having like claims tº act. Evidently, the
positive element is that which expresses a prereq-
170 RECANTATION.
uisite to life in general, and the negative element is
that which qualifies this prerequisite in the way
required, when, instead of one life carried on alone,
there are many lives carried on together.
Hence, that which we have to express in a precise
way is the liberty of each limited only by the like
liberties of all. This we do by saying, Every man
is free to do what he wills, provided he infringes not
the equal freedom of any other man.
7. — The Authority of this Formula.
The reigning school of politics and morals has a
contempt for doctrines that imply restraint on the
doings of immediate expediency. But if causation
be universal, it must hold throughout the actions of
incorporated men. Evolution implies that a distinct
conception of justice can have arisen but gradually.
It has gone on more rapidly under peaceful relations,
and been held back by war. Nevertheless, where the
conditions have allowed, it has evolved slowly to
some extent, and formed for itself approximately true
expressions, as shown in the Hebrew Commandments,
and without distinction between generosity and jus-
tice, in the Christian Golden Rule, and in modern
forms in the rule of Kant. It is also shown on the
legal side, in the maxims of lawyers as to natural
law, admitted inferentially even by the despotically-
minded Austin.
These, it will be objected, are a priori beliefs. The
doctrine of evolution teaches that a priori beliefs
entertained by men at large Inust have arisen, if not
from the experiences of each individual, then from
the experiences of the race. Fixed intuitions must
have been established by that intercourse with things
which throughout an enormous past has directly and
indirectly determined the organization of the nervous
system, and certain resulting necessities of thought.
Thus had the law of equal freedom no other than
a priori derivations, it would still be rational to re-
JUSTICE IN THE SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY. 171
gard it as an adumbration of a truth, if not still
literally true. And the inductive school, including
Bentham and Mill are, on analysis, driven to the basis
of a priori cognitions. -
But the principle of natural equity, expressed in
the freedom of each, limited only by the like freedom
of all, is not exclusively an a priori belief.
Examination of the facts has shown it to be a funda-
mental law, by conformity to which life has evolved
from its lowest up to its highest forms, that each adult
individual shall take the consequences of its own nature
and actions: survival of the fittest being the result.
And the necessary implication is an assertion of that
full liberty to act which forms the positive element in
the formula of justice; since, without full liberty to act,
the relation between conduct and consequence cannot
be maintained. Various examples have made clear the
conclusion manifest in theory, that among gregarious
creatures this freedom of each to act has to be restricted;
since if it is unrestricted there must arise such clashing
of actions as prevents the gregariousness. And the fact
that, relatively unintelligent though they are, inferior
gregarious creatures inflict penalties for breaches of the
needful restrictions, shows how regard for them has
come to be unconsciously established as a condition to
persistent social life.
These two laws, holding, the one of all creatures and
the other of social creatures, and the display of which is
clearer in proportion as the evolution is higher, find their
last and fullest sphere of manifestation in human socie-
ties. We have recently seen that along with the growth
of peaceful co-operation there has been an increasing
conformity to this compound law under both its positive
and negative aspects; and we have also seen that there
has gone on simultaneously an increase of emotional
regard for it, and intellectual apprehension of it.
So that we have not only the reasons above given for
concluding that this a priori belief has its origin in the
experiences of the race, but we are enabled to affiliate
it on the experiences of living creatures at large, and to
perceive that it is but a conscious response to certain
necessary relations in the order of nature.
172 RECANTATION.
No higher warrant can be imagined; and now, accept-
ing the law of equal freedom as an ultimate ethical
principle, having an authority transcending every other,
we may proceed with our inquiry.
8. — Its Corollaries.
That the general formula of justice may serve for
guidance, deductions must be drawn severally appli-
cable to special classes of cases. The several par-
ticular freedoms deducible from the laws of equal
freedom may fitly be called, as they commonly are
called, rights. Rights truly so called are corollaries
from the law of equal freedom, and what are falsely
called rights are not deducible from it.
It is not worth while to examine this argument.
It is sufficient for our purpose to see that in “Justice”
Mr. Spencer re-asserts the same principle from which
in “Social Statics” he condemned private property
in land.
CHAPTER V.
MR. SPENCER's TASK.
THE first eight chapters of “Justice,” as we have
seen, bring Mr. Spencer by a different route to the
same “first principle '' which he had laid down forty
years before in “Social Statics,” and from which he
had deduced the equal right of all men to the use
of land and the ethical invalidity of private property
in land — “all deeds, customs, and laws notwith-
standing.”
We are not concerned now with “Social Statics.”
We are not concerned with any of Mr. Spencer's
changes in opinion, teleological, metaphysical, or of
any other kind. We have here merely the Synthetic
philosopher, who from grounds based on the doctrine
of evolution lays down as the fundamental formula
of justice, the axiomatic principle from which all the
rights of men in their relations with each other are
to be deduced: that all men have freedom to do as
they will, provided they infringe not the equal freedom
of all others." What follows, with regard to the use
1 From Appendix A of “Justice,” it seems that Mr. Spencer
has hitherto supposed that his statement of this “first principle ’’ of
“Social Statics,” was the first time it had been thus put. In 1883
Professor Maitland had, however, pointed out that “ Kant had
already enunciated in other words a similar doctrine.” Mr. Spencer
tells us that, “Not being able to read the German quotation given
by Mr. Maitland,” he was unable to test the statement until, in the
174 RECANTATION.
of land, from this fundamental principle of the evolu-
tionary philosophy 2 Is it not, unavoidably and irre-
sistibly what Mr. Spencer stated years before ?—
Given a race of human beings having like claims to
pursue the objects of their desires — given a world
adapted to the gratification of those desires — a world
into which such beings are similarly born, and it una-
voidably follows that they have equal rights to the use
of this world. For if each of them “has freedom to do
all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal
freedom of any other,” then each of them is free to use
the earth for the satisfaction of his wants, provided he
allows all others the same liberty. And conversely, it
is manifest that no one, or part of them, may use the
earth in such a way as to prevent the rest from similarly
using it; seeing that to do this is to assume greater
freedom than the rest, and consequently to break the
law.
Is there one single deduction in Chapter IX. of
“Social Statics" that does not as clearly follow from
this reasoning of “Justice ’” — one single word that
requires alteration to fit it for a place in the deduc-
tions to be drawn from this formula, except the
single word God? And the substitution of “The
preparation of “Justice,” he reached Chapter VI., when he discov-
ered in a recent English translation of Kant certain passages which
he gives, that “make it clear that Kant had arrived at a conclu-
sion, which, if not the same as my own, is closely allied to it.”
I mention this as showing the importance Mr. Spencer yet
attaches to the “first principle,” from which he deduced the con-
demnation of private property in land. Otherwise the matter is
of no interest. His statement of this principle or formula was
a good one, and doubtless original with him. Who had stated it
before made no more difference than who first stated that one and
one equal two. There are some things which to the human mind
are self-evident — that is to say, which may be seen by whoever
chooses to look — and this is one of them.
MR. SPENCER's TASK. 175
Unknowable” or “Evolution ” for “God” would in no
wise alter or lessen the force of the reasoning.
How, then, shall Mr. Spencer justify private prop-
erty in land, which in his letters to the Times he had
bound himself to do? How shall he deduce the
rights of land-owners to compensation for their land
or in any way assert for them rights that will lessen
or modify, or in any way condition, the equal right of
all their fellows to the use of land 7
To men like Professor Huxley there is a short
and easy way of doing this. It is simply to deny the
existence of natural rights ; that is to say, rights
having any higher or more permanent sanction than
municipal regulation. To be sure this opens a most
awkward dilemma, for if power, or if you please
legislative enactment, be the only sanction of right,
what remains for the House of Have, when the House
of Want shall muster its more numerous forces, either
on the field of brute strength or in legislatures already
controlled by popular suffrage 2 But, “after us, the
deluge!” and such considerations do not much trouble
those who take this short and easy way. Mr. Spencer,
however, is debarred from taking it; not by what he
has before said on the land question, for that could
be unsaid, but by his philosophy. If there is no right
but might, what does that philosophy mean and what
is it for 2 If there is no law but that of the state,
why does he write books to tell us what the state
ought and ought not to do? And, furthermore, he
has just deduced as his formula of justice, having,
he says, the highest imaginable warrant — the same
first principle from which in “Social Statics” he
deduced the invalidity of private property in land.
176 RECANTATION.
The short and easy way of justifying private prop-
erty in land, because it exists, or because it is sanc-
tioned by the state, is therefore not open to Mr.
Spencer, unless he is ready to abandon the last shred
and figment of philosophic claim. His is a more
difficult task. What he has to do, is to prove that
the disinheritance of nineteen-twentieths of his coun-
trymen accords with his “ultimate ethical principle
having an authority transcending every other ”— his
formula of justice, that “Every man is free to do that
which he will, provided he infringes not the equal
freedom of any other man.” To show that the so-called
rights of existing land-owners to monopolize the land
on which all must live are real rights, he must, on
his own statement, show that they are deducible from
the law of equal freedom.
Knowing, then, from Mr. Spencer's more recent
utterances that he is determined at any cost to get
on the comfortable side of the land question, we may
be certain in advance that “Justice ’’ will afford a
spectacle both interesting and instructive. Interest-
ing as the effort of a man of ability to accomplish a
feat of intellectual legerdemain equivalent, not to
swallowing a sword, but to swallowing himself.
Instructive as showing how far a man so able that
many people think him the greatest philosopher that
has ever yet appeared; a man who has the advantage
of knowing what can be said on the other side, can,
on grounds which admit the equal right of men to be
in the world, succeed in justifying that existing social
arrangement which gives to a few the exclusive owner-
ship of the world, and denies to the many any right
to its use, save as they purchase the privilege of
these few world-owners.
MR. SPENCER's TASK. 177
A Lord Bramwell or a Professor Huxley or a
Duke of Argyll would rush in boldly and proceed
frankly. But Mr. Spencer knows that to accomplish
his task the attention of the reader must be confused
and the real issue avoided. The effort to do this
is to be seen at a glance the moment we come to
the vital part of “Justice.”
In “Social Statics” the discussion of “The
Rights of Life and Personal Liberty” occupies hardly 4
more than a single page, being treated as “such self-
evident corollaries from our first principle as hardly
to need a separate statement.” In “Justice ’’ it is
padded out into two chapters — “The Right to Per-
sonal Integrity" and “The Rights to Free Motion
and Locomotion,” which, by references to the Fijians,
the Wends, the Herculeans, the Homeric Greeks, and
so on, are made to occupy some twelve or thirteen
times as much space. But, although Mr. Spencer
also refers to the Abors, the Nagas, the Lepchas, the
Jakuns, and other far-off people, he takes no notice
of such infractions of the right of free motion and
locomotion by land-owning dukes as in 1850 excited
his indignation. …
In place of the chapter on “The Right to the Use
of the Earth,” which stands out so clearly and so
prominently in “Social Statics,” we find in “Justice”
a chapter on “The Rights to the Uses of Natural
Media,” of which only a part is devoted to the right
to the use of land, though a short note, having some-
thing of the same relation to it that the traditional
lady's postscript has to her letter, is inserted in the
Appendix. t
This treatment of land, or the surface of the earth,
178 It ECANTATION.
as but one of the natural media is in the highest
degree unphilosophic, and could only be adopted for
the purpose of confusion. For so far as man is con-
cerned all natural media are appurtenant to land; and
the term land in political economy and law comprises
all natural substances and powers. To treat land
as one of such natural media as light and air is
therefore as unphilosophic as it would be to treat it
as one of such sub-divisions of itself as water, rock,
gravel or sand. The clearest and only philosophic
terminology is that adopted in “Social Statics” — the
right to the use of the earth, or the right to the use
of land. For the right to the use of all natural ele-
ments comes from and with, and is inseparably in-
volved in and annexed to, the right to the use of
land.
Mr. Spencer's reasons for thus treating land as
but one of the natural media appear as we read. Not
merely is the burning question thus minimized and
confused, but it becomes easier by means of analogy
to slide over the injustice of the present treatment of
land — an injustice which, as Mr. Spencer had
himself previously seen, is inferior only to murder or
slavery — and to bring private property in land into
the category of things with which we need not con-
cern ourselves.
CHAPTER VI.
“THE RIGHTS TO THE USES OF NATURAL MEDIA.”
HERE in full is Chapter XI. of “Justice ’’:
CHAPTER XI. — THE RIGHTS TO THE USES OF NATURAL
MEDIA.
§ 49. A man may be entirely uninjured in body by
the actions of fellow-men, and he may be entirely unim-
peded in his movements by them, and he may yet be
prevented from carrying on the activities needful for
maintenance of life, by traversing his relations to the
physical environment on which his life depends. It is,
indeed, alleged that certain of these natural agencies
cannot be removed from the state of common possession.
Thus we read :
“Some things are by nature itself incapable of appropriation,
so that they cannot be brought under the power of any one. These
got the name of res communes by the Roman law ; and were
defined, things the property of which belongs to no person, but
the use to all. Thus, the light, the air, running water, etc., are so
adapted to the common use of mankind, that no individual can
acquire a property in them, or deprive others of their use.”. (An
Institute of the Law of Scotland by John Erskine (ed. Macallan),
i., 196).
But though light and air cannot be monopolized, the
distribution of them may be interfered with by one man
to the partial deprivation of another man — may be so
interfered with as to inflict serious injury upon him.
No interference of this kind is possible without a
breach of the law of equal freedom. The habitual in-
terception of light by one person in such way that an-
other person is habitually deprived of an equal share,
implies disregard of the principle that the liberty of
180 RECANTATION.
each is limited by the like liberties of all ; and the like
is true if free access to air is prevented.
Under the same general head there must, however, by
an unusual extension of meaning, be here included some-
thing which admits of appropriation — the surface of the
Earth. This, as forming part of the physical environ-
ment, seems necessarily to be included among the media
of which the use may be claimed under the law of equal
freedom. The Earth's surface cannot be denied to any
one absolutely, without rendering life-sustaining activi-
ties impracticable. In the absence of standing-ground
he can do nothing ; and hence it appears to be a corollary
from the law of equal freedom, interpreted with strict-
ness, that the Earth's surface may not be appropriated
absolutely by individuals, but may be occupied by them
only in such manner as recognizes ultimate ownership
by other men ; that is — by Society at large.
Concerning the ethical and legal recognitions of these
claims to the uses of media, not very much has to be
said : only the last demands much attention. We will
look at each of them in succession.
§ 50. In the earliest stages, while yet urban life had
not commenced, no serious obstruction of one man’s light
by another man could well take place. In encampments
of savages, and in the villages of agricultural tribes, no
one was led, in pursuit of his ends, to overshadow the
habitation of his neighbor. Indeed, the structures and
relative positions of habitations made such aggressions
almost impracticable.
In later times, when towns had grown up, it was un-
likely that much respect would forth with be paid by
men to the claims of their neighbors in respect of light.
During stages of social evolution in which the rights to
life and liberty were little regarded, such comparatively
trivial trespasses as were committed by those who built
houses close in front of others’ houses, were not likely
to attract much notice, considered either as moral trans-
gressions or legal wrongs. The narrow, dark Streets of
ancient continental cities, in common with the courts and
alleys characterizing the older parts of our own towns,
imply that in the days when they were built the shutting
out by one man of another man's share of Sun and sky
“RIGHTS TO THE USES OF NATURAL MEDIA.” 181
was not thought an offence. And, indeed, it may reason-
ably be held that recognition of such an offence was in
those days impracticable ; since, in walled towns, the
crowding of houses became a necessity.
In modern times, however, there has arisen the per-
ception that the natural distribution of light may not be
interfered with. Though the law which forbids the
building of walls, houses, or other edifices of certain
heights, within prescribed distances from existing houses,
does not absolutely negative the intercepting of light;
yet it negatives the intercepting of it to serious degrees,
and seeks to compromise the claims of adjacent owners
as fairly as seems practicable. .
That is to say, this corollary from the law of equal
freedom, if it has not come to be overtly asserted, has
come to be tacitly recognized.
§ 51. To some extent interference with the supply of
light involves interference with the supply of air; and,
by interdicting the One, Some interdict is, by implication,
placed on the other. But the claim to use of the air,
though it has been recognized by English law in the
case of windmills, is less definitely established : prob-
ably because only small evils have been caused by ob-
structions.
There has, however, risen into definite recognition the
claim to unpolluted air. Though acts of one man which
may diminish the supply of air to another man, have
not come to be distinctly classed as wrong; yet acts
which vitiate the quality of his air are in modern times
regarded as offences — offences for which there are in
some cases moral reprobations only, and in other cases
legal penalties. In some measure all are severally
obliged, by their own respiration, to vitiate the air re-
spired by others, where they are in proximity. It needs
but to walk a little distance behind one who is smoking,
to perceive how widely diffused are the exhalations from
each person's lungs; and to what an extent, therefore,
those who are adjacent, especially indoors, are compelled
to breath the air that has already been taken in and sent
out time after time. Hut since this vitiation of air is
mutual, it cannot constitute aggression. Aggression
occurs only when vitiation by one, or some, has to be
182 RECANTATION.
borne by others who do not take like shares in the vitia-
tion; as often happens in railway-carriages, where men
who think themselves gentlemen Smoke in other places
than those provided for Smokers : perhaps getting from
fellow-passengers a nominal, though not a real, consent,
and careless of the permanent nuisance entailed on those
who afterwards travel in compartments reeking with
stale tobacco-smoke. Beyond the recognition of this by
right-thinking persons as morally improper, it is for-
bidden as improper by railway-regulations; and, in virtue
of by-laws, may bring punishment by fine.
Passing from instances of this kind to instances of
a graver kind, we have to note the interdicts against
various nuisances — stenches resulting from certain
businesses carried on near at hand, injurious fumes such
as those from chemical works, and Smoke proceeding
from large chimneys. Legislation which forbids the acts
causing such nuisances, implies the right of each citizen
to unpolluted air.
Under this same head we may conveniently include
another kind of trespass to which the surrounding
medium is instrumental. I refer to the production of
sounds of a disturbing kind. There are small and large
trespasses of this class. For one who, at a table d'hôte,
speaks so loudly as to interfere with the conversation of
others, and for those who, during the performance at a
theatre or concert, persist in distracting the attention of
auditors around by talking, there is reprobation, if noth-
ing more : their acts are condemned as contrary to good
manners, that is, good morals, for the one is a part of
the other. And then when inflictions of this kind are
public, or continuous, or both — as in the case of street-
music and especially bad street-music, or as in the case
of loud noises proceeding from factories, or as in the
case of church-bells rung at early hours, the aggression
has come to be legally recognized as such and forbidden
under penalty : not as yet sufficiently recognized, how-
ever, as is shown in the case of railway-whistles at cen-
tral stations, which are allowed superfluously to disturb
tens of thousands of people all through the night, and
often to do serious injury to invalids.
Thus in respect of the uses of the atmosphere, the
liberty of each limited only by the like liberties of all,
“RIGHTS TO THE USES OF NATURAL MEDIA.” 183
though not overtly asserted, has come to be tacitly as-
serted; in large measure ethically, and in a considerable
degree legally.
§ 52. The state of things brought about by civiliza-
tion does not hinder ready acceptance of the corollaries
thus far drawn; but rather clears the way for accept-
ance of them. Though in the days when cannibalism
was common and victims were frequently sacrificed to
the gods, assertion of the right to life might have been
received with demur, yet the ideas and practices of those
days have left no such results as stand in the way of un-
biassed judgments. Though during times when slavery
and serfdom were deeply organized in the social fabric,
an assertion of the right to liberty would have roused
violent opposition, yet at the present time, among our-
selves at least, there exists no idea, sentiment, or usage,
at variance with the conclusion that each man is free to
use his limbs and move about where he pleases. And
similarly with respect to the environment. Such small
interferences with others' supplies of light and air as
have been bequeathed in the structures of old towns and
such others as Smoking fires entail, do not appreciably
hinder acceptance of the proposition that men have
equal claims to uses of the media in which all are im-
mersed. But the proposition that men have equal
claims to the use of that remaining portion of the en-
vironment — hardly to be called a medium — on which all
stand and by the products of which all live, is antago-
nized by ideas and arrangements descending to us from
the past. These ideas and arrangements arose when
considerations of equity did not affect land-tenure any
more than they affected the tenure of men as slaves or
serfs ; and they now make acceptance of the proposition
difficult. If, while possessing those ethical sentiments
which social discipline has now produced, men stood in
possession of a territory not yet individually portioned
out, they would no more liesitate to assert equality of
their claims to the land than they would hesitate to as-
sert equality of their claims to light and air. But now
that long-standing appropriation, continued culture, as
well as sales and purchases, have complicated matters,
the dictum of absolute ethics, incongruous with the state
184 RECANTATION.
of things produced, is apt to be denied altogether. Be-
fore asking how, under these circumstances, we must
decide, let us glance at Some past phases of land-tenure.
Partly because in early stages of agriculture, land,
soon exhausted, soon ceases to be worth occupying, it
has been the custom with little-civilized and semi-civ-
lized peoples, for individuals to abandon after a time
the tracts they have cleared, and to clear others. Causes
aside, however, the fact is that in early stages private
ownership of land is unknown : only the usufruct be-
longs to the cultivator, while the land itself is tacitly
regarded as the property of the tribe. It is thus now
with the Sumatrans and others, and it was thus with our
own ancestors: the members of the Mark, while they
severally owned the products of the areas they respect-
ively cultivated, did not own the areas themselves.
Though it may be said that at first they were members
of the same family gems, or clan, and that the ownership
of each tract was private ownership in so far as the tract
belonged to a cluster of relations; yet since the same
kind of tenure continued after the population of the
Mark had come to include men who were unrelated to
the rest, ownership of the tract by the community and
not by individuals became an established arrangement.
This primitive condition will be clearly understood after
contemplating the case of the Russians, among whom it
has but partially passed away.
“The village lands were held in common by all the members of
the association [mir]; the individual only possessed his harvest,
and the dvor or enclosure immediately surrounding his house.
This primitive condition of property, existing in Russia up to the
present day, was once common to all European peoples.” — (The
History of Russia, A. Rambaud, trans. by Lang, vol. i. p. 45).
With this let me join a number of extracts from Wal-
lace’s “Russia,” telling us of the original state of things
and of the subsequent states. After noting the fact
that while the Don Cossacks were purely nomadic —
“agriculture was prohibited on pain of death,” appar-
ently because it interfered with hunting and cattle-
breeding, he says: —
“JEach Cossack who wished to raise a crop ploughed and sowed
wherever he thought fit, and retained as long as he chose the land
“RIGHTS TO THE USES OF NATURAL MEDIA.” l85
thus appropriated ; and when the soil began to show signs of ex-
haustion, he abandoned his plot and ploughed elsewhere. As the
number of agriculturists increased, quarrels frequently arose. Still
worse evils appeared when markets were created in the vicinity.
In some stamtzas [Cossack villages] the richer families appropriated
enormous quantities of the common land by using several teams of
Oxen, or by hiring peasants in the nearest villages to come and
plough for them ; and instead of abandoning the land after raising
two or three crops they retained possession of it. Thus the whole
of the arable land, or at least the best parts of it, become actually,
if not legally, the private property of a few families.”—(Ib. ii. 86).
Then he explains that as a consequence of something
like a revolution :
“In accordance with their [the landless members of the com-
munity’s] demands the appropriated land was confiscated by the
Commune and the system of periodical distributions . . . was in-
troduced, By this system each male adult possesses a share of the
-land.”—(Ib. ii. 87).
On the Steppes “a plot of land is commonly cultivated for only
three or four years in succession. It is then abandoned for at
least double that period, and the cultivators remove to some other
portion of the communal territory. . . . Under such circumstances
the principle of private property in the land is not likely to strike
root ; each family insists on possessing a certain quantity rather
than a certain plot of land, and contents itself with a right of usu-
fruct, whilst the right of property remains in the hands of the Com-
mune.”—(Ib. ii. 91).
But in the central and more advanced districts this early
practice has become modified, though without destroying
the essential character of the tenure.
“According to this system [the three-field system] the cultivators
do not migrate periodically from one part of the communal territory
to another, but till always the same fields, and are obliged to manure
the plots which they occupy. . . . Though the three-field system
has been in use for many generations in the central provinces, the
communal principle, with its periodical re-allotment of the land,
still remains intact.” — (Ib. ii. 92).
Such facts, and numerous other such facts, put beyond
question the conclusion that before the progress of social
organization changed the relations of individuals to the
soil, that relation was one of joint ownership and not
one of individual ownership.
How was this relation changed 2 How only could
it be changed ? Certainly not by unforced consent.
It cannot be supposed that all, or some, of the members
186 RECANTATION.
of the community willingly surrendered their respective
claims. Crime now and again caused loss of an individ-
ual’s share in the joint ownership; but this must have
left the relations of the rest to the soil unchanged. A
kindred result might have been entailed by debt, were it
not that debt implies a creditor; and while it is scarcely
supposable that the creditor could be the community as
a whole, indebtedness to any individual of it would not
empower the debtor to transfer in payment something
of which he was not individually possessed, and which
could not be individually received. Probably elsewhere
there came into play the cause described as having oper-
ated in Russia, where some, cultivating larger areas than
others, accumulated wealth and consequent power, and
extra possessions; but, as is implied by the fact that in
Russia this led to a revolution and re-institution of the
original state, the process was evidently there, and prob-
ably elsewhere, regarded as aggressive. Obviously the
chief cause must have been the exercise of direct or
indirect force: sometimes internal but chiefly external.
Disputes and fights within the community, leading to
predominance (achieved in some cases by possession of
fortified houses) prepared the way for partial usurpa-
tions. When, as among the Suanetians, we have a still-
extant case in which every family in a village has its
tower of defence, we may well understand how the in-
testine feuds in early communities commonly brought
about individual supremacies, and how these ended in
the establishment of special claims upon the land subor-
dinating the general claims.
But conquest from without has everywhere been
chiefly instrumental in Superseding communal proprietor-
ship by individual proprietorship. It is not to be sup-
posed that in times when captive men were made slaves
and women appropriated as spoils of war, much respect
was paid to pre-existing ownership of the soil. The old
English buccaneers who, in their descents on the coast,
slew priests at the altars, set fire to churches, and mas-
sacred the people who had taken refuge in them, would
have been very incomprehensible beings had they recog-
nized the land-ownership of such as survived. When
the pirate Danes, who in later days ascended the rivers,
had burnt the homesteads they came upon, slaughtered
“RIGHTS TO THE USES OF NATURAL MEDIA.” T87
the men, violated the women, tossed children on pikes
or sold them in the market-place, they must have under-
gone a miraculous transformation had they thereafter
inquired to whom the Marks belonged, and admitted the
titles of their victims to them. And similarly when,
two centuries later, after constant internal wars had
already produced military rulers maintaining quasi-feudal
claims over occupiers of lands, there came the invading
Normans, the right of conquest once more overrode such
kinds of possession as had grown up, and still further
merged communal proprietorship in that kind of indi-
vidual proprietorship which characterized feudalism.
Victory, which gives unqualified power over the defeated
and their belongings, is followed, according to the nature
of the race, by the assertion of universal ownership,
more or less qualified according to the dictates of policy.
While in some cases, as in Dahomey, there results abso-
lute monopoly by the king, not only of the land but of
everything else, there results in other cases, as there
resulted in England, Supreme ownership by the king
with recognized sub-ownerships and sub-sub-ownerships
of nobles and their vassals holding the land one under
another, on condition of military service: supreme own-
ership being, by implication, vested in the crown.
Both the original state and the subsequent states have
left their traces in existing land-laws. There are many
local rights which date from a time when “private
property in land, as we now understand it, was a strug-
gling novelty.” " - *
“The people who exercise rights of common exercise them by a
title which, if we could only trace it all the way back, is far more
ancient than the lord’s. Their rights are those which belonged to
the members of the village community long before manors and
lords of the manor were heard of.” f
And any one who observes what small tenderness for the
rights of commoners is shown in the obtainment of
Inclosure-Acts, even in our own day, will be credulous
indeed if he thinks that in ruder times the lapse of
communal right into private rights was equitably ef-
fected. The private ownership, however, was habitually
incomplete; since it was subject to the claims of the
over-lord, and through him, again, to those of the over-
. The Land Lars, by Sir Fredk. Pollock, Bart., p. 2. Ibid., p. 6.
4
188 RECANTATION.
over-lord: the implication being that the ownership was
subordinate to that of the head of the community.
“No absolute ownership of land is recognized by our law-books
except in the Crown. All lands are supposed to be held imme-
diately, or mediately, of the Crown, though no rent or services
may be payable, and no grant from the Crown on record.” +
And that this conception of land-ownership survives,
alike in theory and in practice, to the present time, is
illustrated by the fact that year by year State-authority
is given for appropriating land for public purposes, after
making due compensation to existing holders. Though
it may be replied that this claim of the State to supreme
land-ownership is but a part of its claim to supreme
ownership in general, since it assumes the right to take
anything on giving compensation; yet the first is an
habitually-enforced claim, while the other is but a nomi-
nal claim not enforced; as we see in the purchase of
pictures for the nation, to effect which the State enters
into competition with private buyers, and may or may
not succeed. -
It remains only to point out that the political changes
which have slowly replaced the supreme power of the
monarch by the Supreme power of the people, have, by
implication, replaced the monarch's Supreme ownership
of the land by the people's Supreme ownership of the
land. If the representative body has practically in-
herited the governmental powers which in past times
vested in the king, it has at the same time inherited that
ultimate proprietorship of the soil which in past times
vested in him. And since the representative body is
but the agent of the community, this ultimate proprie-
torship now vests in the community. Nor is this denied
by land-owners themselves. The report issued in Decem-
ber, 1889, by the council of “The Liberty and Property
Defence League,” on which sit several Peers and two
judges, yields proof. After saying that the essential
principle of their organization, “based upon recorded
experience,” is a distrust of “officialism, imperial or mu-
nicipal,” the council go on to say that : —
“This principle applied to the case of land clearly points to indi-
vidual ownership, qualified by State-suzerainty. . . . The land can
of course be “resumed ' on payment of full compensation, and man-
aged by the “people’, if they so will it.”
* The Land Laws, by Sir Fredk, Pollock, Bart., p. 12,
“RIGHTS TO THE USES OF NATURAL MEDIA.” 189
And the badness of the required system of administra-
tion is the only reason urged for maintaining the exist-
ing system of land-holding : the Supreme ownership of
the community being avowedly recognized. So that
whereas, in early stages, along with the freedom of each
man, there went joint ownership of the soil by the body
of men ; and whereas, during the long periods of that
militant activity by which small communities were con-
solidated into great ones, there simultaneously resulted
loss of individual freedom and loss of participation in
land-ownership; there has, with the decline of militancy
and the growth of industrialism, been a re-acquirement
of individual freedom and a re-acquirement of such
participation in land-ownership as is implied by a share
in appointing the body by which the land is now
held. And the implication is that the members of the
community, habitually exercising as they do, through
their representatives, the power of alienating and using
as they think well, any portion of the land, may equit-
ably appropriate and use, if they think fit, all portions
of the land. But since equity and daily custom alike
imply that existing holders of particular portions of land,
may not be dispossessed without giving them in return
its fairly-estimated value, it is also implied that the
wholesale resumption of the land by the community can
be justly effected only by wholesale purchase of it. Were
the direct exercise of ownership to be resumed by the
community without purchase, the community would take,
along with something which is its own, an immensely
greater amount of something which is not its own. Even
if we ignore those multitudinous complications which, in
the course of century after century, have inextricably
entangled men's claims, theoretically considered — even
if we reduce the case to its simplest theoretical form ;
we must admit that all which can be claimed for the
community is the surface of the country in its original
unsubdued state. To all that value given to it by clear-
ing, breaking-up, prolonged culture, fencing, draining,
making roads, farm buildings, etc., constituting nearly
all its value, the community has no claim. This value
has been given either by personal labor, or by labor paid
for, or by ancestral labor; or else the value given to it
in such ways has been purchased by legitimately earned
190 RECANTATION.
money. All this value artificially given vests in existing
owners, and cannot without a gigantic robbery be taken
from them. If, during the many transactions which
have brought about existing land-ownership, there have
been much violence and much fraud, these have been
small compared with the violence and the fraud which
the community would be guilty of did it take posses-
sion, without paying for it, of that artificial value, which
the labor of nearly two thousand years has given to the
land.
§ 53. Reverting to the general topic of the chapter —
the rights to the uses of natural media — it chiefly con-
cerns us here to note the way in which these rights have
gradually acquired legislative Sanctions as Societies have
advanced to higher types.
At the beginning of the chapter we saw that in mod-
ern times there have arisen legal assertions of men’s
equal rights to the uses of light and air: no forms of
social organization or class-interests having appreciably
hindered recognition of these corollaries from the law of
equal freedom. And we have just seen that by implica-
tion, if not in any overt or conscious way, there has in
our days been recognized the equal rights of all electors
to supreme ownership of the inhabited area — rights
which, though latent, are asserted by every Act of Par-
liament which alienates land. Though this right to
the use of the Earth, possessed by each citizen, is tra-
versed by established arrangements to so great an ex-
tent as to be practically suspended; yet its existence as
an equitable claim cannot be denied without affirming
that expropriation by State-decree is inequitable. The
right of an existing holder of land can be equitably
superseded, only if there exists a prior right of the com-
munity at large ; and this prior right of the community
at large consists of the sum of the individual rights
of its members.
NotE. Various considerations touching this vexed
question of land-ownership, which would occupy too much
space if included here, I have included in Appendix B.
“RIGHTS TO THE USEs or NATURAL MEDIA.” 191
Let us take breath and gather our wits. It is like
going through a St. Gothard tunnel. Here we are on
the other side, sure enough But how did we get
there 2
Mr. Spencer brought us in, asserting the law of
equal freedom as “an ultimate ethical principle,
having an authority transcending every other; ” de-
claring that “rights truly so called are corollaries from
the law of equal freedom, and what are falsely called
rights are not deducible from it.”
He brings us out, with a confused but unmistakable
assertion that the freedom to use land belongs only
to the small class of landlords; with an assertion of
the strongest kind of their right to deprive all other
men of freedom to use the earth until they are paid
for it.
How has he got there?
Has he shown that the law of equal freedom gives
freedom to the use of land only to a few men and denies
it to all other men? Has he shown that the right so-
called of the small class of land-owners to the exclu-
sive use of land is a true right and not a false right,
by deducing it from the law of equal freedom 2 Has
he met one of the conditions called for by his elaborate
derivation and formula of justice in the preceding
chapters of this very book 2 Has he shown the in-
validity of a single one of the deductions by which
he proved in “Social Statics” that justice does not
permit private property in land 7
It is worth while to examine this chapter in detail.
Its argument is divisible into two parts — (1) as to
the right to the use of light, air, etc., and (2) as
to the right to the use of land. Let us consider the
one part before passing to the other.
CHAPTER VII.
“JUSTICE * ON THE RIGHT TO LIGHT AND AIR.
MR. SPENCER's carelessness of thought is shown in
the very opening sentence of this chapter on “The
Right to the Uses of Natural Media: ”
A man may be entirely uninjured in body by the
action of fellow-men, and he may be entirely unimpeded
in his movements by them, and he may yet be prevented
from carrying on the activities needful for maintenance
of life, by traversing his relations to the physical envi-
ronment on which his life depends.
How 2
To ordinary apprehension, the only way in which
men can be deprived of the use of “the physical en-
vironment on which life depends” is either by such
bodily injuries as killing, maiming, binding, imprison-
ing, or by such restrictions on movement as have the
threat of bodily injury behind them, like the taboo
among the South Sea Islanders, or private property in
land among us. Nor have the tyrants of the world,
much as they would have liked to, ever been able to
find any other way.
Without condescending to explain, Mr. Spencer
goes on to quote Erskine to the effect that “the
light, the air, running water, etc., are so adapted to
the common use of mankind that no individual can
acquire a property in them or deprive others of their
22
UlS62.
“JUSTICE * ON THE RIGHT TO LIGHT AND AIR. 193
This again shows carelessness in apprehension and
statement. What Erskine really means is that the
law does not, and that because it can not, give
property in the substance of matter, so that the
molecules or atoms of which it is composed may be
identified and reclaimed through all changes in
form or place; but that ownership can only attach
to matter in its relation to form or place. For in-
stance, I buy to-day a dog or a horse. I acquire in
this purchase the ownership of what matter is now,
or at any time in the future may be, contained in the
form of this dog or horse, not the ownership of a
certain amount of matter in whatever form it may
hereafter assume. That no law could give me, nor
could I even set up a claim to it, for it would be im-
possible for me to identify it. For the matter which
my dog or horse embodies for the moment, like the
matter of which my own frame is composed, is con-
stantly passing from that form to other forms. The
only thing tangible to me or other men is this form.
And it is in this that ownership consists. If my dog
eats your mutton chop, your property in the chop
does not become property in the dog. If the law
gives you any action it is certainly not that of
reple win. - ...” -
The principle of the law that Erskine refers to is
thus stated by Blackstone (Chapter 2, Book II.):
I cannot bring an action to recover possession of a
pool or other piece of water either by superficial measure
for twenty acres of Water or by general description, as
for a pond or a rivulet; but I must bring my action for
what lies at the bottom and call it twenty acres of land
covered with water. For water is a movable, wandering
thing, and must of necessity continue common by the
194 RECANTATION.
law of nature, so that I can only have a temporary,
transient, usufructuary property; wherefore if a body
of Water runs out of my pond into another man’s I have
no right to reclaim it. 13ut the land which that water
covers is permanent, fixed and immovable, and there-
fore in this I may have a certain substantial property, of
which the law will take notice and not of the other.
Now the comparatively rough distinctions that are
amply sufficient for the purposes of the lawyer are
not always sufficient for the purposes of the philoso-
pher. If we analyze this principle of the law, we
see that no real distinction is made as to ownership
between the substance of water and the substance of
land — that is to say, between the more or less stable
forms of matter of which the body of the universe
consists. The distinction is as to tangible form. I
may bring an action for ice, which is water that has
assumed tangible form by the lowering of tempera-
ture, or for water in barrels or bottles, which in another
way gives it form. And the real reason why in an
action for the possession of a body of water I must
describe it as land covered by water is that it is the
land which holds the water in place and gives it
form.
So, on the other hand, if a freshet or a water-burst
carry the fertile soil from my field into that of my
neighbor, I can no more reclaim it by action at law
than I can reclaim the water that runs out of my
pond. Or if a volcanic convulsion were to shift the
position of a mineral deposit, it would cease to belong
to one land-owner and the other would acquire legal
possession. The legal result would be precisely the
same as the legal result of a change in a rivulet's
course. In ruder times, ere the art of surveying was
“JUSTICE * ON THE RIGHT TO LIGHT AND AIR. 195
so well developed as now, it was customary to fix
the boundaries of legal possession by natural objects
deemed immovable, such as mountains, Ocean shores,
rivers, etc., and in places where this method has been
retained changes in landmarks frequently change the
ownership of considerable bodies of land, as on the
shifting banks of the lower Mississippi. But our
modern surveying takes for its bases latitude and lon-
gitude. And this is the essential idea of land owner-
ship : It is the ownership, not of certain atoms of
matter, be they rock, soil, water or air, or of certain
forms of energy, such as heat, light or electricity, but
the ownership of a certain section of space and of all
that may be therein contained.
Mr. Spencer is confusing two essentially different
ideas — the idea of substance and the idea of form
or locality. In the One sense nothing whatever may
be owned — land no more than light or electricity.
In the other, all natural substances and powers may
be owned — water, air, light, heat or electricity, as
truly as land. And they are owned, though, since in
our legal terminology space and its contents are
known as land, they must in law be described as land.
Whoever, under our laws, acquires ownership in land
may deprive others of light, air, running water, etc.,
and does acquire a property in their use, which is
frequently a tangible element, and at times the only
element in the value of an estate — as where the
purity of the air, the beauty of the view, the abun-
dance of sunlight which a favorable exposure gives,
the presence of mineral springs, or the access to
streams, are elements in the price at which land can
be sold or rented.
196 RECANTATION.
In the next sentence we are told that “light and
air cannot be monopolized.” But they are monop-
olized in the monopolization of land, and this as
effectually as any monopolizer could wish. It is true
that air and sunlight are not formally bought, sold
and rented. But why? Not that they could not be
measured off and determined by metes and bounds,
but simply because they are to our physical constitu-
tions inseparable from land, so that whoever owns
the land owns also the air it is bathed in and the light
that falls on it. Light and air are monopolized when-
ever land is monopolized ; and the exclusive use to
them is bought and sold whenever land is bought
and sold.
It is not merely that, as the flying-machine has not
yet been perfected, the owner of land holds the
means of access to the air above it and the light that
falls on it; it is that the owner of land is the owner
of such light and air, not merely virtually, but for-
mally and legally. And were the air-ship perfected, he
would have the same legal right to forbid trespass on
his light and air, and to demand payment for any
use made of it or any passage through it, thousands
of feet above the surface, as he now has to forbid
trespass on his ground or to demand payment for
any use of or any passage through what lies thou-
sands of feet below it. In English law, land does
not mean merely the surface of the earth within
certain metes and bounds, but all that may be above
and all that may be below that surface; and under
the same legal right by which the land-owner holds
as his private property any certain part of the surface
of the globe he also holds the rocks and minerals
“JUSTICE’’ ON THE RIGHT TO LIGHT AND AIR. 197
below it and the air and the light above it. As
Blackstone says: “The word ‘land’ includes not
only the face of the earth, but everything under it
or over it. . . . By the name of land everything
terrestrial will pass.” The land-owner is, in law as
well as in fact, not a mere surface owner, but a uni-
verse owner. And just as in some places land-owners
sell the surface right, retaining mineral rights; or
sell mineral rights, retaining surface rights; or sell
the right of way, retaining rights to other use: so,
where there is occasion, the right to use light and
air may be separated, in sales and purchases and
title-deeds, from the right to the use of the ground.
An invention which would make practicable the use
of light and air without possession of the surface,
would at once bring out the fact that, legally, they
belong to land-owners, just as subterranean mining
and the projection of underground railways have
brought out the fact that land-owners are legal own-
ers of all beneath the surface. In fact, existing
deeds furnish instances in which the real thing
bought and sold, though properly enough styled land
in the conveyances, is not land at all in the narrow
meaning, but light and air, or the right to their use.
To cite a case: The city of Cleveland, Ohio, some
years since, desired to convert the viaduct bridge
over the Cuyahoga river into a swinging bridge.
To do this it was necessary that one end of the
bridge should in its swing pass for a short distance
through the air over a strip of land belonging to a
private owner. The city of Cleveland had, there-
fore, to buy the right to use this air, and I have
before me a copy of the deed, executed on the 28th
198 RECANTATION.
of February, 1880, by which, in consideration of
$9,994.88, Meyers, Rouse & Co. sell and convey to
the city of Cleveland the right to swing such bridge
over a small area thirty-five feet above the ground.
Of this estate in the air the grantors describe them-
selves as holding a good and indefeasible title in fee
simple, with the right to bargain and sell the same.
Were it thirty-five hundred or thirty-five hundred
thousand feet above the surface, the legal right of
ownership would be the same. For the ownership
which attaches to land under our laws is not to be
really measured by linear feet and inches, but by
parallels of latitude and meridians of longitude, start-
ing from the centre of the earth and indefinitely ex-
tendible. And while Meyers, Rouse & Co. have sold
to the city of Cleveland a slice of their air of perhaps
fifteen feet in depth, they still retain the legal owner-
ship of all the air above it, and could demand toll of
or refuse passage to any flying machine that should
attempt to cross it.
The same lack of analytic power continues to be
shown by Mr. Spencer when he goes on to tell us that
the equal rights to the use of light and air, though
not recognized in primitive stages, have, in the
course of social evolution, come to be completely or
all but completely recognized now. So far is this
from being true, that in such countries as England
and the United States there is no recognition what-
ever of the equal right to the use of light and air. To
the list of interdictions which he cites as recognitions
of this equal right, he might as well have added that
of shying bricks through these media at passers-by.
For where the interdictions he mentions — of inter-
“JUSTICE’’ ON THE RIGHT TO LIGHT AND AIR. 199
ceptions of light and air, of Smoking in certain
places, of the maintenance of stenches and fumes, of
the making of disturbing noises—are not mere inter-
dictions of certain species of assault; they are inter-
dictions based on and involved in the ownership of
land.
Mr. Spencer might have seen this for himself,
where he speaks of “the law which forbids the build-
ing of walls, houses, or other edifices within prescribed
distances of other houses . . . and seeks to compro-
mise the claims of adjacent owners as fairly as seem
practicable.”
Owners of what? Why, owners of land. It is
only as an owner of land, or as the tenant of an
owner of land, that under our English law any one
has a right to complain of the interception of light
and air by another land-owner. The owner of land
may intercept light and air, may make noises and
create stenches to any extent he pleases, provided he
infringes not the equal rights of other owners of land,
for light and air are considered by English law as
what they truly are, so far as human beings are con-
cerned, appurtenances of land. No one in England,
be he stranger or native born, has any legal right
whatever to the use of English light and English air,
save as the owner or grantee of an owner of English
land. That even on the Queen's highways the public
are deemed to have such rights as against adjacent
land-holders I am not sure. Certain it is, that one
may travel for miles through the public roads, amid
wantonly shut out by high and costly walls, erected
for the express purpose of intercepting the light, and
200 - IRECANTATION.
crowned on their tops with broken glass, to tear the
clothes and cut the flesh of any one who dares climb
them to get such a view as the unintercepted light
would give.
The rights to the use of light, air and other natural
media are in truth as inseparable from the right to
the use of land as the bottom of that atmospheric
Ocean which surrounds our globe is inseparable from
the globe's surface; and the pretence of treating them
separately could only spring from Mr. Spencer's
evident desire to confuse the subject he is pretending
to treat, to cover with a fog of words his abandonment
of a position incapable of refutation, and from the
false assumption that the liberty of each to the use
of air and light, limited only by the like liberty of all,
às practically and legally recognized, to lead to the
still more preposterously false assumption that equal
rights to the use of land are also fully recognized.
But before examining this last assumption, there
is one form of it which he incidentally makes that
is worth noticing — the assumption that the equal
right to personal liberty and freedom of movement is
already fully recognized.
It is a pity that Mr. Spencer had not intermitted
his studies of the Abors, the Bodas, the Creeks, the
Dhimals, the Eghas, and other queer people, to the
end of the alphabet, of whom his later books are as
full as those of the pedants of the last century were
of classical quotations, and made some observations
in his own country. They would have saved him
from the astounding statement that —
At the present time, among ourselves at least, there
exists no idea, sentiment, or usage at variance with the
“JUSTICE’’ ON THE RIGHT TO LIGHT AND AIR. 201
conclusion that each man is free to use his limbs and
move where he pleases.
The truth is, that instead of every one being free
in England “to use his limbs and move about where
he pleases,” there is no part of the British Isles, even
though it be wild moor, bleak deer-forest or bare
mountain-top, where a man is free to move about
without permission of the private owner, except it
be the highroads, the public places, or other strips
and spots of land deemed the property of the com-
munity.
Mr. Spencer seems to have forgotten this now, but
he knew it when in “Social Statics” he denounced .
the system that permitted the Duke of Leeds to warn
off tourists from Ben-muich-Dhui, the Duke of Atholl
to close Glen Tilt, the Duke of Buccleuch to deny
Free Church sites, and the Duke of Sutherland to
displace Highlanders with deer.
“Verily, they have their reward.” The name of
Herbert Spencer now appears with those of about all
the Dukes in the Kingdom as the director of an asso-
ciation formed for the purpose of defending private
property in land that was especially active in the
recent London County Council election.
CHAPTER VIII.
“JUSTICE’’ ON THE RIGHT TO LAND.
AT last, however, as all men must, even after the
flying-machine becomes practicable, Mr. Spencer is
forced to come down from light and air to solid
earth. -
But observe how reluctantly, how tenderly, he
approaches the main question, the subject he would
evidently like to ignore altogether. Land—to us
the one solid, natural element; our all-producing, all-
supporting mother, from whose bosom our very frames
are drawn, and to which they return again; our stand-
ing-place; our workshop; our granary; our reservoir
and substratum and nexus of media and forces; the
element from which all we can produce must be
drawn; without which we cannot breathe the air or
enjoy the light; the element prerequisite to all hu-
man life and action — he speaks of as “that remain-
ing portion of the environment, hardly to be called a
medium,” which “by an unusual extension of meaning”
is included in the things to which the equal liberty
of all extends.
Yet, at last, and thus tenderly, after having shown
to his own satisfaction that with regard to personal
rights and the liberty of movement, “things as they
are * in such countries as England do not differ from
“things as they ought to be,” except, perhaps, that
“JUSTICE’’ ON THE RIGHT TO LAND. 203
there is too much smoking in railway carriages, Mr.
Spencer does at last get to the burning question of
the land. And no sooner does he get there than the
power by virtue of which a truth once recognized
can never be entirely forgotten or utterly ignored,
forces from him this recognition:
If, while possessing those ethical sentiments which
social discipline has now produced, men stood in the pos-
session of a territory not yet individually portioned out,
they would no more hesitate to assert equality of their
claims to the land than they would hesitate to assert
equality of their claims to light and air.
“If, while possessing those ethical sentiments which so-
cial discipline has now produced.” This “if” is the
assumption of the Spencerian philosophy, that our
moral sentiments have been evolved by pressure of
conditions, survival of the fittest and hereditary trans-
mission, since the time when, according to it, primitive
men were accustomed to eat each other. Having told
us that social evolution has brought mankind in the
Victorian era to the recognition of equal rights to air
and light, Mr. Spencer now assumes that the idea of
equal rights to the use of land is the product of a
similar development instead of being a primary per-
ception of mankind.
Now this assumption is not merely opposed to all
the facts; it is inconsistent with the Spencerian phi-
losophy.
To consider the philosophy first : It holds that man
is an evolution from the animal. He comes to be
man by gradual development from the monkey or
from some form of life from which the monkeys have
also sprung. In the course of this evolutionary
204 REC ANTATION.
process, continued since he became man, he has ac-
quired his present instincts, habits and powers.
Now I will not ask how, since the highest animals
that habitually eat their own kind are on the syn-
thetic genealogical tree far below any of the animals,
existing or extinct, from which man can have de-
scended, the oft-repeated assumption that primitive
men were habitual cannibals can be reconciled with
the assumption that they derived their habits from
their animal ancestors.
But I will make bold to ask how the assumption
that men have only now arrived at the perception of
the equality of rights to the use of the natural media,
and especially land, can be reconciled with the
assumption that our moral perceptions are derived
from animals. Animals fight with their own kind,
as men fight ; or at least some of them do occasion-
ally, though none fight so frequently and so wan-
tonly. But is there an animal, from the monkey to
the jelly-fish, that does not, with animals of its own
kind, and when at peace, fail to claim for itself and
accord to others the liberty to use natural media,
bounded only by the equal liberty of all? If there
is not, how can the assumption that it has taken man
all these ages to recognize the equality of rights to
the use of natural media be made to harmonize with
the assumption that he primarily derives his percep-
tions from the animal?
I ask this question to emphasize the fact that, in
his effort to smooth away the monstrous injustice of
private property in land, Mr. Spencer does violence
to his own theories — not alone to the theories which
he held when he wrote “Social Statics,” but to the
“JUSTICE * ON THE RIGHT TO LAND. 205
theories of his Synthetic Philosophy — the theories
set forth in “Justice; ” that he stands ready to sacri-
fice to his new masters not only his moral honesty, but
even what the morally depraved often cling to — the
pretence of intellectual honesty. In order to ignore
the gist of the land question while pretending to
explain it, he is endeavoring to create the impression
that the present treatment of land, if not indeed the
best, is at least the highest form which the progressive
development of the idea of the equality of rights to
the use of natural media has assumed. But to say
that the idea of equal rights to land is the product of
advancing social discipline is to say that it has pro-
ceeded from the contrary idea — that of unequal
rights, or private property in land. Since the ani-
mals show no trace of this idea, this assumption is
inconsistent with the doctrine that primitive man
came closest to the animals. And to assume, as
Mr. Spencer does in this chapter, that men start
with the idea of unequal rights to land, and have
been working up through social discipline to the
idea of equal rights, is likewise inconsistent with
all the points in the elaborate derivation of the idea
of justice, which occupy the first eight chapters of
this very book.
The assumption that the idea of equal rights to
land is the product of social discipline is at both
ends contradicted by the facts. In America, Aus-
tralia and New Zealand, men of English speech, pos-
sessing “those ethical sentiments which social disci-
pline has now produced,” have stood in possession of
territory not yet individually portioned out; but, in-
stead of asserting the equality of claims to land,
206 RECANTATION.
they have proceeded to individually portion out this
territory as fast as they could. Thus the effect upon
their ethical sentiments of the social discipline to
which they have been subjected has been the precise
opposite of what Mr. Spencer asserts. Instead of
leading them from non-perception to a perception of
the equality of rights to land, social discipline, domi-
nated by land-owners, and continued steadily and rig-
orously, had, within comparatively recent times,
almost entirely crushed out the idea of natural rights
in land among the English people, and taught them
to look on private property in land as in nowise dif-
fering from property in other things.
Or, try Mr. Spencer's assumption from the other
end.
Among the aboriginal races in the countries we
modern English have overrun, the idea of equal rights
to land, and of course to other natural media, has
been so clearly perceived that they were unable to
comprehend the artificial notion of private property
in land—could no more see than could Mr. Spencer
in 1850 how land could equitably become private
property. To this very day, and in spite of the
pressure of the national government and of the sur-
rounding whites, the Cherokees, the Choctaws, and
other civilized remnants of the aboriginal tribes of
the United States, though recognizing fully the right
of property in things produced by labor, and recog-
nizing also the right of private possession of land,
refuse to recognize land as the property of the
individual; and no man can hold land among them
except while putting it to use. The idea that land
itself can become subject to such individual owner-
“JUSTICE’’ ON THE RIGHT TO LAND. 207
ship as attaches to things that man produces by labor,
is as repugnant to the human mind, undisciplined
by generations of cruel repression and undistorted
by persistent misteachings, as the idea that air or
sunlight may be so owned.
Mr. Spencer himself, while stating that the per-
ception of the equality of natural rights to land
is the product of the social advance that has
brought men of the highest civilization to their
present ethical condition, goes on in the next para-
graph to show at length that “in early stages private
ownership of land is unknown,” and that private
property in land has arisen from “the exercise of
direct or indirect force, sometimes internal but chiefly
external.” "
What Mr. Spencer thus admits is that private prop-
erty in land has no derivation from perceptions of
justice, whether these be original or acquired by
evolution, but that its only genesis is force. And
then comes his supreme effort. In the reference to
the feudal system and the assumption that the rights
! It may be worth noting that here Mr. Spencer again confuses
equal rights with joint rights. The primitive idea is not that of
deeming land the property of the tribe, and the relations of individ-
uals to the soil one of joint ownership. Although within generally
vague territorial limits each tribe may claim the right to exclude
other tribes, yet the idea is not that of property in the land, but of
that sort of separation which took place between Lot and Abraham;
and the relation of the members to the land is not that of joint
ownership, but of equal right to use — such regulations as in the
earlier stages become necessary, being merely those which secure
this equality in use. Among no primitive people would it be
thought that a member of the tribe required the consent of the
whole to make use of land no one else was using. He would do
that without question, as a matter of individual right.
208 - RECANTATION.
of the monarch, as representative of the whole people,
are still exercised by the people's representatives, lies
the pivotal point of his whole argument.
To return to my illustration of the tunnel. This
is the way he gets there:
We are told that when private property in land did
arise, it was habitually incomplete, since it was sub-
ject to the claims of the over-lord, the implication
being that the ownership was subordinate to that of
the head of the community ; and that this conception
survives alike in theory and in practice to the present
time, since the state now takes land for public pur-
poses after making due compensation to existing
holders. The supreme power of the monarch having
been replaced by the supreme power of the people,
the people are now the supreme owners of the land,
and may take it, if they please, on payment of full
compensation. Thus, individual freedom has been
re-acquired with regard to land, and to-day, in the
existing theory and practice of English law, and like
their equal rights to light and air, the equal rights
of all to the use of land are fully recognized.
All that has gone before is the by-play of the jug-
gler to distract attention. In this the transmogrifi-
cation is worked.
Here, with one flash of synthetic logic, the horse-
chestnut becomes a chestnut horse ! Here is the
explanation of what was averred in Mr. Spencer's
letter to the Times — that the view of land-ownership
he has taken all along is “congruous with existing
legal theory and practice.” Here is his reconciliation
of his formula of justice — that “each is at liberty
to do all that he wills, provided that he infringes not
“JUSTICE’’ ON THE RIGHT TO LAND. 209
the equal liberty of any other man’—with the views
of that august body, the Land and Property Defence
League, “on which sit several peers and two judges.”
Both are harmonized in the assumption that the equal
rights of all to the use of land are to-day recognized in
the right of Parliament to take land for public pur-
poses on paying for it.
What, it may be asked, has become of the nine-
teen-twentieths of the people of England who, as
“Social Statics” told us, were being robbed of their
birthright—their heritage in the earth — by a gigan-
tic injustice inferior only in wickedness to murder
and enslavement? Why, having the privilege of
voting for members of one branch of the Legislature,
which Mr. Spencer has, in this very book, page 49,
described as “a motley assemblage of nominees of
caucuses, ruled by ignorant and fanatical wire-
pullers,” they have been transmogrified into supreme
owners of the land.
What, it still may be asked, has become of that
part of them that do not have even the poor privilege
of voting for this motley assemblage of nominees of
caucuses 7
There is no answer. We may search Chapter IV.
of the “Principles of Ethics — The Ethics of Social
Life: Justice,” in vain. They have incontinently
dropped out of sight.
It may be worth while to examine that part of
Mr. Spencer's logical process where it is assumed
that the legal theory and practice by which the
British Legislature, on the payment of compensa-
tion, now takes land for public purposes is identical
210 RECANTATION.
with the theory and practice by which the feudal
monarch, as representing the whole people, was the
supreme owner of land. This is all that he ventures
specifically to assert, and the question raised by it is
much narrower than the real question, whether the
present legal theory and practice does adequately
recognize the equal rights of all to land. Yet, even
here, Mr. Spencer clearly suppresses the vital fact.
The taking of land for public purposes on payment
of compensation — or by process of condemnation,
as it is termed — is neither an exercise nor recogni-
tion of the supreme ownership of land. In the
American States where the ownership of land is by
their constitutions declared allodial, the same powers
of condemning land are exerted, and more freely
exerted than in England. If pictures are bought for
the national galleries, not condemned, it is merely be-
cause there is no need for condemnation. The same
legal power exists to take pictures for public use as
to take land. In case of necessity, such as war, the
power of taking anything is habitually exercised,
and ships, horses, railways, provisions, and even men
are taken for public uses. The power to do this is a
power incident to the Supreme authority and at times
necessary to society.
When, in 1889, Johnstown, Pennsylvania, was cut
off from the rest of the world by the flood that de-
stroyed pre-existing organization, a British subject,
Arthur J. Moxham, was placed in charge by what a
Quaker would call “the sense of the meeting.” His
first acts were to seize all food, to destroy all liquor,
and to put every able-bodied man at work, leaving
the matter of compensation to be determined after-
“JUSTICE * ON THE RIGHT TO LAND. 211
wards. He voiced the will of the society, driven by
crushing disaster into a supreme effort for self-pres-
ervation, and the man who had resisted his orders
would, if need be, have been shot.
But the theory of English law that the crown is
the only owner of English land, and that the highest
estate an individual can hold is that of tenancy, though
often confused with the right of eminent domain, has
in reality a different origin. Now a mere fiction, it had
in feudal times expression in practice. When William
the Conqueror divided England, he conditioned his
grants on the payment of rent in dues or services.
This was the essence of the feudal principle. In a
rough and partial but still substantial way, it recog-
nized the right of the community to rent. It was a
rude attempt to carry out that system of land nation-
alization which Mr. Spencer in “Social Statics' de-
clares the only equitable system of land-tenure.
Under it the holding of valuable land entailed pay-
ment or service. The crown lands maintained the
sovereign and the civil list. From the church lands
the expenses of public worship, and of education,
the care of the sick and the relief of wayfarers were
provided; the holders of military tenures had to
maintain the army and do the fighting, and on occa-
sions, such as the ransom of the king, the knighting
of his eldest son, the marriage of his eldest daughter,
etc., were called on for extra payments ; while the
right of all Englishmen to the use of some portion
at least of English soil was recognized in the numer-
ous public commons. This spirit of the feudal
system was the origin of primogeniture, of ward-
ships and liveries and other feudal incidents, which,
212 IRECANTATION.
where they remain on the law-books of to-day are but
meaningless and useless survivals.
Mr. Spencer, in his “glance at some past phases of
land-tenure,” has told us of the Sumatrans, the Don
Cossacks, the Russians, the Suanetians, and the Daho-
means, but he has failed to tell us how we of the
English speech have lost those fragments of the
equal right to the use of land that we retained long
after the last conquest of England. I do not charge
him with ignorance. If he does not tell us, it is not
because he does not know, for “Political Institu-
tion " shows that he does know." But he does not
tell us, because the facts are inconsistent with the
juggle by which he is trying to impose on the reader.
It was in reality by a gigantic series of no-rent declara-
tions on the part of the class that had got possession of
English land on condition of paying rent for it. The
crown lands were given away by profligate sovereigns
without any stipulation of return in rent to the com-
munity. Henry VIII. made over the greater part of
the church lands to his favorites, and the people were
robbed of the services and benefits that they had re-
ceived from the former holders. Finally, by act of
the Long Parliament, confirmed after the restoration
1 In the chapter on Political Differentiation, page 297, “I’rin-
ciples of Sociology,” Volume II., he quotes from Hallam : —
“William the Conqueror . . . divided this kingdom into about
60,000 parcels, of nearly equal value [partly left in the hands of
those who previously held it, and partly made over to his follow-
ers as either owners or suzerains], from each of which the service
of a soldier was due.”
And again, in the chapter on Property, page 553 of the same
book, occurs the passage once before quoted: —
In our case the definite ending of these tenures took place in
1660; when for feudal obligations (a burden on land-owners) was
substituted a beer-excise (a burden on the community).
“JUSTICE * ON THE RIGHT TO LAND. 213
by a close majority, the military dues were abolished;
and, growing in power by what they fed on, the land-
holders, now actually land-owners, appropriated to
themselves, by the simple process of inclosure, nearly
all the common lands.
The essence and meaning of the supreme owner-
ship of the land of England by the crown is thus
gone. What remains is but a legal fiction, a mere
survival of form, of no more validity than was in
the time of George III. the form by which he styled
himself King of France. Yet in this empty phrase,
and in the taking of land for public use on payment
of full compensation, Mr. Spencer tells his disinher-
ited countrymen that their equal rights are actually
recognized. - º
Thus the equal right of Englishmen to the use of
English land amounts to the privilege of buying it
at its full value! What, then, has the Englishman as
Englishman? A Russian or a Turk, a Winans or a
Carnegie, may use land in England by paying for it.
If we put the conclusion as to the right to the use of
land to which Mr. Spencer thus comes in “Justice"
in the same form which he uses in “Social Statics,” we
have this:
Given a race of beings having like claims to pursue
the objects of their desires — given a world adapted
to the gratification of those desires — a world into
which such beings are similarly born, and it unavoid-
ably follows that they have the right to use this
world as soon as they have paid the full value of it
to those of their number who call themselves its
OWIlêI’S.
But this telling the disinherited masses that their
equal rights to land are already acknowledged seems
214 RECANTATION.
hardly satisfactory to Mr. Spencer himself, for he at
once proceeds to re-enforce it, by the plea that for
them to claim any more than the right of buying
land at its full value would be ethically wrong.
This is a putting of the cart before the horse. For
a wrong is only the violation of a right. Rights, as
Mr. Spencer has just before told us, are the particular
freedoms deducible from the law of equal freedom,
and to assert Wrong he must show violation of that
law. Let us, however, follow his reasoning.
The first proposition is that —
Since equity and daily custom alike imply that exist-
ing holders of particular portions of land may not be
dispossessed without giving them in return its fairly
estimated value, it is also implied that the wholesale
resumption of the land by the community can be justly
effected only by the wholesale purchase of it.
Is it? By equity and custom when the state
takes any part of the wealth of a particular person
it compensates him. But when it takes part of the
wealth of all persons, or of all persons of a special
class, as it is constantly doing by taxation, does it
compensate them 2
The reason for compensation, when land is taken
from particular owners, is that otherwise a discrim-
ination would be made between them and other land-
owners. Equity, as Mr. Spencer once told us, means
equalness. It would not be equitable for the com-
munity to resume possession of the land of this or
that particular land-owner without compensation,
while leaving to other land-owners their land, for
while this would be to leave unredressed the unequal-
ness between land-holders and others, it would be to
“JUSTICE’ ON THE RIGHT TO LAND. 215
treat land-owners unequally as between themselves.
But if all land were resumed equity would require
no compensation, for while land-owners would be
treated equally as between themselves, the inequality
between them and other members of the community
would be removed, and all would be treated with
equalness. And since they, too, are members of the
community, the resumption of all land by the com-
munity would place all in a condition of equalness
with respect to the land.
But, continues Mr. Spencer—herein admitting that
the community may in equity take the land —
Were the direct exercise of ownership to be resumed
by the community without purchase, the community
would take, along with something which is its own, an
immensely greater amount of something which is not
its own. -
How so? The proposition is only to take the land,
not to take anything else.
Because, Mr. Spencer continues —
Even if we ignore those multitudinous complications
which, in the course of century after century, have
inextricably entangled men's claims theoretically con-
sidered — even if we reduce the case to its simplest
theoretical form —
Well, all classes of land resumptionists would
quickly reply, we are quite willing to do so. Since,
as laid down in “Social Statics,” men derive their
equal rights to the use of the world, from their
equal presence in the world, there can be no compli-
cations that can entangle their equal claims to the
use of land, either considered theoretically or in any
other way.
216 R.ECANTATION.
But without heeding this, Mr. Spencer goes on
to say, that even if we ignore what no one proposes to
consider, and even if we reduce the case to simple
theoretical form —
We must admit that all which can be claimed for the
community is the surface of the country in its original
unsubdued state. To all that value given to it by clear-
ing, breaking-up, prolonged culture, fencing, draining,
making roads, farm-buildings, etc., constituting nearly
all its value, the community has no claim. This value
has been given either by personal labor, or by labor paid
for, or by ancestral labor; or else the value given to it
in such ways has been purchased by legitimately earned
money. All this value artificially given vests in exist-
ing owners, and cannot without a gigantic robbery be
taken from them. If, during the many transactions
which have brought about existing land-ownership, there
have been much violence and much fraud, these have
been small compared with the violence and the fraud
which the community would be guilty of did it take
possession, without paying for it, of that artificial value
which the labor of nearly two thousand years has given
to the land.
What does Mr. Spencer mean 2 If he means that
all that can be claimed by the community is the
land itself, and that land-owners should retain the
value of their improvements, and of all things else
that they may possess, we admit it — not entirely as
a matter of strict justice, for much of things other
than the land itself, which existing land-owners
now possess, they have obtained by their unjust
appropriation of land. But we wish to be within
our right, and to let bygones be bygones, and so all
that we propose is just what Mr. Spencer in “Social
Statics' proposed — the resumption of equal rights
in land, leaving to existing land-owners, without
“JUSTICE’’ ON THE RIGHT TO LAND. 217
question as to how it was obtained, the whole value
of their improvements in or on land, and all their
other property.
But what, then, does Mr. Spencer mean by talking
of “the surface of the country in its original unsub-
dued state,” as all the community can claim 2 What
does he mean by talking of that “artificial value
which the labor of nearly two thousand years has
given to the land?” Vague as are his notions of
value, can it be that he means that, even if their
natural rights are admitted, the people of England
are only entitled to what value the land had before
there were any people? and that they must pay the
land-owners for the value of all the labor that has been
expended on that land since Caesar landed?
What the people of England are entitled to by
natural right, and what we propose by the single tax
to take for their use, is the value of land as it is, ex-
clusive of the value of improvements as they are in
or on the land privately owned. What would thus
be left to the land-owners would be their personal or
movable property, the value of all existing improve-
ments in or on their land, and their equal share with
all other citizens in the land value resumed. This is
perfectly clear, and if not perfectly fair, is only so
because it would leave to the land-owners in their per-
sonal property and the value of their improvements
much not due to any exertion of labor by themselves
or their ancestors, but which has come to them through
the unjust appropriation of the proceeds of others’
labor.
The value of the land when the country was in its
original unsubdued state has nothing to do with the
218 - RECANTATION.
matter; what we have to deal with is the value of
the land as it is. Nor has the labor expended since
Caesar's time anything to do with it; the value of im-
provements to be left to land-owners is the value of
existing improvements. Surely if Mr. Spencer were
to try to formulate his notions it would be too prepos-
terous even for him to contend that in resuming our
rights in the land — not the rights of the ancient
Britons, nor the rights of primitive man, nor the rights
of the animals that existed before man was — we
should credit the existing land-owners with the value
which attaches to the land from our presence, and
charge them only with what value the land might
have if we did not exist. And surely he would not
contend that the land-owners are alone entitled to the
value which the existing social environment gives to
land — to the sole benefit of the introduction of Chris-
tianity, the extirpation of wolves, the beating off or
civilizing of the Danes, the defeat of the Spanish
armada, the building of public roads and the lighting
of public streets, the introduction of vegetables and
fruits and the improvement of domestic animals, the
utilization of steam and electricity and labor-saving
appliances, the discoveries of science and the progress
of the arts |
Nor yet would he formally assert the notion that
in addition to the present value of their improvements
the land-owners must be credited with the value of all
such improvements when they were new, and with
the cost of all the draining, hedging, fencing, digging,
manuring, building, etc., that has gone on for two
thousand years — that the owner of land in the city
of London, for instance, must be credited, not only
“JUSTICE’’ ON THE RIGHT TO LAND. 219
with the present value of his houses, but with the
value of the houses that existed before the great fire,
and from the time of the first Roman camp ! This
would be equally preposterous.
It is hard to say what Mr. Spencer really does
mean. But he is evidently trying to get some sort
of vague excuse for assuming that it would not pay
the disinherited to claim their rights in land, since
to compensate land-owners would take more than the
land is worth. Let us, therefore, try to form some
idea of what would be the present value of the land
of England in its “original, unsubdued state,” popu-
lation and social environment, and the existing build-
ings, which we propose to leave to the land-owners,
remaining as they are. &
If, whenever a house was pulled down, or destroyed
by fire, in Threadneedle street or Lombard street, in
Cheapside or at Charing Cross, the ground on which
it stood were to spring into its original condition,
how much less would be its value to those who, in
renting or buying it, seek not so much soil or rock
or sand, but so many square feet of standing-place
in those centres of population and trade? How much
less would be the value of the land that around
London and Manchester and Liverpool and Birming-
ham and Leeds and all the growing English towns
is being turned from agricultural uses into house-
sites, were it to revert to its condition in Roman
times 2 While as for the country outside the cities
and towns, would it not, could such a miracle be
worked, become more rather than less valuable 2
Something of draining, hedging, walling, manuring
and digging would be lost; but would not the ac-
220 - RECANTATION.
cumulated richness of virgin soil, the great forests
that in England now would have enormous value,
the stores of coal and iron and other minerals that
have now been exhausted or can only be worked at
great depths, much more than make up?
If Mr. Spencer would go to the greater Englands
growing up in Australia and the American West,
he would cease thinking of Romans, or Saxons or
Normans as having anything to do with the present
value of English land; for he would see that it is not
what has been done in the past, but the population
and activity of the present, that give value to land.
He would see from Chicago or Johnstown that Lon-
don might be swept by fire or flood, and yet, if the
causes that concentrate population and trade there
still remained, land, instead of being less valuable,
would really become more valuable, from the better
improvements that the clearing would bring about.
He would see that, if the population and business of
London could be transported to a newly-risen island
in the antipodes, land there would become as valuable
as land in London now; and that, though all improve-
ments were to be left behind, the value of land in
London would disappear.
What the new countries will show us is, that as
man lives in the present so he lives by the labor of
the present and the immediate past, truly from hand
to mouth ; and what we get from our ancestors is
, little more than language, traditions, laws, habits,
and the store of transmitted knowledge, including
also prejudices and superstitions. And thus rich and
poor, learned and ignorant, we are alike “the heirs of
all the ages.” While if some of us are richer than
“JUSTICE’’ ON THE RIGHT TO LAND. 221
we ought to be, and more of us are poorer than we
ought to be, it is not because of the wrongful appro-
priations of wealth that took place in a dead and
gone past, but from the wrongful appropriations of
wealth that are taking place now.
Barring the appendix, which is yet to be considered,
we have now gone through Mr. Spencer's defence of
existing landlordism — his answer, in his maturest
years, to the arraignment of private property in
land which he made in “Social Statics.” Stripped of
its padding it amounts simply to the assumption
(1) that the equal rights of all to the use of land are
recognized in the right of the state to take land for
public purposes on paying compensation ; which is
backed by the assumption (2) that equity requires
that existing owners shall be paid the full value of
the land they hold before equal rights to land can be
acknowledged.
Of the first assumption, the only attempt at sup-
port is in the last paragraph, the reasoning of which
on analysis will be found to be this:
The equal right of all electors to the use of land
is recognized by implication in the right asserted by
Parliament to take land for public use on paying
full compensation for its value ; because —
If it is not, there is no equitable warrant for the
state so taking land for public uses, since the only
right by which the land-owners can be superseded is
the right of the community at large : hence —
As the state has this right, which it can only get
as the sum of the individual rights of its members;
therefore, by its exercise, the individual rights of
222 RECANTATION.
members of the state to the use of land are now
recognized.
Of the second assumption, the only attempt at Sup-
port is another obviously false assumption — that the
value of land cannot be distinguished from the value
of improvements.
This is the argument of the lauded Synthetic
Philosophy in the most important part of the most
important book of its most important sub-division.
I commend the study of such logical processes to
those who on authority of Herbert Spencer's phi-
losophy believe that man is an evoluted monkey,
who got the idea of God from observing his own
shadow.
As for anything deserving the name of reasoning,
anything on which may be founded either a denial of
the equal right of all to the use of land, or an affir-
mation of the exclusive right of existing land-owners,
there is nothing whatever. It is not merely that the
reasoning of “Social Statics” is not impugned: it is
that the reasoning of “Justice” itself is utterly ig-
nored. No connection whatever is made between the
conclusions here assumed and the formula of justice,
the law of equal freedom, which in preceding chapters
of this very book has been declared the ultimate
ethical principle.
The reader has just been told that rights are the
particular freedoms deducible from the law of equal
freedom; that what are truly called rights are dedu-
cible from it, and that what are falsely called rights are
not deducible from it. But where does Mr. Spencer,
or how can he, deduce the right which he asserts for
land-owners, the right to the exclusive use of land
“JUSTICE * ON THE RIGHT TO LAND. 223
until they are paid its full value, from the law of
equal freedom? Or, if we go back through all the
links of his derivation of the formula of justice can
we find any connection between what he now asserts
as right, and what he has just asserted as justice in
any of its evolutionary stages?
Does not the ownership by some to the exclusion
of others, of elements essential to all life, the legal
giving of the products of labor to those who do no
labor, by taking it away from those who do labor,
violate what he declares to be the principle of animal
ethics—that the ill-fitted must suffer the evils of
unfitness, and the well-fitted prove their fitness?
Does it not violate what he declares to be the prin-
ciple of sub-human justice, that each individual shall
receive the benefits and evils of its own nature and
consequent conduct?
Does it not violate what he declares to be the
principle of human justice, that no one should be
prevented from having whatever good his actions
normally bring to him, nor allowed to shoulder off
on other persons whatever evil they bring?
Does it not violate what he declares to be the sen-
timent of justice, the feeling that we ourselves ought
to have freedom to receive the results of our own
nature and consequent actions, and which prompts
the maintenance of this sphere of free play for
others ?
Does it not violate what he declares to be the idea
of justice, the equality as to mutually limited spheres
of action, the inequality in the results which each
may achieve within these mutual limits? Does it
not establish inequality by authority—an inequality
224 RECANTATION.
referring not to the natural achievement of greater
rewards by greater merits, but to the artificial appor-
tionment of rewards to no merits at all?
Does it not violate what he declares to be the for-
mula of justice, that every man is free to do that
which he wills, provided he infringes not the equal
freedom of any other man?
Does it not set at defiance what he declares to be
the authority of this formula, the relation between
conduct and consequence, which he bases on his com-
pound law?
Private property in land, which Herbert Spencer in
“Justice” defends by the darkening of counsel and
baseless assumptions ! . Does it not openly, notori-
ously, flagrantly, deny to men the equal use of nat-
ural opportunities to live their lives, develop their
powers, and reap the rewards of their conduct? Does
it not give to the idle, the stupid, the profligate, the
vicious, through the accidents of birth or luck, or
successful forestalling, the natural rewards of indus-
try, energy, temperance and thrift? Does it not pro-
portionately, and far more than proportionately (for
it involves enormous wastes), deny these rewards to
those who have really earned them? Does it not
give wealth, honor, the command of everything that
labor in a high civilization can produce, to idlers,
idiots, gamesters, profligates? Does it not, on the
other hand, condemn toil to penury, and honest labor,
to contempt and grinding want? Does it not,
wherever our civilization extends, make the mere op-
portunity to work a boon? keep men in idleness whose
strongest desire is to earn a living? fill prisons and
almshouses? condemn to ignorance minds that might
“JUSTICE’’ ON THE RIGHT TO LAND. 225
enlighten and bless mankind? debase and embrute
great masses of men and women? rob little children
of the grace and sweetness and glory of life, and
force them before their time out of a world in which
monopoly denies them room?
Try Herbert Spencer by the ideas that he once
held—the idea of a Living God, whose creatures we
are, and the idea of a divine order, to which we are
bound to conform. Or try him by what he now pro-
fesses—the idea that we are but the evolutionary
results of the integrations of matter and motion.
Try him by the principles of “Social Statics,” or
try him by the principles of “Justice.” In this chap-
ter he proves himself alike a traitor to all that he
once held and to all that he now holds—a conscious
and deliberate traitor, who assumes the place of the
philosopher, the office of the judge, only to darken
truth and to deny justice; to sell out the right of the
wronged and to prostitute his powers in the defence
of the wronger.
Is it a wonder that intellectually, as morally, this
chapter is beneath contempt?
CHAPTER IX.
“JUSTICE.”—THE RIGHT OF PROPERTY.
IN “Justice” as in “Social Statics,” the chapter
on the right to land is followed by a chapter on the
right of property. That in “Social Statics " I have
reprinted in full, to meet Mr. Spencer's subsequent
assertion that it modified the radical conclusions of
the preceding chapter. But it is hardly necessary
thus to treat the similar chapter of “Justice.” It
begins (Section 54):
Since all material objects capable of being owned are
in one way or other obtained from the earth, it results
that the right of property is originally dependent on the
right to the use of the earth. While there were yet no
artificial products, and natural products were therefore
the only things which could be appropriated, this was
an obviously necessary connection. And though, in our
developed form of society, there are multitudinous pos.
sessions, ranging from houses, furniture, clothes, works
of art, to bank-notes, railway-shares, mortgages, govern-
ment bonds, etc., the origins of which have no mani-
fest relation to use of the earth; yet it needs but to
remember that they either are, or represent, products of
labor, that labor is made possible by food, and that food
is obtained from the soil, to see that the connection,
though remote and entangled, still continues. Whence
it follows that a complete ethical justification for the
right of property is involved in the same difficulties as
the ethical justification for the right to the use of the
earth.
Since all material things capable of being owned
consist either of land or products of land, the round-
“JUSTICE.” — THE RIGHT OF PROPERTY. 227
about connection between such things as are here
specified and the earth, through the food consumed
by laborers, is a queer one, which indicates what in
some parts of “Social Statics” may be suspected,
that in speaking of land Mr. Spencer, as is often the
case with English writers, is really thinking only of
agricultural land.
The difficulties of which he speaks are the diffi-
culties he raises in “Social Statics,” by confounding
equal rights with joint rights, and he here again
takes issue with Locke and assumes, as before, that for
production to give title, the right of the producer to
the use of material must be shown to be “greater
than the pre-existing rights of all other men put to-
gether.” The forty-one years that have elapsed have
left Mr. Spencer still entangled by this self-raised
difficulty. But he now goes on to say that the dif-
ficulty arising from the question whether by labor
“a man has made his right to the thing greater
than the pre-existing rights of all other men put to-
gether' . . . may be avoided however. There are
three ways in which, under savage, semi-civilized,
and civilized conditions, men's several rights of
property may be established with due regard to the
equal rights of all other men.”
* Mr. Spencer speaks of such usages as that an unsuccessful
hunter in passing might take a deer from a trap for food, leaving
head, skin, and saddle for the owner, as implying the belief of the
tribesmen that “this prey was in part theirs before it was killed.”
But it no more implies this than the custom by which, among the
early California rancheros, any traveller might catch a fresh horse,
transfer his saddle and leave the tired one implied common prop-
erty in horses, or than the kindly customs of essentially the same
kind that are to be found wherever the struggle for existence that
has developed with our civilization has not become intense.
228 RECANTATION.
In the savage condition, he says there is a tacit
agreement that having equal opportunities of utiliz-
ing such products, appropriation achieved by one
shall be passively assented to by the others.
As to the semi-civilized condition, he says:
We meet with usages having the same general impli-
cations. . . . It is perceived that the assent of the clan
to ownership of food grown on an appropriated portion
by any one, is implied in the assumptions of kindred
ownership similarly established by all others. . . . In
this case then as in the first, the right of property arises
in conformity with the law of equal freedom.
So far then Mr. Spencer derives, and properly de-
rives, the right of property from the exertion of labor
under conditions in which all are equally free to
make use of land. He now comes to his third divis-
ion, where he is to show how in civilized conditions
the right of property “may be established with due
regard to the equal rights of all other men.” I will
quote this in full:
Though we cannot say that ownership of property, thus
arising, results from actual contract between each mem-
ber of the community and the community as a whole, yet
there is something like a potential contract; and such
potential contract might grow into an actual contract if
one part of the community devoted itself to other occu-
pations, while the rest continued to farm : a share of the
produce being in such case payable by agreement to those
who had ceased to be farmers, for the use of their shares
of the land.” We have no evidence that such a relation
between occupiers and the community, with consequent
1 Here is another instance of the habit of thinking of land as
only agricultural land. The assumption here is that farmers are
the only users of land, whereas the obvious truth is that there is
no occupation that can be carried on without the use of land, and
that many other occupations require the use of much more valuable
“JUSTICE.” — THE RIGHT OF PROPERTY. 229
authorized rights of property in the produce which re-
mained after payment of a portion equivalent to rent,
has ever arisen; for, as we have seen, the original owner-
ship by the community has habitually been usurped by
internal or external aggressors, and the rent, taking the
shape, if not of produce, then of labor or military ser-
vice, has been habitually paid to the usurper, a state of
things under which equitable rights of property, in com-
mon with equitable rights of all kinds, are submerged.
But out of such usurpations there has grown up, as we
have seen, ownership by the state and tenancy under it ;
from which there may again arise a theoretically equitable
right of property. In China, where “the land is all held
directly from the Crown " " on payment of an annual
tax,” “with composition for personal service to the gov-
ernment,” the legitimate proprietorship of such produce
as remains after payment of rent to the community, can
be asserted only on the assumption that the emperor
stands for the community. In India, where the govern-
ment is supreme land-owner, and where, until the zemin-
dar system was established, it was the direct receiver of
rents, the derivation of a right of property by contract
between the individual and the community can be still
less asserted without a strained interpretation. Nor at
home, where the theory that each land-owner is a tenant
of the crown is little more than a theory, is there any
better fulfilment of the ethical requirement. Only here
and there, where state-ownership is not potential but
actual, and ordinary rents are paid by occupiers to the
Crown (which has now in such cases come to be identi-
fied with the community), has there been consequently
established that kind of use of the earth which gives a
theoretically valid basis to the right of private property.
Now what is it that Mr. Spencer here says? It is
that a theoretically equitable right of property does
not now exist in civilized conditions; but that it may
arise if the now nominal and potential supreme own-
land than does farming. In the occupancy of his London apart-
ments Mr. Spencer himself is more of a land user, value con-
sidered, than many a small farmer,
230 RECANTATION.
ership of land by the state is made real and actual by
the taking for the use of the community, by the rep-
resentatives of the community, of the rents that are
(or should be) paid by occupiers of land.
Truly “Justice ’’ is a suprising book. Here we have
Mr. Spencer going back to the very principle he has
just recanted.
In one sentence of this paragraph he says that we
have no evidence that this equitable adjustment of
the rights to land in conformity with the needs of the
civilized state has ever arisen, since the original own-
ership of land by the community has been habitually
usurped, and in another sentence he says vaguely
that it has arisen only here and there. But that it may
arise and ought to arise, and would give an even theo-
retically perfect basis to the right of property, this
section states, if not as clearly, but yet on careful
reading as unmistakably as does “Social Statics”
itself.
The paragraph just quoted is followed by this
recapitulatory paragraph, with which the section
closes:
But admitting that the establishment of an ethically
complete right of property is beset with difficulties like
those which beset the establishment of an ethically com-
plete right to the use of the earth, we are nevertheless
shown by a survey of the facts which existing primitive
Societies present, and the facts traceable in the early
histories of civilized societies, that the right of property
is originally deducible from the law of equal freedom ;
and that it ceases to be so deducible only when the other
corollaries from the law of equal freedom have been
disregarded.
Or to put this statement of the propositions of this
section in fuller form, they are : (1) That the estab-
“JUSTICE.” — THE RIGHT OF PIROPERTY. 231
lishment of the right of property is beset by the diffi-
culties of showing that the right of a man to the
material element from which property is obtained is
greater than the rights of all existing men put together.
(2) But in primitive societies and in the early his-
tory of civilized societies, where the use of land is
open to all, this equality of access to land enables us
to deduce the right of property in things produced
by labor from the law of equal freedom ; and (3) it
ceases to be so deducible where equality in the use of
land is denied, as in civilized societies at present; but
would again become deducible from the law of equal
freedom if the rent of land were taken for the use of
the Society.
If Mr. Spencer had written “Justice ’’ under coer-
cion; if imprisoned in the chambers of an Inquisi-
tion, and under fear of the rack, he had been forced
against his will, like Galileo, to recant what he still
held to be true, we might well believe that this Sec-
tion 54 of “Justice ’’ contained his sign to posterity
that in spite of the denials he had just been compelled
to make he in his heart held to the truth.
But though, unfortunately, the conditions do not
admit of such a conclusion, this section is perhaps an
even stronger testimony to the power of truth.
In the preceding chapter Mr. Spencer has forced
back his better nature, and defended landlordism
as well as the man who had written “Social Stat-
ics' could. But when after an interval of over
forty years he begins to rewrite his old chapter on
“The Right of Property,’” the truth he once held
reasserts its sway, and though he cuts out all that
might give open offence to his new clients, the per-
232 RECANTATION.
ception of truth, as by “unconscious cerebration,”
causes him in the very first section to relapse, and
to tell us – unmistakably, if not clearly — that in
the civilized state it is only the appropriation of rent
to the use of the whole community that can give to
property an ethical basis.
But Mr. Spencer soon recovers himself. Having in
Section 54 shown that in rude societies there is a
substantial basis for the right of property, but that in
highly civilized countries, such as England, the equi-
table right of property has been submerged by the
usurpation of land-ownership, he proceeds in Sec-
tion 55 to assert, as he did in the preceding chap-
ter, that the course of modern civilization has been
more fully to establish this right.
Section 55 begins:
This deduction [i.e., of the right of property from
the law of equal freedom through the equal right to the
use of land], early recognized in custom and afterwards
formulated by legislators, has come to be elaborated and
enforced more and more fully as Society has developed.
Then comes something about primitive societies,
the patriarchal group and the house community, in
which occurs the reference to inherent value already
quoted on page 51, and the section thus closes:
To trace the development of the right of property as
established by rulers and administered by their agents,
setting out with the interdict on theft in the Hebrew
commandments, and continuing down to modern days,
in which proprietorships of all kinds have been legally
formulated in multitudinous detail and with great pre-
cision, would be no less out of place than it would be
superfluous. It suffices for present purposes to note that
this implication of the principle of justice, perceived
from the first perhaps more clearly than any other, has
“JUSTICE.” — THE RIGHT OF PROPERTY. 233
gained in the course of social progress increased definite-
ness of recognition as well as increased extension and
increased peremptoriness; so that now, breach of the
right of property by unauthorized appropriation of a
turnip or a few sticks, has become a punishable offence;
and there is ownership of a Song, of a pattern, of a trade-
mark.
The principle of justice in the right of property
perceived from the first, as Mr. Spencer has just ex-
plained, is equality in the use of natural opportunities.
Has this principle gained by a social progress, which
as exemplified in England, now denies nineteen-
twentieths of the people of all right whatever in the
land of their birth, punishes them if they take a hand-
ful of wild fruit or a few sticks from the abundant
offerings of nature, creates private ownership in a
salmon fishery, a coal mine, an advowson or a
hereditary pension, and condemns millions to chronic
pauperism?
This is what Mr. Spencer's examination of the
right of property in “Justice ’’ amounts to: First
showing that the right of property in civilized socie-
ties has to-day no ethical basis, he goes on to make
believe that it has, and from this basis of make-
believe to assume the ethical validity of existing
conditions. And then he virtuously turns on the
communists. They are a feeble folk and have no
friends.
In this he follows the order of “Social Statics,”
but the spirit is that of “The Man versus the State.”
He ignores what he once saw plainly, the incentive
to communistic and socialistic schemes in the bitter
wrong and widespread suffering of the existing order,
declares their motive to be the desire to take from the
234 RECANTATION.
&
worker the produce of his work, and assumes that
between them and existing social conditions lies the
only choice. Here is the section :
$ 56. Supposing themselves to be justified, and indeed
enjoined by moral principle, many in our days are seeking
to over-ride this right. They think it wrong that each
man should receive benefits proportionate to his efforts
— deny that he may properly keep possession of all
which his labor has produced, leaving the less capable in
possession of all which their labors have produced. Ex-
pressed in its briefest form, their doctrine is — Let
unlike kinds and amounts of work bring like shares
of produce — let there be “equal division of unequal
earnings.”
That communism implies violation of justice as de-
fined in foregoing chapters, is manifest. When we assert
the liberty of each bounded only by the like liberties of
all, we assert that each is free to keep for himself all
those gratifications and sources of gratification which he
procures without trespassing on the spheres of action
of his neighbors. If, therefore, one obtains by his
greater strength, greater ingenuity, or greater applica-
tion, more gratifications or sources of gratification, than
others, and does this without in any way trenching on
the spheres of action of others, the law of equal freedom
assigns him exclusive possession of all such extra grati-
fications and sources of gratification ; nor can others take
them from him without claiming for themselves greater
liberty of action than he claims, and thereby violating
the law. •
In past times the arrangements made were such that
the few superior profited at the expense of the many
inferior. It is now proposed to make arrangements
such that the many inferior shall profit at the expense
of the few superior. And just as the old social system
was assumed by those who maintained it to be equitable,
so is this new social system assumed to be equitable
by those who propose it. I3eing, as they think, un-
doubtedly right, this distribution may properly be estab-
lished by force; for the employment of force, if not
avowedly contemplated, is contemplated by implication.
“JUSTICE.” — THE RIGHT OF PROPERTY. 235
With a human nature such as has been known through-
out the past and is known at present, one who, by higher
power, bodily or mental, or greater endurance of work,
gains more than others gain, will not voluntarily sur-
render the excess to such others: here and there may be
found a man who would do this, but he is far from being
the average man. And if the average Superior man will
not voluntarily surrender to others the excess of benefit
gained by his superiority, the implication is that he
must be obliged to do this, and that the use of force
to oblige him is justifiable. That the many inferior are
physically able thus to coerce the few superior is agreed
on both sides, but the assumption of the communists is
that the required coercion of the minority who are best
by the majority who are worst would be equitable.
After what was said in the early chapter of this Part,
it scarcely needs pointing out that a system established
in pursuance of this doctrine would entail degeneration
of citizens and decay of the community formed by them.
Suspension of that natural discipline by which every
kind of creature is kept fit for the activities demanded
by the conditions of life, would inevitably bring about
unfitness for life and either prompt or slow disappearance.
An old fable tells us that when the plague raged
among the animals they concluded that among them
was some great criminal, who must be sacrificed to
the wrath of heaven, and agreed that to discover him
all should confess their sins. The fox volunteered to
act as judge. He listened with equanimity to the
lion's recital of flocks devoured and men slaughtered,
declaring his majesty blameless, and in the same way
excused all that the tiger, the hyena, the wolf, and
the bear confessed. At length came a poor ass, who
told how, when his master had forgotten to give him
his breakfast, he had nibbled a few leaves from his
load of cabbages. “You impious rascall ” cried the
fox, “it is you beyond doubt who have brought on
us the anger of the gods !” and applauding the de-
236 RECANTATION.
cision and following his lead, the lordly animals threw
themselves on the poor ass and tore him to pieces.
As the nibbling of a cabbage leaf is to Herod's
slaughter of the innocents, so is the dream of a few
communists compared with what the monopoly of
land is actually doing. In the highest civilization
in other respects that the world has yet seen this
monopoly is, even now, entailing the degradation of
citizens and decay of the community, so that Mr.
Spencer cannot look out of the windows of his club
without seeing men turned into advertising signs;
or get into a cab without having some miserable
wretch officiously hasten to close the door in the
hope of a penny; or travel through the three king-
doms without beholding the decay of population in
the country and its congestion in the slums of towns?
It is, even now, suspending “that natural discipline
by which every creature is kept fit for the activities
demanded by the conditions of life,” so that men are
being destroyed, on the one side by repletion and
debauchery, and on the other side by privation and the
denial of opportunities for honest work. It is, even
now, taking the produce of their work from superior
worker and inferior worker alike, and is giving the
gratifications and sources of gratification earned by
work to those who do no work —is piling up wealth
in the hands of those who do nothing to produce
wealth, who as land-owners are useless appropriators
and worse than useless destroyers. To this giant
wrong, this most monstrous of all denials of the law
of equal freedom, Mr. Spencer is as complaisant as
the fox was to the lion, while he vents his indigna-
tion on the poor ass of communism.
“JUSTICE.” — THE RIGHT OF PROPERTY. 237
The next and final chapter shows how far Mr.
Spencer really wishes to assert the right of property.
It was, as he knows, by violating the right of prop-
erty in putting taxes on the products of labor that
the larger tenants of English land made themselves
its virtual owners and that private property in land
has come to be established in those wide regions
to which English institutions have been extended.
And it is on the line of abolishing this taxation
of labor and the products of labor that, as is now
evident, the struggle for the resumption of equal
rights in land will in English-speaking countries be
made — nay, is already beginning to be made. So
in the next section Mr. Spencer brings out his
double-barrelled ethics to break down the right of
property and to open the door for what is essenti-
ally socialism and communism in the interests of the
rich :
§ 57. While absolute ethics thus asserts the right of
property, and while no such breach of it as is implied
by the schemes of communists is warranted by that
relative ethics which takes account of transitional needs,
relative ethics dictates such limitation of it as is neces-
sitated for defraying the costs of protection, national
and individual.
The truth recognized at the outset, that the preser-
vation of the species, or that variety of it constituting a
nation, is an end which must take precedence of indi-
vidual preservation, has already been cited as justifying
that subordination of the right to life which is implied
by exposure to possible death in defensive war, and as
also justifying that subordination of the right to lib-
erty which military service and subjection necessitate.
Here it must be again cited as affording a legitimate
reason for appropriating such portions of the posses-
sions and the earnings of individuals, as may be re-
quired for adequately resisting enemies. But while
238 RECANTATION.
there is thus a quasi-ethical justification for whatever
encroachment on the right of property is necessitated
for the purposes of defensive war, there is no justifica-
tion for any such encroachment for the purposes of
offensive war.
No less manifest is it that the right of property is
legitimately subject to one further restriction. Prop-
erty must be trenched upon for supporting those pub-
lic administrations by which the right of property, and
all other rights, are enforced. In a society wholly com-
posed of men who duly respected one another's claims,
no such partial invasion of the right of property would
be called for ; but in existing societies and in such
societies as are likely to exist for a long time to come,
the nearest approach to fulfilment of the law of equal
freedom is made when the various deduced rights are
sacrificed to the extent needful for preservation of the
remainders. Relative ethics, therefore, warrants such
equitably-distributed taxation as is required for main-
taining order and safety.
Since the ethical commands, thou shalt do no mur-
der and thou shalt not steal, mean also, thou shalt
not permit thyself to be murdered or to be stolen
from, the justification of defensive war needs no
invention of relative ethics. Nor is this needed to
justify under extraordinary circumstances what under
ordinary circumstances would be violations of the
right of property. Take Johnstown, when the sun
rose on wreck and ruin and death in their most awful
forms, and on men and women half crazed with lis-
tening all night long to the shrieks that came from the
flaming mass of float-wood into which the flood was
sweeping their nearest and dearest. In ordering the
destruction of all liquor, the seizing of all food, and
the impressment, should that be necessary, of all who
could work, in a systematized effort to succor who
still might be succored and to bury what remained to
“JUSTICE.” — THE RIGHT OF PROPERTY. 239
bury of the dead, was not Arthur Moxham acting,
in the name of the reason and conscience of the com-
munity, on the same eternal principles of right and
wrong that in ordinary conditions would have forbid-
den these things? What in form was a denial of the
rights of property and person was in its essence
respect for life and property.
But while changing conditions may change the
application of ethical principles, it is only as the
change in a ship's course turns the compass card
in her binacle. The change is in the conditions not
in the principles. And if there be an ethical right
of property, then, except under conditions of immi-
ment danger and dire stress, a community cannot
be justified in taking property by force from the
individual.
What Mr. Spencer does in this section, in the name
of his convenient fiction of relative ethics, is to jus-
tify the habitual violations of the right of property
which are committed under the name of government
in all civilized countries, and thus to make his phi-
losophy of things as they ought to be, conform the
better with things as the ruling classes desire to
maintain them. And he does this effectually, for he
leaves the right of property without defence, save in
idle platitudes, against those forms of taxation which
have everywhere proved so efficient in robbing the
many and enriching the few. *
To be sure Mr. Spencer justifies the taking of prop-
erty by taxation only for purposes of defensive war
and the maintenance of order and safety. But such
limitations are practically no limitations. Neither an
English jingo nor an American protectionist would
240 RECANTATION.
quarrel with them. No invading foot has trod
English soil, no hostile fleet has fired a shot at an
English town, since the English national debt began
to form. Yet what one of all the wars for which the
English masses have paid in blood and privation and
of which this great debt is the reminder, has not been
advocated at the time as a defensive war? Is not
our monstrous American tariff declared by its advo-
cates to be necessary to the maintenance of order and
safety 2 What has been the assigned reason for the
maintenance of every fat English sinecure but order
and safety 2
Granted that Mr. Spencer would abolish the more
flagrant abuses of taxation ; or, as in the light of his
changes on the land question we may more certainly
say, granted that he is in favor of abolishing them so
long as Sir John and his Grace do not seriously
object; yet in admitting that the right of property
may justly be set aside by the state for ordinary
public needs and uses, he opens the door for every
abuse that the ruling power — the majority, if you
please — may at any time choose to deem a use. He
leaves no principle save the shifting one of expe-
diency to guard the right of property against any
interest or desire or whim that may gain control of
the legislative power.
But the reign of relative ethics, like that of the
old-fashioned devil, to which it bears some analogy,
is not to be forever, for we are given to understand
that when evolution has carried the descendants of
what are now the human race to a point as far above
us as it has carried us above the monkey, and brought
on the agnostic millennium, relative ethics are to
“JUSTICE.” — THE RIGHT OF PROPERTY. 241
vanish in the unknowable pit. So Mr. Spencer tells
us that “in a society composed of men who duly
respected one another's claims, no such partial inva-
sion of the rights of property would be called for.”
But then, he continues, it is called for “in existing
societies and in such societies as are likely to exist
for a long time to come.” What ground does that
give me to assert that I am robbed directly by the
blackmail demanded in the name of duty at the
American post-office every time a friend sends me a
book from a foreign country, or even from Canada,
and am robbed indirectly every day of my life in the
purchases I make 2 The protectionist, if a Spence-
rian and disposed to argue, would simply reply,
“You are talking absolute ethics, whereas, as Her-
bert Spencer has shown, we are now under the rule
of relative ethics.”
It is true, but in a sense that Mr. Spencer does
not mean, that if men duly respected one another's .
claims, no taking of individual property in taxation
by the state would be necessary. For if men duly
respected one another's claims to the use of land, all
necessity for invading the right of property by taxa-
tion would disappear. Either by the single tax on
land values or by the crude and clumsy scheme of
land nationalization proposed by Mr. Spencer himself
in “Social Statics,” enough revenue would accrue to
the state to defray all needed expenses without taking
a penny of any man's property. But if men are to
continue to disregard each other's claims to the use
of land, and to continue to treat that element as be-
longing to a few individuals—and this Mr. Spencer
now insists on — then there is no possible improve-
242 RECANTATION.
ment in society or in the race that could dispense
with the taking of property by taxation.
Mr. Spencer evidently entertains the innocent
notion that could the soldier and the policeman be
done away with, there would be no further need for
public revenues, and all organized government could
be dispensed with. But would not civilized societies
still need revenues for building and keeping roads
and bridges, for paving and cleaning streets, for
establishing lighthouses and supporting a fire ser-
vice, and doing the many things which become
increasingly necessary to the public health, safety,
comfort, and convenience, as 'social integration goes
on 2 Or in the millennium of the Spencerians, as in
the millennium of the anarchists, is each one to pave,
clean and light the street before his door, when and
how he pleases 2 are roads, bridges and public works,
as to which competition is impossible, to be left to
private individuals and companies, charging what
they please and rendering what service they choose?
and are all other public functions to be dependent on
volunteer service or voluntary subscription ?
CHAPTER X.
THE RIGHT OF PROPERTY AND THE RIGHT OF
TAXATION.
OF such primary and practical importance is the
question just raised, that it is worth while to discuss
it more fully.
Mr. Spencer, in a book he has re-issued this year,
has flippantly accused “Mr. George and his friends'
with asserting the absolute right of the community
over the possessions of each member. Yet in nothing
is the divergence between us and the common opin-
ion more sharply shown than in this, that we utterly
deny the right of the community to take the property
of the individual for any purpose whatsoever, except
under circumstances where all rights must yield to
the supreme right of self-preservation. There may
be circumstances of such sudden stress and danger
as would justify an individual in taking the horse or
boat of another individual, in making use of his house,
his goods, or anything that is his ; and so there may
be similar circumstances that will justify such taking
of individual property on the part of a community.
But short of this, which is not a limitation but an
abrogation, we hold the right of property to be abso-
lute, and deny the proposition which Mr. Spencer in
the chapter just quoted asserts, and which is commonly
conceded, that the right of property is limited by the
right of the state to take in taxation what it may
244 RECANTATION.
think it needs. Thus we are to-day the defenders of
the right of property as against communists, protec-
tionists, and socialists, as well as against such moderate
deniers of the right of property as the revenue
tariffites of the Cobden Club class, and such half-way
individualists as the Liberty and Property Defence
League and Mr. Auberon Herbert's associations.
How then is it that we are called deniers of the
right of property 2
It is for the same reason that, when I was a boy,
caused nine-tenths of the good people in the United
States, north as well as south, to regard abolitionists
as deniers of the right of property; the same reason
that made even John Wesley look on a smuggler as
a kind of robber, and on a custom-house seizer of
other men's goods as a defender of law and order.
Where violations of the right of property have been
long sanctioned by custom and law, it is inevitable
that those who really assert the right of property will
at first be thought to deny it. For under such
circumstances the idea of property becomes confused,
and that is thought to be property which is in reality
a violation of property.
That such confusion exists to-day may be seen in
the way in which the great struggle for better condi-
tions of life for the masses, that all over the civilized
world has begun or is impending, is generally regarded
by both sides. Except by the single-tax men, and
possibly by the philosophic anarchists, it is thought
of as a struggle between capital and labor — a contest
between the rights of man and the rights of property.
It is not merely that one side charges the other side
with proposing to impair the right of property. It is,
PROPERTY AND TAXATION. - 245
that, with the exceptions noted, those who would
better secure the rights of men, do propose restric-
tions and denials of the right of property. So, from
the thorough-going socialists who would have the
state appropriate all capital and direct all industry,
to those milk-and-water socialists who are willing
to play at doing something, by encouraging trades
unions, and by two-penny alms and restrictions, and
by attempts to make the rich less rich, and conse-
quently as they think the poor less poor, through
income and succession taxes and Irish Land Acts,
we find those who aim, or profess to aim at improv-
ing the conditions of the laboring masses, advocating
measures which are violations of the right of property.
In this confusion of thought we who hold that the
right of property is an absolute right, we who say
that the command “Thou shalt not steal" applies to
the state as fully as to the individual, are looked upon
by one side as deniers of the right of property, and by
the other—even by the poor, timid university social-
ists—as not radical enough.
Yet to whoever will grasp first principles it must
be evident :
That there can be no real conflict between labor
and capital — since capital is in origin and essence
but the product and tool of labor;
That there can be no real antagonism between the
rights of men and the rights of property —since the
right of property is but the expression of a funda-
mental right of man ;
That the road to the improvement of the conditions
of the masses cannot be the road of restricting and
denying the right of property, but can only be that
246 RECANTATION.
of securing most fully the right of property; and that
all measures that impair the right of property must
in the end injure the masses — since while it may be
possible that a few may get a living or be aided in
getting a living by robbery, it is utterly impossible
that the many should.
It is not as deniers, but as asserters of the equal
rights of man, that we who for want of a better name
call ourselves single-tax men so strenuously uphold
the right of property. It is not because we would
palter with a social system that condemns the masses
to hard work and low wages, to absolute want and
starvation more or less disguised; but because we
would bring about a social system in which it would
be impossible for any one to want or to starve unless
he deserved to. It is not because we are less radical,
but because in the true sense we are more radical
than the socialists of all degrees.
Let me ask those who think there is any conflict
between the rights of men and the rights of property
to name any denial of the rights of men which is not
or does not involve a denial of the rights of property;
or any denial of the rights of property which is not
or does not involve a denial of the rights of men.
Take chattel slavery. Was that an assertion of the
right of property or a denial of the right of property 2
Or, consider any system of tyranny or oppression
by which the personal liberties of men have been
denied or curtailed. Take out of it the element
which infringes the right of property and is not its
efficacy gone?
On the other hand, take anything which denies or
impairs the right of property – robbery, brigandage,
PROPERTY AND TAXATION. 247
piracy, war, customs duties, excises, or taxes on wealth
in any of its forms — do they not all violate per-
sonal liberty, directly and indirectly 7
This is not an accidental, but a necessary connec-
tion. The right of life and liberty — that is to say,
the right of the man to himself — is not really one
right and the right of property another right. They
are two aspects of the same perception — the right of
property being but another side, a differently stated
expression, of the right of man to himself. The right
to life and liberty, the right of the individual to him-
himself, presupposes and involves the right of prop-
erty, which is the exclusive right of the individual to
the things his exertion has produced.
This is the reason why we who really believe in
the law of liberty, we who see in freedom the great
solvent for all social evils, are the stanchest and
most unflinching supporters of the rights of property,
and would guard it as scrupulously in the case of the
millionnaire as in the case of the day laborer.
But what is property 2 This we must keep clearly
in mind if, in attempting to see what the right of
property does and does not permit, we would avoid
confusion. The question is not what the state sanc-
tions, but what it may rightfully sanction. There
are those who say that the right of property, as all
other rights, are derived from the state. But they do
not really think this ; for they are as ready as any one
else to say of any proposed state action that it is right
or it is wrong, in which they assert some standard of
action higher than the state.
Property — not property in the legal sense, for that
may be anything which greed or perversity may have
248 IRECANTATION.
power to ordain ; but property in the ethical sense —
is that which carries with it the right of exclusive
ownership, including the right to give, sell, bequeath
or destroy.
To what sort of things does such right of owner-
ship rightfully attach 2
Clearly to things produced by labor, and to no
other.
And that this rightful ownership can only attach to
things produced by labor is always shown by those
who try to assert such right of ownership in other
things. For invariably, instead of proving a right of
ownership in such other things, they devote them-
selves to proving the right of ownership in things
produced by labor, and then assume that in some way
the right thus accruing has become transferred to
things of a different nature.
Mr. Spencer is an example of this, as are all with-
out exception who have ever written on the side he
has now assumed. He wishes in this book to justify
property in land. But he only justifies property in
the products of labor, and then insinuates what he
dares not clearly state—that by some process of trans-
fer or conjoinment the right of ownership in the pro-
ducts of labor has become transmuted into a right of
ownership in land.
In this, however, he does as well as any one who
ever attempted it. The logical processes of those who
attempt to prove a right of exclusive ownership in
land are always akin to those of the bum-boat man,
who, having agreed to bring the sailor a white mon-
key, brought him instead a yellow dog which he in-
sisted had eaten a white monkey. They are like a
PROPERTY AND TAXATION. 249
lawyer who, called on to prove his client's title to an
estate, should go on to prove his client's title to the
money which he gave for the estate.
The ethical right of property is so perfectly clear
as to be beyond all dispute — as to be testified to by
all who attempt to assert some other right of prop-
erty. It springs from the right of each man to use
his own powers and enjoy their results. And it is a
full and absolute right. Whatever a man produces
belongs to him exclusively, and the same full and
exclusive right passes from him to his grantor,
assignee or devisee, not to the amount of eighty or
fifty or any other percentage, but in full. And as is
shown by reason and as is proved by the experience
of the world, the advance in civilization depends upon
the recognition of this right. Therefore for the State
to levy taxes on that which is truly property, that is
to say, upon the possession of wealth in any of its
forms, is unjust and injurious — is a denial and viola-
tion of the right of property and of the rights of man.
But it may be said: In an isolated condition it is
true that a man is entitled to all that he produces, and
that it is robbery to take any part of it from him
against his will. But in the civilized condition it is
not alone the exertion of the individual that contri-
butes to his production. Over and above what the
producer receives from other producers, and for which
he recompenses them in the various ways by which
the claims between man and man are settled in
ordered society, he is aided, in an indefinite yet tan-
gible way, by society as a whole. Does he not there-
fore owe to society as a whole some return? Is not
organized society, or the state, entitled therefore to
250 RECANTATION.
claim and to take some portion of what in an isolated
condition would be rightfully his exclusive property?
We reply: There is such a debt, but the producer
cannot escape paying it, even though there be left to
him in full what is his by the right of property.
Here is a man who gives to a painter an order for a
beautiful picture. Can he alone enjoy it? Here is
another man who builds a factory, or works out a
beneficial invention. Do what benefits he may re-
ceive, even if he be untaxed, represent the sum total
of its benefits? Does not what he has done also
benefit others and benefit society at large 2 And if
society helps the individual producer, does not the
individual producer also help society? These diffused
benefits, these benefits which society as a whole re-
ceives, are something separate from what the right
of property accords to the producer. They become
tangible in the value of land, and may be taken by
society without any curtailment of the right of prop-
erty. To bring one beautiful picture to a town might
not perceptibly increase the value of land. But bring
a number, or even one famous picture, and the value
of land will perceptibly increase. Place the pictures
of one of the great European galleries on a piece of
American land that you might now buy for a hundred
dollars and you will soon find a value of millions
attaching to that land. And that the erection of a
factory, or even of a dwelling-house, or the utilization
of a beneficial invention, will perceptibly add to the
value of land every one knows. Look at the millions
on millions which the elevated roads have added to
the value of New York lands.
Again, it may be said, as Mr. Spencer now says, that
PROPERTY AND TAXATION. 251
it is necessary for organized society to have revenues,
and that therefore the society must take some part
at least of the property of individuals. The proposi-
tion we admit, but the conclusion we deny. Organ-
ized society must have revenues; but the natural
and proper and adequate source of those revenues is
not in what justly belongs to individuals, but in what
justly belongs to society — the value which attaches
to land with the growth of society. Let the state
take that, and there will be no need for it to violate
the right of property by taking what justly belongs
to the individual.
Mr. Spencer's admission in “Justice ’’ of the right
of the state to take from innividuals their property
by taxation — an admission which makes impossible
any clear assertion of the right of property —is forced
upon him by the radical change in his teachings that
his fear of Sir John and his Grace has compelled him
to make. He made no such surrender of individual
rights to the state in “Social Statics.” On the con-
trary he there emphatically — though as to details not
very clearly, for in many things he only saw men as
trees walking — asserts the rights of the individual
as against Society. But in “Justice” he is compelled
to admit the right of the state to take property by
taxation, because of his desire to admit the right of
land-owners to appropriate the revenues which are
the natural provision for the needs of the state.
For the state is natural and necessary, and the
state must have revenues. Hence any one who does
not see, or who chooses to deny, that the natural rev-
enue of the state is the value which social growth
gives to land, is compelled to admit that for the pur-
252 IRECANTATION.
pose of obtaining revenue the state may take the
property of individuals, and thus to deny the right of
property. -
Suppose some one to have asked the Herbert
Spencer who wrote “Social Statics: ” “Where shall
the state get its necessary revenues if it scrupulously
observes the right of property and does not continue
to take by force what it needs of the property of
individuals 2 °
He would have promptly replied, for the answer is
in that book, “By taking through its own agents for
its own purposes the rent of land, which is now taken
by the agents of Sir John and his Grace for their
purposes.”
But the Herbert Spencer who now writes “Justice”
could find no answer to such a question, since he
writes for the purpose of defending the appropriations
of Sir John and his Grace. Hence he is compelled to
deny the right of property — justifying its appropria-
tion by an agency which in another place in this same
book he calls “the many-headed government appointed
by multitudes of ignorant people ; ” and which, in-
deed, owing to the poverty, ignorance, greed and
immorality which are the results of ignoring the right
of property, is not undeserving of such a contemptuous
characterization.
But that he really knows better; that he really
sees that the taxation of the products of labor is a
violation of the right of property which differs from
slavery only in degree ; and that he is only advocat-
ing it in the interests of that privileged class to gain
whose tolerance now seems to be his supreme ambi-
tion, is clearly shown further on in this same book,
PROPERTY AND TAXATION. 253
where in opposing what he deems unnecessary taxa-
tion he clearly states the principle that condemns all
taxation of what belongs to individuals. I quote
from Chapter XXVI. of “Justice,” “The Limits of
State-duties,” Section 121, pp. 222–224:
If justice asserts the liberty of each limited only by
the like liberties of all, then the imposing of any further
limit is unjust ; no matter whether the power imposing
it be one man or a million of men. . . . In our time the
tying of men to the lands they were born on, and the
forbidding any other occupations than the prescribed
Ones, would be considered as intolerable aggressions on
their liberties. But if these larger inroads on their
rights are wrong, then also are smaller inroads. As we
hold that a theft is a theft whether the amount stolen
be a pound or a penny, so we must hold that an aggres-
sion is an aggression whether it be great or small. . . .
We do not commonly see in a tax a diminution of free-
dom, and yet it clearly is one. The money taken
represents so much labor gone through, and the product
of that labor being taken away, either leaves the indi-
vidual to go without such benefit as was achieved by it
or else to go through more labor. In feudal days, when
the subject classes had, under the name of corvées, to
render services to their lords, specified in time or work,
the partial slavery was manifest enough ; and when the
services were commuted for money, the relation remained
the same in substance though changed in form. So is it
now. Tax-payers are subject to a state corvée, which is
none the less decided because, instead of giving their spe-
cial kinds of work, they give equivalent sums; and if the
corvée in the original undisguised form was a deprivation
of freedom, so is it in its modern disguised form. “Thus
much of your work shall be devoted, not to your own pur-
poses, but to our purposes,” say the authorities to the cit-
izens; and to whatever extent this is carried, to that
extent the citizens become slaves of the government.
“But they are slaves for their own advantage,” will
be the reply — “ and the things to be done with the
money taken from them are things which will in one way
254 - RECANTATION.
or other conduce to their welfare.” Yes, that is the
theory — a theory not quite in harmony with the vast
mass of mischievous legislation filling the statute books.
But this reply is not to the purpose. The question is a
question of justice; and even supposing that the benefits
to be obtained by these extra public expenditures were
fairly distributed among all who furnish funds, which
they are not, it would still remain true that they are at
variance with the fundamental principle of an equi-
table social order. A man’s liberties are none the less
aggressed upon because those who coerce him do so
in the belief that he will be benefited. In thus impos-
ing by force their wills upon his will, they are breaking
the law of equal freedom in his person ; and what the
motive may be matters not. Aggression which is flagi-
tious when committed by one, is not sanctified when
committed by a host.
Thus, in the same book, does Herbert Spencer
answer Herbert Spencer.
CHAPTER XI.
COMPENSATION.
WHILE not needed in reply to Mr. Spencer, for
his own scornful denial that there is any way in
which land can equitably become private property
remains unanswered by him, the wide prevalence of
the idea that justice requires the compensation of
land-owners if their exclusive ownership be abolished,
makes it worth consideration; the more so as the
same principle is involved in other questions, which
are already, or may soon become, of practical im-
portance.
That this idea will not bear examination Mr. Spen-
cer himself shows, even when, as now, he is more
than willing to be understood as accepting it. While
anxious to find some ground, any ground, for as-
suming that land-owners are entitled to compensation
for something equal or more than equal to the value
of their land, he nowhere ventures to assert that they
are entitled to compensation for their land. Such a
notion is too preposterous to be stated by any one
who has ever realized the relation of men to land.
Yet to those who have not, it seems at first most
reasonable, for it accords with accustomed ideas. If
it were ever customary for primitive man to eat his
grandmother, as the Synthetic Philosophy would lead
us to suppose, she must have been thought a wicked
256 ſº RECANTATION.
old woman who without compensation to the would-be
eater tried to avoid that fate. In a community such
as Edmond About pictured in his “King of the
Mountain,” where brigandage was looked on as a
most respectable business, the captive who tried to
escape without ransom would be deemed a violator of
his captors’ rights. And many a man now living can
appreciate Mark Twain's portrayal of the pangs of
conscience felt by Huckleberry Finn as he thought
that in not denouncing his negro companion he was
helping to rob a poor widow.
The habitual confusion of thought where violations
of property have long been treated by custom and law
as property, requires time and effort to escape from,
and while justice is yet struggling for recognition
there is with many a desire to compromise between
the right that ought to be and the wrong that is.
Thus there are to-day, in England at least, even
among those who to some extent have become con-
scious of the injustice of denying the equal right to
the use of land, many who think that before this
natural right can be equitably asserted present land-
owners must be compensated for their loss of legal
rights.
This idea does not apply to the land question
alone. It was carried out in England in the com-
pensation paid to West India slave-owners on the
abolition of slavery ; in the compensation paid to the
owners of rotten Irish boroughs at the time of the
Union for the loss of their power to sell legislation;
in the capitalization of hereditary pensions; and in
the compensation paid to their holders when profitable
sinecures are abolished.
COMPENSATION. 257
Nor are we without examples of the same idea
in the United States. It is often contended that it
would be wrong to abolish protective duties where
capital has been invested on the expectation of their
continuance; and not many years since, even in the
North, good, honest people, so far awake to the crime
of slavery that they deemed the original enslavement
of a man wickedness so atrocious as to merit death —
which indeed was the penalty denounced by our laws
against engaging in the external slave trade — really
believed that slave-owners must be compensated be-
fore existing slavery could be justly abolished. Even
after the war had fairly begun, this idea was so strong
that the nation compensated owners when, in 1862,
slavery was abolished in the District of Columbia,
and subsequent efforts to apply the same principle to
the slave States that adhered to the Union were only
defeated by the opposition to any national interfer-
ence with slavery.
Let us see clearly what this question of compensa-
tion is :
It does not involve the validity of any contract
or agreement or promise formally made by the state.
This does not exist and is not pleaded by the advo-
cates of compensation in the cases we are considering.
If it did, the question would arise how far legisla-
tive power may bind legislative power, and one gen-
eration control the action of succeeding generations.
But it is not necessary to discuss that here.
It is not a question of all right of compensation.
That the state should compensate when it destroys a
building to make way for a public improvement, or
takes goods or provisions or horses or shipping for
\
258 RECANTATION.
which it may have sudden need, or demands of some
citizens Services which it does not demand of others,
is not in question. The right of compensation in
such cases is not disputed.
That is to say it is not a question whether the
state should pay for its destruction of property having
moral sanction, for the assertion of moral sanction in-
volves the right of compensation. Where the right
of compensation itself becomes the issue is only where
the want of moral sanction in the property in question
is conceded.
Thus the belief in the rightfulness of compensation
for the abolition of slavery bore no determining part
in the minds of those who believed in the rightfulness
of slavery. The pro-slavery men, who asserted that
slavery was of God’s ordinance, that it was the nat-
ural right and duty of the stronger to enslave the
weaker so they might paternally care for them, who
insisted not merely that slavery ought not to be abol-
ished where it existed, but that it ought to be
extended where it did not exist, were not affected
by belief in the rightfulness of compensation. That
slave-owners ought to be compensated if slavery was
abolished followed from their assertion that slavery
was right and ought not to be abolished. It was only
in the minds of those who had come to think that
slavery was wrong and ought to be abolished, that the
idea that slave-holders must be compensated assumed
importance, and became the pivotal question.
So as to land. The idea of compensation is raised
and has importance only where it serves as a sec-
ondary defence of private property in land. If a man
believes in private property in land it is needless
COMPENSATION. 259
to address to him any argument for the necessity of
compensation on its abolition. He does not believe
in its abolition, but in its continuance and extension;
and as the greater includes the less, he already believes
in the necessity of compensation if it be abolished.
But if he has come to doubt its justice and to favor its
abolition, then the raising of the question of compen-
sation, as though it were a new and separate moral
question, may serve the purpose of a second embank-
ment or second ditch in military defence, and prevent
him from advocating abolition, or at least abolition
that would cause any loss to vested interests. And
the intermediate character of this defence of vested
wrong gives it of course great attractions for those
timid and prudent souls who when moral right comes
in conflict with powerful interests like to keep out of
the battle.
Thus the idea of compensation with which we are
concerned is the idea of compensation for the abolition
of something in itself conceded to be wrong. Yet it
is based on moral grounds, and raises what is purely
a moral question.
Those who assert this necessity of compensation
for the abolition of what in itself they concede to be
wrong contend that the state has incurred a moral ob-
ligation by its previous acquiescence. They say that
while it would be right for it to refuse such acquies-
cence in the first place — as to prohibit slavery where
it does not yet exist; to refrain from making private
property of new land; to refuse to grant new pen-
sions or impose new protective duties or grant new
special privileges — yet where it has already done
such things the state is morally bound to those who
260 RECANTATION.
have accepted its action; and for it to destroy the
value of property already acquired under its sanction
would be in the nature of a retroactive law.
But in this there is evident confusion. If it were
proposed that the state should undo what has already
been done under its sanction — as, for instance, that
it should declare invalid titles to the proceeds of slave
labor already rendered, and give the slaves legal
claim for previous services; or if it should call on the
beneficiaries of protective tariffs for profits they had
already acquired—then this reasoning might have
weight. But it is not retroactive to declare that for
the future the labor of the slave shall belong to him-
self, nor that for the future trade shall be free. To
demand compensation for action of this kind is to as-
sert, not that the state must be bound by what it has
already done, but that what it has already done it is
morally bound to continue to do.
The loss for which compensation is in such cases
asked is not the loss of a value in hand, but the loss of
an expectation. The value of a bale of cotton is an
actual existing value, based on work done. But the
value of a slave is not actual, but prospective; it is
not based on work done, but on the expectation that
the state will continue to compel him to work for his
owner. So the value of a house or other improve-
ment represents the present value of the labor thus
embodied. But the value of land itself represents
merely the value of the expectation that the state will
continue to permit the holder to appropriate a value
belonging to all. Now, is the state called on to com-
pensate men for the failure of their expectations as to
its action, even where no moral element is involved?
COMPENSATION. 261
If it make peace, must it compensate those who have
invested on the expectation of war. If it open a
shorter highway, is it morally bound to compensate
those who may lose by the diversion of travel from the
old one? If it promote the discovery of a cheap means
of producing electricity directly from heat, is it mor-
ally bound to compensate the owners of all the steam
engines thereby thrown out of use and all who are en-
gaged in making them? If it develop the air-ship,
must it compensate those whose business would be
injured? Such a contention would be absurd. Yet
the contention we are considering is worse. It is
that the state must compensate for disappointing the
expectations of those who have counted on its contin-
uing to do wrong.
When the state abolishes slavery or hereditary
pensions or protective duties or special privileges of
any kind, does it really take from the individuals who
thereby lose, anything they actually have 2 Clearly
not. In the abolition of slavery it merely declines
for the future to compel one man to work for another.
In the abolition of hereditary pensions it merely de-
clines for the future to take property by force from
those to whom it rightfully belongs and hand it over
to others. In the abolition of protective duties it
merely declines for the future forcibly to interfere with
the natural rights of all in order that a few may get
an unnatural profit. In the abolition of special privi-
leges it merely declines for the future to use its power
to give some an advantage over others.
See, then, for what in such cases compensation is
really asked. It is not for any attempt to right past
wrongs; it is for refusing to do wrong in future. It
262 RECANTATION.
is not for the unequal treatment of individuals; it is
for refusal to continue unequal treatment. That there
may be a loss of Salable value to individuals in this
refusal is true. But it is not a loss of anything they
now have ; it is a loss of what they expected to get.
It is not a loss for which these individuals can justly
demand compensation or the state can justly make
compensation. It is a loss of the kind that the sil-
versmiths of Ephesus sustained from Paul’s preach-
ing; a loss of the kind that comes to liquor-sellers
from the spread of a temperance movement ; a loss of
the kind that falls on some individuals with every
beneficial invention and every public improvement.
Such demand for compensation is a denial of any right
of reform. It involves the idea that the state, having
once done wrong, is morally bound to continue it —
not merely that it must continue to do wrong or
else compensate; but that it must continue to do
wrong anyhow.
For compensation implies equivalence. To com-
pensate for the discontinuance of a wrong is to give
those who profit by the wrong the pecuniary equiv-
alent of its continuance. Now the state has nothing
that does not belong to the individuals who compose it.
What it gives to some it must take from others. Ab-
olition with compensation is therefore not really abo-
lition, but continuance under a different form — on
one side of unjust deprivation, and on the other side
of unjust appropriation. When on the abolition of a
hereditary pension the holder is compensated, he re-
ceives in money or bonds a sum calculated to yield him
in interest the same power of annually commanding
the labor of others that the pension gave. So compen-
COMPENSATION. 263
sation for the selling value of a slave, which disap-
pears on the refusal of the community longer to
force him to work for the master, means the giving
to the master of what the power to take the property
of the slave may be worth. What slave-owners lose
is the power of taking the property of the slaves
and their descendants; and what they get is an agree-
ment that the government will take for their ben-
efit and turn over to them an equivalent part of the
property of all. The robbery is continued under
another form. What it loses in intention it gains in
extension. If some before enslaved are partially
freed, others before free are partially enslaved.
That confusion alone gives plausibility to the idea
of compensation for refusal to continue wrong, is seen
in the fact that such claims are never put forward in
behalf of the original beneficiaries of the wrong, but
always in behalf of purchasers. Sometimes the con-
fusion is that of direct substitution. Thus it is some-
times said, “Here is a man who, presuming on the
continued consent of the state, invests his earnings
in property depending on that consent. If the state
withdraws its consent, does it not, unless it compen-
sates him, destroy the products of his hard labor?”
The answer is clear: It does not. Let the property
be, for instance, a slave. What the state destroys in
abolishing slavery is not what may have been given
for the slave, but the value of the slave. That the
purchaser got by honest work what he exchanged
for the slave is not in point. He is not injured as
laborer, but as slave-owner. If he had not exchanged
his earnings for the slave the abolition of slavery would
have caused him no loss. When a man exchanges
264 RECANTATION.
property of one kind for property of another kind he
gives up the one with all its incidents and takes in its
stead the other with its incidents. He cannot sell
bricks and buy hay, and then complain because the hay
burned when the bricks would not. The greater lia-
bility of the hay to burn is one of the incidents he
accepted in buying it. Nor can he exchange property
having moral sanction for property having only legal
sanction, and claim that the moral sanction of the
thing he sold attaches now to the thing he bought.
That has gone with the thing to the other party in
the exchange. Exchange transfers, it cannot create.
Each party gives up what right he had and takes what
right the other party had. The last holder obtains
no moral right that the first holder did not have.
“But,” it may be said, “the purchaser of what has
been long treated as property stands in a different
position from the original holder. In our adminis-
tration of justice between man and man, this differ-
ence between the wrongful appropriator and the
innocent purchaser is recognized, and long possession
is held to cure defects of original title. This prin-
ciple ought to be recognized by the state in dealing
with individuals, and hence when, even by omission,
it deprives innocent purchasers of what has long been
held as property it ought to compensate them.”
Innocent purchasers of what involves wrong to
others' Is not the plurase absurd 2 If in our legal
tribunals, “ignorance of the law excuseth no man,”
how much less can it do so in the tribunal of morals
and it is this to which compensationists appeal.
And innocence can only shield from the punishment
due to conscious wrong; it cannot give right. If you
COMPENSATION. 265
innocently stand on my toes, you may fairly ask me
not to be angry; but you gain no right to continue.
to stand on them. Now in merely abolishing property
that involves wrong, the state imposes no penalty, it
does not even demand recompense to those who have
been wronged. In this it is more lenient than the
principles on which we administer justice between
man and man. For they would require the innocent
purchaser of what belonged to another to make resti-
tution, not only of the thing itself, but of all that had
been received from it. Nor does the principle of
market overt, which gives to the purchaser of cer-
tain things openly sold in certain places, possession
even against the rightful owner unless he proves
fraud; nor the principle of statutes of limitation,
which refuses to question ownership after a certain
lapse of time, deny this general principle.
The principle of “market overt” is, not that pas-
sage from hand to hand gives ownership, but that
there are certain things so constantly passing from
hand to hand by simple transfer that the interests
of commerce and the general convenience are best
served by assuming possession to be conclusive of
ownership where wrongful intent cannot be proved.
The principle of statutes of limitation is not that
mere length of possession gives ownership, but that
past a certain point it becomes impossible certainly to
adjudicate disputes between man and man. This is
one of the cases in which human law must admit its
inadequacy to more than roughly enforce the dictates
of the moral law. No scheme of religion and no
theory of morals would hold him blameless who relied
on a statute of limitations to keep what he knew
266 RECANTATION.
belonged morally to another. But legal machinery
cannot search into the conscience, it can only inquire
into the evidence; and the evidence of things past is
to human perceptions quickly dimmed and soon
obliterated by the passage of time. So that as to
things whose ownership must depend on what was
done in the past, it is necessary, to avoid intermin-
able disputes, that the state should set some limit
beyond which it will not inquire, but will take pos-
session as proof of ownership. -
In our ordinary use of words everything subject to
ownership and its incidental rights is accounted
property. But there are two species of property,
which, though often ignorantly or wantonly con-
founded, are essentially different and diametrically
opposed. Both may be alike in having a selling value
and being subject to transfer. But things of the one
kind are true property, having the sanction of natural
right and moral law independently of the action of
the state, while things of the other kind are only
spurious property, their maintenance as property re-
quiring the continuous exertion of state power, the
continuous exercise or threat of its force, and involv-
ing a continuous violation of natural right and moral
law. To things of the one kind the reasonable prin-
ciple of statutes of limitation properly applies; for,
being in their nature property, any question of their
ownership is not a question of general right, but only
a question of transactions between man and man in
the past. But to things of the other kind, and as
between the individual and the state, this principle
does not and cannot apply, for holding their character
as property only from the action of the state, that
COMPENSATION. 267
character is gone the moment the state withdraws its
support. The question whether this support shall or
shall not be withdrawn is not a question of what was
done in the past, but of what shall be done in the
future — a question of general rights, not a question
between individuals. Things which are brought into
existence by the exertion of labor, and to which the
character of property attaches from their origin as
an extension of the right of the man to himself,
are property of the first kind. Special privileges by
which the state empowers and assists one man in
taking the proceeds of another's labor, are property
of the second kind.
A question of the ownership of a coat, a tool, a
house, a bale of goods, is a question of the ownership
of the concrete results of past labor. We know from
the nature of the thing that it must be owned by
somebody, but after lapse of time we cannot from the
weakness of human powers undertake in case of dis-
pute to determine who that may be ; and hence, refus-
ing to inquire so far back, we assume the right
to be in the possessor, of which we have at least pre-
Sumptive evidence. But a question of the mainten-
ance or abolition of slavery or private property in
land, of the continuance or non-continuance of a trade
monopoly, a hereditary pension, or a protective duty,
is a question whether the state shall or shall not in
the future lend its power for the wrongful appropria-
tion of the results of labor yet to be performed.
There is in this no place for the principle of statutes
of limitations. No indistinctness as to the past can
affect the decision. It is not a question of what has
been done in the past, but of what shall be done in the
268 RECANTATION.
future. And so far from the presumption being that
the possessor of this species of property is entitled to
it, the moral certainty is the other way.
Again it is said, “Here is a man who invests in a
slave and another who invests in a building, both being
alike recognized as property by the state. The state
by refusing longer to give its former sanction destroys
the value of one investment while the other continues
profitable. Have not these two men been treated
with inequality, which in justice should be remedied
by compensation? If there was a wrong involved in
the one species of property, was it not a wrong of which
by state sanction all were guilty? Is it just therefore
that those who have happened to invest in it should
bear the whole loss?”
To other confusions there is here added confusion
as to the relation between the state and its members.
If the maintenance by the state of a species of property
that involves wrong is to be considered as the action
of all its members, even of those who suffer by it, so
must the resolve of the state to do so no longer be
considered as the resolve of all, even of those who
relatively lose by it. If the one cannot demand
recompense, how can the others demand compensa-
tion ?
Passing this, the moral law appealed to in the de-
mand for compensation must be the moral law that
binds individuals. Now the moral law cannot sanc-
tion immorality. It must hold as void even a spe-
cific contract to do wrong. But in the cases we are
considering there is no contract. The claim is merely
that the state by its wrongful action having given rise
to the expectation that it would continue such wrong-
COMPENSATION. 269
ful action, is morally bound, should it decline to do
so, to compensate those who have invested in this
expectation. Would such a claim hold as between
individuals 2 If, for instance, I have been accustomed
to spend my earnings in a gambling-house or rum-shop
till the proprietor has come to count on me as a source
of regular profit, am I morally bound to compensate
him if I stop? Or if an innocent purchaser has
bought the business on the expectation that I would
continue, does that bind me to compensate him 2
Consider further: If a moral right of property is
created by the acquiescence of the state in a wrong,
then it must be morally binding on all. If the state
would violate the moral law in abolishing slavery
without compensation, so would the slave violate the
moral law in attempting to escape without first com-
pensating his master, and so would every one who
aided him, even with a cup of cold water. This was
actually held and taught and enacted into law in the
United States previous to the war, and with reference
to the white slaves of Great Britain is held and taught
by the foremost men and journals of that country,
who declare that for the masses even by strictly legal
forms to resume their natural rights in the land of
their birth, without compensation to present legal
owners, would be a violation of the Ten Command-
ments!
That the state is not an individual, but is composed
of individual members all of whom must be affected
by its action, is the reason why its legitimate sphere
is that of securing to those members equal rights.
This is the equality which it is bound to secure, not
equality in the results of individual actions; and
270 RECANTATION.
whoever chooses to invest on the presumption of its
denial of equal rights does so at his own risk. He
cannot ask that, to secure equality of profits between
him and investors who did not take this risk, the state
should continue to deny equality of rights. It is the
duty of the state to secure equality of rights, not to
secure equality of profits. -
Of the investments of all kinds constantly being
made under the equal sanction of the state some re-
sult in loss and some in gain. Supposing it to be
asked, “Why should not the state secure equality by
compensating those who lose?”
The answer would be quick and clear. It is not
the business of the state to secure investors from loss,
and it would be grossly unjust for it to attempt to do
so. For this would be to compel those who had made
good investments to make up the losses of those who
had made bad ones. It would be to take from pru-
dence and care their natural reward and make them
bear the losses of recklessness and waste; to punish
forethought, to put a premium on ignorance and ex-
travagance, and quickly to impoverish the richest
community.
But would it not be even more unjust and unwise
for the state to compensate those who up to the last
moment had held and bought property involving
wrong, thus compelling those who had refrained from
holding and buying it to make up their losses 2 Is
it true that the acquiescence of the state in a wrong
of this kind proves it equally the wrong of all 2 Did
that part of the community consisting of slaves ever
acquiesce in slavery? Did the men who were robbed
of their natural rights in land ever really acquiesce?
COMTENSATION. 271
Are not such wrongs always instituted in the first
place by those who by force or cunning gain control
of the state? Are they not maintained by stifling
liberty, by corrupting morals and confusing thought
and buying or gagging the teachers of religion and
of ethics? Is not any movement for the abolition of
such wrongs always and of necessity preceded by a
long agitation in which their injustice is so fully de-
clared that whoever does not wilfully shut his eyes
may see it?
“Caveat emptor” is the maxim of the law — “Let
the buyer beware!” If a man buys a structure in
which the law of gravity is disregarded or mechanical
laws ignored he takes the risk of those laws asserting
their sway. And so he takes the risk in buying prop-
erty which contravenes the moral law. When he
ignores the moral sense, when he gambles on the con-
tinuance of a wrong, and when at last the general
conscience rises to the point of refusing to continue
that wrong, can he then claim that those who have
refrained from taking part in it, those who have suf-
fered from it, those who have borne the burden and
heat and contumely of first moving against it, shall
share in his losses on the ground that as members of
the same state they are equally responsible for it?
And must not the acceptance of this impudent plea
tend to prevent that gradual weakening and dying
out of the wrong which would otherwise occur as the
rise of the moral sense against it lessened the pros-
pect of its continuance ; and by promise of insurance
to investors tend to maintain it in strength and energy
till the last minute 2
Take slavery. The confidence of American slave-
272 TECANTATION.
holders, strengthened by the example of Great Britain,
that abolition would not come without compensation,
kept up to the highest point the market value of
slaves, even after the guns that were to free them
had begun to sound, whereas if there had been no
paltering with the idea of compensation the growth
of the sentiment against slavery would by reducing
the selling value of slaves have gradually lessened
the pecuniary interests concerned in supporting it.
Take private property in land. Where the expec-
tation of future growth and improvement is in every
advancing community a most important element in
selling value, the effect of the idea of compensation
will be to keep up speculation, and thus to prevent
that lessening in the selling value of land, that
gradual accommodation of individuals to the coming
change, which is the natural effect of the growth of
the demand for the recognition of equal rights to
land.
The question we are discussing is necessarily a
moral question. Those who contend that the state
is the source of all rights may indeed object to any
proposed state action that it would be inexpedient,
but they cannot object that it would be wrong.
Nevertheless, just as we find the materialistic evolu-
tionists constantly dropping into expressions which
imply purpose in nature, so do we find deniers of
any higher law than that of the state vociferous in
their declarations that it would be wrong, or unjust,
or wicked, for the state to abolish property of this
spurious kind without compensation. The only way
we can meet them with any regard for their profes-
sions is to assume that they do not quite understand
COMPENSATION. 273
the language, and that by such expressions they
mean that it would be inexpedient. Their argument,
I take it, may be most fairly put in this way: Expe-
rience has shown respect for property rights to be
greatly conducive to the progress and well-being of
mankind, and all rights of property resting (as they
assert) on the same basis, the recognition of the state,
the destruction of a recognized right of property by
action of the state would give a shock to and cast a
doubt over all rights of property, and thus work
injury.
But even if we ignore any moral basis, and assume
that all rights of property are derived from the state,
it is still clear that while some forms of property do
conduce to the general wealth and prosperity, others
may be recognized by the state that lessen the gen-
eral wealth and impair the general prosperity. The
right of piracy, which at times and places has been
recognized by the state, does not stand on the same
basis of expediency with the right of peaceful com-
merce. The right of hereditary jurisdiction, or “the
right of pit and gallows” as it was called in Scotland,
where it was actually bought out by the state as a
piece of valuable property; the right, long having a
salable value in France, of administering justice; the
right, at times recognized by the state as belonging to
every petty lordling, of making private war, of col-
lecting local dues and tolls and customs, and com-
pelling services; the right of trampling down the
fields of the husbandman in the pursuit of game ;
the monopolies which made valuable privileges of
permissions to manufacture, to trade and to import,
were certainly not promotive of the general prosper-
274 RECANTATION.
ity. On the contrary the general wealth and pros-
perity have been greatly enhanced by their abolition.
Even if we grant that all rights of property have
the same basis and sanction and eliminate all moral
distinction, reason and experience still show that
there is but one right of property that conduces to
the prosperity of the whole community, and that this
is the right which secures to the laborer the product
of his labor. This promotes prosperity by stimulat-
ing production, and giving such security to accumu-
lation as permits the use of capital and affords leisure
for the development of the intellectual powers. It
is respect for this, not respect for those forms of
property which the perversion or folly of legislative
power may at times sanction, and which consist in
the power of appropriating the results of others'
labor, that universal experience shows to be essential
to the peace, prosperity and happiness of mankind.
So far from the destruction of those spurious and
injurious rights of property which have wound around
the useful rights of property, like choking weeds
around a fruitful vine, being calculated to injure
that respect for property on which wealth and pros-
perity and civilization depend, the reverse is the
case. They are not merely directly destructive of
what it promotes, but to class them with it and to
insist that the respect due to it is also due to them is
to give rise to the belief that all rights of property
are injurious to the masses. The history of mankind
shows that the respect for property which is essential
to social well-being has never been threatened, save
by the growth of these noxious parasites. And this
to-day is the only thing that threatens it. Why are
COMPENSATION. 275
the socialists of to-day so hostile to capital? It is
for no other reason than that they confuse with what
is really capital legalized wrongs which enable the
few to rob the many, by appropriating the products
of labor and demanding a blackmail for the use of the
opportunity to labor. To teach that the good and the
bad in legal recognitions are indistinguishable, that
all that the state may choose to regard as property is
property, is virtually to teach that property is robbery!
And what is this state, to whose control by selfish-
ness or ignorance or dishonesty or corruption these
deniers of moral distinctions would give the power
of binding men in the most vitally important matter
for all future time 7 Caligula was the state. Nero
was the state. Louis XIV. truly said, “The state,
it is I.” And according to Herbert Spencer the
state in England consists of “a motley assemblage of
nominees of caucuses, ruled by ignorant and fanatical
wire-pullers.” Practically, the state is always what
man, what combination, what interest, may control
its machinery. Hence the expediency of strictly
limiting its power; and, if indeed there be no moral
principle, no higher law, that will give us clear
guidance as to what the state may or may not do,
then it becomes all the more expedient that we carry
the principle of state omnipotence over rights to its
logical conclusion, and assert the power of the state
in any present or any future time utterly to annul
any stipulation, contract, regulation or institution of
the state at any past time. If there be no moral
right, no higher law, to check the action of the state,
then is it all the more needful that it should be subject
at least to the prospective check of sharp and com-
276 T.ECANTATION.
plete reversal. For the more permanent and there-
fore the more valuable are the special privileges
which the state has power to grant, the greater is the
inducement to selfish interests to gain control of it.
Nothing better calculated to corrupt government and
to strengthen a most dangerous tendency of our time
can well be imagined than the doctrine that state
grants which enable one man to take the labor and
property of others can never be abolished without
compensation to those who may hold them.
Of different nature is the plea sometimes made,
that compensation, by disarming opposition, is the
easiest and quickest way of abolishing a vested
wrong. As to this, not only is compensation not
abolition, not only does its advocacy tend to keep in
full strength the pecuniary interests which are the
greatest obstacles to the reform, but it renders it im-
possible to arouse that moral force which can alone
overcome an intrenched wrong. For to say that men
must be compensated if they are prevented from
doing a thing is to say that they have a right to do
that thing. And this those who intelligently advo-
cate compensation know. Their purpose in advocat-
ing compensation is to prevent abolition.
It is sometimes said that it would have been
cheaper for us to pay for the Southern slaves, as
Great Britain did in the West Indies, than incur the
civil war. But the assumption that American slavery
might thus have been got rid of and the war avoided,
is far from being true. An aristocratic government,
such as that of Great Britain in 1832, may abolish
slavery in a few small dependencies by imposing the
burden on its own people, but in a popular govern-
COMPENSATION. 277
ment and on a great scale this cannot be done.
Great Britain saved no war by paying compensation,
for the West Indian planters could not have fought
emancipation, and if the West Indian slaves were
freed more quickly with compensation than they could
have been without, it was solely because the class
concerned in the maintenance of vested wrongs was
overpoweringly strong in the British Parliament.
With even such representation as the masses now
have it would have been easier to abolish slavery in
the West Indies without compensation than with it.
In the United States abolition with compensation
was never a practical question, nor could it have
become a practical question until the sentiment
against slavery had reached even a stronger pitch
than that which led to war. The war came before
more than a small minority had seriously thought of
abolishing slavery, let alone of paying for it; before
either section really dreamed of war. It came from
the unstable equilibrium which legalized wrong be-
gets, from the incidental issues and passions which
it always arouses when the moral sense begins to
revolt against it, even before the main question is
reached. It came, not from a demand for compen-
sation on one side and a refusal to give it on the
other, but from the timidity with which the moral
Question had been treated by those who really saw
the essential injustice of slavery, and which by con-
cessions and compromises had so strengthened and
emboldened the slavery interest that in revolt at
measures far less threatening to it than the discus-
sion of abolition with compensation could have been,
it flung the nation into war.
278 RECANTATION.
And even if the alternative of compensation or
war had been fairly presented to the American peo-
ple, who shall say that it would have been really
wiser and cheaper for them to surrender to such a
demand 2 Could the Nemesis that follows national
wrong have thus been placated? Might not the car-
rying out of such a measure as the compensation for
three million slaves have given rise to political strug-
gles involving an even more disastrous war? And
would the precedent established in the conscious viola-
tion of the moral sense ultimately have cost nothing 2
The cost of the war, in blood, in wealth, in the bit-
terness aroused and the corruptions of government
engendered, cannot well be estimated; yet who cannot
but feel that the moral atmosphere is clearer and that
the great problems which still beset the republic are
easier of solution than if with the alternative of com-
pensation or war, like a pistol at its head, the nation
had consciously and cravenly surrendered to wrong?
What this plea for compensation amounts to is,
that it is cheaper to submit to wrong than to stand
for right. Universal experience shows that whenever
a nation accepts such a doctrine of submission it loses
independence and liberty without even gaining peace.
The peace it will secure is the peace that declining
Rome bought of the barbarians, the peace of fella-
heen and Bengalees.
Even in personal matters it is difficult to say what
will be the result of action based on mere expediency;
in the larger and more intricate scale of national
affairs it is impossible. This is why, as contended
by Mr. Spencer in “Social Statics " the course of
true wisdom in social affairs is to follow the dictate
COMPENSATION. 279
of principle — to ask, not what seems to be expedient,
but what is right. If a law or institution is wrong, if
its continuance involves the continuance of injustice,
there is but one wise thing to do, as there is but one
right thing, and that is to abolish it.
To come back to the main question :
All pleas for compensation on the abolition of
unequal rights to land are excuses for avoiding right
and continuing wrong; they all, as fully as the origi-
nal wrong, deny that equalness which is the essential
of justice. Where they have seemed plausible to any
homestly-minded man, he will, if he really examines
his thought, see that this has been so because he has,
though perhaps unconsciously, entertained asympathy
for those who seem to profit by injustice which he has
refused to those who have been injured by it. He
has been thinking of the few whose incomes would
be cut off by the restoration of equal right. He has
forgotten the many, who are being impoverished,
degraded, and driven out of life by its denial. If
he once breaks through the tyranny of accustomed
ideas and truly realizes that all men are equally en-
titled to the use of the natural opportunities for the
living of their lives and the development of their
powers, he will see the injustice, the wickedness, of
demanding compensation for the abolition of the
monopoly of land. He will see that if any one is to
be compensated on the abolition of a wrong, it is
those who have suffered by the Wrong, not those who
have profited by it.
Private property in land — the subjecting of land
to that exclusive ownership which rightfully attaches
to the products of labor — is a denial of the true
280 RECANTATION.
right of property, which gives to each the equal right
to exert his labor and the exclusive right to its re-
sults. It differs from slavery only in its form, which
is that of making property of the indispensable nat-
ural factor of production, while slavery makes prop-
erty of the human factor; and it has the same purpose
and effect, that of compelling some men to work for
others. Its abolition therefore does not mean the
destruction of any right but the cessation of a wrong
—that for the future the municipal law shall conform
to the moral law, and that each shall have his own.
I have gone over this question of compensation —
this “last ditch '' of the advocates of landlordism
—because it is so persistently raised, not that it arises
in anything I have advocated. We who propose that
natural and therefore easy method of restoring their
equal rights to men, which for the purpose of clearly
differentiating it from all schemes of land nationali-
zation we call the single tax, do not propose to take
from land-owners anything they now have. We pro-
pose to leave to land-owners whatever they actually
have, even though it be in their hands the fruits of
injustice; we propose not even to change the forms
of land tenure, and greatly to simplify instead of
enlarging the machinery and functions of the state.
We propose, in short, only so to change present meth-
ods of raising public revenues that they shall conform
to the requirements of the right of property, taking
for the use of the state that which rightfully belongs
to the state, leaving to individuals that which right-
fully belongs to the individual.
But that clumsy mode of abolishing private prop-
erty in land which is properly called land nationali-
COMPENSATION. 281
zation requires the taking of rightful property in the
improvements that have been annexed to land. In
this it calls for compensation in a way that confusion
of thought may carry to the ownership of land itself.
And even the taking of land it proposes would be in
form a taking of property. The land would have to
be formally appropriated by the state and then rented
out. Now we are accustomed to the compensation
of owners when particular portions of land are taken
for the use of the state, and this indeed as I have
before pointed out is rightful, so that it is easy for
the superficial to think that when the state shall take
all the land for the purpose of renting it out again it
should compensate all owners. Thus the scheme of
land nationalization gives to the idea of compensation
a plausibility that does not properly belong to it.
This is the reason why in England, where there
has been a good deal of talk of land nationalization,
the notion of compensation is strong among certain
classes, while in America, where the movement for
the recognition of equal rights to the use of land has
gone from the beginning on the lines of the single
tax, there is almost nothing of it, except as a reflec-
tion of English thought. And this is the reason why,
although even in England the advocates of land
nationalization are few and weak as compared with
the great body that is advancing on the unjust privi-
leges of landlords by the way of taxation, the English
advocates of landlordism always endeavor to discuss
the land question as though the actual taking of land
by the state were the only thing proposed. It will
be observed for instance that Mr. Spencer, in “Jus-
tice,” never so much as alludes to the proposition to
282 RECANTATION.
secure equal rights in land by taking land values, not
land. Yet he cannot be so ignorant of what is going
on about him as not to know that this is the line
which the advance against landlordism is taking and
must take. He ignores it because there is on that
line no place for proposing or even suggesting com-
pensation. Compensation to the ultimate payers of
a tax is something unheard of and absurd.
The primary error of the advocates of land nation-
alization is in their confusion of equal rights with
joint rights, and in their consequent failure to realize
the nature and meaning of economic rent — errors
which I have pointed out in commenting on Mr.
Spencer's declarations in “Social Statics.” In truth
the right to the use of land is not a joint or common
right, but an equal right; the joint or common right
is to rent, in the economic sense of the term. There-
fore it is not necessary for the state to take land, it is
only necessary for it to take rent. This taking by
the commonalty of what is of common right, would
of itself secure equality in what is of equal right —
for since the holding of land could be profitable only
to the user, there would be no inducement for any one
to hold land that he could not adequately use, and
monopolization being ended no one who wanted to use
land would have any difficulty in finding it. And it
would at the same time secure the individual right,
for in taking what is of common right for its revenues
the state could abolish all those taxes which now take
from the individual what is of individual right.
The truth is that customs taxes, and improvement
taxes, and income taxes, and taxes on business and
occupations and on legacies and successions, are mor-
COMPENSATION. 283
ally and economically no better than highway robbery
or burglary, all the more disastrous and demoralizing
because practised by the state. There is no necessity
for them. The seeming necessity arises only from
the failure of the state to take its own natural and
adequate source of revenue — a failure which entails
a long train of evils of another kind by stimulating a
forestalling and monopolization of land which creates
an artificial scarcity of the primary element of life and
labor, so that in the midst of illimitable natural re-
sources the opportunity to work has come to be
looked on as a boon, and in spite of the most enor-
mous increase in the powers of production the great
mass find life a hard struggle to maintain life, and
millions die before their time, of over-strain and
under-nurture.
When the matter is looked on in this way, the idea
of compensation — the idea that justice demands that
those who have engrossed the natural revenue of the
state must be paid the capitalized value of all future
engrossment before the state can resume those rev-
enues—is too preposterous for serious statement.
And while in the nature of things any change from
wrong-doing to right-doing must entail loss upon those
who profit by the wrong-doing, and this can no more
be prevented than can parallel lines be made to meet;
yet it must also be remembered that in the nature of
things the loss is merely relative, the gain absolute.
Whoever will examine the subject will see that in the
abandonment of the present unnatural and unjust
method of raising public revenues and the adoption
of the matural and just method even those who rela-
tively lose will be enormous gainers.
CHAPTER XII.
“JUSTICE’” — “THE LAND QUESTION.”
WHILE “Justice ’’ shows no decadence of intellect-
ual power, and those who have seen the utterances of
a great thinker in preceding volumes of the Synthetic
Philosophy will doubtless have as high an opinion of
this, there is in it everywhere, as compared with
“Social Statics,” the evidence of moral decadence,
and of that perplexity which is the penalty of delib-
erate sacrifice of intellectual honesty. But it were
wearying, and for our purpose needless, to review the
subsequent chapters of “Justice,” and to show the con-
tradictions and confusions into which Mr. Spencer
falls at every turn,' and the manner in which he re-
cants his previously expressed opinions on such sub-
jects as the political rights of women, and even the
equal political rights of men. To complete the ex-
amination of that cross-section of his teachings which
in the beginning I proposed, let us proceed to the
1 One of these may be worth quoting as particularly interesting
in view of what has gone before and what is yet to come. In
Chapter XVI., “The Right of Gift and Bequest,” pp. 122–124,
Mr. Spencer says : -
Few will deny that the earth’s surface and the things on it
should be owned in full by the generation at any time existing.
Hence the right of property may not equitably be so interpreted as
to allow any generation to tell subsequent generations for what
purpose or under what conditions they are to use the earth’s sur-
face or the things on it. . . . One who holds land subject to that
supreme ownership of the community which both ethics and law
assert, cannot rightly have such power of willing the application
of it as involves permanent alienation from the community.
“JUSTICE’” – “THE LAND QUESTION.” 285
consideration of his very last word on the land ques-
tion, the note to which he refers the reader at the
close of the chapter on “The Rights to the Uses of
Natural Media.”
This note is to be found among the appendices to
“Justice,” which consist of Appendix A, “The Kant-
ian Idea of Rights,” before referred to (page 173);
Appendix B, “The Land Question; ” Appendix C,
“The Moral Motive,” a reply to a criticism by the
Rev. J. Llewelyn Davis; and Appendix D, “Con-
science in Animals,” which is a collection of dog
stories.
The idea that for the genesis of all there is in man,
even his moral perceptions, we must look down, not
up, permeates the Synthetic Philosophy, seeking to
obliterate the gulf between man and other animals by
greedily swallowing every traveller's tale that tends
to degrade man and every wonder-monger's story that
ascribes human faculties to brutes. Thus “Justice ’’
begins with “Animal Ethics” and ends with dog sto-
ries, the appendix devoted to them being twice as
large as that devoted to “The Land Question” and
illustrated with diagrams."
1 The dog stories which close this crowning book of the Syn-
thetic Philosophy are sent to Mr. Spencer by Mr. T. Mann Jones,
of Devon, with this introduction :
DEAR SIR: The following careful observations on animals other
than man, may be of interest to you as supporting your idea that
the idea of “duty '' or “ought '' (owe it) may be of non “super-
natural” origin. “Supernatural ” is used in the usual sense,
without committing the writer to any opinion.
These “careful observations” are indorsed by Mr. Spencer as
highly remarkable and instructive, and as supporting his own con-
clusion, and he tells us, apparently on the faith of them, that Mr.
Jones is a careful, critical and trustworthy observer. To give a
286 RECANTATION.
These dog stories are, however, fit companions to
the savage stories with which, by the assistance of
a corps of readers, the volumes of the Synthetic Phi-
losophy are profusely embellished. The wooden lit-
eralness with which, to suit himself, Mr. Spencer
interprets the imagery and metaphor of which the
language of all peoples who come close to nature is
full, is perhaps the most comical thing in this un-
consciously comic collection. I hesitate to give an
instance, such is the embarrassment of riches; but
here, to quote at random, is one. It is from the
chapter on “The Religious Idea” in “Principles of
Sociology.” Mr. Spencer has been showing to his
own satisfaction, and doubtless to that of the gentle-
men who regard him as greater than Aristotle, how
from the adoption of such family names as Wolf, and
the habit of speaking of a strong man as “a bear,”
the less civilized peoples, whom he generically lumps
as “savages,” have come to believe that their ances-
tors passed into animals. He goes on to show “how
naturally the identification of stars with persons may
occur.” Recalling first, what he declares to be “the
belief of some North Americans that the brighter stars
in the Milky Way are camp-fires made by the dead
on their way to the other world,” this is the fashion
in which he does it:
sample, here is one of the observations, which as it has no dia-
grams, I may quote as printed:
The “ought” may be established as an obligation to a higher
mind in opposition to the promptings of the strongest feelings of the
animal; e.g. —
A bitch I had many years ago showed great pleasure at the
attentions of male dogs, when in season. I checked her repeat-
edly, by voice only. This set up the “ought '' so thoroughly, that
though never tied up at such times, she died a virgin at thirteen
and a half years old.
“JUSTICE *— “THE LAND QUESTION.” 287
When a sportsman, hearing a shot in the adjacent
wood, exclaims, “That's Jones 1’’ he is not supposed to
mean that Jones is the sound ; he is known to mean that
Jones made the sound. But when a Savage, pointing to
a particular star originally thought of as the camp-fire
of such or such a departed man, says, “There he is,”
the children he is instructing naturally suppose him to
mean that the star itself is the departed man; especially
when receiving the statement through an undeveloped
language. — Principles of Sociology, Vol. II., page 685.
“Lo, the poor Indian l’”
What would happen to the beliefs of Savage chil-
dren if their undeveloped language enabled them
to receive such information as is often conveyed
through our developed language —such, for instance,
as “She’s a daisy l’’ or “He’s a brick l’’ or “You
would have to use a pick-axe to get a joke through
his head ‘’”
But I am keeping the reader from “The Land
Question.” This is, for our purpose at least, the
most important utterance of what its author deems
the most important book of the great Synthetic
Evolutionary Philosophy — a book that begins with
“Animal Ethics,” and ends with dog stories. I
Quote this appendix in full:
APPENDIX B.—THE LAND QUESTION.
The course of Nature, “red in tooth and claw,” has
been, on a higher plane, the course of civilization.
Through “blood and iron ’’ small clusters of men have
been consolidated into larger ones, and these again into
still larger ones, until nations have been formed. This
process, carried on every where and always by brute
force, has resulted in a history of wrongs upon wrongs:
savage tribes have been slowly welded together by savage
means. We could not, if we tried, trace back the acts
of unscrupulous violence committed during these thou-
288 RECANTATION.
sands of years; and could we trace them back we could
not rectify their evil results.
Land-ownership was established during this process;
and if the genesis of land-ownership was full of iniqui-
ties, they were iniquities committed not by the ancestors
of any one class of existing men but by the ancestors of
all existing men. The remote forefathers of living
Englishmen were robbers, who stole the lands of men
who were themselves robbers, who behaved in like man-
ner to the robbers who preceded them. The usurpation
by the Normans, here complete and there partial, was of
lands which, centuries before, had been seized, some by
piratical Danes and Norsemen, and some at an earlier
time by hordes of invading Frisians or old English.
And then the Celtic owners, expelled or enslaved by
these, had in bygone ages themselves expropriated the
people who lived in the underground houses here and
there still traceable. What would happen if we tried
to restore lands inequitably taken — if Normans had to
give them back to Danes and Norse and Frisians, and
these again to Celts, and these again to the men who
lived in caves and used flint implements 2 The only
imaginable form of the transaction would be a restor-
ation of Great Britain bodily to the Welsh and the
Highlanders; and if the Welsh and the Highlanders
did not make a kindred restoration, it could only be on
the ground that, having not only taken the land of the
aborigines but killed them, they had thus justified their
ownership !
The wish now expressed by many that land-ownership
should be conformed to the requirements of pure equity,
is in itself commendable ; and is in some men prompted
by conscientious feeling. One would, however, like to
hear from such the demand that not only here but in
the various regions we are peopling, the requirements of
pure equity should be conformed to. As it is, the indig-
nation against Wrongful appropriations of land, made in
the past at home, is not accompanied by any indignation
against the more Wrongful appropriations made at pres-
ent abroad. Alike as holders of the predominant polit-
ical power and as furnishing the rank and file of our
armies, the masses of the people are responsible for
those nefarious doings all over the world which end in
“JUSTICE *— “THE LAND QUESTION.” 289
the seizing of new territories and expropriation of their
inhabitants. The filibustering expeditions of the old
English are repeated, on a vastly larger scale, in the
filibustering expeditions of the new English. Yet those
who execrate ancient usurpations utter no word of pro-
test against these far greater modern usurpations — nay,
are aiders and abetters in them. Remaining as they do
passive and silent while there is going on this universal
land-grabbing which their votes could stop; and sup-
plying as they do the soldiers who effect it; they are
responsible for it. By deputy they are committing in
this matter grosser and more numerous injustices than
were committed against their forefathers.
That the masses of landless men should regard private
land-ownership as having been wrongfully established, is
natural ; and, as we have seen, they are not without
warrant. But if we entertain the thought of rectifica-
tion, there arises in the first place the question — which
are the wronged and which are the wrongers ? Passing
over the primary fact that the ancestors of existing
Englishmen, landed and landless, were, as a body, men
who took the land by violence from previous owners;
and thinking only of the force and fraud by which cer-
tain of these ancestors obtained possession of the land
while others of them lost possession; the preliminary
question is — Which are the descendants of the one and
of the other ? It is tacitly assumed that those who now
own lands are the posterity of the usurpers, and that
those who now have no lands are the posterity of those
whose lands were usurped. But this is far from being
the case. The fact that among the nobility there are
very few whose titles go back to the days when the last
usurpations took place, and none to the days when there
took place the original usurpations; joined with the
fact that among existing land-owners there are many
whose names imply artisan-ancestors; show that we
have not now to deal with descendants of those who un-
justly appropriated the land. While, conversely, the
numbers of the landless whose names prove that their
forefathers belonged to the higher ranks (numbers which
must be doubled to take account of inter-marriages with
female descendants) show that among those who are now
without land, many inherit the blood of the land-usurp-
290 RECANTATION.
ers. Hence, that bitter feeling towards the landed which
contemplation of the past generates in many of the
landless, is in great measure misplaced. They are them-
selves to a considerable extent descendants of the sin-
ners; while those they scowl at are to a considerable
extent descendants of the sinned-against.
But granting all that is said about past iniquities, and
leaving aside all other obstacles in the way of an equi-
table re-arrangement, there is an obstacle which seems
to have been overlooked. Even supposing that the
English as a race gained possession of the land equita-
bly, which they did not; and even supposing that exist-
ing land-owners are the posterity of those who spoiled
their fellows, which in large part they are not ; and even
supposing that the existing landless are the posterity of
the despoiled, which in large part they are not ; there
would still have to be recognized a transaction that goes
far to prevent rectification of injustices. If we are to
go back upon the past at all, we must go back upon the
past wholly, and take account not only of that which
the people at large have lost by private appropriation of
land, but also that which they have received in the form
of a share of the returns — we must take account, that
is, of Poor-Law relief. Mr. T. Mackay, author of The
English Poor, has kindly furnished me with the follow-
ing memoranda, showing something like the total amount
of this since the 43d Elizabeth (1601) in England and
Wales.
Sir G. Nicholls (History of Poor Law, appendix to Vol. II.)
ventures no estimate till 16SS. At that date he puts the poor rate
at nearly £700,000 a year. Till the beginning of this century the
amounts are based more or less on estimate.
1601–1630. say 3 millions.
1631–1700. (1688 Nicholls puts at 700,000.) 30 { %
1701–1720. {} Nicholls puts at 900,000.) 20 6 &
1721–1760. 1760 Nicholls says 1 1-4 millions.) 40 64
1761–1775. (1775 put at 1 1-2 million.) 22 6 &
1776–1800. (1784 2 millions.) 50 46
1801–1812. (1803 4 millions; 1813.6 millions.) 65 46
1813–1840. (based on exact figures given by
Sir G. Nicholls.) 170 “
1841–1890. (based on Mulhall's Dict. of Sta-
tistics and Statistical Abstract.) 334 64
734 millions.
“JUSTICE *— “THE LAND QUESTION.” 291
The above represents the amount earpended in relief
of the poor. Under the general term “poor-rate,”
moneys have always been collected for other purposes —
county, borough, police rates, etc. The following table
shows the annual amounts of these in connection with
the annual amounts expended on the poor :
Total levied. Expended on Other purposes
poor. balance.
Sir G. In 1803. 5,348,000 4,077,000 1,271,000 2
Nicholis ** 1813. 8,646,841 6,656,106 1,990,735?
o “ 1853. 6,522,412 4,939,064 1,583,341 ?
Total spent. Sum spent.
Statistical | “ 1875. 12,694,208 7,488,481 5,205,727
abstract. “1SS9. 15,970,126 8,366,477 7,603,649
In addition, therefore, to sums set out in the first table, there is a
further sum, rising during the century from 13 to 7% millions per
annum “for other purposes.”
Mulhall, on whom I relied for figures between 1853 and 1875,
does not give “other expenditure.”
Of course of the £734,000,000 given to the poorer
members of the landless class during three centuries, a
part has arisen from rates on houses; only such portion
of which as is chargeable against ground rents, being
rightly included in the sum the land has contributed.
From a land-owner, who is at the same time a Queen's
Counsel, frequently employed professionally to arbitrate
in questions of local taxation, I have received the
opinion that if, out of the total sum received by the poor,
£500,000,000 is credited to the land, this will be an
under-estimate. Thus even if we ignore the fact that
this amount, gradually contributed, would, if otherwise
gradually invested, have yielded in returns of one or
other kind a far larger sum, it is manifest that against
the claim of the landless may be set off a large claim of
the landed — perhaps a larger claim.
For now observe that the landless have not an equitable
claim to the land in its present state — cleared, drained,
fenced, fertilized, and furnished with farm-buildings,
etc. — but only to the land in its primitive state, here
stony and there marshy, covered with forest, gorse,
heather, etc.; this only, it is, which belongs to the com-
292 RECANTATION.
munity. Hence, therefore, the question arises — What
is the relation between the original “prairie value " of
the land, and the amount which the poorer among the
landless have received during these three centuries 2
Probably the land-owners would contend that for the
land in its primitive, unsubdued state, furnishing nothing
but wild animals and wild fruits, £500,000,000 would be
a high price.
When, in Social Statics, published in 1850, I drew
from the law of equal freedom the corollary that the
land could not equitably be alienated from the com-
munity, and argued that, after compensating its existing
holders, it should be re-appropriated by the community,
I overlooked the foregoing considerations. Moreover, I
did not clearly see what would be implied by the giving
of compensation for all that value which the labor of
ages has given to the land. While, as shown in Chapter
XI., I adhere to the inference originally drawn, that the
aggregate of men forming the community are the Supreme
owners of the land — an inference harmonizing with
legal doctrine and daily acted upon in legislation — a
fuller consideration of the matter has led me to the
conclusion that individual ownership, subject to state-
suzerainty, should be maintained.
Even were it possible to rectify the inequitable doings
which have gone on during past thousands of years, and
by Some balancing of claims and counter-claims, past
and present, to make a re-arrangement equitable in the
abstract, the resulting state of things would be a less
desirable one than the present. Setting aside all finan-
cial objections to nationalization (which of themselves
negative the transaction, since, if equitably effected, it
would be a losing one), it suffices to remember the in-
feriority of public administration to private administra-
tion, to see that ownership by the state would work ill.
Under the existing system of ownership, those who
manage the land, experience a direct connection between
effort and benefit ; while, were it under state-ownership,
those who managed it would experience no such direct
connection. The vices of officialism would inevitably
entail immense evils.
“JUSTICE *— “THE LAND QUESTION.” 293
Was ever philosopher so perplexed before ?
Mr. Spencer started out in 1850 to tell us what
are our rights to land. And, excepting that he fell
into some confusion by carelessly transforming equal
rights into joint rights, he clearly did so. But now,
in 1892, and in the climax of the Spencerian Syn-
thetic Philosophy, he has got himself into a maze, in
which the living and the dead — Normans, Danes,
Norsemen, Frisians, Celts, Saxons, Welsh, and High-
landers; old English and new English; plebeians,
with aristocratic names, and aristocrats with plebeian
names, and female descendants who have changed
their names; ancient filibusters and modern filibus-
ters — are all so whirling round that, in sheer despair,
he springs for guidance to “a land-owner who is at the
same time a Queen's counsel,” and is led by him plump
into the English poor law and a long array of figures.
Yet, in the mad whirl he still pretends to consist-
ency. “I adhere,” he says, “to the inference origi-
nally drawn, that the aggregate of men forming the
community are the supreme owners of the land.”
Here is that inference in his own words — the in-
ference originally drawn in “Social Statics: ”
Given a race of beings having like claims to pursue
the objects of their desires, given a world adapted to
the gratification of those desires — a world into which
such beings are similarly born, and it unavoidably fol-
lows that they have equal rights to the use of this world.
. . . Equity therefore does not permit private property
in land. . . . The right of mankind at large to the earth’s
surface is still valid; all deeds, customs, and laws not-
withstanding.
What is it that Mr. Spencer here asserts? Not
that men derive their rights to the use of the earth
294 REC ANTATION.
by gift, bequest or inheritance, from their ancestors,
or from any previous men, but that they derive them
from the fact of their own existence. Who lived on
the earth before them, or what such predecessors did,
has nothing whatever to do with the matter. The
equal right to the use of land belongs to each man
as man. It begins with his birth; it continues till
his death. It can be destroyed or superseded by no
human action whatever.
And this is the ground on which, without excep-
tion, stand all who demand the resumption of equal
rights to land. Where there has been any reference
on their part to the wrongfulness of past appropria-
tions of land, it has merely been —as in the case of
Mr. Spencer himself in “Social Statics” — by way
of illustrating the origin of private property in land,
not by way of basing the demand for the rights of
living men on the proof of wrongs done to dead men.”
Neither Mr. Spencer in his “straight" days, nor any
one else who has stood for equal rights in land, ever
dreamed of such a stultifying proposition as that the
right to the use of land must be drawn from some
1 I, for instance, have uniformly asserted that it made no differ-
ence whatever whether land has been made private property by
force or by consent; that the equal right to its use is a natural and
inalienable right of the living, and that this is the ground, and the
only ground, on which the resumption of those rights should be
demanded. Thus in “The Irish Land Question,” in 1881, I said:
The indictment which really lies against the Irish landlords is
not that their ancestors or the ancestors of their grantors robbed
the ancestors of the Irish people. That makes no difference.
“I let the dead bury their dead.” The indictment that truly lies
is, that here and now, they rob the Irish people. . . . The great-
est enemy of the people’s cause is he who appeals to national
passions and excites old hatreds. He is its best friend who does
his utinost to bury them out of sight.
“JUSTICE *— “THE LAND QUESTION.” 295
dispossessed generation, for this would be to assert
what he so ridiculed, that “God has given one charter
of privilege to one generation and another to the
next.”
Yet, now, this same Herbert Spencer actually as-
sumes that the only question of moral right as to
land is, who robbed whom, in days whereof the very
memory has perished, and when, according to him,
everybody was engaged in robbing everybody else.
He not only eats his own words, denies his own per-
ceptions, and endeavors to confuse the truth he once
bore witness to, but he assumes that the whole great
movement for the recognition of equal rights to land,
that is beginning to show its force wherever the
English tongue is spoken, has for its object only recti-
fication of past injustices — the ridiculous search, in
which he pretends to engage, as to what ancestor
robbed what ancestor — and that until that is discov-
ered, those who now hold as their private property the
inalienable heritage of all may hold it still. And in
the course of this “argument,” this advocate of the
rich against the poor, of the strong against the weak,
declares that the toiling masses of England, made
ignorant and brutal and powerless by their dis-
inheritance, have lost their natural rights by serving
as food for powder and payers of taxes in foreign
wars waged by the ruling classes.
This is bad enough; but more follows. Mr. Spencer
discovers a new meaning in the English poor laws.
In “Social Statics,” be it remembered, he declared
that the equal right to the use of land is the
natural, direct, inalienable right of all men, having
its derivation in the fact of their existence, and
296 IRECANTATION.
of which they can in no possible way be equi-
tably deprived. He declared that equity does not
permit private property in land, and that it is
impossible to discover any mode by which land can
become private property. He scouted the idea
that force can give right, or that sale or bequest or
prescription can make invalid claims valid; saying
that, “though nothing be multiplied forever, it will
not produce one'; asking, “How long does it take for
what was originally wrong to grow into a right? and
at what rate per annum do invalid claims become
valid 2 ” He declared that neither use nor im-
provement, nor even the free consent of all existing
men, could give private ownership in land, or bar the
equal right of the next child born. And he, more-
over, proved that land nationalization, which he then
proposed as the only equitable treatment of land, did
not involve state administration.
Not one of the arguments of “Social Statics " is
answered in “Justice ’” — not even the showing that
land nationalization merely involves a change in the
receivers of rent, and not the governmental occupa-
tion and use of land. There are two things, and two
things only, that Mr. Spencer admits that he over-
looked—the relation of the poor law to the claims of
land-owners, and the amount of compensation which
the landless must give to the landed “for all that
value which the labor of ages has given to the land.”
Mr. Spencer has discussed the poor law before.
One of the longest of the chapters of “Social
Statics,” from which I have already quoted," is de-
voted to it; and in recent writings he has again
1 pp. 89–90.
“JUSTICE *— “THE LAND QUESTION.” 297
referred to it. In “Social Statics” he declares that
the excuse made for a poor law — that it is a com-
pensation to the disinherited for the deprivation
of their birthright — has much plausibility; but he
objects, not only that the true remedy is to restore
equal rights to land, but that the poor law does not
give compensation, insisting that poor rates are in
the main paid by non-landowners, and that it is only
here and there that one of those kept out of their
inheritance gets any part of them.
In 1884, in “The Coming Slavery,” he repeats the
assertion that non-landowners get no benefit from
the poor law, saying —
The amount which under the old poor law the half-
pauperized laborer received from the parish to eke out
his weekly income was not really, as it appeared, a
bonus, for it was accompanied by a substantially equiv-
alent decrease of his wages, as was quickly proved when
the system was abolished and the wages rose.
In “The Sins of Legislators,” he repeats that
instead of being paid by land-owners, the poor rates
really fall on non-land owners, saying —
As, under the old poor law, the diligent and provi-
dent laborer had to pay that the good-for-nothings might
not suffer, until frequently, under this extra burden, he
broke down and himself took refuge in the workhouse
— as, at present, it is admitted that the total rates levied
in large towns for all public purposes, have now reached
such a height that they “cannot be exceeded without
inflicting great hardship on the small shopkeepers and
artisans, who already find it difficult enough to keep
themselves free from pauper taint.”
But in Appendix B Mr. Spencer ignores all this.
He assumes that land-owners have been the real
298 RECANTATION.
payers and the disinherited the real receivers of the
poor rates; and, adding together all that the land-
owners have paid in poor rates since the time of
Queen Elizabeth, he puts the whole sum to their
credit in a ledger account between existing landlords
and existing landless.
He begins this account at 1601. He credits the
landlords and charges the landless with all that has
been collected from land for poor rates between 1601
and 1890. Now, if this is done, what is to be put on
the other side of the ledger? We must take the
same date, the ordinary book-keeper would say, and
charge the landlords and credit the landless with all
the ground rents the land-owners have received from
1601 to 1890. To this we must add all that the
land-owners have received from the produce of gen-
eral taxes between 1601 and 1890, by virtue of their
political power as landlords." And to this we must
again add the selling value in 1890 of the land of
England, exclusive of improvements. The difference
will show what, if we are to go back to 1601, and no
farther, existing landlords now owe to existing land-
less.
This would be the way of ordinary, every-day
book-keeping if it were undertaken to make up such a
debtor and creditor account from 1601 to 1890. But
this is not the way of Spencerian synthetic book-
keeping. What Mr. Spencer does, after crediting
1 The Financial Reform. Almanac has given some idea of what
enormous sums the British land-owners have received from the
offices, pensions and sinecures they have secured for themselves,
and from their habit of providing for younger sons and poorer
relatives in the army, navy, church, and civil administration.
“JUSTICE *— “THE LAND QUESTION.” 299
landlords and charging the landless with the amount
collected from land for poor rates between 1601 and
1890, is, omitting all reference to mesne profits, to
credit the landless and charge the landlords with
the value of the land of England, not as it is, but
“in its primitive, unsubdued state, furnishing nothing
but wild animals and wild fruits " — that is, before
there were any men. This — though by what sort
of synthetic calculus he gets at it he does not tell
us — Mr. Spencer estimates at £500,000,000, a sum
that will about square the account, with some little
balance on the side of the landlords !
Generous to the poor landless is Mr. Accountant
Spencer' — so generous that he ought to make a
note of it in writing Part VI. of his “Principles of
Ethics " — “The Ethics of Social Life : Positive
Beneficence.” For is it not positive beneficence to
those who are to be credited with it to say that
£500,000,000 would be a high estimate of the value
of England when there was nothing there but wild
animals and wild fruit? To one of less wide mag-
nificence two and threepence would seem to be rather
more than a high estimate of the value of the land
of England before man came.
CHAPTER XIII.
PRINCIPAL BROWN.
REALLY, this final close of the most important dis-
cussion of the most important book of the most
important grand division of the great Spencerian
Synthetic Philosophy can only be fitly treated by
calling on the imagination for an illustration:
Mr. J. D. Brown, for some time before our civil
war a prominent citizen of Vicksburg, Mississippi,
was a native of Connecticut, of Puritan stock and
thrifty habits. Beginning life as a clock-maker,
he emigrated when a young man to that part of
Ohio, settled from New England, which is still in
those regions known as the Western Reserve. There
he went to school-teaching, joined a local literary
society, and made some speeches which were highly
applauded, and in which he did not hesitate to de-
nounce slavery as the sum of all villanies, and to
declare for immediate, unconditional emancipation.
Somewhat later on, he went South and settled at
Vicksburg, where he became professor of moral philos-
ophy in a young ladies’ seminary, and, finally, its
principal. Being prudent in speaking of the peculiar
institution, and gaining a reputation for profundity,
he became popular in the best society, a favorite
guest in the lavish hospitalities of the wealthier
planters, and, in the Southern manner, was always
PRINCIPAL BROWN. 301
spoken of to visitors with pride as “Principal Brown,
one of our most distinguished men, sir! — a great
educator, and a great authority on moral philoso-
phy, sir!”
The slavery question was in the mean time grow-
ing hotter and hotter. There were no abolitionists
in Vicksburg or in the country about, for any one
suspected of abolitionism was promptly lynched, or
sent North in a coat of tar and feathers. But slaves
were occasionally disappearing, among them some of
especial value as mechanics; and even a very valuable
yellow girl, whose beauty and accomplishments were
such that her owner had refused $5,000 for her, had
been spirited off by the underground railroad. And
“society'' in Vicksburg was becoming more and more
excited. Though no one yet dreamed that it was
destined ere long to redden the Mississippi, and
light the skies of Vicksburg with bursting bombs, the
cloud on the northern horizon was visibly swelling
and darkening, and in “bleeding Kansas" a guerrilla
war had already crimsoned the grass.
Still, the lines of Principal Brown were cast in
pleasant places, and he received the honors due to a
great philosopher, deemed all the greater by those
who in their secret hearts did not find his moral
philosophy quite intelligible ; for he not only made a
practice of using the longest words and of interlard-
ing his discourses with references to people of whom
his auditors had never heard, and of whom he could
say anything he pleased, but he had taken Balzac's
hint, and every now and again he strung together a
series of words that sounded as though they might
mean something, but really had no meaning at all.
302 RECANTATION.
He had thus gained a reputation for great profundity
with those who vainly puzzled over them, and who
attributed their difficulty to an ignorance they were
ashamed to admit.
But one woful day there came to Vicksburg some
echo of one of his debating-club speeches in the
Western Reserve, and some of the leading citizens
deemed fit to interrogate him. He had to lie a little,
but succeeded in quieting them ; and as not much
was said about the matter, his standing in Vicksburg
society was, in general, unchanged.
Following this, however, something worse hap-
pened. The Rev. Dr. Sorely, one of the most elo-
quent divines of the Methodist Church South, made
a trip to Ohio, and in the Western Reserve delivered
a lecture on the biblical and patriarchal system of
labor as practised by our Southern brethren. Among
the auditors was a man who remembered and quoted
some of the eloquent utterances, on the other side, of
the reverend doctor's friend, Principal Brown. The
matter might have passed unheeded, but that the
Vicksburg Thunderbolt, anticipating much glory to
the South from the Northern visit of its eloquent
defender, had sent a special correspondent with him;
and a report of the lecture, including the reference
to Principal Brown, duly appeared in its columns.
This was indeed a serious matter, and the Princi-
pal wrote immediately to the Thunderbolt with feel-
ing and vehemence. He said that he feared that
if he remained silent many would think he had
said things he had not said ; intimated that he had
never been in Ohio, and what he had said when he
was there he had said for the purpose of finding a
PRINCIPAL BIROWN. 303
secure basis for slavery ; that he had only been talk-
ing of transcendental ethics, and not of sublunary
ethics at all; that he had always insisted that the
slave-owners of the South should be paid in full for
their slaves; that he had never supposed that the
question would come up for millions of years yet;
and that the most he had said was that, “It may be
doubted, if it does not possibly seem inferable, that
perhaps there may be reason to suspect that at some
future time the slaves may be liberated, after paying
to their owners more than they are worth ; but I
have no positive opinion as to what may hereafter
take place, and am only sure that, if emancipation
ever does take place, the negroes must pay to their
owners far more in interest on their purchase money
than they now pay in work.”
To most of the citizens of Vicksburg this seemed
entirely satisfactory, but there were some dissen-
tients. Colonel F. E. Green strongly urged patriotic
citizens not to think of such a thing as treating the
Principal to a coat of tar and feathers, and Professor
Bullhead, of the leading young men's seminary,
wrote to the Thunderbolt, requesting his respected
colleague to give a categorical answer to the ques-
tion “whether, when A B went to the slave pen and
bought a negro, the negro was or was not his prop-
erty, morally as well as legally.” If yes, then Pro-
fessor Bullhead wanted to know what his learned and
respected friend meant by admitting the possibility
of emancipation even some millions of years hence;
and if no, then Professor Bullhead wanted Principal
Brown to tell him why the slaves, before regaining
their freedom, must pay their owners more than they
304 RECANTATION.
were worth. And Professor Bullhead closed with
Some sarcastic references to transcendental ethics.
Principal Brown did not answer this plain ques-
tion of his friend Professor Bullhead, but got rid of
him as quickly as he could, telling him that there
was no dispute between them, since they both insisted
on the right of any citizen to work and whip his own
negro, and then luring him off into a long discus-
sion of transcendental ethics vs. sublunary ethics.
But it was evident that something more had to be
done, and the papers soon contained an announce-
ment that Principal Brown proposed to forego for a
time the publication of Volumes XXIV. and XXV.
of his great work on Moral Philosophy, and imme-
diately to bring out Volume XXVI., containing
a chapter on the slavery question, which he proposed
to read to the citizens of Vicksburg at a public
meeting.
The lecture drew a large audience of the first citi-
zens of Vicksburg. There was also a sprinkling of
rougher citizens, some of whom before entering the
hall deposited in a rear lot a long rail that they had
brought with them, and some pails that smelled like
tar, with a number of large but evidently light sacks.
However, the lecture was a great success, and at the
close, Principal Brown's hand was nearly shaken off,
and he was escorted to his home by an enthusiastic
and cheering crowd, who vowed that nothing like
such a “demolisher to the nigger-lovers” had ever
been heard in Vicksburg before.
But although the stately periods of the Principal
are occasionally marred by what is evidently a repor-
torial tendency to the slang of the time, let me quote
PRINCIPAL BROWN. 305
from the papers of the next day, which contained
long reports of the speech, accompanied with glow-
ing encomiums: —
[From the Vicksburg Thunderbolt, June 19, 1859.]
The wealth and beauty and fashion of Vicksburg
turned out in full force last evening to listen to a lec-
ture on the slavery question by our distinguished
townsman, Principal J. D. Brown, the widely hon-
ored writer on moral philosophy. In the audience
our reporter counted thirty-seven colonels, two majors,
and thirty-two judges, besides the pastors of all the
leading churches. It is a great pity, as many of the
enthusiastic hearers said, while congratulating Prin-
cipal Brown and each other at the conclusion, that
William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips them-
selves could not have been there; for if their miser-
able nigger-loving hides could be penetrated by the
solid blocks of learning, the unanswerable logic, and
the mathematical demonstrations which Principal
Brown poured into his audience, they would have
sung exceedingly small; even if they had not seen
the full wickedness of their efforts to rob the widow
and the orphan by interfering with our beneficent
domestic institution.
Much of Principal Brown's lecture it will be impos-
sible to give to our readers this morning, for our re-
porter, not being well versed in Moral Philosophy,
finds himself unable from his notes to make sense of
some of the more profound passages, and is uncertain
as to how some of the authorities cited spell their
names. There was some confusion, too, in the hall
when Principal Brown touched on the subject of
transcendental ethics, and said that he had always
held, and always would hold, that, in transcendental
ethics all men were pretty much alike. But Colonel
Johnson rose in his place and stilled the disturbance,
asking the audience to keep their coats on till the
306 RECANTATION.
Principal got through ; and when Principal Brown
explained that transcendental ethics related to the
other side of the moon, while sublunary ethics related
to this side of the moon, there was silence again. It
was in the wind-up, however, that the professor got
in his best work, and roused his audience to the high-
est pitch of delight and enthusiasm. He said: —
There are people who contend that these negro slaves
of the South, after they have paid their owners in
full the compensation due them, ought to be put back
in their native land. But how are we to find who
brought them here ? Some were brought in Spanish
vessels, some in Portuguese vessels, some in Dutch,
Some in English, and some in American vessels; and
these vessels are all by this time sunk or destroyed, and
their owners and crews are dead, and their descendants
have got mixed. Besides, they only got the negroes
from the barracoons on the African coast. Who is to tell
where the ancestor of each one was taken from and who
took him to the coast 2 Many of these slaves bear such
names as Brown, Smith, Jones, and Simpson, names
borne by the very men who brought their progenitors
here. Then they have such given names as Caesar, Han-
nibal, Dick, Tom, Harry, Ephraim, Alexander, and
Nebuchadnezzar, so that no one can tell from their
names whether they originally came from Africa or
England, Italy, Jerusalem, Greece, or Assyria. And
what have these negroes ever done for freedom ? Did any
one ever hear of them expressing any sympathy for the
independence of Greece, or protesting against the Rus-
sian invasion of Hungary, or even contributing for the
conversion of the Jews, or for sending missionaries to
the South Sea Islands, where only man is vile 2 Con-
trariwise, when British tyranny invaded our shores did
not these negroes work just as readily for the hirelings
of King George as they did for their own patriotic mas-
ters who were fighting the battles of liberty ? And
to-day when a nigger runs away, where does he head
for ? Does he not make a straight streak for Canada,
a country groaning under the government of an effete
monarchy, and with a full-fledged aristocrat for governor-
PRINCIPAL. BROWN. 307
general 2 One would like to know that these negro
slaves, whom it is proposed to send back to their native
land when they have compensated their owners, have
some real love for free institutions, before thrusting
freedom upon them.
To think that slavery was wrongly established is
natural, and not without warrant in transcendental
ethics. But if we entertain the thought of rectification,
there arises in the first place the question — who enslaved
them 2 Their owners did not. They only bought them.
These negroes were enslaved by negroes like themselves,
— likely enough by their own mothers, cousins, and aunts.
Now which are the descendants of the one and which of
the other ? and where are they to be found 2 But sup-
posing that they could be found, there would still have
to be recognized a transaction which goes far to prevent
rectification. If we are to go back upon the past at all,
we must go back upon the past wholly, and take account
of what it has cost to feed and clothe and keep these
negroes since they have been here.
I have consulted one of our most eminent negro
traders, a gentleman who has probably bought and sold
more negroes than any one in the Southwest, and after a
close calculation, he informs me that taking men, women,
and children together, and considering the loss of their
labor which their owners have to suffer in the rearing of
children, sickness, and old age, and the cost of overseers,
drivers, patrols, and an occasional pack of bloodhounds,
the average negro costs the average owner a fraction over
$267,57 per annum. But as I wish to be generous to
the negro I have thrown off the 57 cents and a fraction,
and will put their cost to their masters at only $267 a
year. ..
Now, the first cargo of negro slaves was landed in
Jamestown, Virginia, in the year 1620, and the external
slave trade was abolished in 1808. We may therefore as-
Sume the average time during which each negro has been
in this country as one hundred and fifty years. Saying
nothing whatever about interest, it is thus clear that
each living negro owes to his owner, as the cost of keep-
ing him, $267 a year for one hundred and fifty years,
which, excluding interest, amounts at the present time to
just $40,050. (Great applause.)
308 REC ANTATION.
Here a man in a back seat rose, and in a decidedly
Yankee accent asked Principal Brown if he included
negro babies? The Principal replying in the affirma-
tive, the intruder began : “How can a negro baby
just born owe any one forty thou’” — The rest of the
sentence was lost by the sudden exit of the intruder
from the hall, over the heads of the audience. There
was quite an excitement for a few moments, but
Colonel Johnson again rose and restored order by
asking the young men in the rear not to escort the
interrupter further than the vacant lot adjoining until
the close of the proceedings, as the audience were
intent on enjoying the remainder of the logical feast
which their distinguished townsman was laying be-
fore them. All being quiet again, Principal Brown
resumed :
Observe that the negroes have not an equitable
claim to themselves in their present condition — washed,
clothed and fed, civilized, Christianized and taught how
to work — but only to themselves in their primitive wild
and uncivilized condition. Now, what is the relation be-
tween the original “wild nigger " value of each slave
and what each one of them has received from his owner
during one hundred and fifty years ? We know that
they were bought at the barracoons, delivered on board
ship at prices ranging from a half-pound of beads to a
bottle of rum or a Manchester musket, the owners being
at the cost of transporting them to America, including
the heavy insurance caused by the necessarily great
mortality, items which as you will observe I have not
charged against the existing slaves. My friend the slave
merchant estimates that on an average 15s. 9d. English
money would be a high rate. Let us call it, however, $4
American money. Thus we see that an equitable rectifi-
cation would require that each negro in the South should
pay his owner a balance of $40,046 (Loud and long-
continued applause.)
Now, when in the Western Reserve many years ago,
I drew from transcendental ethics the corollary that the
ownership of a man could not be equitably alienated
PRINCIPAL I3 IROWN. 309
from the man himself, and argued that after the slaves
had compensated their owners they should be freed, I had
overlooked the foregoing considerations. Moreover, I
did not clearly see what would be implied by the giving
of compensation for all that during these one hundred
and fifty years it has cost the owner to keep the slave.
While, therefore, I adhere to the inference originally
drawn — that is to say, as far as transcendental ethics
is concerned — a fuller consideration of the matter has
led me to the conclusion that slavery, subject to the
right of the slave to buy himself on payment to his
owner of what he has cost, say $40,046, should be main-
tained. But it may be readily seen that such a transac-
tion would be a losing one to the slaves themselves, for at
the present market price of negroes, they are not worth,
big and little, more than $1,000 each. And, whereas
I have also said that I really did not know but that in
the course of some millions of years it might possibly
be that the slaves could be allowed their freedom on
paying to their owners full compensation, I now see,
since what is due from them to their masters is con-
stantly increasing, that with humanity as it now is, the
implied reorganization would become more and more
unprofitable. (Still louder and longer applause, led by
Professor Bullhead, who called for three times three
cheers, which were given with a will, the audience rising
and the ladies waving their handkerchiefs.)
I also wish to point out that all this talk about giving
their freedom to the slaves is as foolish as it is wicked.
Since under our laws the slave himself is the property
of the master, the slaves already have their freedom
in the freedom of the master. Thus the equal freedom
of each to do all that he wills, provided that he in-
terferes not with the equal freedom of all others, as
taught by transcendental ethics, is already recognized
by the laws of the South, and nothing more remains
for us to do, except to keep abolitionist theories from
Spreading in this “land of the free and home of the
bravel ”
The uproarious enthusiasm of the audience could
no longer be restrained, and, led by Professor Bull-
head, who rushed on the stage and embraced Princi-
310 RECANTATION.
pal Brown, our best citizens crowded round him.
During this time the wretch who had interrupted the
Principal was tarred and feathered in an adjoining
lot, and ridden on a rail to the levee. Unfortunately
all efforts of the police to discover the perpetrators
of this reprehensible proceeding have failed. It is
generally supposed to have been the work of some
negroes who were listening through the open windows
and whose feelings were hurt by the slighting insin-
uation of the stranger as to the value of colored
infants.
While thus calling attention to the similarity be-
tween Mr. Spencer's philosophic methods and those
of Principal Brown, I do not wish to make any
personal comparison between the two philosophers.
Since he was under fear of tar and feathers, that
would be unjust to Principal Brown.
CONCLUSION.
THE MORAL OF THIS EXAMINATION.
I had rather believe all the fables in the legend, and the Talmud, and the
Alcoran, than that this universal frame is without a mind. . . . It is true
that a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism, but depth in philoso-
phy bringeth men’s Iminds about to religion; for while the mind of man
looketh upon second causes scattered it may sometimes rest in them and go
no further; but when it beholdeth the chain of them confederate and linked
together, it must needs fly to Providence and Deity. — Bacon.
CONCLUSION.
THE MORAL OF THIS EXAMINATION.
I HAVE laid before the reader enough to show
what weight is due to Mr. Spencer's recantation of
his earlier declarations on the land question.
But even his high reputation and great influence
would not have led me to make so elaborate an exami-
nation, did it relate only to him. My purpose has
been more than this.
In abandoming his earlier opinions Mr. Spencer has
adopted those which have the stamp of the recognized
authorities of our time. In seeking for excuses to
justify his change he has taken the best he could
find ; and the confusions and fallacies and subter-
fuges to which he resorts are such as pass for argu-
ment with the many men of reputation and ability,
who have undertaken to defend the existing system.
Examination will show that no better defence of that
system has been made or can be made.
Taking Mr. Spencer as the foremost representa-
tive of those who deny the justice and expediency of
recognizing the equal right to land — a pre-eminence
given him by his great reputation, his accorded ability,
and the fact that he once avowed the opinions he now
seeks to discredit — I have set forth his utterances
on the land question, from his first book to his last,
printing them in full in order to do him the amplest
314 CONCLUSION.
justice, and subjecting them to an examination which
any one of ordinary ability and information is com-
petent to test. I have thus given the best example
to be found in the writings of one man, of what may
be said for and what may be said against the equal
right to land.
It is not the example of intellectual prostitution
thus disclosed that I would dwell upon. It is the
lesson that prompts to intellectual self-reliance. It
is not merely the authority of Mr. Spencer as a
teacher on social subjects that I would discredit; but
the blind reliance upon authority. For on such sub-
jects the masses of men cannot safely trust authority.
Given a wrong which affects the distribution of
wealth and differentiates society into the rich and
the poor, and the recognized Organs of opinion and
education, since they are dominated by the wealthy
class, must necessarily represent the views and wishes
of those who profit or imagine they profit by the
wrong. -
That thought on social questions is so confused
and perplexed, that the aspirations of great bodies of
men, deeply though vaguely conscious of injustice,
are in all civilized countries being diverted to futile
and dangerous remedies, is largely due to the fact
that those who assume and are credited with superior
knowledge of social and economic laws have devoted
their powers, not to showing where the injustice lies
but to hiding it; not to clearing common thought
but to confusing it. -
It is idle to quarrel with this fact, for it is of the
nature of things, and is shown in the history of every
great movement against Social Wrong, from that
THE MORAL OF THIS EXAMINATION. 315
which startled the House of Have in the Roman
world by its proclamation of the equal fatherhood
of God and the equal brotherhood of men, to that
which in our own time broke the shackles of the
chattel slave. But it is well to recognize it, that
those who would know the truth on social and
economic subjects may not blindly accept what at
the time passes for authority, but may think for
themselves.
It is not, however, in regard to social problems
only that I trust this examination may do something
to enforce the need of intellectual self-reliance. It
is in regard to those larger and deeper problems of
man's nature and destiny which are, it seems to me,
closely related to social questions.
Stepping out of their proper sphere and arrogating
to themselves an authority to which they have no
claim, professed teachers of spiritual truths long pre-
sumed to deny the truths of the natural sciences.
But now professed teachers of the natural sciences,
stepping in turn out of their proper sphere and arro-
gating to themselves an authority to which they have
no claim, presume to deny spiritual truths. And
there are many, who having discarded an authority
often perverted by the influence of dominant wrong,
have in its place accepted another authority which in
its blank materialism affords as efficient a means for
stilling conscience and defending selfish greed as any
perversion of religious truth.
Mr. Spencer is the foremost representative of this
authority. Widely regarded as the scientific philoso-
pher; eulogized by his admirers as the greatest of all
316 CONCLUSION.
philosophers—as the man who has cleared and illumi-
nated the field of philosophy by bringing into it the
exact methods of science — he carries to the common
mind the weight of the marvellous scientific achieve-
ments of our time as applied to the most moment-
ous of problems. The effect is to impress it with a
vague belief that modern science has proved the idea
of God to be an ignorant superstition and the hope of
a future life a vain delusion.
Now, the great respect which in our day has
attached to professed scientific teachers, and which
has in large degree given to them the same influence
that once attached to the teachers of religion, arises
from the belief in the truthfulness of science —from
the belief that in the pure, clear atmosphere in which
its votaries are supposed to dwell they are exempt
from temptations to pervert and distort. And this
has been largely attributed to them where they have
passed the boundaries of what is properly the domain
of the natural sciences and assumed the teaching of
politics and religion. It is his reputation as an hon-
est, fearless thinker, bent only on discovering and
proclaiming the truth, a reputation which he derives
from his reputation as a scientific philosopher, that
gives to Mr. Spencer the powerful influence which,
having been exerted to deny all hope of a world to
come, is now exerted to deny the right of the masses
to the essentials of life in this world — to maintain
the wrong, wider than that of chattel slavery, which
condemns so many not merely to physical, but to
mental and moral privation and want, to undeveloped
and distorted lives and to untimely death.
While the examination we have made has only
THE MORAL OF THIS EXAMINATION. 317
incidentally touched the larger phases of Mr. Spencer's
philosophy, it has afforded an opportunity to judge
of the very things on which his popular reputation
is based — his intellectual honesty and his capacity
for careful, logical reasoning. It has, so to speak,
brought the alleged philosopher out of what to the
ordinary man is a jungle of sounding phrases and big
words, and placed him on open ground where he may
be easily understood and measured. In his first book,
written when he believed in God, in a divine order,
in a moral sense, and which he has now emasculated,
he does appear as an honest and fearless, though some-
what too careless a thinker. But that part of our
examination which crosses what is now his distinct-
ive philosophy shows him to be, as a philosopher
ridiculous, as a man contemptible — a fawning Vicar
of Bray, clothing in pompous phraseology and arro-
gant assumption logical confusions so absurd as to
be comical.
If the result be to shatter an idol, I trust it may
also be to promote freedom of thought.
As there are many to whom the beauty and har-
mony of economic laws are hidden, and to whom
the inspiring thought of a social order in which
there should be work for all, leisure for all, and
abundance for all — in which all might be at least
as true, as generous and as manful as they wish to
be — is shut out by the deference paid to economic
authorities who have as it were given bonds not
to find that for which they profess to seek, so
there are many to-day to whom any belief in the
spiritual element, in the existence of God and in a
future life, is darkened or destroyed, not so much by
3.18 CONCLUSION.
difficulties they themselves find, but by what they
take to be the teachings of science. Conscious of
their own ignorance, distrustful of their own powers,
stumbling over scientific technicalities and awed by
metaphysical terminology, they are disposed to accept
on faith the teachings of such a man as Mr. Spencer,
as those of one who on all things knows more and
sees further than they can, and to accord to what
they take to be intellectual pre-eminence the moral
pre-eminence that they feel ought to accompany it.
I know the feeling of such men, for I remember the
years when it was my own.
To these it is my hope that this examination may
be useful, by putting them on inquiry. In its course
we have tested, in matters where ordinary intelligence
and knowledge are competent to judge, the logical
methods and intellectual honesty of the foremost of
those who in the name of science eliminate God and
degrade man, taking from human life its highest dig-
nity and deepest hope. Now, if in simple matters
we find such confusion, such credulity, such violation
of every canon of sound reasoning as we have found
here, shall we blindly trust in deeper matters—in
those matters which always have and always must
perplex the intellect of man 7
Let us rather, as I said in the beginning, not too
much underrate our own powers in what is concerned
with common facts and general relations. While we
may not be scientists or philosophers we too are men.
And as to things which the telescope cannot resolve,
nor the microscope reveal, nor the spectrum analysis
throw light nor the tests of the chemist discover, it
is as irrational to blindly accept the dictum of those
TEIE MORAL OF THIS EXAMINATION. 319
who say, “Thus saith science 1” as it is in things
that are the proper field of the natural sciences to
bow before the dictum of those who say, “Thus
saith religion 1’’
I care nothing for creeds. I am not concerned
with any one's religious belief. But I would have
men think for themselves. If we do not, we can only
abandon one superstition to take up another, and it
may be a worse one. It is as bad for a man to think
that he can know nothing as to think he knows all.
There are things which it is given to all possessing
reason to know, if they will but use that reason.
And some things it may be there are, that — as was
said by one whom the learning of the time sneered
at, and the high priests persecuted, and polite society,
speaking through the voice of those who knew not
what they did, crucified — are hidden from the wise
and prudent and revealed unto babes.
New York, October 12, 1892.
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