ÆäÀÌÁö À̹ÌÁö
PDF
ePub

CHAPTER X.

SIX FEET OF EARTH FOR A GRAVE.

"To drop a man in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and tell him he is at liberty to walk ashore, would not be more bitter irony than to place a man where all the land is appropriated as the property of other people andto tell him that he is a free man, at liberty to work for himself and to enjoy his own earnings."-HENRY GEORGE.

SUPPOSE, my reader, that in a little earth inhabited by a thousand people, the entire land surface, amounting to one hundred square miles, has been divided into four hundred farms of one hundred and sixty acres each, and is owned absolutely by four hundred persons, while the six hundred people comprising the remainder of the population are landless. Suppose that you are born into such a world, without any traditional golden spoon to bear you company in that interesting portion of your existence, and that when you arrive at years of discrimination, if not of discretion, you find the land surface of the little earth entirely monopolized by those who happened to get there first by the same method that you entered the world. Do you think that your condition and future prospects under the shadow of that social land-trust or combination would be particularly enviable, or that you could be very proud of your rights as a citizen or inhabitant of that imaginary earth?

Suppose that the landowners should conclude that all the other people ought to be regarded as trespassers, and having erected barbed wire fences around their property they should politely request you and your landless associates to step outside the boundaries of their estates, do

you really have any very clear idea where you would take up your future residence under such circumstances?

Your supposed condition brings to mind that of some tramps in a western city during the winter of 1894.

Heavy storms had driven the impecunious classes into the city, and some of them being vicious they were considered a dangerous nuisance, so the mayor recommended in the following language that the "saloons be closed at midnight, when their patrons will thus be turned into the streets, and if they have homes they will go home; if they have no homes, the police will arrest them and drive them out of the city."

It does not seem quite right to drive a man from place to place with policemen's clubs, simply because he has no home; and it is probable that my well-fed and comfortable reader, placed under these real circumstances, or under the supposed circumstances that have been described, would complain of injustice, and would, doubtless, incite some kind of a rebellion among the landless six hundred and against the four hundred monopolists. Rebellion in real life on the real earth always arises sooner or later out of such a condition of land monopoly, which, as will be proved hereafter, is not any peculiar monopolization, but only one form of the universal wealth monopoly that is the bane of civilization. It may be predicted, with little doubt in the mind of a man conversant with social institutions, that, unless the evil tendency in that direction is corrected in the United States, it will eventually produce a rebellion as a perfectly natural fruition. On this account, it may be worth while for every citizen to pause for a few moments in his mad scramble for wealth and devote a little thought to ascertaining whether any man has a natural right of access to any greater quantity of land than society is supposed to embody in the universal heritage of "six feet of earth for a grave," even this landed estate

being materially lessened in some instances by burying men in trenches.

The nature of land tenures, land being the most prominent and persistent form that wealth can assume, is at the bottom of nearly all the burning social problems that are being discussed, and the question may as well come directly home to every man in this form :

"Does any man naturally and justly own land to which he has acquired a legal title in any way, his ownership being a perpetuity either in his hands or in the hands of successors to whom he transfers his rights, or is his land tenure merely a lease from the community, who are the real owners at any given instant, or from all humanity of the past, present, and future, who are the owners in a more general sense?"

That is the question for every man to answer before he can have any basis established from which to reach final conclusions in property rights. Every man must decide in his own mind this question before he can either accept the theory that our deeds justly as well as legally convey land to any man "his heirs and assigns forever." Every man will, doubtless, understand that land is now held under private ownership in every civilized country; but the question is not what is custom or law, but whether the practice of treating land as private property is just or unjust, and whether human misery from tyranny is produced by the system. We are liable to suppose because we find land owned and controlled in this way when we arrive at an age which enables us to observe and comprehend such things, that it was always thus, and that the system must be right because we never knew of any other. When we remember, however, that millions of men have come into the world and gone out of it profoundly convinced during their entire existence that such customs as cannibalism, infanticide, human sacrifices, wife-slavery,

and all other kinds of slavery, were entirely right and perfectly consistent with the religion and morality of the age in which they were practiced, it may not be to our discredit as presumably intelligent occupants of the world in its more advanced stages, if we frankly and deliberately investigate some of the institutions that our forefathers have handed down to us, with the idea of ascertaining, if possible, whether they are really any more consistent with justice and morality, as we understand those terms, than some customs that we have already discarded, or whether they are now really adapted to the general welfare of society. We should remember that society outgrows its institutions just as a boy becomes too big for his clothes, and that in a metaphorical sense the past is strewed with cast-off garments.

I

It is not my purpose to enter very minutely into the land question, my conception of its nature being very different from that usually entertained among students of the problem, but, the land question being a special form of perpetuated monopoly, it is interesting to trace its ramifications in the early writings of Herbert Spencer, embodied in his Social Statics, and in the works of our American reformer, Henry George, who is now at war with Mr. Spencer because the latter has apparently decided to sacrifice human rights on the altar of Mammon. The essential evil of private or perpetual ownership is that when all the available, or useful, or fertile land in any country is apportioned among its people under private ownership, the earth will continue turning around every twenty-four hours. Meanwhile men will go out of the country by death, and other men come into it by birth, just as if the land remained accessible to the entire people under common ownership. In about seventy-five years later than any date which may be selected, the 1 See "A Perplexed Philosopher," by Henry George.

people who then live in that country will be a new people, for those who agree in the present or who agreed in the past to distribute the land, will have died and returned to dust. Some of the new men will have land, gained, probably, by inheritance, a few of them will own vast tracts of farming land, and others will possess smaller but infinitely more valuable tracts in the great centers of population. Many of the new population, sometimes on account of their own characteristics, but often from the mere difference in ancestry, will possess neither land nor anything they can exchange for land. They will be confronted at their birth by the agents of the most gigantic of all monopolies the private absorption and absolute individual control of land, from which is derived all other wealth. Society has established a system by which inheritance. and disinheritance are handed down to future generations, side by side, without any justice in its methods.

In the United States our land laws have met the exigencies of the present very satisfactorily, and homesteads have been popular with the people, but these laws will provide for the future no better than any other laws establishing private ownership. Great trouble will result if the present system remains intact long enough for land to become thoroughly appropriated and monopolized among a denser population.

The history of water-rights in California is a curious record of changes in the nature of ownership within a brief period. When the territory was obtained from Mexico and received its first settlers from the United States, the water of the flowing streams was supposed to belong equally to the people under the doctrine of riparian rights, each occupant of the banks having the right of use, but no right of pollution or diversion.

When gold was discovered, on this account the presence of a large body of water in an auriferous channel

« ÀÌÀü°è¼Ó »