and badly-housed of the labouring classes, men with stunted bodies and dwarfed minds, with scarcely anything of family life, kept near the starvation line, drudging for long hours, and leading dreary monotonous lives. On estates in Wiltshire, Dorsetshire, and other English counties, agricultural labourers earn a beggarly pittance of ten, eleven, or twelve shillings for a week of eighty or, ninety working hours. As a result of landlordism, the pauperism of country districts is not only perpetuated, but increased.

In consequence of this land appropriation, the position of an agricultural labourer has become a degradation and a misery; and if he has any soul left in him he prefers to go into the town, and finds himself better off at unloading grain, coalheaving, or other casual work. If he has been worked out in the country, he helps likewise to swell the residuum of the town. Thus driven off the land, where there is plenty of room to enjoy healthy and happy lives for hundreds of thousands of men, he drifts to the great centres of population, there to overstock the labour-market or add to the 'submerged tenth.'

Still futher does land monopoly stand responsible for the overcrowding of towns, and all the evils of disease and vice proceeding from it. Our landed system girdles our towns as with a dead wall, enabling the owner of broad acres to refuse one or two of them for town extension, or to ask for them exorbitant prices. It is almost impossible, under the present system, to acquire land in small plots at agricultural prices; and this restriction on the growth of towns is the source of incalculable mischief. For it not only leads to an oppressive increase of land and house rents, and a system of building leases resulting in unsound house-building and injurious to the health of the community, but it likewise tempts town landlords to convert their gardens into lanes of hovels, the result of which has been a concentration of squalor, degradation, and misery, that is the shame alike of our civilisation and our Christianity.

V.

LAND QUESTION-LAND REFORM.

In consequence of such abuses there is a Land Question. From the standpoint of principle or abstract right, private ownership in land, we have seen, is fairly open to criticism. For in the judgment of leading thinkers, the land of every country belongs to the people of that country, and no man is an absolute owner of land. The idea of absolute possession is unknown to English law. Writers have pushed this idea to its ultimate consequences, and pointed out that a claim to exclusive property in the soil involves a land-owning despotism. Herbert Spencer thus puts it: 'If the landowners have a valid right to the surface of our planet, all who are not landowners have no right at all to its surface.' Since the nation is the ultimate owner of the soil, an eminent jurist says that 'all landowners are merely tenants in the eye of the law.' The primary right of ownership in land has always belonged, and must always belong, to the nation; individual rights of ownership can only come by a secondary title, which the nation may at any time, if desirous, take back again. But when the 'tortuous and ungodly jumble' of our Land Laws is considered, and when the evil comes about that the land plainly exists not for the people but for a few persons, it is evident that something needs. to be done. Some will say that reform ought to be instant and thorough, but a system which has been the product of centuries, and which involves enormous interests, cannot be so easily exposed and overturned.

The Land Question has been before the country for fifty years, and it is interesting to trace it from one stage to another, and see how it has developed till it is now the fundamental and overwhelming problem of the day. When it was first raised, it signified a group of minor proposals, such as a cheaper mode of conveyancing and a simpler form of transfer than existed at the time. Nothing could be more modest than such a reform, but it did not touch the fringe of the grievance. Besides dealing with the Corn Laws, Richard Cobden had examined the Land Laws, and found in them as black a record of fraud and injustice as under the protective system; keenly alive to the mischief of primogeniture, tying up land, and a system of taxation that favoured landowners and cheated the public, he used the memorable words: 'If I were five-and-twenty, or thirty, instead of, unhappily, twice that number of years, I would take Adam Smith in hand-I would not go beyond him, I would have no politics in it, and I would have a league for free land, just as we had a free trade in corn.' Such were the utmost demands of the land reformers in the early years of this century. The writings of John Stuart Mill advanced the Land Question another important stage. Accepting Ricardo's theory of rent as being regulated by the inherent qualities of the lands, he inferred that land should be treated on principles different from those which affect other property, and that its value could be enchanced by the labours of others. He advocated not common property in land, but the resumption by the State of future additions to its market value in the shape of improvements. This he called the unearned increment of land.' That proposal met with favour so long as rent was everywhere rising, but since the income from lands has fallen nearly £1,000,000 during the last ten years, the unearned increment is seldom mentioned. Another reform of a more sweeping description has come into vogue-the 'Nationalisation of the Land,' and the two chief advocates of this drastic measure are Henry George, the prophet of San Francisco, and Alfred Russell Wallace, the distinguished naturalist. Henry George's book on

Progress and Poverty, fascinating not only for its deftness in the treatment of economic problems, but for the moral enthusiasm and burning eloquence with which it pleads the claims of justice and equal rights, has had an immense circulation in America and Great Britain, and has done more than anything else to bring the Land Question into public view. He proposes the entire abolition of all taxes by the laying of such a tax on land as would render it unprofitable for anyone to hold it without putting it to its full use. It is not necessary, he argues, to resort to expropriation; it will be enough to increase the land tax so as to absorb rent, and shift the burden of taxation from the fruits of labour, lower the selling price of land, throw it open, when unused, for improvement, put a stop to its monopoly, bring more of it under cultivation, and let labour find access to enlarged natural opportunities. By a substitution of this single land tax for other taxes, the State could let the labourer have the full reward of his labour, and the capitalist the full return of his capital. If it were imposed, it would replace the population on the land, spread prosperity all over the country, and equalise the distribution of wealth. These views of Henry George are not original. In 1854 Patrick Dove published a treatise on The Elements of Political Science, and put forth a theory of Land Reform which so struck the Hon. Charles Sumner, an American senator, that he had an account of it stereotyped in Boston. A letter to this effect from Sumner is in possession of Dove's family. It is the identical theory of Henry George's volume, as a few extracts will show. Mention is made of three sources of poverty, and Dove says the third is 'the work of the laws of the land, which have made such a distribution of the sources of human support that, although Almighty God made a plentiful provision for all, yet some are reduced to poverty, because others, without labour on their part, are elevated to great comparative wealth.' 'The rent-value ought to be allocated to those who create it; I do not hesitate to say, to the Nation.' 'National property there must be somewhere, and assuredly it is more just to take that property from the natural value of the

'There is no

soil than from the individual fruits of industry.' other possible way than to reserve the rents of the soil in perpetuity to the whole of the community, and to extend the same for the benefit of the whole, in paying the government, the judicature, a universal system of education, etc., and in facilitating the progress of the whole community.' 'Either the nation must be sacrificed to the landed interest, or the landed interest must be sacrificed to the interests of the nation. Either the population will found or seek new countries where labour shall meet with a more equitable reward, or a war of classes will ultimately ensue, having for its theme, not liberty as in former days, but property.' Dove concludes his summary of advantages to be derived by allocating the rents of the soil to the nation thus: 'It is the law of God, as declared in the constitution of the terrestrial world, and the law of Christianity, that the industrious man should be rich, and that the man who labours not should be poor. The richest men in England are those who do not labour, and who never did labour.' These extracts show not only that an old Scotch prophet anticipated, and mayhap inspired, the prophet of San Francisco, but that he forecast larger questions of Disestablishment and Disendowment than Ecclesiastical ones; murmurings of which now break everywhere on our ears.

Many of these ends are devoutly to be wished, but whether an immediate substitution of this single tax on rent for all other taxes is now just or fair, every temperate thinker will be disposed to call in question. George would let landlords keep their land, but would tax it eighty or ninety per cent., leaving them just enough to meet the expenses of management. He advocates confiscation of rent, pure and simple, while he allows those who hold the land still to retain it, and still to buy and sell it. He says: 'It is not necessary to confiscate land; it is only necessary to confiscate rent.' This seems to be only a refinement of language, as it still involves confiscation. Admitting it to be so, George discounts the landowner's claim to compensation by arguing that his possession of the land is