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The People's Jubilee.

The Bible and the Land Question.

English Land Restoration League. (Leaflet No, 9.)

A few years ago we were all talking of the "Jubilee.'

What is a "Jubilee"? The Hebrew books which we call the Old Testament will tell us. The Bible Jubilee was not a "Queen's Jubilee," for the Hebrews were warned by their great religious and political teachers against the evils of monarchy (I. 8am. viii. 10). It was not celebrated by the erection of an "Imperial Institute," or of a "Church House," or by the passing of a Coercion Act. But it was the "People's Jubilee"; and it was kept by a great Act of Land Restoration.

The teaching of the Bible about the Land condemns Landlordism. There is only one land-lord—the God who created the land—and for any one of God's creatures to call himself a landlord is an act of blasphemy against God and of robbery against man. "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." "The earth is the Lord's"—and not "the landlords'." "The earth hath He given to the children of men"—not to a few individuals, or a few thousand privileged families, but to the whole human race. "The land shall not be sold for ever (i.e., ' in perpetuity 'or' in freehold ') for the land is Mine," saith the Lord, "for ye are strangers and sojourners with Me" (Levit. xxv. 23).

Such were the principles upon which the Mosaic Land Laws were based. The land itself cannot be the absolute property of any individual: it belongs to God alone. The use of the laud belongs in equal right to all God's children—to the whole human race, and to every generation of it. "So that no number of individuals can justly grant away the equal rights of other individuals to land, and no generation can grant away the rights of future generations."

The Hebrews in Canaan carried out these principles in their own national life. As they all had equal lights to the land, they made an equal division of the common heritage (Numb. xxvi. 52). In fact they nationalised the land: that is, they gave effect in their law to the principle that the land was the common possession of the whole body of the people. And as they were a nation of farmers and shepherds, all wanting to work directly on the land, the best way of nationalising the land was to divide it equally among the people; though this would be by no means the best way, or a good way at all, in a commercial and manufacturing country like ours. They classed the man who tried to rob another of his equal right to the land among the vilest of criminals (Deut. xxvii. 14—26). "Cursed be he that removeth his neighbour's landmark. And all the people shall say, Amen."

Thus, when the Hebrews began their national life in Canaan, they page 11 all "started fair." Every man had direct and free access to the soil upon which and from which all must live, and no landlord could compel him to pay rent for the right to live and work, flow different would life be in England, which calls itself Christian, if every one of us had a "fair chance" of getting an honest living by his own industry.

But this same "fair chance" was equally the right of each new generation. And so every fifty years came the Year of Jubilee, to preserve and restore this just system of land nationalisation. If a man had lost his share in the national heritage—by carelessness, or drunkenness, or idleness, or misfortune—the law did not allow that his children should be condemned to live all their lives as outcasts and paupers. At the next Year of Jubilee they were restored to their rights, "all contracts of sale to the contrary notwithstanding." (See Levit. xxv.)

When a man lost his hold upon the land, he sank into the condition of a wage-slave; that is, he was obliged to go and work as a "hired servant" upon land belonging to someone else (Levit. xxv. 39-41). But the Year of Jubilee set the wage-slave free, by restoring to him his equal right to the use of the land. So, too, if we wish to set free the wage-slaves of our great cities from their grinding toil, we must work for the Restoration of the land to the People.

This is why the Year of Jubilee was called a year of liberty. "Ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a Jubilee unto you." True liberty does not exist where the land is the monopoly of the few; the man who owns the land practically owns the men who live upon the land. The wage-slaves in our English towns are often worse fed, worse clothed, worse housed, and harder worked than were the chattel slaves in the cotton fields of the Southern States. Landlordism is disguised slavery, and is the more dangerous because of its disguise. Perhaps this is why Moses, the Hebrew legislator, permitted slavery under certain severe restrictions, but would not permit landlordism under any conditions whatever.

Let those, therefore, who wish to bring about a real Jubilee—a Jubilee of the people—join the English Land Restoration League, which is working for the abolition of landlordism.

Let us say through our Members in Parliament what the Hebrew statesman Nehemiah said to the landlords of his day:—

"Restore, I pray you, to them, Even this Day, their lands, their vineyards, their olive-yards, and their houses, also the hundredth part of the money, and of the corn, the wine, and the oil, that ye exact of them."

Will English landlords answer as honestly as did the Hebrew landlords before them?

"Then said they, we will Restore them, and Will Require nothing of them; so will we do as thou sayest" (Neh. v. 11-12). F. V.