Land Nationalisation Society Tracts.—No. 1.

The Land Difficulty:—How shall we Deal with it?

To all who take an intelligent interest in the affairs of their own country, the land problem, as it presents itself to-day, is one of commanding urgency. With Ireland in a state of scarcely veiled rebellion, with English agriculture in a depressed, ruinous condition, with the Scotch farmers presenting a compact front and demanding reform in their land laws, the land question in truth may be said to have reached the stage of acute crisis. The situation is grave, and two things are undeniable clear. First, that there have been for a long time past natural forces at work conspiring, silently, but nevertheless surely, to lay bare the weak points—we had almost said the hideous deformities—of our land system. Second, that a remedy adequate to the occasion will have to be applied. For us who write as well as for those who read, this last point, the remedy—its thoroughness, its adequacy, the wisdom, in short, of the statesmanship involved in its application, is the one thing needful to consider. Some embarrassment arises here from the variety of panaceas already put forward, and intended to cure the evil. Peasant proprietorship, abolition of primogeniture, of entail and settlement, and, loudest of all, free trade in land—these are a few of the cries that assail our ears. Such panaceas, then, let us briefly but emphatically say, only temporise with the evil; they do not go searchingly to its root. Again, there exists a school of economists who assert that land, being property, should be dealt with like all other property, by free contract between man and man. To such a doctrine it is the object of this paper to give unqualified denial. Land, we submit, is in no sense capable of being regarded as an exchangeable commodity, but is differentiated from all other exchangeable commodities by two considerations. First, it is absolutely limited in quantity; second, it is not producible by man. It is on the land and from the land that man must live. Indeed, we affirm that private property in land is inherently unjust, and in its results evil. Abundant evidence, cogent to a degree, in support of this last assertion, is adducible. Further, we submit that the adoption of the principle here contended for—namely, to nationalise the land, vesting it for ever in the State, and to apply the rent accruing to the relief of State burdens—is the only just, logical, and permanently satisfactory basis upon which the difficulties that now confront the nation can be settled. In support of the radical position taken by the Land Nationalisation Society, we invite attention to the dicta of the following eminent thinkers:—