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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 74

IV

IV.

The fourth characteristic of true Liberalism is that it upholds the institution of private property, and every one's right to the fruit of his own labour, but not of his neighbour's. By private property we mean that which we are entitled by immemorial prescription to call our own, as that to which we have an exclusive right within the limits of reason. For instance, if a man buys land and pays for it and raises crops on it, that land and those crops are his. Or if he, in accordance with law and justice, inherit money, or dig silver and gold out of the mine, that money and those metals certainly are his. Or if he shears the wool off the backs of his sheep, and grows flax in his swamps, and manufactures them into woollen and linen cloth, or pays others for doing such things, assuredly the cloth is his, his own or private property. This is what is meant when we allege that everyone has the completest right to the work of his own hands, to the outcome or fruit of his own exertions, manual or mental.

Such political convictions as the foregoing are repudiated by our counterfeit namesakes. They hold that things universally, our very selves and our means, belong to the People, and that the State, as their officer and factotum, has a perfect right to take by taxation, not a small and reasonable share of our means, but just as much as may be required by their wastefulness and extravagance. They are incessantly telling us that under a democracy the will of the majority of the People is all in all, and that the chosen exponents of that will may dispose of us and ours at their good pleasure, and tax us to any extent they please. If such a tryannical creed were acted on fully, there would be little or no difference between our senile condition and the condition of Negro chattel slaves. Their favourite candi- page 8 dates and some of their supporters are already advocating land nationalisation, which is the second step to Communism (the first was State agency or Collectivism). They claim that the land belongs to the People because the Almighty made it equally for all and that all have an equal right to it, and that this right can be realised by imposing a heavy land tax and making the agricultural population pay all the necessary taxation of the nation, and exempting all others.

On the same ground it will next be argued that the silver and gold, the metallic money of the world, belongs to the People equally; for the owners of silver and gold no more make their metals than the land-owners make the soil. In the same way they will next contend, and with cogency, that the People have a right to share equally all the broadcloth and fine linen on earth, because it was the common Father of us all, and not the flock-master and flax-grower, who clothed the sheep with the wool and made the meadows produce flax. Such is the process by which Collectivism and unlimited taxing power in the Government lead to land nationalisation, and from that to Socialism, and from that again to Communism, with free love and universal concubinage.

While marching along the downward path we have been describing, our sham Liberals at present seem more particularly bent on effecting through State-agency what they call a more equitable distribution of the good things of the world. It would be more correct to say that their object was a more equal, even a perfectly equal distribution. Were they able, by the continuation in office of such a Ministry as the present, to accomplish their object, and to divide all the existing wealth equally all round, what would be the final outcome ? The equality produced would not last a year, perhaps not a month. There would be a brief period of holidaying and feasting—the saturnalia of extravagance and dissipation—a morning bright and brilliant, but brief, and ending in a dreary day of clouds and storm. A re-distribution of the world's wealth, in equal shares, would lead to idleness and waste and anarchy and, eventually, to universal destitution, and would carry us back to primeval barbarism and savagery. Instead of this equality being a benefit and a blessing, it would be a calamity and a curse. We even affirm unhesitatingly that it is the very inequalities, which the new or Socialistic Liberalism wishes to remove, that are the real operative causes to which we are indebted for the rise and maintenance and progress of civilisation. It is the inequalities of the page 9 earth's surface which make it habitable and beautiful and grand, so it is the inequalities in the social conditions of men which make them useful in this life and train them for the next. Level the surface of our globe and make it as smooth as a bowling green, and immediately a shoreless ocean would roll around it from pole to pole, and would extinguish all terrestrial life, inclusive of the human race.