Municipalization of Land and Local Industries.

It is useless to tax unearned incomes or nationalize rent as long as you have no place to put the money except the treasury of a central government that can do little with it except spend it in gunpowder and international mischief. The Imperial Parliament cannot deal with local industrial difficulties or with the pressing question of the unemployed in bad times. At present, no Municipal Authority can engage in the organization of industry, even for the supply of gas and water, without a special Act of Parliament. We want the Town and County Councils, elected by adult suffrage, and backed with the capital derived from the taxation of unearned incomes, and with compulsory powers of acquiring the necessary land upon payment of a reasonable consideration to the present holders, to be empowered to engage in all branches of industry in the fullest competition with private industrial enterpnse. We want to drop the old political cant of pretending that the tyranny that keeps the London tram-slave away from his home for seventeen hours a day, seven days in the week, is the tyranny of Priest or Jung, or House of Lords, or anything but what it really is—viz., the tyranny of the Board of Directors, elected by the votes of private shareholders, whose only care is to get the biggest dividend that can be sweated out of their employés by long hours and low wages want to recognize that until these employés and their like are transferred from the employment of private capitalists to that of the Town or County Council, which they and their fellow workers control through their votes, their claims as men can never meet with adequate consideration. Local Self-Government can be but a page 9 mockery to the poorer workers until it means the democratic control and administration not merely of a park or a sewer, but of the shops and factories in which the worker has to earn his living. Therefore, we want to overthrow that infamous system of Protection to Private Enterprise by Prohibition of Public Enterprise, which has hitherto prevented the people from using their political organizations as industrial organizations, and thereby escaping in The Only Possible Peaceful Way from the slavery of private employment to the freedom of democratic co-operation. We want to substitute free and honorable municipal employment for charity, and to put a stop to the national wickedness of deliberately making our workhouses prisons, and our prisons hells, lest the wretched laborer should try to get into them as being preferable to the sweater's den, or the nail and chain forge. And we want to Restore the land and industrial capital of the country to the workers of the country, and so realize the dream of the Socialist on sound economic principles, by gradual, peaceful, and constitutional means.