CHAPTER XVIII. GRADUAL RESUMPTION OF PUBLIC LANDS BY THE STATE.
Necessity of Agrarian Reform—Crown Lands, Church Lands, and Corporation Lands to be immediately resumed, and their Rent applied to the relief of Taxation—The Rich have no right to meddle with them—Needed, by the exploited Millions, as a Fulcrum to raise them from the Earth.
The first three resolutions of the National Reform League affirm (as already observed) only provisional or temporary measures to redress temporary grievances. They apply to pauperism, public and private indebtedness, and to onerous and unequal taxation, which, though great and oppressive evils, are nevertheless but natural and inevitable consequences of the gigantic social wrongs they emanate from, and which are grappled with in the four last resolutions. But for radically bad agrarian and commercial laws, there would be no pauperism, no overwhelming public and private debt, no oppressive and unequal taxation. It is these laws that are at the bottom of all the mischief; it is these laws that have produced the pauperism, the indebtedness, the taxation, and that would produce them again were they extinguished this hour. Therefore, to have a permanent cure of our social evils we must radically reform our agrarian and commercial systems. Resolutions 4, 5, 6, and 7 show how this may be done. But, meanwhile, the evil consequences of our agrarian and commercial systems cannot brook delay: they must be dealt with provisionally and summarily before the permanent remedy can be applied. Paupers cannot be left to starve, debtors to be overwhelmed with usury and law expenses, and struggling millions to be ground down with oppressive rates and taxes, while our agrarian and commercial systems are being reformed by the slow operation of the measures suggested in Resolutions 4, 5, 6, and 7. These several classes must have speedy relief; else relief will come too late. The effect of Peel’s monetary and free-trade measures in aggravating the burdens of debts and taxes while it diminishes the means of meeting them, and in multiplying paupers while it impoverishes ratepayers, renders it absolutely necessary to deal speedily and summarily with the evils of pauperism, indebtedness, and taxation. Hence the three first resolutions of the League. By perusing them attentively, the reader will find that they, at one and the same time, go to mitigate the evils of pauperism, indebtedness, and taxation by just and efficient provisional measures, and to prepare the way for those larger and permanent measures by which Resolutions 4, 5, 6, and 7 seek to extirpate social evil altogether.
In the preceding chapter we have shown cause for Resolution No. 1; we now proceed to show cause for Resolution No. 2, which is as follows:—
“In order to lighten the pressure of rates, and, at the same time, gradually to diminish, and finally to absorb, the growing mass of pauperism and surplus population, it is the duty of the Government to appropriate its present surplus revenue, and the proceeds of national or public property, to the purchasing of lands, and the location thereon of the unemployed poor. The rents accruing from these lands to be applied to further purchases of land, till all who desired to occupy land, either as individual holders or industrial communities, might be enabled to do so. A general law, empowering parishes to raise loans upon the security of their rates, would greatly facilitate and expedite the operation of Government towards this desirable end.”
If it be but an act of justice to paupers and ratepayers that the rates should be levied and dispensed as Resolution No. 1 suggests; it is no less an act of justice to both that the rates should be expended in the most beneficial manner for all parties, and finally dispensed with altogether when no longer necessary. Resolution No. 2 has this end in view. It asks the government and ratepayers to use the public money in the most advantageous way for the public. It does not ask them to take money from one class to give to another, nor to relieve the pauperism that is at the risk of what may be elsewhere. All surplus revenue in the hands of government is clearly public property: it is raised from the whole body of the public. The proceeds of crown lands, corporation lands, church lands, and various other descriptions of public property are also clearly amenable to public uses, without infringing the rights of private property or vested interests. The seven or eight millions of rates raised annually for the relief of the poor are also public property,—only with this important distinction, that being a legal substitute for the share which the poor formerly enjoyed of the tithes and other ecclesiastical revenues, their destination for the poor has equity as well as law for its sanction. The celebrated William Cobbett estimated that, if everything that was titheable formerly were titheable now (that is, if lay-impropriators had not converted to their own use the “great tithes,” and if they had not also taken possession of the abbey-lands at the time of the Reformation), the poor’s share of the tithes, &c., would be now upwards of ten millions sterling per annum. For this, which was their ancient patrimony, the present poor’s rate is but a substitute. Surely, then, it is not asking too much for the poor to ask that the eight millions arising from this rate should be appropriated to the best advantage for them.
And how could it be better appropriated than by purchasing land, whereon to employ them productively, and locate them in comfortable habitations? At present their lives are a burden to themselves and others. Upon the land they would enjoy independence and happiness—the natural result of their own industry and thrift. After the first year or two they would be able to subsist themselves in comfort. The rents paid by them would, in the first instance, go to liquidate the loans contracted on the credit of the rates; and, these discharged, they would be afterwards available for the purchase of other lands as they came into the market. Thus paupers and ratepayers would be both benefited,—the former made independent, the latter relieved permanently from a grievous and growing burden on their respective parishes. Then, as to the surplus revenue and the proceeds of public property, to what better use could the public possibly apply them than to the location of the industrious poor on the land? Talk of repealing the duty on bricks! talk of a sinking fund to reduce the National Debt!—no sensible man has any faith in these schemes. Every such man knows that no reduction of taxes can possibly benefit those who cannot command employment, or an adequate remuneration for it when they have it. Every such man knows, too, that as long as landlords and capitalists can create what “surplus population” they like, by keeping the people from cultivating land on their own account, there can be no security either for regular employment or adequate wages. Farmers and manufacturers will employ only those they want—those they can make a profit by. The rest will be left to the union bastile or to starvation. But let the surplus revenue and the proceeds of public property be applied in the way we speak of, and, from that moment, the surplus population diminishes with every fresh location on the land; the food of the country is increased in amount and cheapened in price; employment and wages are augmented for the unlocated; and a new and never-failing home market is created for the benefit of all, through the conversion of unemployed paupers (half-starved upon workhouse diet) into substantial husbandmen able to give agricultural produce in exchange for manufactures. There is a vast deal of public property in this country, a portion, at least, of whose proceeds a universal-suffrage parliament would be sure to employ in this way. There are the crown lands; there is still a good deal of unenclosed common (though not less than 6,000,000 acres have been filched from the people during the reigns of the 2nd and 3rd Georges); there are the lands belonging to the church, the universities and the colleges; there are the tithes, too; there is a deal of property in the hands of corporate bodies, and attached to various educational and eleemosynary establishments, and most of these endowments have been altogether perverted from their original destinations.
A universal-suffrage parliament would secure to the poor their full share of benefit accruing from the revenues of all this property. What belongs to the whole public ought to be applied for the advantage of the whole public; and it is only a majority of the whole public that is competent to decide how corporate bodies elected upon property qualifications have a right to dispose of property which equitably belongs to the non-electors as much as to the burgesses having votes. The same remark applies to schools, charities, and other endowments, the original founders of which intended them principally for the benefit of the poor. The crown lands do not belong to the higher or middle classes, more than they do to the working-classes or to the paupers in our union workhouses. Yet the aristocracy and their retainers alone derive any benefit from them. The lands and revenues of the church are public property. A parliament which represents only a fraction of the public has no right to appropriate these lands and revenues to the Established Church, or to any church, if the vast majority of the population desire they should be differently applied. And who can doubt that such majority is totally averse to their present appropriation? Many, like ourselves, might not like to dispossess the present incumbents. But why should not their revenues, as they die off, revert to the public for public uses, and their successors be left (like the ministers of other churches, and like all other professional men) to their own congregations and their own resources? Suppose this had been done twenty or thirty years ago—the revenues of bishopricks and livings, as the incumbents died off, thrown into a common fund for the purchase of lands, and the rents of these lands again applied in the same way—what a goodly slice of the soil, and what a goodly revenue, would be now in the hands of the public! And who would be wronged by such appropriation? Clearly not the then clergy, for the reform would not have taken effect till after their death. Clearly not their present successors; for these would have no legal title to a property which the public and the law had chosen to appropriate otherwise. Indeed, the majority of them—the poor curates—would have been even benefited by the change; for, if left to the voluntary principle, their congregations would provide better for them than does the present Establishment. At all events, they could not be said to have lost what they never had; and even if they fared worse than they do now, they could not blame the public for having “done what it liked with its own.” What was not done twenty or thirty years ago ought to be done now: the public should now insist that church property and every other description of property belonging to the public, should be henceforward devoted only to such public uses as a majority of the public may sanction. Any other application of it is robbery. A parliament has no more right to rob the public for the benefit of individuals, than it has to rob individuals for the benefit of the public. This is their own maxim, and they should be held to it.
The proceeds of public property and the poor’s rate would, if honestly applied, be amply sufficient to locate the unemployed poor upon the land. Estates are every day coming into the market for sale. To the owners it matters not a straw who buys their lands, so long as the full price is paid for it. They are willing to sell, and the public are willing to buy. The funds wherewith to buy are the surplus revenue, the proceeds of public property, and some £8,000,000 of poor’s rate. Assuredly, here is ample means of restoring their own to the people, without robbing anybody. All that is wanted is an honest parliament to legalize the work.
If it be said that such application of public property would benefit the poor only, and be an injustice to the rich, the answer is that the lands so purchased would not be the property of the poor, but the property of the whole nation—rich and poor; and that, inasmuch as the rents accruing therefrom would be applicable to public uses only, the whole public, and not the poor alone, would have the benefit in the remission of rates and taxes. The only disadvantage the rich would suffer from such reform is that it would gradually emancipate industry from their iron grasp. Now that disadvantage is its best recommendation. The rich may have a right to use their own private property as they like (though with respect to land they have no such right), but they can have no right to use the public property otherwise than as a majority of the public may decide—much less to use it for the enslavement and degradation of the great majority.
As to the present parliament doing anything like what is here recommended, it would be madness to expect it. A parliament which represents only those who thrive by labour’s wrongs will never recognise labour’s rights, nor legislate for labour’s emancipation. Such a parliament will never apply public property otherwise than to the injury and enslavement of the industrial classes. If it had a surplus of twenty millions, these classes would not derive a shilling benefit from it. Indeed, not even the distressed portion of the middle classes can command its sympathies where aristocratic interests stand in the way: of this we have a remarkable instance in the result of a motion for the repeal of the window-tax—the tax on air and light. At the same time there was an opportunity of saving about a million a year by calling home the African anti-slavery squadron. But no; the precious House would neither repeal the tax on air and light nor disband the anti-slavery armament. Everybody is now aware that this blockading squadron on the Gold Coast was the veriest humbug that ever provoked derision.
In the next chapter we shall treat of the 3rd Resolution. We are on the eve of great changes, and nothing but a clear understanding by the people of their social rights can enable them to profit by what may occur.
