These modern writers seem to regard rent simply as a result of the ordinary operation of the laws of supply and demand. The concept rent has been generalised so that it can no longer be regarded as a curiosity or an anomaly. The law of diminishing returns loses much of its economic importance, and even the Ricardian theory which is based upon it seems imperilled. After the numerous polemics to which it has given rise, it seems as if this theory, along with the Classical theory of value, were about to be relegated to the class of doctrines in which the historian is still interested but which are apparently of little practical value.[1186]
II: UNEARNED INCREMENT AND THE PROPOSAL TO CONFISCATE RENT BY MEANS OF TAXATION
It does not appear that Ricardo fully realised the damaging consequences which would ensue if the doctrine of rent ever happened to be made the basis of an attack upon the institution of private property. He was quite satisfied with the inference which he had drawn from it in support of the free importation of corn, and did not feel called upon to defend the rent of land any more than the interest of capital, both of which seemed inseparable from a conception of private property.
Other writers proved more exacting. Despite the numerous exceptions met with in actual life, the feeling that all forms of revenue ought to be justified by some kind of personal effort on the part of the beneficiary is fairly deeply rooted in our moral nature. But according to the Ricardian theory the rent of land is a kind of income got without corresponding toil—a reward without merit, and as such it is unjust. Such seems to be the logical conclusion of the Ricardian thesis.
The conclusion thus established is further confirmed by the natural feeling that not only is rent unjust, but the whole institution of private property as well. This feeling is one which all of us share (except those fortunate individuals who happen to be landlords, perhaps!), and is, of course, much older than any doctrine of rent. Movable property is generally the personal creation of man, the result of the toil or the product of the savings, if not of the present possessor, at least of a former one. But land is a gift of nature, a bountiful creation of Providence placed at the disposal of everyone without distinction of wealth or of station. Proudhon’s celebrated dictum is known to most people: “Who made the land? God. Get thee hence, then, proprietor.”[1187] That line of argument is really very old, and Ricardo unwittingly gave it new strength.
The idea of a natural right to the land and of a common interest in it is the instinctive possession of every nation. But in England the feeling seems more general than elsewhere, because, possibly, of the number of large proprietors and of the serious abuses to which the system has given rise. It seems rooted in the legal traditions of the nations. “No absolute ownership of land,” writes Sir Frederick Pollock, “is recognised by our law-books except in the Crown. All lands are supposed to be held, immediately or mediately, of the Crown, though no rent or services may be payable, and no grant from the Crown on record.”[1188] Even as far back as the seventeenth century, Locke, in his work On Civil Government, had ventured to declare that God had given the land as common property to the children of men.
As one approaches the end of the eighteenth century the demands that all lands unlawfully taken from the public should be again restored to it become much more frequent. Sometimes the demand is put forward by otherwise obscure writers, but occasionally it finds support in distinguished and influential quarters. In 1775 a Newcastle schoolmaster of the name of Thomas Spence, in the course of a lecture given before the Philosophical Society of that town, proposed that the parishes should again seize hold of the land within their own area. Thereupon he was obliged to flee to London, where he carried on an active propaganda in support of these ideas, achieving a certain measure of success. In 1781 a distinguished professor of the University of Aberdeen of the name of Ogilvie published an anonymous essay on the rights of landed proprietorship, wherein confiscation was proposed by taxing the whole of the value of the soil which was not due to improvements effected by proprietors. But little notice was taken of his suggestions, despite the fact that they had won the approval of Reid the philosopher. Tom Paine, in a pamphlet published in 1797, gave expression to similar ideas,[1189] and the same views were put forward in a book published in 1850 by a certain Patrick Edward Dove.[1190] The following year Herbert Spencer, in his book Social Statics, claimed that the State in taking back the land would be “acting in the interests of the highest type of civilisation” and in perfect conformity with the moral law. It is true that in a subsequent work he took pains to point out that all that can be claimed for the community is the surface of the country in its original unsubdued state. “To all that value given to it by clearing, making up, prolonged culture, fencing, draining, making roads, farm buildings, etc., constituting nearly all its value, the community has no claim.”[1191] But despite this reservation the justice of the general principle is clearly recognised by him.
Other communities besides England have put forward a similar demand. Not to mention the claims made by socialists like Proudhon and the Belgian Baron Colins, and Christian Socialists like François Huet, we find that a similar method of procedure is advocated by philosophers like Renouvier, Fouillée, and Secrétan. Some of them even go the length of claiming compensation for the loss which this usurpation has involved to the present generation.
Thus, a conception that was already ancient even when the law of rent was first formulated proclaimed the inalienable right of man to the soil and demanded the re-establishment of that right. We shall hear an echo of that ancient belief in all the advocates of land nationalisation, in Stuart Mill, Wallace, Henry George, and Walras;[1192] and this is one of the many links that bind them to those earlier writers. Gossen is a solitary exception.
But a simple pronouncement on the illegality of property does not take us very far. Appropriation of public property for private purposes is undoubtedly a great injustice, but the transaction is so old that retribution would serve little useful purpose, and the authors, were they still alive, would be safely ensconced behind their prescriptive rights. Moreover, most of the present proprietors, possibly all of them, cannot be accused of violent theft. They have acquired their land in a perfectly regular fashion, giving of their toil or their savings in exchange for it. To them it is merely an instrument of production, and their possession of it as legally justifiable as the ownership of a machine or any other form of capital. To take it away from them without some indemnity would not be to repair the old injustice, but to create a new one. Hence it is that the doctrine of the right of the community to the land had little more than philosophic interest until such time as it begot a new theory—the theory of rent.