State factories distributed amongst penal colonies in accordance with the geographical conditions that will make them most efficient, will furnish garments, shoes, hats, etc., to the other colonies at the cheapest possible price.
By the side of these productions, there will be maintained exactly the same system of private ownership that exists to-day with all the virtues that emulation produces free from the fatal consequences that make failure result in misery, pauperism, prostitution, vagrancy, and crime. For so long as the individual prospers in his private enterprise, he will be encouraged to maintain it; whereas the moment he fails, he will come within the state system under which the private individual having proved his inability to support himself and his family under the competitive plan, will be shown how to support himself and his family by state institutions that will have reduced this task to a science.
That the state will occasionally fail in this task is to be expected. But what is the worst consequence that can result from failure? Nothing more than the maintenance of the competitive system in every field of industry where the state fails. If the state fails to furnish good bread, private initiative will take the baking of bread from the state and will keep it until the state succeeds in furnishing bread to the taste of the public. If the state fails in furnishing garments, private initiative will keep garment making in its hands except in so far as the state makes garments for the inmates of its own institutions.
Many problems connected with this system of production will occur to the mind of the intelligent reader. These problems, however, will be found to belong more strictly to the question of distribution and government control—two subjects that cannot be intelligently discussed until the question of private property in land has been answered.
§ 5. Land
Socialism was formerly defined as including state ownership of land. This idea is to-day, however, abandoned in favor of a much more intelligent system:
One principal difference between the Socialist and the Single Taxer is that the Single Taxer is opposed to state ownership of all land; and it is probable that the Single Taxer is more wise in this respect than the state Socialist. In the first place, the state Socialist who wants all land to be owned by the state ignores some very fundamental facts in human nature: He ignores the fact that humanity has for generations cultivated the instinct of ownership in land. There is nothing dearer in life to the French peasant than the strip of land barely sufficient to support life, and he will cling to that strip of land until some accident has torn it from him and reduced him to the condition of a pauper. Out of this instinct of ownership springs the extraordinary industry of the farmer—an industry which is not excelled or equalled in any but sweated trades.
The life of the peasant or small farmer is one of hardship that leaves no moment for leisure, and of monotony that populates our lunatic asylums.[179] Not only is the life of the farmer one of the hardest, but it is also one of the least secure. The failure of a single crop, the loss of a single horse, disease in a chicken yard, a violent hail-storm—any of these may oblige a farmer to put that first small mortgage on his farm which is the beginning of his ruin. Nevertheless, the farmer sticks to his farm and labors on it from the rising of the sun, through the glare of noon and up to the last ray in the west, because the land is his own and he has for it the kind of affection that a mother has for her child—an affection that makes no sacrifice too great. It would seem unwise to deprive the farmer of the satisfaction of ownership and the community of the industry and productivity which this sense of ownership results in.
There is no conceivable advantage in depriving the farmer of the ownership of his farm. The farmer now pays taxes on his land. The right of the state to exact a tax puts the state in the position of a landlord except that the state calls the tribute it levies on the farm a "tax," whereas the owner calls this tribute "rent." Of course there is a great difference between the tax levied by the state and the rent paid by the farmer to the private owner, because the one is light and the other heavy. This is the material difference which must not be lost sight of in the discussion of the subject. Every farmer expects to pay taxes to the state and all he asks is that the tax be not an onerous one. It can be rendered less onerous in the coöperative commonwealth than to-day because a coöperative commonwealth will not exact payment of taxes in money, but will content itself with payment in produce. Instead of the state taking over the land and depriving the farmer of ownership, and exacting rent, the coöperative commonwealth will leave the ownership in the farmer and exact a tax in produce; and so long as this tax is paid, the farmer will remain the undisputed owner of his land, and will continue to give it that hourly care without which the best results can hardly be obtained.
There is nothing in modern Socialism, therefore, to frighten the farmer. He cannot but benefit by it, for his taxes will be levied in produce instead of in cash; and it is the conversion of farm produce into cash which is the farmer's main difficulty to-day, as was seen when money was discussed.