CHAPTER VIII[ToC]
SOCIALIST VIEWS AND PROPOSALS REGARDING LAND AND THE LANDLORDS
British Socialists, as we have learned in Chapter IV.,[411] adopting the celebrated formula of Proudhon, have proclaimed "Property is theft," and they are of opinion that property in land is a particularly heinous form of theft. Therefore they demand the restitution of the land to the people, not as a matter of expediency but as a matter of right. "Man has a right only to what his labour makes. No man 'makes' the land."[412] "Land is the gift of Nature. It is not made by man. Now, if a man has a right to nothing but that which he has himself made, no man can have a right to the land, for no man made it."[413] "The land belongs by inalienable right not to any body of individuals but to all."[414]
O high cliffs looking heavenward,
O valleys green and fair.
Sea cliffs that seem to gird and guard
Our island once so dear,
In vain your beauty now ye spread,
For we are numbered with the dead;
A robber band has seized the land,
And we are exiles here.
The ploughman ploughs, the sower sows.
The reaper reaps the ear;
The woodman to the forest goes
Before the day grows clear,
But of our toil no fruit we see;
[146] The harvest's not for you and me:
A robber band has seized the land,
And we are exiles here.[415]
Appealing to the passions, hatred, and greed of their followers, and relying on their credulity, Socialist leaders proclaim not only that the landlords are useless, but also that the people will have the land rent free as soon as the present owners have been expropriated. "The landlord, qua landlord, performs no function in the economy of industry or of food production. He is a rent-receiver; that, and nothing more. Were the landlord to be abolished, the soil and the people who till it would still remain, and the disappearance of the landowner would pass almost unnoticed."[416] "Rent is brigandage reduced to a system. So long as the English people are content to be tenants-at-will on their own soil, and to pay for the privilege, they will remain virtually slaves."[417] "The tenant earns the rent. The landlord spends it. If the tenant had not to pay the rent he could spend it himself, and so it would get spent, and get spent by the man who earns it and has the best right to spend it."[418]
Whilst some Socialist agitators are unscrupulous enough to make their followers believe that in the Socialist State they may have land for the asking, others are so unkind as to destroy that pleasing illusion. For instance, we learn from a Fabian pamphlet, "A Socialist State or municipality will charge the full economic rent for the use of its land and dwellings, and apply that rent to the common purposes of the community."[419] Another Socialist authority very pertinently remarks: "It is of not the least consequence to the person who rents the land whether he pays the rent for it to an individual or whether he Pays it to the State,"[420] and therefore it is clear that statements such as "If the tenant had not to pay the rent he could spend it himself," are merely meant to deceive the simple. Tenants, instead of paying their rent to a human landlord, would have to pay it to an impersonal State or municipality, and the latter might prove as grasping and as heartless as rating committees are now.