So far as I am able to judge, there is only one respect in which the pecuniary interest of the landlord appears to be unfavourable to an extension of cultivation. There is probably a considerable quantity of land that might be cultivated with advantage to the community generally by labourers who expected nothing from it but the equivalent of ordinary wages, and which is at present suffered to lie waste, because its produce would be insufficient to yield anything more than wages, and would afford nothing to the capitalist farmer as profit or to the landlord as rent. How far this operates I have, of course, no means of knowing; but here again one may deal with waste ground if it were judged requisite to do so, without resorting to any revolutionary schemes of general land nationalization. Of course much land is kept in an inferior condition, or perhaps absolutely waste, through want of capital on the part of its owners, but the same result would happen under the nationalization plan, through want of capital on the part of the tenants. Mr. George does not propose to supply any of the necessary capital out of public funds, but trusts to the enterprise and ability of the tenants themselves to furnish it; so that the occupier would be no better situated under the State than he would be under an embarrassed landlord, if he enjoyed compensation for his improvements. In either case he would improve as far as his own means allowed, and he would improve no further. But if by nationalization of land we get rid of the embarrassed landlord, we lose at the same time the wealthy one, and the tenants of the latter would be decidedly worse off under the State, which only drew rents, but laid out no expenses. The community, too, and the general cultivation of the country would be greatly the losers. Mr. George has probably little conception of the amount of money an improving landlord thinks it necessary to invest in maintaining or increasing the productive capacity of his land. A convenient illustration of it is furnished by the evidence of Sir Arnold Kemball, commissioner of the Duke of Sutherland, before the recent Crofters' Commission. Sir Arnold gave in an abstract of the revenue and expenditure on the Sutherland estates for the thirty years 1853-1882, and it appears that the total revenue for that period was £1,039,748, and the total expenditure (exclusive of the expenses of the ducal establishment in Sutherland) was £1,285,122, or a quarter of a million more than the entire rental. Here, then, is a dilemma for Mr. George: With equally liberal management of the land on the part of the State, how is he to endow widows and pay the taxes of the bourgeoisie out of the rents? And without such liberal management how is he to promote the spread of cultivation better than the present owners?

The production of food, however, is only one of those uses of the land in which the public have a necessary and growing interest. They require sites for houses, for churches, for means of communication, for a thousand purposes, and the landlord often refuses to grant such altogether, or charges an exorbitant price for the privilege. He has refused sites to churches from sectarian reasons; for labourers' cottages in rural districts for fear of increasing the poor-rate; in small towns with a growing trade from purely sentimental objections to their growth; he has refused rights of way to people in search of pure air, for fear they disturbed his game, and he has enclosed ancient paths and commons which had been the enjoyment of all from immemorial time. I do not speak of the ground rent in large cities where owners are numerous, because that, though a question of great magnitude, involves peculiarities that separate it from the allied question of rural ground-rent, and make it more advantageously treated on its own basis. But in country districts where owners are few, and the possession of land therefore confers on one man power of many sorts over the growth and comfort of a whole community, that power ought certainly to be closely controlled by the State. Its tyrannical exercise has probably done more than anything else to excite popular hostility against landlordism, and to lend strength to the present crusade for the total abolition of private property in land. But here again the cure is far too drastic for the disease. What is needed is merely the prevention of abuses in the management of land, and that will be accomplished better by regulations in the interest of the community than by any scheme of complete nationalization. A sound land reform must—in this country at least—set its face in precisely the contrary direction. It must aim at multiplying, instead of extirpating, the private owners of land, and at nursing by all wise and legitimate means the growth of a numerous occupying proprietary. State ownership by itself is no better guarantee than private ownership by itself for the most productive possible use of the land; indeed, if we judge from the experience of countries where it is practised, it is a much worse one; but by universal consent the best and surest of all guarantees for the highest utilization of the land is private ownership, coupled with occupation by the owner.

INDEX.

Opinions of the Press on the First Edition.

"A work of commanding ability and great practical value. It deserves to be studied by everybody who wishes to understand a series of questions which are just now attracting a large share of attention.... Admirably adapted to dissipate erroneous impressions on the subject."—Scotsman.

"The reader will find much to interest him in Mr. Rae's volume. His introductory chapter is well worth studying, as are also his sketches of Lassalle, Karl Marx, and Professor Winkelblech."—Times.

"Mr. Rae has made a special study of the various phases of Continental socialism, and has therefore peculiar qualifications for this part of his task.... With a special recommendation of the last chapter, we take leave of a useful and ably written book."—Saturday Review.

"Mr. John Rae has already won his spurs as a writer on socialism. The book on that subject which he has just published is the best of its kind, in English at least, that we have seen. Holding an intermediate position between the socialists and the Manchester School, Mr. Rae has just that amount of sympathy with the aims of the socialists which enables him to look at the problems involved from their point of view, and thus to meet their errors fully and directly while doing justice to them in some respects in which hitherto they have hardly received it."—Westminster Review.

"In Mr. Rae's interesting volume full information will be found respecting the leaders of the socialistic movement in Europe, and a clear statement of their teaching."—Literary World.

"A very admirable piece of work, displaying thorough research in the presentation of the various forms of socialistic theory, keen discrimination in their analysis, and a masterly comprehension of the whole economic situation. Mr. Rae's essay on Nihilism is as good as anything that we have seen on this mysterious subject, but there are few persons who are interested in the history of the present century that will not be glad to read the whole book, and some parts of it more than once. We will only add that the analysis of Mr. Henry George's theories is extremely well done. It undermines the very foundations on which Mr. George's structure is built, and the whole fabric dissolves before our eyes."—Evening Post (New York).

"These studies attracted much attention when they first appeared, and readers will be glad to meet them again in this book. A short analysis could not do justice to Mr. Rae's work. What characterizes the work most, is the impression derived from it as a whole; it is the conscientiousness and sincerity with which the author has studied the writers he discusses. The judgments he pronounces are his own. Those who wish, if not a new, yet a more enlarged idea of the principle socialistic theories, will find pleasure in following the effect which they produce on an enlightened mind, the remarks they suggest to him, and the objections he makes to them."—Journal des Economistes (Paris).

"It is the best English text-book on the important subject of which it treats, and like all good text-books, it whets the reader's appetite."—Glasgow Herald.