Look at this diagram. A square board, with two men on it; one is black and one is white.
Call the board England, the black pawn a landlord, and the white pawn a labourer.
Let me repeat that every useful thing comes out of the land, and then ask this simple question: If all the land—the whole of England—belongs to the black man, how is the white man going to get his living?
You see, although the population of England consists of only two men, if one of these men owns all the land, the other man must starve, or steal, or beg, or work for wages.
Now, suppose our white man works for wages—works for the black man—what is going to regulate the wages? Will the fact that there is only one beggar make that beggar any richer? If there were ten white men, and all the land belonged to the black man, the ten whites would be as well off as the one white was, for the landowner could find them all work, and could get them to work for just as much as they could live on.
No: that idea of raising wages by reducing the population is a mistake. Do not the workers make the wealth? They do. And is it not odd to say that we will increase the wealth by reducing the number of the wealth makers?
But perhaps you think the workers might get a bigger share of the wealth if there were fewer of them.
How? Our black man owns all England. He has 100 whites working for him at wages just big enough to keep them alive. Of those 100 whites 50 die. Will the black man raise the wages of the remaining 50? Why should he? There is no reason why he should. But there is this reason why he should not, viz. that as he has now only 50 men working for him, he will only be half as rich as he was when he had 100 men working for him. But the land is still his, and the whites are still in his power. He will still pay them just as much as they can live on, and no more.
But you may say that if the workers decreased and the masters did not decrease in numbers, wages must rise.