Now, if it is right and expedient thus to deprive the inventor or the author of his own production after a time, and to give the use thereof to the public, what sense or justice is there in allowing a landowner to hold land and to draw an ever-swelling rent to the exclusion, inconvenience, and expense of the people for ever? And by what process of reasoning can a landlord charge me, an author, with immorality or confiscation for suggesting that the same law should apply to the land he did not make, that I myself cheerfully allow to be applied to the books I do make?
For the landlord to speak of confiscation in the face of the laws of patent and of copyright seems to me the coolest impudence.
But there is something else to be said of the landlord's title to the land. He claims the right to hold the land, and to exact rent for the land, on the ground that the land is lawfully his.
The land is not his.
There is no such thing, and there never was any such thing, in English law as private ownership of land. In English law the land belongs to the Crown, and can only be held in trust by any subject.
Allow me to give legal warranty for this statement. The great lawyer, Sir William Blackstone, says—
Accurately and strictly speaking, there is no foundation in nature or in natural law why a set of words on parchment should convey the dominion of land. Allodial (absolute) property no subject in England now has; it being a received and now undeniable principle in law, that all lands in England are holden mediately or immediately of the King.
Sir Edward Coke says—
All lands or tenements in England in the hands of subjects, are holden mediately or immediately of the King. For, in the law of England, we have not any subject's land that is not holden.
And Sir Frederick Pollock, in English Land Lords, says—