Every permanent improvement of the soil, every railway and road, every bettering of the general condition of society, every facility given for production, every stimulus applied to consumption, raises rent. The landowner sleeps, but thrives.
The volume of this unearned increment is tremendous. Mr. H. B. Haldane, M.P., speaking at Stepney in 1894, declared that the land upon which London stands would be worth, apart from its population and special industries, "at the outside not more than £16,000 a year." Instead of which "the people pay in rent for the land alone £16,000,000, and, with the buildings, £40,000,000 a year." Those £16,000,000 constitute a fine levied upon the workers of London by landlords.
A similar state of affairs exists in the country, where the farms are let chiefly on short leases. Here the tenant having improved his land has often lost his improvements, or, for fear of losing the improvements, has not improved his land nor even farmed it properly. In either case the landlord has been enriched while the tenant or the public has suffered.
A landlord has an estate which no farmer can make pay. A number of labourers take small plots at £5 an acre, and go in for flower culture. They work so hard, and become so skilful, that they get £50 an acre for their produce. And the landlord raises the rent to £40 an acre.
That is "unearned increment," or "compound rent." The landlord could not make the estate pay, the farmer could not make it pay. The labourer, by his own skill and industry, does make it pay, and the landlord takes the proceeds.
And these are the men who talk about confiscation and robbery!
Do I blame the landlord? Not very much. But I blame the people for allowing him to deprive their wives and children of the necessaries, the decencies, and the joys of life.
But if you wish to know more about the treatment of tenants by landlords in England, Scotland, and Ireland, get a book called Land Nationalisation, by Dr. Alfred Russell Wallace, published by Swan Sonnenschein, at 1s.
That private landowners should be allowed to take millions out of the pockets of the workers is neither just nor reasonable. There is no argument in favour of landlordism that would not hold good in the case of a private claim to the sea and the air.