Imagine a King or Parliament granting to an individual the exclusive ownership of the Bristol Channel or the air of Cornwall! Such a grant would rouse the ridicule of the whole nation. The attempt to enforce such a grant would cause a revolution.
But in what way is such a grant more iniquitous or absurd than is the claim of a private citizen to the possession of Monsall Dale, or Sherwood Forest, or Covent Garden Market, or the corn lands of Essex, or the iron ore of Cumberland?
The Bristol Channel, the river Thames, all our high roads, and most of our bridges are public property, free for the use of all. No power in the kingdom could wrest a yard of the highway nor an acre of green sea from the possession of the nation. It is right that the road and the river, the sea and the air should be the property of the people; it is expedient that they should be the property of the people. Then by what right or by what reason can it be held that the land—Britain herself—should belong to any man, or by any man be withheld from the people—who are the British nation?
But it may be thought, because I am a Socialist, and neither rich nor influential, that my opinion should be regarded with suspicion. Allow me to offer the authority of more eminent men.
The late Lord Chief-Justice Coleridge said, in 1887—
These (our land laws) might be for the general advantage, and if they could be shown to be so, by all means they should be maintained; but if not, does any man, with what he is pleased to call his mind, deny that a state of law under which such mischief could exist, under which the country itself would exist, not for its people, but for a mere handful of them, ought to be instantly and absolutely set aside?
Two years later, in 1889, the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone said—
Those persons who possess large portions of the earth's space are not altogether in the same position as possessors of mere personality. Personality does not impose limitations on the action and industry of man and the well-being of the community as possession of land does, and therefore I freely own that compulsory expropriation is a thing which is admissible, and even sound in principle.
Speaking at Hull, in August 1885, the Right Hon. Joseph Chamberlain said—