A Modern Zoroastrian

by S. Laing

Altruism, as Herbert Spencer well puts it, if carried to excess, defeats itself, for in annihilating egoistic vices it annihilates egoistic virtues, and the result is zero—a result which, as ‘nature abhors a vacuum,’ can happily never be attained, and the precepts of the Sermon on the Mount must always remain maxims of private morality, rather than of State regulation.

It is of little use, however, to deal with such generalities; as long as we confine ourselves to extreme instances on either side, it is as easy as it is idle to refute them. Profitable discussion only begins when we enter on the wide intermediate space which lies between the extreme frontier provinces, and, instead of arguing for absolute conclusions, endeavour to discover the happy mean in doubtful cases, where there really are limitations of time and circumstance, and a good deal which may be reasonably said on each side of the question.

Take for instance the case of contract, which has been so much discussed with reference to the Irish question. Nothing can be clearer than that the enforcement of contracts is one of the principal duties of a government. The principle of caveat emptor may occasionally lead to results not altogether consistent with strict morality; but there will always be fools in the world, and it is better they should pay for their folly than that the State should be perpetually interfering in the vain attempt to protect them. The bargain may be a bad one, but it is far better that men should be held to their bargains than that every loser should have a loophole provided to escape by appealing to some legal quibble or State-provided tribunal of arbitration.

But there are limits to this salutary principle. The contract must be a free one, freely entered into by parties who meet on equal terms. If it is a compulsory one, which the weaker party has practically no option of refusing, the case is altered. Thus, in the case of children, it is absurd to say that they are free agents in contracting for the disposal of their labour, and the State properly interferes by Factory Acts to limit the number of hours for which they are to work. So in the relations between landlord and tenant, whenever they meet on equal terms, and the tenant has an option of either taking or refusing to take a farm at the rent asked, both sides must be held to their bargain, however disadvantageous it may turn out for either of them. But if the landlord is practically omnipotent, and the tenant has no alternative but to promise to pay an impossible rent or to be turned out on the roadside and die of starvation, it is by no means so clear that the State should enforce the bargain unless the landlord submits to equitable terms. Or again, if the rent is not due to the intrinsic value of the land, but is a confiscation of the tenant’s improvements, it is far from being self-evident that the law should look only at landlords’ rights and forget all about landlords’ duties.

It is a question rather of fact than of argument or assertion, whether such a state of things does or does not prevail at any particular time in any particular country. If the contracts were fair bargains entered into by free agents, they ought to be enforced whether prices have risen or fallen, leaving it to the humanity and self-interest of landlords to make reasonable reductions. But if they were no more equal bargains than those of slaves or factory-children, the State might fairly interfere to attach equitable conditions to the enforcement of inequitable contracts.

The antithesis between the rights and duties of property, especially in the case of land, is one which raises many nice and difficult questions. Some theorists, like Henry George, are for solving it by ignoring the rights altogether. According to them, private property in land is the source of all the evils that afflict modern society; poverty, depressions of trade, low profits, and low wages are caused by the constant drift towards high rents, due to the possession by a small section of the community of a monopoly in that which is as much a necessity of existence as air or water. Abolish private property in land, and straightway you will have the millennium.

In this extreme form the fallacy of the argument is obvious. You cannot stop at land, but must have the courage of your opinion, and go the full length, with Proudhon, of denouncing all property as robbery. For if the right of individual property is the first condition of civilised society, you can hardly exclude that form of it which, in all ages and all countries, has been practically the most powerful incentive to progress and civilisation.

Compare the United States of America under their homestead laws, with Russia under a system of village communes; or the California of to-day with that of fifty years ago under the Jesuit padres; and you will see that the desire to acquire property in land has been what may be called the high-pressure steam supplying the motive power to reclaim continents and multiply population.

Nor in principle is there any argument for the confiscation of land which would not equally apply to the confiscation of any other sort of property, when theorists, philanthropic at other people’s expense, thought that the owner had more than was good for him, or had acquired it as an unearned increment, without working for it. Suppose two men, A and B, employed as engine-drivers on an American railway, have each saved a hundred dollars. The railway has been a failure: intended to reach a distant terminus, it has stopped halfway in a desert, for want of funds, and for years has paid no dividend. The hundred-dollar shares are only worth ten, and the land at the distant terminus is only worth ten dollars an acre. But A and B are sharp fellows, and see that if speculation ever revives the line will probably be completed, and both shares and land will become valuable. A buys ten shares with his hundred dollars, and B ten acres of land. The boom comes, the capital is found, the line completed, and the shares rise to par, and the land to a hundred dollars an acre. A and B have each realised nine hundred dollars by what may be described, as you like to put it, either as an unearned increment or as providence and foresight. On what principle can you confiscate B’s nine hundred dollars because it is in land, and leave A’s untouched because it is in shares?