[31] Land, that is, in the technical economic sense. It does not mean the solid part of the earth’s surface—earth as distinguished from water. It means the sum-total of natural resources.
[32] It is hardly necessary to go into the methods by which this control is exercised. In a country where government is elected, as in this, privilege controls through its contribution to party-funds, through bribery, through economic pressure, and all the other means which its control of economic opportunity puts at its disposal.
[33] Women and slaves were discriminated against in this country; and in the State of California today, no person incapable of citizenship may hold land—a provision which excludes Japanese and Chinese.
[34] A great deal is said about credit-monopoly, as if it were something requiring a new and special kind of instrument to break up. But what is credit? Merely a device for facilitating the exchange of wealth, and all wealth is produced from land. The break-up of land-monopoly would therefore at once break up credit-monopoly. Or, putting it in another way, the one and only imperishable security is land—all other forms of security finally run back to it. The break-up of land-monopoly would therefore break up the monopoly of all the secondary and derived forms of security upon which credit could be based.
[35] There is recent precedent for this in American law. Under the XVIII Amendment and the Volstead Act, the Federal Government confiscated ex post facto without a penny of compensation hundreds of millions invested in the liquor business. All this, too, was in labour-made property, not in law-made property, which greatly strengthens the precedent.
[36] The Constitution of one of the Soviet Republics—I think it is Georgia—begins something after this fashion: “It is the purpose of this Government to abolish government.”
[37] The political placeholder must not be confused with those workers in business, industry, or the arts who are not manual labourers, but perform valid services which are exchangeable for wealth and justify their being accounted productive workers.
[38] This is not to be taken as a contradiction of what I have said in Chapter I concerning the argument that women wanted to be subjected. No class ever voluntarily accepts subjection; but when it has been subjected by one means or another, the ignorance that its subjection breeds may cause it to become passively acquiescent in the injustice of its position. It is worth noting that so long as the idea of slavery is tolerated, slaves may accept their position with a certain fatalism, much as the vanquished force in war accepts its defeat.
[39] It is not to be understood that all male workers, individually or in union, take this attitude; but that it does exist among them I have already shown.
[40] This is not to be taken as contradicting the earlier statement that women would not renounce without a struggle the rights they have gained. The world can not move toward freedom without carrying women along; they would not tolerate a dual movement, towards freedom for men and slavery for themselves. But when the general movement is away from freedom, as the movement of political government is at present, the rights of women are endangered along with those of men.