Watson's Magazine, Vol. IV, No. 2, April, 1906

by Various

Why? Because they were not ground down by Taxes and Feudal dues.

Could you ask a more convincing illustration?

Mr. Doctrinaire makes the point that when one member of the tribe decided to undertake the arduous task of making a farm out of a few acres of the millions which belonged to the tribe, this industrious member of the community “robbed” all the others when he claimed as his own that which his hands had made. I can see no more “robbery” in this case than in that of another tribesman who went and cut down one of the millions of forest trees which belonged to the tribe, and with painful labor hollowed out this tree and created a canoe. At the time the one tribesman made the canoe, every other tribesman had the same chance to do the same thing. At the time the one tribesman went into the woods and made a farm every other tribesman had the same right. If Mr. Doctrinaire thinks that the first occupant of any particular spot did not have the right to locate a farm, he might as well say that the first finder of the cavern, or the hollow tree, did not have the right to occupy that which he had first found, and yet he knows perfectly well that this right of discovery and occupancy was always recognized from the beginning of time and that from the very nature of things it had to be recognized to prevent the bloodiest feuds in every tribe. (A curious survival of this Right of Discovery is to be seen even now in the claim to the “Bee Tree” by the first to find it.)

Mr. Doctrinaire says, impliedly, that if the tribesman had fenced in no more than the spot out of which he had made a farm, injustice would not have been done to the tribe: but he says the tribesman went further and fenced in a great deal more—“vast areas,” which he could not use, and also “claimed” these as his own. How does Mr. Doctrinaire know that? I did not state anything of the sort. Nor does the historian state anything of the sort. I was tracing title to land to its origin, and I contended that the origin of title to land was labor. Consequently, my contention was that the tribesman fenced in that which his labor had redeemed from the wilderness—his original purpose in fencing it in being partly to identify what was his own, partly to assert his exclusive possession, but chiefly to protect his crop from the ravages of the wild animals that were still roaming at large in the forest. Mr. Doctrinaire must remember that the fencing of the farm was one of the most tremendous difficulties that the pioneer met with. He had no barbed wire; he had no woven wire, he had no convenient sawmill from which he could haul plank. No; he had to cut down enormous trees, and by the hardest labor known to physical manhood, he had to split those trees into rails, and with these rails fence in that little dominion which he rescued from “the wild,” that little oasis in a great desert of savagery.

To put up the fence was heroic work. To keep it up was just as heroic, for forest fires destroyed it from time to time, and the pioneer had to replace the barrier against the encroachment of animal life and the inroads of savagery with as great a tenacity and as sublime a courage as that of the people of Holland, who tore their country from the clutches of the ocean and barred out the sea with dikes. Tell me, that after the pioneer had created this little paradise of his—rude though it might have been—amidst the terrors and the toils and sacrifices of that life in the wilderness, it should be taken from him by the first man who coveted it, and who said, “here, take your crop, that is all you are entitled to: take your crop and give me your farm!” Would that have been right, at the time private property was first recognized by our people in Germany? Would that have been right at the time our pioneer farmers in New England and Virginia created their farms, endured difficulties and dangers which make them stand out in heroic outline on the canvas of history? No, by the splendor of God! It would have been robbery and nothing less than robbery for the tribe to have confiscated the farm which the pioneer of America had made—partly with his rifle, partly with his axe, partly with his spade—and throw it into the common lot where the idler and the criminal would have just as much benefit from it as the pioneer who had made the farm.

As to the abuse of land ownership, that is an entirely different question. I agree that there should be no monopoly of land for speculative purposes. The platform of the People’s Party has constantly kept that declaration as a part of its creed. The abuse of land ownership is quite a different thing from land ownership itself. I am not defending any of its abuses. I am simply saying that the principle is sound. All those things which belong to the class of private utilities should be left to private ownership, because I believe in individualism; but all those things which partake of the nature of public utilities should belong to the public.

Mr. Doctrinaire says that railroads have their power based in the fixed principle of private ownership of land. I deny this utterly. It was always necessary for the civilized community to have public roads. Even the Indians had their great trails which were in the nature of public roads. A public road never of itself did anything injurious to a community. The taking of land for a public road confers a benefit upon the entire community. It is for that reason it is laid out. The amount of land which is taken for a road, whether you cover it with blocks of stone, as the Romans did, or whether you cover it with iron rails, as modern corporations do, can inflict no injury whatever upon the community unless you go further. For instance, if you erect toll gates on the public highways and vest in some corporation the right to charge toll on freight and passengers at those toll rates, then you have erected a tyranny which can rob the traveler and injure the community. In that case, you can clearly see it is not the road, it is not the land over which the road passes, that is hurting the individual and the public. The thing which hurts is that franchise which empowers the corporation to tax the citizens and the property of the citizens as they pass along that highway. In like manner, the road which the transportation companies use could never have inflicted harm upon individuals or communities. The thing which hurts is the franchise which empowers the corporation to rob the people with unjust freight and passenger tolls as they pass along the highway.

Mr. Doctrinaire mires up badly in trying to evade the point which I made about Italy. I contended that while it was true that great estates were the ruin of Italy, there had to be some general cause at work, injurious to the average man, before the soil could be concentrated into these great estates. This is very obvious to anyone who will stop to think a moment. Mr. Doctrinaire thinks that the great estates in Italy were acquired by simply claiming the land and fencing it in, by “each individual claiming far more than he could use.” If all the land of Italy had been claimed and enclosed, the power that these land claimers had over subsequent comers is obvious; but how did “the claimers” get the lands? The most superficial knowledge of Roman History ought to convince Mr. Doctrinaire that Italy was cut up into small holdings until one branch of the government, the aristocracy, represented by the Senate, gathered into its own hands by persistent encroachment all the powers of the State. After that had been done, they fixed the machinery of government so that the aristocracy were almost entirely exempt from public burdens, whereas the common people had to bear not only their just portion, but also the portion which the aristocracy shirked. The ruling class, the patricians, not only escaped their burdens in upholding the State but they appropriated to themselves the revenue which the Roman State exacted from the lower class, the plebeians. The result was that the Italian peasant found himself unable to sustain the burdens which the government put upon him and he abandoned his farm, just as the French peasant quit the land, for the same reason, prior to the French Revolution. In other words, the small proprietor had to sell out to the patrician, and the patricians got these great estates in the same manner that Rockefeller, for instance, got the estate which he now holds at Tarrytown. The Standard Oil King did not simply stretch his wires and “claim” land. He bought out the people who found themselves unable or unwilling to hold their lands. Rockefeller stood relatively on the same ground of advantage held by the Roman patricians. Governmental favoritism, and special privilege, the power of money which he had attained through unjust laws, made him more able to buy than the individual owners around him were to hold. Therefore he absorbed the small estates, and his estate became the “great estate,” just as such great estates were created in Italy.

Mr. Doctrinaire can see the process going on around us. He can see how great estates absorb small estates. Our legislation for one hundred years has been in the interest of capital against labor. A plutocracy which enjoys the principal benefits of government, and contributes almost nothing to the support of the government, has been built up: charters have been granted by which large corporations exploit the public; and in this way great estates, whether in stocks or bonds, or gold, or land, have been created.

The same principles, the same favoritism, the same privilege, working in different ways, brought about the same results in France before the Revolution, in Rome before its downfall, in Egypt, in Persia, in the Babylonian Empire. If there is any one word which can be appropriately used as an epitaph for all the dead nations of antiquity, that word is “privilege.” The government was operated by a ruling class for the benefit of that class, and the result was national decay, national death.