The Man from Mars: His Morals, Politics and Religion

by William Simpson

You are now, we shall suppose, at the end of the second decade in the history of your city, and many changes are observable, due to the progress of your society and civilization. Your metropolis may contain now about one hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants. The market value of its land surface, about three miles square, has increased, from the government price at which it was purchased by the single or half dozen purchasers, from about seven thousand to three hundred and fifty millions of dollars, and the whole value of the products of industry upon it may be reasonably estimated at a like sum. With the privileges and partnership which labor has enjoyed in this great increase of values, it is so far quiet and satisfied; but unfortunately the inevitable outcome is not so promising to it. The evil effects of your private ownership become more and more apparent as your city advances, and when, under the promptings of human greed and selfishness, your landlords have fairly commenced their raid upon the industries of the city. They now exact from you a tax in the form of land rent alone which consumes yearly the twentieth part of all the products of industry upon their possessions. This enormous tax is exacted without the return of any service whatever except the privilege of a dwelling place.

Your inhabitants are called upon also to provide for the necessities of government, and an additional tax is levied therefore, which takes from the profits of labor and capital an amount equal to the tenth part of all their savings. Because the privilege of becoming a land owner is equal to all, and is the hope of most of you, you have permitted the transformation of this gift of nature into a monopoly, the most arbitrary and consuming that can be conceived.

This gift of nature, however, is not the only one diverted from its equitable distribution, and permitted to become the material of unrighteous exaction. The process of the water, heat, and light supply, so manifestly among the duties of your government to institute and superintend, is given, like your land, to the management and control of private individuals; thus converting these indispensable elements of life and comfort into money getters for wealth, and subtracting to an unnecessary degree from the profits of industry and the savings of labor.

We shall now suppose that your city has arrived at the termination of its fourth decade. Its population has increased two-fold, and its land value has quadrupled; but it is noticeable that your products of industry have not kept pace in their value with this enormous appreciation, and your ground rents alone now consume every ten years the whole cost of all buildings and their contents. In other words, every vestige of the accumulated labor of your city goes into the pockets of its landlords every ten years. Change now becomes apparent in social life. Competition has now reduced the wages of labor, and it has very nearly lost its ability to share in some of the minor operations of capital. The struggles of increasing numbers, precisely the same influence which has depressed wages, have advanced land. Labor has lost much of its old buoyancy and hopefulness. While raiment and food, the products of its own industry, have fallen in price, with a tendency to make up for its reduced income, every other one of its living expenses is greatly increased. Allowing it its proper place with matrimonial ambitions and hopes, the remarkable proportion of one fourth of its hard-earned wages is demanded of it in land rent alone, for a dwelling spot in the midst of a region which nothing else but its own energies have produced from a wilderness. Every single one of the bounties of nature, except the air and sunshine, are inaccessible without the charges of an intercepting medium. The heat, and light-giving materials of the earth, together with water, the most useful and abundant of all, are served out to it burdened with all the costs and profits levied by an organized and irresponsible few.

The capital engaged in your industries adjusts itself to all these burdens, and is quiet under them, because it can readily reimburse itself by transferring all expenses and costs to prices. There is no such escape for labor, which not only pays these monopoly exactions directly, but as a consumer is obliged by an indirect method to foot a large share of these bills for capital. Capital remains contented under these extraordinary demands for another reason. All monopoly enterprises, and especially that one of land, furnish the safest and most profitable reservoirs of investment for its surplus earnings, and when it does not already participate it looks forward to a partnership in their profits.

You can readily understand, then, why the toilers of your city, at this period of its history, should show signs of sinking back into that dependent condition which characterizes them elsewhere upon your planet. A few among them, with great fortitude of restraint and large acquisitiveness, manage to lay by some of their earnings, but the margin between income and expense is so narrow that such a practice is not general. So that from the disabling vicissitudes of life, and a carelessness of habit induced by lack of ambition, comes that distressful state of existence, unknown on our planet, but common enough on yours, where a human being, with abundant stores of food and raiment surrounding him, suffers for enough of them to supply his moderate wants. Poverty, which before had been only exceptional and sporadic, assumes now the proportions of a numerous class among you, and out of which, by a lack of the opportunities of knowledge, crime as naturally appears as weeds in a neglected husbandry.

Another and significant change now becomes apparent in your social state. During the first stages of your city’s existence, there had been no money invested except as capital. Every dollar laid out in that way had been shared by labor. Any increase in the volume of capital brings a corresponding prosperity to those who toil; but the accumulations from the profits of capital have not generally been added to it, and in many cases the capital itself has been led away into the many profitable monopoly enterprises which abound. These now flourish as they never did before. Increase of population and trade has stimulated the various industries to increased supplies, but the prices of all commodities instead of being raised are lowered. The free and open competition within the precincts of capital and labor has effected this; not greatly to the detriment of either, because the producer in one department of industry is a consumer in many of the others, and capital has increased its volume of business to make up for smaller profits. But you have within the borders of your city those money-making contrivances peculiar to your planet, wherein the natural effect of competition is entirely reversed, and where the universal law of supply and demand is completely abrogated. The worst and most disastrous of these is your system of land ownership.

Into this, and the other of your monopolies, capital pours its surplus, and finally retires to them with its accumulations, deserting its partnership with labor, and appearing on the scene in the new form of wealth. From a few instances, so rare as to be conspicuous, your holders of large money accumulations become now a numerous and influential class. While your society at one end has been sinking into poverty, it blooms at the other with signs of unusual thrift. With an increase of luxury on one hand, and of want on the other, your city is now approaching the normal state. A few decades more it will have established within itself those relations between wealth, capital, and labor which are as inevitably the outcome of your land ownership system, as drouth and famine are the outcome of a lack of moisture in the soil.

We shall say now that your city contains a half million of inhabitants. Its surface is not extended in proportion with its increase in population, the cost of space inducing a greater crowding of houses and people. Your labor products, and the land upon which they rest, have been so constantly receding from each other in values, that now, with all the forced economy of space, your piles of goods, merchandise, and houses, if sold at their market value, would not furnish more than a quarter enough of money to purchase the ground beneath them. This enormous increase in the value of your city land is mostly the result of the opportunities its owners enjoy to prey upon the industries, and at this stage the following very remarkable conditions may be observed: While the city’s capital, properly so called, is about three hundred millions of dollars, and the number of its workers in industrial pursuits about one hundred thousand, the aggregate earnings of both labor and capital combined have one quarter of the whole swept away by the demands of your landlords, estimating ground rent alone. And this enormous exaction, remember, is imposed without rendering any service in return. None of your economists will deny that this large drain does not come directly from the industries of your people, and its exhausting effects are daily seen in the gradually hardening lines in the lives of those who toil. In an early period, twenty persons in every hundred of your workers owned a portion of your city’s surface. Now only four per cent are land owners, and within a few decades not more than five in a thousand will dwell or pursue their avocations without the virtual consent of some superintending ground owner, upon whose mercy in abstaining from ejectment or extortion they will remain in constant uncertainty.

The ownership of your city lots will now have gone almost exclusively into the hands of your leisure class; and the vast sums of money drawn monthly for rent, instead of being, as formerly, partly returned as capital, to assist labor in the various industrial enterprises is now either dissipated in luxury, expended in new possessions, or invested in some of the many monopoly undertakings of the day. The effects of this unjust burden are daily apparent. It reduces the possible savings of labor and the accumulations of industry to such a minimum that success in these is the exception rather than the rule. It is mostly because of this monopoly of land that life among your masses is a continuous and uninterrupted struggle; and to this more than all else is due that unequal distribution of wealth which affords only the few that cultivation and knowledge which elevates them, and that dooms the many to an unceasing wear of nerve and muscle to sustain themselves.