The Essential Reform:
Land Value Taxation
In Theory and Practice
C. H. Chomley and R. L. Outhwaite
[Part 11 of 15]
That the monopoly of the soil is the root cause of social distress
the history of the British people abundantly proves, though the fact
that the condition of the common people once left little to be desired
in point of material comfort, owing to land being available to them,
and that each well-marked decline has synchronised with an extension
of private property in the soil is seldom sufficiently recognised. For
instance, writers frequently point to the end of the eighteenth
century and the beginning of the nineteenth as the period when the
labourer sank to the position of a wage slave, when women and little
children toiled and perished under conditions that no slave-owner ever
enforced, when the loss of his slaves meant the loss of valuable
personal property. They then point to the fact that this was the era
when the discovery of steam and the invention of machinery led to the
introduction of the factory system, and deduce that the private
ownership of machinery results in the ownership of those who use it.
But the cause that compelled men, women, and children to go to the
factory-owners and sell their labour in fierce competition with one
another, the cause of which wage slavery was the result, is seldom
disclosed.
The following from a pamphlet issued by the Social Democratic
Federation is a case in point: --
"In 1770 more than half the population were engaged
in agriculture, and of those engaged in the manufacturing industries
the majority were self-employed. The industrial revolution of the
latter end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth
centuries changed all that; it turned an agricultural population
into an industrial one; it created huge factories, in which
thousands of 'hands' were massed together as mere parts of a
machine; it tore the people from the land and crowded them into
slums of great industrial towns, and developed whilst it
consolidated the modern proletariat."
Some further explanation is needed as to why the people were torn
from the soil, and an agricultural turned into an industrial
population by the building of factories. The cause of this creation of
a proletariat becomes clear when it is remembered that in the
eighteenth century 3,000,000 acres of common lands were enclosed, and
in the nineteenth century up to 1854 nearly 6,000,000 more, being an
mount more than one-third of the whole cultivable surface of England
and Wales.
With this fact before us, this realisation in England of the economic
change which we have seen those desirous of getting cheap labour in
South Africa suggested should be effected by depriving the natives of
their communal rights to the soil, we can easily understand how at
this epoch a proletariat was created and industrialism took its
sinister aspect. At this time in Yorkshire alone over half a million
acres of common fields, arable, pasture, and meadow, were enclosed by
specific acts, other areas in the county were enclosed by acts the
acreage to which they related not being disclosed, and other areas
were seized. Can any one doubt that this divorcement of the people
from the soil had a potent influence in driving them into the
factories and mines of Yorkshire, then coming into existence? Nor had
the manufacturers of the North only the locally dispossessed at their
disposal, for in veritable chain-gangs those of the South were drafted
to them. The parish authorities found in this procedure a satisfactory
means of disposing of the children of those who had applied for Poor
Law relief, as they were authorised to apprentice them to any trade.
Mr. Wilkins, in his work, "The Rise and Progress of Poverty in
England," says: --
"To prevent having idiots left upon their hands, the
London local authorities made the mill-owners agree to take one
idiot child with every nineteen sane ones."
Contemporaneous evidence exists to show that the result of the
enclosing of the commons was to depopulate the countryside. The
following is from a tract written in 1786 by a farmer who, after
referring to the enclosures, says: --
"Several hundred villages that forty years ago
contained between four to five hundred inhabitants, very few will
now be found to exceed eighty, and some not half that number; nay,
some contain only one poor decrepit old man or woman, housed by the
occupiers of lands who live in another parish, to prevent their
being obliged to pay towards the support of the poor who live in the
next parish."
In the Board of Agriculture's Report, 1808, as Mr. Wilkins points
out, the fate that had befallen the villagers is disclosed.
Gloucester: "Nothing increased but the poor. Eight farmhouses
filled with them." Bucks: "Milk to be had at 1d. a quart
before. Not to be had now at any price." Northamptonshire: "The
poor deprived of their cows, and great sufferers by the loss of their
hogs." Berkshire: "The poor can no longer keep a cow, and
they are therefore maintained by the parish."
Mr. Forster, of Norwich, a professional Enclosure Commissioner,
lamented that "he had injured 2000 poor people at the rate of 20
a parish."
A writer named John Cowper in 1732 described how villages of 120
farmers or cottagers had in a few years been reduced to four or two
houses, as a result of enclosure.
The famous investigator Arthur Young wrote: --
"By nineteen Enclosure Acts out of twenty the poor
are injured, in some grossly injured. The poor in these parishes may
say, and with truth, 'Parliament may be tender of property; all I
know is I had a cow, and an Act of Parliament has taken it from me.'"
With such facts as these before us we can understand the inspiration
of the old rhyme -
"Why prosecute the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common,
And leave the greater felon loose
Who steals the common from the goose."
That those who were depriving the labourers of their rights in the
soil had in view to reduce them to servitude is not to be doubted.
In the year 1794 there was drawn up for, and published by, the Board
of Agriculture, "A General View of the County of Salop," by
J. Bishton, of Kilsaal, Shropshire. The writer, dealing with the
question of the commons, enthusiastically advocated their enclosure,
for these reasons, amonst others, that the use of the common land by
labourers "operates upon their minds as a sort of independence,
and this idea leads the man to lose many days' work by which he gets a
habit of indolence; a daughter, kept at home to milk a half-starved
cow, being open to temptations, soon turns harlot and becomes an
ignorant, distressed mother instead of a good, useful servant. The
surrounding farmers by this means have neither industrious labourers
nor servants; therefore the commons with the cottages around become a
great burden instead of a convenience."
But the commons enclosed, the labourers "will work every day in
the year, and have their children taught to read and put out to labour
early (the italics are Mr. Bishton's) … and that
subordination of the lower ranks of society, which in the present
times is so much wanted, would be hereby considerably secured."
The commons were duly enclosed, and "that subordination of the
lower ranks of society" was achieved.
To this day the view that the workman should be kept in the position
of a serf maintains on the countryside, and every obstacle is thrown
in the way of the labourer desirous of obtaining a patch of land by
local employers, who see the result would be his independence, which
would end in the wage rate being raised. It finds expression (or did
in 1902) in the regulations of the Crowland Parish Council in respect
to applicants for all allotments. Rule 19 reads: "Occupiers
keeping families regularly at home when capable of servitude,
ineligible."
There can scarcely be need to labour a point so obvious, as that in
the wholesale enclosing of the commons and in the shifting of the
burden of taxation from land-holders on to the people is to be found
the basic cause of the fearful conditions of "wage slavery"
that existed at the time of the inception of the factory system, and
which penal laws against labour combinations accentuated. Those
conditions were subsequently ameliorated by Factory Acts, and far more
so by the operation of trades unionism at a time when a rapidly
increasing demand for labour enabled the workers to raise their wage
above the subsistence level. This force of rapidly expanding trade and
consequent demand tends to diminish, and a time has come when labour
is face to face with the results of the extension and consolidation of
land monopoly that was effected at the beginning of last century.
As we can trace one disastrous decline in the condition of the people
in recent times to the monopoly of the soil, so too the same lesson is
conveyed from centuries past. Mr. Thorold Rogers, in "Six
Centuries of Work and Wages," says: --
"I find that the fifteenth century and the first
quarter of the sixteenth were the Golden Age of English labourers. …Relatively
speaking, the working-man is not so well off now as he was in the
fifteenth century."
Those conditions were due to the association of the people with the
soil that the communal, monastic, and Guild land established. And in
those days of the Golden Age the land-holder, under the obligations of
feudal tenure, provided the cost of maintaining the State.
But these conditions were soon to undergo a rapid change, and in the
reigns of Henry VIII and Elizabeth we find the common people reduced
to beggary and being hanged and imprisoned in tens of thousands for
having no means of subsistence, the Poor Law of Elizabeth being
ultimately enacted for their relief. Here again we can clearly discern
the cause to have lain in the extension of the monopoly ownership of
the soil. Great land-holders were eager to increase their estates to
reap the profits of sheep husbandry, and a profligate king aided their
desires. Then were founded the huge estates which to-day are largely
the cause of the derelict countryside. For Henry VIII despoiled the
Church of the monastic lands, which had always been available to the
people, and handed them over to parasitic courtiers, the Guild lands
going the same way. At the same time the enclosing of the common lands
accentuated the evil. The people themselves knew the cause of their
distress, and in 1549 rose in rebellion under Robert Kett, in Norfolk,
the avowed object being to remedy the wrong done them by the enclosing
of the common lands. It was not the fault of Bernard Gilpin if it were
not known in high quarters also, for, preaching before Edward VI in
1552, he said: --
"As for turning poor men out of their holdings, they
take it for no offence, but say their land is their own, and they
turn them out of their shrouds like mice. Thousands in England,
through such, beg now from door to door, which once kept honest
houses."
Latimer had previously preached his famous sermon, in which lie dwelt
upon the evil that had befallen the nation through the people being
forced from the soil, and referred to his father's prosperous
condition, as a yeoman having the right to the use of the communal
land. Rebellion followed rebellion in the reign of Henry VIII., due to
the driving of the peasantry from the land. Again in the reign of
James I., we find the common people of the Midlands rising in
insurrection under "Captain Pouch," the grievance again
being the deprivation of ancient rights to the soil.
Then again, in the time of the Commonwealth, we have the movement led
by Winstanley, the Digger, who with his followers occupied George's
Hill in Surrey, and began to dig and plant it to emphasise the right
of the people to the soil. The research of Mr. L. Behrens, which has
resulted in his work, "The Digger Movement," has added a
notable contribution to social history. In "An Appeal to the
House of Commons," the Diggers p1ead: "Let the Common People
have the Common and Waste lands set free to them from all Norman
enslaving Lords of Manors." In a letter to Oliver Cromwell occurs
this splendid and prophetic passage, which well might be addressed
to-day to the leader of the Liberal host in Parliament: --
"Now you know, sir, that the Kingly Conqueror was
not beaten by you only, as you are a single man, nor by the Officers
of the Army joined to you; but by the hand and assistance of the
commoners, whereof some came in person and adventured their lives
with you, others stayed at home and planted the earth, and paid
taxes, and gave Free Quarter to maintain you that went to war. …And
now you have the power of the Land in yr hand, you must do one of
these two things: First either set the Land free to the oppressed
Commoners who assisted you … and so take possession of yr
deserved honour; or, secondly, you must only remove the Conqueror's
power out of the King's Hand into other men's, maintaining the old
laws still; and then yr wisdom and honour will be blasted for ever,
you will either lose yourself, or lay the foundation a greater
slavery to posterity than you ever knew."
Space does not permit more than a cursory historical survey, but even
this much suffices to show that each well-marked decline of the common
people in material well-being from the high standard of the Golden Age
has followed as a direct result of the curtailment of their rights to
the use of the soil. In the past they clearly recognised the cause of
their undoing, and did not hesitate to strive to remedy the the injury
at the point of the pike. They have always suffered defeat; hanged and
quartered in one age, beguiled with charity in another, kept quiet
with sops and palliatives in a later. Nevertheless, amongst the common
people the belief cherished through the ages that the earth was
intended for the use of all still lingers on the countryside. And now
that a means has been discovered of establishing common rights,
victory may last be achieved.
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