Some Fruits of Landlordism

Joseph Fels

[Reprinted from Twentieth Century Magazine, April, 1910]

NOTE: - No American thinker who wrought under the compulsion of moral idealism during the last quarter of the nineteenth century has exerted so profound an influence over lofty minds or awakened so great passion for justice in so many earnest and thoughtful men and women as did Henry George, the fundamental democrat and most profound apostle of a land philosophy based on the granite of eternal justice. Throughout America, and we may say throughout the English-speaking world, a large proportion of those who are to-day unselfishly battling for a nobler civilization marked by just social and economic conditions, have at some time come under the magic of Mr. George's moral enthusiasm and his clear and convincing logic. Among this number are business men and statesmen, novelists and philosophers, journalists and poets. Some have failed to find in Mr. George's philosophy the full solution of the great problems confronting us. Others believe it to furnish the basis for a sound social and economic order. Among the latter class is the author of the accompanying paper on English landlordism, Mr. Joseph Fels, one of America's most successful business men. After making a fortune he is devoting a large part of his wealth and energies to a systematic educational agitation aiming at arousing men and women who dare and care to think, in America, Europe and Australasia, to the basic facts of Mr. George's land philosophy and to the great underlying principles that differentiate a democracy from all forms of class rule. While the masters of the feudalism of privileged wealth are reaching out on every hand for unearned gold, seizing and hoarding, hoarding and seizing, and not a few of them are exerting a baleful influence on government, church, school and press, Mr. Fels, now in England, now in America, is busily engaged in preaching the gospel of freedom and fraternity based on equality of opportunities and of rights. He is a successful man in the highest sense of the word, for with him the earning of money is a means to an end - the means by which he is striving to elevate, ennoble and develop the people and immensely enlarge the boundaries of human happiness.

THE EDITOR


Since my return from England I have found it most difficult to convince people of the intense and absorbing interest the English people have taken in the recent election there, as well as in the economic questions raised by the Budget. Our most exciting presidential elections are apathetic by comparison, and I think the real reason why our English cousins are so thoroughly aroused is that land-ownership and the consequent individual appropriation of rent has been carried in England to such an extreme that the people there have come to realize that some immediate solution of the land question is of as paramount necessity to them as an immediate means of rescue would be to a shipwrecked crew.

The English people are awake to the fact that under their very eyes the land has been taken away from them. The commons have been fenced in to make great estates and game preserves, while in towns and cities land is held at such high prices that capital and labor cannot make a living on it. As a consequence, thousands and thousands of native-born Englishmen have been literally forced off the land, thrown out of employment and left without any right in the country they still call theirs, except to tramp the highways. This condition has been brought about by practically exempting land from taxation. Although everybody knows that the value of land in England has increased many thousandfold in the past two hundred years, the landed interests have thus far succeeded in preventing any increase in the valuation of their holdings for the purpose of taxation since a valuation made in the year 1696.

The effect of this has been, first, as I have stated, to favor land monopoly; secondly, to relieve landowners of their share of the expenses of government; and, thirdly, to increase the tax burdens of all other citizens. All exemptions from taxation and all tax-dodging work this way. For every one who escapes, the heavier the burden is which the rest have to bear, and as Tax Dodgers the Lords of England have long held the championship. Their contemptible meanness towards the poor and unfortunate almost surpasses belief. Stealing candy from children would be considered a noble and generous act compared to the whole record of the House of Lords in the matter of taxation.

Said Richard Cobden, speaking in the House of Commons, December 17, 1845 :-

"I warn ministers, and I warn landlords and the aristocracy of this country, against forcing on the attention of the middle and industrial classes, the subject of taxation. For … mighty as I consider the fraud and injustice of the Corn Laws, I verily believe, if you were to bring forward the history of taxation in this country for the last 150 years, you will find as black a record against the landowners as even in the Corn Law itself. I warn them against ripping up the subject of taxation. If they want another league at the death of this one - if they want another organization and a motive - then let them force the middle and industrial classes to understand how they have been cheated, robbed and bamboozled."

Certainly no one can read the literature put out by the Liberals and the speeches of the Cabinet Ministers without being impressed with the overwhelming gravity of the situation in which the English people now find themselves. As a political campaign of education alone, the recent election has been remarkable, and the most strenuous defender of landlordism is silenced when confronted with the records showing the enormous incomes of the landlords, not in a few places only, but in every county and shire in England. Every local newspaper and every speaker could point to home illustrations and conditions showing the effects of landlordism - how enormous the revenues of the great lords were and how they had succeeded for so many centuries in shifting the burden of taxation from themselves to the working classes. And if anyone doubted the truth of these illustrations or the validity of the speaker's argument he had only to read a landowner's attempted reply or attend a Tory meeting and listen to a Tory speaker to become convinced not only of the truth of the indictment against the landed gentry, individually and collectively, but that here was a monstrous wrong that called for immediate remedy. For it should not be overlooked, though it often is, that the vast wealth which finds its way to the pockets of English landlords must be produced by someone. It does not fall from heaven, nor is it cast up by the sea. It is the product of human labor, toil and endeavor, and when the pride and boast of any class in a community is that they do not work, that neither they nor their ancestors for many generations back were ever "tradesmen," and when it is apparent that this class enjoys all the things which workers or "tradesmen" produce, it must be equally manifest that some men are working without getting while other men are getting without working - that some are unjustly enriched while others are robbed.

It is, I am sure, such feelings as these which actuated the English people at the last election. They have vaguely felt for a long time that there was something wrong with their institution of landowning. The fruits of it have begun to taste bitter. They do not yet clearly see all the evils which flow from landlordism and many of them would like to cure the evils without removing the cause, while many others honestly think there must be some other remedy than taxation of land values, that the time is not yet ripe for a change, etc., but these are in the minority. They belong to the more comfortable classes which have not yet felt the full force of an institution which is literally starving people to death.

Speaking for myself as a Single Taxer and for those who think as I do, I would be glad to see far more radical measures proposed than Lloyd-George offers, but I am one of those who politically takes what he can get, and then demands more, people of England challenge the institution, hitherto so sacred to them, of private property in land; when they begin, as they have begun, to question the right of landowners to take all the rent. I look forward with renewed land hope to the time when they will ask what right the landowners have to any rent at all. And I think the logic of events, so to speak, will sooner or later drive the English people to this position. It will be remembered that the strictly analogous question of chattel slavery here in the United States assumed this very phase. It began by an attempt to limit slave-holding, to confine it within a certain territory; but those who favored such a compromise were soon forced to take the positive stand either for slavery or against it; and when the matter got to this point slavery was doomed.

I have spoken particularly of English landlordism, and as if the evils due to it were peculiar to that country; but I do not wish my remarks to be so limited in their application. Landlordism here in the United States is just the same as it is in England, and its effects are just as bad. If its effects are not so apparent, it is simply because, until very recently, we have had vast areas of free land. We are but transplanted Englishmen largely and have brought with us to this country English laws, customs and institutions, and like conditions may be expected to produce like results.

In a recent issue of Life Uncle Sam is depicted as turning a searchlight on Alaska and there discovering the land-grabbers at their same old tricks. Uncle Sam need not have gone so far away from home to find illustrations of how some men by seizing land (on which and from which people alone can live) thereby virtually enslave their fellow-men, and thus in a new country dedicated to freedom and boasted of as Opportunity itself, reproduce all the poverty and degradation to which so many millions of men in the Old World are condemned.

I sometimes think we Americans are the most easily fooled and tricked people on earth. We have been fooled by a tariff so long that even the recent great advance in the price of all necessities of life, concurrently with the growth of immense fortunes to tariff beneficiaries and deepening poverty on the part of the working classes, has not aroused us to the realization of its iniquity. We complain of the extortions of tariff-supported trusts and combines, and yet we send lawyers who are, or have been, in the pay of these combinations as our representatives to Washington, childishly expecting them to guard our interests. Everywhere in our federal and municipal affairs the influence and power of "Big Business" is apparent. Its interests are always conserved while the people are treated as geese to be plucked, just as that corresponding institution, the House of Lords, in England has for so many years, fooled and plucked the English people.

I have assumed that the readers of The Twentieth Century Magazine are familiar with the arguments usually advanced to prove the beneficial results which flow from the taxation of landowners alone; how such a tax would destroy landlordism or the monopoly by some of natural opportunities to the exclusion of others; how it would relieve industry of the heavy burdens now placed upon it in the form of taxes on things which men make; how it would bring about an equitable distribution of wealth so that those who made would have and poverty would thus disappear; how it would make for better social conditions, purify our political life and generally give human nature a chance to develop what is best in it, instead of what is worst. The reason I have done this is because my space is limited and, besides, the argument has been made so often that now no intelligent person ought to plead ignorance of it. If, however, there should be some who read this article who are not familiar with the writings of Henry George, the man who has best formulated and expounded this theory, it is my sincere hope that they will not rest until they have made themselves acquainted with what he has said. Henry George, thirty years ago, foresaw and stated all that could be said on the land question, and to this day his arguments have not been successfully answered or refuted. Henry George, in my opinion, and in the opinion of a constantly increasing number of men, is still the greatest discoverer, sage and statesman that the world has ever seen, and it is with feelings of satisfaction greater than I can express that, to-day, in England, the stronghold of Privilege, the truth which he fought for has been perceived has taken hold on men's consciences, and a war against a monstrous wrong has begun which, though it may be long, cannot fail to have but one result, namely, the overthrow of Privilege in all of its many forms and the triumph of Equal Rights - equal rights to life, to liberty, to the pursuit of happiness, all of which depend on men's equal right to the use of the earth.