The Land Question

Marion Mills Miller

[An introduction to the land question as it arose in the 19th century. Reprinted from Chapter II -- Land-Value Taxation [The Single Tax] of Great Debates in American History, Vol. 10, Economic and Social Questions: Part One. Published in 1913 by the Current Literature Publishing Company, New York]

IN the decade following the introduction of the Homestead Act, and preceding the Civil War, the question of private property in land was seriously pondered in America, although not to the same extent as it was in Great Britain, owing to its obscuration here by the absorbing issue of private property in man (chattel slavery).

Herbert Spencer, the English philosopher, in chapter ix of his Social Statics (1850), demonstrated with Euclidean clearness and cogency the common right of all men to the use of the earth. This work made a profound impression on a number of progressive thinkers in America, although it was not until the close of the Civil War that the philosophy of the author, expressed in this and succeeding works, became generally known and appreciated here.

Even in the days of youth (Spencer was thirty years of age when he published Social Statics, after several years' cogitation on the subject) when, if ever, a man is optimistic, Herbert Spencer had little hope that the restoration of the land to the people would be accomplished, in view of the fact that the institution of private property in land, by law and custom, had permeated every fiber of the social system. Therefore it was little wonder that in advancing years he repudiated chapter ix of his early work, claiming that, in view of the vested private interest in land, the appropriation of rent by the public would be unethical unless the landowners were compensated. On this point Henry George replied to him in his A Perplexed Philosopher (1892).

In the same year which saw the publication of Social Statics (1850), Patrick Edward Dove, a Scots philosopher, published A Theory of Human Progression, in which he came independently to the same philosophic conclusion reached by Spencer, but, in opposition to the despair of the English philosopher, he proclaimed that the restoration of the land to the people would be the next great step in democratic government. He further declared that when the land was taken there would be no compensation to the owners, since this would be no advance in civilization, the people becoming slaves to the debt incurred (literally "bond" slaves) instead of to the land. His conclusions were drawn from the compensated emancipation of the slaves in the British West Indies. By what right, he asked, do you tax the English white laborer to pay the Jamaica man-owner for foregoing an unnatural and unjust privilege in the labor of a black man? When the land question is settled, said he, it will be upon no such inequitable basis.

Dove's book was little read in this country, only the Abolitionists, to whom it was highly recommended by Senator Charles Sumner, being interested in it, and that chiefly because of its position on slavery - Dove's highly optimistic, but yet true, prophecy, that this barbaric institution was doomed to perish within a very few years, being most encouraging to the little band of advanced thinkers who were fighting against forces apparently indomitable.

Neither Spencer nor Dove presented a practical program for the restoration of the land to the people. This remained for political thinkers in America - at that period the most prolific of all countries in invention, which is the adoption and utilization of existing forces and instrumentalities for the accomplishment of new ends in every field of human activity, political and social, as well as industrial. These thinkers, being inheritors of the mental slant of the Revolutionary patriots who had revolted from an empire and founded a republic on the basic democratic idea of the control of the taxing power by the people, naturally turned at once to taxation as the instrument for maintaining that republic by abolishing abuses which had been permitted to remain in the Government at its foundation, either because it was thought that the abuse would die out of itself (as in the case of slavery), or because the abuse had not made itself felt at the time (as in the case of land monopoly).

Now the Constitution, by forbidding the Federal Government to interfere with the domestic institutions of the States, and by recognizing slavery in compelling the return of fugitive slaves, and in counting five slaves as three freemen in apportioning the basis of representation in the popular house of Congress, compelled a political solution for the first great abuse, the private ownership of man (chattel slavery), which had to be abolished before the promise of the Declaration of Independence could be fulfilled and this country become a land where all men had equal rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." No economic solution was possible, although economic arguments were presented by anti-slavery men to induce the slave States voluntarily to abolish the institution which gave them their evil distinction.

But the second great abuse, private ownership of land, or industrial slavery, as the thinkers regarded it, had been left a purely economic question, and so the instrumentality of taxation could here come freely into play.

Indeed, the use of this instrumentality was invited by the Constitution itself, which expressly gave the Federal Government the power to tax the value of land in the States in ratio to population. Furthermore, the opinion of the Supreme Court, delivered by Chief Justice John Marshall, that "the power to tax involves the power to destroy,"[1] permitted the use of this grant to the practical destruction of private ownership of land, and the practical creation of public ownership thereof. Whatever be the nature of a tax, and however small its rate, it accomplishes this conversion or redistribution of property in some manner and to some degree, and is essentially confiscatory in that the principle of compensation to the loser in cases of changes in taxation is not recognized in our laws as obligatory.

Thus the American philosophers who belonged to the class of Spencer and Dove (although they developed their theories independently of these, and, indeed, of each other) made a great advance on the British philosophers, who never thought of taxation as the means of restoring the land to the people.

The first of these American economic revolutionists was Edwin Burgess.

Edwin Burgess (born in London in 1807, died in Racine, Wis., in 1869) emigrated to the United States in the middle 40s, locating in Racine and engaging in his trade as tailor. Acquiring a modest competence and failing in health, he retired from business shortly before the breaking out of the Civil War, and thereafter devoted himself to advancing his theory of restoring the land to the people through the instrumentality of taxation. A series of letters from him on this subject were published in the Racine Advocate during 1859-60. They have been republished in 1912 in pamphlet form by Hyland Raymond and William S. Buffham, Racine, Wis. Say his publishers:

We who were young at that time remember him as a man of liberal ideas in both politics and religion, yet most kindly, moderate, and thoughtful in all things, but in the overshadowing presence of the anti-slavery campaign and the impending Civil War these letters of his were passed over as the irrelevent dreams of a crank, and at the time excited but little note or comment.

Yet here was a man who probably never read the writings of any of the great political economists, yet who, out of a heart overflowing with sympathy for his fellowmen, and especially for the masses of his fellow-countrymen and a wonderful keenness of intellect, evolved practically the whole theory of the single tax as set forth and elaborated twenty years later by Henry George.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

1. The case in which Chief Justice Marshall said that "the power to tax involves the power to destroy," was McCulloch vs. Maryland, reported in 4 Wheaton, 316, in the year 1819.
***The question before the Court was the validity of a statute of Maryland requiring the notes of the branch of the United States Bank established in that State to be issued upon stamped paper, subject to a stamp tax levied by the State. There was at issue not only the constitutional power of Congress to establish the bank, and the bank to establish its branches, but, also, the power of the State to tax such branches. After holding that Congress had the constitutional power to establish the bank, and the bank the right to establish its branches in the State, it was held further that the State, within which the branch was located, could not, without violating the Constitution, tax that branch. The State government had no right to tax any of the constitutional means employed by the government to execute its constitutional powers, and no power by taxation or otherwise to retard, impede, burden or in any manner control the operation of the constitutional laws enacted by Congress to carry into effect the powers vested in the national government.
***At page 431 the Court says: "That the power to tax involves the power to destroy; that the power to destroy may defeat and render use-leas the power to create; that there is a plain repugnance in conferring upon one government the power to control the constitutional measures of another, which other, with respect to those very measures, is declared to be supreme over that which it exerts the control, are propositions not to be denied. …If the State may tax one instrument, employed by the Government in the execution of its powers, they may tax every other instrument. They may tax the mail; they may tax the mints; they may tax patent rights; they may tax the paper of a customs house; they may tax judicial process; they may tax all the means employed by the Government to an excess which would defeat all the ends of government. This was not intended by the American people. They did not design to make their government dependent on the States. . . .The question is, in truth, a question of supremacy; and if the right of the State to tax the means employed by the General Government be conceded, the declaration that the Constitution, and the laws made in pursuance thereof, shall be the supreme law of the land, is an empty and unmeaning declaration."