Land Monopoly,
The Curse of the Centuries
H. Martin Williams
[Reprinted from the Single Tax Review,
May-June 1909]
H. Martin Williams, who has written
a series of papers on land monopoly for the Single Tax
Reviewe, of which this is the first installment, is one of
the "old guard" in the movement which began with the
publication of Progress and Poverty in 1879. He has not
ceased during this period his interest and activity in the work.
We are glad to be privileged to print this result of Mr.
Williams mature study of conditions based on statistics he has
carefully collected. -- Editor
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I - Poverty Caused by the Denial of the Common Right to the Use
of the Earth
II - Rise and Growth of Land Monopoly in Great Britain and Ireland
That there is increasing poverty amidst abounding plenty; that there
are hungry men, women and children in a land teeming with grain and
all the fruits of the earth; that there are hundreds upon hundreds of
thousands of men, able and willing to work, in enforced idleness in a
country which, under natural conditions, affords opportunities for
labor and productive enterprise superior to that of any country on
earth, are conditions which should challenge the earnest attention of
all lovers of liberty and justice, and of all who desire to see "a
government of the people, by the people, and for the people,"
endure among the nations of the earth.
These conditions are not confined to any clime or country. They are
as wide-spread as civilization. They are apparently as deep seated as
the institutions of human government. Where civilization has made its
greatest triumphs where human invention and human skill have done most
to economize labor and strength, and increase the productive power of
man; where the refining influences of education have been most potent;
where the arts and sciences have done most to improve and elevate the
human mind, there, strange to say, we find these conditions
intensified.
Beside the greatest wealth we find the most bitter, biting poverty.
Beside the greatest moral and intellectual refinement, we find the
deepest moral and intellectual degradation.
In this wonderfully fair, fruitful, rich land of ours, with its
incomparable, incomputable wealth and its teeming millions of
industrious, willing workers, we find the wheels of industry clogged,
productive enterprises crippled, financial depression everywhere, and
the gaunt forms of Hunger and Want standing in the doorway of
innumerable homes.
These conditions are not the result of natural causes. The earth is
free from famine and pestilence. There has been no visitation of
Providence, leaving destruction and woe in its track.
On the contrary, the seasons have been propitious. The good kind,
loving All-Father has sent His genial sunshine and refreshing showers,
causing the soil to yield generously to the labor of the husbandman.
For years the earth has groaned beneath the load of its abundant
crops.
These conditions then, must result from other than natural causes.
They must be the result of bad laws and an unjust and vicious social
organism. They lie deeper than any system of finance. They are beyond
any question of tariff. They cannot be reached and remedied by any of
the proposed reforms of existing political parties. They come from the
denial of man's natural right to live and move and have his being on
this earth, unhindered and unobstructed by any code of laws, any set
of constitutions or any form of government.
The denial of this natural, inherent, indefeasible, indestructible
right, is the primary, underlying, all-sufficient cause of industrial
and financial depressions, and results from the prevailing system of
land tenure, which permits a few to forestall and monopolize what was
intended by the Creator for the common use and benefit of all mankind.
The right to the elements necessary to sustain life is the sequence
of the right to life itself. If some men are permitted the exclusive
use and ownership of the means necessary to sustain and preserve the
lives of their fellows, to be parted with only on such terms as they
choose to make, then some men are given a property right in the labor
and muscle of other men. In short, they who own the land, own the men
who live on the land. The land monopolist may exact from his less
fortunate brother, such portion of the results of his labor - of the
wealth he produces, - as he may desire, - limited only by the
prickings of an outraged conscience, - for having given him leave to
apply his labor to the land; for vouchsafing him the precious
privilege of exercising a natural right, upon the use of which depends
his very existence.
Hence it is, that we hold land monopoly to be the most monstrous
crime of the ages - the sum of all political villainies - the
continued existence of which means the perpetual drudgery and
ceaseless, unending toil for the masses, and the enjoyment of
fabulous, unearned wealth by the few; the ultimate downfall and ruin
of free government and the ushering in the night of despotism.
Land monopoly is the prolific parent from which have sprung all the
other forms of monopoly. It is a Bohun Upas tree which withers and
blights and kills everything that is touched by the deadly shade of
its poisonous branches.
But it is not so much my purpose to portray the baneful effects of
land monopoly, as it is to show by facts and indisputable statistics,
the existence of the evil, in a manner which will impress its enormity
upon the reader.
This appears to be rendered necessary by the continued asseveration
of those who antagonize the remedy which we propose, that there is not
and cannot be such a thing as land monopoly in the United States with
its hundreds of millions of acres of unused and unoccupied land and
its comparatively sparse population.
Every person of ordinary reading and intelligence, readily admits the
existence and evil effects of the monopoly of the land in the Old
World, but many laughs at the statement that in this new country of
ours, we are suffering from the same curse which they admit exists
abroad.
The history of the rise and growth of land monopoly in Europe is
interesting at this time only for the lesson which it teaches of the
manifold evils which flow from a system which permits the
monopolization of nature's gifts to all mankind.
II
The story of the crimes which have been committed to create and
perpetuate land monopoly in Europe, and especially in Great Britain
and Ireland, is as "familiar as a thrice told tale." The
bare recital of the wrongs and outrages which have been heaped upon
the Irish tenants, the Scotch crofters, and the disinherited poor of
England and Wales, causes the breasts of American citizens to heave
with indignation which finds vent in mass-meeting, speeches,
resolutions and editorials denunciatory of the heartless acts of
British landlords.
Since the study of landlordism or land monopoly in Great Britain
affords the most striking illustration of the evils which result from
the system, it may be instructive to sketch its rise and growth.
Originally, the soil of England was held by the community, and
cultivated by the people in common. The land was as free to every
human creature as the water, the light and the air. Laveleye, the
great Belgian publicist and political economist, in his work on "Primitive
Poverty," says:
"There can be no doubt that originally, Great
Britain was occupied by agrarian communities. … Numerous traces
of the ancient community still exists. …The laws of Edgar speak
of common pasturage, as the ordinary property of every village or
township. Certain remote districts retain the ancient agricultural
system."
In this communal state, the people were happy, independent and free.
This condition of things lasted until the Conquest, when the Norman
robbers subjugated the Saxons, stole their lands and parceled them out
among themselves. In a few years these alien robbers quarreled among
themselves, and the lands stolen from the Anglo-Saxons were stolen
from each other, and again divided up, the stronger plundering the
weaker.
Like their neighbors across the Channel, the ancient Celts held the
land of Ireland in common. But when the Tudors had robbed the Catholic
Church of all the lands that belonged to it, which constituted
one-third of the soil of England, their attention was turned to
Ireland, which they proceeded to wrest from its occupiers by the most
brutal system of pillage ever resorted to by that greatest of land
pirates - England. The history of the crimes and brutalities that
characterized the seizure of the lands of Ulster by that monumental
monarchial land thief, James I, is sickening in its details. Says a
recent writer on this subject:
"This land-grab was carried out in mid-winter under
the most heartrending surroundings. The natives of the soil were
driven out at the point of the sword, their homes were razed to the
ground, and their fields devastated. They were forced onto the
barren waste lands of Connaught, which were so sterile that it had
passed into a proverb. There is not water enough to drown an enemy,
wood enough to burn him, or even hemp enough to hang him. To return
to their native lands was made high treason, and the new seventeenth
century British acreocrats cordoned Ulster around with castle and
cannon, and any Celt, either man, women or child, daring to cross
the border was remorseless y shot down like a dog."
The same writer goes on to say:
"The best part of what was left to the native Irish
by James I and Cromwell, was, after the battle of the Boyne, divided
up among the followers of William, Prince of Orange. It is an
historical fact that one-third of all Ireland came into the hands of
King William III, by the sequestration of estates. He gave one
enormous block of this stolen land to his mistress, Lady Elizabeth
Villiers. To the Earl of Portland, the oldest son of his favorite,
Benwick, Duke of Portland, he granted 135,820 acres out of 1,060,692
acres of confiscated Irish lands."
The processes by which the lords of the soil of England have obtained
their vast estates are equally execrable and criminal. William
Marshall, an eminent British historian, who wrote from 1770 to 1820
says:
"A few centuries ago, nearly the whole of the lands
of England lay in an open and more or less in a communal state. Each
parish or township was considered one common farm."
It is a fact, not disputed by any well informed persons, that out of
a total area of 240,000 acres in Huntingdonshire, 130,000 was
communal.
The Enclosures Act passed by the British Parliaments from 1710 to
1843 in obedience to the dictation of the landocracy, authorized the
lords of the manor to enclose the common lands for their own use, and
made private property of 7,624,249 acres, nearly one-third of the
cultivated area of England, which in 1867 amounted to 25,451,626
acres. More than 600,000 acres of communal lands have been enclosed,
and have become the property of land-grabbers, since 1845. In 1862,
the Forest, the play-ground, of the London poor, having an area of
7,000 acres was reduced to 3,000, the other 4,000 acres being handed
over to the titled aristocrats.
In Scotland vast areas of territory, once covered with happy homes of
the tillers of the soil, are now owned by the titled robbers who have
changed them into deserts and deer forests, and where a few years ago
could be seen the herds of the thrifty husbandman, one sees now only
the wild deer and hears the horn and the baying of the hounds of some
regal hunting party, who could ride for a day over their own
possessions stolen from the rightful occupants of the soil.
To sum up the argument in the case against land monopoly in Great
Britain and Ireland, I quote from an article which appeared in the
London Times a few years ago:
"The extent of the land in the United Kingdom is
72,117,766 acres. Of this extent it appears that 348 owners hold
17,302,466 acres or nearly one-fourth; or, 2,198 owners hold
33,885,967 acres or nearly one-half; or, 10,911 owners hold
52,082,095 acres, which is upwards of two-thirds of all the land in
the United Kingdom. The other third of the land is held by the
multitude, altogether numbering 1,162,772 owners. The average
quantity of land held by each of the 10,911 owners, is 4,773 acres,
and by each of the 1,162,772 owners is 17 acres."
But what of the multitudes in the United Kingdom, who do not own an
inch of soil? In 1881, the population of the United Kingdom was
36,998,032, so that as there are only 1,173,683 of the population who
own land, 35,824,349 of the people are deprived of their natural
inheritance in the soil, which God intended alike for all of his
creatures who might be born in the United Kingdom.
In England the aggregate holdings of twelve of the largest land
owners is 1,058,883 acres; and their respective acreages are, 186,399,
133,001, 102,789 91,024. 87,515, 78,542, 70,022, 68,066, 66,105,
61,018, 57,802, 56,600.
But it is in Scotland that land piracy assumes its most colossal and
magnificent proportions. There the holdings of the twelve largest
land-owners aggregate 4,339,722 acres, and their respective acreages
are 1,326,453,432,369, 424,560, 372,729, 305,831, 302,283, 253,221,
220,663, 194,640, 175,114, 166,151, 165,645.
The aggregate holdings of the twelve largest land-owners in Ireland,
is 1,297,888 acres, and their respective acreages are 156,974,
121,353, 118,607, 114,881, 107,119, 101,030, 95,008, 94,551, 93,629,
86,321, 72,915, 69,501.
The twelve largest land-owners in the United Kingdom and their
respective acreages are as follows:
- Duke of Sutherland -- 1,358,548
- Duke of Buccleugh and Queensbury -- 459,260
- Sir James Matheson -- 406,070
- Earl of Breadelbane -- 372,609
- Earl of Seafield -- 305,891
- Duke of Richmond -- 286,407
- Earl of Fife -- 257,629
- Alexander Matheson -- 220,433
- Duke of Athol -- 194,649
- Duke of Devonshire -- 193,121
- Duke of Northumberland -- 185,515
- Duke of Argyle -- 175,114
In England, 1 person in 20 is an owner of land; in Scotland, 1 person
in 25; in Ireland, 1 person in 79.
In view of these startling facts, is it any wonder that John Ruskins
wrote:
"Though England is deafened with spinning wheels,
her people have not clothes; though she is black with digging coal,
her people have not fuel; and though she has sold her soul for gain,
they die of hunger."
As the result of this wholesome filching of the lands from the common
people by the nobility of Great Britain, and their consequent power to
appropriate the earnings of labor, the inequality of social conditions
is more marked than in any other civilized country on the globe. The
few are immensely rich, while the many are miserably poor, and from
the throats of millions of land-robbed and disinherited British
subjects is going up the hoarse cry of discontent. Hunger and
starvation are staring them in the face, and the Government is
confronted with one of the most serious crises in its history.
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