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 748 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

not necessary to follow to its full extent here. It has never been more clearly stated than it was by Herbert Spencer, in 185 i, in his chapter of Social Statics, entitled: "The Right to the Use of the Earth." Although Mr. Spencer, forty years later, suppressed this chapter, in deference to an almost ferocious opposition from the ruling classes of English society, he has never refuted it, nor indeed explicitly retracted it. His original statement was, in substance, that all men have an equal right to the use of the earth, just as truly as all men have an equal right to breathe the air; that no man, and no collection or organiza- tion of men, can ever have the right to appropriate the surface of the earth, to the exclusion of the equal right of all other men, any more than they could have the right, if they had the power, to absorb into their own private vaults one-half of all the air surrounding the earth, leaving half mankind to perish from absolute inability to breathe. He showed that this equal right to the use of the earth could not be enforced by a mere equal partition of the surface, according to area, but must be effected by the appropriation of ground rent, for the benefit of the entire community; in other words, that the distribution of land, in order to effect real equality, must be made according to value, and not according to area.

With the exception of those modern philosophers who deny that any man has any rights whatever, no one having the ability to express himself intelligently has ever undertaken to deny that Herbert Spencer's original doctrine was one which ought to have been applied at the origin of society ; and the argument against it has been confined solely to its application to the pres- ent condition of society; which, under the influence of Roman law, has grown entirely away from this foundation of justice. Mr. George, taking up the subject again, many years after Her- bert Spencer had written, but without knowing that anyone had preceded him in the same line of thought, arrived at the same general conclusion ; and then, after reading Herbert Spencer, he went one step farther, and maintained that there could be no vested right in a future and continuing wrong, and therefore that no claim for compensation for the loss of future ground