Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/353

Rh them, the assimilation may eventually be denied. . . . There is reason to suspect that, while private possession of things produced by labor will grow even more definite and sacred than at present, the inhabited area, which can not be produced by labor, will eventually be distinguished as something which may not be privately possessed. . . . Possibly the communal proprietorship of land, partially or wholly merged in the ownership of dominant men during evolution of the militant type, will be resumed as the industrial type becomes fully evolved.

After quoting these and similar passages from his revised opinions, Mr. Spencer makes the following observations: "The use of the words 'possible' 'possibly' and 'perhaps' in the above extracts shows that I have no positive opinion as to what mayhereafter take place." But of this Mr. Spencer feels sure: Nationalize the land on righteous principles of compensation, and the interest on the purchase-money would exceed the sum now paid in rent. Moreover, it is a "wild belief" that the land would be better managed—i. e., more profitably managed—by public officials than by private owners. "With a humanity anything like that we now know, the implied reorganization would be disastrous."

Well, we have only to do with the humanity that we now know; and being what it is, surely Mr. Spencer should have taken pains from the beginning to consider its manifold weaknesses and temptations. Yet still he repeats that the individual ownership of land was established by force, the assertion that Mr. Laidler and the Labor party of Newcastle stand upon. While, as for his perhapses and possiblies, they are in fact expressions of doubt as to whether the community will or will not resume ownership of the land, but they are not necessarily to be taken in that sense, and any Mr. Laidler might be forgiven if he saw in them a suggestion of the right thing to do, or a prophecy the fulfillment of which it would not be wrong to precipitate. All the more reasonably might he think so when he sees that in these same revised conclusions Mr. Spencer likens the acquisition of property in land by individuals to the old-time "ownership of man by man." "The ownership of land was established by force"; it originated in robbery; at the root it is robbery still. That is the point for Mr. Laidler; and, writing for humanity as we know it, and as the next generation is likely to know it, it is a pity that Mr. Spencer did not guard at once and in the strongest way against the probable use that humanity, as we know it, would make of the assertion. The possible resumption of the land by some totally different generation of humanity, one that we know not of, should not have been committed to print as the righting of a wrong, without the clearest warning that, till that generation comes, land nationalization must be an exceeding great folly, amounting to absolute disaster. For the good of humanity, that