Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/358

344 Ce serait creer le plus faillible, le plus universel, le plus immediát, le plus inquisitorial, le plus insupportable, et disons, fort heureusement, le plus impossible, de tous les despotismes que jamais cervelle de pacha ou de mufti ait pu conçevoir.

The second course could only lead to the gradual pauperization and ultimate bankruptcy of any country which had the folly to embark in it. Such an experiment would be only comparable.to that of a vast joint-stock company in which all comers were entitled to shares without paying for them.

The distinction drawn by Mr. Herbert Spencer, in common with the late Mr. Mill, between private property in land and private property in things produced by labor is one which I believe to have no economic justification whatever. It ignores the fundamental principle, on which the institution of private property is grounded—viz., that a due relation between demand and supply can be maintained in no other way consistently with personal freedom.

From this point of view the fact that the supply of land is practically limited, and that it is, therefore, a natural monopoly, renders it not less but more necessary that it should be allowed to be the subject of private appropriation.

Sir Henry Maine has summed up the whole question in a few words, which can not be too often repeated:

There are two sets of motives, and two only, by which the great bulk of the materials of human subsistence and comfort have hitherto been produced and reproduced. One has led to the cultivation of the Northern States of the American Union from the Atlantic to the Pacific; the other had a considerable share in bringing about the agricultural and industrial progress of the Southern States, and in old days it produced the wonderful prosperity of Peru under the Incas. One system is economical competition, the other consists in the daily task, perhaps fairly and kindly allotted, but enforced by the prison or the scourge. So far as we have any experience to teach us, we are driven to the conclusion that every society of men must adopt one system or the other, or it will pass through penury to starvation. ("Popular Government.")

To the Editor of "The Times":

As Prof. Huxley admits that his friend A. B.'s title to his plot of land is qualified by the right of the State to dispossess him if it sees well—as, by implication, he admits that all land-owners hold their land subject to the supreme ownership of the State, that is, the community—as he contends that any force or fraud by which land was taken in early days does not affect the titles of