Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/512

496 “The appropriation of land does so interfere. To test the principle, it will be proper to take for illustration a community like New York or Massachusetts, whose laws maintain private property in land, and in which all the land has been fenced in or substantially so; for such communities are numerous, and, as population increases, will become more numerous. In such a community, obviously, a landless man can not do anything individually. He can not obtain for himself food or clothing or shelter or fire; he is dependent upon other men for such alms or for such employment as they are willing to give him.”

When the fight against the English corn laws was in progress, it was urged by the protectionists that agriculture was the most meritorious of all employments, because it furnished food, without which man could not exist. I recall the apt reply of General Perronet Thompson, who said that, if you were to throw two men into the street, one without any products of agriculture and the other without any products of manufacture, there would not be much to choose between them. One of them would be hungry and the other naked. But the naked man would very soon be as hungry as the other, because he would have no tools to cultivate the land with, and if the temperature happened to be at zero the naked man would be frozen to death before the hungry man would be starved to death.

Mr. Clarke, I believe, makes his living by the practice of law, and, being a landless man, “can not do anything individually.” He is “dependent upon other men for such alms or such employment as they are willing to give him.” I, too, am in this plight. We two are therefore worse off theoretically than any of the Connecticut farmers whose pecuniary condition has been ascertained for us in the report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. I say “theoretically,” but I suppose that actually the case is somewhat different. If we are dependent on farmers for food, they are dependent on us for law and newspapers. They might get on after a fashion without law and without newspapers, perhaps, but they could not get on without houses, clothing, tools, wagons, railroads, ships, medicines, etc., the producers of which in turn have need of law and newspapers. The only man who can do anything “individually” is Robinson Crusoe. Neither of us would care to swap places with him.

There are other economic formulas in the essay before us as unsubstantial as this, but space serves to notice only one more. The merit or demerit of this belongs to Mr. George, Mr. Clarke having merely condensed what Mr. George has set forth at greater length. It relates to land held for speculative purposes, and the argument is, that the single tax will wipe out this speculative element and thus benefit society. Thus, it is said: “A very great