Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/526

510 the change might go further. We have looked on "Social Statics" as one of the most splendid and helpful books ever written in the English language, and even the blot, as it seems to us, of land nationalization could not dim our enthusiasm for it; and now we—in saying "we," it is not an undivided "we" for I admit fully the divisions among individualists on this point—rejoice greatly to think that our leader has, at last, his doubts and hesitations whether land nationalization is a true article in the creed which he has taught us.

May I now add some reasons to those already given in "The Times" why land nationalization is both bad as philosophy and bad as expediency?

1. As philosophy. It is said that the land of a country belongs to the people as a whole. But if so, it is clearly the people, that is, the whole people without exception, to whom it belongs, and not a majority among them. Philosophy must be exact in her terms, and if she says it belongs to the people, she can not possibly mean two thirds or three fourths, or some other unstated quantity short of the whole. It may be, I can readily understand, a matter of practical convenience to politicians and other believers in power to treat a majority as society; but no amount of torture could wring from a Philosophy that knew what she was talking about the admission that the two things are equivalents. The deductions from this are plain. Property belonging to the whole people could never be used by any part of them, for the consent of the whole could not practically be got as regards any special use of it, seeing that every day, almost every hour, that whole is changing. We can, therefore, hardly accept a theory which lands us forthwith in an absurdity.

2. If the soil belongs to society in the abstract, and if, notwithstanding the urgent remonstrances of Philosophy, we decide to interpret the word "society" by the word "majority," why is it taken for granted that it belongs to that majority of the people who at any given moment happen to inhabit it? If the Chinese are overcrowded, or to come nearer home, if the Belgians are overcrowded, or if some part of the Russian people possesses a less attractive portion of the world to live in than our own, can they not claim with unanswerable logic that the doctrine of the majority has no merely local application, but must be treated in a far more comprehensive spirit? If Philosophy says the land of right belongs to the majority, it must also answer, "What majority?" and the nations that are now located on the least advantageous spots will not answer that question in quite the same way as the nations that enjoy the sunny side of the hedge.

3. It is claimed that the present owners may be dispossessed by force because some of them (a quantity that is diminishing