Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/528

512 the hungry, greedy, necessitous state of the politician will ever place itself on the same footing as it has placed the Irish landlord, upon whom the other day it so freely practiced its cheap philanthropy; that it will ever consent to fix its rents in perpetuity, or to abide by them if they were fixed? Then comes all the unutterable official management, the inspectorate, the armies of surveyors and clerks, the arrogant petty kinglets, the red tape, the annoying conditions, the unending correspondence on the subject of the new pump or the new road, the constant battle in Parliament as to new methods of land-tenure, new methods to allow A to replace B in quicker succession, new forms of land-taxation, universal upsetting of existing system, and universal establishment of the last land fancy of the half-baked theorist. Conceive for one moment the slough of despond into which you would plunge back a vigorous, self-helping nation that had once, however hesitatingly and half-heartedly, taken the first few steps along the road of individual initiative, experiment, and progress.

No, it is in another direction our efforts must be turned. Years and years ago, if our political parties were not—both of them—like wild beasts fighting, with no thought or sense, but for the mad struggle in which they lie locked together, biting and tearing with tooth and claw, they would have freed the land. They would have broken the lawyer's yoke that still curses our present generation and again and again prevents the ready sale, and they would have got rid of the heavy burdens of rate and tax that now fall on land and make it an undesirable possession for the poor man. Of all pieces of stupidity none is greater than taxing land just because the rich man at present holds the larger part of it. It is like all other pieces of class legislation, branded on its forehead with the fool's mark. You strike at your supposed enemy and wound yourself. Land must be made free in the only true sense—free from the clutch of the lawyer, free from the visits of the tax and rate collector, and it will then become the greatest source of happiness and comfort to our people. Once really freed, the industrious, vigorous poor will slowly wrest it from the rich man, paying, as has been seen in France, notwithstanding the heavy State burdens on land, a price that the rich man will not pay for its acquisition. Above all other forms of investment for the poor man, land is far away king. It is no pig in a poke for him. He knows it, he understands it in all its good and bad qualities better probably than any other living man; he can not be juggled out of it, when it is once bought, by the carelessness or fraud of directors; he can put all his spare time and spare labor into it. It is not, however, a question of the agricultural laborer alone, but also of the saving mechanic in town, who would look forward to the 'bee farm, or flower or fruit farm, on which he might end his days.