Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/529

Rh It is not only a question of the townsman; it is also a question of co-operative and trade-union societies, who also would learn to put their investments in land, perhaps producing for themselves, and offering in many cases opportunities of country life to their members who needed rest and change. Unless we persist in follies upon follies in the shape of legislative interferences; of expensive machinery to provide the people with land—machinery that will defeat its own object, for it must be paid for out of the rates, and will therefore increase the burdens on land; of forced agricultural agreements between landlord and tenant that tend to stereotype all farms in their present size; of State-hired allotments that, as in the case of our benighted dealings with Ireland, must tend to weaken the desire for ownership, the land of this country, now thrown upon the market at prices so far below its real value, industriously acquired and held in firm, unalterable fee-simple, will prove the greatest blessing to all classes of our working people. All that is wanted is to keep land free—free alike from Radical messing and Tory messing, and leave it what it naturally is—until spoiled by that blessed politician whose eternal finger finds its way into every pie—the sweetest reward for a man's labor and the most powerful incentive to undergo those labors. If you wish to develop all the virile virtues of our English country folk, and to place before them a worthy goal for their life-efforts, sweep away every obstruction and make it easy for them to gain their own home, held neither at the will of the land-owner nor of that worse modern creation—the changing majority inside Parliament.

I notice that Mr. Spencer still allows himself to think of that ogre, the land-owner, who might clear a district if so minded. That is true; but may I submit to him that it is equally true of a majority, and in one sense more true? A parliamentary majority which once considered itself lord and master of the soil might play any prank under high heaven that once occurred to it. It would be quite likely to turn a perpetuity into a thirty years' tenure, or a thirty years' tenure into a fifteen years' tenure, or to revolutionize every home in England in deference to the last notion that had got uppermost in its infallible head. Moreover, it should be seen that once the spirit of individualism begins to get hold of our people, the action of the landlord who cleared the estate would serve to redouble the efforts of the people to become absolute owners of their property. Unconsciously he would be the instrument of a good greater than the harm he had caused. We have not yet sufficiently profited by Mr. Spencer's teaching to recognize the enormous stimulus for good which there is in every form of evil when once we are fairly on the track of fighting it with the true self-helpful remedies. "What delays and impedes the human race is far less the evil that abounds than the false