Page:The Complete Works of Henry George Volume 3.djvu/228

 30 THE CONDITION OP LABOR.

On the contrary, it would justify a gigantic no-rent declaration that would take land from those who now legally own it, the landlords, and turn it over to the tenants and laborers. And if it also be that improve- ments cannot be distinguished and separated from the land itself, how could the landlords claim consideration even for improvements they had made ?

But your Holiness cannot mean what your words imply. What you really mean, I take it, is that the original justification and title of landownership is in the expenditure of labor on it. But neither can this justify private property in land as it exists. For is it not all but universally true that existing land titles do not come from use, but from force or fraud ?

Take Italy ! Is it not true that the greater part of the land of Italy is held by those who so far from ever having expended industry on it have been mere appropriators of the industry of those who have? Is this not also true of Great Britain and of other countries? Even in the United States, where the forces of concentration have not yet had time fully to operate and there has been some attempt to give land to users, it is probably true to-day that the greater part of the land is held by those who neither use it nor propose to use it themselves, but merely hold it to compel others to pay them for permis- sion to use it.

And if industry give ownership to land what are the limits of this ownership? If a man may acquire the ownership of several square miles of land by grazing sheep on it, does this give to him and his heirs the ownership of the same land when it is found to contain rich mines, or when by the growth of population and the progress of society it is needed for farming, for garden- ing, for the close occupation of a great city? Is it on the rights given by the industry of those who first used

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