Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/392

 370 TH ICONOMIC JOURNAL cultivation will be, and this is oI serious import enough; but, increase or no increase, the private ownership of land and capital necessarily involves the complete exclusion oI the mere worker, as such, from all the economic advantages o! the fertile soil on which he is born, and of the buildings, machinery, and railways he finds around him. Few Individualists, however, now attempt to deny the economic conclusion that the private ownership of land and capital necessarily involves a serious 1or inequality in the distribution of the annual product of the community; and that this inequality bears no relation to the relative industry or abstinence o! the persons concerned. They regard it, however, as impossible to dispossess equitably those who now levy the tribute of rent and interest, and they are therefore driven, like Mr. Courney, silently to drop their original ideal of equality of opportunity, and to acquiesce in the 1ocrioetl continuance of the inequality which they vainly deplore. Mr. Courney, for instance, evidently regards it as immoral to take any step, by taxation or otherwise, which should diminish even by a trifle the income of the present owners of the soil of England and their descendants for ever and ever. This ca, not be done, he argues, without sheer confiscation, which would be, as he says, none the less confiscation because carried out gradually and under the guise of taxation. The problem has, indeed, got to be faced. Either we must submit for ever to hand over at least one-third of our annual product to those who do us the fayour to own our country, without the obligation of rendering any service to the com- munity, and to see this tribute augment with every advance in our industry and numbers, or else we must take steps, as con- siderately as may be possible, to put an end to this state o! things. Nor does equity yield any such conclusive obiection to the latter course as Mr. Courney assumes. Even i! the infatt children of our proprietors have come into the world booted and spurred, it can scarcely be contended that whole generations of their descendants yet unborn have a vested interest to .ride on the backs o! whole generations of unborn workers. Few persons will believe that this globe must spin round the sun for ever charged with the colossal mortgage implied by private owner- ship of the ground-rents of great cities, merely because a few generations of mankind, over a small part of its area, could at first devise no better plan of appropriating its surface. There is, indeed, much to be said in fayour of the liberal