Page:The State and the Slums.djvu/16

12 "alone of all the great civilised countries the actual tillers of the soil are practically forbidden even the hope of ownership, has been changed into something more humane and sensible; but this is a remedy not dreamt of in Lord Salisbury's philosophy, and foreign to the immediate purpose of the present article.'"

Mr. Chamberlain fancies himself to have a mission to redress the English system of land tenure. We shall see presently that his practical remedy (so far as he has not borrowed it from some more moderate politicians) seems to have been framed under the influence of theories not unlike those of Mr. Henry George, the American agrarian socialist. Mr. Chamberlain may well say that his attack upon the tenure of agricultural land is foreign to the purpose of his essay. No one, reasoning calmly, could for a moment suppose that any amount of peasant proprietorship could diminish the crowding of towns by certain classes, and those the classes who do crowd towns, break or evade sanitary laws, and vex the souls of the inspector and the philanthropist. But let us turn to the remedies actually proposed by Mr. Chamberlain. These are given in seven formal paragraphs, which we extract. But they are prefaced by a statement of a very general and very remarkable nature, upon which it will be necessary to make some comment. The seven paragraphs, meantime, may be summed up in a very few words, with which neither politician, nor social reformer, nor social conservative, will be at all likely to disagree. "Make sanitary law stronger where it appears necessary to do so; and make it easier to work the sanitary laws that exist." This (omitting the preamble) is the entire sum and substance of the extracts that follow, and it is a very remarkable fact that a great many of Mr. Chamberlain's suggestions are law already.

The expense of making towns habitable for the toilers who dwell in them must be thrown on the land which their toil makes valuable, and without any effort on the part of its owners. When these owners, not satisfied with the unearned increment which the general prosperity of the country has created, obtain exorbitant returns from their investment by permitting arrangements which make their property a public nuisance and a public danger, the State is entitled to step in and deprive them of the rights which they have abused, paying only such compensation as will fairly represent the worth of their property fairly used.