Page:The land, the people, and the coming struggle .djvu/10

 £54,678,412; to-day, including mines and minerals, they exceed £198,000,000; while the land-tax, which in 1800 was about £2,032,000 per annum, is now reduced by redemption to about one-half that amount.

Since the date of the usurpation of power by the territorial aristocracy—viz., since the accession to the throne of the House of Brunswick—land has, according to the Westminster Review, increased in value in Great Britain to a startling extent. Our taxation is constantly and fearfully on the increase; in 1842 it was, without the charge for the Kaffir war, under 57 millions; in 1877 it overtops 78 millions—an increase of 22 millions in twenty-eight years.

Out of this taxation, in this country, less than one-seventy-seventh portion of the burden falls on land. In France, land, prior to the Franco-Prussian war, bore one-sixth of all imperial burdens; in India, nearly one-half of the taxation falls on the land. To make the contrast more striking, we may point out that twenty-five years before the accession of the House of Brunswick, land paid nearly two-thirds of all the imperial taxes, the rents received by the aristocracy being then only the tenth part of what they are to-day. And these rents, which have grown tenfold in two hundred years, for what are they paid? For the natural fecundity of the soil, which the owner seldom or never aids. It is for the use of air, moisture, heat, for the varied natural forces, that the cultivator pays, and the receiver talks of the rights of property. We shall have for the future to talk in this country of the rights of life—rights which must be recognised, even if the recognition involves the utter abolition of the present landed aristocracy. The great rent-takers have been the opponents of progress, they have hindered reform, they kept the taxes on knowledge, they passed combination laws, they enacted long parliaments, they made the machinery of parliamentary election costly and complicated, so as to bar out the people. They have prevented education, and then have sneered at the masses for their ignorance. All progress in the producing power of labour has added to the value of land, and yet the landowner, who has often stood worse than idly by while the land has increased in value, now talks of the labourer as of the lower herd which must be checked and restrained. As Louis Blanc says: "The general wealth and population are susceptible of an almost indefinite increase, and, in fact, never do cease increasing; commerce demands for its operations a territorial basis,