Page:The land, the people, and the coming struggle .djvu/14

 In the Liverpool Mercury it was alleged that the wickedly-fraudulent truck system—here, too, cunningly disguised to evade the Truck Act—also prevailed in the Wednesbury district. And yet the noble lords and high-minded gentlemen who thus grind down the poor, and who, by cheating their labourers, demoralise honest labourers into cheats—will preside at pious gatherings, and talk about saving the souls of those whose lives they are damning. Or these born legislators will denounce trades union outrages—these high-minded men, who draw scores of thousands out of the muscle and heart of their wretched workpeople, and then endow a church, and listen to a laudatory sermon preached by the local bishop.

We affirm the doctrine laid down by Mr. Mill and other political economists, "that property in land is only valid, in so far as the proprietor of the land is its improver," and that "when private property in land is not expedient, it is unjust;" we contend that the possession of land involves and carries with it the duty of cultivating that land, and, in fact, individual proprietorship of soil is only defensible so long as the possessor can show improvement and cultivation of the land he holds. And yet there are—as Captain Maxse shows in his admirable essay published in the Fortnightly Review—in Great Britain and Ireland, no less than about 29,000,000 acres of land in an uncultivated state, of which considerably over 11,000,000 acres could be profitably cultivated.

There are many thousands of labourers who might cultivate this land, labourers who are in a semi-starving condition, labourers who help to fill gaols and workhouses. To meet this let the legislature declare that leaving cultivable land in an uncultivated state is a misdemeanour, conviction for which should give the Government the right to take possession of such land, assessing it by its actual return for the last five years, and not by its real value, and handing to the proprietor the amount of, say, twenty years' purchase in Consolidated 3¼ per cent. Stock, redeemable in a limited term of years. The land so taken should not be sold at all, but should be let out to persons willing to become cultivators, on sufficiently long terms of tenancy to fairly recoup the cultivators for their labour and capital, and these cultivators should yearly pay into the National Treasury, in lieu of all other imperial taxes, a certain proportion of the value of the annual produce. This tenancy to be immediately