Page:The rise, progress, and phases of human slavery.djvu/129

 of other lands as they came into the market. Thus paupers and ratepayers would be both benefited,—the former made independent, the latter relieved permanently from a grievous and growing burden on their respective parishes. Then, as to the surplus revenue and the proceeds of public property, to what better use could the public possibly apply them than to the location of the industrious poor on the land? Talk of repealing the duty on bricks! talk of a sinking fund to reduce the National Debt!—no sensible man has any faith in these schemes. Every such man knows that no reduction of taxes can possibly benefit those who cannot command employment, or an adequate remuneration for it when they have it. Every such man knows, too, that as long as landlords and capitalists can create what "surplus population" they like, by keeping the people from cultivating land on their own account, there can be no security either for regular employment or adequate wages. Farmers and manufacturers will employ only those they want—those they can make a profit by. The rest will be left to the union bastile or to starvation. But let the surplus revenue and the proceeds of public property be applied in the way we speak of, and, from that moment, the surplus population diminishes with every fresh location on the land; the food of the country is increased in amount and cheapened in price; employment and wages are augmented for the unlocated; and a new and never-failing home market is created for the benefit of all, through the conversion of unemployed paupers (half-starved upon workhouse diet) into substantial husbandmen able to give agricultural produce in exchange for manufactures. There is a vast deal of public property in this country, a portion, at least, of whose proceeds a universal-suffrage parliament would be sure to employ in this way. There are the crown lands; there is still a good deal of unenclosed common (though not less than 6,000,000 acres have been filched from the people during the reigns of the 2nd and 3rd Georges); there are the lands belonging to the church, the universities and the colleges; there are the tithes, too; there is a deal of property in the hands of corporate bodies, and attached to various educational and eleemosynary establishments, and most of these endowments have been altogether perverted from their original destinations.

A universal-suffrage parliament would secure to the poor their full share of benefit accruing from the revenues of all this property. What belongs to the whole public ought to be applied for the advantage of the whole public; and it is only a majority of the whole public that is competent to decide how corporate bodies elected upon property qualifications have a right to dispose of property which equitably belongs to the non-electors as much as to the burgesses having votes. The same remark applies to schools, charities, and other endowments, the original founders of which intended them principally for the benefit of the poor. The crown lands do not belong to the higher or middle classes, more than they do to the working-classes or to the paupers in our union workhouses. Yet the aristocracy and their retainers alone derive any benefit from them. The lands and revenues of the church are public property.