Page:The rise, progress, and phases of human slavery.djvu/141

 of those armies; in a word, it is landlords and profitmongers that have everywhere organised society as we find it, and that uphold this organisation for their own advantage, at the cost of more wrong and wretchedness to mankind than tongue or pen ever did or ever will be able to describe. And amongst the greatest of their crimes against humanity is this, that, in addition to the machinery of brute force they keep in pay to uphold their domination, they have rendered an effectual exposure of their system next to impossible through the legions of venal journalists, mercenary orators, and unprincipled littérateurs they subsidise to corrupt public opinion and to mystify the people on every subject that bears upon their weal or woe, as also to hunt down by calumny, and to destroy by private persecution, any and every man that shall dare to lift the veil that hides from the millions their horrible policy.

We must live somewhere; and we must have the needful things to live on. But landlords and profitmongers claim to own every rood of ground in the kingdom, and every house on the land; and we cannot procure the commonest necessaries of life except through some profitmonger. We must therefore either go without homes and without meat and drink altogether, or we must have them from the landlord and profitmonger on their own arbitrary terms. To have them on any terms, too many persons are often obliged, in times of difficulty and danger, to connive at and even laud what they abhor. Again, the wrongs done by ordinary criminals are in general superficial and ephemeral in their effects. The man who steals my watch, or robs my house, does me only as much wrong as I may repair at the cost of earning the price of another watch or of the goods stolen from my house. But they who rob a people of their territory rob them of a priceless possession, for which all the labour and labour's worth in the world would be no adequate compensation. It is not only a robbery of the existing generation, but a robbery of all generations to come; for it is depriving the whole posterity of the disinherited of their fair legitimate share of the raw materials of wealth, which God made equally for the use of all, in order that the descendants of the wrong-doers, so far as human laws can determine it, may be able to grow richer and richer in every succeeding age, by letting out for rents that raw material which is by natural right the inheritance of all.

Perhaps the most extortionate system of legal robbery, in connection with private property in the soil, is found in what are called ground rentals. By virtue of this system, a man like the Duke of Westminster is enabled to realise an income greater than the queen gets for her services (and she does something for her money, but the duke does absolutely nothing for his), merely because the land on which certain houses are built is said, by a fiction in law, to belong to him; and, after a certain number of years, the houses themselves become his property, and he forthwith proceeds to grant fresh leases of them at increased rents.

As to the right of occupation of the land, we should make it the same for all, giving the tenancy to those who would pay most rent