Page:The rise, progress, and phases of human slavery.djvu/145

 threatened to supplant their own with the millions. And so it ever will be—until the millions shall become wise enough, and moral enough, to be able to dispose summarily of landlordism and usury without further preaching or teaching. Any one who will take the trouble to read over a list of the laws proposed by Julius Cæsar, in any book of Roman antiquities (say Adams's "Antiquities"), will see by their titles that they were all essentially popular, and designed to protect the citizens from the cupidity of land-monopolists, usurers, and dilapidators of the public revenue. In this we have the true secret of his murder by the patrician conspirators, headed by Brutus, who, with all the stoic virtues attributed to him, was a rank aristocrat in grain, and a usurer to boot; for, according to the testimony of his friend Cicero, he used to charge interest for his money at the rate of 48 per cent., and gather it in, too, with the sabre's edge when necessary.

In a well-ordered state of society there would be neither land-usurpers nor money-changers; that is, no persons living by letting out land as private property (since all land would be public property solely, the rents going to the public for public uses only), and no persons living upon what Lord Bacon called "the bastard use of money," that is, upon profits, usury, dividends, &c. In other words, the whole people would be sole landlord, every individual of the people having the same proprietary and the same occupancy rights as every other individual; and with respect to money, it would be a mere representative of wealth or value, which would disappear altogether when the wealth or value it represented disappeared; money would not grow money, as it does now. In a just and rational state of society, all the money in the world could not purchase an acre of land, nor would it enable the owner to add one pound more to his heap, unless he earned it by producing a pound's worth of wealth, or doing a pound's worth of service for society, such as society would recognise. To speak downright, plain English, landlords and money-changers have no right to be in the world at all. Instead of governing society absolutely, as they do now, they have no right to form a recognised part of society at all, no more than wolves and crocodiles have to invite themselves to our Christmas parties that they may devour our children, or than wens, tumours, ulcers, cancers, running sores, or deformities of any sort have to constitute themselves parts of our natural bodies, and to claim to invade, overrun, and subject our whole systems to their pestilential domination. All the talent and all the sophistry in the world could not show any legitimate use for landlords or profit-mongers as such, or anything they do for society that could not be better done without them than with them, and at less than a hundredth part of their cost.