[01] When it is proposed to abolish private
property in land the first question that will arise is that of
justice. Though often warped by habit, superstition, and selfishness
into the most distorted forms, the sentiment of justice is yet
fundamental to the human mind, and whatever dispute arouses the
passions of men, the conflict is sure to rage, not so much as
to the question "Is it wise?" as to the question "Is it right?"
[02] This tendency of popular discussions
to take an ethical form has a cause. It springs from a law of
the human mind; it rests upon a vague and instinctive recognition
of what is probably the deepest truth we can grasp. That alone
is wise which is just; that alone is enduring which is right.
In the narrow scale of individual actions and individual life
this truth may be often obscured, but in the wider field of national
life it everywhere stands out.
[03] I bow to this arbitrament, and accept
this test. If our inquiry into the cause which makes low wages
and pauperism the accompaniments of material progress has led
us to a correct conclusion, it will bear translation from terms
of political economy into terms of ethics, and as the source of
social evils show a wrong. If it will not do this, it is disproved.
If it will do this, it is proved by the final decision. If private
property in land be just, then is the remedy I propose a false
one; if, on the contrary, private property in land be unjust,
then is this remedy the true one.
[04] What constitutes the rightful basis
of property? What is it that enables a man justly to say of a
thing, "It is mine!" From what springs the sentiment which acknowledges
his exclusive right as against all the world? Is it not, primarily,
the right of a man to himself, to the use of his own powers, to
the enjoyment of the fruits of his own exertions? Is it not this
individual right, which springs from and is testified to by the
natural facts of individual organization -- the fact that each
particular pair of hands obey a particular brain and are related
to a particular stomach; the fact that each man is a definite,
coherent, independent whole -- which alone justifies individual
ownership? As a man belongs to himself, so his labor when put
in concrete form belongs to him.
[05] And for this reason, that which a
man makes or produces is his own, as against all the world --
to enjoy or to destroy, to use, to exchange, or to give. No one
else can rightfully claim it, and his exclusive right to it involves
no wrong to any one else. Thus there is to everything produced
by human exertion a clear and indisputable title to exclusive
possession and enjoyment, which is perfectly consistent with justice,
as it descends from the original producer, in whom it vested by
natural law. The pen with which I am writing is justly mine. No
other human being can rightfully lay claim to it, for in me is
the title of the producers who made it. It has become mine, because
transferred to me by the stationer, to whom it was transferred
by the importer, who obtained the exclusive right to it by transfer
from the manufacturer, in whom, by the same process of purchase,
vested the rights of those who dug the material from the ground
and shaped it into a pen. Thus, my exclusive right of ownership
in the pen springs from the natural right of the individual to
the use of his own faculties.
[06] Now, this is not only the original
source from which all ideas of exclusive ownership arise -- as
is evident from the natural tendency of the mind to revert to
it when the idea of exclusive ownership is questioned, and the
manner in which social relations develop -- but it is necessarily
the only source. There can be to the ownership of anything no
rightful title which is not derived from the title of the producer
and does not rest upon the natural right of the man to himself.
There can be no other rightful title, because (1st) there is no
other natural right from which any other title can be derived,
and (2d) because the recognition of any other title is inconsistent
with and destructive of this.
[07] For (1st) what other right exists
from which the right to the exclusive possession of anything can
be derived, save the right of a man to himself? With what other
power is man by nature clothed, save the power of exerting his
own faculties? How can he in any other way act upon or affect
material things or other men? Paralyze the motor nerves, and your
man has no more external influence or power than a log or stone.
From what else, then, can the right of possessing and controlling
things be derived? If it spring not from man himself, from what
can it spring? Nature acknowledges no ownership or control in
man save as the result of exertion. In no other way can her treasures
be drawn forth, her powers directed, or her forces utilized or
controlled. She makes no discriminations among men, but is to
all absolutely impartial. She knows no distinction between master
and slave, king and subject, saint and sinner. All men to her
stand upon an equal footing and have equal rights. She recognizes
no claim but that of labor, and recognizes that without respect
to the claimant. If a pirate spread his sails, the wind will fill
them as well as it will fill those of a peaceful merchantman or
missionary bark; if a king and a common man be thrown overboard,
neither can keep his head above water except by swimming; birds
will not come to be shot by the proprietor of the soil any quicker
than they will come to be shot by the poacher; fish will bite
or will not bite at a hook in utter disregard as to whether it
is offered them by a good little boy who goes to Sunday school,
or a bad little boy who plays truant; grain will grow only as
the ground is prepared and the seed is sown; it is only at the
call of labor that ore can be raised from the mine; the sun shines
and the rain falls, alike upon just and unjust. The laws of nature
are the decrees of the Creator. There is written in them no recognition
of any right save that of labor; and in them is written broadly
and clearly the equal right of all men to the use and enjoyment
of nature; to apply to her by their exertions, and to receive
and possess her reward. Hence, as nature gives only to labor,
the exertion of labor in production is the only title to exclusive
possession.
[08] (2d) This right of ownership that
springs from labor excludes the possibility of any other right
of ownership. If a man be rightfully entitled to the produce of
his labor, then no one can be rightfully entitled to the ownership
of anything which is not the produce of his labor, or the labor
of some one else from whom the right has passed to him. If production
give to the producer the right to exclusive possession and enjoyment,
there can rightfully be no exclusive possession and enjoyment
of anything not the production of labor, and the recognition of
private property in land is a wrong. For the right to the produce
of labor cannot be enjoyed without the right to the free use of
the opportunities offered by nature, and to admit the right of
property in these is to deny the right of property in the produce
of labor. When nonproducers can claim as rent a portion of the
wealth created by producers, the right of the producers to the
fruits of their labor is to that extent denied.
[09] There is no escape from this position.
To affirm that a man can rightfully claim exclusive ownership
in his own labor when embodied in material things, is to deny
that any one can rightfully claim exclusive ownership in land.
To affirm the rightfulness of property in land, is to affirm a
claim which has no warrant in nature, as against a claim founded
in the organization of man and the laws of the material universe.
[10] What most prevents the realization
of the injustice of private property in land is the habit of including
all the things that are made the subject of ownership in one category,
as property, or, if any distinction is made, drawing the line,
according to the unphilosophical distinction of the lawyers, between
personal property and real estate, or things movable and things
immovable. The real and natural distinction is between things
which are the produce of labor and things which are the gratuitous
offerings of nature; or, to adopt the terms of political economy,
between wealth and land.
[11] These two classes of things are in
essence and relations widely different, and to class them together
as property is to confuse all thought when we come to consider
the justice or the injustice, the right or the wrong of property.
[12] A house and the lot on which it stands
are alike property, as being the subject of ownership, and are
alike classed by the lawyers as real estate. Yet in nature and
relations they differ widely. The one is produced by human labor,
and belongs to the class in political economy styled wealth. The
other is a part of nature, and belongs to the class in political
economy styled land.
[13] The essential character of the one
class of things is that they embody labor, are brought into being
by human exertion, their existence or nonexistence, their increase
or diminution, depending on man. The essential character of the
other class of things is that they do not embody labor, and exist
irrespective of human exertion and irrespective of man; they are
the field or environment in which man finds himself; the storehouse
from which his needs must be supplied, the raw material upon which
and the forces with which alone his labor can act.
[14] The moment this distinction is realized,
that moment is it seen that the sanction which natural justice
gives to one species of property is denied to the other; that
the rightfulness which attaches to individual property in the
produce of labor implies the wrongfulness of individual property
in land; that, whereas the recognition of the one places all men
upon equal terms, securing to each the due reward of his labor,
the recognition of the other is the denial of the equal rights
of men, permitting those who do not labor to take the natural
reward of those who do.
[15] Whatever may be said for the institution
of private property in land, it is therefore plain that it cannot
be defended on the score of justice.
[16] The equal right of all men to the
use of land is as clear as their equal right to breathe the air
-- it is a right proclaimed by the fact of their existence. For
we cannot suppose that some men have a right to be in this world
and others no right.
[17] If we are all here by the equal permission
of the Creator, we are all here with an equal title to the enjoyment
of his bounty -- with an equal right to the use of all that nature
so impartially offers.1
This is a right which is natural and inalienable; it is a right
which vests in every human being as he enters the world, and which
during his continuance in the world can be limited only by the
equal rights of others. There is in nature no such thing as a
fee simple in land. There is on earth no power which can rightfully
make a grant of exclusive ownership in land. If all existing men
were to unite to grant away their equal rights, they could not
grant away the right of those who follow them. For what are we
but tenants for a day? Have we made the earth, that we should
determine the rights of those who after us shall tenant it in
their turn? The Almighty, who created the earth for man and man
for the earth, has entailed it upon all the generations of the
children of men by a decree written upon the constitution of all
things -- a decree which no human action can bar and no prescription
determine. Let the parchments be ever so many, or possession ever
so long, natural justice can recognize no right in one man to
the possession and enjoyment of land that is not equally the right
of all his fellows. Though his titles have been acquiesced in
by generation after generation, to the landed estates of the Duke
of Westminster the poorest child that is born in London today
has as much right as has his eldest son.2
Though the sovereign people of the state of New York consent to
the landed possessions of the Astors, the puniest infant that
comes wailing into the world in the squalidest room of the most
miserable tenement house, becomes at that moment seized of an
equal right with the millionaires. And it is robbed if the right
is denied.
[18] Our previous conclusions, irresistible
in themselves, thus stand approved by the highest and final test.
Translated from terms of political economy into terms of ethics
they show a wrong as the source of the evils which increase as
material progress goes on.
[19] The masses of men, who in the midst
of abundance suffer want; who, clothed with political freedom,
are condemned to the wages of slavery; to whose toll laborsaving
inventions bring no relief, but rather seem to rob them of a privilege,
instinctively feel that "there is something wrong." And they are
right.
[20] The widespreading social evils which
everywhere oppress men amid an advancing civilization spring from
a great primary wrong -- the appropriation, as the exclusive property
of some men, of the land on which and from which all must live.
From this fundamental injustice flow all the injustices which
distort and endanger modern development, which condemn the producer
of wealth to poverty and pamper the nonproducer in luxury, which
rear the tenement house with the palace, plant the brothel behind
the church, and compel us to build prisons as we open new schools.
[21] There is nothing strange or inexplicable
in the phenomena that are now perplexing the world. It is not
that material progress is not in itself a good; it is not that
nature has called into being children for whom she has failed
to provide; it is not that the Creator has left on natural laws
a taint of injustice at which even the human mind revolts, that
material progress brings such bitter fruits. That amid our highest
civilization men faint and die with want is not due to the niggardliness
of nature, but to the injustice of man. Vice and misery, poverty
and pauperism, are not the legitimate results of increase of population
and industrial development; they only follow increase of population
and industrial development because land is treated as private
property -- they are the direct and necessary results of the violation
of the supreme law of justice, involved in giving to some men
the exclusive possession of that which nature provides for all
men.
[22] The recognition of individual proprietorship
of land is the denial of the natural rights of other individuals
-- it is a wrong which must show itself in the inequitable division
of wealth. For as labor cannot produce without the use of land,
the denial of the equal right to the use of land is necessarily
the denial of the right of labor to its own produce. If one man
can command the land upon which others must labor, he can appropriate
the produce of their labor as the price of his permission to labor.
The fundamental law of nature, that her enjoyment by man shall
be consequent upon his exertion, is thus violated. The one receives
without producing; the others produce without receiving. The one
is unjustly enriched; the others are robbed. To this fundamental
wrong we have traced the unjust distribution of wealth which is
separating modern society into the very rich and the very poor.
It is the continuous increase of rent -- the price that labor
is compelled to pay for the use of land, which strips the many
of the wealth they justly earn, to pile it up in the hands of
the few, who do nothing to earn it.
[23] Why should they who suffer from this
injustice hesitate for one moment to sweep it away? Who are the
landholders that they should thus be permitted to reap where they
have not sown?
[24] Consider for a moment the utter absurdity
of the titles by which we permit to be gravely passed from John
Doe to Richard Roe the right exclusively to possess the earth,
giving absolute dominion as against all others. In California
our land titles go back to the Supreme Government of Mexico, who
took from the Spanish King, who took from the Pope, when he by
a stroke of the pen divided lands yet to be discovered between
the Spanish or Portuguese -- or if you please they rest upon conquest.
In the eastern states they go back to treaties with Indians and
grants from English kings; in Louisiana to the government of France;
in Florida to the government of Spain; while in England they go
back to the Norman conquerors. Everywhere, not to a right which
obliges, but to a force which compels. And when a title rests
but on force, no complaint can be made when force annuls it. Whenever
the people, having the power, choose to annul those titles, no
objection can be made in the name of justice. There have existed
men who had the power to hold or to give exclusive possession
of portions of the earth's surface, but when and where did there
exist the human being who had the right?
[25] The right to exclusive ownership of
anything of human production is clear. No matter how many the
hands through which it has passed, there was, at the beginning
of the line, human labor -- some one who, having procured or produced
it by his exertions, had to it a clear title as against all the
rest of mankind, and which could justly pass from one to another
by sale or gift. But at the end of what string of conveyances
or grants can be shown or supposed a like title to any part of
the material universe? To improvements, such an original title
can be shown; but it is a title only to the improvements, and
not to the land itself. If I clear a forest, drain a swamp, or
fill a morass, all I can justly claim is the value given by these
exertions. They give me no right to the land itself, no claim
other than to my equal share with every other member of the community
in the value which is added to it by the growth of the community.
[26] But it will be said: There are improvements
which in time become indistinguishable from the land itself! Very
well; then the title to the improvements becomes blended with
the title to the land; the individual right is lost in the common
right. It is the greater that swallows up the less, not the less
that swallows up the greater. Nature does not proceed from man,
but man from nature, and it is into the bosom of nature that he
and all his works must return again.
[27] Yet, it will be said: As every man
has a right to the use and enjoyment of nature, the man who is
using land must be permitted the exclusive right to its use in
order that he may get the full benefit of his labor. But there
is no difficulty in determining where the individual right ends
and the common right begins. A delicate and exact test is supplied
by value, and with its aid there is no difficulty, no matter how
dense population may become, in determining and securing the exact
rights of each, the equal rights of all. The value of land, as
we have seen, is the price of monopoly. It is not the absolute,
but the relative, capability of land that determines its value.
No matter what may be its intrinsic qualities land that is no
better than other land which may be had for the using can have
no value. And the value of land always measures the difference
between it and the best land that may be had for the using. Thus,
the value of land expresses in exact and tangible form the right
of the community in land held by an individual; and rent expresses
the exact amount which the individual should pay to the community
to satisfy the equal rights of all other members of the community.
Thus, if we concede to priority of possession the undisturbed
use of land, confiscating rent for the benefit of the community,
we reconcile the fixity of tenure which is necessary for improvement
with a full and complete recognition of the equal rights of all
to the use of land.
[28] As for the deduction of a complete
and exclusive individual right to land from priority of occupation,
that is, if possible, the most absurd ground on which landownership
can be defended. Priority of occupation give exclusive and perpetual
title to the surface of a globe on which, in the order of nature,
countless generations succeed each other! Had the men of the last
generation any better right to the use of this world than we of
this? or the men of a hundred years ago? or of a thousand years
ago? Had the mound builders, or the cave dwellers, the contemporaries
of the mastodon and the threetoed horse, or the generations still
further back, who, in dim Öons that we can think of only as geologic
periods, followed each other on the earth we now tenant for our
little day?
[29] Has the first comer at a banquet the
right to turn back all the chairs and claim that none of the other
guests shall partake of the food provided, except as they make
terms with him? Does the first man who presents a ticket at the
door of a theater, and passes in, acquire by his priority the
right to shut the doors and have the performance go on for him
alone? Does the first passenger who enters a railroad car obtain
the right to scatter his baggage over all the seats and compel
the passengers who come in after him to stand up?
[30] The cases are perfectly analogous.
We arrive and we depart, guests at a banquet continually spread,
spectators and participants in an entertainment where there is
room for all who come; passengers from station to station, on
an orb that whirls through space -- our rights to take and possess
cannot be exclusive; they must be bounded everywhere by the equal
rights of others. Just as the passenger in a railroad car may
spread himself and his baggage over as many seats as be pleases,
until other passengers come in, so may a settler take and use
as much land as he chooses, until it is needed by others -- a
fact which is shown by the land acquiring a value when his right
must be curtailed by the equal rights of the others, and no priority
of appropriation can give a right which will bar these equal rights
of others. If this were not the case, then by priority of appropriation
one man could acquire and could transmit to whom he pleased, not
merely the exclusive right to 160 acres, or to 640 acres, but
to a whole township, a whole state, a whole continent.
[31] And to this manifest absurdity does
the recognition of individual right to land come when carried
to its ultimate -- that any one human being, could he concentrate
in himself the individual rights to the land of any country, could
expel therefrom all the rest of its inhabitants; and could he
thus concentrate the individual rights to the whole surface of
the globe, he alone of all the teeming population of the earth
would have the right to live.
[32] And what upon this supposition would
occur is, upon a smaller scale, realized in actual fact. The territorial
lords of Great Britain, to whom grants of land have given the
"white parasols and elephants mad with pride," have over and over
again expelled from large districts the native population, whose
ancestors had lived on the land from immemorial times -- driven
them off to emigrate, to become paupers, or to starve. And on
uncultivated tracts of land in the new state of California may
be seen the blackened chimneys of homes from which settlers have
been driven by force of laws which ignore natural right, and great
stretches of land which might be populous are desolate, because
the recognition of exclusive ownership has put it in the power
of one human creature to forbid his fellows from using it. The
comparative handful of proprietors who own the surface of the
British Islands would be doing only what English law gives them
full power to do, and what many of them have done on a smaller
scale already, were they to exclude the millions of British people
from their native islands. And such an exclusion, by which a few
hundred thousand should at will banish thirty million people from
their native country, while it would be more striking, would not
be a whit more repugnant to natural right than the spectacle now
presented, of the vast body of the British people being compelled
to pay such enormous sums to a few of their number for the privilege
of being permitted to live upon and use the land which they so
fondly call their own; which is endeared to them by memories so
tender and so glorious, and for which they are held in duty bound,
if need be, to spill their blood and lay down their lives.
[33] I refer only to the British Islands,
because, landownership being more concentrated there, they afford
a more striking illustration of what private property in land
necessarily involves. "To whomsoever the soil at any time belongs,
to him belong the fruits of it," is a truth that becomes more
and more apparent as population becomes denser and invention and
improvement add to productive power; but it is everywhere a truth
-- as much in our new States as in the British Islands or by the
banks of the Indus.
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