[01] If chattel slavery be unjust, then
is private property in land unjust.
[02] For let the circumstances be what
they may -- the ownership of land will always give the ownership
of men, to a degree measured by the necessity (real or artificial)
for the use of land. This is but a statement in different form
of the law of rent.
[03] And when that necessity is absolute
-- when starvation is the alternative to the use of land, then
does the ownership of men involved in the ownership of land become
absolute.
[04] Place one hundred men on an island
from which there is no escape, and whether you make one of these
men the absolute owner of the other ninety-nine, or the absolute
owner of the soil of the island, will make no difference either
to him or to them.
[05] In the one case, as the other, the
one will be the absolute master of the ninety-nine -- his power
extending even to life and death, for simply to refuse them permission
to live upon the island would be to force them into the sea.
[06] Upon a larger scale, and through more
complex relations, the same cause must operate in the same way
and to the same end -- the ultimate result, the enslavement of
laborers, becoming apparent just as the pressure increases which
compels them to live on and from land which is treated as the
exclusive property of others. Take a country in which the soil
is divided among a number of proprietors, instead of being in
the hands of one, and in which, as in modern production, the capitalist
has been specialized from the laborer, and manufactures and exchange,
in all their many branches, have been separated from agriculture.
Though less direct and obvious, the relations between the owners
of the soil and the laborers will, with increase of population
and the improvement of the arts, tend to the same absolute mastery
on the one hand and the same abject helplessness on the other,
as in the case of the island we have supposed. Rent will advance,
while wages will fall. Of the aggregate produce, the landowner
will get a constantly increasing, the laborer a constantly diminishing
share. Just as removal to cheaper land becomes difficult or impossible,
laborers, no matter what they produce, will be reduced to a bare
living, and the free competition among them, where land is monopolized,
will force them to a condition which, though they may be mocked
with the titles and insignia of freedom, will be virtually that
of slavery.
[07] There is nothing strange in the fact
that, in spite of the enormous increase in productive power which
this century has witnessed, and which is still going on, the wages
of labor in the lower and wider strata of industry should everywhere
tend to the wages of slavery -- just enough to keep the laborer
in working condition. For the ownership of the land on which and
from which a man must live is virtually the ownership of the man
himself, and in acknowledging the right of some individuals to
the exclusive use and enjoyment of the earth, we condemn other
individuals to slavery as fully and as completely as though we
had formally made them chattels.
[08] In a simpler form of society, where
production chiefly consists in the direct application of labor
to the soil, the slavery that is the necessary result of according
to some the exclusive right to the soil from which all must live,
is plainly seen in helotism, in villeinage, in serfdom.
[09] Chattel slavery originated in the
capture of prisoners in war, and, though it has existed to some
extent in every part of the globe, its area has been small, its
effects trivial, as compared with the forms of slavery which have
originated in the appropriation of land. No people as a mass have
ever been reduced to chattel slavery to men of their own race,
nor yet on any large scale has any people ever been reduced to
slavery of this kind by conquest. The general subjection of the
many to the few, which we meet with wherever society has reached
a certain development, has resulted from the appropriation of
land as individual property. It is the ownership of the soil that
everywhere gives the ownership of the men that live upon it. It
is slavery of this kind to which the enduring pyramids and the
colossal monuments of Egypt yet bear witness, and of the institution
of which we have, perhaps, a vague tradition in the biblical story
of the famine during which the Pharaoh purchased up the lands
of the people. It was slavery of this kind to which, in the twilight
of history, the conquerors of Greece reduced the original inhabitants
of that peninsula, transforming them into helots by making them
pay rent for their lands. It was the growth of the latifundia,
or great landed estates, which transmuted the population of ancient
Italy, from a race of hardy husbandman, whose robust virtues conquered
the world, into a race of cringing bondsmen; it was the appropriation
of the land as the absolute property of their chieftains which
gradually turned the descendants of free and equal Gallic, Teutonic
and Hunnish warriors into coloni and villeins, and which changed
the independent burghers of Sclavonic village communities into
the boors of Russia and the serfs of Poland; which instituted
the feudalism of China and Japan, as well as that of Europe, and
which made the high chiefs of Polynesia the all but absolute masters
of their fellows. How it came to pass that the Aryan shepherds
and warriors who, as comparative philology tells us, descended
from the common birthplace of the Indo-Germanic race into the
lowlands of India, were turned into the suppliant and cringing
Hindoo, the Sanscrit verse which I have before quoted gives us
a hint. The white parasols and the elephants mad with pride of
the Indian rajah are the flowers of grants of land. And could
we find the key to the records of the long-buried civilizations
that lie entombed in the gigantic ruins of Yucatan and Guatemala,
telling at once of the pride of a ruling class and the unrequited
toil to which the masses were condemned, we should read, in all
human probability, of a slavery imposed upon the great body of
the people through the appropriation of the land as the property
of a few -- of another illustration of the universal truth that
they who possess the land are masters of the men who dwell upon
it.
[10] The necessary relation between labor
and land, the absolute power which the ownership of land gives
over men who cannot live but by using it, explains what is otherwise
inexplicable -- the growth and persistence of institutions, manners,
and ideas so utterly repugnant to the natural sense of liberty
and equality.
[11] When the idea of individual ownership,
which so justly and naturally attaches to things of human production,
is extended to land, all the rest is a mere matter of development.
The strongest and most cunning easily acquire a superior share
in this species of property, which is to be had, not by production,
but by appropriation, and in becoming lords of the land they become
necessarily lords of their fellow men. The ownership of land is
the basis of aristocracy. It was not nobility that gave land,
but the possession of land that gave nobility. All the enormous
privileges of the nobility of medieval Europe flowed from their
position as the owners of the soil. The simple principle of the
ownership of the soil produced, on the one side, the lord, on
the other, the vassal -- the one having all rights, the other
none. The right of the lord to the soil acknowledged and maintained,
those who lived upon it could do so only upon his terms. The manners
and conditions of the times made those terms include services
and servitudes, as well as rents in produce or money, but the
essential thing that compelled them was the ownership of land.
This power exists wherever the ownership of land exists, and can
be brought out wherever the competition for the use of land is
great enough to enable the landlord to make his own terms. The
English landowner of today has, in the law which recognizes his
exclusive right to the land, essentially all the power which his
predecessor the feudal baron had. He might command rent in services
or servitudes. He might compel his tenants to dress themselves
in a particular way, to profess a particular religion, to send
their children to a particular school, to submit their differences
to his decision, to fall upon their knees when he spoke to them,
to follow him around dressed in his livery, or to sacrifice to
him female honor if they would prefer these things to being driven
off his land. He could demand, in short, any terms on which men
would still consent to live on his land, and the law could not
prevent him so long as it did not qualify his ownership, for compliance
with them would assume the form of a free contract or voluntary
act. And English landlords do exercise such of these powers as
in the manners of the times they care to. Having shaken off the
obligation of providing for the defense of the country, they no
longer need the military service of their tenants, and the possession
of wealth and power being now shown in other ways than by long
trains of attendants, they no longer care for personal service.
But they habitually control the votes of their tenants, and dictate
to them in many little ways. That "right reverend father in God,"
Bishop Lord Plunkett, evicted a number of his poor Irish tenants
because they would not send their children to Protestant Sunday
schools; and to that Earl of Leitrim for whom Nemesis tarried
so long before she sped the bullet of an assassin, even darker
crimes are imputed; while, at the cold promptings of greed, cottage
after cottage has been pulled down and family after family forced
into the roads. The principle that permits this is the same principle
that in ruder times and a simpler social state enthralled the
great masses of the common people and placed such a wide gulf
between noble and peasant. Where the peasant was made a serf,
it was simply by forbidding him to leave the estate on which he
was born, thus artificially producing the condition we supposed
on the island. In sparsely settled countries this is necessary
to produce absolute slavery, but where land is fully occupied,
competition may produce substantially the same conditions. Between
the condition of the rackrented Irish peasant and the Russian
serf, the advantage was in many things on the side of the serf.
The serf did not starve.
[12] Now, as I think I have conclusively
proved, it is the same cause which has in every age degraded and
enslaved the laboring masses that is working in the civilized
world to-day. Personal liberty -- that is to say, the liberty
to move about -- is everywhere conceded, while of political and
legal inequality there are in the United States no vestiges, and
in the most backward civilized countries but few. But the great
cause of inequality remains, and is manifesting itself in the
unequal distribution of wealth. The essence of slavery is that
it takes from the laborer all he produces save enough to support
an animal existence, and to this minimum the wages of free labor,
under existing conditions, unmistakably tend. Whatever be the
increase of productive power, rent steadily tends to swallow up
the gain, and more than the gain.
[13] Thus the condition of the masses in
every civilized country is, or is tending to become, that of virtual
slavery under the forms of freedom. And it is probable that of
all kinds of slavery this is the most cruel and relentless. For
the laborer is robbed of the produce of his labor and compelled
to toil for a mere subsistence; but his taskmasters, instead of
human beings, assume the forms of imperious necessities. Those
to whom his labor is rendered and from whom his wages are received
are often driven in their turn -- contact between the laborers
and the ultimate beneficiaries of their labor is sundered, and
individuality is lost. The direct responsibility of master to
slave, a responsibility which exercises a softening influence
upon the great majority of men, does not arise; it is not one
human being who seems to drive another to unremitting and ill-requited
toil, but "the inevitable laws of supply and demand," for which
no one in particular is responsible. The maxims of Cato the Censor
-- maxims which were regarded with abhorrence even in an age of
cruelty and universal slaveholding -- that after as much work
as possible is obtained from a slave he should be turned out to
die, become the common rule; and even the selfish interest which
prompts the master to look after the comfort and well-being of
the slave is lost. Labor has become a commodity, and the laborer
a machine. There are no masters and slaves, no owners and owned,
but only buyers and sellers. The higgling of the market takes
the place of every other sentiment.
[14] When the slaveholders of the South
looked upon the condition of the free laboring poor in the most
advanced civilized countries, it is no wonder that they easily
persuaded themselves of the divine institution of slavery. That
the field hands of the South were as a class better fed, better
lodged, better clothed; that they had less anxiety and more of
the amusements and enjoyments of life than the agricultural laborers
of England there can be no doubt; and even in the northern cities,
visiting slaveholders might see and hear of things impossible
under what they called their organization of labor. In the southern
states, during the days of slavery, the master who would have
compelled his Negroes to work and live as large classes of free
white men and women are compelled in free countries to work and
live, would have been deemed infamous, and if public opinion had
not restrained him, his own selfish interest in the maintenance
of the health and strength of his chattels would. But in London,
New York, and Boston, among people who have given, and would give
again, money and blood to free the slave, where no one could abuse
a beast in public without arrest and punishment, barefooted and
ragged children may be seen running around the streets even in
the winter time, and in squalid garrets and noisome cellars women
work away their lives for wages that fail to keep them in proper
warmth and nourishment. Is it any wonder that to the slaveholders
of the South the demand for the abolition of slavery seemed like
the cant of hypocrisy?
[15] And now that slavery has been abolished,
the planters of the South find they have sustained no loss. Their
ownership of the land upon which the freedmen must live gives
them practically as much command of labor as before, while they
are relieved of responsibility, sometimes very expensive. The
Negroes as yet have the alternative of emigrating, and a great
movement of that kind seems now about commencing, but as population
increases and land becomes dear, the planters will get a greater
proportionate share of the earnings of their laborers than they
did under the system of chattel slavery, and the laborers a less
share -- for under the system of chattel slavery the slaves always
got at least enough to keep them in good physical health, but
in such countries as England there are large classes of laborers
who do not get that.1
[16] The influences which, wherever there
is personal relation between master and slave, slip in to modify
chattel slavery, and to prevent the master from exerting to its
fullest extent his power over the slave, also showed themselves
in the ruder forms of serfdom that characterized the earlier periods
of European development, and aided by religion, and, perhaps,
as in chattel slavery, by the more enlightened but still selfish
interests of the lord, and hardening into custom, universally
fixed a limit to what the owner of the land could extort from
the serf or peasant, so that the competition of men without means
of existence bidding against each other for access to the means
of existence, was nowhere suffered to go to its full length and
exert its full power of deprivation and degradation. The helots
of Greece, the metayers of Italy, the serfs of Russia and Poland,
the peasants of feudal Europe, rendered to their landlords a fixed
proportion either of their produce or their labor, and were not
generally squeezed past that point. But the influences which thus
stepped in to modify the extortive power of landownership, and
which may still be seen on English estates where the landlord
and his family deem it their duty to send medicines and comforts
to the sick and infirm, and to look after the wellbeing of their
cottagers, just as the southern planter was accustomed to look
after his Negroes, are lost in the more refined and less obvious
form which serfdom assumes in the more complicated processes of
modern production, which separates so widely and by so many intermediate
gradations the individual whose labor is appropriated from him
who appropriates it, and makes the relations between the members
of the two classes not direct and particular, but indirect and
general. In modern society, competition has free play to force
from the laborer the very utmost he can give, and with what terrific
force it is acting may be seen in the condition of the lowest
class in the centers of wealth and industry. That the condition
of this lowest class is not yet more general, is to be attributed
to the great extent of fertile land which has hitherto been open
on this continent, and which has not merely afforded an escape
for the increasing population of the older sections of the Union,
but has greatly relieved the pressure in Europe -- in one country,
Ireland, the emigration having been so great as actually to reduce
the population. This avenue of relief cannot last forever. It
is already fast closing up, and as it closes, the pressure must
become harder and harder.
[17] It is not without reason that the
wise crow in the Ramayana, the crow Bushanda "who has lived in
every part of the universe and knows all events from the beginnings
of time," declares that, though contempt of worldly advantages
is necessary to supreme felicity, yet the keenest pain possible
is inflicted by extreme poverty. The poverty to which in advancing
civilization great masses of men are condemned, is not the freedom
from distraction and temptation which sages have sought and philosophers
have praised; it is a degrading and embruting slavery, that cramps
the higher nature, dulls the finer feelings, and drives men by
its pain to acts which the brutes would refuse. It is into this
helpless, hopeless poverty, that crushes manhood and destroys
womanhood, that robs even childhood of its innocence and joy,
that the working classes are being driven by a force which acts
upon them like a resistless and unpitying machine. The Boston
collar manufacturer who pays his girls two cents an hour may commiserate
their condition, but he, as they, is governed by the law of competition,
and cannot pay more and carry on his business, for exchange is
not governed by sentiment. And so, through all intermediate gradations,
up to those who receive the earnings of labor without return,
in the rent of land, it is the inexorable laws of supply and demand,
a power with which the individual can no more quarrel or dispute
than with the winds and the tides, that seem to press down the
lower classes into the slavery of want.
[18] But in reality, the cause is that
which always has and always must result in slavery -- the monopolization
by some of what nature has designed for all.
[19] Our boasted freedom necessarily involves
slavery, so long as we recognize private property in land. Until
that is abolished, Declarations of Independence and Acts of Emancipation
are in vain. So long as one man can claim the exclusive ownership
of the land from which other men must live, slavery will exist,
and as material progress goes on, must grow and deepen!
[20] This -- and in previous chapters of
this book we have traced the process, step by step -- is what
is going on in the civilized world today. Private ownership of
land is the nether millstone. Material progress is the upper millstone.
Between them, with an increasing pressure, the working classes
are being ground.
