[01] In the earlier stages of civilization
we see that land is everywhere regarded as common property. And,
turning from the dim past to our own times, we may see that natural
perceptions are still the same, and that when placed under circumstances
in which the influence of education and habit is weakened, men
instinctively recognize the equality of right to the bounty of
nature.
[02] The discovery of gold in California
brought together in a new country men who had been used to look
on land as the rightful subject of individual property, and of
whom probably not one in a thousand had ever dreamed of drawing
any distinction between property in land and property in anything
else. But, for the first time in the history of the Anglo-Saxon
race, these men were brought into contact with land from which
gold could be obtained by the simple operation of washing it out.
[03] Had the land with which they were
thus called upon to deal been agricultural, or grazing, or forest
land, of peculiar richness; had it been land which derived peculiar
value from its situation for commercial purposes, or by reason
of the water power which it afforded; or even had it contained
rich mines of coal, iron or lead, the land system to which they
had been used would have been applied, and it would have been
reduced to private ownership in large tracts, as even the pueblo
lands of San Francisco, really the most valuable in the state,
which by Spanish law had been set apart to furnish homes for the
future residents of that city, were reduced, without any protest
worth speaking of. But the novelty of the case broke through habitual
ideas, and threw men back upon first principles, and it was by
common consent declared that this gold-bearing land should remain
common property, of which no one might take more than he could
reasonably use, or hold for a longer time than he continued to
use it. This perception of natural justice was acquiesced in by
the General Government and the Courts, and while placer mining
remained of importance, no attempt was made to overrule this reversion
to primitive ideas. The title to the land remained in the government,
and no individual could acquire more than a possessory claim.
The miners in each district fixed the amount of ground an individual
could take and the amount of work that must be done to constitute
use. If this work were not done, any one could relocate the ground.
Thus, no one was allowed to forestall or to lock up natural resources.
Labor was acknowledged as the creator of wealth, was given a free
field, and secured in its reward. The device would not have assured
complete equality of rights under the conditions that in most
countries prevail; but under the conditions that there and then
existed -- a sparse population, an unexplored country, and an
occupation in its nature a lottery, it secured substantial justice.
One man might strike an enormously rich deposit, and others might
vainly prospect for months and years, but all had an equal chance.
No one was allowed to play the dog in the manger with the bounty
of the Creator. The essential idea of the mining regulations was
to prevent forestalling and monopoly. Upon the same principle
are based the mining laws of Mexico; and the same principle was
adopted in Australia, in British Columbia, and in the diamond
fields of South Africa, for it accords with natural perceptions
of justice.
[04] With the decadence of placer mining
in California, the accustomed idea of private property finally
prevailed in the passage of a law permitting the patenting of
mineral lands. The only effect is to lock up opportunities --
to give the owner of mining ground the power of saying that no
one else may use what he does not choose to use himself. And there
are many cases in which mining ground is thus withheld from use
for speculative purposes, just as valuable building lots and agricultural
land are withheld from use. But while thus preventing use, the
extension to mineral land of the same principle of private ownership
which marks the tenure of other lands has done nothing for the
security of improvements. The greatest expenditures of capital
in opening and developing mines -- expenditures that in some cases
amounted to millions of dollars -- were made upon possessory titles.
[05] Had the circumstances which beset
the first English settlers in North America been such as to call
their attention de novo to the question of landownership,
there can be no doubt that they would have reverted to first principles,
just as they reverted to first principles in matters of government;
and individual landownership would have been rejected, just as
aristocracy and monarchy were rejected. But while in the country
from which they came this system had not yet fully developed itself,
nor its effects been fully felt, the fact that in the new country
an immense continent invited settlement prevented any question
of the justice and policy of private property in land from arising.
For in a new country, equality seems sufficiently assured if no
one is permitted to take land to the exclusion of the rest. At
first no harm seems to be done by treating this land as absolute
property. There is plenty of land left for those who choose to
take it, and the slavery that in a later stage of development
necessarily springs from the individual ownership of land is not
felt.
[06] In Virginia and to the South, where
the settlement had an aristocratic character, the natural complement
of the large estates into which the land was carved was introduced
in the shape of Negro slaves. But the first settlers of New England
divided the land as, twelve centuries before, their ancestors
had divided the land of Britain, giving to each head of a family
his town lot and his seed lot, while beyond lay the free common.
So far as concerned the great proprietors whom the English kings
by letters patent endeavored to create, the settlers saw clearly
enough the injustice of the attempted monopoly, and none of these
proprietors got much from their grants; but the plentifulness
of land prevented attention from being called to the monopoly
which individual landownership, even when the tracts are small,
must involve when land becomes scarce. And so it has come to pass
that the great republic of the modern world has adopted at the
beginning of its career an institution that ruined the republics
of antiquity; that a people who proclaim the inalienable rights
of all men to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness have
accepted without question a principle which, in denying the equal
and inalienable right to the soil, finally denies the equal right
to life and liberty; that a people who at the cost of a bloody
war have abolished chattel slavery, yet permit slavery in a more
widespread and dangerous form to take root.
[07] The continent has seemed so wide,
the area over which population might yet pour so vast, that familiarized
by habit with the idea of private property in land, we have not
realized its essential injustice. For not merely has this background
of unsettled land prevented the full effect of private appropriation
from being felt, even in the older sections, but to permit a man
to take more land than he could use, that he might compel those
who afterwards needed it to pay him for the privilege of using
it, has not seemed so unjust when others in their turn might do
the same thing by going further on. And more than this, the very
fortunes that have resulted from the appropriation of land, and
that have thus really been drawn from taxes levied upon the wages
of labor, have seemed, and have been heralded, as prizes held
out to the laborer. In all the newer States, and even to a considerable
extent in the older ones, our landed aristocracy is yet in its
first generation. Those who have profited by the increase in the
value of land have been largely men who began life without a cent.
Their great fortunes, many of them running up high into the millions,
seem to them, and to many others, as the best proofs of the justice
of existing social conditions in rewarding prudence, foresight,
industry, and thrift; whereas, the truth is that these fortunes
are but the gains of monopoly, and are necessarily made at the
expense of labor. But the fact that those thus enriched started
as laborers hides this, and the same feeling which leads every
ticket bolder in a lottery to delight in imagination in the magnitude
of the prizes has prevented even the poor from quarreling with
a system which thus made many poor men rich.
[08] In short, the American people have
failed to see the essential injustice of private property in land,
because as yet they have not felt its full effects. This public
domain -- the vast extent of land yet to be reduced to private
possession, the enormous common to which the faces of the energetic
were always turned, has been the great fact that, since the days
when the first settlements began to fringe the Atlantic Coast,
has formed our national character and colored our national thought.
It is not that we have eschewed a titled aristocracy and abolished
primogeniture; that we elect all our officers from school director
up to president; that our laws run in the name of the people,
instead of in the name of a prince; that the State knows no religion,
and our judges wear no wigs -- that we have been exempted from
the ills that Fourth of July orators used to point to as characteristic
of the effete despotisms of the Old World. The general intelligence,
the general comfort, the active invention, the power of adaptation
and assimilation, the free, independent spirit, the energy and
hopefulness that have marked our people, are not causes, but results
-- they have sprung from unfenced land. This public domain has
been the transmuting force which has turned the thriftless, unambitious
European peasant into the self-reliant Western farmer; it has
given a consciousness of freedom even to the dweller in crowded
cities, and has been a wellspring of hope even to those who have
never thought of taking refuge upon it. The child of the people,
as he grows to manhood in Europe, finds all the best seats at
the banquet of life marked "taken," and must struggle with his
fellows for the crumbs that fall, without one chance in a thousand
of forcing or sneaking his way to a seat. In America, whatever
his condition, there has always been the consciousness that the
public domain lay behind him; and the knowledge of this fact,
acting and reacting, has penetrated our whole national life, giving
to it generosity and independence, elasticity and ambition. All
that we are proud of in the American character; all that makes
our conditions and institutions better than those of older countries,
we may trace to the fact that land has been cheap in the United
States, because new soil has been open to the emigrant.
[09] But our advance has reached the Pacific.
Further west we cannot go, and increasing population can but expand
north and south and fill up what has been passed over. North,
it is already filling up the valley of the Red River, pressing
into that of the Saskatchewan and pre-empting Washington Territory;
south, it is covering western Texas and taking up the arable valleys
of New Mexico and Arizona.
[10] The republic has entered upon a new
era, an era in which the monopoly of the land will tell with accelerating
effect. The great fact which has been so potent is ceasing to
be. The public domain is almost gone -- a very few years will
end its influence, already rapidly failing. I do not mean to say
that there will be no public domain. For a long time to come there
will be millions of acres of public lands carried on the books
of the Land Department. But it must be remembered that the best
part of the continent for agricultural purposes is already overrun,
and that it is the poorest land that is left. It must be remembered
that what remains comprises the great mountain ranges, the sterile
deserts, the high plains fit only for grazing. And it must be
remembered that much of this land which figures in the reports
as open to settlement is unsurveyed land, which has been appropriated
by possessory claims or locations which do not appear until the
land is returned as surveyed. California figures on the books
of the Land Department as the greatest land state of the Union,
containing nearly 100,000,000 acres of public land -- something
like one-twelfth of the whole public domain. Yet so much of this
is covered by railroad grants or held in the way of which I have
spoken; so much consists of untillable mountains or plains which
require irrigation; so much is monopolized by locations which
command the water, that as a matter of fact it is difficult to
point the immigrant to any part of the state where he can take
up a farm on which he can settle and maintain a family, and so
men, weary of the quest, end by buying land or renting it on shares.
It is not that there is any real scarcity of land in California
-- for, an empire in herself, California will some day maintain
a population as large as that of France -- but appropriation has
got ahead of the settler and manages to keep just ahead of him.
[11] Some twelve or fifteen years ago the
late Ben Wade of Ohio said, in a speech in the United States Senate,
that by the close of this century every acre of ordinary agricultural
land in the United States would be worth $50 in gold. It is already
clear that if he erred at all, it was in overstating the time.
In the twenty-one years that remain of the present century, if
our population keep on increasing at the rate which it has maintained
since the institution of the government, with the exception of
the decade which included the civil war, there will be an addition
to our present population of something like forty-five millions,
an addition of some seven millions more than the total population
of the United States as shown by the census of 1870, and nearly
half as much again as the present population of Great Britain.
There is no question about the ability of the United States to
support such a population and many hundreds of millions more,
and, under proper social adjustments, to support them in increased
comfort; but in view of such an increase of population, what becomes
of the unappropriated public domain? Practically there will soon
cease to be any. It will be a very long time before it is all
in use; but it will be a very short time, as we are going, before
all that men can turn to use will have an owner.
[12] But the evil effects of making the
land of a whole people the exclusive property of some do not wait
for the final appropriation of the public domain to show themselves.
It is not necessary to contemplate them in the future; we may
see them in the present. They have grown with our growth, and
are still increasing.
[13] We plow new fields, we open new mines,
we found new cities; we drive back the Indian and exterminate
the buffalo; we girdle the land with iron roads and lace the air
with telegraph wires; we add knowledge to knowledge, and utilize
invention after invention; we build schools and endow colleges;
yet it becomes no easier for the masses of our people to make
a living. On the contrary, it is becoming harder. The wealthy
class is becoming more wealthy; but the poorer class is becoming
more dependent. The gulf between the employed and the employer
is growing wider; social contrasts are becoming sharper; as liveried
carriages appear, so do barefooted children. We are becoming used
to talk of the working classes and the propertied classes; beggars
are becoming so common that where it was once thought a crime
little short of highway robbery to refuse food to one who asked
for it, the gate is now barred and the bulldog loosed, while laws
are passed against vagrants which suggest those of Henry VIII.
[14] We call ourselves the most progressive
people on earth. But what is the goal of our progress, if these
are its wayside fruits?
[15] These are the results of private property
in land -- the effects of a principle that must act with increasing
and increasing force. It is not that laborers have increased faster
than capital; it is not that population is pressing against subsistence;
it is not that machinery has made work scarce; it is not that
there is any real antagonism between labor and capital -- it is
simply that land is becoming more valuable; that the terms on
which labor can obtain access to the natural opportunities which
alone enable it to produce are becoming harder and harder. The
public domain is receding and narrowing. Property in land is concentrating.
The proportion of our people who have no legal right to the land
on which they live is becoming steadily larger.
[16] Says the New York World:
"A nonresident proprietary, like that of Ireland, is getting to
be the characteristic of large farming districts in New England,
adding yearly to the nominal value of leasehold farms; advancing
yearly the rent demanded, and steadily degrading the character
of the tenantry." And the Nation, alluding to the same
section, says: "Increased nominal value of land, higher rents,
fewer farms occupied by owners; diminished product; lower wages;
a more ignorant population; increasing number of women employed
at bard, outdoor labor (surest sign of a declining civilization),
and a steady deterioration in the style of farming -- these are
the conditions described by a cumulative mass of evidence that
is perfectly irresistible."
[17] The same tendency is observable in
the new states, where the large scale of cultivation recalls the
latifundia that ruined ancient Italy. In California a
very large proportion of the farming land is rented from year
to year, at rates varying from a fourth to even half the crop.
[18] The harder times, the lower wages,
the increasing poverty perceptible in the United States are but
results of the natural laws we have traced -- laws as universal
and as irresistible as that of gravitation. We did not establish
the republic when, in the face of principalities and powers, we
flung the declaration of the inalienable rights of man; we shall
never establish the republic until we practically carry out that
declaration by securing to the poorest child born among us an
equal right to his native soil! We did not abolish slavery when
we ratified the Fourteenth Amendment; to abolish slavery we must
abolish private property in land! Unless we come back to first
principles, unless we recognize natural perceptions of equity,
unless we acknowledge the equal right of all to land, our free
institutions will be in vain; our common schools will be in vain;
our discoveries and inventions will but add to the force that
presses the masses down!
