510 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the change might go further. We have looked on " Social Statics" 

 as one of the most splendid and helpful books ever written in the 

 English language, and even the blot, as it seems to us, of land 

 nationalization could not dim our enthusiasm for it ; and now we 

 in saying " we," it is not an undivided " we/' for I admit fully 

 the divisions among individualists on this point rejoice greatly 

 to think that our leader has, at last, his doubts and hesitations 

 whether land nationalization is a true article in the creed which 

 he has taught us. 



May I now add some reasons to those already given in " The 

 Times " why land nationalization is both bad as philosophy and 

 bad as expediency ? 



1. As philosophy. It is said that the land of a country belongs 

 to the people as a whole. But if so, it is clearly the people, that 

 is, the whole people without exception, to whom it belongs, and 

 not a majority among them. Philosophy must be exact in her 

 terms, and if she says it belongs to the people, she can not pos- 

 sibly mean two thirds or three fourths, or some other unstated 

 quantity short of the whole. It may be, I can readily understand, 

 a matter of practical convenience to politicians and other believers 

 in power to treat a majority as society ; but no amount of torture 

 could wring from a Philosophy that knew what she was talking 

 about the admission that the two things are equivalents. The 

 deductions from this are plain. Property belonging to the whole 

 people could never be used by any part of them, for the consent of 

 the whole could not practically be got as regards any special use of 

 it, seeing that every day, almost every hour, that whole is chang- 

 ing. We can, therefore, hardly accept a theory which lands us 

 forthwith in an absurdity. 



2. If the soil belongs to society in the abstract, and if, notwith- 

 standing the urgent remonstrances of Philosophy, we decide to 

 interpret the word " society " by the word " majority," why is it 

 taken for granted that it belongs to that majority of the people 

 who at any given moment happen to inhabit it ? If the Chinese 

 are overcrowded, or to come nearer home, if the Belgians are over- 

 crowded, or if some part of the Russian people possesses a less 

 attractive portion of the world to live in than our own, can they 

 not claim with unanswerable logic that the doctrine of the major- 

 ity has no merely local application, but must be treated in a far 

 more comprehensive spirit ? If Philosophy says the land of right 

 belongs to the majority, it must also answer, " What majority ? " 

 and the nations that are now located on the least advantageous 

 spots will not answer that question in quite the same way as the 

 nations that enjoy the sunny side of the hedge. 



3. It is claimed that the present owners may be dispossessed 

 by force because some of them (a quantity that is diminishing 



