5 i2 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the hungry, greedy, necessitous state of the politician will ever 

 place itself on the same footing as it has placed the Irish land- 

 lord, upon whom the other day it so freely practiced its cheap 

 philanthropy ; that it will ever consent to fix its rents in per- 

 petuity, or to abide by them if they were fixed ? Then comes all 

 the unutterable official management, the inspectorate, the armies 

 of surveyors and clerks, the arrogant petty kinglets, the red tape, 

 the annoying conditions, the unending correspondence on the sub- 

 ject of the new pump or the new road, the constant battle in Par- 

 liament as to new methods of land-tenure, new methods to allow 

 A to replace B in quicker succession, new forms of land-taxation, 

 universal upsetting of existing system, and universal establish- 

 ment of the last land fancy of the half-baked theorist. Conceive 

 for one moment the slough of despond into which you would 

 plunge back a vigorous, self -helping nation that had once, how- 

 ever hesitatingly and half-heartedly, taken the first few steps 

 along the road of individual initiative, experiment, and progress. 



No, it is in another direction our efforts must be turned. Years 

 and years ago, if our political parties were not both of them 

 like wild beasts fighting, with no thought or sense, but for the 

 mad struggle in which they lie locked together, biting and tearing 

 with tooth and claw, they would have freed the land. They would 

 have broken the lawyer's yoke that still curses our present gener- 

 ation and again and again prevents the ready sale, and they would 

 have got rid of the heavy burdens of rate and tax that now fall 

 on land and make it an undesirable possession for the poor man. 

 Of all pieces of stupidity none is greater than taxing land just 

 because the rich man at present holds the larger part of it. It is 

 like all other pieces of class legislation, branded on its forehead 

 with the fool's mark. You strike at your supposed enemy and 

 wound yourself. Land must be made free in the only true sense 

 free from the clutch of the lawyer, free from the visits of the 

 tax and rate collector, and it will then become the greatest source 

 of happiness and comfort to our people. Once really freed, the 

 industrious, vigorous poor will slowly wrest it from the rich man, 

 paying, as has been seen in France, notwithstanding the heavy 

 State burdens on land, a price that the rich man will not pay for 

 its acquisition. Above all other forms of investment for the poor 

 man, land is far away king. It is no pig in a poke for him. He 

 knows it, he understands it in all its good and bad qualities better 

 probably than any other living man ; he can not be juggled out of 

 it, when it is once bought, by the carelessness or fraud of direct- 

 ors ; he can put all his spare time and spare labor into it. It is 

 not, however, a question of the agricultural laborer alone, but also 

 of the saving mechanic in town, who would look forward to the 

 'bee farm, or flower or fruit farm, on which he might end his days. 



