PRIMITIVE PROPERTY AXD MODERN SOCIALISM. 



439 



nral rights and equality was discoverable in the 

 primitive usages of society relating to property. 

 But we canuot accept Mr. Cliffe Leslie's benevo- 

 lent disavowal against the text of M. de Lave- 

 leye's own volume. It remains tolerably clear 

 that M. de Laveleye in fact believes that there is 

 something specially natural in a tenure with which 

 society set out, as compared with that toward 

 which it tends. In betaking itself to private 

 ownership, it has been only trying an experi- 

 ment; but, discover some mode of reconciling 

 communal ownership with the more elaborate 

 exigencies of modern economy, and the world, we 

 are left by M. de Laveleye to suppose, will gladly 

 return to the species of ownership which his bold 

 fancy asserts fits best the needs of humanity. 



It is to be regretted that M. de Laveleye 

 should waste his powers in aspirations after a re- 

 turn to a system European civilization has out- 

 grown. But there is not much harm in indulging 

 such sentimental wishes. There is harm in en- 

 couraging those who would be less satisfied with 

 an agreeable theory than is M. de Laveleye's 

 philosophic temperament, to regard the existing 

 forms of human property as a violation of natu- 

 ral right. M. de Laveleye honors this country 

 with many animadversions on its land tenure. 

 He denounces the tendency by which " in Eng- 

 land, as at Rome, large property has swallowed 

 up small property, in consequence of a continu- 

 ous evolution unchecked from the beginning to 

 the end of the nation's history," and he alleges 

 that " the social order seems to be threatened 

 just as in the Roman Empire." We should have 

 rejoiced had it been possible to keep the old order 

 of yeomen, without interfering with the general 

 progress of the country ; and we should now be 

 glad did the fashion abate of adding acre to acre 

 for the mere sake, not of fair investment of cap- 

 ital, but of territorial influence and grandeur. 

 But England has become what she is bv securinsr 

 to men freedom to do what they will with their 

 own. The land has been made a garden by the 

 application to it of capital, which could not have 

 been so employed had it remained in the hands 

 of petty cultivators, whose only capital would 

 have been the land itself. The kingdom alto- 

 gether has been the richer for the soil being 

 treated like other kinds of property. With a lim- 

 ited territory, and a population and capital indefi- 

 nitely larger in proportion than the soil, the soil 

 necessarily grows to be a luxury for which only 

 the rich can compete. But it benefits by being 

 in the hands of those who can expend most on it. 

 M. de Laveleye would hardly dispute this ; but he 



would hold that the people suffer though the land 

 may gain. We deny this altogether. He himself 

 would not desire the spread throughout this island 

 of la petite propriete, with the hard and cruel econ- 

 omy it imposes on the peasant; and Air. Mill, in 

 a letter M. de Laveleye publishes, says that sys- 

 tem is repudiated by the working-classes, and has 

 few partisans besides some economists and phi- 

 lanthropists. What he desires is cooperative agri- 

 cultural labor. But it is of the very essence of 

 English society, that industry of whatever kind 

 should compete freely in the market. Coopera- 

 tive agriculture could not hope to be " protected," 

 and we are not sanguine that farm-laborers work- 

 ing for their own hand would hold their own against 

 capitalist farmers. The agricultural laborer has 

 suffered hitherto by not having the energy to go 

 where his labor would be best remunerated ; that 

 lack of energy would not be cured by setting him 

 and a number of his fellows down on a plot of 

 land, without either farmer or landlord, except 

 some form of commune, above or beside them. 

 There is exactly as much reason for stocking 

 shops for cooperative shoemakers or tailors, as 

 for assigning portions of land to bodies of farm- 

 laborers ; and the result would be as ruinous to 

 the men and unprofitable to the country in the 

 one case as in the other. 



M. de Laveleye is treading on dangerous ground 

 when he searches among theories of property for 

 reasons against the present tenure of land in Eu- 

 rope, and particularly England. A very common 

 theory of property, and one which, though not 

 impregnable, is as defensible as any other, is that 

 which makes labor its legitimate source. It is 

 strange to find M. de Laveleye arguing against 

 this, that, " if labor were the only legitimate source 

 of property, it would follow that a society in 

 which so many laborers live in poverty and so 

 many others in opulence is contrary to all right, 

 and a violation of the true foundation of proper- 

 ty." M. de Laveleye would seem to have forgot- 

 ten that labor, like everything else, can be capi- 

 talized, and that the heir of an estate holds it by 

 the title of labor expended by his ancestors, as 

 fiurly as the man who has made a fortune in 

 trade and invested it in land. Whatever prop- 

 erty a man holds, whether patrimonial or self- 

 acquired, must have been amassed by somebody 

 and at some time or other; and, with the rare 

 exception of property acquired by spoliation or 

 conquest, it must all be the result of labor, thrift, 

 or a judicious and useful employment of capital, 

 accumulated by successive generations. 



M. de Laveleye, while he repudiates the labor 



