292 STUDIES, SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL chap. 



for the exclusive pleasures of the rich. Even the beautiful 

 country lanes, with their wide margins of grass, and 

 banks often shaded with trees and adorned with wild flowers 

 — lanes which afford the purest delight to the constantly 

 increasing population of our towns and villages, and 

 which are often the only examples of picturesque Nature 

 within their reach, are now constantly being stolen from 

 them by the owners of the adjacent fields who (regardless 

 of decisions in our highest courts) fence in the narrow- 

 roadway in order to add a few perches to their land ; 

 while everywhere we find what were once pleasant foot- 

 paths either stopped altogether or shut in by obstructive 

 fences. This land-monopoly of the rich pursues the mass of 

 the people even to their homes, since they are obliged to 

 live in crowded, badly built, and often unhealthy houses, 

 because so many landowners will only grant land on 

 building-leases and at high ground-rents, in order to 

 enrich their unborn, and perhaps unworthy successors, at 

 the expense of the health, the comfort, and the freedom of 

 the present generation. And, lastly, they see that these 

 great landowners are, as a class, the opponents of all 

 progress, the upholders of cruel and obsolete game laws, 

 and that they possess legal powers and privileges virtually 

 giving them a command over others which in a free 

 country no class of citizens ought to possess. This wide- 

 spread feeling of discontent manifests itself in Ireland in 

 land-leagues and tenant-right associations, and in other 

 more destructive forms ; while in England there is a very 

 general but as yet undefined belief that the true remedy 

 for the evil is to be found in the Nationalization of the 

 Land.^ The danger is, that all reform should be opposed 



1 Proposals for the nationalization of the land have received compara- 

 tively little attention by modern writers, because it has been assumed 

 that present owners must be paid its full value, and this was clearly 

 impossible. Thus in the recently published work of Mr. J. Boyd 

 Kinnear, in a chapter on this subject, we find such statements as the 

 following: — "Under the broader form of the proposal the first step is 

 that the State shall purchase the land from its present owners, either 

 compulsorily or by agreement, but in either case paying its full value'' 

 (p. 106). And again : — "There is, of course, no objection in principle 

 to the State taking possession of all the land in the realm, on the 

 understanding, which is ahvays included in the proposal, that it shall 



