XVII LAND NATIONALIZATION— WHY ? AND HOW ? 301 



part of the world, a single acre might sell for £1,000 or 

 £10,000. Who created this value ? Not the original 

 settler, but society. And this shows the absurdity of 

 comparing, as some do, the occasional increase in the 

 value of other property with that of land. In the case of 

 everything which is the product of human labour, the 

 tendency is for it to become cheaper as population 

 increases and civilization advances. When the reverse 

 occurs it is usually owing to exceptional conditions, or to 

 the influence of some kind of monopoly, and it never 

 applies to the necessaries of life. But with land the 

 increase of value is universally coincident with and due 

 to the growth of society, and the only fluctuations in this 

 constant rise are owing either to monopoly and specu- 

 lation forcing the price at a certain epoch above its 

 natural value, or to restrictions on its free use by the 

 people. Here again we bring out a broad distinction 

 between the products of a man's labour which are and 

 should be private property, and land, the gift of nature 

 to man and the first condition of his existence, which 

 should ever remain the possession of society at large, and 

 be held in trust for the equal benefit of all. 



One other consideration remains, and perhaps the most 

 important of all as affording a demonstration of the 

 necessarily evil results of unrestricted private property in 

 land. If a portion of the community is allowed to appro- 

 priate the whole of the land for its private use and benefit, 

 this appropriation necessarily carries with it the right and 

 the power to appropriate the bulk of the products of the 

 labour of the rest of the community, while it keeps down 

 wages to a minimum rate just sufficient to maintain 

 physical existence. Carlyle recognized this truth when he 

 speaks of the poor widow boiling nettles for her only food, 

 and the perfumed lord at Paris extracting from her every 

 third nettle as rent. The late Professor Cairnes in many 

 of his writings dwelt upon this consequence of landlordism. 

 In one of his essays in the Fortnightly Review, he says : — 



"The soil is, over the greater portion of the inhabited globe, 

 cultivated by very humble men, with very little disposable wealth, 

 and whose career is practically marked out for them by irresistible 



