340 STUDIES, SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL chap. 



the earth, now and for future generations, is or is not, in 

 Herbert Spencer's own words, " a crime inferior only in 

 wickedness to the crime of taking away their lives or 

 personal liberties." If Mr. Spencer had taken the trouble 

 to study the Programme of the Land Nationalization 

 Society, which it would have been a natural and proper 

 thing for him to have done before arguing against the 

 possibility of such nationalization — he would have found 

 that, among the eight reasons we give for holding private 

 ownership of land to be wrong, the mode in which it has 

 been acquired either by past or present generations of 

 landlords finds no place. We ground our claim on con- 

 siderations of absolute justice as well as of practical ex- 

 pediency, and as against us, all the good or evil deeds of 

 landlords or their ancestors are wholly beside the question. 

 We maintain, that, when a great wrong has been done in 

 the past, a wrong which still produces and must ever pro- 

 duce evil results, a wrong which is the fundamental cause 

 of the wide-spread pauperism and misery that pervades 

 our land — it is our primary duty to find a means of abo- 

 lishing that wrong. And when the great philosopher who 

 first taught us how enormous was this wrong, goes back 

 on his own words, declares that he sees no way out of the 

 difficulty, and that the huge injustice to the living and to 

 the unborn must go on indefinitely — then we refuse to 

 accept the teachings of such a helpless guide, who sets 

 before us this most impotent conclusion under the holy 

 name of Justice. 



Let us now turn for a while to consider the fundamental 

 principles of Mr. Spencer's Social -philosophy — principles 

 which are altogether excellent, and which, if he had boldly 

 and logically followed them out, would have shown him 

 how this great wrong — this wicked crime of land-monopoly 

 may be easily and equitably abolished. 



In the second paragraph of his Chapter entitled Human 

 Justice (as distinguished from animal and sub-human 

 justice previously discussed), Mr. Spencer thus lays down 

 the ethical correlative of the law of survival of the fittest 

 in the animal world : — " Each individual ought to receive 



