362 STUDIES, SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL chap. 



cultivator of land. We want men to be able to form and 

 keep a home ; to be practically as secure in that home, so 

 long as they pay the moderate ground-rent for the land, as 

 if they were the actual owners of the freehold, subject 

 only to the payment of a tax. We want the new tenants 

 under land-nationalization to be really free-holders in the 

 old sense — free men holding land from the community, 

 never to be interfered with so long as they continued to 

 pay the moderate dues and to be law-abiding citizens. To 

 give this full security all the rights of bequest or sale now 

 appertaining to freehold land should appertain to these 

 State tenancies. 



It is, I believe, only by some such process as that which 

 1 have here indicated that we can possibly obtain the full 

 benefit of land- nationalization or of the first steps which 

 we may be able to make towards it. We must always 

 remember that the community will be benefited just in 

 proportion to the well-being of the cultivators and of those 

 who obtain access to land. If we rack-rent them so that 

 they just make a living out of the land, they will have 

 little influence in raising the wages of other workers or 

 in enabling them to make a successful bargain with 

 capitalist employers. But if, on the other hand, we 

 allow all occupiers of land to have it on such terms and 

 conditions that they are able to make a good living, 

 provide well for their families, and enjoy an old age of 

 secure repose in their own homesteads, this state of well- 

 being will serve to establish a standard of living which 

 will react on the whole working population, and lead to 

 a corresponding rise in the rate of wages throughout 

 the whole industrial world. There appears to me to be 

 no proposition in the domain of political and social 

 science more certain than this. On the other hand, no 

 mistake can be more fatal than to think that the 

 community would be benefited by screwing from twenty 

 to fifty per cent, more rental from the occupiers of land, 

 thus reducing their profits, rendering their position less 

 secure, lowering their standard of living, and with it that 

 of the whole working population, and often creating a 

 body of prospective paupers. 



