Cobbett and Mill. 483 



quired for this purpose. No man, he asserts, made the land ; it 

 is the original inheritance of the whole race, and, therefore, 

 landed property is a different thing from other property. Such 

 circumstances, he goes on to assert, give the so-called owners 

 no right to the land, but only to compensation for that portion 

 of their interest in it of which it may be the policy of the State 

 to deprive them. If the land were bought with the labour 

 and abstinence of themselves or their ancestors, compensation 

 is due even to those landlords who have become little more 

 than burdens to their property ; presumably, even to the two 

 Scotch dukes who, according to Mill, had deprived their estates 

 of all the principles of private property by devoting them to 

 other uses than those of cultivation.^ The last link in the 

 Sorites is the establishment of the theory that the State has a 

 claim on the "unearned increment." " Suppose," Mill writes, 

 " that there is a kind of income which constantly tends to in- 

 crease, without any exertion or sacrifice on the part of the 

 owners, those owners constituting a class in the community, 

 whom the natural course of things progressively enriches, con- 

 sistently'^ with complete passiveness on their part. In such a 

 case, it would be no violation of the principles on which private 

 property is grounded, if the State should appropriate this 

 increase of wealth, or part of it as it arises Now this," he 

 goes on to say, is the case with rent. The landlords grow 

 richer, as it were, in their sleep, without working, risking, or 

 economising. What claim have they, on the general principle 

 of social justice, to this accession of riches ? "^ 



It is not our present purpose to criticise the various steps in 

 this line of reasoning, but simply to lay before the reader the 

 dire straits to which landed proprietorship had attained, when 

 such subtle agencies were undermining the landlord's cherished 

 prerogatives. 



The influence of Mill depended upon the logical and judicial 

 characteristics of his mind, that of Cobbett upon a thorough 

 familiarity with all the ins and outs of the landed economy. 

 A man who had spent the first portion of his working life in 



^ Principles of Political Economy^ vol. i. bk. ii. ch. 2, passim. 

 » Id. Ihid., vol. ii. bk. v. ch. 2, p. ^60. 



