_;S MY LIFE 



This article appeared in the Contemporary Review of 

 November, [880, and it immediately attracted the attention 

 of Mr. A. C. Swinton, Dr. G. B. Clark, Mr. Roland Estcourt, 

 and a few others, who had long been seeking a mode of 

 applying Herbert Spencer's great principle of the inequity of 

 private property in land, and who found it in the suggestions 

 and principles I had laid down. They accordingly commu- 

 nicated with me ; several meetings were held at the invitation 

 of Mr. Swinton, who was the initiator of the movement, and 

 after much discussion as to a definite programme, the " Land 

 Nationalization Society ' was formed, and much against my 

 wishes, I was chosen to be president. Notwithstanding the 

 scanty means of the majority of the founders and members, 

 the society has struggled on for a quarter of a century. 

 Its lecturers and its yellow vans have pervaded the country, 

 and it has effected the great work of convincing the highest 

 and best-organized among the manual workers as represented 

 by their Trades Unions, that the abolition of land-monopoly, 

 which is the necessary result of its private ownership, is at 

 the very root of all social reform. Hence the future is with 

 them and us, and though the capitalists and the official liberals 

 are still against us, we wait patiently, and continue to 

 educate the masses in the certainty of a future and not distant 

 success. 



Although Herbert Spencer was the first eminent English- 

 man of science to establish the doctrine of land-nationalization 

 upon the firm basis of social justice, he had several fore- 

 runners who saw the principle as clearly as he did, declared 

 it as boldly, but, being far in advance of their age, were 

 treated with scorn, persecution, or neglect. The earliest was 

 Thomas Spence, a poor schoolmaster of Newcastle-on-Tyne, 

 who in 1775 delivered a lecture before the Philosophical 

 Society of that town, for which he was immediately expelled 

 from the society, and soon after obliged to leave the town. 

 This lecture was reprinted by Mr. H. M. Hyndham in 1882, 

 and a single sentence will indicate its scope and purpose : — 



" Hence it is plain that the land or earth, in any country 



