Alfred Russel Wallace 



way through fields or woodlands, and especially beside the 

 sea. With the advent of the motor-car and other swift 

 means of locomotion, the public roads are no longer safe 

 and pleasurable for pedestrians ; .besides the iniquitous fact 

 that hundreds are kept from enjoying the beauties of nature 

 by the utterly selfish and useless reservations of such by- 

 paths by the landowner. 



'' This all-embracing system of land-robbery," again he 

 writes, " for which nothing is too great or too small ; which 

 has absorbed meadow and forest, moor and mountain, which 

 has appropriated most of our rivers and lakes and the fish 

 that live in them; making the agriculturist pay for his sea- 

 weed manure and the fisherman for his bait of shell-fish; 

 which has desolated whole counties to replace men by sheep 

 or cattle, and has destroyed fields and cottages to make a 

 wilderness for deer and grouse; which has stolen the com- 

 mons and filched the roadside wastes ; which has driven the 

 labouring poor into the cities, and thus been the chief cause 

 of the misery, disease, and early death of thousands ... it 

 is the advocates of this inhuman system who, when a partial 

 restitution of their unholy gains is proposed, are the loudest 

 in their cries of ' robbery ' ! 



" But all the robbery, all the spoliation, all the legal and 

 illegal filching, has been on their side. . . . They made the 

 laws to legalise their actions, and, some day, we, the people, 

 will make laws which will not only legalise but justify our 

 process of restitution. It will justify it, because, unlike their 

 laws, which always took from the poor to give to the rich — 

 to the very class which made the laws — ours will only take 

 from the superfluity of the rich, not to give to the poor or 

 to any individuals, but to so administer as to enable every 

 man to* live by honest work, to restore to the whole people 

 their birthright in their native soil, and to relieve all alike 

 from a heavy burden of unnecessary and unjust taxation. 



142 



