xvi HOW TO NATIONALIZE THE LAND 285 



The probabilities are that men of this stamp are increasing, 

 and will increase, and the system of free-trade in land 

 would serve chiefly to afford them the means of an 

 unlimited gratification of their great passion. With such 

 men for competitors in the market, who will ever be able 

 to buy land for personal occupation and cultivation as a 

 business? Such a course will become more and more 

 impossible ; and nothing seems more likely to check and 

 render difficult the growth of a peasant proprietary than 

 free-trade in land, with the unlimited power of accumula- 

 tion by wealthy individuals which such free-trade will 

 render still easier than before. This increased accumula- 

 tion will inevitably exaggerate the numerous evils of 

 absentee proprietorship, such as management by agents, 

 restriction of agricultural processes, discouragement of 

 improvements, the preservation of game, the system of 

 short* building leases, 1 and a pauperized class of agricultural 

 labourers ; and thus, although the abolition of restrictions 

 on the transfer of land is a valuable reform, and receives 

 my hearty support, it is yet utterly powerless to ameliorate 

 the evils inherent in the unlimited possession of the soil 

 of the country by individual owners, either as a money 

 investment or as a source of political and social power. 



The advocates of the views here opposed seem to have 

 overlooked two fundamental facts that the land of a 

 country is the great essential of human existence ; and, 

 that, being fixed in quantity and incapable of increase, 

 absolute freedom to buy and sell it must result in a 

 monopoly, and in giving absolute power to the rich who 

 possess it over the poor who do not a power which, in 

 civilized countries, is checked by public opinion and by 

 special legislation, but is nevertheless always incompatible 

 with the well-being of a free people. 2 



1 I am informed that some landowners will now only let their land 

 on building leases for eighty or even sixty instead of the usual ninety- 

 nine years, and when they have the monopoly of fine sites land is 

 actually largely taken on these onerous terms. 



2 In Mr. Froude's remarkable paper on Ireland, in the Nineteenth 

 Century for September last, he gives the following case of (probably 

 ignorant) abuse of power, apparently from personal knowledge. He 

 says: "Not a mile from the place where I am now writing, an 

 estate on the coast of Devonshire came into the hands of an English 



