xxiv ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL JUSTICE 435 



widely accepted, was an obscure Newcastle schoolmaster, 

 Thomas Spence, who in 1775 gave a lecture before the 

 Philosophical Society of that town, which was so much 

 in advance of the age that when he printed his lecture 

 the society expelled him, and he was soon afterwards 

 obliged to leave the town. He maintained the sound 

 doctrine that the land of any country or district justly 

 belongs to those who live upon it, not to any individuals 

 to the exclusion of the rest; and he points out, as did 

 Herbert Spencer at a later period, the logical result of 

 admitting private property in land. He says : 



' ' And any one of them (the landlords) still can, by laws of their 

 own making, oblige every living creature to remove off his property 

 (which, to the great distress of mankind, is too often put in execu- 

 tion) ; so, of consequence, were all the landholders to be of one 

 mind, and determined to take their properties into their own hands, 

 all the rest of mankind might go to heaven if they would, for there 

 would be no place found for them here. Thus men may not live in 

 any part of this world, not even where they are born, but as 

 strangers, and by the permission of the pretender to the property 

 thereof." 



He maintained that every parish should have possession 

 of its own land, to be let out to the inhabitants, and that 

 each parish should govern itself and be interfered with as 

 little as possible by the central government, thus an- 

 ticipating the views as to local self-government which we 

 are now beginning to put into practice. 



A few years later, in 1782, Professor Ogilvie published 

 anonymously, An Essay on the Eight of Property in Land, 

 with respect to its foundation in the Law of Nature, its 

 present establishment by the Municipal Laws of Europe, and 

 the Regulations by which it might be rendered more beneficial 

 to the Lower Banks of Mankind. This small work contains 

 an elaborate and well-reasoned exposition of the whole 

 land question, anticipating the arguments of Herbert 

 Spencer in Social Statics, of Mill, and of the most advanced 

 modern land-reformers. But all these ideas were before 

 their time, and produced little or no effect on public 

 opinion. The workers were too ignorant, too much 

 oppressed by the struggle for bare existence, while the 



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