316 ON THE NATURAL INEQUALITY OF MEN vil 



ing ground for any more ; if it were not that, long 

 before that time, they would have eaten up the 

 limited quantity of food-stuffs and died like the 

 locusts that have consumed everything eatable in 

 an oasis of the desert. The attempt to draw a 

 distinction between land as limited in quantity, in 

 the sense, I suppose, that it is something that can- 

 not be imported and other things as unlimited, 

 because they can be imported has arisen from 

 the fact that Rousseau's modern followers entertain 

 the delusion that, consistently with their principles, 

 it is possible to suppose that a nation has right of 

 ownership in the land it occupies. If the island 

 of Great Britain is the property of the British na- 

 tion, then, of course, it is true that Britons cannot 

 have more than somewhere about 90,000 square 

 miles of land, while the quantity of other thi 

 they can import is (for the present, at any rate), prac- 

 tically, if not strictly, unlimited. But how is the 

 assumption that the Britons own Britain, to be re- 

 conciled with the great dictum of Rousseau, 

 that a man cannot rightfully appropriate any part 

 of this limited commodity, land, without the unani- 

 mous consent of all his fellow men ( My strong 

 impression is that if a parti-coloured plebiscite <>i 

 Europeans, Chinese, Hindoos, Negroes, Red Indians, 

 Maoris, and all the other inhabitants of the ten 

 trial globe were to decree us to be usurpers, not a 

 soul would budge ; and that, if it came t<> lighting. 

 Mr. Morley's late " herklers " might be safely 



