240 



MY LIFE 



[Chap. 



just as the house-tax and the land-tax are collected, the state- 

 tenant being left as completely free as is the " freeholder " 

 now (who is in law a state-tenant), or as are the holders of 

 perpetual feus in Scotland. 



This article appeared in the Contemporary Review of 

 November, 1880, 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 com- 

 municated 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 pro- 

 gramme, 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 



