242 



MY LIFE 



[Chap. 



forcible, and go so directly to the root of all those social 

 problems which demand solution to-day even more peremp- 

 torily than they did a century ago, that I will give the more 

 important of them here — 



Prop. I. The use of earth in the form of food is equally 

 necessary for human life as the use of air — the privation 

 of one kills in a few minutes, of the other in a few days or 

 weeks." 



Prop, II. Hence the man who controls land, controls 

 human life — excluding life that might be, holding at his 

 mercy life that is." 



" Prop. III. As God made a free gift to each man of life, 

 He equally intended for a free gift the necessary condition 

 of life — a portion of the soil." 



''Prop. V. Hence a portion of the soil is each man's 

 congenital and inalienable patrimony." 



" Prop. VII. The nationalizing of the soil should have been 

 the primary, the fundamental step in human association." 



''Prop. X. The culture of a portion of the soil (as a man's 

 own) has this advantage over all other labour, that it gives 

 him directly, and at first cost, those very necessaries which 

 he is obliged, indirectly, to seek, in manufactures, trade, and 

 commerce, namely, home, food, fuel, etc., all which must 

 otherwise be purchased at more than natural cost in labour 

 or money." 



Prop, XIIL It is out of the pauper and floating masses 

 who have been separated from the land, and have consequently 

 no option between starvation and selling their labour un- 

 conditionally, that capital is originally formed, and is, there- 

 after, enabled absolutely to dictate to the very labour that 

 creates it, and to defraud that labour of those surplusses 

 which ought to remain wholly with the latter." 



In these two last propositions is comprised the whole 

 philosophy of social reform, the last anticipating the main 

 thesis of Marx. And to show how well this fine writer and 

 thinker appreciated the more human, esthetic, and ennobling 

 aspects of the question, I will give one more short quotation, 

 on the overcrowding and housing questions, still talked about 



