The Vermont watchman. [volume] (Montpelier, Vt.) 1883-1911, 1885-07-01

| lie, and II he collects rent for that he must
account for II to the public in the form of
| land tax. Why? Because IL is the public
in general, who have hocked in and popu-
lated and developed the new city, that have
created these new values, and to them they
belong The individual has no right to
has himself created.
But, the reader will say, what will the
public do with such immense sums received
as land rents from the public land upon
which great cities are built? Well Mr..
George says, the public will not take anv
more than 1t needs for public uses, and as
the owner of the buildings cannot collect
rent on anything but the building itself,
| rents in cities must be greatly reduced, and
the poor of these cities to that extent bene-
fitted. Or If not, If it does not work that
way Qor he believes in taking all the rent
any one is willing to pay in a free competi-
tom, then he believes the surplus revenue
should be divided equally among the citi-
| zens. The land is theirs and they ought to
have the income of it, either in lower prices
| or in cash.
The above is but the merest outline of Mr..
George $ teaching, as given in his "Prog-
ress and Poverty" a work which has had a
vast circulation both in America and in Eu-
rope, and which is confessed by the ablest
men to be an eloquent and captivating pro-
duction even when it is condemned as I'M
sound in its principles.
Mr.. George believes that unless our land
laws are radically reformed upon the lines
he has laid down, there is no possible way
of preventing the present rapid accumula-
ton of wealth in the hands of compare
lively few men, in the commercial and
manufacturing centers, to the depletion and
impovershment of all the working classes
including the farmers.
But another writer Mr.. Edward At
kinson, of equal ability, and almost as in
teresting and convincing in his methods of
statement, holds that with our institutions
as they now are, without any violent or rad
zeal changes, our affairs will regulate them
selves and, in the end, secure the greatest
good to the greatest number. He calls the
great inventors and the great business men
of our times g great communists" and says
of Bessemer, Vanderbilt, George Stephen
son. Edward Cunard and Mccormick (the
reaper NAM, " Five greater Jewelers., five
more potent breakers of images which men
have set up in their minds in the past days
as the representatives of divine rights
five more benefcent persons, whatever their
own conception of their function in life may
have been, can hardly be named in all his
tory. They have broken down, or will
break down, class distinctions, which mark
only difference of condition rather than
any real difference among men; they will
cause the idle representatives of the priv
LEGGED classes to serve a useful purpose in
the world, or else take themselves out of
the way they are abating the vested
wrongs of ages, they are securing the con-
ditions under which it will hereafter be inn
possible to collect rent for land which does
not mark service rendered.; and in the end
they may make even the distribution of
honor as well as of wealth depend upon
service rather than upon name or heritage.
The temporary accumulation of capital in
the hands of rich men is a matter of small
moment. There is no such thing as fixed
capital Everything is perishable, and the
greatest progress is worked by destructive
inventions which render old forms of little
or no value. In the meantime, those who
have possessed them have consumed only
their own subsistence and that of their
families; the rest has been used in the ser
vice of the common people. The time is
near at hand when a fair subsistence will
be so well assured by the practice of integ-
rity and the eXertion of moderate degree of
industry that it will no longer pay to be rich"
Let me temper Mr. Atkinsons glowing OPP
timism by view of the other side, taken
from Mr.. Georges book. Perhaps the truth
lies between the two. | copy from page
80, et. So: When the idea of individual
ownership, which so justly and naturally
attaches to things of human production, is
extended to land, all the rest is a mere mat
ter of development. The strongest and
most cunning easily acquire superior share
in this species of property, which is to be
had not by production, but by appropria-
ton, and, in becoming lords of the land,
they become necessarily lords of their fell
low-men. The ownership of land is the
basis of aristocracy. 1t is not nobility
|
that gave nobility. All the enormous priv
ieges of the nobility of medieval Europe
flowed from their position as owners of the
soil. The simple principle of the owner
ship of the soil produced on the one side
the lord, and on the other the vassal-the
one having all rights and the other none.
Power exists wherever the ownership of
land exists, and can be brought out where
ever the competition for the use of land is
great enough to enable the landlord to make
his terms III Ia demand terms
on which men would still consent to live on
his land, and the law cannot prevent him
so long as it does not qualify his owner
ship. Thus the condition of the
masses in every civilized country is, or is
tending to become, that of virtual slavery
under the forms of freedom And it is
probable that of all kinds of slavery this is
the most cruel and relentless For the la
borer is robbed of the produce of his labor
and compelled to toll for a mere subsist-
ence; but his taSkmasters, instead of hui
man beings, assume the form of imperious
necessities The direct responsibility of
; master to slave, responsibility which ex-
ercises a softening influence upon the great
majority of men, does not arise; it is not
one human being who seems to drive
another to unremitting and ill-requited toll,
but the inevitable laws of supply and de-
mand, for which no one in particular is re-
sponsible. When the Shareholders of the
South looked upon the condition of the free
laboring poor in the most advanced civil
lzed countries, it is no wonder that they
easily persuaded themselves of the divine
institution of slavery. In the southern
states, during the days of slavery, the mas
ter who would have compelled his negroes
to work and live as large classes of free
white men and women are compelled in
free countries to work and live, would have
been deemed infamous. But in London,
New York and Boston, among people who
have given and would give again, money
and blood to free the slave, where no one
could abuse a beast in public without arrest
and punishment, barefooted and ragged chill
dren may be seen running around the streets,
even in the winter time, and in squalid
garrets and noisome cellars women work
away their lives for wages that fail to keep
them in proper warmth and nourish-
ment. Our boosted freedom neces-
sarily involves slavery so long as we recog-
nze private property in land-the monopo-
lzation by some of what nature has de-
signed for all. So long as one man can
claim the exclusive ownership of the
land from which other men must live,
slavery will exist, and as material progress
goes on, must grow and deepen" 7. H.
A Letter of July 4, 1879.