But what is a fair price? The landlord, standing upon his alleged rights, may demand a price out of all reason and beyond all possibility.
Therefore I propose here to examine the nature of those alleged rights, and to compare the claims of the landholders with the practice of law as it is applied to holders of property in brains; that is to say, as it is applied to authors and to inventors.
Private ownership of land rests always on one of three pleas--
1. The right of conquest: the land has been stolen or "won" by the owner or his ancestors.
2. The right of gift: the land has been received as a gift, bequest, or grant.
3. The right of purchase: the land has been bought and paid for.
Let us deal first with the rights of gift and purchase. It is manifest that no man can have a moral right to anything given or sold to him by another person who had no right to the thing given or sold.
He who buys a watch, a horse, a house, or any other article from one who has no right to the horse, or house, or watch, must render up the article to the rightful owner, and lose the price or recover it from the seller.
If a man has no moral right to own land, he can have no moral right to sell or give land.
If a man has no moral right to sell or to give land, then another man can have no moral right to keep land bought or received in gift from him.
So that to test the right of a man to land bought by or given to him, we must trace the land back to its original title.
Now, the original titles of most land rest upon conquest or theft.
Either the land was won from the Saxons by William the Conqueror, and by him given in fief to his barons, or it has been stolen from the common right and "enclosed" by some lord of the manor or other brigand.
I am sorry to use the word brigand, but what would you call a man who stole your horse or watch; and it is a far greater crime to steal land.
Now, stolen land carries no title, except one devised by landlords. That is, there is no _moral_ title.
So we come to the land "won" from the Saxons. The title of this land is the title of conquest, and only by that title can it be held, and only with that title can it be sold. What the sword has won the sword must hold. He who has taken land by force has a title to it only so long as he can hold it by force.
This point is neatly expressed in a story told by Henry George--
A nobleman stops a tramp, who is crossing his park, and orders him off _his_ land. The tramp asks him how came the land to be his? The noble replies that he inherited it from his father. "How did _he_ get it?" asks the tramp. "From his father," is the reply; and so the lord is driven back to the proud days of his origin--the Conquest.
"And how did your great, great, great, etc., grandfather get it?"
asks the tramp. The nobleman draws himself up, and replies, "He fought for it and won it." "Then," says the unabashed vagrant, beginning to remove his coat, "I will fight _you_ for it."
The tramp was quite logical. Land won by the sword may be rewon by the sword, and the right of conquest implies the right of any party strong enough for the task to take the conquered land from its original conqueror.
And yet the very men who claim the land as theirs by right of ancient conquest would be the first to deny the right of conquest to others.
They claim the land as theirs because eight hundred years ago their fathers took it from the English people, but they deny the right of the English people to take it back from them. A duke holds lands taken by the Normans under William. He holds them by right of the fact that his ancestor stole them, or, as the duke would say, "won" them. But let a party of revolutionaries propose to-day to win these lands back from him in the same manner, and the duke would cry out, "Thief! thief! thief!"
and call for the protection of the law.
It would be "immoral" and "illegal," the duke would say, for the British people to seize his estates.
Should such a proposal be made, the modern duke would not defend himself, as his ancestors did, by force of arms, but would appeal to the law. Who made the law? The law was made by the same gentlemen who appropriated and held the land. As the Right Hon. Joseph Chamberlain said in his speech at Denbigh in 1884--
The House of Lords, that club of Tory landlords, in its gilded chamber, has disposed of the welfare of the people with almost exclusive regard to the interests of a class.
Or, as the same statesman said at Hull in 1885--
The rights of property have been so much extended that the rights of the community have almost altogether disappeared, and it is hardly too much to say that the prosperity and the comfort and the liberties of a great proportion of the population have been laid at the feet of a small number of proprietors, who neither toil nor spin.
Well, then, the duke may defend his right by duke-made law. We do not object to that, for it justifies us in attacking him by Parliament-made law: by new law, made by a Parliament of the people.
Is there any law of equity which says it is unjust to take by force from a robber what the robber took by force from another robber? Or is there any law of equity which says it is unjust that a law made by a Parliament of landlords should not be reversed by another law made by a Parliament of the people?
The landlords will call this an "immoral" proposal. It is based upon the claim that the land is wanted for the use and advantage of the nation.
Their lordships may ask for precedent. I will provide them with one.
A landlord does not make the land; he holds it.
But if a man invent a new machine or a new process, or if he write a poem or a book, he may claim to have made the invention or the book, and may justly claim payment for the use of them by other men.
An inventor or an author has, therefore, a better claim to payment for his work than a landlord has to payment for the use of the land he calls his. Now, how does the law act towards these men?
The landlord may call the land his all the days of his life, and at his death may bequeath it to his heirs. For a thousand years the owners of an estate may charge rent for it, and at the end of the thousand years the estate will still be theirs, and the rent will still be running on and growing ever larger and larger. And at any suggestion that the estate should lapse from the possession of the owners and become the property of the people, the said owners will lustily raise the cry of "Confiscation."
The patentee of an invention may call the invention his own, and may charge royalties upon its use for _a space of fourteen years_. At the end of that time his patent lapses and becomes public property, without any talk of compensation or any cry of confiscation. Thus the law holds that an inventor is well paid by fourteen years' rent for a thing he made himself, while the landlord is _never_ paid for the land he did not make.
The author of a book holds the copyright of the book for a period of forty-four years, or for his own life and seven years after, whichever period be the longer. At the expiration of that time the book becomes public property. Thus the law holds that an author is well paid by forty-four years' rent for a book which he has made, but that the landlord is _never_ paid for the land which he did not make.
If the same law that applies to the land applied to books and to inventions, the inheritors of the rights of Caxton and Shakespeare would still be able to charge, the one a royalty on every printing press in use, and the other a royalty on every copy of Shakespeare's poems sold.
Then there would be royalties on all the looms, engines, and other machines, and upon all the books, music, engravings, and what not; so that the cost of education, recreation, travel, clothing, and nearly everything else we use would be enhanced enormously. But, thanks to a very wise and fair arrangement an author or an inventor has a good chance to be well paid, and after that the people have a chance to enjoy the benefits of his genius.
Now, if it is right and expedient thus to deprive the inventor or the author of his own production after a time, and to give the use thereof to the public, what sense or justice is there in allowing a landowner to hold land and to draw an ever-swelling rent to the exclusion, inconvenience, and expense of the people for ever? And by what process of reasoning can a landlord charge me, an author, with immorality or confiscation for suggesting that the same law should apply to the land he did not make, that I myself cheerfully allow to be applied to the books I do make?
For the landlord to speak of confiscation in the face of the laws of patent and of copyright seems to me the coolest impudence.
But there is something else to be said of the landlord's title to the land. He claims the right to hold the land, and to exact rent for the land, on the ground that the land is lawfully his.
The land is _not_ his.
There is no such thing, and there never was any such thing, in English law as private ownership of land. In English law the land belongs to the Crown, and can only be held in trust by any subject.
Allow me to give legal warranty for this statement. The great lawyer, Sir William Blackstone, says--
Accurately and strictly speaking, there is no foundation in nature or in natural law why a set of words on parchment should convey the dominion of land. Allodial (absolute) property no subject in England now has; it being a received and now undeniable principle in law, that all lands in England are holden mediately or immediately of the King.
Sir Edward Coke says--