IMAGINE an island girt with ocean; imagine a little world swimming in space.
Put on it, in imagination, human beings. Let them divide the land,
share and share alike, as individual property. At first, while population is sparse
and industrial processes rude and primitive, this will work well enough.
Turn away the eyes of the mind for a moment, let time pass, and look again.
Some families will have died out, some have greatly multiplied; on the whole,
population will have largely increased, and even supposing there have been
no important inventions or improvements in the productive arts, the increase
in population, by causing the division of labor, will have made industry
more complex. During this time some of these people will have been careless,
generous, improvident; some will have been thrifty and grasping. Some of
them will have devoted much of their powers to thinking of how they themselves
and the things they see around them came to be, to inquiries and speculations
as to what there is in the universe beyond their little island or their little
world, to making poems, painting pictures, or writing books; to noting the
differences in rocks and trees and shrubs and grasses; to classifying beasts
and birds and fishes and insects – to the doing, in short, of all the
many things which add so largely to the sum of human knowledge and human
happiness, without much or any gain of wealth to the doer. Others again will
have devoted all their energies to the extending of their possessions. What,
then, shall we see, land having been all this time treated as private property?
Clearly, we shall see that the primitive equality has given way to
inequality. Some will have very much more than one of the original shares
into which
the land was divided; very many will have no land at all. Suppose that, in
all things save this, our little island or our little world is Utopia – that
there are no wars or robberies; that the government is absolutely pure and
taxes nominal; suppose, if you want to, any sort of a currency; imagine,
if you can imagine such a world or island, that interest is utterly abolished;
yet inequality in the ownership of land will have produced poverty and virtual
slavery.
For the people we have supposed are human beings – that is to say,
in their physical natures at least, they are animals who can live only on
land and by the aid of the products of land. They may make machines which
will enable them to float on the sea, or perhaps to fly in the air, but to
build and equip these machines they must have land and the products of land,
and must constantly come back to land. Therefore those who own the land must
be the masters of the rest. Thus, if one man has come to own all the land,
he is their absolute master even to life or death. If they can live on the
land only on his terms, then they can live only on his terms, for without
land they cannot live. They are his absolute slaves, and so long as his ownership
is acknowledged, if they want to live, they must do in everything as he wills.
If, however, the concentration of landownership has not gone so far as to
make one or a very few men the owners of all the land – if there are
still so many landowners that there is competition between them as well as
between those who have only their labor – then the terms on which these
non-landholders can live will seem more like free contract. But it will not
be free contract. Land can yield no wealth without the application of labor;
labor can produce no wealth without land. These are the two equally necessary
factors of production. Yet, to say that they are equally necessary factors
of production is not to say that, in the making of contracts as to how the
results of production are divided, the possessors of these two meet on equal
terms. For the nature of these two factors
is very different. Land is a natural element; the human being must have his
stomach filled every few hours. Land can exist without labor, but labor cannot
exist without land. If I own a piece of land, I can let it lie idle
for a year or for years, and it will eat nothing. But the laborer must eat every day, and his family
must eat. And so, in the making of terms between them, the landowner has
an immense advantage over the laborer. It is on the side of the laborer that
the intense pressure of competition comes, for in his case it is competition
urged by hunger. And, further than this: As population increases,
as the competition for the use of land becomes more and more intense, so
are the owners of land enabled to get for the use of their land a larger
and larger part of the wealth which labor exerted upon it produces. That
is to say, the value of land steadily rises. Now, this steady rise in the
value of land brings about a confident expectation of future increase of
value, which produces among landowners all the effects of a combination to
hold for higher prices. Thus there is a constant tendency to force mere laborers
to take less and less or to give more and more (put it which way you please,
it amounts to the same thing) of the products of their work for the opportunity
to work. And thus, in the very nature of things, we should see on our little
island or our little world that, after a time had passed, some of the people
would be able to take and enjoy a superabundance of all the fruits of labor
without doing any labor at all, while others would be forced to work the
livelong day for a pitiful living.
But let us introduce another element into the supposition. Let us suppose
great discoveries and inventions – such as the steam-engine, the power-loom,
the Bessemer process, the reaping-machine, and the thousand and one labor-saving
devices that are such a marked feature of our era. What would be the result?
Manifestly, the effect of all such discoveries and inventions is to increase
the power of labor in producing wealth – to enable the same amount
of wealth to be produced by less labor, or a greater amount with the same
labor. But none of them lessen, or can lessen the necessity for land. Until
we can discover some way of making something out of nothing – and that
is so far beyond our powers as to be absolutely unthinkable – there
is no possible discovery or invention which can lessen the dependence of
labor upon land. And, this being the case, the effect of these labor-saving
devices, land being the private property of some, would simply be to increase
the proportion of the wealth produced that landowners could demand for the
use of their land. The ultimate effect of these discoveries and inventions
would be not to benefit the laborer, but to make him more dependent.
And, since we are imagining conditions, imagine laborsaving inventions to
go to the farthest imaginable point, that is to say, to perfection. What
then? Why then, the necessity for labor being done away with, all the wealth
that the land could produce would go entire to the landowners. None of it
whatever could be claimed by any one else. For the laborers there would be
no use at all. If they continued to exist, it would be merely as paupers
on the bounty of the landowners! ... read the whole article