Charles Stanton Devas

“ For as grace rests on nature, the religion that is alone truly Divine, must also ipso facto be truly human. But the instinct of private property is truly human; and the proper unfolding of human liberty and personality is historically bound up with it, and cannot develop where each person is only a sharer in a compulsory partnership, or, on the other hand, where property is confined to a privileged few. ”

“ Agrarianism.—The Latin word agrarius was applied historically to laws, or their partisans, favouring the division of Roman public lands among the poorer citizens. So the English words, agrarianism, and agrarian generally, imply theories and movements intended to benefit the poorer classes of society by dealing in some way with the ownership of land or the legal obligations of the cultivators. ”

“ That if individuals may not take to themselves the land that God has given to all, no more may nations; and the Irish soil thus belongs no more to the Celts than to the Saxons, the United States no more to the Americans than to the Chinese. Further, from the socialist standpoint (g) that George offers an illogical half measure, recovering for the workers only one portion of the "surplus product", and leaving competitive anarchy and capitalist exploitation untouched; whereas incomes, in the shape of dividends and interest, are just as much "unearned income" as incomes in the shape of rent. ”

“ That "rent", in the sense of an unearned increment, is not confined to land, but is seen in all forms of production, wherever a common market price yields a surplus to those who can produce more cheaply than their competitors. ”

“ They incited to no act of human vengeance upon evil-doers, nor to revolt against authority, even when it was misused; but they denounced immorality in home life, fraud in commerce, harshness to debtors, injustice to the poor; and as, under the technical conditions of production in antiquity, the main social problem was the preservation of a free peasantry, and the social question primarily an agrarian question, the Prophets appeared as agrarian reformers, with the not impracticable aim that each man should dwell in security under his own vine and his own fig-tree, on his father's inheritance. ”

“ Suitably, therefore, the same Pope who had defended the true dignity and true liberty of man urged the diffusion of property as the mean between Socialism and Individualism, and that where possible each citizen should dwell secure in a homestead which, however humble, was his own. ”

“ That in one vast section of British India, where for many years the State has attempted by periodical land settlements to absorb the unearned increment, and the single-tax system is in great measure in force, the population is no better off, but rather more penurious, than in the other vast section, where no such system is in force, but the Permanent Settlement of Bengal instead. ”

“ That a great unmerited loss is inflicted on those who have recently bought land, or have received land as their part of a testamentary estate, while those who have recently sold land, or have received cash as their part of a testamentary estate, escape scot-free. ”