Land redistribution

“ The redistribution of land is particularly important where large estates and vast numbers of the land-poor coexist. Crucial components include the reform of tenancy arrangements, security of tenure, and the clear recording of land rights. ”

“ The rate of land resettlement and land purchase for redistribution has not reached our expectations. It must be accelerated. But in another phase of land tenure improvement—the issuance of land patents—we have made unprecedented progress. ”

“ This cause must operate to some extent in all progressive communities, though in such countries as England, where the tenant system prevails in agriculture, it may be shown more in the selling price of land than in the agricultural margin of cultivation, or actual rent. But in communities like the United States, where the user of land generally prefers, if he can, to own it, and where there is a great extent of land to overrun, it operates with enormous power. ”

“ But if land were to be thus granted, as is erroneously supposed, so far from its being a benefit, it would be a serious injury to the labouring person. How can he cultivate a hundred acres of land without a capital ? or support himself till his allotment produces the means of subsistence ? He may, it is true, obtain liberal wages for working for other settlers, but then his own land must be neglected ”

“ The monstrous demand of twenty shillings an acre for crown-lands, has not only had the effect of deterring capitalists from embarking in so hopeless a speculation, but has grievously wronged the existing land-owners, by raising the price of labour. When land was sold at five shillings an acre, a fund was accumulated in the hand of the local Government that served to pay for the introduction of labouring emigrants. ”

“ Finally, since under this system government assumes a control over landed estates, from which it exempts all other forms of property, it tends toward the nationalization of land, which would necessarily destroy the system itself. For if government claims all increment from land production, land ceases to be property and does not pass from owner to owner at a market value: then government fixes arbitrarily the rental of space, and taxation is distributed upon a new principle. ”

“ Added to this outlay, large sums have been expended in boring wells, building reservoirs and establishing water stations on cattle and sheep ranges. Buying land from landowners controlling large tracts, obtained by devious means in the early stages of the country's development, is still another heavy national expense. This land, when allotted to small farm settlers, is leased. Leasing the land, instead of granting the freehold, does not augur for a rapid increase in the rural population. ”

“ Mineral land would be thrown open to use, just as agricultural land; and in the heart of a city no one could afford to keep land from its most profitable use, or on the outskirts to demand more for it than the use to which it could at the time be put would warrant. Everywhere that land had attained a value, taxation, instead of operating, as now, as a fine upon improvement, would operate to force improvement. Whoever planted an orchard, or sowed a field, or built a house, or erected a manufactory, no matter how costly, would have no more to pay in taxes than if he kept so much land idle. ”

“ Wealth, unduly centralized, endangers the efficient workings of the machinery of government. Land monopoly—in the hands of individuals, corporations or syndicates—is at bottom the prime cause of the inequalities which obtain; which desolate fertile acres turned over to vast ranches and into bonanza farms of a thousand acres, where not one family finds a habitation, where muscle and brain are supplanted by machinery, and the small farmer is swallowed up and turned into a tenant or slave. ”

“ Not merely this, but the appropriation of rent for public purposes, which is the only way in which, with anything like a high development, land can be readily retained as common property, becomes, when political and religious power passes into the hands of a class, the ownership of the land by that class, and the rest of the community become merely tenants. And wars and conquests, which tend to the concentration of political power and to the institution of slavery, naturally result, where social growth has given land a value, in the appropriation of the soil. ”

“ It is seen that private property in land, instead of being necessary to its improvement and use, stands in the way of improvement and use, and entails an enormous waste of productive forces; that the recognition of the common right to land involves no shock or dispossession, but is to be reached by the simple and easy method of abolishing all taxation save that upon land values. ”

“ The present system which treats land as private property and prevents free access to it, hampers industry, checks production, crowds the towns by depopulating the countryside, obstructs the provision of good housing, lowers the standard of public health both physical and moral; this Conference strongly urges the Government to bring forward, as early as possible, some scheme for the nationalization of land so as to abolish the present unjust system of land ownership and land leasing. ”

“ The advantages which would be gained by substituting for the numerous taxes by which the public revenues are now raised, a single tax levied upon the value of land, will appear more and more important the more they are considered. This is the secret which would transform the little village into the great city. With all the burdens removed which now oppress industry and hamper exchange, the production of wealth would go on with a rapidity now undreamed of. This, in its turn, would lead to an increase in the value of land—a new surplus which society might take for general purposes. ”

“ With an unlimited stock of good land, all is plain sailing under any social institutions; but when land is limited in extent and every new-comer has the right to cut in and get an equal share with those already in possession, excessive subdivision is inevitable, and the point is soon reached where any fresh impost or outgoing destroys the profitableness of cultivation, and converts the right to the land from an asset into a liability. ”

“ I do not speak of the ground rent in large cities where owners are numerous, because that, though a question of great magnitude, involves peculiarities that separate it from the allied question of rural ground-rent, and make it more advantageously treated on its own basis. But in country districts where owners are few, and the possession of land therefore confers on one man power of many sorts over the growth and comfort of a whole community, that power ought certainly to be closely controlled by the State. ”

“ In order to lighten the pressure of rates, and, at the same time, gradually to diminish, and finally to absorb, the growing mass of pauperism and surplus population, it is the duty of the Government to appropriate its present surplus revenue, and the proceeds of national or public property, to the purchasing of lands, and the location thereon of the unemployed poor. The rents accruing from these lands to be applied to further purchases of land, till all who desired to occupy land, either as individual holders or industrial communities, might be enabled to do so. ”

“ The money will be used for land reform operations and to boost agricultural productivity in land reform areas.
As a corollary to the leasehold system and eventual land ownership, we have slopped up our resettlement program. We consider it our prime social responsibility to provide land to those displaced by urban and industrial development. ”

“ Rent must arise, under any social arrangement, from all soils which are better than the poorest soil cultivated: it must be necessarily paid to somebody; and that somebody must necessarily be the owner. If a peer or a squire is the owner, it is paid to the peer or squire; if the cultivator is the owner, the cultivator pays it to himself; if the land were nationalised and the State were to become the owner, the cultivator would have to pay it away to the State. ”

“ We want to get our industries and our people out of the towns and with control of area we could do it. The State, as landlord from John o'Groats to Land's End, could afford to dispense with the acquisition of the tiny areas upon which the majority of our people are now crowded. Land nationalization, viewed in this way, presents no insuperable financial difficulties. ”

“ Where, as in India, the landlords' share of the annual returns from the soil has been always taken by the Government as the most legitimate fund for the payment of its public establishments; and the estates of the farmers, and the holdings of the immediate cultivators of the soil, are liable to be subdivided in equal shares among the sons in every succeeding generation, the land can never aid much in giving to society that without which no society can possibly be well organized—a gradation of rank. ”

“ It is an undoubted evil that in this crowded kingdom so few as 2,238 persons should own 39,924,232 acres of land, and that the enormous holdings should be inadequately taxed, but we need the influence of the one million small landowners to enable us legally to reform and modify those obnoxious land laws which have facilitated the accumulation of such vast estates in so few hands. ”

“ It has been suggested that it would be better that the states should rent out the land at four per cent of the sale price. This would leave more money in the hands of settlers and enable many to get farms who cannot pay the price and have enough left to raise a crop. In reality it would be better for the state to help farmers get a start rather than to tax them one dollar per acre to begin with. However, under our system of government, we permit only those who have money to have land. ”

“ Then would the resumption of land as common property in nowise interfere with the proper use and improvement of land.
What is necessary for the use of land is not its private ownership, but the security of improvements. It is not necessary to say to a man, “this land is yours,” in order to induce him to cultivate or improve it. It is only necessary to say to him, “whatever your labor or capital produces on this land shall be yours.” Give a man security that he may reap, and he will sow; assure him of the possession of the house he wants to build, and he will build it. ”

“ In the chain of reasoning no link is wanting and no link is weak. Deduction and induction have brought us to the same truth—that the unequal ownership of land necessitates the unequal distribution of wealth. And as in the nature of things unequal ownership of land is inseparable from the recognition of individual property in land, it necessarily follows that the only remedy for the unjust distribution of wealth is in making land common property. ”

“ On the first settling of a country, in which there is an abundance of rich and fertile land, a very small proportion of which is required to be cultivated for the support of the actual population, or indeed can be cultivated with the capital which the population can command, there will be no rent; for no one would pay for the use of land, when there was an abundant quantity not yet appropriated, and therefore at the disposal of whosoever might choose to cultivate it. ”

“ They know that, over a large proportion of the arable soil of the kingdom, rent cannot so fall without being insufficient to meet the present burdens on land, and the great outlay required to maintain the farm-buildings, and to liquidate the other innumerable demands made on the proprietor of the soil. You call loudly for liberal covenants, for expensive buildings, and for more drainage, and at the very time you are depriving the proprietor of the means, and crippling him in his finances. Falling rents, farmers may well know, are the certain index of a retrograde agriculture ”

“ But the rest of the population would gain nothing. They would have no more share in the advantages of land ownership than before. And if, what is manifestly impossible, a fair distribution of the land323 were made among the whole population, giving to each his equal share, and laws enacted which would interpose a barrier to the tendency to concentration by forbidding the holding by any one of more than the fixed amount, what would become of the increase of population? ”

“ M'Gregor's argument really valid it must exceed all these combined. For a true money reform, I repeat, would abolish almost entirely and directly every one of these forms of usury except ground-rent, while a true land reform would directly abolish only ground-rent. Therefore, unless labor pays more in ground-rent than in interest, profit, and rent of buildings combined, the money question is of more importance than the land question. ”

“ Some writers have sought to define RENT as the difference between fertile lands and those that are so unproductive as barely to pay the cost of tillage. This far-fetched idea is contradicted by the circumstance that for centuries rent was paid by labor—the personal service of the vassal—and it is now part of the annual produce of the soil inasmuch as land will be unproductive without seed and labor, or being pastured by tame animals, the representative of labor in taming and tending them. ”

“ There still remains, however, the difficult question as to how far the communal right of property in the land and the periodical redistributions to which it gives rise, impose hurtful restrictions on the peasant's liberty of action in the cultivation of his fields, and deprive him of the natural inducements to improve his land. ”