"The Land for the People."

Liberty Vol. I, No. 11
December 24, 1881

The natural wealth of the earth belongs to all the people. The land, the coal, the minerals, the water courses, — all that furnishes the basis of the prime opportunities for human well-being should be the common possession of all.
The above proposition is practically accepted by the leading thinkers and agitators of the world. The socialists declare it as the bottom plank of their system. The communists of course avow it. The "Irish World" cries it aloud from week to week. John Stuart Mill affirmed it almost in so many words. Herbert Spencer reiterates it constantly, and even Froude and John Bright have repeatedly accepted it by inference. Liberty affirms it too; so one main and vital proposition is generally admitted by all shades of advanced reformers.

But at the point where this proposition is accepted begins the great socialistic controversy in which we find ourselves at uncompromising war with social democrats, the communists, and the whole rank and file of government regulationists. "By what method do you propose to give every man a fair opportunity to enjoy all these 'natural gifts'?" "How can you best secure this natural wealth to all the people?" These questions which tower in importance above all others which now confront thinking men.

Now, Liberty's way of getting all these good things to the people is to put every man on his own merits. The very purpose of that machine called the State is to set an artificial patent man-trap, by which  the intended servile classes shall be crippled in the race for natural wealth and natural opportunities.

Years ago the natural wealth of the public waters was not interfered with by legislation. Go to the shores of our bays and rivers, and the poor fishermen, if not already starved out or forced into the service of big operators, will recall with a sigh the good old days when all poor men fared alike and could make a living out of the public waters. But since politics have become a thieving trade, legislation has so "put a job" on natural water privileges that the poor are practically evicted and choked off, while the big concerns who dictate the legislation scoop up he fisherman in their politico-industrial nets under the current despotic wage system.

Cease to protect landlords in their monopoly of the land through the State, and the land will readily revert to the people. It will revert, too, speedily, with little expense, and with less violence, injustice, and dissatisfaction than under our boasted law-and-order arrangements. The island of Ireland belongs to the people, as Bishop Nulty and the "Irish World" assert. But why do the people not enjoy it? Simply because their wits are not awakened to their real enemy, the State. Acting better than it knows, the Land League, as a power for Liberty, is only strong in the fact that is has been this expression of practical revolt against the British State. The London "Times," more sagacious than the blind leaders of the League, foresees that a successful strike against that tax known as rent is only a step, which needs to be followed by a strike against that other tax which needs to be followed by a strike against that other tax which is levied to support the State in order that the tap-root of the whole scheme of landlordism may be reached.

And yet the mass of Irishmen are so swallowed up in the delusion that society is impossible without a State that the craze of Irish national independence came near capturing the recent convention at Chicago, and threatens to yet the beneficent work of the Land League movement. The prospective Irish State will be the same machine, under another banner, that now has the Irish tenant by the throat. The American republic is to-day more favorable to landlords than is the government of England. A late editorial in the New York "Tribune" produced unanswerable proof that the laws of this country are vastly more favorable to the landlord and more sever to the tenant than the laws which hold sway in Ireland. Unless Irish human nature is the one exception of the world, the coming Irish republic will be simply a reproduction of the machine which inevitably provides that the land shall not come into the hands of the people. The very purpose of the State is to make the mass of the people the slaves of the privileged classes. The State, in its very nature, cannot be of the people and by the people. It is of the few and by the few by virtue of its organic structure.

Until these bottom facts of despotism can be gotten into the heads of the Irish leaders, the land war will flounder along blindly. The leaders of the movement are to-day ignorant of the only saving grace there is "no rent." When the London "Times" says that "no rent" is but the stepping-stone to "no taxes," it shows a far keener insight into the situation than Parnell and his infatuated companions who cry for Irish national independence. Stop feeding the infernal machine which alone protects the landlord in his piracy, and the game is up with one stroke. To institute another machine in its place is simply to invite the Irish to practice upon their own race what the hated Saxon has been practicing all these centuries, and to substitute the Irish swindle for the English is about the extent of the average Irishman's aspiration. Nothing better can be expected till the agitation shall call forth somebody who has the sense and courage to supplement Michael Davitt's "no rent" with "no taxes" and "no State." Then this now useless cry of "the land for the people" will begin to mean something for Ireland and the whole human race. A sort of blind Providence has driven Ireland into the "no rent" resolve, but her vaunted leaders are ignorant of its real significance. They are mere children besides such men as Michael Bakounine, the founder of Nihilism, and are entitled only to the credit of blindly acting better than they know.