deduction that the land is the common possession of mankind, a proposition to which Locke gave the seal of his authority, but which is probably as old as mankind itself. Spence declares indignantly that "Men may not live in any part of this world, not even where they were born, but as strangers and by the permission of the pretender to the property thereof." Paine suggests that God had not set up an Estate Office in Heaven where title-deeds to perpetual rights over land could be acquired. Ogilvie, a much soberer and more scientific writer, contents himself with the statement that land in its uncultivated state was the common property of mankind.
Naturally the particular conclusions to be drawn from these very wide premises vary immensely. Spence arrives at the absolute prohibition of private property in land; Ogilvie allows a system of private property with taxation of unearned increment and the parcelling of large estates—a remarkable foreshadowing of the modern policy, and based, like it, upon a more scientific consideration of the question; Paine aims at paying, out of heavy succession duties upon landed property, an old-age pension to every person as compensation for the loss of his rights in land. Thomas Spence (1750–1814) was the most outspoken and extreme of the three writers. He probably did as much as any other reforming zealot to popularise that fanatical and unreasoning hatred of the landed aristocracy which characterised English radical and revolutionary opinion during the early part of the nineteenth century, and which formed so large a part of the oratorical stock-in-trade of Vincent, O'Connor, O'Brien, and the like, in the Chartist Movement. A sturdy, stiff-necked, fluent Radical, with much of the rebel in his nature, Spence made many zealous disciples and a powerful enemy—the "panic-stricken Toryism" of the Government. He passed a stormy forty years of political agitation, between 1775 and 1814, and died in poverty, as many other good men did at that time. A sample of Spence ought to be given. One of his pamphlets, the Rights of Infants (1797), is in the form of a dialogue between a mother and a member of the aristocracy. The mother asks who receives the rents:
Aristocrat—We, to be sure.
Woman—You, to be sure! Who the Devil are you? Who gave you a right to receive the rent of our common?
Aristocrat—Woman, our ancestors either fought for or purchased our estates.
