Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/390

THE ECONOMIC JOURNAL Few can doubt the fundamental causes of this inequality of condition. The abstraction from the total of over one-third of the product necessarily makes a serious inroad in that which the 'niggardliness of Nature' allows us, and the distribution of the remaining two-thirds is, of course, itself fatally affected by the secondary results of the division into 'two nations' which the private appropriation of rent and interest creates. Now Mr. Courtney may tell us of the good things that the worker could get for himself by thrift and sobriety, prudence and saving, but no economist will for a moment suggest that any con- ceivable advance in these virtues would remove the fundamental inequality arising from the phenomenon of rent. The mere worker, qu? worker, is necessarily working, as far as its own re- muneration is concerned, on the very worst land in economic use, with the very minimum advantage of industrial capital. Every development towards a freer Individualism must, indeed, inevit- ably emphasize the power of the owner of the superior instruments of wealth-production to obtain for himself all the advantages of their superiority. Individualists may prefer to blink this fact, and to leave it to be implied that, somehow or another, the virtuous artisan can dodge the law of rent. But against this complacent delusion of the philanthropist political economy emphatically protests. So long as the instruments of production are in un- restrained private ownership, so long must the tribute of the workers to the drones continue: so long will the toilers' reward inevitably be reduced by their exactions. No tinkering with the land laws can abolish, or even diminish economic rent, however much it may result in the redistribution of this tribute. The whole equivalent of every source of fertility o? advantage of all land over and above the worst in economic use is under free com- petition necessarily abstracted from the mere worker on it. So long as Lady Matheson can'own' the island of Lewis, and (as she says) do what she likes with her own -so long as the Earls of Derby can appropriate at their ease the unearned increment of Bootle or Burymir is the very emphatic teaching of political economy that the earth may be the Lord's, but the fulness thereof must inevitably be the landlord's. There is an interesting episode in English history among James I.'s disputes with the Corporation of London, then the protector of popular liberties. James, in his wrath, threatened to remove the Court to Oxford. 'Provided only your Majesty leave us the Thames,' cleverly replied the Lord Mayor. But economic dominion is more subtle than -kingcraftmom. landlords steal from