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been characterised by such a reckless disregard of principles and the rights of property, as to afford a precedent, and almost a justification, for the most extravagant propositions.
Nationalization of the LandWere it not for this, it hardly needed Mr. Fawcett's elaborate arguments the other day, to show how entirely visionary was the scheme, recently promulgated at the Trades' Union Congress, for the nationalization of the land—that, in other words, the State should become the sole great landlord, which should mete out to every citizen his holding, and make a great community of small proprietors. Its advocates do not seem to have stopped to consider, quite apart from the immorality involved in such a wholesale confiscation, how they propose to prevent the inevitable operation of the law of supply and demand, without putting a stop to the very thing they wish to encourage, viz., the free alienation of land; or how often a general re-distribution is to take place, if the system is to be a permanent one. Possibly, moreover, the advocates of this theory little realise that they are seeking to restore to a reality one of the most salient features of the feudal tenure they are always inveighing against, viz., the legal fiction that all estates are originally holden by grant from the Crown. Just as mischievous is Mill's theory, that the unearned Mill's theory. increment of land should revert to the State. No argument can be cited in favour of such a proposition, which would not equally justify State confiscation of the continually increasing value of the stock of a railway or canal company. Each owes its increased value, not so much to the exertion of its owners as to the increasing wants and demands of the people. Such a scheme,—even if it did not involve, as injustice it ought to do,
