The Editor of the Daily Chronicle.

     Sir,--Many land nationalisers must, I am sure, feel surprised that Mr. Spencer should so easily acquiesce in the indefinite perpetuation of a state of things which he himself has described as "a crime only inferior in wickedness to the crime of taking away their (the people's) lives or personal liberties" on the mere financial ground that if the landlords received full compensation, the transaction would not be a profitable one. This seems to imply that, in Mr. Spencer's opinion, if the State should take away a portion only of the superabundant wealth of the great landlords for the purpose of abolishing for ever the continuous perpetration of the crime described in the above terms, to do so would constitute an equal crime. In this few of your readers will, I imagine, agree with him.

     But my present purpose is to point out that, even from Mr. Spencer's own point of view, there are other methods of undoing the great wrong of private ownership of land than that of purchase at full market value, and which yet are perfectly equitable. There are two distinct aspects of landlordism which require to be considered separately, but of which Mr. Spencer takes no account. These are, first, the income, or tribute in the form of rent, which the landlord is able to extract from the community; and, secondly, the vast and injurious political and social power which the possession of the land enables him to wield, and which he does often make use of in such a way as to endanger and sometimes to destroy, the liberties and even the lives of his fellow citizens. The irresponsible power of great landlords to determine who shall live upon the land and under what conditions is hardly less opposed to the principles of liberty and justice than was the direct power over the life and liberty of their vassals possessed by many of the barons in the middle ages. Surely Mr. Spencer will not maintain that it is unjust to take away this power, and thus to secure to every Englishman the elementary right to live upon his native soil, subject only to the equal right of his fellow-citizens? But this can be done without taking from existing landlords any portion of their income, by merely enacting that the whole of the land shall at a certain date be transferred to the parish or town councils to be held in trust for the use and benefit of the whole community, subject only to the payment of an income equal to the present net rental during the life of existing landlords and of such of their living heirs as already possess, through entail or otherwise, a legal property in any landed estate. Other direct heirs--that is, the members of a man's own family--would receive a reasonable provision out of the estate. By some such arrangement as this, I submit, the rights both of existing landholders and of the landless people would be secured in the shortest time and in the simplest manner. The resumption of the land itself for the use and benefit of the community is admitted by Mr. Spencer--as well as by Mr. Gladstone, and even by the Liberty and Property Defence League--to be within the just powers of Parliament, and to continue the incomes now derived from the land to all who now possess legal rights to any portion of it would be a degree of liberality on the part of the long-suffering people which can only be described as magnanimous. The right to transmit property by will or deed is a right conferred by law, and limited by considerations of public advantage. And when the question is the abolition of the most gigantic wrong in the history of civilisation--a vaster wrong even than slavery, since it affects the whole population of all civilised countries--we shall feel that we are within the limits of strict equity when we refuse to continue the evil practice of making special provision to enable large numbers of persons to live in luxurious idleness on the labour of their fellow-men. Public opinion is growing rapidly on this great question of "the right to the use of the earth"; and I venture to think that we of the Land Nationalisation Society are working on the line of least resistance in claiming, first, the resumption of the land itself, to be held by the people’s local representatives for the people’s use; and, secondly, to recognise fully the claims of those who are now possessed either of the revenues derived from the land or of any legal estate in it, but steadily to refuse more than a fair and liberal provision for those of the next or future generations who have no such legal claims.

Alfred R. Wallace.
Aug. 28.