Chapter IV (3)

The whole stream of tendency, then, both in what is now occurring, and in what is likely to occur in no remote future, seems setting strongly in a direction which cannot be regarded as favourable to the maintenance of our present land-system. And the observation of this will, sooner or later, consciously or unconsciously, very much modify opinion on the subject; for in human affairs, just as with respect to the operations of Nature, we are disposed to acquiesce in what we have come to understand is inevitable.

But we have for some time lost sight of the Valley of the Visp, though not of its imaginary sole Proprietor. He has all along been before us. What we have been considering was how, in this era of capital, he came to be its sole proprietor, what are the action and effects of those artificial conditions which placed him in this position, and what are the chances of the maintenance of these artificial conditions.

Things move fast in these days: but few people expect that any change will take place in his time. He will continue in the position of social eminence, and of political power, he now occupies. He will go on hoping to leave after him a line of descendants occupying the same, or even a greater, position. This will be the dominant motive in his mind. If any land is to be bought in his neighbourhood, there will still be a likelihood that he will become the purchaser of it. It has always been so, since the estate became the predominant one in those parts. And that it should be so is now regarded almost as a law of nature; as something quite inevitable; so that no one need enquire whether it is beneficent in its action, or otherwise. If he have not cash in hand to pay for the new purchase, he will mortgage his property to the amount of the price. In this era of capital the value of land goes on increasing, and so the mortgage will in time be paid off by the estate itself. In this way, in these times, every large estate has within itself, even without Austrian marriages,[1] a progress-generated power of absorption and growth. Without lessening the area of the estate, he will provide for those who are dependent on him by charging it with the payment of whatever he may please to leave them: so that while no very apparent injustice will be done to them, the position of the single representative of the family will not be affected, for he will still appear before the world as the owner of the whole estate. He will also hope that, from time to time, the representatives of the family will, by making purchases in the way in which he has, and by the introduction of great heiresses into the family, increase the extent of the estate.

Footnote 1:

Bella gerant alii. Tu felix Austria nube: Nam, quæ Mars aliis, dat
tibi regna Venus.

At times, when he hears how demagogues are raving about the nationalisation of the land, and the tyranny of capital; and when he visits the valley, and sees the condition of many, indeed of all the people on the estate, he may feel that he is in a somewhat invidious position. But he will feel also that no one is to blame: his progenitors could not well have acted otherwise than as they did; nor could he well act otherwise than as he is acting, and will act. And those who are discussing the matter, sometimes with the tone of men who are suffering a wrong, would, we may be sure, not act otherwise, under the circumstances, themselves.

Suppose, however, that for the restricted and artificial action of capital, which has brought this state of things about, its natural action has been substituted: what will be the effect on the hopes, and on the family, of the proprietor of our valley? We may venture to predict that the natural order of things will give him a securer chance of realising his hopes in their best sense. His family will start, in the race of life, in possession of the whole of the land of the valley. For them this will be no bad start. The land of the valley will bear division for several generations without reducing the members of the family to a bad position, even if none of them should do anything at all to improve their position. But this, judging by the ordinary principles of human nature, we may be sure, speaking generally, will not be the case. Two centuries hence, it will be their own fault, if, instead of the family being really only one man, they have not become a clan in the valley: a clan possessed of more social importance, and of more political influence, than could attach to a family represented by a single member. Some will have become invigorated by the inducements to exertion that will have come home to them, and by the wholesome consciousness in each that he is somewhat dependent on himself for maintaining and improving his position. Whatever efforts to advance themselves they may come to make, will not be made under unfavourable circumstances. None of them will have occasion to feel, as perhaps some of their ancestors at times had, that they are in an invidious position; and none will regard them with feelings that, if not ‘somewhat leavened with a sense of injustice,’ do yet arise from a suspicion that things are not quite as they ought to be, through there having been some kind of interference with their natural course. Is not this a nobler, a more patriotic, a more human, and in every way a better prospect than that which is now feeding the somewhat misdirected paternal ambition of the present proprietor? Would it not be a better anticipation of the fortunes of his family, to think of them as a numerous body of proprietors, occupying a good position, through the natural action of the circumstances and conditions of the times, than to look forward to the uncertain character and uncertain position of a single member of his family, who will be maintained, if maintained, by conditions, on the permanency of which no dependence can be placed, because they are at discord with the needs and circumstances of the times?

Land now no longer rules. Capital is king. Capital it is that does everything now; that even, but under abnormal and artificial conditions, aggregates our large estates. Under this dynasty the advantages the land is capable of conferring on man are not withdrawn, but much increased both in degree and in variety; and everything desirable, the land not excepted, becomes, in a manner and degree inconceivable in all foregone times, the reward of personal exertion and worth. This is what distinguishes this dynasty from those that have preceded it. If it be the true king, it will prove its legitimacy, by removing all artificial barriers to the development and exercise of its beneficent powers. If it cannot do this, it is a bastard dynasty, and will be dethroned.

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V. But I have not yet exhausted all the possible forms in which land may be held. Their name is legion. Every country, and every condition of society, has had, has now, and will have, its own. I say nothing of the serf-system: that among civilised nations has gone for ever. So has the system of village communities. The co-operative system, however, has believers, and, it appears possible, may have a trial. But I, for one, because I believe in capital, and in the individual, have no belief in this kind of co-operation, as a general system, either in manufactures and commerce, or, and that least of all, in agriculture: and, with respect to the latter, whether the co-operators be renters, or owners. Ownership would make no difference at all beyond the power owners would possess of mortgaging their land; and this, as it is a resource that would very soon be exhausted, need not be considered here. The only practical difference would be, that co-operative renters would require a larger extent of land to live from than co-operative owners, whose land was unmortgaged. If the system of co-operation were general, competition, and the increase of population that would have to be provided for, and which would lead either to subdivision, or to an increase of co-operators upon each farm, would inevitably bring the style of living down to a point at which it would be no better than it is now in the Visp Valley. And this is so low a condition of life, both materially and intellectually, that most people are of opinion that it is not worth while to go in for its maintenance, or even, perhaps, to regret its disappearance.

A population of co-operators sunk to this depth, and they could not but sink to it, would, like the old Irish potatovors, or the French petty proprietors, be in a state of chronic wretchedness and degradation: this, in bad seasons, amounts to a state of starvation. If the individual Irish potatovor could not, and the individual French petty proprietor, in whom the parsimonious disposition of his race is exaggerated, rarely can, save, because bad seasons oblige him to mortgage his little plot of land, from which he can hardly extract a living in good seasons, we may be sure that neither would, nor could, such co-operators. I am disposed to prefer the present condition of our agricultural labourers, the most feeble class amongst us. At all events, they have more than one buffer between themselves and bad seasons. First there is the reservoir of capital possessed by the farmer. This is, to the extent of wages, generally, sufficient. In consequence of its existence bad seasons make little or no difference to hired labourers. But under the co-operative system there would be no farmers, but only co-operators, just able to get along in ordinary seasons. Our labourers have, also, a second buffer, which is often of some use to them, in their wealthy neighbours. But under the co-operative system there would probably be no wealthy neighbours. They possess, too, a third buffer in the State, which comes in, in the last resort, to rescue them from the extreme consequences of every kind of calamity. But under a system of peasant co-operators there could hardly be anything resembling our poor-law; for the rationale of that is, that the people who cultivate the soil of the country, are themselves devoid of all property. These three buffers, then, would all have disappeared; and nothing, as far as we can see, would arise, or could be created, to take their place. Such co-operators would be only co-operative peasant-proprietors: which is an absurdity.

Another sufficient objection to this system is, that this is the era of capital, and that such a system would most effectually prohibit the outflow of capital to the land. Capital could no more be invested in the ownings of a wretched population of co-operators, than it could be in the plots of Irish potatovors, or of French petty proprietors.

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The conclusion, then, to which my moralising on the spectacle of the Valley of the Visp brought me was, that it belongs to a state of things, which, even in such secluded retreats, will not be able to linger on much longer: at all events, that it is not desirable that it should. We live under the dominion of capital, that is to say, of property other than land, or rather, perhaps, of an accumulated, and still accumulating, interest or dividend-bearing essence of all property (which is labour stored up in some material), reconvertible at will, for productive purposes, into land, labour, or anything men have of exchangeable value. This mighty essence of all property is within the reach of us all, in proportion to our respective opportunities and abilities, and the efforts to gain possession of it we choose to make. But though within the reach of all, it is the mightiest of all magicians; and it is evident that it must modify both the possession, the distribution, and the use of land, as well as everything else with which we have to do. In this there is nothing to be regretted. On the contrary, we ought all of us to congratulate ourselves on the advent of such an era: for it means that our resources for living, and for living well, in respect of all the requirements of human happiness, have been thereby vastly enlarged, and with a power of indefinite enlargement, irrespective of the area of the country. It means, too, that careers have been thereby opened to all, in ways which would have been inconceivable when land supplied the only resource for living; for that now every moral and intellectual endowment, every form of labour, and every aptitude can be turned to account. Even land can be made productive of greater benefits to us than we were wont to derive from it, for capital is showing that it has economical, and other, capacities for improving man’s estate, undreamt of by its old cultivators.

Popular language, which is the expression of popular ideas, on this subject is adequate. It gives correctly the philosophy of the matter. What is wanted is that it should be clearly and generally understood, and used with accuracy. Money has both an intrinsic value as the representative of so much labour expended in the acquisition of the precious metals, and a conventional use as a metallic certificate, entitling its holder to exchange it against anything else in the world anyone has to part with, that costs in its production an equal amount of labour, there being at the time no abnormal disturbance of the ratio of supply and demand. In the latter respect it matters not whether the certificate is on gold or paper: for the paper represents gold, or equal value. When earned, or otherwise acquired, by a kitchen-maid, a speculator, or a prime-minister, it may be used in any one of three ways. First, it may be spent. Secondly, it may be hoarded. Thirdly, it may be used as capital. By spending is meant using money for the acquisition of what perishes in the use; when it passes into another man’s hands who again has the option of using it in any one of the three ways. It is evident that a man may spend money for clothing, food, and other necessary purposes, in order to live, and to enable him to do his work in life well, whatever it may be: it is then spent well, and in a sense productively. Or he may spend it on vice, or ostentation, or hurtful pleasures: it is then spent ill. By hoarding is meant putting it away unproductively for future use. This was originally the only alternative to spending. The money stored away in the treasuries of the old Pharaohs was an instance of this unproductive suspension of use. This is still the practice, everywhere, among rude and ignorant people: it is the hibernation of money; its active uses are put in abeyance. As capital it may be used in two ways. It may either be invested, or employed. Investing it means placing it in securities that do not require management, as, for instance, consols, mortgages, the rent of land, &c.; the correlative of which is interest. Employing it means placing it in reproductive industries, as, for instance, in agriculture, manufactures, trade, commerce, &c., which require management, and the correlative of which is profit. This when divided among shareholders, who manage the concern jointly, or by a selection from their body, becomes dividend. This is the highest form of economical organisation. It gives to all, in their respective proportions, however small those proportions may be, the power of employing capital; and to all who have the ability and integrity, the chance of rising to its management. It is the full development of the era of capital. It is the stage we have now reached. It enables the kitchen-maid, and everybody, to participate in the highest advantages of capital. I think we shall see it employed in this way in the cultivation and proprietorship of the land. If so, then, I think the poor and ignorant will have brought home to them a very strong motive for saving, because they will have constantly before their eyes a safe and profitable means of employing their savings. They, too, may thus become capitalists of the best kind.

Two pregnant errors, however, there appear to be, which it will be necessary for us to avoid, especially, in order that, as respects the land, we may secure the natural conditions and natural advantages of our era of capital. One is the error of making people’s wills for them directly, in the way done in France. This breaks up the land of a country into properties smaller than they would become under the natural circumstances of the times: thus condemning, through legislation, a large part of the population, deluded by the fallacious disguise of proprietorship, to life-long misery. The other error is that of making people’s wills for them indirectly, in the way done in some other countries. This has the opposite effect of agglomerating the land of the country into estates larger than they would become under the natural circumstances of the times, and of reducing the number of proprietors of agricultural land almost to the vanishing point. The first method both increases the number of wretched, degraded, and almost useless proprietors, and diminishes the size of the properties, to a highly mischievous degree. The latter just in proportion as it increases the size of the estates diminishes the number of proprietors. Both limit the variety of uses to which the land may be put. Both introduce causes of political action at variance with the natural conditions of the times. Every system has some advantages: but whatever may be the advantages of the latter, it is, at all events, an interference with the natural rights of each generation, and with the natural course of things; for it prevents the ownership, and the uses, of the land of the country adjusting themselves to the circumstances and the requirements of the times; and hinders the application, to its culture, of that combination of knowledge, energy, and capital, which is manifestly within reach, and has become requisite for developing its productiveness to the degree acknowledged to be possible now, but which cannot be secured under our present landlord-and-tenant system. If, however, this be a serious evil, it is, for reasons already given, one of that class of evils which engender their own remedy.

Many are of opinion that landlordism was all along at the bottom of the evils of Ireland. Landlordism is probably the cause of the Liberalism of Scotch constituencies. If so, what is there to prevent the same cause having, eventually, somewhat similar effects in England? And, if so, then, what next? If, however, the law, instead of interfering with the natural course of things, by indirectly making people’s wills for them, would take care that the land of the country should pass from generation to generation, and from hand to hand, free from every kind of encumbrance, and so be all, at all times, at the will of the holder, marketable, a question, which is now causing much anxiety, because it may, before long, give much trouble, would probably die away, and be no more heard of; nor, probably, should we hear any more of the antagonisms, with which we are all now so familiar, between the town and the country. One step, at least, would have been taken towards making us one people.

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The stimulus new scenes apply to the mind, more particularly when its owner is passing through them on foot, and alone, accounts for the foregoing chapter. But its having been thought out under such circumstances by A is no reason for its being read by B, who is neither on foot, nor, probably, alone; and the only scene before whom is, doubtless, the not unfamiliar one of his own fireside; one which, perhaps, has never invited, and may, too, be quite unfitted for, either the debate, or the rumination, of such discussions. Still, as it was suggested by, and constructed in the mind during, the tramp I am recording, and was so one of its incidents, I set it down here in its place.

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