In
Justice
as in
Social Statics, the chapter on the right to land is followed
by a chapter on the right of property. That in
Social Statics
I have reprinted in full, to meet Mr. Spencer's subsequent assertion that
it modified the radical conclusions of the preceding chapter. But it is
hardly necessary thus to treat the similar chapter of
Justice.
It begins (Section 54):
Since all material objects capable of being
owned are in one way or other obtained from the earth, it results that
the right of property is originally dependent on the right to the use of
the earth. While there were yet no artificial products, and natural products
were therefore the only things which could be appropriated, this was
an obviously necessary connection. And though, in our developed form of
society, there are multitudinous possessions, ranging from houses, furniture,
clothes, works of art, to bank-notes, railway shares, mortgages, government
bonds, etc., the origins of which have no manifest relation to use of
the earth; yet it needs but to remember that they either are, or represent,
products of labour, that labour is made possible by food, and that food
is obtained from the soil, to see that the connection, though remote and
entangled, still continues. Whence it follows that a complete ethical justification
for the right of property is involved in the same difficulties as the
ethical justification for the right to the use of the earth.
Since all material things capable of being
owned consist either of land or products of land, the roundabout connection
between such things as are here specified and the earth, through the
food consumed by labourers, is a queer one, which indicates what in some
parts of
Social Statics may be suspected, that in speaking of land
Mr. Spencer, as is often the case with English writers, is really thinking
only of agricultural land.
The difficulties of which he speaks
are the difficulties he raises in
Social Statics, by confounding
equal rights with joint rights, and he here again takes issue with Locke
and assumes, as before, that for production to give title, the right of
the producer to the use of material must be shown to be "greater than the
pre-existing rights of all other men put together." The forty-one years
that have elapsed have left Mr. Spencer still entangled by this self-raised
difficulty. But he now goes on to say that the difficulty arising from
the question whether by labour "a man has made his right to the thing
greater than the pre-existing rights of all other men put together* …
may be avoided however. There are three ways in which, under savage, semi-civilized,
and civilized conditions, men's several rights of property may be established
with due regard to the equal rights of all other men."
* Mr. Spencer speaks of such
usages as that an unsuccessful hunter in passing might take a deer from
a trap for food, leaving head, skin, and saddle for the owner, as implying
the belief of the tribesmen that "this prey was in part theirs before it
was killed.—But it no more implies this than the custom by which, among
the early California rancheros, any traveller might catch a fresh horse,
transfer his saddle and leave the tired one implied common property in
horses, or than the kindly customs of essentially the same kind that are
to be found wherever the struggle for existence that has developed with
our civilisation has not become intense.
In the savage condition, he says there
is a tacit agreement that having equal opportunities of utilising such
products, appropriation achieved by one shall be passively assented to
by the others.
As to the semi-civilised condition,
he says:
We meet with usages
having the same general implications. … It is perceived that the assent
of the clan to ownership of food grown on an appropriated portion by any
one, is implied in the assumptions of kindred ownership similarly established
by all others … In this case then as in the first, the right of property
arises in conformity with the law of equal freedom.
So far then Mr. Spencer
derives, and properly derives, the right of property from the exertion
of labour under conditions in which all are equally free to make use of
land. He now comes to his third division, where he is to show how in civilised
conditions the right of property "may be established with due regard
to the equal rights of all other men." I will quote this in full:
Though we cannot say that ownership of property,
thus arising, results from actual contract between each member of the
community and the community as a whole, yet there is something like a potential
contract; and such potential contract might grow into an actual contract
if one part of the community devoted itself to other occupations, while
the rest continued to farm: a share of the produce being in such case payable
by agreement to those who had ceased to be farmers, for the use of their
shares of the land.* We have no evidence that such a relation between occupiers
and the community, with consequent authorized rights of property in the produce
which remained after payment of a portion equivalent to rent, has ever arisen;
for, as we have seen, the original ownership by the community has habitually
been usurped by internal or external aggressors, and the rent taking the
shape, if not of produce, then of labour or military service, has been habitually
paid to the usurper, a state of things under which equitable rights of
property, in common with equitable rights of all kinds, are submerged.
But out of such usurpations there has grown up, as we have seen, ownership
by the state and tenancy under it; from which there may again arise a theoretically
equitable right of property. In China where "the land is all held directly
from the Crown" "on payment of an annual tax," with composition for personal
service to the government," the legitimate proprietorship of such produce
as remains after payment of rent to the community, can be asserted only
on the assumption that the emperor stands for the community. In India,
where the government is supreme landowner, and where, until the zemindar
system was established, it was the direct receiver of rents, the derivation
of a right of property by contract between the individual and the community
can be still less asserted without a strained interpretation. Nor at home,
where the theory that each landowner is a tenant of the Crown is little
more than a theory, is there any better fulfillment of the ethical requirement.
Only here and there, where state ownership is not potential but actual,
and ordinary rents are paid by occupiers to the Crown (which has now in such
cases come to be identified with the community), has there been consequently
established that kind of use of the earth which gives a theoretically valid
basis to the right of private property.
* Here is another
instance of the habit of thinking of land as only agricultural land. The
assumption here is that farmers are the only users of land, whereas the
obvious truth is that there is no occupation that can be carried on without
the use of land, and that many other occupations require the use of much
more valuable land than does farming. In the occupancy of his London apartments
Mr. Spencer himself is more of a land-user, value considered, than many
a small farmer.
Now what is it that Mr. Spencer here
says? It is that a theoretically equitable right of property does not
now exist in civilized conditions; but that it may arise if the now nominal
and potential supreme ownership of land by the state is made real and
actual by the taking for the use of the community, by the representatives
of the community, of the rents that are (or should be) paid by occupiers
of land.
Truly
Justice is a surprising
book. Here we have Mr. Spencer going back to the very principle he has
just recanted.
In one sentence of this paragraph he
says that we have no evidence that this equitable adjustment of the rights
to land in conformity with the needs of the civilized state has ever arisen,
since the original ownership of land by the community has been habitually
usurped, and in another sentence he says vaguely that it has arisen
only here and there. But that it may arise and ought to arise, and would
give an even theoretically perfect basis to the right of property, this
section states, if not as clearly, but yet on careful reading as unmistakably
as does
Social Statics itself.
The paragraph just quoted is followed
by this recapitulatory paragraph, with which the section closes:
But admitting that the establishment of an ethically
complete right of property is beset with difficulties like those which
beset the establishment of an ethically complete right to the use of the
earth, we are nevertheless shown by a survey of the facts which existing
primitive societies present, and the facts traceable in the early histories
of civilized societies, that the right of property is originally deducible
from the law of equal freedom; and that it ceases to be so deducible only
when the other corollaries from the law of equal freedom have been disregarded.
Or to put this statement of the propositions
of this section in fuller form, they are: (1) That the establishment
of the right of property is beset by the difficulties of showing that
the right of a man to the material element from which property is obtained
is greater than the rights of all existing men put together. (2) But in
primitive societies and in the early history of civilized societies, where
the use of land is open to all, this equality of access to land enables us
to deduce the right of property in things produced by labour from the law
of equal freedom; and (3) it ceases to be so deducible where equality in
the use of land is denied, as in civilized societies at present; but would
again become deducible from the law of equal freedom if the rent of land
were taken for the use of the society.
If Mr. Spencer had written
Justice
under coercion; if imprisoned in the chambers of an Inquisition, and
under fear of the rack, he had been forced against his will, like Galileo,
to recant what he still held to be true, we might well believe that this
Section 54 of
Justice contained his sign to posterity that, in
spite of the denials he had just been compelled to make, he in his heart
held to the truth.
But though, unfortunately, the conditions
do not admit of such a conclusion, this section is perhaps an even stronger
testimony to the power of truth. In the preceding chapter Mr. Spencer
has forced back his better nature, and defended landlordism as well as
the man who had written
Social Statics could. But when
after an interval of over forty years he begins to rewrite his old chapter
on "The Right of Property," the truth he once held reasserts its sway, and
though he cuts out all that might give open offence to his new clients,
the perception of truth, as by "unconscious cerebration," causes him in the
very first section to relapse, and to tell us—unmistakably, if not clearly—that
in the civilized state it is only the appropriation of rent to the use of
the whole community that can give to property an ethical basis.
But Mr. Spencer soon recovers himself.
Having in Section 54 shown that in rude societies there is a substantial
basis for the right of property, but that in highly civilized countries,
such as England, the equitable right of property has been submerged by
the usurpation of landownership, he proceeds in Section 55 to assert, as
he did in the preceding that the course of modern civilization has been more
fully to establish this right.
Section 55 begins:
This deduction [i.e., of the right of property
from the law of equal freedom through the equal right to the use of land],
early recognized in custom and afterwards formulated by legislators, has
come to be elaborated and enforced more and more fully as society has
developed.
Then comes something about primitive
societies, the patriarchal group and the house community, in which occurs
the reference to inherent value already quoted on page 51, and the section
thus closes:
To trace the development of the right of property
as established by rulers and administered by their agents, setting out
with the interdict on theft in the Hebrew commandments, and continuing down
to modern days, in which proprietorships of all kinds have been legally
formulated in multitudinous detail and with great precision, would be no
less out of place than it would be superfluous. It suffices for present
purposes to note that this implication of the principle of justice, perceived
from the first perhaps more clearly than any other, has gained in the course
of social progress increased definiteness of recognition as well as increased
extension and increased peremptoriness; so that now, breach of the right
of property by unauthorized appropriation of a turnip or a few sticks, has
become a punishable offence; and there is ownership of a song, of a pattern,
of a trade-mark.
The principle of justice in the right
of property perceived from the first, as Mr. Spencer has just explained,
is equality in the use of natural opportunities. Has this principle gained
by a social progress, which as exemplified in England, now denies nineteen-twentieths
of the people of all right whatever in the land of their birth, punishes
them if they take a handful of wild fruit or a few sticks from the abundant
offerings of nature, creates private ownership in a salmon-fishery, a
coal mine, an advowson or a hereditary pension, and condemns millions
to chronic pauperism?
This is what Mr. Spencer's examination
of the right of property in
Justice amounts to: First showing
that the right of property in civilized societies has to-day no ethical
basis, he goes on to make believe that it has, and from this basis of make-believe
to assume the ethical validity of existing conditions. And then he virtuously
turns on the communists. They are a feeble folk and have no friends.
In this he follows the order of
Social
Statics, but the spirit is that of
The Man versus the State.
He ignores what he once saw plainly, the incentive to communistic and
socialistic schemes in the bitter wrong and widespread suffering of the
existing order, declares their motive to be the desire to take from the
worker the produce of his work, and assumes that between them and existing
social conditions lies the only choice. Here is the section:
§ 56. Supposing themselves
to be justified, and indeed injoined by moral principle, many in our days
are seeking to override this right. They think it wrong that each man
should receive benefits proportionate to his efforts—deny that he may
properly keep possession of all which his labour has produced, leaving the
less capable in possession of all which their labours have produced. Expressed
in its briefest form, their doctrine is—Let unlike kinds and amounts of
work bring like shares of produce—let there be "equal division of unequal
earnings."
That communism implies violation
of justice as defined in foregoing chapters, is manifest. When we assert
the liberty of each bounded only by the like liberties of all, we assert
that each is free to keep for himself all those gratifications and sources
of gratification which he procures without trespassing on the spheres
of action of his neighbours. If, therefore, one obtains by his greater strength,
greater ingenuity, or greater application, more gratifications or sources
of gratification than others, and does this without in any way trenching
on the of action of others, the law of equal freedom assigns him exclusive
possession of all such extra gratifications and of sources of gratification;
nor can others take them from him without claiming for themselves greater
liberty of action than he claims, and thereby violating the law.
In past times the arrangements made
were such that the few superior profited at the expense of the many
inferior. It is now proposed to make arrangements such that the many inferior
shall profit at the expense of the few superior. And just as the old
social system was assumed by those who maintained it to be equitable,
so is this new social system assumed to be by those who propose it. Being,
as they think, undoubtedly right, this distribution may properly be established
by force; for the employment of force, if not avowedly contemplated by
implication. With a human nature such as has been known throughout the
past and is known at present, one who, by higher power, bodily or mental,
or greater endurance of work, gains more than others gain, will not voluntarily
surrender the excess to such others: here and there may be found a man who
would do this, but he is far from being the average man. And if the average
superior man will not voluntarily surrender to others the excess of benefit
gained by his superiority, the implication is that he must be obliged
to do this, and that the use of force to oblige him is justifiable. That
the many inferior are physically able thus to coerce the few superior is
agreed on both sides, but the assumption of the communists is that the
required coercion of the minority who are best by the majority who are
worst would be equitable.
After what was said in the
early chapter of this Part it scarcely needs pointing out that a system
established in pursuance of this doctrine would entail degeneration
of citizens and decay of the community formed by them. Suspension of that
natural discipline by which every kind of creature is kept fit for the
activities demanded by the conditions of life, would inevitably bring about
unfitness for life and either prompt or slow disappearance.
An old fable tells us that when the plague
raged among the animals they concluded that among them was some great
criminal, who must be sacrificed to the wrath of heaven, and agreed that
to discover him all should confess their sins. The fox volunteered to
act as judge. He listened with equanimity to the lion's recital of flocks
devoured and men slaughtered, declaring his majesty blameless, and in
the same way excused all that the tiger, the hyena, the wolf, and the
bear confessed. At length came a poor ass, who told how when his master
had forgotten to give him his breakfast, he had nibbled a few leaves from
his load of cabbages. "You impious rascal!" cried the fox, "it is you beyond
doubt who have brought on us the anger of the gods!" and applauding the
decision and following his lead, the lordly animals threw themselves on
the poor ass and tore him to pieces.
As the nibbling of a cabbage-leaf is
to Herod's slaughter of the innocents, so is the dream of a few communists
compared with what the monopoly of land is actually doing. In the highest
civilization in other respects that the world has yet seen this monopoly
is, even now, entailing the degradation of citizens and decay of the
community, so that Mr. Spencer cannot look out of the windows of his
club without seeing men turned into advertising signs; or get into a
cab without having some miserable wretch officiously hasten to close
the door in the hope of a penny; or travel through the three kingdoms
without beholding the decay of population in the country and its congestion
in the slums of towns. It is, even now, suspending "that natural discipline
by which every creature is kept fit for the activities demanded by the
conditions of life," so that men are being destroyed, one the one side
by repletion and debauchery, and on the other side by privation and the
denial of opportunities for honest work. It is, even now, taking the produce
of their work from superior worker and inferior worker alike, and is giving
the gratifications and sources of gratification earned by work to those
who do no work—is piling up wealth in the hands of those who do nothing to
produce wealth, who as landowners are useless appropriators and worse than
useless destroyers. To this giant wrong, this most monstrous of all denials
of the law of equal freedom, Mr. Spencer is as complaisant as the fox was
to the lion, while he vents his indignation on the poor ass of communism.
The next and final chapter shows how
far Mr. Spencer really wishes to assert the right of property. It was,
as he knows, by violating the right of property in putting taxes on the
products of labour that the larger tenants of English land made themselves
its virtual owners and that private property in land has come to be established
in those wide regions to which English institutions have been extended.
And it is on the line of abolishing this taxation of labour and the products
of labour that, as is now evident, the struggle for the resumption of equal
rights in land will in English-speaking countries be made—nay, is already
beginning to be made. So in the next section Mr. Spencer brings out his
double-barrelled ethics to break down the right of property to open the
door for what is essentially socialism and communism in the interests of
the rich:
§ 57. While absolute
ethics thus asserts the right of property, and while no such breach
of it as is implied by the schemes of communists is warranted by that
relative ethics which take* account of transitional needs, relative ethics
dictates such limitation of it as is necessitated for defraying the costs
of protection, national and individual.
The truth recognized at the outset,
that the preservation of the species, or that variety of it constituting
a nation, is an end which must take precedence of individual preservation
has already been cited as justifying that subordination of the right
to life which is implied by exposure to possible death in defensive war,
and as also justifying that subordination of the right to liberty which
military service and subjection necessitate. Here it must be again cited
as affording a legitimate reason for appropriating such portions of the
possessions and the earnings of individuals, as may be required for adequately
resisting enemies. But while there is thus a quasi-ethical justification
for whatever encroachment on the right of property is necessitated for
the purposes of defensive war, there is no justification for any such encroachment
for the purposes of offensive war.
No less manifest is it that the
right of property is legitimately subject to one further restriction.
Property must be trenched upon for supporting those public administrations
by which the right of property, and all other rights, are enforced. In
society wholly composed of men who duly respected on another's claims,
no such partial invasion of the right o property would be called for;
but in existing societies and in such societies as are likely to exist
for a long time to come, the nearest approach to fulfilment of the law
of equal freedom is made when the various deduced rights are sacrificed
to the extent needful for preservation of the remainders. Relative ethics,
therefore, warrants such equitably distributed taxation as is required
for maintaining order and safety.
Since the ethical commands, "Thou shalt
do no murder" and "Thou shalt not steal," mean also, thou shalt not
permit thyself to be murdered or to be stolen from, the justification
of defensive war needs no invention of relative ethics. Nor this needed
to justify under extraordinary circumstance what under ordinary circumstances
would be violations of the right of property. Take Johnstown, when the
sun rose on wreck and ruin and death in their most awful forms, an on
men and women half crazed with listening all night to the shrieks that
came from the flaming mass of float-wood into which the flood was sweeping
their nearest and dearest. In ordering the destruction of all liquor,
the seizing of all food, and the impressment, should that be necessary, of
all who could work, in a systematized effort to succour who still might
be succoured and to bury what remained to bury of the dead, was not Arthur
Moxham acting, in the name of the reason and conscience of the community,
on the same eternal principles of right and wrong that in ordinary conditions
would have forbidden these things? What in form was a denial of the rights
of property and person was in its essence respect for life and property.
But while changing conditions may change
the application of ethical principles, it is only as the change in a
ship's course turns the compass-card in her binnacle. The change is in the
conditions, not in the principles. And if there be an ethical right of
property, then, except under conditions of imminent danger and dire stress,
a community cannot be justified in taking property by force from the individual.
What Mr. Spencer does in this section,
in the name of his convenient fiction of relative ethics, is to justify
the habitual violations of the right of property which are committed
under the name of government in all civilized countries, and thus to make
his philosophy of things as they ought to be, conform the better with
things as the ruling classes desire to maintain them. And he does this
effectually, for he leaves the right of property without defence, save
in idle platitudes, against those forms of taxation which have everywhere
proved so efficient in robbing the many and enriching the few.
To be sure Mr. Spencer justifies the
taking of property by taxation only for purposes of defensive war and
the maintenance of order and safety. But such limitations are practically
no limitations. Neither an English jingo nor an American protectionist
would quarrel with them. No invading foot has trod English soil, no hostile
fleet has fired a shot at an English town, since the English national debt
began to form. Yet what one of all the wars for which the English masses
have paid in blood and privation and of which this great debt is the reminder,
has not been advocated at the time as a defensive war? Is not our monstrous
American tariff declared by its advocates to be necessary to the maintenance
of order and safety? What has been the assigned reason for the maintenance
of every fat English sinecure but order and safety?
Granted that Mr. Spencer would abolish
the more flagrant abuses of taxation; or, as in the light of his changes
on the land question we may more certainly say, granted that he is in
favour of abolishing them so long as Sir John and Grace do not seriously
object; yet in admitting that the right of property may justly be set
aside by the state for ordinary public needs and uses, he opens the door
for every abuse that the ruling power—the majority, if you please—may at
any time choose to deem a use. He leaves no principle save the shifting
one of expediency to guard the right of property against any interest or
desire or whim the may gain control of the legislative power.
But the reign of relative ethics, like
that of the fashioned devil, to which it bears some analogy, is not to
be forever, for we are given to understand that when evolution has carried
the descendants of what are now the human race to a point as far above
us as it has carried us above the monkey, and brought on the agnostic
millennium, relative ethics are to vanish in the unknowable pit. So Mr.
Spencer tells us that "in a society composed of men who duly respected
one another's claims, no such partial invasion of the rights of property
would be called for." But then, he continues, it is called for "in existing
societies and in such societies as are likely to exist for a long time to
come." What ground does that give me to assert that I am robbed directly
by the blackmail demanded in the name of duty at the American post-office
every time a friend sends me a book from a foreign country, or even from
Canada, and am robbed indirectly every day of my life in the purchases I
make? The protectionist, if a Spencerian and disposed to argue, would simply
reply, "You are talking absolute ethics, whereas, Herbert Spencer has shown,
we are now under the rule of relative ethics."
It is true, but in a sense that Mr.
Spencer does not mean, that if men duly respected one another's claims,
taking of individual property in taxation by the state would be necessary.
For if men duly respected one another's claims to the use of land, all
necessity for invading the right of property by taxation would disappear.
Either by the single tax on land values or by the crude and clumsy scheme
of land nationalization proposed by Mr. Spencer himself in
Social Statics,
enough revenue would accrue to the state to defray all needed expenses
without taking a penny of any man's property. But if men are to continue
to disregard each other's claims to the use of land, and to continue to
treat that element as belonging to a few individuals—and this Mr. Spencer
now insists on—then there is no possible improvement in society or in
the race that could dispense with the taking of property by taxation.
Mr. Spencer evidently entertains the
innocent notion that could the soldier and the policeman be done away
with, there would be no further need for public revenues, and all organized
government could be dispensed with. But would not civilized societies
still need revenues for building and keeping roads and bridges, for paving
and cleaning streets, or establishing lighthouses and supporting a fire
service, and doing the many things which become increasingly necessary to
the public health, safety, comfort, and convenience, as social integration
goes on? Or in the millennium of the Spencerians, as in the millennium of
the anarchists, is each one to pave, clean and light the street before his
door, when and how he pleases? are roads, bridges and public works, as to
which competition is impossible, to be left to private individuals and companies,
charging what they please and rendering what service they choose? and are
all other public functions to be dependent on volunteer service or voluntary
subscription?