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man they are both equally forms of property, merely different kinds of investments-that is, arrangements for obtaining a revenue from the labor of others. The practical statesman sees in them simply sources of income, and assesses them equally to income tax. Indeed, that famous tax of 20 per cent. on rent, of which the English Land Restoration League and many Radicals are demanding the revival, was not imposed as a land tax at all, but formed part of the incidence of a general tax of four shillings in the pound on the annual value of ALL REALIZED PROPERTY AND SALEABLE INTERESTS, excepting only farm stock and household furniture.* Will not the Land Nationalizers take this hint, and include all unearned incomes in their "Single Tax" Program?

Who own all this Land and Capital?

Who, then, are the Landlords and the Capitalists amongst us? They are those persons who own the instruments of wealth-production and enjoy the profits of them. In England, as in all developed industrial societies, almost the whole of the land and industrial capital, and most of the consumers' capital (chiefly consisting of dwelling-houses), is at present owned and controlled by one set of people, while it is ⚫another set of people who produce wealth by using them.

"Capitalists" and "Landlords."

A glance at Sir R. Giffen's table will show how little of the material wealth of England is available for immediate enjoyment or consumption, and how large a proportion is in the form of machinery to aid labor in the supply of our wants from day to day. The value of movable personal property, not employed as instruments of production, must be less than one-tenth of the total. Dwelling-houses, and the land attached to them, may amount to about two-tenths more. But occupying ownership of these properties is the exception, and most of them are used by their owners as an investment yielding rent, paid out of the earnings of working occupiers. The whole of the remainder consists of land and capital employed for wealth-production in agriculture, mining, transport, and other industries, trades, and professions.

Part III., Sir R. Giffen estimated the total capital of the United Kingdom to be £15,000,000,000. (The number of years' purchase taken above is low, and a small increase would easily account for this larger figure.) The increase in realized wealth in forty-one years may, therefore, safely be estimated at six thousand millions sterling, or an average of more than 140 millions a year. The average annual increase has been at the rate of 24 per cent., or nearly two and a half times the rate of increase of the population.

* It was an "Aid" (or tax upon realized property) imposed primarily upon all persons having any Estate in ready Monies, or in any Debts whatsoever owing to them, within this Realm or without, or having any Estate in Goods, Wares, Merchandizes, or other Chattels or personal Estate whatsoever except "the Stock upon Lands and such Goods as are and for Household Stuff" at the rate of four Shillings in the Pound according to the true Yearly Value thereof," computed at 6 per cent. of their capital value (see the Act of Parliament of 1692, 4 Willliam and Mary, cap. I., sec. 2), including also the emoluments of public officers, at that time regarded as saleable property (sec. 3), and finally "to the end a further Aid and Supply for their Majesties' Occasions may be raised," a similar tax is imposed on Lands according to the true Yearly Value thereof at a Rack Rent" (sec. 4).

Four-fifths of our national wealth, we may safely say, consists of such instruments. The wants of the community are supplied from year to year, and week to week, by the reciprocal services of the active workers who use and administer them. The worker, of whatever kind, is paid by a wage, a salary, a professional income, or profits due to his skill in organizing or directing industry, the amount of which is determined by competition between himself and other workers. The owners of the instruments of production receive as rent and interest such an amount of the value of the produce as equalizes the normal income of the workers in each calling; that is to say, they obtain from the workers who are using their land and capital a toll equal to the difference between the product of industry engaged in with any particular instrument of land or capital, and the product of the like industry engaged in with the least efficient instrument actually employed anywhere at the time.

Some of the workers are, it is true, themselves capitalists, that is to say, own larger or smaller amounts of land and capital; and many capitalists work. How many, and how much? Here are some facts gathered from the Report of the Commissioners of Inland Revenue and other reliable sources.

Probate or administration was granted in 66,082 estates, of the net capital value of £298,460,180 in 1906-7.* They were classified as follows:

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About one-seventieth part of the population owns far more than one-half of the entire accumulated wealth, public and private, of the United Kingdom. More than one-half the area of the whole country is owned by 2,500 people.t

"Workers."

How much land and capital do the manual labor class own Supposing that they were the owners of the whole of the

Deposits in the P.O. Savings Bank (1906)‡

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53,009,299

£155,996,446

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† See Riches and Poverty, by L. G. Chiozza Money, M.P., pp. 72 and 75. Also "Facts for Socialists," published by the Fabian Society; price id.

LIA See "Statistical Abstract," 1907 (Cd-3691).

"Eleventh Annual Report of the Labor Department of the Board of Trade," Cd-3690, 1907.

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that is to say, a little less than one thirty-second part of the land and capital with which they work. The number of persons "employed at wages" in the industries of the kingdom was estimated at about fourteen millions, including over four million women in 1891, and must be at least fifteen and a half millions now. The share of the able-bodied manual workers, in property, then, must average about £29 per head of those in employment.

What sort of a System is this?

Labor politicians, Land Nationalizers, Conservatives, Radicals, all who interest themselves in social science as the study of the wellbeing of man, will agree with us that

The Use of Land and Capital

should be to serve as instruments for the active, the energetic, the industrious, the intelligent of mankind to produce wealth for themselves and those who are necessarily dependent on them, and to maintain the conditions of healthy existence for the society which they compose. And will they not also agree with us that it is

The Abuse of Land and Capital

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that they should be made by the laws of any people a "property often owned by entirely idle and unprofitable persons, who may exact hire for them from those who are working for the maintenance of social existence, or may even refuse the would-be workers access to these indispensable instruments of industry? For what are the effects?

If the access be refused-land kept out of cultivation; tillage turned into sheepwalks, and sheepwalks into shootings; natural sources of wealth locked up from use; the pleasant places of the earth, the mountains, the moors, the woodlands, the sea shores, parked and preserved and placarded, that the few may have space for their pride, while the many must crowd into squalid cities and dismal agricultural towns, and take their holidays in herds on the few beaten tracks left free for them. In commerce-rings, corners, syndicates, pools, and monopolies, and all the fearful social loss and

"Eleventh Annual Report of the Labor Department of the Board of Trade," Cd-3690, 1907.

See "Statistical Abstract," 1907 (Cd—3691).

This figure includes some societies such as the Civil Services Stores, which are not Workmen's Co-operative Societies, though registered as Industrial and Provident Societies under the Friendly Societies Acts.

§ This total is undoubtedly a great deal too large, and much of it is duplicate. Thus, for instance, many of the Building Societies, Trade Unions, Co-operative Societies, Friendly Societies, and Industrial Assurance Societies, bank their surplus funds in the Post Office and the Trustee Savings Banks, and those amounts therefore are in this total counted twice over. Much of it, moreover, is owned by children and others belonging to the middle class.

waste of under-production; lock-outs, short time, and other expedients of the reckless selfishness of capitalists who are nursing the market for private ends.

If access be granted-if the land and capital be devoted to their proper use, then it is on condition that rent and interest be paid to the proprietor, simply in virtue of his existence as such. He may or may not be doing some work of social utility, but the rent and interest are paid to him as an absolutely idle person, and it is this,

The Tribute of Industry to Idleness,

that Land Nationalizers denounce in its form of rent, and that Socialists, and all who have the Socialist spirit, denounce in all its forms.

With the Land Nationalizers we are at one entirely on this point: That so much of the annual value of land as they class as rent (which is caused by the physical qualities, advantages, or position of land), is a toll taken by an idle class from the industry of the rest of the nation, and should be resumed by the nation in the quickest and most effectual manner possible.

With the non-Socialists we agree entirely on this point: That so much of the income of any landlord as is caused, not by rent as defined by the political economists, but by the exercise of his own abilities as a superintendent and director of agriculture or industry, is of the nature of a salary, the competitive price of useful work done for society. And we further agree with the non-Socialists that so much of the income of any capitalist as is caused, not by interest as defined by the economists, but by the exercise of a similar ability in the administration of capital and the organization of industry, is equally of the nature of a salary obtained by useful work.

We must, however, point out that the monopoly of land and capital has led, and still leads, to a virtual class monopoly of the opportunities of doing this kind of work, and of the education and training required for it; and that not till these private monopolies are abolished will the remuneration of such activity reach its normal level of competition value. The same monopoly has given to the sons of the privileged classes an advantage which still keeps the wages of certain professions (the Bar, for instance), to which access is guarded by the useless convention of a long and extravagant shameducation, above the level at which they would stand were their opportunities equally open to all.

The Amount of Tribute and its Effects.

Of the tolls enumerated in Sir R. Giffen's table we cannot say what part should be classed as rent and what part as interest; we can only state that the total income derived from real property-lands and buildings must amount to about £310,000,000 a year; and that, according to the table, at least £390,000,000 may be classed as pure interest on other instruments of production (apart from all reward for personal services).*

* See Fabian Tract No. 5, "Facts for Socialists."

The profits and salaries of the class who share in the advantages of the monopoly of the instruments of production, or are endowed by nature with any exceptional ability of high marketable value, amount, according to the best estimate that can be formed, to about £490,000,000 annually. While, out of a national income of some £1,920,000,000 a year, the workers in the manual labor class, fourfifths of the whole population, obtain in wages not more than €730,000,000.*

Rent and interest alone, the obvious tribute of the workers as such to the drones as such, amount demonstrably to almost as much as this sum annually, and it may be safely said that the workers, from top to bottom of society, pay a fine of

One-half the Wealth they Produce

to a parasitic class, before providing for the maintenance of themselves and their proper dependents.

Is a healthy existence secured for society by this arrangement? The income of the manual labor class may be put at less than £50 per family, and out of this they must pay heavy rents for the houses they live in. How much is left for healthy life? Even that little is not always vouchsafed to them. There are in London now at least 35,000 adult men who with their families (say 100,000) are slowly starving for want of regular employment. Over thirty per cent. of the whole four million inhabitants of the richest city in the world were found by Mr. Charles Booth to fall below his "Poverty Line" of bare subsistence earnings.

"At present the average age at death among the nobility, gentry and professional classes in England and Wales is 55 years; but among the artizan classes of Lambeth it only amounts to 29 years; and whilst the infantile death-rate among the well-to-do classes is such that only eight children die in the first year of life out of 100 born, as many as 30 per cent. succumb at that age among the children of the poor in some districts of our large cities. The only real cause of this enormous difference in the position of the rich and poor with respect to their chances of existence lies in the fact that at the bottom of society wages are so low that food and other requisites of health are obtained with too great difficulty." (Dr. C. R. Drysdale, "Report of Industrial Remuneration Conference," p. 130.)

One in three of Londoners dies in the workhouse, hospital, or lunatic asylum; one in six of the manual labor class is a pauper, or has been one.

Hear Professor Huxley (Nineteenth Century for February, 1888): "Anyone who is acquainted with the state of the population of all great industrial centres, whether in this or other countries, is aware that amidst a large and increasing body of that population there reigns supreme that condition

which the French call la misère, a word for which I do not think there is any exact English equivalent. It is a condition in which the food, warmth, and clothing, which are necessary for the mere maintenance of the functions of the body in their normal state, cannot be obtained; in which men, women, and children are forced to crowd into dens wherein decency is abolished, and the most ordinary conditions of healthful

* See Fabian Tract No. 5, " Facts for Socialists."

+ Annual Report of the Labor Department, 1893-4, C-7565.

Life and Labor of the People. By Charles Booth. (Macmillan; 1894.)

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