CHAPTER IX.

THE LAND AND THE LABOURERS.

It is now generally admitted, alike by historians, jurists, antiquarians, and economists, that the earliest form of ownership and cultivation of land was that in which a certain district of greater or less extent was held as the property of a tribe in common. Traces of the existence of such societies are to be found in all parts of the world. The Russian mir, the village communities of Eastern Europe and India, are but survivals of ownership of land in common, such as formerly prevailed in England, and in every other civilised country, where common property in land has almost entirely disappeared. From this tribal ownership private property was gradually established, chiefly owing to the effect of war and exchange; for war gave supremacy to certain families, and exchange, though at first a communal business, soon helped to give power to the stronger or more dexterous. The tribal ownership once partially shaken, property in land became vested, to some extent, in the family, and the produce was, of course, common, so far as the members of each family were concerned; but a large portion of the soil was still at the disposal of the community in general for purposes of pasture. Slavery, no matter how introduced into different communities, tended to strengthen private ownership and to increase the inequality of conditions among the tribe or nation. Thus, in the slow evolution of

thousands of years, our present views with regard to landed property as a private concern were established.

The internal history of Rome is little more than a record of the bitter struggle in relation to landed property, and the development of private ownership; and the rules by which such ownership has been governed in modern Europe are based upon the Roman law. The great slave-cultivated estates which, under the control of the powerful Roman landowners and capitalists, gradually devoured the common land and, by degrees, forced the small family proprietors and cultivators to sell their holdings by sheer pressure of economical competition, are paralleled to-day in the great factoryfarms of Western America and in the modern monopoly of the means of production, machinery, credit, &c., which enables a class to make use of the wage-slaves of the nineteenth century to crush out skilled handicraftsmen and small producers generally. Our English pauper class inside and outside the workhouse, is in many respects more miserable than even the proletari and slaves of ancient Rome. But the circumstances with us are far more complicated than they were in any of the old civilisations based upon open and acknowledged slavery. A Licinian law, or an agrarian agitation which should carry all the reforms proposed by the Gracchi, would go but a very little way towards allaying the ills from which we suffer. In order to help on that growth from below, which can alone remedy the anarchy of our present agrarian system, it is absolutely necessary to deal with the relations now existing from the point of view of their historical development within the limits of our own country. And this the rather that we are, economically speaking, generations, if not centuries, in advance of any other European nation.

In the fifteenth century, the period at which our historical survey of the growth of the domination of capital began, the land of England was held by a great number of private persons, subject to certain personal dues to feudal superiors, and partly in common for the use of all, as pasture for sheep, cattle, and the like. How the small proprietors were driven off their lands, and how, on various pretexts, the common lands were enclosed and appropriated; in what shameful fashion also the lands of the church were seized and divided up among the aristocracy, has already been recorded. The total result of this long career of forcible and economical expropriation from the sixteenth century onwards, is that we now have a mere handful of landowners over against 30,000,000 of landless people. These landowners let their lands to capitalist farmers who, in turn, hire landless serfs in the shape of agricultural labourers at starvation wages to work for them. During this period, not only the relations between the parties interested, but the very ideas about land and landed property have completely changed.

The feudal lord who, subject to his fealty to his superior, was himself the head of a whole society of feudatories and subfeudatories, received services and dues from his inferiors in accordance with well-understood personal agreements on both sides; he, as well as they, had clear defined obligations. What was paid to him was not paid as rent for land, but as the condition of personal connection: the lands themselves were called tenements. The small peasant farmer regarded the land, not as the means of getting a money return or profit, but as giving him good subsistence or possibly even wealth and. comfort for himself and his family. Land represented a species of property which gave food and clothing in return for labour expended upon it, and upon

the animals which belonged to the holder; land was, as a rule, in no sense a capital which returned a given rate of interest or a definite rental in money. With the decay of the feudal system and the growing importance of the farming class with capital, all this changed. The landlord increased his holding in land on account of the political and social importance which its possession ensured him, and the secure return in money-rents it gave; large capitalists who had made accumulations out of other men's labour in different fields of business, bought land for the same reasons, and reckoned their amount of purchase on the capitalised value of so many years' money rental.

The men who provided this rental as the small freeholders and small farmers disappeared, were the farmers with capital who hired the land from the landlord in order to make a profit out of it, just as they might have hired a machine in order to make a profit out of that. Of course, the one profit like the other is made out of the labourers who are employed in the first instance, or in part out of the consumers in the second; but the fact remains, that the landlords became economically mere hangerson of the capitalist farmers, who got the entire produce of the soil, and paid the landlords a certain proportion of its average saleable value. This proportion or rent being paid only in such amount as left an average net profit on the farmers' capital employed after payment of the labourers' wages and other unavoidable outgoings.*

*

If the farmer did not exist, and the landlord were a

The division of the product of the soil between landlord and capitalist, after the labourer has taken his share, is determined by the value of the raw product relatively to the finished product when brought forward for exchange. Rodbertus.

commercial capitalist as well as the owner of the land, he could, of course, either farm the land himself, organising the labour of the agricultural labourers by means of a bailiff, or he could, provided the people on the land had no other occupation to turn to, and were unable or unwilling to emigrate, rack-rent the cultivators direct. By employing a bailiff as capable as the capitalist farmer, he might possibly obtain for himself the entire rent and the average return on his capital too—that is to say, the whole of the produce which could be raised according to the science of the time, less the amount paid to the agricultural labourers in the shape of competition wages. By rack-renting the cultivators direct, the landlord would likewise obtain the total produce, less so much as would keep the cotter cultivator and his family in the ordinary standard of life to which they were accustomed. Rent in this sense, therefore, is all that the man who owns both the land and the capital can get after the labourers on the estate have been clothed, fed, and housed, in accordance with their usual standard. If one man owned the soil of an island and had sufficient power at his back to enforce his presumed "rights," he might evict everybody upon it who was not content to exist upon the standard of nourishment he saw fit to ordain. The rest would be his rent. When, as in the South and West of Ireland, the standard of life was reduced, and population was increased by the introduction of the potato, the rents of the landlords were increased by the growing competition. for land, the improvements made by half-starved serfs were coolly appropriated by the monopolists, and the capitalist farmer scarcely made his appearance at all.

The culture of land in England is therefore carried on upon what is, so far, an exceptional system, and to