SOCIALISM IN ENGLAND. 
317 
As we have seen, following Karl Marx, they base everything 
on the fundamental proposition, dealt with by M. de Laveleye, 
that “ all wealth is due to labour, and therefore,” they say, “ to 
the labourer all wealth is due.” Thirty thousand persons, 
they assert, though with considerable inaccuracy,* own the 
land of Great Britain. They therefore call for the Nationaliza 
tion of the Land. 
“We claim that land in country and land in towns, mines, parks, 
mountains, moors, should be owned by the people for the people, to be 
held, used, built over, and cultivated upon such terms as the people them 
selves see fit to ordain. The handful of marauders who now hold 
possession have, and can have, no right save brute force against the tens of 
millions whom they wrong.” 
But, after all, the landlords are not the worst They get 
only ;^6o,ooo,ooo out of a total ;^i,000,000,000 robbed from 
the workers, t 
“ The few thousand persons who own the National Debt . . . exact 
>^28,000,000 yearly from the labour of their countrymen for nothing ; the 
shareholders, who have been allowed to lay hands upon our great railway 
communications, take a still larger sum. Above all, the active capitalist 
class, the loan-mongers, the farmers, the mine-exploiters, the contractors, 
the middle men, the factory-lords—these, the modern slave-drivers, these 
are they who, through their money, machinery, capital, and credit, turn 
every advance in human knowledge, every improvement in human 
dexterity, into an engine for accumulating wealth out of other men’s 
labour, and for exacting more and yet more surplus value out of the wage- 
slaves whom they employ. So long as the means of production, either of 
raw materials or of manufactured goods, are the monopoly of a class, so 
long must the labourers on the farm, in the mine, or in the factory sell 
themselves for a bare subsistence wage. As land must in future be a 
national possession, so must the other means of producing and distributing 
wealth. ... 
* The Parliamentary Return of 1872 gives the total number of land- 
owners in Great Britain and Ireland as 1,173,724. Apart from Ireland, 
there were in Great Britain (in round numbers) 234,000 owners of between 
I and 100 acres ; 47,000 owners of 100 acres and upwards ; while there 
were no less than 816,000 owners of less than one acre. These last must 
have been mainly owners of town holdings, as their aggregate rental 
amounts to >¿‘35,000,000. 
t Apart from the theory involved in the expression “ robbed from the 
workers,” it is right to state that the figures from which the sum of 
1,000,000,000 is arrived at are by no means admitted by the best 
statistical authorities.