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 Nationalization
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 themselves
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 wageslaves
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 landowners
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.
