The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Arena Magazine, July, 1897, edited by John Clark Ridpath

The pleasure which springs from loyalty to duty is strenuously insisted upon by Ruskin, and he, more than any other illustrious man in our time, has reached such heights of unselfishness as to enable him to fully appreciate the unalloyed pleasure which flows from a life of sacrifice. If he is austere, he is also very humane. The fountains of pleasure that he would have us drink deeply from would leave no bitter aftertaste. He delights in no pseudo-pleasure; faithfulness to the highest ideal, untiring effort at complete self-mastery, a settled determination to work for the good of all and to be ever on guard lest by some inadvertence we injure some other living creature,—such are some of the lessons upon which our philosopher insists as essential to man’s happiness.

“If,” he urges, in writing for the young, “there is any one point which, in six thousand years of thinking about right and wrong, wise and good men have agreed upon, or successively by experience discovered, it is that God dislikes idle and cruel people more than any others; that His first order is, ‘Work while you have light;’ and his second, ‘Be merciful while you have mercy.’ ‘Work while you have light,’ especially while you have the light of morning. There are few things more wonderful to me than that old people never tell young ones how precious their youth is…. Remember, then, that I, at least, have warned you, that the happiness of your life, and its power, and its part and rank in earth or in heaven, depend on the way you pass your days now. They are not to be sad days; far from that, the first duty of young people is to be delighted and delightful; but they are to be in the deepest sense solemn days. There is no solemnity so deep, to a rightly thinking creature, as that of dawn…. You must be to the best of your strength usefully employed during the greater part of the day, so that you may be able at the end of it to say, as proudly as any peasant, that you have not eaten the bread of idleness. Then, secondly, I said, you are not to be cruel. Perhaps you think there is no chance of your being so; and indeed I hope it is not likely that you should be deliberately unkind to any creature; but unless you are deliberately kind to every creature, you will often be cruel to many.”

Ruskin is often disquieting to conventionalists; he is too candid to be popular with those who make long prayers and descant on charity while they ignore justice. He puts questions to them which they do not want to consider themselves, or to have others consider. By insisting on the substitution of justice for charity, and by taking the teachings of Jesus seriously, he offends the sleek money-changers who occupy choice pews in the modern palaces of ease dedicated to the lowly Nazarene. Such expressions as the following from the magnificent lecture on “Work” prove far less satisfying to this class than the popular sermons they are accustomed to hear:

“It is the law of heaven,” says Ruskin, “that you shall not be able to judge what is wise or easy, unless you are first resolved to judge what is just, and to do it. That is the one thing constantly reiterated by our master—the order of all others that is given oftenest: ‘Do justice and judgment.’ That’s your Bible order; that’s the ‘service of God.’ The one divine work—the one ordered sacrifice—is to do justice; and it is the last we are ever inclined to do. Anything rather than that! As much charity as you choose, but no justice. ‘Nay,’ you will say, ‘charity is greater than justice.’ Yes, it is greater; it is the summit of justice; it is the temple of which justice is the foundation. But you can’t have the top without the bottom; you cannot build upon charity. You must build upon justice, for this main reason, that you have not, at first, charity to build with. It is the last reward of good work. It is all very fine to think you can build upon charity to begin with; but you will find all you have got to begin with begins at home, and is essentially love of yourself.

“You well-to-do people, for instance, who are here to-night will go to ‘Divine Service’ next Sunday, all nice and tidy, and your little children will have their tight little Sunday boots on, and lovely little Sunday feathers in their hats; and you’ll think, complacently and piously, how lovely they look! So they do; and you love them heartily, and you like sticking feathers in their hats. That’s all right; that is charity; but it is charity beginning at home. Then you will come to the poor little crossing-sweeper got up also—in its Sunday dress—the dirtiest rags it has that it may beg the better: we shall give it a penny, and think how good we are. That’s charity going abroad. But what does justice say, walking and watching near us? Christian justice has been strangely mute, and seemingly blind; and, if not blind, decrepit this many a day: she keeps her accounts still, however—quite steadily—doing them at nights, carefully, with her bandage off, and through acutest spectacles (the only modern scientific invention she cares about). You must put your ear down ever so close to her lips to hear her speak; and then you will start at what she first whispers, for it will certainly be, ‘Why shouldn’t that little crossing-sweeper have a feather on its head, as well as your own child?’ Then you may ask justice, in an amazed manner, How she can possibly be so foolish as to think children could sweep crossings with feathers on their heads? Then you stoop again, and justice says—still in her dull, stupid way—‘Then, why don’t you, every other Sunday, leave your child to sweep the crossing, and take the little sweeper to church in a hat and feather?’ Mercy on us (you think), what will she say next? And you answer, of course, that you don’t, because everybody ought to remain content in the position in which Providence has placed them.

“Ah, my friends, that’s the gist of the whole question. Did Providence put them in that position, or did you? You knock a man into a ditch, and then you tell him to remain content in the ‘position in which Providence has placed him.’ That’s modern Christianity. You say, ‘We did not knock him into the ditch.’ How do you know what you have done or are doing? That’s just what we have all got to know, and what we shall never know until the question with us every morning, is, not how to do the gainful thing, but how to do the just thing.”

These thoughts suggest to us Ruskin, the social economist, for we must not lose sight of the fact that this greatest of all art critics, this strong, sane ethical philosopher who has emphasized so forcibly the possibilities, duties, and responsibilities of the individual in all his complex relations, is also one of the most enlightened and broad-visioned economists of our wonderful age. By treatises, essays, and letters he has striven for a brighter day for the breadwinners. He has sought to elevate the ideals and tastes of all toilers, while he has labored unremittingly to secure for them that meed of justice which is their right, but which has so long been denied them.

So far back as 1868, when few people of position dared advocate so sane a proposition as the governmental ownership of “natural monopolies,” John Ruskin published these bold and thoughtful words in the London Daily Telegraph:

The ingenious British public seemed to be discovering to its cost, that the beautiful law of supply and demand does not apply in a pleasant manner to railroad transit. But if they are prepared to submit patiently to the “natural” laws of political economy, what right have they to complain? The railroad belongs to the shareholders; and has not everybody a right to ask the highest he can get for his wares? The public have a perfect right to walk, or to make other opposition railroads for themselves, if they please, but not to abuse the shareholders for asking as much as they think they can get. Will you allow me to put the real rights of the matter before them in a few words?

Neither the roads nor the railroads of any nation should belong to any private persons. All means of public transit should be provided at public expense, by public determination, where such means are needed, and the public should be its own shareholder. Neither road, nor railroad, nor canal should ever pay dividends to anybody. They should pay their working expenses, and no more. All dividends are simply a tax on the traveller and the goods, levied by the persons to whom the road or canal belongs, for the right of passing over his property, and this right should at once be purchased by the nation, and the original cost of the roadway—be it of gravel, iron, or adamant—at once defrayed by the nation, and then the whole work of the carriage of persons or goods done for ascertained prices, by salaried officers, as the carriage of letters is done now.

Happily these suggestions of the distinguished Englishman have been followed, in part at least, by several enlightened nations, but to the disgrace of our republic, and to the great cost of the producing and consuming masses, we are lagging behind in these respects, becoming a camp-follower instead of a leader in the march of progress, because of the influence exerted by a small class, who have grown so powerful through special privileges given to them by the nation that they now assume to thwart beneficent legislation in order that they may continue to grow richer through this vicious form of governmental paternalism, which places the multitude in the power of a few.

Ruskin’s views on money are as disturbing to the usurers and those who through special privileges in money have amassed fortunes of unearned wealth as his sound position on railroads is distasteful to the monopolists who impoverish the producer and consumer by exorbitant rates on transportation.

The great Englishman is also too clear-sighted to accept the fallacious doctrines of the money-changers in regard to the medium of exchange. He is too honest to hold his peace in the presence of a great wrong, hence his definition of money is far more nearly correct than the false and essentially injurious definitions so industriously promulgated by special pleaders for an interested class. “The final and best definition of money,” says Ruskin, “is that it is a documentary promise ratified and guaranteed by the nation to give or find a certain quantity of labor on demand.”

In 1873 our author carried on a spirited discussion with some conventional economists regarding the money of the rich. One writer undertook to defend the lavish and reckless expenditures of the wealthy by calling to his aid the well-worn plea that money thus paid out finds its way into the pockets of poor families, and that thus through the bounty of the rich the starving are blest. Ruskin, in the course of his reply, observed that, were he a poor man instead of a moderately rich one, he would be sure that the paper referred to would suggest the question:

These means of living, which this generous and useful gentleman is so fortunately disposed to bestow on me—where does he get them himself?… These are the facts. The laborious poor produce “the means of life” by their labor. Rich persons possess themselves by various expedients of a right to dispense these means of life, and, keeping as much means as they want for themselves, and rather more, dispense the rest usually only in return for more labor from the poor, expended in producing various delights for the rich dispenser. The idea is now gradually entering poor men’s minds, that they may as well keep in their own hands the right of distributing “the means of life” they produce; and employ themselves, so far as they need extra occupation, for their own entertainment or benefit, rather than that of other people.

The conventional economist replied to the question relating to how the rich man got his wealth by stating that it was obtained by the possessor or his ancestors through a “mutually beneficent partnership” between the rich and the poor by which the poor had their share of the joint returns advanced to them. Mr. Ruskin in his reply stated the question again, and then proceeded to answer it by a telling personal illustration. He says:

“Where does the rich man get his means of living?” I don’t myself see how a more straightforward question could be put! so straightforward, indeed, that I particularly dislike making a martyr of myself in answering it, as I must this blessed day—a martyr, at least, in the way of witness; for if we rich people don’t begin to speak honestly with our tongues, we shall, some day soon, lose them and our heads together, having for sometime back, most of us, made false use of the one and none of the other. Well, for the point in question, then, as to means of living: the most exemplary manner of answer is simply to state how I got my own, or rather how my father got them for me. He and his partners entered into what your correspondent mellifluously styles “a mutually beneficent partnership” with certain laborers in Spain. These laborers produced from the earth annually a certain number of bottles of wine. These productions were sold by my father and his partners, who kept nine-tenths, or thereabouts, of the price themselves, and gave one-tenth, or thereabouts, to the laborers. In which state of mutual beneficence my father and his partners naturally became rich, and the laborers as naturally remained poor. Then my good father gave all his money to me.

Space forbids a more extended notice of Mr. Ruskin’s broad and thoughtful views on economic problems, but before closing this paper, I wish to notice how the life of this great philanthropist has touched and brightened other lives. Many men think noble thoughts and at times are stirred by the loftiest aspirations, but in actual everyday life they sadly fail to live up to their teachings; but he who can and does master himself, he who gives his life for justice and thinks of the welfare of others before he considers himself, has reached a far higher summit than have the most gifted intellects who, while apprehending the beauty of goodness, fail to express that beauty in their daily lives. John Ruskin’s life has been at once earnest, pure, and unselfish.

Of the unexampled manner in which he gave up his beautiful wife to his friend—how he quietly secured a divorce that she might become the wife of the man she loved—electing to pass the rest of his life alone rather than destroy her happiness,—these facts are well known, and Mr. Ruskin has been severely criticised for not holding his wife in unwilling bondage. But he was so constituted that it was impossible for him to endure the thought of being directly or indirectly the cause of another’s misery.

Another striking illustration of his unselfishness is seen in the manner in which he has disposed of his fortune, which at the time of his father’s death amounted to a million dollars. With this money he set about doing good. Poor young men and women who were struggling to obtain an education were helped, homes for working men and women were established, and model apartment-houses were erected. He also promoted a work for reclaiming waste land outside of London. This land was used for the aid of unfortunate men who wished to rise again from the state into which they had fallen through cruel social conditions and their own weaknesses. It is said that this work suggested to General Booth his colonization farms. Ruskin has also ever been liberal in aiding poor artists, and has done much to encourage the artistic taste among the young. On one occasion he purchased ten fine water-color paintings by Holman Hunt for $3,750, to be hung in public schools of London.

By 1877 he had disposed of three-fourths of his inheritance, besides all the income from his books. But the calls of the poor and the plans which he wished to put into operation looking toward education and ennobling the toilers, and giving to their gloomy lives something more of sunshine and joy, were such that he determined to dispose of all the remainder of his wealth except a sum sufficient to yield him fifteen hundred dollars a year on which to live.

Of all English writers of our century no one has left a more valuable literary legacy than has John Ruskin, but the splendid and voluminous works of his brain are even less priceless than the example of his wonderful life. That he is in the shadow in his old age is by no means strange; a nature so sensitive, so finely strung, so keenly alive to the sufferings of others on every hand, has necessarily felt what the well-kept and self-engrossed animals around him knew nothing of. Indeed, just here we find the chief reason why the finest natures suffer so keenly in this age of heartless greed, self-absorption, and gold madness, of wanton extravagance and biting poverty, of widespread misery and growing discontent. Sensitive natures who are spiritually alive to the misery around them must suffer while they sow the seed-thoughts of a new day—suffer uncomplainingly until the waiting-time of this great transition period has passed.

In John Ruskin we find great breadth of thought and a wide range of intellectual vision, going hand in hand with a profound philosophical grasp of life’s deepest problems; and, what is more, these excellences are rendered luminous by the influence of an enlightened soul. His life has been characterized by nobility of purpose, purity of thought, a passion for nature and art, and an enthusiasm for humanity.

THE SINGLE TAX IN OPERATION.

Then follows the period of incubation. Removed from the din of controversy a certain number of people are always found who are keenly sensible of the evils which the new system was supposed to cure, and who continue to meditate upon the possibility of its possessing the power to do so. These persons, it may be, make but little noise in the arena either of literature or politics, but they are not the less active, nor perhaps in the end the less really influential, on that account. Their influence is of the sort that depends upon a solid conviction, right or wrong, that the theory which they support is the true one; and as long as the evils, which the system they adhere to professes to cure, continue to exist, so long their influence may be expected to increase.

It is the third or experimental stage which is the critical one, and generally speaking it is well when that stage can be reached without any needless delay. By experiment alone can the value of such theories be tested to the satisfaction of the practical mind of humanity, and it is only as the result of a trial that men will either consent to admit the value of a proposed reform or to abandon a specious theory to which they have once given their adherence.

The single-tax theory of political economics advanced by Henry George, having passed through the first of these three stages with something more than the usual publicity and controversy, has already been in its second stage for a good many years. The cessation of active discussion, which appears to some people to argue that it has passed into oblivion, or is at any rate well on the way toward such a consummation, is only evidence that it is in its second, or fermentation, period. Nobody can pretend for an instant that any one of the evils pointed out by Henry George as the things that called loudly for reform, have actually been reformed since the date of the publication of his original essay on “Progress and Poverty.” No reasonable man can doubt that many, if not all of these evils, ought in some way to be dealt with, and if possible amended. While such is the case it is impossible wholly to get rid of the theory which trenchantly pointed out those evils and professed at least to offer an effective remedy.

Under these conditions few things could be more desirable than that the matter should be advanced to the third of its natural stages by being submitted to the critical test of experience. Nothing short of this will ever satisfy the mass of mankind of the feasibility of the system proposed, or of its adequacy to meet the evils complained of; nothing less will set free the minds of many thousands of intelligent persons to inquire into other methods of reform than the fair trial of the single-tax system, and its failure to cure the evils which its author expected it to cure. The difficulty, which indeed is by no means a slight one, is to find a favorable arena in which the experiment can be tried, and a community prepared to make the experiment.

It must be remembered that, if the evils aimed at by the proposed remedy of the single tax are great and far-reaching, its complete application could hardly, in most communities, amount to less than a practical revolution. Striking as it does at the whole received theory of land tenure, as sanctioned throughout the civilized world by the practice of many centuries, it arrays against itself the prejudices of the most influential classes in every long-established community, and its introduction is necessarily surrounded by difficulties and at least apparent injustices which must indefinitely delay any attempt to bring it to the test of experiment there. The only reasonable hope, indeed, of reducing the theory of the single tax to the plane of experience is to find a country not yet fully committed to any other system, and occupied by a self-governing people sufficiently intelligent to perceive the evils of other existing systems of land tenure, and sufficiently enterprising to be willing to experiment in this direction.

It may perhaps prove of no little benefit to other communities that one self-governing country has been found which has been both able and willing to make trial of the principle which has been so strongly contended for by the author of “Progress and Poverty,” and by those who have seen in his proposals a way of escape from many of the most serious difficulties that beset civilized communities at the present day. There is probably no other country which is to-day in so good a position to enter upon experimental legislation in this and other directions as the British colony of New Zealand. An island community separated by more than a thousand miles from its nearest neighbors, possessed of practically unlimited powers of self-government, and inhabited by a prosperous and intelligent population, substantially of unmixed British race, there is little either in their external relations or internal circumstances to prevent the colonists of New Zealand making many experiments in economic legislation. And during the last quarter of a century this fact has been fully realized by the people and their leaders. They have established a system of education which is at once more popular, free, and comprehensive than even the most complete systems in force in this country; they have placed local option in the control of the liquor traffic upon a broad and entirely popular basis, which has rendered New Zealand the most sober and law-abiding of communities, without introducing the doubtful principle of prohibition; they have thrown open the franchise unreservedly to all persons of full age and competent education, without regard to sex; and they have successfully introduced life insurance and trusteeship of estates by the government, as well as many others of the proposals which are generally comprehended under the term “State Socialism.”

It is by no means surprising that a community which has made so many experiments in legislation should have turned its attention to the question which may perhaps be looked upon as most specially inviting attention from social reformers in a new country. The circumstances of New Zealand in relation to the land were from the first exceptional. In every other country occupied by savage tribes in modern times which has been taken possession of for purposes of settlement by people of European race, the ownership of the soil has been assumed, as a matter of course, to vest not in the aboriginal natives, but in the intruding settlers. Spain, England, France, Holland, Germany, and the United States have one after the other adopted this convenient theory of international morality, and entered with a cool assumption of right upon the inheritance of their comparatively helpless predecessors. In New Zealand the conditions of the country and its inhabitants rendered this popular system wholly inapplicable. The area of the country was limited, to an extent which rendered it impossible to adopt the fiction which has lain at the root of nearly all the forcible confiscation of the territory of native tribes, namely, that they could make no profitable use of so great an area. The islands of New Zealand contain only a little more land than Great Britain itself, and sixty years ago, when England first thought of annexing them to her empire, the native inhabitants numbered little if anything short of a hundred thousand souls. They were besides a settled people who cultivated the soil, and moreover they were warlike, and formidable to any invader. In consequence of these things a wholly new departure was made in the case of New Zealand. The country was not occupied on any plea of discovery or of conquest, as had been done in so many parts of the world before, but the sovereignty of the islands was obtained by treaty with the chiefs of the native tribes, upon the distinct guarantee that the full rights of the aboriginal inhabitants to their lands should be recognized and protected by England against all comers.

From the first, therefore, the lands of New Zealand have been purchased by the government before they could be disposed of to the settlers. The community had no vast tracts of land to dispose of which had cost nothing but the expense of survey, but as a matter of fact had to look on every acre as an investment which must be sold for a certain definite price unless the transaction was to result in an absolute loss of money to the people at large. It may well have happened that the result of so unusual a condition of affairs was to lead the community to regard the public lands in a somewhat different light from other people. At any rate it led to all lands being sold for a price which prevented their being lightly esteemed or as a rule held as freeholds in large areas. So much was this the case that from the first nearly all pastoral lands were held under leases from the government at fixed annual rentals. Fully forty years ago the southern, and larger, of the islands was nearly all purchased from the comparatively small native population by the government, and in that island a very large proportion of the land has always been let on lease for grazing. In the northern island nearly one-half of the land even now belongs to the original native owners, and much of this area is leased from them by Europeans for farming or grazing purposes.

In this way it has happened that in New Zealand, more than in any other country occupied by people of European race, the inhabitants have grown accustomed to the idea of holding land on lease, with the people at large, as represented by the government, for landlord. Under these conditions it is easy to understand how the doctrine of the single tax found a peculiarly congenial home in the minds of New Zealand public men. It is true that large areas of the lands of the country had been disposed of in freehold to settlers. It is true that the freehold tenure of the native inhabitants had in a certain sense been guaranteed to them by treaty, at least in so far that it should never be taken from them without compensation. It is true that the mass of the people were very fully possessed by the apparently almost universal preference for the idea of a freehold over every other tenure of lands so far as they were personally concerned. But, on the other hand, they had grown accustomed to the practice of holding areas of land on lease both from the government and from the native owners, whose tenure was not individual, but tribal, and they had learned the lesson that there was no intolerable hardship in the system.

The attempt to introduce a system which should give effect to the principle underlying the economic theory of Henry George in New Zealand was not hastily made, nor was it attempted on a scale that could be fairly open to the charge of being revolutionary in its incidence. The first step taken by the legislature was in the direction of so dealing with the public estate of the country as to encourage settlers to lease rather than to purchase the freehold. With this in view a system of leases in perpetuity was established, and areas of the best and most accessible of the land still unsold were set apart to be dealt with under the new plan. Any person, not already the holder of land in freehold, which, together with the land applied for under perpetual lease, would make an area of more than six hundred and forty acres, or one square mile, could apply for a lease of not more than three hundred and forty acres on perpetual lease. Five dollars per acre was fixed as the price of the land, such being the average price of first-class freehold land unimproved in the country, and the applicant was entitled to a lease for 999 years of the land applied for, subject to the conditions that he resided upon the land during the first ten years of the tenancy; that he improved it to the extent of thirty per cent of its upset value within six years; and that he paid as annual rental interest at the rate of five per cent on the price or value of the land.

Each lease contained clauses rendering the land subject to revaluation at the end of each period of twenty-one years, on which the rental would be calculated. If the new valuation, which it was provided should rigidly exclude all improvements on the land, was assented to by the tenant, the matter was settled for another twenty-one years; but if he objected to the new valuation as excessive, it was provided that he could demand that it should be offered by public auction (subject to payment of the value of his improvements), and that the amount bid for it either by himself or by anybody else at the sale should be esteemed the value on which the rental was to be calculated during the twenty-one years next following the sale. In case the present holder of the lease was the highest bidder, this was the only result of the sale; but in case he was outbid he was bound to transfer the lease to the best bidder, on receiving from the government the amount at which his improvements had been valued. This payment might be made in government bonds, bearing interest at four per cent, at the option of the government, and the new holder of the lease was charged as rent the interest on the value of the land as bid by himself and also interest at five per cent upon the former leaseholder’s improvements. By this means it was proposed to retain for the community at large the increased value of the lands of the country which was not due to the improvements made from time to time by the leaseholder. The inducement held out to the public to accept such leases in preference to a freehold was the saving of capital involved in not paying for the land when taken up, but only interest on the amount. This, it was hoped, would suffice to render it popular with a considerable class of actual working settlers as distinguished from speculative buyers.

It is only fair to say that in spite of every effort that could be made by the government, the system did not commend itself to the judgment or the prejudices of the persons interested to any very great extent. What they wanted—what it may be taken for granted is wanted by nearly everybody in dealing with land—was a fixed tenure. It was not enough to know that they had a lease for 999 years; they wanted to know what they were to pay for it, not only during the first twenty-one years, but at any time during the 999. Eventually this had to be conceded, and as the land law of New Zealand now stands the holder of a perpetual lease gets it for a rental of four per cent upon the original price fixed by government on the land, subject still, however, to the conditions as to residence and improvements on the land during the first ten years.

Having abandoned this promising and theoretically perfect plan for securing to the state all state-produced increase in the value of the public lands, the New Zealand parliament was still anxious to secure for the country the other advantages held out by the author of the single-tax doctrine. These advantages may be briefly summed up in the words, the discouragement of large holdings and the prevention of speculation in future land values. To obtain these results without laying the community open to the charge of practical confiscation, which has been, and probably will always be, the strongest argument against the practical application of the doctrine of the single tax, as propounded by its author, was felt to be no easy matter. Even in New Zealand there were already some large freehold estates, and these naturally included some of the most desirable and valuable of the land. It was eventually decided to impose a land tax, the incidence of which would tend at least to discourage speculation, while it supplied revenue for the public expenditure.

A uniform tax of one penny in the pound sterling, equivalent to one two-hundred-and-fortieth part of the capital value of all land in the country held in freehold by Europeans, was imposed, the value of improvements being in all cases deducted from such valuation. Each owner of land is, however, allowed an exemption of land to the value of two thousand five hundred dollars, on which no tax is payable, as well as of all mortgage money secured on the freehold. Thus all freehold lands held by any individual are liable to be taxed above the value of $2,500, so far as he is really interested in them; while all money lent on mortgage of land is subject to a tax of five per cent on the annual interest reserved by the terms of the mortgage. New Zealand is mainly a country of small holdings, and the result of this system has been that, out of about 90,000 holders of land in freehold, only about 13,000 actually pay the tax on land. In other words, the settlers of the colony who own land which, apart from improvements and mortgage debts, is worth more than $2,500, are found to be only about one-seventh of the whole number.

To provide for the discouragement of land speculation on a large scale a further provision is made by the enactment of a further tax upon all lands held by individuals or corporations of a value exceeding $25,000 clear of incumbrance. This is called the graduated land tax, and provides for a farther taxation on all such lands, beginning at one-eighth in addition to the original tax, and rising by advances of an additional eighth for each sum of $25,000 at which the land is valued, until a maximum rate of three times the original tax is reached in the case of large estates. To provide for the risk of vexatious opposition to valuations on the part of owners, there is a farther provision that the government may at its option elect to purchase, at an advance of ten per cent over the valuation objected to, any unimproved land held in freehold. It is also a part of the system that the government may compulsorily purchase at a valuation any lands not in actual use in case any association of persons shall apply to have this done, undertaking satisfactorily to take the land upon its purchase under the conditions of perpetual lease, which of course includes subdivision into small areas, with residence and improvement.

By these means the people of New Zealand confidently expect to secure the subdivision of the lands of the country into small areas; to discourage to the utmost the holding of land by capitalists in expectation of greatly increased values at the expense of the less wealthy classes; to render practically impossible the establishment on any extensive scale of private landlordism in respect of agricultural lands; and gradually to substitute, as far as possible, the payment to the state of a yearly interest on value, for the purchase of the freehold in the land of the country.

So far as the experience of the last eight years, during which the system has been in force, may be taken as a reliable guide, the experiment shows many signs of success. It has certainly checked the tendency to speculate in lands with a view to a rise in price, which threatened to become a great, as it certainly was a growing, evil. It has been found that it will not pay to do this in the face of taxation, and particularly of the graduated tax; and owners of large areas of land have developed a strong inclination to subdivide and sell lands which they formerly were disposed to hoard and increase. The power given to the government to purchase lands where the owners have objected to the valuation for taxation purposes has not been widely exercised, but several very important and considerable compulsory purchases of estates have been made in cases where associations of persons wishing to take the land on perpetual lease have applied to the government for that purpose. The chief benefit of such examples, indeed, seems to have been in compelling owners either to use the land themselves or to offer it for sale to persons anxious to use it; but from the New Zealand point of view this would appear to be almost if not quite equally desirable. Finally, the land tax has largely enabled the country to do without other taxes, which would necessarily have fallen more heavily upon the class of workers with small incomes, instead of being levied on the classes best able to bear them.

It yet remains to be seen whether evils may not lurk, as yet unnoticed, in the system, which may impair if not destroy its usefulness. One consequence which was predicted by its opponents, however, has not been found to follow upon the introduction of the system. It was said that capital would be withdrawn from the country, and that poverty and stagnation would result. No such result has followed up to this time. New Zealand, with its less than a million inhabitants, is to-day looked on as one of the soundest dependencies of the British empire; it continues to draw to it from the mother country as much capital as it can profitably use; its exports steadily increase; and its people, if not rich, are well-to-do and comfortable.

It may be said, indeed, that New Zealand has not accepted Henry George’s doctrines as they were propounded by their author, and this is literally true. It is, however, also true that they have accepted the essential spirit of those doctrines, and, applying that spirit to the circumstances of their own country, are giving probably the most useful practical illustration of all that is best in them for the world’s acceptance. No doctrine in economics yet propounded for the acceptance of humanity has ever been found to be applicable in exactly the same form or to exactly the same extent under all circumstances, and this, it may be safely said, will prove emphatically true of the doctrine of the single tax. The single tax, like all other economic plans, is not an end, but only a means. The end must be the amelioration of the condition of the masses of the people, and the consequent prosperity and happiness of the great majority. In New Zealand the people and their leaders believe this to be secured by taxing wealth rather than comparative poverty; by giving every encouragement to those who will devote themselves to the cultivation of the land; and by throwing every obstacle in the path of those who would fain establish and promote the pernicious system of private landlordism, which everywhere tends to create and perpetuate class distinctions, with their long train of attendant evils.

In these respects New Zealand presents an object-lesson which can hardly fail to be of value to other countries, even if their conditions differ widely from her own. Her successes may be noted with advantage, her mistakes may be criticised with profit, in every free country and by all those who see that existing conditions are far from perfect in any part of the world, and that the safety as well as the advancement of society may depend largely upon the introduction of wise and, it may be, far-reaching reforms.

NATURAL SELECTION, SOCIAL SELECTION, AND HEREDITY.

But self-consciousness is at first only vague, capricious, and unprincipled. It grows by becoming definite, self-controlled, and conscientious; that is, more regardful both of its own higher self and of others. It thus develops into moral character, which we call personality. Personality is the final outcome of social selection. When once liberated it becomes a new selective principle to which all others are subordinated. What, then, are the social conditions which promote or retard the survival of personality?

It is a debated question where we shall place the dividing line between pre-social and social man. In view of what precedes we should look for that line at the point where self-consciousness begins to throw about itself a social covering. This covering is private property. The former view that primitive property was common property is now nearly abandoned. The supposed village communities of free proprietors were really villages of slaves and serfs. The semblance of common property in primitive times belongs to the pre-social or gregarious stage, and differs but little from the common use of a given area by a colony of beavers.

Private property involves two facts: 1. Perception of enduring value in external objects; 2. Exclusive control and enjoyment of those objects. Its psychological basis is therefore self-consciousness, which is the knowledge not of an abstracted and isolated self, but of self as related to external nature and human beings.

The first private property was animals and tools. Artificial selection begins with the domestication of animals. Soon it lays hold on man himself by means of social institutions, all of which originate as private property. The primitive social family was not a state of promiscuity nor even the voluntary pairing of animals and birds, but it was private property in women, beginning as wife-capture and becoming wife-purchase and polygamy. Natural selection, too, is transcended when cannibalism ceases. The self-conscious victor enslaves his enemy and reduces him to property. Next, government arises as private despotism, and with it the land becomes the property of the chief. Thus the family, the state, protracted industry, and the control of social opportunities begin with that artificial selection denoted by private property.

Property in its early forms means the domination of the powerful over the weak. Social institutions develop out of this primitive tyranny, where the caprice of owners crushes the personality of the masses, towards a state of equal rights and opportunities for all. The industrial classes emerge from slavery and serfdom into a wage system, which in turn is modified in the direction of fair wages, short hours, and security of employment—fundamental conditions for personal development.

The family has arisen from the private property of a despot to the mutual coöperation of lovers, and the woman becomes a person instead of a chattel. The legal successor of polygamy—the slavery of women—is not monogamy, but prostitution, which is the wage system of the sexes, grounded on the subordinate position of women and their meagre opportunities for self-support.

Government is passing into democracy, and property in land and capital is being hedged about by the police and taxing powers, or diffused and socialized in the interest of the personal equality of all.

Social evolution is therefore the evolution of freedom and opportunity, on the one hand, and personality, on the other. Without freedom and security there can be no free will and moral character. Without exalted personality there can be no enduring freedom. The educational environment, therefore, which develops personality must itself develop with freedom. The ruling ideas of justice, integrity, morality, must move in advance, else the personality of individuals will not survive the temptations of freedom. To what extent, therefore, can education modify the individual? The answer is to be sought in the problems of heredity and degeneration.

The human degenerate is essentially different from the animal degenerate. The latter is solely a physical product, and by losing certain organs is better fitted for survival, as parasites and snakes.

Human degenerates, however, do not form a new type, but are on the decline to extinction. They are those who lack personality; that is, they are not moulded into harmony with a social environment which unfolds self-consciousness. They are strictly biological only when they are congenital and therefore not educable. They are social degenerates when they are the product of a degraded education. Both factors are radical. A born idiot can never be other than an idiot. On the other hand, the deprivation during childhood and youth of language and education, as shown by Caspar Hauser, or the wolf-boy of Agra, or the experiment of Emperor Akbar, leaves the normal natural endowments as idiotic as though they never existed. The two factors vary independently through all degrees. Education ranges from the slums to the pure firesides. The congenital equipment varies from the idiot to the genius.

The relative weight of these two factors is a matter of statistics. Absolutely speaking, heredity is everything; relatively, its social significance depends upon the actual proportion of abnormal to normal births.

The highest estimate I am able to make of the total number of degenerates, both born and induced, is five and one-half per cent of the population, as follows: