![xvi Symbols
r(<*eq) Latitude-dependent factor of radial diffusion coefficient
Y] Scattering angle, longitude
r7min Minimum Coulomb scattering angle determined by shielding of nuclear
charge
A Geomagnetic latitude
Am Latitude of a particle mirroring point
An, Am Eigenvalues of the spatial part of the diffusion equation
v Frequency of global magnetic or electric field fluctuations
Vdnft Longitudinal drift frequency of trapped particles
x First adiabatic invariant = p2
j2m0B (magnetic moment)
/io Permeability of free space
p Gyroradius
p Charge density, mass density
a(rj) Cross-section for Coulomb scattering of an electron through angle r]
rb Bounce period of a trapped particle
rd Longitudinal drift period of a trapped particle
Tg Gyration period of a trapped particle
0 Phase angle between ± and the magnetic field vector of a wave
4> Magnetic flux, third adiabatic invariant
*P Probability function, scalar potential
ty Azimuthal angle
Q Solid angle
Q, Qe Angular gyration frequency, electron gyration frequency
QD Longitudinal angular drift frequency of a trapped particle
o) Wave angular frequency
(od Doppler shifted wave frequency
cop Plasma frequency
§, £', §", £ Dummy variables of integration
6 Colatitude, polar angle
X cos 6 where 6 is colatitude](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/63546-250308164849-82cc52f0/85/Introduction-to-Geomagnetically-Trapped-Radiation-Martin-Walt-22-320.jpg)
Introduction to Geomagnetically Trapped Radiation Martin Walt
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- 5. Introduction to Geomagnetically Trapped Radiation Martin Walt Digital Instant Download Author(s): Martin Walt ISBN(s): 9780521616119, 0521616115 Edition: Digitally Printed 1st Pbk. Version File Details: PDF, 5.24 MB Year: 2005 Language: english
- 7. This book is an introductory textbook on the physical processes occurring in the Earth's radiation belts. The presentation is at the senior or first year graduate level, and it is appropriate for students who intend to work in some aspect of magnetospheric physics. The treatment is quantitative and provides the mathematical basis for original work in this subject. The equations describing the motion of energetic ions and electrons in the geomagnetic field are derived from basic principles, and concepts such as magnetic field representations, guiding center motion, adiabatic invariance, and particle distribution functions are presented in a detailed and accessible manner. Relevant experimental techniques are reviewed and a summary is given of the intensity and energy spectra of the particle populations in the Earth's radiation belts. Problem sets are included as well as appendices of tables, graphs and frequently used formulas.
- 9. Cambridge atmospheric and space science series Introduction to Geomagnetically Trapped Radiation
- 10. Cambridge atmospheric and space science series Editors Alexander J. Dessler John T. Houghton Michael J. Rycroft Titles in print in this series M. H. Rees, Physics and chemistry of the upper atmosphere Roger Daley, Atmospheric data analysis Ya. L. Al'pert, Space plasma, Volumes 1 and 2 J. R. Garratt, The atmospheric boundary layer J. K. Hargreaves, The solar-terrestrial environment Sergei Sazhin, Whistler-mode waves in a hot plasma S. Peter Gary, Theory of space plasma microinstabilities Ian N. James, Introduction to circulating atmospheres Tamas I. Gombosi, Gaskinetic theory
- 11. Introduction to Geomagnetically Trapped Radiation Martin Walt Lockheed Missiles and Space Company and Stanford University CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
- 12. CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521431439 © Cambridge University Press 1994 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1994 This digitally printed first paperback version 2005 A catalogue recordfor this publication is available from the British Library ISBN-13 978-0-521-43143-9 hardback ISBN-10 0-521-43143-3 hardback ISBN-13 978-0-521-61611-9 paperback ISBN-10 0-521-61611-5 paperback
- 13. Contents Preface xi List of symbols xiii Useful constants xvii Geophysical quantities xviii Energy equivalents xix 1 The Earth's radiation belts 1 Introduction 1 The magnetosphere 2 The radiation belts 4 The importance of trapped radiation in space science and technology 4 Implications for astrophysics 6 Status of radiation belt knowledge 7 2 Charged particle motion in magnetic and electric fields 10 Introduction 10 Uniform magnetic field 11 Uniform magnetic and electric fields 12 Inhomogeneous magnetic field 14 vii
- 14. viii Contents 3 The geomagnetic field 25 Representation of the Earth's interior field 27 The dipole field 29 Representation of the external current systems 33 4 Adiabatic invariants 36 Introduction 36 First adiabatic invariant 39 Second adiabatic invariant 44 Third adiabatic invariant 50 Geomagnetic coordinate system based on adiabatic invariants-the L-shell parameter 53 5 Particle fluxes, distribution functions and radiation belt measurements 59 The specification of particle distributions 59 Liouville's theorem and phase space densities 64 Trapped radiation measurement techniques 68 Particle detectors 71 Trapped particle populations 74 Introduction 74 Radiation belt protons 75 Electrons 79 Ions other than protons 81 Time variations 83 6 Particle diffusion and transport 92 Introduction 92 Diffusion equation 94 Particle diffusion in the radiation belts 97 Injection of protons by cosmic ray albedo neutrons 106 7 Diffusion in pitch angle 111 Electron diffusion by collisions with atmospheric atoms 111 Diffusion in pitch angle by interactions with waves 118 Coupling of particle and wave energy 128 Discussion 130 8 Diffusion in the L coordinate or radial diffusion 132 Radial diffusion induced by magnetic fluctuations 134
- 15. Contents ix Radial diffusion induced by electric potential fields 141 Observed and derived values of DLL 144 Dilution of phase space density 146 9 Summary and comments 149 Appendix A Summary of frequently used formulas 157 Appendix B Gyration, bounce and drift frequencies in a dipole field 161 References 167 Index 168
- 17. Preface This book is the outgrowth of teaching an introductory course in geomag- netically trapped radiation to graduate and undergraduate students at Stanford University. Because this material is well-plowed ground, the topics are presented in what is hoped to be a logical sequence, and the historical chronology is not followed. The emphasis is on the basic physical processes treated in a tutorial manner, rather than on the descriptive aspects of the magnetosphere. Thus the principles developed here should be useful regardless of further evolution in our understanding of trapped radiation. Items such as frequently used formulas and graphs of trapped particle parameters are collected in appendices for ready access and for future reference. The rationalized MKS system of electromagnetic units is used through- out the book. Although much of the published research in this field is in Gaussian units, the author believes that the MKS system is preferable and will eventually prevail. Some exceptions to SI units are allowed, such as particle fluxes, which are expressed in cm"2 s~1 rather than m~2 s~1 because of convention and because detector apertures are more readily visualized in cm2 . Inasmuch as this work is written to be a textbook rather than a review of current research, references to original works are limited. Undergraduates and first-year graduate students are more interested in understanding the material than in learning the source. The references listed are primarily those articles and books which will be useful to the student who wishes to dig deeper into any of the topics covered. The numbers listed after each of the references indicate the chapter for which that reference is particularly applicable. I apologize to my many colleagues whose work is utilized here but is not explicitly acknowledged. Special thanks go to many of my friends who helped with various stages XI
- 18. xii Preface of the book and who provided many stimulating and informative discus- sions. My colleagues John Cladis, Ted Northrop, David Stern, Tim Bell and Michael Schulz were particularly helpful and patient, both in review- ing portions of the text and in working the problem sets. I must also thank the students who ferreted out inconsistencies in the lecture notes and who provided fresh perspectives on the subject. I am grateful to the Lockheed Missiles and Space Company for author- izing my teaching efforts at Stanford University and to Stanford for providing the opportunity. The endless number of drafts with redundant and repetitive alterations were patiently processed by my secretary, Mrs Glenda Roberts, whose competence and good nature were essential to convert rough notes into legible text. The support and encouragement of my wife during the years involved in this book is acknowledged and appreciated.
- 19. Symbols Symbols in bold face denote vector quantities. When only the magnitude of the quantity is used, the same symbol is used in standard type. A Magnetic vector potential A Area A(t) Asymmetric part of the time variation of the Earth's magnetic field B Magnetic field Bd Dipole magnetic moment Bo Mean value of geomagnetic field on the equator at the Earth's surface Z?eq Value of B in the equatorial plane not at the Earth's surface Bm Value of B at the mirroring point of a particle Br, Be, BQ Components of geomagnetic field in spherical coordinates Bmax Maximum value of B above the atmosphere for a given drift shell b Magnetic field of a wave or perturbation on the Earth's magnetic field c Velocity of light in vacuum Z), Dxx, Daa, DLL Diffusion coefficients for particle transport D™L Radial diffusion coefficient produced by magnetic field perturbations DL Radial diffusion coefficient produced by electric field perturbations ^ Z > v Differential operator defined by equation (7.46) E, Ej., E|| Electric field intensity, perpendicular and parallel components E6j ET, EQ Components of electric field in spherical polar coordinates E<i>n nth Fourier coefficient in expansion of the Earth's electric field fluctuations E Particle kinetic energy £i> e2, e3; e^, ey, ez and er, i0, e0 Unit orthogonal vectors e, s Kinetic plus potential energy, average kinetic plus potential energy £', e! Constant of integration equal to mv + iB, average value F, Fx, Fy, Fz Force, orthogonal components of force Xlll
- 20. xiv Symbols /(x, t) Number of particles at coordinate x per unit dx at time t. ^(P> < 1 > 0> F(fa J> 0> 0 Distribution function of particles in phase space or adiabatic invariant space at time t. g™, h™ Harmonic expansion coefficients describing the core geomagnetic field g™, h™ Harmonic expansion coefficients describing the magnetic field produced by magnetopause current systems gm Spatial eigenfunctions of the diffusion equation G Geometric factor of a detector i Electric current density / Integral invariant function I Electric current j(E, a) Differential, directional particle flux j{E) Omnidirectional particle flux /(or, E > Eo) Integral particle flux above an energy Eo J Action integral, adiabatic invariant J — fa h = J, h — <£ First, second and third adiabatic invariants or action integrals Q = v Jacobian relating two sets of variables or coordinates L Magnetic shell parameter - approximate distance from center of Earth to equatorial crossing of the field line in Earth radii) m Mass of a particle me, mp Mass of electron, mass of proton m0 Rest mass of a particle i First adiabatic invariant, magnetic moment of a charged particle JKE Magnetic moment of a dipole field N Number density of scattering centers, number of particles Ni(x), N2(x) Geometric function of geomagnetic field defined by equations (6.28) and (6.31) n Unit vector normal to surface or parallel to the radius of curvature of line p, p± , pu Particle total momentum, perpendicular and parallel components PA (Q) Power spectrum of A(t) evaluated at angular frequency Q P Canonical momentum of a charged particle P™ Associated Legendre functions, Schmidt normalization Pnm Associated Legendre functions, usual normalization q Electric charge qt Position coordinate conjugate to momentum coordinate pt Q Source intensity for a particle distribution r, 6, (/> Spherical polar coordinates r Position vector
- 21. Symbols xv R Position vector of the guiding center of a charged particle R(r), 0(8), O(0) Separation functions for solution of Laplace's equation in spherical coordinates Rc Radius of curvature of a magnetic field line RE Radius of the Earth Ro Distance from the center of the Earth to the equatorial crossing point of a magnetic field line 5 * Distance measured along a geomagnetic field line sm, $m Conjugate mirroring points on a magnetic field line As Increment of distance along a geomagnetic field line S Area S(t) Symmetric part of the time variation of the Earth's magnetic field 5b Helical distance traveled by a particle during a complete bounce t Time T = Kinetic energy in rest mass units m0c2 v, v±, V|| Particle velocity, perpendicular and parallel components vx, vy, vz Orthogonal components of velocity vf Apparent velocity of magnetic field line motion vg Group velocity of a wave vph Phase velocity of a wave V(x) Potential energy V Velocity of moving reference frame VE Guiding center drift velocity of a particle caused by an electric field perpendicular to the magnetic field VG Gradient drift velocity Vc Curvature drift velocity Vj. Guiding center drift velocity perpendicular to the magnetic field W Relativistic total energy of a particle (kinetic energy + rest energy) x, y, z Rectangular coordinate axes x cos aeq = cosine of equatorial pitch angle of a trapped particle x Generalized vector coordinate z Atomic number of an atom oc Pitch angle of particle in a magnetic field = tan-1 (v±/v) atq Pitch angle of a particle measured at the equatorial plane aLC Bounce loss cone pitch angle #LC Drift loss cone pitch angle P o/c y Relativistic factor (1 — /J2 )"1 /2 , wave growth rate e0 Permitivity of free space
- 22. xvi Symbols r(<*eq) Latitude-dependent factor of radial diffusion coefficient Y] Scattering angle, longitude r7min Minimum Coulomb scattering angle determined by shielding of nuclear charge A Geomagnetic latitude Am Latitude of a particle mirroring point An, Am Eigenvalues of the spatial part of the diffusion equation v Frequency of global magnetic or electric field fluctuations Vdnft Longitudinal drift frequency of trapped particles x First adiabatic invariant = p2 j2m0B (magnetic moment) /io Permeability of free space p Gyroradius p Charge density, mass density a(rj) Cross-section for Coulomb scattering of an electron through angle r] rb Bounce period of a trapped particle rd Longitudinal drift period of a trapped particle Tg Gyration period of a trapped particle 0 Phase angle between ± and the magnetic field vector of a wave 4> Magnetic flux, third adiabatic invariant *P Probability function, scalar potential ty Azimuthal angle Q Solid angle Q, Qe Angular gyration frequency, electron gyration frequency QD Longitudinal angular drift frequency of a trapped particle o) Wave angular frequency (od Doppler shifted wave frequency cop Plasma frequency §, £', §", £ Dummy variables of integration 6 Colatitude, polar angle X cos 6 where 6 is colatitude
- 23. Useful constants M o Elementary charge Rest mass of electron Rest mass of proton Speed of light in vacuum Permeability of free space Permittivity of free space 1.602 x 10-19 coulombs 9.11 x 10-31 kg 1.673 x 10"27 kg 2.998 x Wms-1 4TT x 10~7 newton s2 coulomb"2 8.85 x 10"12 coulomb2 newton-1 meter-2 xvn
- 24. Geophysical quantities RE Mean radius of Earth 6.37 x 103 km Bo Mean magnetic field on equator at Earth's surface 3.12 x 10~5 T ME Magnetic dipole moment of the Earth 8.07 x 1022 Am2 ——- Magnetic dipole parameter of the Earth 8.07 x 1015 T m3 477 xvin
- 25. Energy equivalents mpc2 938.3 MeV mec2 0.511 MeV l e V 1.6 x 10-19 joules xix
- 26. Other documents randomly have different content
- 27. further and fatal objection that restriction will not secure the end which is alone worth aiming at—a fair division of the produce. It will not reduce rent, and therefore cannot increase wages. It may make the comfortable classes larger, but will not improve the condition of those in the lowest class. If what is known as the Ulster tenant right were extended to the whole of Great Britain, it would be but to carve out of the estate of the landlord an estate for the tenant. The condition of the laborer would not be a whit improved. If landlords were prohibited from asking an increase of rent from their tenants and from ejecting a tenant so long as the fixed rent was paid, the body of the producers would gain nothing. Economic rent would still increase, and would still steadily lessen the proportion of the produce going to labor and capital. The only difference would be that the tenants of the first landlords, who would become landlords in their turn, would profit by the increase. If by a restriction upon the amount of land any one individual might hold, by the regulation of devises and successions, or by cumulative taxation, the few thousand land holders of Great Britain should be increased by two or three million, these two or three million people would be gainers. But the rest of the population would gain nothing. They would have no more share in the advantages of land ownership than before. And if, what is manifestly impossible, a fair distribution of the land were made among the whole population, giving to each his equal share, and laws enacted which would interpose a barrier to the tendency to concentration by forbidding the holding by any one of more than the fixed amount, what would become of the increase of population? Just what may be accomplished by the greater division of land may be seen in those districts of France and Belgium where minute division prevails. That such a division of land is on the whole much better, and that it gives a far more stable basis to the state than that which prevails in England, there can be no doubt. But that it does not make wages any higher or improve the condition of the class
- 28. who have only their labor, is equally clear. These French and Belgian peasants practice a rigid economy unknown to any of the English- speaking peoples. And if such striking symptoms of the poverty and distress of the lowest class are not apparent as on the other side of the channel, it must, I think, be attributed, not only to this fact, but to another fact, which accounts for the continuance of the minute division of the land—that material progress has not been so rapid. Neither has population increased with the same rapidity (on the contrary it has been nearly stationary), nor have improvements in the modes of production been so great. Nevertheless, M. de Laveleye, all of whose prepossessions are in favor of small holdings, and whose testimony will therefore carry more weight than that of English observers, who may be supposed to harbor a prejudice for the system of their own country, states in his paper on the Land Systems of Belgium and Holland, printed by the Cobden Club, that the condition of the laborer is worse under this system of the minute division of land than it is in England; while the tenant farmers—for tenancy largely prevails even where the morcellment is greatest—are rack-rented with a mercilessness unknown in England, and even in Ireland, and the franchise “so far from raising them in the social scale, is but a source of mortification and humiliation to them, for they are forced to vote according to the dictates of the landlord instead of following the dictates of their own inclination and convictions.” But while the subdivision of land can thus do nothing to cure the evils of land monopoly, while it can have no effect in raising wages or in improving the condition of the lowest classes, its tendency is to prevent the adoption or even advocacy of more thorough-going measures, and to strengthen the existing unjust system by interesting a larger number in its maintenance. M. de Laveleye, in concluding the paper from which I have quoted, urges the greater division of land as the surest means of securing the great land owners of England from something far more radical. Although in the districts where land is so minutely divided, the condition of the
- 29. laborer is, he states, the worst in Europe and the renting farmer is much more ground down by his landlord than the Irish tenant, yet “feelings hostile to social order,” M. de Laveleye goes on to say, “do not manifest themselves,” because— “The tenant, although ground down by the constant rise of rents, lives among his equals, peasants like himself who have tenants whom they use just as the large land holder does his. His father, his brother, perhaps the man himself, possesses something like an acre of land, which he lets at as high a rent as he can get. In the public house peasant proprietors will boast of the high rents they get for their lands, just as they might boast of having sold their pigs or potatoes very dear. Letting at as high a rent as possible comes thus to seem to him to be quite a matter of course, and he never dreams of finding fault with either the land owners as a class or with property in land. His mind is not likely to dwell on the notion of a caste of domineering landlords, of “bloodthirsty tyrants,” fattening on the sweat of impoverished tenants and doing no work themselves; for those who drive the hardest bargains are not the great land owners but his own fellows. Thus, the distribution of a number of small properties among the peasantry forms a kind of rampart and safeguard for the holders of large estates, and peasant property may without exaggeration be called the lightning conductor that averts from society dangers which might otherwise lead to violent catastrophes. “The concentration of land in large estates among a small number of families is a sort of provocation of leveling legislation. The position of England, so enviable in many respects, seems to me to be in this respect full of danger for the future.” To me, for the very same reason that M. de Laveleye expresses, the position of England seems full of hope. Let us abandon all attempt to get rid of the evils of land monopoly by restricting land ownership. An equal distribution of land
- 30. is impossible, and anything short of that would be only a mitigation, not a cure, and a mitigation that would prevent the adoption of a cure. Nor is any remedy worth considering that does not fall in with the natural direction of social development, and swim, so to speak, with the current of the times. That concentration is the order of development there can be no mistaking—the concentration of people in large cities, the concentration of handicrafts in large factories, the concentration of transportation by railroad and steamship lines, and of agricultural operations in large fields. The most trivial businesses are being concentrated in the same way—errands are run and carpet sacks are carried by corporations. All the currents of the time run to concentration. To resist it successfully we must throttle steam and discharge electricity from human service.
- 31. CHAPTER II. THE TRUE REMEDY. We have traced the unequal distribution of wealth which is the curse and menace of modern civilization to the institution of private property in land. We have seen that so long as this institution exists no increase in productive power can permanently benefit the masses; but, on the contrary, must tend still further to depress their condition. We have examined all the remedies, short of the abolition of private property in land, which are currently relied on or proposed for the relief of poverty and the better distribution of wealth, and have found them all inefficacious or impracticable. There is but one way to remove an evil—and that is, to remove its cause. Poverty deepens as wealth increases, and wages are forced down while productive power grows, because land, which is the source of all wealth and the field of all labor, is monopolized. To extirpate poverty, to make wages what justice commands they should be, the full earnings of the laborer, we must therefore substitute for the individual ownership of land a common ownership. Nothing else will go to the cause of the evil—in nothing else is there the slightest hope. This, then, is the remedy for the unjust and unequal distribution of wealth apparent in modern civilization, and for all the evils which flow from it: We must make land common property. We have reached this conclusion by an examination in which every step has been proved and secured. In the chain of reasoning no link is wanting and no link is weak. Deduction and induction have brought us to the same truth—that the unequal ownership of land necessitates the unequal distribution of wealth. And as in the nature of things unequal ownership of land is inseparable from the
- 32. recognition of individual property in land, it necessarily follows that the only remedy for the unjust distribution of wealth is in making land common property. But this is a truth which, in the present state of society, will arouse the most bitter antagonism, and must fight its way, inch by inch. It will be necessary, therefore, to meet the objections of those who, even when driven to admit this truth, will declare that it cannot be practically applied. In doing this we shall bring our previous reasoning to a new and crucial test. Just as we try addition by subtraction and multiplication by division, so may we, by testing the sufficiency of the remedy, prove the correctness of our conclusions as to the cause of the evil. The laws of the universe are harmonious. And if the remedy to which we have been led is the true one, it must be consistent with justice; it must be practicable of application; it must accord with the tendencies of social development and must harmonize with other reforms. All this I propose to show. I propose to meet all practical objections that can be raised, and to show that this simple measure is not only easy of application; but that it is a sufficient remedy for all the evils which, as modern progress goes on, arise from the greater and greater inequality in the distribution of wealth—that it will substitute equality for inequality, plenty for want, justice for injustice, social strength for social weakness, and will open the way to grander and nobler advances of civilization. I thus propose to show that the laws of the universe do not deny the natural aspirations of the human heart; that the progress of society might be, and, if it is to continue, must be, toward equality, not toward inequality; and that the economic harmonies prove the truth perceived by the Stoic Emperor— “We are made for co-operation—like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and lower teeth.”
- 35. BOOK VII. JUSTICE OF THE REMEDY. CHAPTER I.—INJUSTICE OF PRIVATE PROPERTY IN LAND. CHAPTER II.—ENSLAVEMENT OF LABORERS THE ULTIMATE RESULT OF PRIVATE PROPERTY IN LAND. CHAPTER III.—CLAIM OF LAND OWNERS TO COMPENSATION. CHAPTER IV.—PROPERTY IN LAND HISTORICALLY CONSIDERED. CHAPTER V.—PROPERTY IN LAND IN THE UNITED STATES. Justice is a relation of congruity which really subsists between two things. This relation is always the same, whatever being considers it, whether it be God, or an angel, or lastly a man.—Montesquieu.
- 36. CHAPTER I. THE INJUSTICE OF PRIVATE PROPERTY IN LAND. When it is proposed to abolish private property in land the first question that will arise is that of justice. Though often warped by habit, superstition, and selfishness into the most distorted forms, the sentiment of justice is yet fundamental to the human mind, and whatever dispute arouses the passions of men, the conflict is sure to rage, not so much as to the question “Is it wise?” as to the question “Is it right?” This tendency of popular discussions to take an ethical form has a cause. It springs from a law of the human mind; it rests upon a vague and instinctive recognition of what is probably the deepest truth we can grasp. That alone is wise which is just; that alone is enduring which is right. In the narrow scale of individual actions and individual life this truth may be often obscured, but in the wider field of national life it everywhere stands out. I bow to this arbitrament, and accept this test. If our inquiry into the cause which makes low wages and pauperism the accompaniments of material progress has led us to a correct conclusion, it will bear translation from terms of political economy into terms of ethics, and as the source of social evils show a wrong. If it will not do this, it is disproved. If it will do this, it is proved by the final decision. If private property in land be just, then is the remedy I propose a false one; if, on the contrary, private property in land be unjust, then is this remedy the true one. What constitutes the rightful basis of property? What is it that enables a man justly to say of a thing, “It is mine?” From what springs the sentiment which acknowledges his exclusive right as against all the world? Is it not, primarily, the right of a man to himself to the use of his own powers, to the enjoyment of the fruits
- 37. of his own exertions? Is it not this individual right, which springs from and is testified to by the natural facts of individual organization —the fact that each particular pair of hands obey a particular brain and are related to a particular stomach; the fact that each man is a definite, coherent, independent whole—which alone justifies individual ownership? As a man belongs to himself, so his labor when put in concrete form belongs to him. And for this reason, that which a man makes or produces is his own, as against all the world—to enjoy or to destroy, to use, to exchange, or to give. No one else can rightfully claim it, and his exclusive right to it involves no wrong to any one else. Thus there is to everything produced by human exertion a clear and indisputable title to exclusive possession and enjoyment, which is perfectly consistent with justice, as it descends from the original producer, in whom it vested by natural law. The pen with which I am writing is justly mine. No other human being can rightfully lay claim to it, for in me is the title of the producers who made it. It has become mine, because transferred to me by the stationer, to whom it was transferred by the importer, who obtained the exclusive right to it by transfer from the manufacturer, in whom, by the same process of purchase, vested the rights of those who dug the material from the ground and shaped it into a pen. Thus, my exclusive right of ownership in the pen springs from the natural right of the individual to the use of his own faculties. Now, this is not only the original source from which all ideas of exclusive ownership arise—as is evident from the natural tendency of the mind to revert to it when the idea of exclusive ownership is questioned, and the manner in which social relations develop—but it is necessarily the only source. There can be to the ownership of anything no rightful title which is not derived from the title of the producer and does not rest upon the natural right of the man to himself. There can be no other rightful title, because (1st) there is no other natural right from which any other title can be derived, and
- 38. (2d) because the recognition of any other title is inconsistent with and destructive of this. For (1st) what other right exists from which the right to the exclusive possession of anything can be derived, save the right of a man to himself? With what other power is man by nature clothed, save the power of exerting his own faculties? How can he in any other way act upon or affect material things or other men? Paralyze the motor nerves, and your man has no more external influence or power than a log or stone. From what else, then, can the right of possessing and controlling things be derived? If it spring not from man himself, from what can it spring? Nature acknowledges no ownership or control in man save as the result of exertion. In no other way can her treasures be drawn forth, her powers directed, or her forces utilized or controlled. She makes no discriminations among men, but is to all absolutely impartial. She knows no distinction between master and slave, king and subject, saint and sinner. All men to her stand upon an equal footing and have equal rights. She recognizes no claim but that of labor, and recognizes that without respect to the claimant. If a pirate spread his sails, the wind will fill them as well as it will fill those of a peaceful merchantman or missionary bark; if a king and a common man be thrown overboard, neither can keep his head above water except by swimming; birds will not come to be shot by the proprietor of the soil any quicker than they will come to be shot by the poacher; fish will bite or will not bite at a hook in utter disregard as to whether it is offered them by a good little boy who goes to Sunday-school, or a bad little boy who plays truant; grain will grow only as the ground is prepared and the seed is sown; it is only at the call of labor that ore can be raised from the mine; the sun shines and the rain falls, alike upon just and unjust. The laws of nature are the decrees of the Creator. There is written in them no recognition of any right save that of labor; and in them is written broadly and clearly the equal right of all men to the use and enjoyment of nature; to apply to her by their exertions, and to receive and possess her reward. Hence, as nature gives only to
- 39. labor, the exertion of labor in production is the only title to exclusive possession. 2d. This right of ownership that springs from labor excludes the possibility of any other right of ownership. If a man be rightfully entitled to the produce of his labor, then no one can be rightfully entitled to the ownership of anything which is not the produce of his labor, or the labor of some one else from whom the right has passed to him. If production give to the producer the right to exclusive possession and enjoyment, there can rightfully be no exclusive possession and enjoyment of anything not the production of labor, and the recognition of private property in land is a wrong. For the right to the produce of labor cannot be enjoyed without the right to the free use of the opportunities offered by nature, and to admit the right of property in these is to deny the right of property in the produce of labor. When non-producers can claim as rent a portion of the wealth created by producers, the right of the producers to the fruits of their labor is to that extent denied. There is no escape from this position. To affirm that a man can rightfully claim exclusive ownership in his own labor when embodied in material things, is to deny that any one can rightfully claim exclusive ownership in land. To affirm the rightfulness of property in land, is to affirm a claim which has no warrant in nature, as against a claim founded in the organization of man and the laws of the material universe. What most prevents the realization of the injustice of private property in land is the habit of including all the things that are made the subject of ownership in one category, as property, or, if any distinction is made, drawing the line, according to the unphilosophical distinction of the lawyers, between personal property and real estate, or things movable and things immovable. The real and natural distinction is between things which are the produce of labor and things which are the gratuitous offerings of nature; or, to adopt the terms of political economy, between wealth and land.
- 40. These two classes of things are in essence and relations widely different, and to class them together as property is to confuse all thought when we come to consider the justice or the injustice, the right or the wrong of property. A house and the lot on which it stands are alike property, as being the subject of ownership, and are alike classed by the lawyers as real estate. Yet in nature and relations they differ widely. The one is produced by human labor, and belongs to the class in political economy styled wealth. The other is a part of nature, and belongs to the class in political economy styled land. The essential character of the one class of things is that they embody labor, are brought into being by human exertion, their existence or non-existence, their increase or diminution, depending on man. The essential character of the other class of things is that they do not embody labor, and exist irrespective of human exertion and irrespective of man; they are the field or environment in which man finds himself; the storehouse from which his needs must be supplied, the raw material upon which, and the forces with which alone his labor can act. The moment this distinction is realized, that moment is it seen that the sanction which natural justice gives to one species of property is denied to the other; that the rightfulness which attaches to individual property in the produce of labor implies the wrongfulness of individual property in land; that, whereas the recognition of the one places all men upon equal terms, securing to each the due reward of his labor, the recognition of the other is the denial of the equal rights of men, permitting those who do not labor to take the natural reward of those who do. Whatever may be said for the institution of private property in land, it is therefore plain that it cannot be defended on the score of justice.
- 41. The equal right of all men to the use of land is as clear as their equal right to breathe the air—it is a right proclaimed by the fact of their existence. For we cannot suppose that some men have a right to be in this world and others no right. If we are all here by the equal permission of the Creator, we are all here with an equal title to the enjoyment of his bounty—with an equal right to the use of all that nature so impartially offers.46 This is a right which is natural and inalienable; it is a right which vests in every human being as he enters the world, and which during his continuance in the world can be limited only by the equal rights of others. There is in nature no such thing as a fee simple in land. There is on earth no power which can rightfully make a grant of exclusive ownership in land. If all existing men were to unite to grant away their equal rights, they could not grant away the right of those who follow them. For what are we but tenants for a day? Have we made the earth, that we should determine the rights of those who after us shall tenant it in their turn? The Almighty, who created the earth for man and man for the earth, has entailed it upon all the generations of the children of men by a decree written upon the constitution of all things—a decree which no human action can bar and no prescription determine. Let the parchments be ever so many, or possession ever so long, natural justice can recognize no right in one man to the possession and enjoyment of land that is not equally the right of all his fellows. Though his titles have been acquiesced in by generation after generation, to the landed estates of the Duke of Westminster the poorest child that is born in London to-day has as much right as has his eldest son.47 Though the sovereign people of the State of New York consent to the lauded possessions of the Astors, the puniest infant that comes wailing into the world in the squalidest room of the most miserable tenement house, becomes at that moment seized of an equal right with the millionaires. And it is robbed if the right is denied. Our previous conclusions, irresistible in themselves, thus stand approved by the highest and final test. Translated from terms of
- 42. political economy into terms of ethics they show a wrong as the source of the evils which increase as material progress goes on. The masses of men, who in the midst of abundance suffer want; who, clothed with political freedom, are condemned to the wages of slavery; to whose toil labor-saving inventions bring no relief, but rather seem to rob them of a privilege, instinctively feel that “there is something wrong.” And they are right. The wide-spreading social evils which everywhere oppress men amid an advancing civilization spring from a great primary wrong— the appropriation, as the exclusive property of some men, of the land on which and from which all must live. From this fundamental injustice flow all the injustices which distort and endanger modern development, which condemn the producer of wealth to poverty and pamper the non-producer in luxury, which rear the tenement house with the palace, plant the brothel behind the church, and compel us to build prisons as we open new schools. There is nothing strange or inexplicable in the phenomena that are now perplexing the world. It is not that material progress is not in itself a good; it is not that nature has called into being children for whom she has failed to provide; it is not that the Creator has left on natural laws a taint of injustice at which even the human mind revolts, that material progress brings such bitter fruits. That amid our highest civilization men faint and die with want is not due to the niggardliness of nature, but to the injustice of man. Vice and misery, poverty and pauperism, are not the legitimate results of increase of population and industrial development; they only follow increase of population and industrial development because land is treated as private property—they are the direct and necessary results of the violation of the supreme law of justice, involved in giving to some men the exclusive possession of that which nature provides for all men. The recognition of individual proprietorship of land is the denial of the natural rights of other individuals—it is a wrong which must
- 43. show itself in the inequitable division of wealth. For as labor cannot produce without the use of land, the denial of the equal right to the use of land is necessarily the denial of the right of labor to its own produce. If one man can command the land upon which others must labor, he can appropriate the produce of their labor as the price of his permission to labor. The fundamental law of nature, that her enjoyment by man shall be consequent upon his exertion, is thus violated. The one receives without producing; the others produce without receiving. The one is unjustly enriched; the others are robbed. To this fundamental wrong we have traced the unjust distribution of wealth which is separating modern society into the very rich and the very poor. It is the continuous increase of rent—the price that labor is compelled to pay for the use of land, which strips the many of the wealth they justly earn, to pile it up in the hands of the few, who do nothing to earn it. Why should they who suffer from this injustice hesitate for one moment to sweep it away? Who are the land holders that they should thus be permitted to reap where they have not sown? Consider for a moment the utter absurdity of the titles by which we permit to be gravely passed from John Doe to Richard Roe the right exclusively to possess the earth, giving absolute dominion as against all others. In California our land titles go back to the Supreme Government of Mexico, who took from the Spanish King, who took from the Pope, when he by a stroke of the pen divided lands yet to be discovered between the Spanish or Portuguese—or if you please they rest upon conquest. In the Eastern States they go back to treaties with Indians and grants from English Kings; in Louisiana to the Government of France; in Florida to the Government of Spain; while in England they go back to the Norman conquerors. Everywhere, not to a right which obliges, but to a force which compels. And when a title rests but on force, no complaint can be made when force annuls it. Whenever the people, having the power, choose to annul those titles, no objection can be made in the name of justice. There have existed men who had the power to hold or to
- 44. give exclusive possession of portions of the earth’s surface, but when and where did there exist the human being who had the right? The right to exclusive ownership of anything of human production is clear. No matter how many the hands through which it has passed, there was, at the beginning of the line, human labor— some one who, having procured or produced it by his exertions, had to it a clear title as against all the rest of mankind, and which could justly pass from one to another by sale or gift. But at the end of what string of conveyances or grants can be shown or supposed a like title to any part of the material universe? To improvements such an original title can be shown; but it is a title only to the improvements, and not to the land itself. If I clear a forest, drain a swamp, or fill a morass, all I can justly claim is the value given by these exertions. They give me no right to the land itself, no claim other than to my equal share with every other member of the community in the value which is added to it by the growth of the community. But it will be said: There are improvements which in time become indistinguishable from the land itself! Very well; then the title to the improvements becomes blended with the title to the land; the individual right is lost in the common right. It is the greater that swallows up the less, not the less that swallows up the greater. Nature does not proceed from man, but man from nature, and it is into the bosom of nature that he and all his works must return again. Yet, it will be said: As every man has a right to the use and enjoyment of nature, the man who is using land must be permitted the exclusive right to its use in order that he may get the full benefit of his labor. But there is no difficulty in determining where the individual right ends and the common right begins. A delicate and exact test is supplied by value, and with its aid there is no difficulty, no matter how dense population may become, in determining and securing the exact rights of each, the equal rights of all. The value of land, as we have seen, is the price of monopoly. It is not the
- 45. absolute, but the relative, capability of land that determines its value. No matter what may be its intrinsic qualities, land that is no better than other land which may be had for the using can have no value. And the value of land always measures the difference between it and the best land that may be had for the using. Thus, the value of land expresses in exact and tangible form the right of the community in land held by an individual; and rent expresses the exact amount which the individual should pay to the community to satisfy the equal rights of all other members of the community. Thus, if we concede to priority of possession the undisturbed use of land, confiscating rent for the benefit of the community, we reconcile the fixity of tenure which is necessary for improvement with a full and complete recognition of the equal rights of all to the use of land. As for the deduction of a complete and exclusive individual right to land from priority of occupation, that is, if possible, the most absurd ground on which land ownership can be defended. Priority of occupation give exclusive and perpetual title to the surface of a globe on which, in the order of nature, countless generations succeed each other! Had the men of the last generation any better right to the use of this world than we of this? or the men of a hundred years ago? or of a thousand years ago? Had the mound- builders, or the cave-dwellers, the contemporaries of the mastodon and the three-toed horse, or the generations still further back, who, in dim æons that we can think of only as geologic periods, followed each other on the earth we now tenant for our little day? Has the first comer at a banquet the right to turn back all the chairs and claim that none of the other guests shall partake of the food provided, except as they make terms with him? Does the first man who presents a ticket at the door of a theater, and passes in, acquire by his priority the right to shut the doors and have the performance go on for him alone? Does the first passenger who enters a railroad car obtain the right to scatter his baggage over all the seats and compel the passengers who come in after him to stand up?
- 46. The cases are perfectly analogous. We arrive and we depart, guests at a banquet continually spread, spectators and participants in an entertainment where there is room for all who come; passengers from station to station, on an orb that whirls through space—our rights to take and possess cannot be exclusive; they must be bounded everywhere by the equal rights of others. Just as the passenger in a railroad car may spread himself and his baggage over as many seats as he pleases, until other passengers come in, so may a settler take and use as much land as he chooses, until it is needed by others—a fact which is shown by the land acquiring a value—when his right must be curtailed by the equal rights of the others, and no priority of appropriation can give a right which will bar these equal rights of others. If this were not the case, then by priority of appropriation one man could acquire and could transmit to whom he pleased, not merely the exclusive right to 160 acres, or to 640 acres, but to a whole township, a whole State, a whole continent. And to this manifest absurdity does the recognition of individual right to land come when carried to its ultimate—that any one human being, could he concentrate in himself the individual rights to the land of any country, could expel therefrom all the rest of its inhabitants; and could he thus concentrate the individual rights to the whole surface of the globe, he alone of all the teeming population of the earth would have the right to live. And what upon this supposition would occur is, upon a smaller scale, realized in actual fact. The territorial lords of Great Britain, to whom grants of land have given the “white parasols and elephants mad with pride,” have over and over again expelled from large districts the native population, whose ancestors had lived on the land from immemorial times—driven them off to emigrate, to become paupers, or to starve. And on uncultivated tracts of land in the new State of California may be seen the blackened chimneys of homes from which settlers have been driven by force of laws which ignore natural right, and great stretches of land which might be
- 47. populous are desolate, because the recognition of exclusive ownership has put it in the power of one human creature to forbid his fellows from using it. The comparative handful of proprietors who own the surface of the British Islands would be doing only what English law gives them full power to do, and what many of them have done on a smaller scale already, were they to exclude the millions of British people from their native islands. And such an exclusion, by which a few hundred thousand should at will banish thirty million people from their native country, while it would be more striking, would not be a whit more repugnant to natural right than the spectacle now presented, of the vast body of the British people being compelled to pay such enormous sums to a few of their number for the privilege of being permitted to live upon and use the land which they so fondly call their own; which is endeared to them by memories so tender and so glorious, and for which they are held in duty bound, if need be, to spill their blood and lay down their lives. I refer only to the British Islands, because, land ownership being more concentrated there, they afford a more striking illustration of what private property in land necessarily involves. “To whomsoever the soil at any time belongs, to him belong the fruits of it,” is a truth that becomes more and more apparent as population becomes denser and invention and improvement add to productive power; but it is everywhere a truth—as much in our new States as in the British Islands or by the banks of the Indus.
- 48. CHAPTER II. THE ENSLAVEMENT OF LABORERS THE ULTIMATE RESULT OF PRIVATE PROPERTY IN LAND. If chattel slavery be unjust, then is private property in land unjust. For let the circumstances be what they may—the ownership of land will always give the ownership of men, to a degree measured by the necessity (real or artificial) for the use of land. This is but a statement in different form of the law of rent. And when that necessity is absolute—when starvation is the alternative to the use of land, then does the ownership of men involved in the ownership of land become absolute. Place one hundred men on an island from which there is no escape, and whether you make one of these men the absolute owner of the other ninety-nine, or the absolute owner of the soil of the island, will make no difference either to him or to them. In the one case, as the other, the one will be the absolute master of the ninety-nine—his power extending even to life and death, for simply to refuse them permission to live upon the island would be to force them into the sea. Upon a larger scale, and through more complex relations, the same cause must operate in the same way and to the same end— the ultimate result, the enslavement of laborers, becoming apparent just as the pressure increases which compels them to live on and from land which is treated as the exclusive property of others. Take a country in which the soil is divided among a number of proprietors, instead of being in the hands of one, and in which, as in modern production, the capitalist has been specialized from the laborer, and
- 49. manufactures and exchange, in all their many branches, have been separated from agriculture. Though less direct and obvious, the relations between the owners of the soil and the laborers will, with increase of population and the improvement of the arts, tend to the same absolute mastery on the one hand and the same abject helplessness on the other, as in the case of the island we have supposed. Rent will advance, while wages will fall. Of the aggregate produce, the land owner will get a constantly increasing, the laborer a constantly diminishing share. Just as removal to cheaper land becomes difficult or impossible, laborers, no matter what they produce, will be reduced to a bare living, and the free competition among them, where land is monopolized, will force them to a condition which, though they may be mocked with the titles and insignia of freedom, will be virtually that of slavery. There is nothing strange in the fact that, in spite of the enormous increase in productive power which this century has witnessed, and which is still going on, the wages of labor in the lower and wider strata of industry should everywhere tend to the wages of slavery—just enough to keep the laborer in working condition. For the ownership of the land on which and from which a man must live is virtually the ownership of the man himself, and in acknowledging the right of some individuals to the exclusive use and enjoyment of the earth, we condemn other individuals to slavery as fully and as completely as though we had formally made them chattels. In a simpler form of society, where production chiefly consists in the direct application of labor to the soil, the slavery that is the necessary result of according to some the exclusive right to the soil from which all must live, is plainly seen in helotism, in villeinage, in serfdom. Chattel slavery originated in the capture of prisoners in war, and, though it has existed to some extent in every part of the globe, its area has been small, its effects trivial, as compared with the forms of slavery which have originated in the appropriation of land. No
- 50. people as a mass have ever been reduced to chattel slavery to men of their own race, nor yet on any large scale has any people ever been reduced to slavery of this kind by conquest. The general subjection of the many to the few, which we meet with wherever society has reached a certain development, has resulted from the appropriation of land as individual property. It is the ownership of the soil that everywhere gives the ownership of the men that live upon it. It is slavery of this kind to which the enduring pyramids and the colossal monuments of Egypt yet bear witness, and of the institution of which we have, perhaps, a vague tradition in the biblical story of the famine during which the Pharaoh purchased up the lands of the people. It was slavery of this kind to which, in the twilight of history, the conquerors of Greece reduced the original inhabitants of that peninsula, transforming them into helots by making them pay rent for their lands. It was the growth of the latifundia, or great landed estates, which transmuted the population of ancient Italy, from a race of hardy husbandmen, whose robust virtues conquered the world, into a race of cringing bondsmen; it was the appropriation of the land as the absolute property of their chieftains which gradually turned the descendants of free and equal Gallic, Teutonic and Hunnish warriors into colonii and villains, and which changed the independent burghers of Sclavonic village communities into the boors of Russia and the serfs of Poland; which instituted the feudalism of China and Japan, as well as that of Europe, and which made the High Chiefs of Polynesia the all but absolute masters of their fellows. How it came to pass that the Aryan shepherds and warriors who, as comparative philology tells us, descended from the common birthplace of the Indo-Germanic race into the lowlands of India, were turned into the suppliant and cringing Hindoo, the Sanscrit verse which I have before quoted gives us a hint. The white parasols and the elephants mad with pride of the Indian Rajah are the flowers of grants of land. And could we find the key to the records of the long-buried civilizations that lie entombed in the gigantic ruins of Yucatan and Guatemala, telling at once of the pride of a ruling class and the unrequited toil to which the masses were condemned, we should read, in all human
- 51. probability, of a slavery imposed upon the great body of the people through the appropriation of the land as the property of a few—of another illustration of the universal truth that they who possess the land are masters of the men who dwell upon it. The necessary relation between labor and land, the absolute power which the ownership of land gives over men who cannot live but by using it, explains what is otherwise inexplicable—the growth and persistence of institutions, manners, and ideas so utterly repugnant to the natural sense of liberty and equality. When the idea of individual ownership, which so justly and naturally attaches to things of human production, is extended to land, all the rest is a mere matter of development. The strongest and most cunning easily acquire a superior share in this species of property, which is to be had, not by production, but by appropriation, and in becoming lords of the land they become necessarily lords of their fellow-men. The ownership of land is the basis of aristocracy. It was not nobility that gave land, but the possession of land that gave nobility. All the enormous privileges of the nobility of medieval Europe flowed from their position as the owners of the soil. The simple principle of the ownership of the soil produced, on the one side, the lord, on the other, the vassal—the one having all rights, the other none. The right of the lord to the soil acknowledged and maintained, those who lived upon it could do so only upon his terms. The manners and conditions of the times made those terms include services and servitudes, as well as rents in produce or money, but the essential thing that compelled them was the ownership of land. This power exists wherever the ownership of land exists, and can be brought out wherever the competition for the use of land is great enough to enable the landlord to make his own terms. The English land owner of to-day has, in the law which recognizes his exclusive right to the land, essentially all the power which his predecessor the feudal baron had. He might command rent in services or servitudes. He might compel his tenants to dress themselves in a particular way, to profess a particular religion, to
- 52. send their children to a particular school, to submit their differences to his decision, to fall upon their knees when he spoke to them, to follow him around dressed in his livery, or to sacrifice to him female honor, if they would prefer these things to being driven off his land. He could demand, in short, any terms on which men would still consent to live on his land, and the law could not prevent him so long as it did not qualify his ownership, for compliance with them would assume the form of a free contract or voluntary act. And English landlords do exercise such of these powers as in the manners of the times they care to. Having shaken off the obligation of providing for the defense of the country, they no longer need the military service of their tenants, and the possession of wealth and power being now shown in other ways than by long trains of attendants, they no longer care for personal service. But they habitually control the votes of their tenants, and dictate to them in many little ways. That “right reverend father in God,” Bishop Lord Plunkett, evicted a number of his poor Irish tenants because they would not send their children to Protestant Sunday-schools; and to that Earl of Leitrim for whom Nemesis tarried so long before she sped the bullet of an assassin, even darker crimes are imputed; while, at the cold promptings of greed, cottage after cottage has been pulled down and family after family forced into the roads. The principle that permits this is the same principle that in ruder times and a simpler social state enthralled the great masses of the common people and placed such a wide gulf between noble and peasant. Where the peasant was made a serf, it was simply by forbidding him to leave the estate on which he was born, thus artificially producing the condition we supposed on the island. In sparsely settled countries this is necessary to produce absolute slavery, but where land is fully occupied, competition may produce substantially the same conditions. Between the condition of the rack- rented Irish peasant and the Russian serf, the advantage was in many things on the side of the serf. The serf did not starve. Now, as I think I have conclusively proved, it is the same cause which has in every age degraded and enslaved the laboring masses
- 53. that is working in the civilized world to-day. Personal liberty—that is to say, the liberty to move about—is everywhere conceded, while of political and legal inequality there are in the United States no vestiges, and in the most backward civilized countries but few. But the great cause of inequality remains, and is manifesting itself in the unequal distribution of wealth. The essence of slavery is that it takes from the laborer all he produces save enough to support an animal existence, and to this minimum the wages of free labor, under existing conditions, unmistakably tend. Whatever be the increase of productive power, rent steadily tends to swallow up the gain, and more than the gain. Thus the condition of the masses in every civilized country is, or is tending to become, that of virtual slavery under the forms of freedom. And it is probable that of all kinds of slavery this is the most cruel and relentless. For the laborer is robbed of the produce of his labor and compelled to toil for a mere subsistence; but his taskmasters, instead of human beings, assume the form of imperious necessities. Those to whom his labor is rendered and from whom his wages are received are often driven in their turn—contact between the laborers and the ultimate beneficiaries of their labor is sundered, and individuality is lost. The direct responsibility of master to slave, a responsibility which exercises a softening influence upon the great majority of men, does not arise; it is not one human being who seems to drive another to unremitting and ill-requited toil, but “the inevitable laws of supply and demand,” for which no one in particular is responsible. The maxims of Cato the Censor—maxims which were regarded with abhorrence even in an age of cruelty and universal slave-holding—that after as much work as possible is obtained from a slave he should be turned out to die, become the common rule; and even the selfish interest which prompts the master to look after the comfort and well-being of the slave is lost. Labor has become a commodity, and the laborer a machine. There are no masters and slaves, no owners and owned, but only buyers and sellers. The higgling of the market takes the place of every other sentiment.
- 54. When the slaveholders of the South looked upon the condition of the free laboring poor in the most advanced civilized countries, it is no wonder that they easily persuaded themselves of the divine institution of slavery. That the field hands of the South were as a class better fed, better lodged, better clothed; that they had less anxiety and more of the amusements and enjoyments of life than the agricultural laborers of England there can be no doubt; and even in the Northern cities, visiting slaveholders might see and hear of things impossible under what they called their organization of labor. In the Southern States, during the days of slavery, the master who would have compelled his negroes to work and live as large classes of free white men and women are compelled in free countries to work and live, would have been deemed infamous, and if public opinion had not restrained him, his own selfish interest in the maintenance of the health and strength of his chattels would. But in London, New York, and Boston, among people who have given, and would give again, money and blood to free the slave, where no one could abuse a beast in public without arrest and punishment, barefooted and ragged children may be seen running around the streets even in the winter time, and in squalid garrets and noisome cellars women work away their lives for wages that fail to keep them in proper warmth and nourishment. Is it any wonder that to the slaveholders of the South the demand for the abolition of slavery seemed like the cant of hypocrisy? And now that slavery has been abolished, the planters of the South find they have sustained no loss. Their ownership of the land upon which the freedmen must live gives them practically as much command of labor as before, while they are relieved of responsibility, sometimes very expensive. The negroes as yet have the alternative of emigrating, and a great movement of that kind seems now about commencing, but as population increases and land becomes dear, the planters will get a greater proportionate share of the earnings of their laborers than they did under the system of chattel slavery, and the laborers a less share—for under the system of chattel slavery the slaves always got at least enough to keep them in good physical
- 55. health, but in such countries as England there are large classes of laborers who do not get that.48 The influences which, wherever there is personal relation between master and slave, slip in to modify chattel slavery, and to prevent the master from exerting to its fullest extent his power over the slave, also showed themselves in the ruder forms of serfdom that characterized the earlier periods of European development, and aided by religion, and, perhaps, as in chattel slavery, by the more enlightened but still selfish interests of the lord, and hardening into custom, universally fixed a limit to what the owner of the land could extort from the serf or peasant, so that the competition of men without means of existence bidding against each other for access to the means of existence, was nowhere suffered to go to its full length and exert its full power of deprivation and degradation. The helots of Greece, the métayers of Italy, the serfs of Russia and Poland, the peasants of feudal Europe, rendered to their landlords a fixed proportion either of their produce or their labor, and were not generally squeezed past that point. But the influences which thus stepped in to modify the extortive power of land ownership, and which may still be seen on English estates where the landlord and his family deem it their duty to send medicines and comforts to the sick and infirm, and to look after the well-being of their cottagers, just as the Southern planter was accustomed to look after his negroes, are lost in the more refined and less obvious form which serfdom assumes in the more complicated processes of modern production, which separates so widely and by so many intermediate gradations the individual whose labor is appropriated from him who appropriates it, and makes the relations between the members of the two classes not direct and particular, but indirect and general. In modern society, competition has free play to force from the laborer the very utmost he can give, and with what terrific force it is acting may be seen in the condition of the lowest class in the centers of wealth and industry. That the condition of this lowest class is not yet more general, is to be attributed to the great extent of fertile land which has hitherto been open on this continent, and which has not
- 56. merely afforded an escape for the increasing population of the older sections of the Union, but has greatly relieved the pressure in Europe—in one country, Ireland, the emigration having been so great as actually to reduce the population. This avenue of relief cannot last forever. It is already fast closing up, and as it closes, the pressure must become harder and harder. It is not without reason that the wise crow in the Ramayana, the crow Bushanda, “who has lived in every part of the universe and knows all events from the beginnings of time,” declares that, though contempt of worldly advantages is necessary to supreme felicity, yet the keenest pain possible is inflicted by extreme poverty. The poverty to which in advancing civilization great masses of men are condemned, is not the freedom from distraction and temptation which sages have sought and philosophers have praised; it is a degrading and embruting slavery, that cramps the higher nature, dulls the finer feelings, and drives men by its pain to acts which the brutes would refuse. It is into this helpless, hopeless poverty, that crushes manhood and destroys womanhood, that robs even childhood of its innocence and joy, that the working classes are being driven by a force which acts upon them like a resistless and unpitying machine. The Boston collar manufacturer who pays his girls two cents an hour may commiserate their condition, but he, as they, is governed by the law of competition, and cannot pay more and carry on his business, for exchange is not governed by sentiment. And so, through all intermediate gradations, up to those who receive the earnings of labor without return, in the rent of land, it is the inexorable laws of supply and demand, a power with which the individual can no more quarrel or dispute than with the winds and the tides, that seem to press down the lower classes into the slavery of want. But in reality, the cause is that which always has and always must result in slavery—the monopolization by some of what nature has designed for all.
- 57. Our boasted freedom necessarily involves slavery, so long as we recognize private property in land. Until that is abolished, Declarations of Independence and Acts of Emancipation are in vain. So long as one man can claim the exclusive ownership of the land from which other men must live, slavery will exist, and as material progress goes on, must grow and deepen! This—and in previous chapters of this book we have traced the process, step by step—is what is going on in the civilized world to- day. Private ownership of land is the nether millstone. Material progress is the upper millstone. Between them, with an increasing pressure, the working classes are being ground.
- 58. CHAPTER III. CLAIM OF LAND OWNERS TO COMPENSATION. The truth is, and from this truth there can be no escape, that there is and can be no just title to an exclusive possession of the soil, and that private property in land is a bold, bare, enormous wrong, like that of chattel slavery. The majority of men in civilized communities do not recognize this, simply because the majority of men do not think. With them whatever is, is right, until its wrongfulness has been frequently pointed out, and in general they are ready to crucify whoever first attempts this. But it is impossible for any one to study political economy, even as at present taught, or to think at all upon the production and distribution of wealth, without seeing that property in land differs essentially from property in things of human production, and that it has no warrant in abstract justice. This is admitted, either expressly or tacitly, in every standard work on political economy, but in general merely by vague admission or omission. Attention is in general called away from the truth, as a lecturer on moral philosophy in a slave-holding community might call away attention from too close a consideration of the natural rights of men, and private property in land is accepted without comment, as an existing fact, or is assumed to be necessary to the proper use of land and the existence of the civilized state. The examination through which we have passed has proved conclusively that private property in land cannot be justified on the ground of utility—that, on the contrary, it is the great cause to which are to be traced the poverty, misery, and degradation, the social disease and the political weakness which are showing themselves so
- 59. menacingly amid advancing civilization. Expediency, therefore, joins justice in demanding that we abolish it. When expediency thus joins justice in demanding that we abolish an institution that has no broader base or stronger ground than a mere municipal regulation, what reason can there be for hesitation? The consideration that seems to cause hesitation, even on the part of those who see clearly that land by right is common property, is the idea that having permitted land to be treated as private property for so long, we should in abolishing it be doing a wrong to those who have been suffered to base their calculations upon its permanence; that having permitted land to be held as rightful property, we should by the resumption of common rights be doing injustice to those who have purchased it with what was unquestionably their rightful property. Thus, it is held that if we abolish private property in land, justice requires that we should fully compensate those who now possess it, as the British Government, in abolishing the purchase and sale of military commissions, felt itself bound to compensate those who held commissions which they had purchased in the belief that they could sell them again, or as in abolishing slavery in the British West Indies $100,000,000 was paid the slaveholders. Even Herbert Spencer, who in his “Social Statics” has so clearly demonstrated the invalidity of every title by which the exclusive possession of land is claimed, gives countenance to this idea (though it seems to me inconsistently) by declaring that justly to estimate and liquidate the claims of the present landholders “who have either by their own acts or by the acts of their ancestors given for their estates equivalents of honestly-earned wealth,” to be “one of the most intricate problems society will one day have to solve.” It is this idea that suggests the proposition, which finds advocates in Great Britain, that the government shall purchase at its market price the individual proprietorship of the land of the country,
- 60. and it was this idea which led John Stuart Mill, although clearly perceiving the essential injustice of private property in land, to advocate, not a full resumption of the land, but only a resumption of accruing advantages in the future. His plan was that a fair and even liberal estimate should be made of the market value of all the land in the kingdom, and that future additions to that value, not due to the improvements of the proprietor, should be taken by the state. To say nothing of the practical difficulties which such cumbrous plans involve, in the extension of the functions of government which they would require and the corruption they would beget, their inherent and essential defect lies in the impossibility of bridging over by any compromise the radical difference between wrong and right. Just in proportion as the interests of the land holders are conserved, just in that proportion must general interests and general rights be disregarded, and if land holders are to lose nothing of their special privileges, the people at large can gain nothing. To buy up individual property rights would merely be to give the land holders in another form a claim of the same kind and amount that their possession of land now gives them; it would be to raise for them by taxation the same proportion of the earnings of labor and capital that they are now enabled to appropriate in rent. Their unjust advantage would be preserved and the unjust disadvantage of the non-landholders would be continued. To be sure there would be a gain to the people at large when the advance of rents had made the amount which the land holders would take under the present system greater than the interest upon the purchase price of the land at present rates, but this would be only a future gain, and in the meanwhile there would not only be no relief, but the burden imposed upon labor and capital for the benefit of the present land holders would be much increased. For one of the elements in the present market value of land is the expectation of future increase of value, and thus, to buy up the lands at market rates and pay interest upon the purchase money would be to saddle producers not only with the payment of actual rent, but with the payment in full of speculative rent. Or to put it in another way: The land would be purchased at prices calculated upon
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