NATIONALISATION OF LAND.

Mount Ida Chronicle, Volume V, Issue 308, 22 January 1875, Page 3

NATIONALISATION OF LAND.

Referring to the alleged scarcity of land, as set"out by Mr. Thornton, Mr. Nett, and others,, the ' Pall Mall Gazette' writes:— .

" Nobody who has the money to buy it need remain without it unless he likes. We do not deny that more land would come into the market if'settlements' were abolished and conveyances were cheaper. But it would still go the person who bid the best price for it; and, seeing who the would-be landed proprietors commonly are, it is very .unlikely that the humbler classes under a system of the completest free trade would have, any chance in competing against, them. Mr. Mill perceived .this, and sought to provide against it .by' various suggestions in the programme he.' drew up" for the Land Tenure- Reform Association, such as State loans to co-op-erative associations and small cultivators. We may "observe,, however, that peasant proprietorship seems commendable in Mr. Thornton's eyes, because something which he thinks better would, he holds, be unattainable except at a cost that he regards as excessive... - His " ideal'' is that there " should be no property in land save that' of; the whole nation in its corporate capacity." But as his " ideal" could not, he believes, be realised without, among other; agreeable things, " a deluge of revolutionary bloodshed such," so he-with some confusion expresses himself,-"" as has not been paralleled even aqueously on this side the Fluod," he considerately lays it by for the present, and counsels the " most advanced ot land reformers to aim at something lower and more practicable than ; their; present summum bonum, the ' nationalisation ' of the soil." Of the so-called nationalisation of the land we shall say nothing further than , that Mr. Fawcett in his excellent essay on the subject has clearly established that the scheme could not Be carried into effect without confiscation if the country is to avoid bankruptcy, or without bank-, ruptcy if the country is to avoid confiscation. Jbsut, supposing this difficulty to be surmounted, the Government, as sole and supreme landlord, would be compelled to. let its estates; and it would be compelled to let them either at a uniform rent per acre or to offer them to public competition. In the one case the difference in value between the best and worst land in cultivation would be lost to the revenue and be available for State patronage in its .ugliest shape. In the other case the rich would possess precisely the-same advantages over the poor that they now enjoy. Neither of these results can we comt.emplate.as. objects, worth a deluge of revolu tionary bloodshed, or indeed worth any bloodshed at all."