LAND NATIONALISATION.

Freethought Review, Volume I, Issue 11, 1 August 1884, Page 14

LAND NATIONALISATION.

Nationalisation of land is an expression of the times in which we live. The demand for land nationalisation shows a feeling of protest against the holding of privileged power in any form, and is an outcome of our present age of concrete definitions in place of moral generalities. Under the freehold law the gap between the owner of much land and the landless laborer who works for him and bread, is too great a space for the proper development of the better faculties of man ; on the one hand some are unduly expanded, on the other hand some are unduly shrunk ; both extremes are unuseful and extravagant. Nationalisation will tend to lessen this distance without destroying individualism ; it will tend to break down self isolation and to build up self dependence.

It seems to offer the essence of Decentralism and the essence of Centralism ; under it each individual will he an assisting and assisted part of his nation, and as such will by the social compact, give and receive aid to and from his fellow-citizens; not existing by himself onty, but each for each and all for all.

Nationalisation meets its first obstacle in the long continued habit or feeling named the freehold sentiment ; this is the initial difficulty to be attacked and overcome. The difficulty is a real one ; for habit has its strength in its deeply radicated hold of the mind, and new ideas have to be not perhaps generated there, but protected and cultivated: yet the mind is a rich soil, and will readily produce when properly encouraged those growths which, though temporarily stunted and lichen-like through long neglect or ill-usage, are yet native to it. There are three aspects in which the question may be viewed, the social, the moral, and the political. The social improvement under it will free and give eisure to the mind and body, and experience tells us that freedom of mind and body when backed up by the forces of civilisation, science, and mental and bodily activity results in greater and ever increasing progress.

Regarded politically it will cause an improvement : for politics may be described as the making and the administering of laws ; the fracture of laws depends upon those by and for whom they are made, and consequently is formed upon the material acquirements and requirements of both the makers and obeyers ; despotic laws for a despotism, republican laws for a republic ; and thus the more improved the nation the more improved, though perhaps simple, the laws.

Considered morally: nothing is more beneficial to a people than a just regard tor others ; when this principle of action guides us, it follows that the rights and property of others are safe from us and secure to themselves ; when this principle holds sway many of the stronger evil passions are held in check.

Again, as regards general civilisation : those gains which man has made since his protoplastic and rudimentary state, have been the gains made by himself unhelped by any exterior aid ; and notwithstanding the ceaseless encroachments and warring of nature against man and his handiwork, the mere fact of his retention of his existence, shows that man is comparatively powerful to subdue and make Nature useful to him, although he himself creates nothing; for man is no creator—he is merely an amalgamator, a joiner, or utiliser.

The forces that are within him and the forces that are without him arc, have always been, and ever will be, such, and such only, as Nature (if I may use the term to denote in one word both cause and effect, a part and the whole) has placed in and around us.

There seems to be no backward tendency among our modern civilised nations : we may, in fact we always must, be going in a circle, but I believe it to be an enlarging, not a narrowing circle : if we have developed in our acquirements to an age of electricity and steam, may not we continue developing to an age as far in advance of this as we are in advance of the ante-speech and ante-fire age ? for there is no reason to suppose that Nature will become offended at man’s industrious curiosity, or say to him “so far shalt thou

go and no further." Nationalisation is in the course of events bound to come: as a principal effect of that resistless steam-hammer called " Material Civilisation" which, welding and moulding the thoughts and actions, the arts, the sciences, the discoveries of nations antipodean to each other in language, in manners, in distance and in time, and crystallising the accumulated knowledge of many generations into useful ends, increases by so much not only the actual stores for the use of man, but seems even to enlarge or at least to free his capacity for further gains, and so helps forward the intelligence of the people of a world to appreciate the Book of Nature, at length beginning to unfold its secret and close-held pages to the ever enquiring and ever insatiable demands of the human intellect. AMICUS.