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and sale. What is wanted in this country, side by side with the gradual extinction of landlordism, is the gradual extension of the co-operative system to agriculture, under communal control. The size of the farms should be regulated by the local authorities in accordance with experience of local needs. Agriculture is a science, and should be taught as such to every aspirant for this kind of employment. In time to come the State farmer will be a thoroughly efficient public servant, whose interests are those of the community, and can never be separated therefrom.

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The amount of compensation. As to the price to be paid as compensation to the landlords, there is not much to be said. The matter is easily arrived at. Granted that the power of compulsory purchase were universal, and liable to be exercised at any time on the basis of the rating value, there would be little opportunity for deception or for exacting an excessive price from the public purchaser. It would be to the interest of the owner to keep the rating value as low as possible and the selling value as high as possible. The two tendencies would regulate each other, and we should arrive automatically at something like a fair figure. These, however, are matters of expediency, and in the present work I am concerned not with expediency, but with principles. I only mention them to show what is practicable.

Housing. -So far as housing is concerned, some

thing more is needed besides getting hold of the land. It would be well to leave the land in its present ownership in some cases where population is congested, and put in force the sanitary regulations which already exist. If at the same time garden cities were established, and communally owned and administered, in all the outlying districts of our great centres of population; and if transit were cheapened by a system of public bounties on condition that railways and tramways became public property within a certain specified period, the value of what is at present slum property would speedily fall, and the landlords could be bought out more cheaply than would otherwise be the case.

The fundamental of the argument. But, apart from all considerations of ways and means, my object in writing this chapter has been to establish one broad principle, namely, that as there is no wealth but what comes out of the natural resources of any country, those natural resources belong by right to the people who live in the country. All those people are living by those natural resources even now, but their access to them is hampered and hindered by private ownership. Moreover, if civilised life is only possible by combination of effort and specialisation of function, private ownership in the means of production is incompatible with the free development of such life; for perfect co-operation in effort is impossible without the common ownership of the objects upon which labour is to

be exercised. I assert, therefore, that private property in natural resources is unjust, and a serious practical hindrance to the realisation of the highest kind of life for the community at large. I assert also that it is possible to put an end to this injustice without harming any one in the process, and that it is meet, right, and our bounden duty so to do.

CHAPTER VIII

THE SOCIALISING OF INDUSTRY

Capital cannot be separated from natural resources.

We come now to a phase of our subject in which the practical difficulties appear to be greater and the issues involved more complex than in that which we have just treated. It is this feeling, no doubt, which, more than anything else, has led the followers of Mr. Henry George to confine their exertions to persuading the public of the advantages of nationalising the land altogether apart from the question of nationalising industrial capital. Many of them maintain, indeed, that the latter is neither desirable nor possible. But, as I now hope to show, there is no distinction in principle between the one proposal and the other, and if the former is practicable the same can be said of the latter. In treating the question of the socialising of natural resources apart from that of the socialising of industry I have only done so for the sake of convenience and clearness, and not because natural resources are essentially different from any other kind of capital. Natural resources are the potential wealth of the community; capital, commonly so called, is only that portion of those same natural resources upon which labour has been exercised with

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the object of turning it into an instrument of further production. Thus a sewing machine is composed of iron which has been dug out of the ground, and wood which has been brought out of the forest, the only difference between the natural resources (iron and wood), in their former as compared with their present state, being that labour has modified and combined them in such a way as to make of them a labour-saving device which will increase the output of wealth. This should be so obvious as to need no further demonstration. All industrial capital of whatever kind-plant, electric, or water power, etc. consists only of natural resources so manipulated as to assist labour in the task of extracting from the same store of natural resources wealth which will be used for purposes of consumption. It is thus a misdescription to speak of capital as the result of saving or keeping back a portion of one year's wealth in order to increase the output in the next; it is only to a very small extent that the acquirement of capital can be said to begin in this way; it begins with the ownership of natural resources, and continues with the acquisition of the power to direct the way in which labour shall be employed upon those resources. It is even difficult to draw any practical distinction between the wealth which is employed for purposes of production and that which is purely for consumption. It may fairly be said that a man's food and clothing are capital, for they are necessary to his efficiency in the work

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