Thomas Paine and the Land Question
Ella M. Murray
[Reprinted from Twentieth Century Magazine,
September, 1910]
The life of the individual is measured in years, the life of the race
in epochs, and though compared with the epoch the year is
insignificant, and compared with the race the individual is a
negligible quantity, yet it is by the insignificant year and through
that negligible quantity the individual, that the epoch is forever
marked and the forward impulse of the race finds expression. In a
certain sense, it is immaterial when a man like Thomas Paine was born,
for he belongs to no year and no age, but rather to all years and all
ages. But the year in which such a man gives expression to a
magnificent truth, unperceived by his predecessors and contemporaries
alike, yet a truth which must have existed as a possible thing ever
since there was conscious life - that year marks an epoch in the life
of a race and is worthy the widest recognition. These are the years
that we celebrate, however unconscious of the fact we may be.
One such year is especially noteworthy, that of 1795-96, when Paine
wrote and published his little pamphlet, Agrarian Justice.
Although less widely known than some of his other works, this little
pamphlet, in breadth of conception, clearness of enunciation,
fearlessness of demonstration and importance to the race, is
unsurpassed by anything he or his predecessors or his contemporaries
have given to the world. Indeed, I know of but one writer and seer
since his time who has done so great a service to the world or has
made clearer the principles Paine so early grasped.
So perverted are we even at this day that the average person
confounds law and justice. When we speak of "justice" we
have in mind something that man has done and incorporated into a law,
but Paine made no such mistake. He clearly states that he is not
considering "Agrarian Law," in his treatise, but "Agrarian
Justice," and that the one is by no means the same as the other.
While laws may express some phases of justice, they are more
frequently enacted to establish permanently some privilege acquired by
force or treachery, and they apply usually to ephemeral or changeable
conditions or interests. Justice, on the other hand, is the
unchanging, underlying, general principle, applicable alike to all
ages, all races and all conditions, and it was the enunciation of such
a general principle that Paine had in mind when he wrote Agrarian
Justice.
Paine divides property into two kinds - "natural, which comes
from the creator, such as earth, air, water -- and artificial, or
acquired property, the invention of men. Equality in the latter is
impossible; equality in the former is necessary. Every individual in
the world is born therein with legitimate claims on a certain kind of
property or its equivalent.
The condition of persons born after
civilization should not be worse than that of those born before.
It
is a position not to be controverted, that the earth in its natural,
uncultivated state was, and ever would have continued to be, the
common property of the human race. ...It is the value of improvement
only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property. Every
proprietor, therefore, of cultivated land, owes to the community a
ground rent (I know no better term to express the idea) for the land
which he holds."
Had Paine written no more than this little group of sentences which I
have selected from Agrarian Justice and combined into a short
paragraph, he would have established an undying claim to be counted
one of the foremost philosophers and benefactors of the race.
A pioneer in any cause making for righteousness must put aside self.
He must not only hold aloft the principles for which he pleads, but he
must at the same time walk on his own heart with every forward step he
takes. Truth accepts no half service. She claims all that a man hath.
It may be said of Paine that he gave all.
When it would have been easy to advance his own material interests,
Paine devoted his time and talents to studying the interests of all
men, to the exclusion of the personal. The world had just been
awakened from its long night of darkness and sleep by the two great
revolutions of this country and France. In both a leading part had
been played by Thomas Paine, and innumerable opportunities for
self-aggrandizement must have opened before him. But, fortunately, for
the world, he was a flame burning clear and high, and nothing quenched
his light. High above the excesses and outrages of the reaction from
the French Revolution shines his Rights of Man, and later,
when he saw that that nation, despite its unequaled opportunity, had
made no provision for coming generations in its treatment of the land
question, he fearlessly promulgated his theory of Agrarian Justice.
And though it was reserved for a later prophet to devise the best
means for securing that justice to the masses, still there could be no
clearer recognition of the rights of the people than that which came
to Paine.
In the Rights of Man he had said: "Every age and
generation must be as free to act for itself in all cases as the age
and generation which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of
governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all
tyrannies. Man has no property in man; neither has any generation a
property in the generations that are to follow.
Every generation
is and must be competent to all the purposes which its occasions
require. It is the living and not the dead that are to be
accommodated."
It is not then to be wondered at that the mind which could grasp and
enunciate such deep, underlying principles of justice could not
contemplate the land system with any satisfaction. He saw that each
succeeding generation must be still further shorn of its right than
its predecessor, if these conditions continued. And though he saw no
way to upset or destroy those conditions, yet he declared that we
could no longer go on depriving the unborn of their birthright. If
every individual born into the world might not have his legitimate
share in the common property of all, then an equivalent must be
offered. It is somewhat strange to note how much the proposals of the
British Budget resembled his plan in some details. Both proposed
taking only a small portion of the "unearned increment" for
the benefit of those who create it, and both believed in old age
pensions. Paine's idea was to create a fund out of this unearned
increment from which pensions should be paid to those past the working
age, and premiums to those beginning life at the age of twenty-one. He
specifically states that this premium is to be considered an
equivalent for the rights denied them through the private ownership of
land. The trouble with Paine was, that although he saw that it was the
community that created values, he had not separated the site value
from improvement value.
He believed that even "the value of personal property is the
effect of society," and while this is in a large measure true, it
is not true in the same sense that the site value of land is "the
effect of society." It is not the cultivation of the soil that
gives it a taxable value for communal purposes, as Paine was inclined
to believe. Cultivation value may be the result of one man's labor,
or, if you please, the labor of several men, who have had returns for
that labor; but the site value is the result of the combined labor and
necessities of the whole community, and upon that combination the
community has received no returns.
There is, too, this further distinction: that society has been paid
in full for all the value of the personal property that it creates. It
was created either for consumption or exchange, and the creators, or
those whom they permitted to rob them, got full value for all their
efforts.
This is not so of land. Moreover, personal property and its value
disappears every few years, while land value goes on increasing.
The Budget proposals included old age pensions and the diversion of a
tiny portion of that unearned increment into the public treasury to
bear public expenses. The great value of these proposals is that it is
the first time that any nation, as a nation, has recognized the
principle of the common rights of all in the earth's surface.
Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill had clear vision of the truth as
far as Paine had seen it, but it remained for our age to produce the
man who saw still farther. To Henry George came not only the clear
knowledge of the inalienable rights of the people - not some of the
people, whether the people of yesterday, today or tomorrow, but of all
the peoples of all the tomorrows---to the earth upon which their very
existence depends, but as with divine insight and understanding he saw
that not merely a portion of the value the people created should be
returned to them, but all of it; for nothing short of all could
constitute an equivalent for their birthright. He would not distribute
this to individuals in the form of pensions, because it does not
belong to individuals, but to the aggregation of individuals. He would
turn it into the public treasury to bear the expense of the public and
thus leave to the individual the full result of his own labor for his
own use.
If Paine, to whom the great principles of justice were so dear, could
have had this proposition presented to him, we might have had from his
trenchant pen an article that would have eclipsed anything even he has
left on record. We may imagine what it would mean to him, for his was
a mind never satisfied with less than all that he could perceive of
truth and justice.
Since the world began, prophets, pioneers and sages have won from man
the martyr's robe and the cruel crown of thorns, but the truth lives
on. Over their bodies, lighted by the flames they kindled, the race
has gone forward. Progress has been slow when gauged by the year or
the individual, but measured by the race and by epochs, it has been
steady and even rapid. It is but little more than a hundred years
since Paine became the pioneer in "the land for the people";
it is less than one generation since the "prophet of San
Francisco" published his great book "Progress and Poverty."
Both were reviled, scorned and at last killed by the world that was
not yet ready for the truth; but in that short time that same world
has become permeated with their ideas; the faith in "agrarian
justice" is growing; the demand for the application of the Single
Tax principle is rapidly increasing, and it almost looks as if in our
own generation we shall prove the truth of the saying that what is "today
the dream of the philosopher, is tomorrow the creed of the persecuted
minority, and soon becomes the accepted faith of the nation."
I look back over the years that have slipped by in the world's
history, and I see the long procession of the peoples and races who
have passed on. For the most part they are mere shadows -- a sort of
indistinguishable mass -- but there are luminous points which throw a
light over the whole cavalcade. These are the prophets and martyrs of
truth, their unquenchable light shining on and on, past our dark
places, and even into the future. I follow this gleam, straining my
eyes adown the long vista of the years to come. Down that dark,
untrodden path the light must be carried; the prophets and martyrs of
the coming races are even now in the making -- shall any of us be
among them?
What does it profit us to celebrate the anniversaries of the great,
if we learn nothing from their lives? It may not be required of us
personally to give our lives for the truth, but it is demanded that we
give our lives to the truth as we see it. Do you ask by whom it is
demanded? Then I answer, by the generations that are to follow; those
who shall mount by the steps we cut, who shall warm themselves by the
fires we build and avoid the abyss of darkness by the light we shed.
Shall we go on making of the masses of the people "Michael
Horans," to be ground to powder in the subways of civilization
built upon privilege and injustice? Or shall we rather by our united
effort secure for all a firm footing upon the earth, which is our
common heritage, and establish for all time justice for all people?
When we have destroyed that "most insolent of all tyrannies"--
governance from the grave -- and have learned that it is not the dead
but the living that we are to accommodate, then, and only then, may we
justly claim the right to call ourselves followers of these two great
pioneers and prophets whose names all future generations will link --
Thomas Paine and Henry George.
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