LAND NATIONALIZATION. Land as a commodity has certain special characteristics which distinguish it from any other commodity known to economics : (a) it is the source of all other forms of material wealth, beginning with foodstuffs; (b) it is not created by man, although it may be modified by human labour; (c) it is everlasting, and not subject to the processes which destroy other forms of wealth ; and (d) it is limited in extent, this being true both of any individual country and of the whole surface of the globe.
For these reasons the claim to enjoy private ownership in land seems an exorbitant one, and history shows us that it was slow to win acceptance. Even to-day many economists, sociologists and philosophers, including some who are by no means socialistic, but rather belong to the individualist Liberal school, have denied that land can properly be subjected to private ownership, or at best, have accepted it, as John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer did, for purely pragmatic considerations. Indeed, since land is essential to all, the owner of it would, if the rights of property were taken in their strictest legal sense, become master of the lives of all other men.
Since land is limited in area, ownership of it necessarily be comes a monopoly as soon as the density of the population has passed a certain limit. This monopoly has long been established in the British Isles—a group of islands of comparatively small area—and would inevitably have checked the increase of the popu lation had not the advent of free trade, in the middle of the 19th century, to some extent broken it down. Since land is ever lasting, real property is everlasting also; thus the inequalities created between men by this form of property are much deeper and more permanent than any which can arise out of the posses sion of capital. The possession of capital, it is true, gives rise to inequalities as great, or even greater, measured in currency, than those arising out of real property ; and the "power of the purse," so frequently denounced, has become more formidable than landlordism. Nevertheless, it must be noted that capital cannot be perpetuated without constant renewal, that the "power of the purse" is ephemeral, and that its effects are not incompatible with the existence of democracy. But if the theory that land should
not be allowed to remain private property be accepted, what action should be taken? The answers are numerous and various. They can, however, be classified in two categories, each with its further subdivisions : nationalization, properly speaking, and taxation.
This consists, as the word implies, in trans ferring land from the domain of private ownership to that of national ownership. It is thus a form of collectivist Socialism; but collectivism is principally and primarily applied to capital, and is even inclined to tolerate individual ownership of land, provided that this be limited to the area which the proprietor is able to cul tivate by his own labour, while agrarian nationalization proposes to socialize the land alone, and to leave capital under the domain of private ownership. Its view is that all capital is the product of human agency ; not only what is supplied by the normal proc esses of labour and saving, but also what is supplied by specu lation, by exploitation or, according to Marx, by "appropriation of the unpaid labour of others," since all of these agencies, whether predatory or creative, are yet forms of human activity. This distinction was apparently first brought out by a Belgian sociologist named Colins (d. 1859), and with a remarkable force which ought to have given him a higher place in the history of economics than that which he actually occupies. Such nationaliza tion of the land, however, presupposes expropriation of the existing owner. How is such expropriation to be effected—with or without indemnification? Expropriation without indemnification. This is tantamount to confiscation, but the harshness of it may be mitigated by various expedients. Colins, who advocated this solution, proposed to effect it by abolishing the right of succession as regards real property, thus allowing the owner to retain the enjoyment of his estate for life; he even extended this concession still further to allow children born before the passage of the decree of nationali zation the right of succession. The expropriation would thus af fect only those born after the promulgation.