a short while ago, and which did all that was possible to stereotype the landlord system and to keep farms in their present size and condition, and the loud declaration of to-day from both parties that they are prepared to create a class of small proprietors. What course then is the true course to follow? I reply, instead of these fitful and spasmodic efforts, instead of yielding to every breeze that blows, instead of trying to steer south by north, we should try to know our own minds in the matter, try to make carefully out the true principle of dealing with land, and then consistently follow it. Now what is that true principle? Here, as everywhere else, the eternal contrast and the eternal choice present themselves. We must give our allegiance either to the principle of freedom or of restriction, of the self-guiding individual or the nursing official, of Free Trade or of Protection.

Nowadays, restriction, officialism, and protection find so many apologists that one may fairly claim to say-if only to relieve monotony- a few words on behalf of Free Trade. I want to urge, in this matter of land, that we should allow the natural motives to act on men; that we should allow the natural rewards to produce their effects; that we should not take out of men's hands the charge of their own interests; that we should not undertake to nurse first one body of citizens and then another body; that we should distrust our powers of prevision and arrangement; and should let our system of landholding shape itself without let or hindrance in its own fashion. according to the ever-changing wants of our people.

But what is Free Trade? The words come easily to our lips. What do we exactly mean by it? I will try to explain.

Free Trade is generally taken to mean unrestricted buying and selling, but its full meaning is not exhausted

in those words. Justly understood, it is an expression of what is perhaps the deepest moral truth which underlies social existence. Why should men buy and sell without restriction? The answer must be, Because the faculties of each person belong to himself and not to somebody else; because each person has the right to use such faculties to his own best advantage; and because, therefore, we have no right to restrict the faculties of one person, whoever he may be, for the advantage of another person, whoever he may be,-which worst of crimes is unfortunately what is done every day, whenever politicians or protectionists occupy themselves by building up systems of interference and restrictions.

Now let us see how Free Trade affects the question of land. As far as laws go, each person should have the same equal liberty to acquire and enjoy land by the exercise of his faculties; each should be free to share in the universal competition by which it is to be acquired. Upon such exercise of faculties and liberty to acquire, no restriction of any kind should be placed, in the interest of any persons or any class, except such restrictions as are necessarily involved in and spring out of this exercise of faculties and this liberty of acquisition. To give examples of what I mean:-a natural, or necessarily involved, restriction to the acquisition of land would be the prohibition that a man should move his neighbour's landmarks by force or fraud, since the idea of force and fraud (or the violent and fraudulent setting aside of another person's consent), is opposed to the idea of acquiring in a free market, where both persons concerned consent to the transaction. The free market means the common ground on which men met to exchange all services and all forms of world-material, each acting in his own right of doing the best that he can for himself in

the universal competition, and only restricted by the condition that he is not to employ force and fraud, because force and fraud are fatal to dealings which are based on free consent on both sides. On the other hand, all the restrictions that politicians love to impose, restrictions favouring the buyer or the seller, limiting quantity, regulating prices, establishing certain systems supposed to be favourable to a special class, are all arbitrary and from a moral point of view, immoral, since they are nothing more nor less than limitations placed by the holders of power upon a man's right to do the best that he can for himself.

The solution of the land problem, therefore, depends, like the solution of every other industrial problem, in finding out what system of buying and selling, of owning and enjoying, allows men the freest scope to use their faculties for their own advantage, neither deducting from this freest scope anything that falls short, nor adding anything which exceeds. Let me try to describe such a system. It must allow men (1) To acquire all such land as they can acquire in the open market; to possess full powers of ownership over it; to make all such contracts as they choose in reference to it during the term of their own life; to sell it in the same unrestricted way as they have acquired it, and to devise it at death to such person as they choose. All these powers are necessary in order to make ownership perfect, and to make land yield the fullest enjoyment to those who own it.

(2) Such powers should apply to the living and not to the dead. The living must not only rank before the dead, but the dead must not in any way compete with the living. It must be remembered that whatever privileges are granted to the dead are taken at the expense of the living, and conflict with our proposition

that we are to allow the freest exercise of faculties, for with the faculties of the dead we are not concerned.

(3) State burdens are not to be placed on the land. If it is mischievous to tax corn, it is far more mischievous to tax land, which, by its nature, is so immediately associated with the all-important questions of home, and a man's independence of life. Nothing interferes so much with the possibilities of human enjoyment of any object, and the exercise of human energies, as the vague claims of what we call the State. The State is an abstract body which runs no risks, undergoes no labour, which neither toils nor spins, but is ever stretching out greedy and unsatisfied hands to seize a part of what the toil of the individual has produced. Both the dead owner and the State are abstractions much given to encroachment upon the free individual, and both must be driven back within their own territory. Nothing less than the complete untaxed freehold, perfect in all its rights and enjoyments, should be the goal of our efforts.

Let us now consider these conditions more exactly, taking Nos. 1 and 2 together. (1 and 2.) As we have seen, the privileges of the dead are not to conflict with the living, or, in other words, the liberty of the living is not to be lessened by the interference of the dead. Let us see where this principle carries us. In the first place, does it forbid a man at death appointing his successor? I think not, for the following reasons:—(a) It is not by appointing a successor that the dead owner diminishes human freedom, if such successor be given full rights of ownership, but by having the power to regulate the action of the successor. (b) Once grant full ownership, and there is no person who can be discovered with any title at all to appoint except the dead owner. It is ludicrous, on the face of it, that the successor should be

appointed by some person to whom the property did not or does not belong. No arrangement could be more topsy-turvy. Some writers have had the courage to propose the State. But the State is simply a group of these very persons to whom the property does not belong, and who have, therefore, no locus standi in the matter. The State, as we have seen, has neither toiled, nor run risks in the matter; the State, properly understood, is only an association to protect individual rights; the State has no more claim to the heritage of the dead man-unless it be the claim of fraud and force-than the English race has to the mountains of the moon. (c) There being no other person in the field with any true moral claim to appoint the successor, it must be looked on as the right of the owner at death-his last living act— both because from a moral point of view there is no other competitor in the field, and because it does not diminish human liberty, but completes those rights of perfect ownership which allow the freest exercise of faculties over all forms of world-material.

It would be easy to pile up reasons of a secondary nature. No more violent transition in human affairs could be imagined than to allow a man to enjoy all rights over a piece of land, to cultivate it, to turn it into grass land, or plough land, or coppice, as he wills; to build on it, to lease it, to be absolute lord and master of it during life; and then to take from him the right of naming who shall succeed to his labours. The violence of such a transition would be fatal to that continuity of effort and intention on which our civilisation rests. A man labours, not simply for himself, but for those dependent on him, and to intrude at the moment of death anybody but those for whom he has laboured, would make the most cruel break in the existence of the