Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne

LETTER XXII.

OF THE NORMAL POSITION AND DUTIES OF THE UPPER CLASSES. GENERAL STATEMENT OF THE LAND QUESTION

136. In passing now to the statement of conditions affecting the interests of the upper classes, I would rather have addressed these closing letters to one of themselves than to you, for it is with their own faults and needs that each class is primarily concerned. As, however, unless I kept the letters private, this change of their address would be but a matter of courtesy and form, not of any true prudential use; and as besides I am now no more inclined to reticence—prudent or otherwise; but desire only to state the facts of our national economy as clearly and completely as may be, I pursue the subject without respect of persons.

137. Before examining what the occupation and estate of the upper classes ought, as far as may reasonably be conjectured, finally to become, it will be well to set down in brief terms what they actually have been in past ages: for this, in many respects, they must also always be. The upper classes, broadly speaking, are originally composed of the best-bred (in the mere animal sense of the term), the most energetic, and most thoughtful, of the population, who either by strength of arm seize the land from the rest, and make slaves of them, or bring desert land into cultivation, over which they have therefore, within certain limits, true personal right; or, by industry, accumulate other property, or by choice devote themselves to intellectual pursuits, and, though poor, obtain an acknowledged superiority of position, shown by benefits conferred in discovery, or in teaching, or in gifts of art. This is all in the simple course of the law of nature; and the proper offices of the upper classes, thus distinguished from the rest, become, therefore, in the main threefold:—

138. (A) Those who are strongest of arm have for their proper function the restraint and punishment of vice, and the general maintenance of law and order; releasing only from its original subjection to their power that which truly deserves to be emancipated.

(B) Those who are superior by forethought and industry, have for their function to be the providences of the foolish, the weak, and the idle; and to establish such systems of trade and distribution of goods as shall preserve the lower orders from perishing by famine, or any other consequence of their carelessness or folly, and to bring them all, according to each man's capacity, at last into some harmonious industry.

(C) The third class, of scholars and artists, of course, have for function the teaching and delighting of the inferior multitude.

The office of the upper classes, then, as a body, is to keep order among their inferiors, and raise them always to the nearest level with themselves of which those inferiors are capable. So far as they are thus occupied, they are invariably loved and reverenced intensely by all beneath them, and reach, themselves, the highest types of human power and beauty.

139. This, then, being the natural ordinance and function of aristocracy, its corruption, like that of all other beautiful things under the Devil's touch, is a very fearful one. Its corruption is, that those who ought to be the rulers and guides of the people, forsake their task of painful honorableness; seek their own pleasure and pre-eminence only; and use their power, subtlety, conceded influence, prestige of ancestry, and mechanical instrumentality of martial power, to make the lower orders toil for them, and feed and clothe them for nothing, and become in various ways their living property, goods, and chattels, even to the point of utter regardlessness of whatever misery these serfs may suffer through such insolent domination, or they themselves, their masters, commit of crime to enforce it.

140. And this is especially likely to be the case when means of various and tempting pleasures are put within the reach of the upper classes by advanced conditions of national commerce and knowledge: and it is certain to be the case as soon as position among those upper classes becomes any way purchasable with money, instead of being the assured measure of some kind of worth, (either strength of hand, or true wisdom of conduct, or imaginative gift). It has been becoming more and more the condition of the aristocracy of Europe, ever since the fifteenth century; and is gradually bringing about its ruin, and in that ruin, checked only by the power which here and there a good soldier or true statesman achieves over the putrid chaos of its vain policy, the ruin of all beneath it; which can be arrested only, either by the repentance of that old aristocracy, (hardly to be hoped,) or by the stern substitution of other aristocracy worthier than it.

141. Corrupt as it may be, it and its laws together, I would at this moment, if I could, fasten every one of its institutions down with bands of iron, and trust for all progress and help against its tyranny simply to the patience and strength of private conduct. And if I had to choose, I would tenfold rather see the tyranny of old Austria triumphant in the old and new worlds, and trust to the chance (or rather the distant certainty) of some day seeing a true Emperor born to its throne, than, with every privilege of thought and act, run the most distant risk of seeing the thoughts of the people of Germany and England become like the thoughts of the people of America.

My American friends, of whom one, Charles Eliot Norton, of Cambridge, is the dearest I have in the world, tell me I know nothing about America. It may be so, and they must do me the justice to observe that I, therefore, usually say nothing about America. But this much I have said, because the Americans, as a nation, set their trust in liberty and in equality, of which I detest the one, and deny the possibility of the other; and because, also, as a nation, they are wholly undesirous of Rest, and incapable of it; irreverent of themselves, both in the present and in the future; discontented with what they are, yet having no ideal of anything which they desire to become.9

142. But, however corrupted, the aristocracy of any nation may thus be always divided into three great classes. First, the landed proprietors and soldiers, essentially one political body (for the possession of land can only be maintained by military power); secondly, the moneyed men and leaders of commerce; thirdly, the professional men and masters in science, art, and literature.

And we were to consider the proper duties of all these, and the laws probably expedient respecting them. Whereupon, in the outset, we are at once brought face to face with the great land question.

143. Great as it may be, it is wholly subordinate to those we have hitherto been considering. The laws you make regarding methods of labor, or to secure the genuineness of the things produced by it, affect the entire moral state of the nation, and all possibility of human happiness for them. The mode of distribution of the land only affects their numbers. By this or that law respecting land you decide whether the nation shall consist of fifty or of a hundred millions. But by this or that law respecting work, you decide whether the given number of millions shall be rogues, or honest men;—shall be wretches, or happy men. And the question of numbers is wholly immaterial, compared with that of character; or rather, its own materialness depends on the prior determination of character. Make your nation consist of knaves, and, as Emerson said long ago, it is but the case of any other vermin—"the more, the worse." Or, to put the matter in narrower limits, it is a matter of no final concern to any parent whether he shall have two children, or four; but matter of quite final concern whether those he has shall, or shall not, deserve to be hanged. The great difficulty in dealing with the land question at all arises from the false, though very natural, notion on the part of many reformers, and of large bodies of the poor, that the division of the land among the said poor would be an immediate and everlasting relief to them. An immediate relief it would be to the extent of a small annual sum (you may easily calculate how little, if you choose) to each of them; on the strength of which accession to their finances, they would multiply into as much extra personality as the extra pence would sustain, and at that point be checked by starvation, exactly as they are now.

144. Any other form of pillage would benefit them only in like manner; and, in reality, the difficult part of the question respecting numbers, is, not where they shall be arrested, but what shall be the method of their arrest.

An island of a certain size has standing room only for so many people; feeding ground for a great many fewer than could stand on it. Reach the limits of your feeding ground, and you must cease to multiply, must emigrate or starve. The modes in which the pressure is gradually brought to bear on the population depend on the justice of your laws; but the pressure itself must come at last, whatever the distribution of the land. And arithmeticians seem to me a little slow to remark the importance of the old child's puzzle about the nails in the horseshoe—when it is populations that are doubling themselves, instead of farthings.

145. The essential land question, then, is to be treated quite separately from that of the methods of restriction of population. The land question is—At what point will you resolve to stop? It is separate matter of discussion how you are to stop at it.

And this essential land question—"At what point will you stop?"—is itself two-fold. You have to consider first, by what methods of land distribution you can maintain the greatest number of healthy persons; and secondly, whether, if, by any other mode of distribution and relative ethical laws, you can raise their character, while you diminish their numbers, such sacrifice should be made, and to what extent? I think it will be better, for clearness' sake, to end this letter with the putting of these two queries in their decisive form, and to reserve suggestions of answer for my next.

LETTER XXIII.

OF THE JUST TENURE OF LANDS: AND THE PROPER FUNCTIONS OF HIGH PUBLIC OFFICERS

146. I must repeat to you, once more, before I proceed, that I only enter on this part of our inquiry to complete the sequence of its system, and explain fully the bearing of former conclusions, and not for any immediately practicable good to be got out of the investigation. Whatever I have hitherto urged upon you, it is in the power of all men quietly to promote, and finally to secure, by the patient resolution of personal conduct; but no action could be taken in re-distribution of land or in limitation of the incomes of the upper classes, without grave and prolonged civil disturbance.

Such disturbance, however, is only too likely to take place, if the existing theories of political economy are allowed credence much longer. In the writings of the vulgar economists, nothing more excites my indignation than the subterfuges by which they endeavor to accommodate their pseudoscience to the existing abuses of wealth, by disguising the true nature of rent. I will not waste time in exposing their fallacies, but will put the truth for you into as clear a shape as I can.

147. Rent, of whatever kind, is, briefly, the price continuously paid for the loan of the property of another person. It may be too little, or it may be just or exorbitant or altogether unjustifiable, according to circumstances. Exorbitant rents can only be exacted from ignorant or necessitous rent-payers: and it is one of the most necessary conditions of state economy that there should be clear laws to prevent such exaction.

148. I may interrupt myself for a moment to give you an instance of what I mean. The most wretched houses of the poor in London often pay ten or fifteen per cent. to the landlord; and I have known an instance of sanitary legislation being hindered, to the loss of many hundreds of lives, in order that the rents of a nobleman, derived from the necessities of the poor, might not be diminished. And it is a curious thing to me to see Mr. J. S. Mill foaming at the mouth, and really afflicted conscientiously, because he supposes one man to have been unjustly hanged, while by his own failure, (I believe, wilful failure)10 in stating clearly to the public one of the first elementary truths of the science he professes, he is aiding and abetting the commission of the cruelest possible form of murder on many thousands of persons yearly, for the sake simply of putting money into the pockets of the landlords. I felt this evil so strongly that I bought, in the worst part of London, one freehold and one leasehold property, consisting of houses inhabited by the lowest poor; in order to try what change in their comfort and habits I could effect by taking only a just rent, but that firmly. The houses of the leasehold pay me five per cent.; the families that used to have one room in them have now two; and are more orderly and hopeful besides; and there is a surplus still on the rents they pay after I have taken my five per cent., with which, if all goes well, they will eventually be able to buy twelve years of the lease from me. The freehold pays three per cent., with similar results in the comfort of the tenant. This is merely an example of what might be done by firm State action in such matters.

149. Next, of wholly unjustifiable rents. These are for things which are not, and which it is criminal to consider as, personal or exchangeable property. Bodies of men, land, water, and air, are the principal of these things.

Parenthetically, may I ask you to observe, that though a fearless defender of some forms of slavery, I am no defender of the slave trade. It is by a blundering confusion of ideas between governing men, and trading in men, and by consequent interference with the restraint, instead of only with the sale, that most of the great errors in action have been caused among the emancipation men. I am prepared, if the need be clear to my own mind, and if the power is in my hands, to throw men into prison, or any other captivity—to bind them or to beat them—and force them, for such periods as I may judge necessary, to any kind of irksome labor: and on occasion of desperate resistance, to hang or shoot them. But I will not sell them.

150. Bodies of men, or women, then (and much more, as I said before, their souls), must not be bought or sold. Neither must land, nor water, nor air, these being the necessary sustenance of men's bodies and souls.

Yet all these may, on certain terms, be bound, or secured in possession, to particular persons under certain conditions. For instance, it may be proper, at a certain time, to give a man permission to possess land, as you give him permission to marry; and farther, if he wishes it and works for it, to secure to him the land needful for his life; as you secure his wife to him; and make both utterly his own, without in the least admitting his right to buy other people's wives, or fields, or to sell his own.

151. And the right action of a State respecting its land is, indeed, to secure it in various portions to those of its citizens who deserve to be trusted with it, according to their respective desires and proved capacities; and after having so secured it to each, to exercise only such vigilance over his treatment of it as the State must give also to his treatment of his wife and servants; for the most part leaving him free, but interfering in cases of gross mismanagement or abuse of power. And in the case of great old families, which always ought to be, and in some measure, however decadent, still truly are, the noblest monumental architecture of the kingdom, living temples of sacred tradition and hero's religion, so much land ought to be granted to them in perpetuity as may enable them to live thereon with all circumstances of state and outward nobleness; but their income must in no wise be derived from the rents of it, nor must they be occupied (even in the most distant or subordinately administered methods), in the exaction of rents. That is not noblemen's work. Their income must be fixed, and paid them by the State, as the King's is.

152. So far from their land being to them a source of income, it should be, on the whole, costly to them, great part of it being kept in conditions of natural grace, which return no rent but their loveliness; and the rest made, at whatever cost, exemplary in perfection of such agriculture as develops the happiest peasant life;11 agriculture which, as I will show you hereafter, must reject the aid of all mechanism except that of instruments guided solely by the human hand, or by animal, or directly natural forces; and which, therefore, cannot compete for profitableness with agriculture carried on by aid of machinery.

And now for the occupation of this body of men, maintained at fixed perennial cost of the State.

153. You know I said I should want no soldiers of special skill or pugnacity, for all my boys would be soldiers. But I assuredly want captains of soldiers, of special skill and pugnacity. And also, I said I should strongly object to the appearance of any lawyers in my territory; meaning, however, by lawyers, people who live by arguing about law,—not people appointed to administer law; and people who live by eloquently misrepresenting facts—not people appointed to discover and plainly represent them.

Therefore, the youth of this landed aristocracy would be trained, in my schools, to these two great callings, not by which, but in which, they are to live.

They would be trained, all of them, in perfect science of war, and in perfect science of essential law. And from their body should be chosen the captains and the judges of England, its advocates, and generally its State officers, all such functions being held for fixed pay (as already our officers of the Church and army are paid), and no function connected with the administration of law ever paid by casual fee. And the head of such family should, in his own right, having passed due (and high) examination in the science of law, and not otherwise, be a judge, law-ward or Lord, having jurisdiction both in civil and criminal cases, such as our present judges have, after such case shall have been fully represented before, and received verdict from, a jury, composed exclusively of the middle or lower orders, and in which no member of the aristocracy should sit. But from the decision of these juries, or from the Lord's sentence, there should be a final appeal to a tribunal, the highest in the land, held solely in the King's name, and over which, in the capital, the King himself should preside, and therein give judgment on a fixed number of days in each year;—and, in other places and at other times, judges appointed by election (under certain conditions) out of any order of men in the State (the election being national, not provincial): and all causes brought before these judges should be decided, without appeal, by their own authority; not by juries. This, then, recasting it for you into brief view, would be the entire scheme of state authorities:—

154. (1) The King: exercising, as part both of his prerogative and his duty, the office of a supreme judge at stated times in the central court of appeal of his kingdom.

(2) Supreme judges appointed by national election; exercising sole authority in courts of final appeal.

(3) Ordinary judges, holding the office hereditarily under conditions; and with power to add to their number (and liable to have it increased if necessary by the King's appointment); the office of such judges being to administer the national laws under the decision of juries.

(4) State officers charged with the direction of public agency in matters of public utility.

(5) Bishops, charged with offices of supervision and aid, to family by family, and person by person.

(6) The officers of war, of various ranks.

(7) The officers of public instruction, of various ranks.

I have sketched out this scheme for you somewhat prematurely, for I would rather have conducted you to it step by step, and as I brought forward the reasons for the several parts of it; but it is, on other grounds, desirable that you should have it to refer to, as I go on.

155. Without depending anywise upon nomenclature, yet holding it important as a sign and record of the meanings of things, I may tell you further that I should call the elected supreme judges, "Princes"; the hereditary judges, "Lords"; and the officers of public guidance, "Dukes"; and that the social rank of these persons would be very closely correspondent to that implied by such titles under our present constitution; only much more real and useful. And in conclusion of this letter, I will but add, that if you, or other readers, think it idle of me to write or dream of such things; as if any of them were in our power, or within possibility of any near realization, and above all, vain to write of them to a workman at Sunderland: you are to remember what I told you at the beginning, that I go on with this part of my subject in some fulfilment of my long-conceived plan, too large to receive at present any deliberate execution from my failing strength; (being the body of the work to which 'Munera Pulveris' was intended merely as an introduction;) and that I address it to you because I know that the working men of England must, for some time, be the only body to which we can look for resistance to the deadly influence of moneyed power.

I intend, however, to write to you at this moment one more letter, partly explanatory of minor details necessarily omitted in this, and chiefly of the proper office of the soldier; and then I must delay the completion of even this poor task until after the days have turned, for I have quite other work to do in the brightness of the full-opened spring.

156. P.S.—As I have used somewhat strong language, both here and elsewhere, of the equivocations of the economists on the subject of rent, I had better refer you to one characteristic example. You will find in paragraph 5th and 6th of Book II., chap. 2, of Mr. Mill's 'Principles,' that the right to tenure of land is based, by his admission, only on the proprietor's being its improver.

Without pausing to dwell on the objection that land cannot be improved beyond a certain point, and that, at the reaching of that point, farther claim to tenure would cease, on Mr. Mill's principle—take even this admission, with its proper subsequent conclusion, that "in no sound theory of private property was it ever contemplated that the proprietor of land should be merely a sinecurist quartered on it." Now, had that conclusion been farther followed, it would have compelled the admission that all rent was unjustifiable which normally maintained any person in idleness; which is indeed the whole truth of the matter. But Mr. Mill instantly retreats from this perilous admission; and after three or four pages of discussion (quite accurate for its part) of the limits of power in management of the land itself (which apply just as strictly to the peasant proprietor as to the cottier's landlord), he begs the whole question at issue in one brief sentence, slipped cunningly into the middle of a long one which appears to be telling all the other way, and in which the fatal assertion (of the right to rent) nestles itself, as if it had been already proved,—thus—I italicize the unproved assertion in which the venom of the entire falsehood is concentrated.

"Even in the case of cultivated land, a man whom, though only one among millions, the law permits to hold thousands of acres as his single share, is not entitled to think that all is given to him to use and abuse, and deal with it as if it concerned nobody but himself. The rents or profits which he can obtain from it are his, and his only; but with regard to the land, in everything which he abstains from doing, he is morally bound, and should, whenever the case admits, be legally compelled to make his interest and pleasure consistent with the public good."