THE BALANCE DANCE OF RENT AND WAGES

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXVI, Issue 8181, 24 July 1912, Page 4

THE BALANCE DANCE OF RENT AND WAGES

In Iho backwoods of America there used to be a d«nco called the ilalanco Dance. The point in connection wiLli it wan that one group was always goiii" up when tho other wa« coming down, and all tlic movements of the dance wore organised round ifTTs alternate movement oi the up and down of the opposite parties in the ffanco.

There is a like movement all tho world over in tho play between rent and wages. Whenever rents "o up, wages come ciuwu; and wherever rents go down wages go up. It frequently occurs in a frontier district where rents have not yet been adjusted that wages are found to bo very high, while it is tho history of the world that the more firmly lixed is the power of the rent lord tho lower arc the wages.

There was a time in California when cooks, harbors and others in like employments were able to command and get £S a week for their services, because if these wages were not paid they could earn that amount at working on their own account in tho gravels which ao 1 audiord had then been able to corner, and which woro a|>en territory for any who wished to use them.

Some of these same lands are now among tho most fruitful jjlaces in tho world. The orchards which are growing from the very soil and gravel-beds whore tho miners of. ’49 were able to secure so high a return, for their selfemployed labor, that wages must needs bo very high or wage labor became impossible—this same soil is now turning out a larger return from orchards and vineyards, and is worth more for that purpose than over it was worth in the palmiest days of tho Placer Diggings. • « « • •

But in tho days of tho Placer Diggings land titles had not yet been established ; tho landlord’s “rake-off” was impossible, and just because the earnings of labor could not be appropriated simply in consideration of obtaining permission to labor, labor itself was able to secure either in wages orin its own products tho total value ot its own labor.

But now tho landlord has been on the ground l: lo, these many years.” The worker has becomo tho “Blanket man” (which is tho American term for the Now Zealand swagger), and his wages as limited in volume and as uncertain in their coming as his opportunity is scant in tho presence of the monopolised fertility of soil. When there were no rents there wore high wages. Now there are exorbitant rents, the wages aro correspondingly low.

Of tho men who employed labor in the mining camp and tho men who em-

ploys labor now, tho mining camp employer was tho bettor rewarded of tho two. Ho paid enormous wages, but ho paid no rent. Tho man who to-day .;j's tho wages must pay such enormous sums lor other purposes to those who render no service that the profits of the enterprise are'so absorbed that only tho fragments of what ne otherwise might possess arc loft either for tho employer in profits or for the employee in wages.

It is by this process and for this reason that tho moat fertile lauds of all tho earth are everywhere cultivated by the toil of those most poorly paid. It is for this reason that the agricultural laborers of Great Britain are not only tho most poorly paid, but the most poorly educated, most limited in their lives, and in every way tho most helpless of all the British workers. It is for this reason that already in New Zealand the most pitiful cases of child labor are found on the very lauds where nature has done tho most for man, but where man himself has become the victim of a land system which has intervened between the gifts of nature and, tho users of the soil in such a way as to make the very land itself an instrument of extortion.

* * • • And tho way out is easily stated. Tho nation itself must be the only landlord. Tho user of tho land must have for himself the total product of his industry : .but if that. industry is made especially productive because the worker enjoys some special advantage which others cannot enjoy, then payment must be made, not by one citizen to another, but by each such person who enjoys any such special advantage to the collective account of the whole community. That will make an end of the private appropriation of ground rents, and it will make an end of this balance dance between rent and wages.