DRIVERS AND SLAVES.

Observer, Volume XXXIV, Issue 24, 21 February 1914, Page 3

DRIVERS AND SLAVES.

Free Land and Harmony

BEFORE he left Auckland the Hon. Geo.. Fowlds filled out a nomination paper in case a -parliamentary seat should be going begging and left some lectures so that the people should, so to speak, hear his voice though he was far over the sea. Apart from his gen- • eral moral reflections, which unfortunately, cannot change human nature, Mr Fowlds's renewed tilt at landlordism is of special interest, because his ideals seem so impossible of realisation and the "private .appropriation of rent under the guise of modern landlordism, seems one of the most difficult matters for adjustment ever presented. About 75 per cent, of the people pay rent. The va3t majority of people own no land. It is Mr Fowlds's ideal that no one shall own land — that is no one else.

" jVop is th° victory the people must win for themselves." How ? By the Mosaic land laws ! Tid the Mosaic land laws contemplate the holding of vast city properties ? Can any law be made, for instance, that ' shall give freely to the great business firm a block of "land that under our system is worth £100,000, and to the scavenger (who has equal rights) a half •acre of garden worth £100 ? These little ebullitions about industrial slavery and "getting the capitalists off rhe neooles' backs" are all very well in thoery. Mr Fowlds and other students of somebody else s •theories never under any circumstances view the matter in the light of personal equation. For instance, Mr Fowlds miaht have remained i" Scotland and contented himself with weaving blankets. He had the courage of requisition, the desire to •excel, the physical and mental attributes for "getting on," and he -got on. The land nationahser is the man who has no land but would "have land if he knew how to get it. The person who wants to share the proceeds of the other fellow's enterprise and accumulative faculty diops his " socialism " as soon as he becomes a landowner. The capitalist (especially in New Zealand) -who "battens on the blood, bones, and souls of the down-trodden mas•ses" (etc., etc.,) is precisely the person who held revolutionary views against " bloodsuckers " before he Ybecame a capitalist.

The idealists don't face problems. Here, for instance, is the Duke of Bedford, who is scandalously rich. He can't help it. His forefathers are to blame. Is it to be believed -••hot if Mr George Fowlds or'f ten million pounds worth of property in the heart of London he would willingly forego it in order to give " free land" to some of the •greatest and wealthiest corporations in the world ? Can it be believed that the State would dispossess the Duke or any other landowner ? If the State did so and paid compensation the compensated owners would still hold the bulk of negotiable wealth and so still be riding on the "backs of the people. Is the Church unable or unwilling to lend a hand in denouncing this monster of iniquity, etc.

The Church, as a matter -of fact, is the keenest possible acquirer of landed estate, a large proportion of which

is turned to no reproductive use of any kind. The Church must, unhappily, be couned out in this matter. It is in most of its branches supported and financially upheld by the classes against which the Hon. Mr Fowlds tilts. That is to say, human nature and the personal equation come in to the relations of the Land and the Church. There is absolutely no hope of the solution of any real social problem by the Church. The one overwhelming fact in connection with all human relations is that the human being is in varying degrees predatory or accumulative. The great landlord has usually become so because of his natural instinct. The opponent of landlordism is just as predatory in his instincts. He desires to handle the other fellow's accumulations merely on ethical and sentimental grounds. When you have killed human instincts, ambition, the love of power, the passion for possession, the deeply implanted desire to "have and hold," you have destroyed a nation and made it a collection of nonentities that simply atrophies in discontented sameness and disappears.