THE PROPOSED CONFISCATION OF COAL.
T"great coal strike, which has been one of the worst organised movements of our day, and will, we believe, entirely fail, has brought into prominence one of the most remarkable, and, indeed, menacing symptoms of the hour, the readiness of men possessed of education and means, and sometimes of excellent intentions, to see in the confiscation .of property a remedy for every evil. There is a whole class of thinkers among us who would remedy the grievances of agricultural labourers by dividing the land among them, with a compensation to its owners of but a few years' purchase. The bulk of the Progressives of London would place the rates on ground-rents, without -regard to leases ; while the more extreme members of that party would " municipalise " land, water, gas, and means of communication at prices which would make the transaction really a violent seizure. The greatest force of this move- ment is, however, directed against property in coal. Coal in Britain is usually worked by lessees, who pay a rent for it to the owner of the soil, and this rent, as it varies in -amount according to the quantity raised, is called a " royalty." This royalty is now the object of an almost unintelligible malignity of denunciation. It is declared to be a tax unjustly levied on the miner and the community; its receivers are described as brigands ; and Parliament is openly adjured to take away property confirmed to its possessors by laws almost as old as legal history. If this kind of language was confined to lessees or miners, we should neither be surprised nor alarmed. Lessees always -contract some idea that they do the work, and some one else gets the profit ; while the labourer naturally longs for a freehold, until he conceives that in a better state of society 'he would possess one ; and the step from that to a dream of redivision is not long. The marvel is not that, but that 'the same idea should- possess responsible men who know, • or should know, the facts, and who have no private interest 'to interfere with an impartial judgment. Yet it certainly is so. Most respectable journals, like the Daily News and the Daily Chronicle, which would no more defend the robbery of shops than they would defend murder, write about royalties as if they believed with Proudhon that property was -plunder, and would eagerly support a Bill transferring the ownership of all coal either to the State at large, or to the mining population. More extraordinary still, the Echo, a journal which has its belief in a liberal Christianity written all over its columns, and which is owned and edited by a man whose benefactions are not only splendid but intelligent—we have noted at different times gifts from him to free libraries alone of many thousands at a time—endorses, and indeed exaggerates, the view of its contemporaries. It published on Wednesday a leader, obviously meant as a de- claration of a thought-out policy, containing these words : —" The miners are en evidence ; they are numerous ; they are asserting themselves, and must be listened to. They are only endeavouring to hold their own. In so doing they may make mistakes ; they may have to make sacrifices ; they may have to suffer as they have suffered before. But they are assisting to lift into the sunlight a question of supreme national importance, and that is the ownership of our coal treasures. These treasures are a common gift of Nature to mankind. But a few have been permitted to take possession of them, and by so doing plundered the community. The landlords of England have no more moral right to coal-beds under the soil than they have to the central fires of the globe, or to the sun- light which falls on the globe, or to the atmosphere which surrounds the globe. They have been permitted by a too easy and confiding people, who for long genera- tions had no power over making laws or moulding the political life of the nation, to enjoy a monopoly. It is time that this monopoly should cease, and that the monopolists should surrender to the people what should never have been taken from the people. It is now for the people to decide this question. The miners' strike, or semi-strike, to hold their own, will assist to bring this question to a head ; and if miserable red-herrings were not dragged along the political pathway, it would soon present itself in all its fulness and demand solution. All we say is—Surrender to the people what belongs to the people. This is the Echo trumpet-call to battle." If those words do not mean that the community should con- fiscate all coal in situ without compensation, what is the sense of them ? Buying the coal-fields at their value, even if that were financially possible, would make no difference to the community, except in an enormous increase of responsibility, and, moreover, would in no degree indicate the absence of right in the landlord so violently insisted on. The writer intends clearly to exact what he thinks a restitution, and the question is, how he can bring himself to think so. If the landlord has no moral right to ask rent for permission to dig out coal in his fields, why has he a right to ask rent for per- mission to dig out stone or slate or chalk, or, indeed, to grow wheat, which is quite as necessary as coal. As a matter of fact, he has a much better moral right to rent from fuel than to rent from wheat. No right to anything can equal the right of a creator, and practically the landlord has usually been the creator of the coal. That is to say, it is to his or his predecessors' enterprise, expenditure, and skill that the discovery of the coal-beds has been due, which else might have rotted, for ever useless to mankind. There are scores of cases on record in which an owner, suspecting coal on his estate, has spent half a life and his whole fortune in the search for it; and when at last his ability has been rewarded by success, and he has enriched the country and his whole neighbourhood, he is to be told that he has no moral right to the treasure which he has discovered, and which the law secures to him ! Why not ? What is there in coal any more than in the things which secure fertility to the soil, which should pre- vent its being the subject of property ? It is under the soil, says the Echo, like the central fire. So are all the substances from which the wheat derives its nourishing character, the water-springs included. The Echo leader- writer speaks as if things under the earth must belong to the community ; but why should they, any more than things above the earth, which are equally the product at once of manual labour, and of qualities in- herent in the soil, and as much concealed by it as the coal itself? If coal cannot belong to an individual, how can a house belong to the proprietor of the Echo, when it is made either of stone or brick-earth taken by labour from the bowels of the land, and fashioned by labour for use. We can understand a man who says that individual pro- perty is bad, and that were perfect altruism the supreme law, all would own all things in common ; but to select one thing as the subject of communism, and that one thing by no means so necessary as many others—France, for example, prospering, though she has no coal to speak of—is almost absurd. The remaining argument in the Echo, that laws are invalid unless the bulk of the com- munity helped to make them, we may forget, for the writer cannot have thought for a minute what his principle would involve. There is not a great law governing the country which was not passed before democracy was raised to supreme authority, or a security, from Consols downward, which would not be invalid if his theory were once accepted. Some of our contemporaries shift the argument against royalties a little, but always with the same result. Royalties are to be confiscated, they say, because their owners have done and are doing nothing to produce the coal. The miner toils, it is said, the lessees manage, and the con- sumer pays ; but what does the owner of royalties—say Lord Durham, who is very often singled out—do except re- ceive huge payments ? As a matter of fact, we fancy the Lambtons could prove that they did a good deal, as much, at all events, as any other discoverers ; but we will let that pass, to ask if the doctrine is to be applied to all property ? Is no one to own anything he does not work for or himself pur- chase? If so, we understand, for that is the doctrine, old as Asia or Peru, that property cannot exist, no man pos- sessing rights except in return for his labour. It is a doctrine fatal to accumulation, and therefore to civilisa- tion; but still, it is intelligible, and has been applied once or twice upon an enormous scale, notably in Madras and Peru ; but then, our contemporaries will not venture to advocate it—it would cover the ease of sleeping partners in a newspaper with singular exactness—and failing such advocacy, we want to know why they single out coal for anathema as property. Because it is indispensable ? It is not indispensable, and half the world has not got it ; but let us allow for a moment that in our climate, and with our civilisa- tion, it is absolutely necessary. So are arable land and grain, and iron and brick-earth, and salt, and water, and, in short, everything of prime necessity of which there is a limited supply. They are all monopolies—even water in great cities—and their position as property is indistinguishable from that of coal. Indeed, in some cases, the power of other monopolists is much greater than that of the coal- owners, the Water Companies and the Salt Trust, for example, being able, if they could use their power to the full, to sell health to us all. Why, then, should coal be selected as the one object of attack? It is held by a right exactly as perfect as the right to anything else, and its possessors, so far from burying it or making it inaccessible, are keeping open shop with their article,—that is, they strive to obtain their profit from the greatness of the quantity sold. Not only is there no lack of coal under the existing system, but the complaint of all engaged in the trade, in- cluding the miners, who are these pleaders' special clients, is that the supply is so abundant that nobody, except, in- deed, the consumer, can get profit enough on coal. If ever a case for property was perfect, it is the one for coal ; its owner discovered it ; and he sells the right to use it at so low a rate, that the competition to pay his rent is so fierce that the article is oversupplied.
• We are almost ashamed to write such palpable truisms, but the new definition of true benevolence, charity at somebody else's expense, is exercising a surprisingly wide influence, and doing an infinity of mischief. The security of property, without which there can be no application of capital at low rates—that is, no industry capable of paying high wages—is visibly affected. It is simply im- possible that, if the masses of our population are told constantly by those they trust that they have a moral right to the property they see around them, they will make no effort to take it; and they have, being the majority of voters, the power to try. That they should succeed is, we think, impossible, though owing to the absence of small proprietors, property does not rest, as in France and Ger- many, on a social rock ; but they may in the struggle do enor- mous injury to the working class, whose wages are paid from the industries which insecurity imperils. It is, moreover, apart from all future consequences, a great moral wrong to single out an innocent class of property-owners for social obloquy. We know nothing of Lord Durham, but why should he be visited with more hostility than any rich man who owns a street of leased houses, and asks every half-year for the rent which his tenants contracted to pay ? For that matter, why should he be treated worse than Messrs. Marshall and Snelgrove, or any other of the great shopkeepers of London ? He stands at his counter as they do, and offers his goods as they do, at the best price which, regard being had to keeping his customers, he can obtain ; and his price is so far from prohibitory, that there is too much of his article in the market. Is it seriously contended that in a country like our own, which is rich because commerce is free, this is a good reason for boy- cotting a man? The whole attack on the coal-owners seems to us pure oppression, exercised in the interest, not of the community, but of that section of it which is learning to regard all inherited wealth with envy, and to consider " possession " an offence which justifies confiscation- " How long have you owned the land ?" asked a civil Judge in the Terror. "Six hundred years." "Then it is time your poor neighbour had a turn," said the Judge, and signed a decree in favour of the suitor without a title save his poverty and his impudence.
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