MR. ODGER'S REVOLUTIONARY PLAN.
T is a custom to abuse Mr. George Odger, the one working- man who, as far as we know, has fought through a contested election, and certainly this week it is a little difficult to say a pleasant word on his behalf. If he and men like him intend to encourage Englishmen in defiantly breaking the law, as he either did, or chose to say he did, in the meeting of Monday in Trafalgar Square, there is an end either of English order or of English freedom. The alter- natives are anarchy or the use of the bayonet, and we hardly know which is worse, or which would the sooner make of our system an unendurable oppression. Nevertheless, though the time be unpropitious, we recommend all English landholders to study Mr. Odgor's ideas about land, as expressed in the
August number of the Contemporary Review, and try to make up their minds if they can what an English Revolutionist, a
man who for years signed the orders of the International Society and its German chief, is really like. We are greatly mistaken if they do not rise from its perusal with an impres-
sion of the most comforting kind, with the impression, that is, that an English Revolutionist is very like an English any- body else, a thorough grumbler on points, who wants changes, and serious changes, but is not in the least prepared to vote the abolition of the Eighth Commandment, and still less that of the Sixth; who, whether from religion or mere good-nature, or constitutional inability to hate hard, retains an idea of justice as between opponents, which of all ideas ever promulgated is the best protection of the minority. It is, of course, open to any one to say Mr. Odger is concealing far more violent ideas than those he admits ; but to us he seems to be trying to be violent ; to be endeavouring, as far as his powers will let him, to tell the whole revolutionary truth that is ia him ; to be straining with the effort to be clear which so exhausts un- trained writers ; to be striving after what the French would call the "brutality of logic" in the expression of his theory. And now let us see what his logic, modified as it is at every step by his indisposition to bloodshed, his reluctance to steal, and his reverence for the rights of the minority, really amounts to. It is very important to understand that, for English Com- munism, if it over comes to anything, will undoubtedly use the labourer and not the artizan as its instrument—if Karl Marx ever gets them, we shall have trouble yet—and will undoubtedly make, as it always has done in our history, some effort more or less successful to alter the ownership of the land.
Mr. Odger commences by the most sweeping and revolu- tionary propositions. He holds that the soil of England was originally stolen from the people by Norman hordes—a blunder, the Normans not evicting the people, but only the landlords of the people,—that the theft has never been con- doned; that no lapse of time can bar the right of the owners to restitution,—a mistake surely, else our Welsh friends would own us all, or the land-rent of England be due as a magnifi- cent reparation to General Trochu and his Bretons,—and that the soil of the country belongs, therefore, to its people, that is, to the State. That theory is clear, consistent, and large, and would if acted on produce certain results he would approve, for, no doubt, the rental of England, if resumed at once by a Government supported by the millions, would defray her taxes ; but Mr. Odger is not a Continental revolutionist. In the English fashion he sees shadows of immorality, acci- dents of injustice, possibilities of misery in his own theory ; there have been quite a number of sales since the Conquest ; everybody cannot have been plundering when he gave good money for his bit of land ; we must not oppress, far less steal ; it will be dreadfully difficult to draw distinctions ; it is better to overpay the guilty than to rob the innocent,—just mark that, you country gentlemen, who think all Reds alike and so it would be better to compensate everybody from whom the land is taken away. We give the actual words ;—" I am well aware that property in land has been acquired by less objectionable modes, and that lands acquired by conquest and plunder have passed by purchase from their original owners. For instance, men have taken possession of land that was apparently worthless, and by their labours enriched it ; others possess by the investment of their savings from other sources of profit, and in some instances it has been bestowed for ser- vices rendered to the nation. Were it possible to sift these differences, I should advise a distinct and separate mode of dealing with each class of possessors ; but this is not possible, and hence I propose to meet the difficulty by making fair andi reasonable compensation to the present proprietors. There. are some exceptions, cases of acquirements so notorieuely bad,. that I would willingly except them ; but as I before said, or rather gave grounds for inferring, it is so much a question of degree, that such a mode of proceeding could only result in apparent and positive injustice." That paragraph will relieve many an anxious mind, which, now that people may become officers by competition, is. haunted with dread of spoliation, rapine, Sue, and every variety of wrong. There are grown men hi England, many of them, who believe that the moment a man in fustian gets power he will begin stealing, that a vote is itself an influence sufficient to corrupt the most elementary ideas of morals. Yet here is one of the dreaded class trying to do his woist, a,nd his worst is to make landholders sell their land at its full price, if Parliament shall decide that the public interest requires it. Even if Mr. Odger becomes President, with a I3arebones Parlia- ment behind him, land is only to be seized as the London, Chatham, and Dover Railway Company seizes it, and person- alty is to be let alone, or only interfered with by a release from all taxation, consequent on the new revenue of the State.
The three principles laid down,—that land belongs to the State, that it should be taken by the State, and that com- pensation at full value should be given to the owners—not being useless corporations—Mr. Odger proceeds to define the method of acquisition, and the uses to which the land is to be applied. The method, Mr. Odger's data granted, is a per- fectly fair ono, though perhaps a little unpractical. He assumes that the multiplication of proprietors must be greatly bene- ficial to the State. He holds, with many much greater econo- mists, that the State does not get quite its fair share of the rental, that the enfranchisement of the soil from military obligations without consideration in return, which marked the extinction of the feudal system, wail a theft—at least,. that seems to be the idea of his references to the obligations of service, &c.—and that the land-tax, now so light as to be- all but imperceptible, might fairly be multiplied fourfold, coming up at last to something like four shillings an acre.. The revenue thus produced, say about six millions, he would. accumulate, and with it purchase Great Britain, and lease it back to her people in minute parcels,—would, in fact, buy out both landlord and farmer, and let the labourer, subject to a moderate rental, have the land. He thinks this would make a man of him—as it would, a man so Conservative that Mr. Odger would anathematize him next minute for a pigheaded fool—and his motive for the change, his governing impulse, is pity for the peasants' condition, a pity so deep and real, and, as we should add, so well founded, that ho has forgotten altogether in his enthusiasm to work out his own sum. The land rental of the United Kingdom, and her mineral rental, which he would also buy, amount to £80,000,000 a year, and at Consol valuation would require for compensation a sum of £2,610,000,000, that is to say, nearly 450 years' yield of his proposed land-tax, or thirty years' yield of the whole taxation of the Empire, a space of time during which all the conditions of English life might be altered, new methods of distribution discovered, or those islands tied so closely by scientific improvements to the empty lands of the world that nobody would give even his moderate rental for a poor seven acres of soil. Even if the process were to be accumulative, that is, the rents of the, acquired lands also devoted to new purchases—which it is not to be, as the return to the people is that rental is to be treated as revenue—it would still take generations to effect. We need not discuss the proposition much farther, or say anything of the injustice of taxing the whole people for centuries to benefit a few of them every year, or of the enormous increase in price which would accompany incessant State purchases, or of any other of the myriad economic difficulties in the way of the' plan. No race that ever existed ever made a serious effort to. attain a result so distant, more especially when a much slighter one would attain a pleasanter result at once, namely, the gratis. emigration of every man who wished to lands where seventy acres instead of seven await the industrious toiler, under climates which are to that of Great Britain as the elimate of Penzance is to that of Kirkwall. That is the point, as sure as the sun rises, round which some day or other the.fight between the humanitarians and the economists will become active, not a dreamy scheme of purchasing out the landlords with accumulated snippets of their own rent-roll. It is nob redia-.
tribution of land, but assisted. emigration to freehold farms, which the labourers, if over they become a power in the State, will demand, it may be, unless education has done its full work, with the torch in their hands.
Mr. Odger's scheme needs only to be stated to be con- demned even by men who, like ourselves, believe that peasant proprietorship is a good, and will be the ultimate conserva- tive force of civilization, but there is no need either to con- demn or to ridicule Mr. Odger. He has not studied his pro- blem sufficiently, has, like so many dreamers on currency, national debts, and. State paper, forgotten that you cannot get more hay out of a field than there is grass in it,—is not, in short, sufficiently educated for a great economic reformer ; but there is no wilful injustice, no cruelty, and, no hatred of class in any part of his proposal. There is a little silliness or thought- lessness perhaps in the notion that the State could. buy the copper mines and then sell the poor man his kettle at a third its present price, and. still gain money on the transaction to use in relief of taxes—it must gain, otherwise Brown's money, who does not want a copper kettle, is spent to help Smith, who does,—but that is a trifle, compared with this, that the typical English Red, moved by a passion of pity for the condition of a class to which he does not belong, only proposes to equalize taxation—it is only equalization in his theory, whatever the fact might be—in order to accumulate a fund for full compensation of the class whom he is supposed to hate. This is the import- ant point, the temper, not the education, of our revolutionists. The education will come quick enough. A week of honest discussion with men who sympathize with his pity for the poor, but who understand figures, would convince Mr. Odger, or a million Mr. Odgers, that his scheme is impracticable on any scale which would affect the position of the bulk of the population ; but argument will not prove that ten men cannot be enriched by stealing the property of one. The moment the idea of confiscation, whether direct or concealed by payment in assignats, is giveti up, we regain a locus standi for discussion, and we have a good deal of confidence in English capacity, however untrained, to understand ordinary figures. There is nothing to fear in any scheme, however wild or however unpractical, if only it is based upon the moral law, upon the obligation of the State to keep its engagements, one of which is not to take away property except for the public good, and not to take it away at all except with compensation. There are remedies, ye believe, for the landlessness of the English masses ; but they are to be sought in other directions than a relent transfer, which in England, as in Ireland, would end in a chronic social war.
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