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THE DEMOCRAT.

"THEY HAVE RIGHTS WHO DARE MAINTAIN THEM."

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If Mr. Chamberlain and Sir William Harcourt are really competing for the leadership of the Liberal party, it must be on the principle of the donkey race where the hindmost takes the prize. A few days ago we thought that Mr. Chamberlain was, on this principle, certain of the stakes, but Sir William has checkmated him even on this line. In his wonderful pronouncement addressed to the Land Restoration League he claims for landlords that twothirds of the rent they receive is for interest on expenditure made by them on the land. He insists upon it that a landlord is entitled in perpetuity to 6 per cent. on such outlay, although it is well known that landlords often lend to themselves the money of the nation at 3 per cent. and even at 1 per cent., while they charge their tenants 5 or 6 per cent., and are thus wholly recouped in a few years. The fact is, landlords rarely spend on the land anything more than a portion of the rent they receive, and for which they have usually done nothing. In estimating their claims for improvement no outlay should be taken into account made more than twenty-five years ago, as in such cases they have been amply repaid. In so grossly overstating the case of the landlords, Sir William Harcourt has shown his inability to recognise the claims of the people. After the blunders made by Liberal chiefs, no man will gain the confidence of the party who does not manifest unmistakeable sympathy with, and a clear understanding of, the practical wants of the working classes, as they are determined no longer to be legally robbed of their hard earnings.

PRICE TWOpence.

One Day's Legislation.

On the 4th of August, 1792, the French Chamber passed the following enactments, which still remain the fundamental principles of the French system, and have never been tampered with, either by Royalists or Imperialists :—

1. Abolition de la qualité de serf.

2. Faculté de rembourser les droits seignoriaux.

3. Abolition des juridictions seigneuriales. 4. Suppression des droits exclusifs de chasse, &c.

5. Rochat de la dime.

6. Egalité des impôts.

7. Admission de tour les citoyens aux emplois civils et militaires.

8. Abolition de la vénalité des offices.

9. Destruction de tous les priviléges de villes et de provinces.

10. Reformation de jurondes.

11. Suppression de pensions obteneues sous titres.

The above was one day's work under a one Chamber legislature, and forms an encouraging precedent.

The School Board Contract.

The London School Board have to decide whether they will accept a tender under which a master printer offers to take their work at 65 per cent. below the standard price, a tender which can only be carried out by obtaining under-paid labour. There ought to be no hesitation on this point. Competition in the matter of public wages is not the rule, and it

ought not to be applied to printers when it is not adopted in other cases. No one would think of subjecting the wages of teachers to competition. The fees of the lawyer to the Board were not subject to tender. Neither are the salaries of public officers in general so determined. It is monstrous that men at the lower part of the social scale should be squeezed and trampled upon while those who are in higher positions and more able to take care of themselves should be protected from pressure. Either competition all round or consideration all round should be the rule, and if consideration prevails none are more entitled thereto than those whose work is so monotonous and wearying as that of a compositor.

Tiree Crofters Sentenced.

His "Grace" of Argyll has won the day, and five of the Tiree Crofters have been sentenced by an Edinburgh judge, Lord Muir, to six, and three to four, months' imprisonment for "deforcement." Not a hair of any man's head was harmed, nor was any property destroyed. Nevertheless, because the chickenhearted police took fright, and declined to serve the writs, the poor Crofters are punished for the cowardice of the constabulary. The jury, a middle-class jury-in this free country working men are carefully excluded from the jury-box-strongly recommended the prisoners to mercy, and six months' and four months' incarceration was what came of their recommendation. The Lord Advocate, who prosecuted, "did not think they would have been breakers of the law had it not been for newspapers giving records of such things happening elsewhere." Doubtless, Lord Advocate Macdonald would make short work of THE DEMOCRAT and other tell-tale prints were he press censor, which, happily, he is not. The fact of the matter is, all the traditions of the bench and bar in Scotland are arbitrary and despotic. For weeks Sheriff Ivory has been careering about Skye at the head of a band of constabulary and Marines, "harrying" the miserable, starving inhabitants in a manner that recalls the doings of a Claverhouse,

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Dalzell, or Laird of Lagg. How long the countrymen of Wallace and Bruce are expected to stand all this sort of thing it is for them to say. Have Scotsmen "become pigeon-livered and lack gall" that they continue to hand over unjust rents, and condemn the men who seek the deliverance of their countrymen from burdens which are insupportable.

Currency Crotchets.

Lord Rosebery, who is first favourite for the Liberal leadership, gives the second place in his programme to currency reform. He wisely omits to suggest the method which he advocates, and thus he will secure the votes of the silver speculators and currency doctors in general. The enormous sums already spent by Bonanza kings in order to enhance the price of silver, and add untold millions to their wealth at the public expense, have had some effect in misleading the public mind. This effect has heen the more easily produced because a radical change in our system of currency works wholly for the benefit of capitalists is undoubtedly necessary, and existing evils are not, however, to be removed by attempting the impossible task of keeping two metals at the same price, or by the absurd process of storing silver in vaults and printing paper to represent its value. We can have paper well secured without such costly and imbecile proceedings. There is one legitimate method of raising the price of silver, and that is repealing the duty on silver plate, which would at once develop Indian industry and assist the Indian currency.

Respecting the candidature of Mr. Henry George for the Mayoralty of New York, the Pall Mall Gazette says that Mr. George continues to make Socialist speeches which elicit much criticism. much criticism.

It should be noted that Mr.

George has never in his life made a Socialist speech, and it is extremely unlikely that he will ever do so. It is, however, necessary for Mr. George's opponents to represent him as a Socialist in order to evade the direct charges of fraud and plunder which Mr. George rings against the privileged classes.

LAND RESUMPTION IN AUSTRALIA.

to the great cause to which I have for a considerable number of years devoted myself, and TO THE EDITOR OF THE DEMOCRAT, I could not refuse to take advantage of it. The series on the Land movement in Great SIR,-In the end of 1882, after suffering Britain, which comprised eight papers, some protracted physical and mental lethargy, if not of them extending over three columns, attracted depression, which seemed as if it would never attention throughout the Australian Colonies, come to an end, I left England on board a and are even now, in certain quarters, not sailing ship that was bound for Adelaide, the infrequently referred to as the Rufus paper, capital of South Australia. The voyage re-in- that being the nom de plume under which they vigorated me. In the beginning of April, were written. In the course of these papers I 1883, I landed at that fair city, and after traced the contributions towards the developspending eight days in making myself ment of the idea, old as the hills, but forgotten acquainted with it and its environments, I and ignored, that the soil is a natural element went to the office of the Register, the principal essential to the existence of all the living paper in the colony, to deliver the solitary human beings on its surface; that it is not a letter of introduction I had brought to produce of human labour and skill, and that it Australia, which was addressed to the editing- is, therefore, not a legitimate or just subject of proprietor. I met the publishing-proprietor, private property. The work of Cobbett, and was informed by him that his partner had Cobden, Herbert Spencer, Henry George, A. R. left three days before on a visit to Europe. He Wallace, and others was summarised and asked leave to open the letter I had brought, revised; and I concluded with a hasty glance. which, of course, was at once granted; and the at the religious non-theological phase which first result was an invitation to dinner the the agitation assumed with those who preach same evening. There I met the gentleman the new, or, rather, the revived, land doctrine who was conducting the Register during the as the "Land Gospel." This was followed by absence of the editing-proprietor, and several occasional signed articles on one or other of the other intelligent and public-spirited citizens. almost universal ramifications of the land Information was desired regarding the move-question; but at the same time the land policy ments, political and social, that were stirring in the mother country, and I had, in particular, to explain in detail the agitation, which was then beginning to attract wide-spread attention, for the recovery of the land by the people. For seven or eight evenings in succession I was the guest of one or other of my new friends, and always after dinner the theme that was mainly discussed was land nationalisation. It occurred to Mr. J. Medway Day, the gentleman who was interim editor of the Register, that the readers of that journal might be as interested as he was himself in the account I gave him of the development of the land doctrine that was visibly and steadily rising into prominence in Britain, and he asked me to write a series of articles on the subject. Before the month of April had passed, the first of these articles appeared. It dealt with the teachings of that remarkable radical reformer, Thomas Spence, who, in 1775, made what is probably the first, and is still the most decided and definite, declaration in favour of the nationalisation, or parochialisation, of the land that has been uttered by an Englishman. Before the third of the series appeared, I was requested to join the editorial staff of the Register, and write for that paper until the return of its editor. Here was an opportunity of doing important and influential service

of the Register was, in its leading columns, gradually, but steadily, undergoing a radical change. Within a few months it openly and earnestly advocated the stoppage of the further alienation of the State lands, and began to discuss the various methods suggested for the recovery of the ten million odd acres that in South Australia have become private property. As an evidence of the favour with which the Register policy in regard to the land was received by the community, I may mention that the rival organ of Adelaide, the Advertiser, for a time adopted it, although it did little more than echo the ideas of its contemporary.

But I have to note far more important results of the propaganda begun, or revived, in South Australia by the Register. Amongst all classes, friends of land resumption soon declared themselves, and a desire was felt that their forces should be organised. It was not, however, until April, 1884, that a South Australian Land Nationalisation Society was formed. In the beginning of February of that year, I went to Kapunda, a town about 200 miles to the north of Adelaide, on the invitation of several ardent and devoted friends of the cause, and delivered a lecture on the "Problem of the Age, the Land Question and its Solution," Institute Hall there, to an overaudience: This discourse, was

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reported verbatim in the Kapunda Herald, and afterwards published in pamphlet form, and circulated by the thousand. Within a few weeks the South Australian Land Nationalisation Society was established, and ever since, by the issue of tracts and leaflets, and the holding of meetings, lecturing, etc., it has carried on an active and most successful agitation. This society has now thirteen branches in various parts of the colony; and about six months ago there was a conference in Adelaide of delegates from these branches, at which it was unanimously resolved to petition the Legislature to abolish all taxes, with the exception of the duty on spirits, and to raise the revenue by the imposition of a tax of 3d. in the pound on the unimproved value of the alienated lands. There is, I may mention, a tax of d. in the pound on the unimproved value of land that is private property in that colony, and the adoption of the policy of land taxation by the Government, in this modified and partial form, was one of the results of the advocacy by the Register of a more thorough and Radical application of the principle.

Until about five months ago the chief journalistic advocates of the abolition of property in land in South Australia were the Adelaide Register and the Kapunda Herald, and both papers have ably and consistently maintained that the land is the indispensable and inalienable property of the whole of the people, although the latter has, perhaps, been the more zealous latterly in its promulgation of that principle in its efforts to apply it to the conduct of affairs. Since that time, however, a weekly journal, called Our Commonwealth, has appeared regularly at Adelaide, which is specially and exclusively devoted to the promotion of the people's rights and interests, including, necessarily and primarily, their rights to and interests in the soil, on and from which they live, and to which they return. Of the ability, the spirit, and the character with which this organ is conducted, I would find it difficult to speak too highly, and it will certainly redound greatly to the credit of the 300,000 inhabitants of South Australia if a sufficient number of them are found duly to appreciate its value and to support it.

South Australia is the centre of the movement for Land Resumption in the Southern Hemisphere, and the small town of Kapunda, thanks to the intelligence and self-devotion of the noble band of men and women who founded and have directed the action of the parent Land Nationalisation Society there, is its head-quarters. It may be that none of the

colonies of the British Empire will anticipate the mother country in the abolition of property in land, but if one of them does so it would not surprise me although that one were South Australia. Not only do many of her sons recognise that the recovery by the people of their natural rights to the soil would inevitably and immediately promote her progress and prosperity "by leaps and bounds," but, what is more important, they have a clear and firm grasp of the great moral principles which demand the overthrow of the institution of property in land. There is a "remnant

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there, and a large and powerful remnant, too, that should be sufficient to save the colony from the privation, and even destruction that, in common with other parts of the civilised world, old and new, are visibly impending over it.

I have dwelt at considerable length on the land movement in South Australia because it is, to my mind, of far more importance than the corresponding movement in any of the other Australasian colonies; but I must glance at what has been done, and is being done, in New South Wales, New Zealand, and Victoria to enlighten the public mind and rouse the public conscience with reference to the relation in which the people should stand towards the soil from which they derive, and ever must derive, their sustenance. About eighteen months ago a public meeting was held in Sydney for the purpose of calling attention to the programme of the New South Wales Land League, which had then just been established. Some of the speeches delivered at that meeting were exceedingly interesting. For instance, one of the speakers referred to a statement which had shortly before been made at a banquet at Orange by the Minister of Lands that fourteen individuals had become possessed of freehold property of over fourteen million acres out of the forty millions that had been fully alienated in that colony, and rightly asserted that New South Wales was in a far worse condition in this respect than Great Britain. The severe depression in trade, from which Sydney and Adelaide have suffered more acutely than any of the other Australian centres of population, is obviously the result of locking up the land available for settlement, and the people in both towns are beginning to perceive the true cause of the evils that periodically afflict them. When I last heard of the progress that the Land League of New South Wales was making, some two or three months before I left Melbourne, it seemed that a formidable combination would be formed, and I expect to hear shortly of the work that it is

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doing. The cause of Land Reform, in its Radical acceptation, has a very powerful and very pungent advocate in the Sydney Bulletin, to which I had the pleasure of contributing during my stay in that city, and in Melbourne. Whilst in Sydney, I wrote a few articles on various aspects of the Land Question, which appeared in the "open columns" of the Sydney Morning Herald, the leading newspaper of New South Wales, and to which the editor responded in the leading columns. An article however, on "Confiscation or Compensation?" which called forth several editorial replies that were not apparently considered conclusive and satisfactory, brought me intimation that the "Council" who conduct that journal had resolved to exclude any further articles from me on the land, even from the "open columns," where the writers alone are responsible, although they would be very pleased to receive my contributions on any other subject. As a matter of course, I could not accept this condition, and I accordingly addressed myself to the Evening News, which has the largest circulation of any daily paper published in Sydney. Here the difficulties I encountered were of a somewhat different and more unbearable kind. This paper was conducted with a sublime indifference to principles which could only be attained by entire ignorance of what they meant, and I cannot believe that I was able to do much good by the little that appeared in its columns from my pen. Still, the seed was flying in the air, and some of it fell on good ground, and will yet, doubtless, bring forth fruit. There, as everywhere else that I have been during the past five or six years, I found many persons ready to assent to the intellectual propositions of the argument for the abolition of property in land as a necessary means to the emancipation of the people; but the vast majority of them, from self-interest or apathy, were not prepared to give effect to their convictions and quit themselves like men. Some of them who either had, or thirsted for, large landed possessions, believed; but, as the Apostles' devils did, they "believed and trembled," desiring that the truth was other than it is.

Victoria is the most backward of all the Australian colonies in the movement for the recovery of the soil, and its backwardness is undoubtedly largely to be accounted for by the prevalence of the economic heresies miscalled "Protection." The Melbourne Age, which is the democratic organ, and has an enormously larger circulation than any other paper published in Victoria, professes itself in

favour of land nationalisation, but, with the grossest inconsistency imaginable, it combines the abolition of property in land with the imposition of prohibitive duties on imported. manufactures. The Melbourne Argus, which has a very small circulation and no influence whatever, except with the landocracy and the capitalists, who approve of what it terms "colonial commercialism," under which all things are reduced to a question of profitscapitalists' profits-with an equally ridiculous incongruity advocates Free Trade and land monopoly. In all the Australasian colonies speculation in land is rife, but in Melbourne and Victoria it is more prevalent than anywhere else. The gambling spirit pervades all new countries to a greater extent than it does old countries, but it is all-pervading in Australia, and its dominance is manifestly one of the consequences of the institution of property in land. By investment in land an individual may there become possessed of the products of other men's labours more readily and with more certainty than he can do by any other means. The land system is consequently a far more powerful and effective source of demoralisation there than betting or horseracing, rowing matches, or any other sport, or, indeed, or all sports put together. But there are in Victoria men who perceive the iniquity of property in land, and the grievous evils that flow from it, although there are very few who attempt to right the wrong, and stay the mischief that flows from it. In 1871 there was an organisation alive in Melbourne entitled "The Land Tenure Reform League," which had for its main objects the cessation of the sale of State lands, and the resumption, with compensation, of the lands thus alienated. Several of the tracts published by this League have fallen into my hands, and they show a very remarkable insight into the land question for the period at which they were issued. late years several attempts have been made to form another organisation with similar objects, but they have all practically failed. Mr. C. E. Jones, M.P., the editor and proprietor of The People's Tribune, a weekly journal that strictly advocates land resumption, presided over two or three meetings, which I attended, about a year ago, that had for their object the formation of a Victorian Land Nationalisation Society, but the number of members who presented themselves and the funds subscribed were in-sufficient even for the nucleus of such an organisation. Notwithstanding these failures, however, I met with a large number of persons in Melbourne and other parts of Victoria who are thoroughly convinced of the soundness of the doctrine of

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