.

Edgar Buck was a longstanding member of the international Georgist movement. By profession, he worked as a Consultant Solicitor and for most of his life was as an active partner in the offices of Philips and Buck, a well-known firm of Cardiff solicitors. During the 'fifties and 'sixties he became the driving force behind the revival of the branch of the International Committee for the Taxation of Land Values in South Wales and, together with late Fred Giggs and myself, founded a series of tutorial classes on Georgist economics in Cardiff, which thrived for more than a decade. In 1971 he was elected President of the Law Society in South Wales. Later he took an active part in international affairs in the city and became the Welsh President of the United Nations Association (Welsh National Council) from 1977 to 1980. He was also appointed an honorary consultant to the Welsh Centre for International Affairs. What motivated his interest in the international scene was his desire to banish poverty from the Third World by applying to their economies the Georgist principles of free trade, sound money, and the taxation of land values. During his period of office he decided to place these principles in their proper historical perspective, and The Broken Trust was the result. Although first published in 1983, Edgar Buck's historical approach to his subject has guaranteed that the work is as fresh and as relevant today as it was when it was first written. It has therefore been republished with just the minimal amount of correction and updating in the light of further scholarship, and it remains a cogent argument in favour of a truly rational and liberal approach to the issues involved in the production, distribution and exchange of wealth. Without such an approach, as he frequently argued, even in the Western democracies the individual enjoys only a limited form of political freedom, while for all intents and purposes he or she remains an economic slave. This is ultimately the result of the continuing hegemony of an outmoded system of land tenure. [Professor F.J. Jones, 1997]

CHAPTER ONE

IN THE MEMORY of many people alive today there have been a number of major industrial depressions, coming in cycles as if they were natural phenomena, and invariably bringing hardship for working people.

Clearly, these depressions must have a common cause; and that cause must be economic and must apply to each and every depression in turn. This is not generally recognised. The usual causes of depression (or recession) are said to be that workpeople expect too much in wages and that either this expectation, or overspending by governments, inflates the currency.

Yet in the 1920s wages were appallingly low; and, since the United Kingdom was then on the gold standard, any significant inflation of the currency was not possible. There was depression just the same.

Apart from the hardship caused by the relentless cycle of economic depressions, there is an enormous incidence of poverty and stark hunger in the world, a world with an abundance of resources sufficient to provide plenty for all.

The purpose of this enquiry is to demonstrate that all these evils arise from the breach of the most fundamental charitable trust known to man.

Charitable Trusts

A charitable trust is an arrangement under which certain persons (the trustees) administer property for the benefit of specified beneficiaries, the objects of the trust being strictly defined and, in one way or another, beneficial to the community.

The advantages of being recognised as a charitable trust (or "charity") are, mainly, exemption from the law against perpetuities (this allows them to remain in existence for as long as their work requires) and partial exemption from taxation.

Under the Charities Act of 1960, an organisation called the Charity Commissioners supervises the operation of charities with the aim of ensuring that it is the specified objects of charitable trusts which receive the benefits. Were the trustees to use their trust's resources to support objects other than those defined, they could be held personally liable to make good the misapplication.

In the report of the Charity Commissioners for England and Wales for 1979 there are three important paragraphs:

127:

Charity trustees must protect the property of their charity and must maintain a high standard of efficiency and integrity. If property is lost to a charity we may have to consider whether the trustees are personally liable to make good that loss or part of it.

140, (relating to Management of Land):

We refer in paragraph 127 of this report to the possibility that trustees who are negligent or who act unreasonably may find themselves personally liable to make good any loss suffered by their charity as a result. Instances of this, although rare, may arise in connection with the leasing of charity property.

144:

The points we want to emphasise here are: --

(a) that trustees have a duty to ensure that the property of the charity is managed efficiently so as to secure the best return from it that can reasonably be expected while safeguarding the real value of the capital and (1,) the importance of making suitable arrangements for the regular review of rents and for their increase within the constraints imposed by law.

In these brief paragraphs, the government of a nation, through its legislation, is holding trustees accountable for the performance of their trusts.

The Charitable Trusts of Governments

But governments themselves are trustees. They are responsible for the proper administration of all the land within their national boundaries. This land was not provided by the government nor, indeed, by any earthly authority. It happens to fall within the guardianship of the government during its terms of office.

There has never been, inside or outside of statute or other law, a trust so self-evident, so absolute and so just as the divine charitable trust which provided the land of our planet -- the natural resources of the Earth -- for the benefit of all living creatures.

Land is the sine qua non of our existence. And over this vast store of natural resources man exerts dominion. Whether one accepts the biblical version of the Creation, with the gift of the dominion of all things to man in God's image, or prefers to regard land as the gift of Nature or Providence, is largely immaterial. The fact of man's dominion is incontrovertible.

It is clear that, not only was mankind given dominion, but that the subject of this dominion is not a once-for-all gift; for it has the special feature of producing sustenance regularly and abundantly in a form of perpetual motion. This is a peculiarity of Nature and though mankind has always been teased by the prospect of achieving perpetual motion it has never succeeded. On the other hand, man has many abilities, not the least of which is to encourage Nature to give at a greater speed and in greater measure. Such is the strength of his natural dominion.

Mankind has divided itself into separate nations, each having jurisdiction over the area it has established as its homeland, with the consequence that the government of each nation holds, or should hold, the land in trust for all of its people. Yet poverty, hunger and unemployment is the lot of the majority of the human race.

Primitive man was not so afflicted. While he suffered from the harshness of Nature and frequently endured the failure of harvests and even famine, he did not suffer poverty and enforced idleness in the midst of plenty as is the lot of many millions of unfortunate people in the developed conditions of today.

The reason for this fundamental difference between the lot of primitive man and that of his modern successor lies in their differing treatment of land. It is clear from history that as human society became organised, so the more self-seeking of its members sought to monopolise land, i.e. to commandeer it for their own exclusive use, and thus deprive their fellow men of their means of livelihood and, eventually, of their liberty.

To illustrate the power over his fellow men that the land monopolist is able to exert, Henry George wrote, in his Social Problems, as follows:

Robinson Crusoe, as we all know, took Friday as his slave. Suppose, however, that instead of taking Friday as his slave, Robinson Crusoe had welcomed him as a man and brother, had read him a Declaration of Independence, an Emancipation Proclamation and a Fifteenth Amendment, and informed him that he was a free and independent citizen, entitled to vote and hold office; but had at the same time also informed him that that particular island was his (Robinson Crusoe's) private and exclusive property. What would have been the difference? Since Friday could not fly up into the air nor swim off through the sea, since if he lived at all he must live on the island, he would have been in one case as much a slave as in the other. Crusoe's ownership of the island would be equivalent of his ownership of Friday.

In our day, our reaction to that story would probably be to recognise that here was confrontation between man and man to be resolved by conflict. But what if the rights of Crusoe were in a populated area and given the backing of the law? From this simple illustration we can discern the position of mankind today and observe the deprivation and conflict which stems from it.

Land - the Broken Charitable Trust

We will now investigate how, in Britain, we came to the present troublous situation. We will then examine the economic considerations involved, the problem as it affects other communities and the proposed remedy.

In this investigation we shall come to see how originally, long before the land became subject to private ownership, Britons "ran free". How there came a time when all land was vested in the monarchy who raised all public revenues from it and used it as a quid pro quo for the provision of armies for the defence of the realm. In short, the King held the land as trustee for the nation. Then came the Norman Conquest which led to the establishment of a network of feudal rights and duties. Under it, land was granted by the Crown to individuals in feu (which became in course of time in fee) which carried obligations to contribute as before although the recipients sometimes repeated the process and "sublet" land to others for fixed duties or tributes. Nevertheless, the King still held the land in trust to provide for the expenses of government.

As I shall demonstrate later, powerful people gradually corrupted this process until nothing was payable to the King or the country. The only relic of its existence is verbal in that, today, the absolute ownership of land -- i.e. the ownership of the freehold -- is called ownership in fee simple. There is no feu or other payment; ownership in fee simple signifies absolute ownership of the surface of the land and all above and below it. In the following pages I shall also treat of the land problem as it exists in other countries. In short, I shall endeavour to expose the greatest public breach of trust in the world and suggest the path necessary to restore the trust property to the rightful beneficiaries.

CHAPTER TWO Britain Before the Enclosures

THERE IS LITTLE value in considering, in any great detail, the period up to 800 A.D. because, although life in Britain was then primitive and, by modern standards, unorganised, the people invariably had access to the soil and could provide for themselves. Their mode of life was rude but there were no unemployed; how could there be when a man always had the opportunity, by working on the land, to provide for himself and his family?

So the story of the disinheriting of Britons from their basic rights must be sought after that period.

Saxon England - The Growth of Feudalism

Before the Norman Conquest, feudalism was not properly established in Saxon England. There were great landowners before 1066 who had obligations to provide armed men at the king's bidding (and the rendering of such service to the King was commonplace) but the system was nothing like William I's later, rigid network of feudal rights and duties. Indeed, tenure and service were intermixed in a most confusing manner; one man could acknowledge another's leadership, hold his land from a third and be dependent on a fourth in matters of jurisdiction. The numerous sokemen, i.e. dwellers in a particular district, could go with their lords wherever they pleased and were not tenants of any particular lord in a feudal sense. Many people held their lands by witness of the shire and not by any express or implied feudal obligation.

Neither the giving of service nor the acceptance of mutual obligations was an essential condition in the grant or the tenure of land.

Before 1066, though the King granted land, the grants were based more upon the notion of a regal sovereignty over the whole territory and population of the realm rather than on the feudal concept of a right of ownership of land residing with the King from which all other private rights in land had to be derived. This later notion, known as nulle terre sans seigneur, was introduced by William I and, in this context, is the great significance of the Norman Conquest.

The Position of the Peasantry

Before the Conquest, the lordship over land was held by the local community, not the King, and the unoccupied and unappropriated land of the country ("folkland") belonged originally and ultimately to the folk of that province; and though permanent inheritance for use might be granted in this land to a community or individual, the community as a whole retained the absolute ownership. The thane, or lord, was not a landlord but a chieftain who protected the land of the local community.

The essence of the freedom of access to land was, first, the lack of centralised government which allowed for the autonomy and power of the individual village communities or vills and, secondly, the large amount of unoccupied land which was far greater than the number of people wishing to work on it. To begin a new settlement, a man had only to build on 'loan-land", hoping in time that he would be allowed to hold it as "bookland", i.e. in perpetuity.

Further, land was so easily available that if a man had no land the law compelled him to get land so that he would not be a burden on the community. (The surest way for a common person to obtain land was to place himself under the protection of a lord.) Thus there was no need for able-bodied pauperism, for every healthy man could obtain work.

Norman England

Twenty years after the Conquest, with the publication of the Domesday Book, came the momentous introduction of full-scale feudalism. The Domesday Book, the great inquest of 1086, gave detailed information about the land of the kingdom, chiefly that south of Yorkshire and Cheshire, and introduced the feudal system by laying stress on tenure under the King. It involved the revision of all the country's ties of tenure and service and of the grants given and services due, and led to a far more structured and rigid system.

The pre-Conquest "folkland" now disappeared, to become terra Regis, the king's land, his absolute property. The manor, including the unoccupied waste land[1] within its limits, came to be regarded as the property of the lord of the manor. Whilst it was held of the King, the holding was subject only to the rendering of certain simple services, and for all practical purposes it was the lord of the manor's land. The lord's jurisdiction over the waste land of the community had been growing even in Saxon England, but now the idea of land being owned by the community, as distinct from the King, had distinctly faded.

However, there were still vast areas of arable land available to the population and therefore no shortage. Often more than half the land of a county was under the plough and it was this emphasis on arable agriculture that favoured the small tenant.

There is no doubt that the Norman Conquest was a misfortune for the English peasants for if their interests clashed with those of the new lords they were bound to lose. Their position was secure only as long as the lords had no special reasons for interfering with their rights over the waste of the manors. Still, for the time being, these rights were allowed to continue, subject to the payment to the lord of dues for the privilege of exercising them.

However, labour was still valuable and the demand for it exceeded the supply. Although many peasants held their land at the will of the lord, their tenure was in fact secure, and by the law of the land they could not be removed as long as they paid their dues.

By the end of the twelfth century the condition of the serfs had improved. They usually owned small plots of land and, in addition, they had extremely valuable "rights of common" which generally consisted of rights of pasture on waste land and meadow land and rights of common over the open arable fields after harvest, and also such rights as fern-cutting and wood collection.

The year 1215 saw the great Magna Carta under the seal of King John. This is generally regarded as the basis of freedom in Britain. Laws and constitutions have been based upon it. But, in fact, it was largely concerned with the relationship between the King and the barons. Nevertheless, it was an important event in the economic history of England although not one to bring any comfort to the mass of the population. For it paved the way for the expenses of government to cease to be met from land revenues and to be transferred to taxes on the incomes and property of working people. It was to prove the key, several centuries later, to the diversion of much of the benefits of the industrial revolution from those who work and manage in industry to those who merely own the land.

CHAPTER THREE The Enclosures and the Industrial Revolution

AT THIS time landlords began taking in and fencing all plots of waste ground with the consent of the freeholders - a practice known as "assorting". Though this reduced the common pasture of the manor, there was little opposition as long as pasture rights were not seriously affected.

Also at this time, the practice of "approvement" grew up, by which the lord, without the consent of the freeholders, enclosed the land. But, here again the practical effects were limited for, by the Statute of Merton (1216), the freeholders had to be left "as much pasture as sufficeth to their tenements and that they have free egress and regress from the tenements unto the pasture." Despite this palliative, however, it can be seen that these small-scale activities of some lords had great and ominous significance. The enclosures, the grim process that was ultimately to deprive the English peasant of his traditional rights in the land, had begun.

Still, the encroachments did not matter as long as there was sufficient land for all, and labour was too valuable to drive away. Also copyhold[2] tenants were guaranteed security of tenure. Landless labourers, as we now know them, did not exist, and there was therefore no sharp dividing line between farmers and labourers. Employment was regular, as there was no violent fluctuation in the demand for artisans' products. Every man had an opportunity of producing his own subsistence and consequently his demand was effective and regular.

The Black Death -- 1347-1351

The Black Death greatly reduced the supply of labourers and therefore raised the price of labour. However, though the wages of labour shot up, most agricultural goods fetched no more than they did before the plague for there was no monopoly of food production. As wages rose the lords' profits from their lands declined. They sought a remedy for this in the Statute of Labourers 1351, a measure designed to hold down wages, but in this they failed. The hands of the peasants were thus greatly strengthened as the lords were very anxious to retain their labour. Wages were high and labour dues or services were commuted for money payments.

Thus the English labourer, for a century or more, became virtually free and constantly prosperous.

Landlords React -- The Trend to Unemployment

The cost of labour encouraged the lords to change from arable farming to sheep farming which required fewer labourers. Sheep farming, however, called for larger areas of land and this led to further extensive enclosures. This phase of the enclosure movement was given impetus by an increased demand for wool which led to the employment of more labour in the towns. The effect on the agricultural labourer, however, was disastrous. Unemployment started to appear and, before very long, led to the depopulation of the manors. That the problem was recognised by the governing classes is shown by Sir Thomas More's Utopia. Also, the lords must have known the effect of what they were doing as they were destroying houses and villages. They, however, had found a means of increasing rents in spite of a shortage of labour and to them that was all that mattered.

It was the enclosures and the growth of industry in the towns that led to the creation of a class of dependent wage earners. It was the enclosures also that denied this class a fair wage, as it prevented their leaving the towns to farm if they were dissatisfied with their wages[3]. Further, the expansion of industry created a large merchant class who accelerated enclosures by buying up land.

At this time the system was no longer feudal, but this, if anything, was a handicap because Parliament was controlled by landowners and all the executive could, or would, do was to offer palliatives such as the Poor Laws.

The Escalation of the Enclosures

By the beginning of the sixteenth century the enclosure movement was so serious that the Government took energetic measures to stem it. An Act of 1489 against the pulling down of towns had been ineffective. It must be remembered that the enclosure movement was also putting up the price of food, for it involved the conversion of land to pasture which gave an increased profit of twenty-eight per cent over arable use. This naturally led to increased prices for food.

People who had been on the same land for generations were evicted. Copyholders were compelled to accept short-term leases instead of their copies. (The lords here made use of ambiguities in the law interpreting the copyholder's tenure. The words stating that the land was held "at the will of the lord, according to the custom of the manor" were taken to mean "at the whim of the lord".)

Whole towns were destroyed, houses crumbled, farms were taken over and populations dispossessed. Copyholders were among the depressed, for legal niceties were wholly ignored though, of course, the majority of the dispossessed were those holding their leases at the will of the lord.

The dissolution of the monasteries and the subsequent redistribution of the land among the King's favourites brought a large number of new landlords onto the scene. These landlords, mainly merchants, tended to squeeze all they could out of their newly acquired property and this led to fresh enclosures and evictions. The feeling against enclosures and the dissolution is shown by the 1536 rising in the North.

Cotters (cottagers) and serfs who had neither leases nor copyholds were evicted straightaway, and those whose holdings were too small to be viable on their own but which carried rights of common, or the opportunity to work on lands of the lord of the manor, were compelled to leave when those rights were taken away from them.

The discontent against the enclosures was shown in yet another rising, this time in the West in 1548.

The widespread destruction of houses and villages, the depopulation of the countryside, widespread unemployment and social unrest can thus all be laid at the door of the landowners of the day. There were numerous attempts to halt enclosures such as Somerset's "Proclamation against Enclosures" of 1548 which was followed by the re-enactment of the Statute of Merton[4]. But still the enclosures continued. The landowners knew that they could act with relative impunity for there was no formal civil service or police force to enforce such statutes and, in any case, the enclosers formed a hugely powerful lobby in Parliament.

Though enclosures of pasture slackened in favour of enclosures of arable land, they still continued and there were frequent civil disturbances throughout Elizabeth I's reign.

Throughout the sixteenth century beggary and vagrancy grew. The Government's attempts to check them by savage sanctions were, of course, useless whilst all attempts to stop the enclosures failed.

As the sixteenth century drew to a close, Parliament was dominated by the landowning element and its supporters. While this situation remained, no effective measures against enclosures were to be expected. Some action was needed, however, to relieve the plight of the unemployed and a measure was introduced to raise the necessary funds by a "poor rate", a levy on householders. In the great Poor Law of 1601 we see the beginning of the transfer of the expenses of government from levies on the land to taxes on labour and industry.

So by the seventeenth century, although the openfield village was still the cornmonest type, and peasants still had access to some of the land, much of the most accessible land was enclosed and monopolised.

In the seventeenth century enclosures were carried out by agreement (i.e. by the amalgamation of holdings) confirmed by Chancery Decree, and sometimes by Act of Parliament. Parliament was still full of landowners and their followers and, broadly speaking, they and the clergy formed the educated class. There was yet another Enclosure Proclamation in 1607 but it was as ineffective as all the others. It appointed judges to look into the justice of each enclosure but, obviously, a large landowner could exert far more pressure on a judge than could a peasant.

The attitude of the authorities to enclosures was vacillating. In 1629 the tillage laws of Elizabeth were repealed and an increase in enclosures followed, but it was then decided by the Court of Chamber that "depopulation" was a common-law offence, and several prosecutions followed.

The Law of Settlement 1662 kept the labourer in the parish of his birth and prevented him from wandering in search of work. This made the labourer even more vulnerable to exploitation for he was, then more than ever, "a serf without land".

That the tenure of the labourer was at all times insecure throughout this century will be gathered from the continuance of enclosures which proceeded in step with the Industrial Revolution. After a comparative lull the number of enclosures again accelerated, stimulated by agricultural revolution and a rise in agricultural prices during the Seven Years War, together with the eagerness of merchants and industrialists to acquire land.

After the middle of the century the private Act of Parliament to enclose became the rule, a procedure requiring some expenditure which, consequently, gave the large landowners a dominant voice.

Between 1702 and 1895 there were 1,385 Acts for enclosing common pasture and waste only, and Dr. Slater puts the total acreage at 1,765,711 acres.

In The Village Labourer, J.L. and Barbara Hammond said:

We give elsewhere a detailed analysis, disentangled from the Journals of Parliament and other sources, of particular enclosures. We propose to give here illustrations of the temper of the Parliamentary Committees. One illustration is provided by a speech made by Sir William Meredith, one of the Rockingham Whigs, in 1772. ... 'Sir William Meredith moved ... that no Bill, or clause in a Bill, making any offence capital, should be agreed to but in a Committee of the whole House.' He observed that at present the facility of passing such clauses was shameful: that he when passing a Committeeroom, when only one Member was holding a Committee, with a clerk's boy, he happened to hear something of hanging; he immediately had the curiosity to ask what was going forward in that small Committee that could merit such a punishment? He was answered, that it was an Inclosing Bill, in which a great many poor people were concerned, who opposed the Bill; that they feared those people would obstruct the execution of the Act and therefore this clause was to make it capital felony in anyone who did so. This resolution was unanimously agreed to. (Parliamentary Register 24~1774)

This is an indication of the situation in that day. The Village Labourer gives an exhaustive and well documented record of the struggles involved. This situation continued into the nineteenth century.

The enclosure of common land led to large-scale farming and depopulation. Consolidation and conversion led to higher rents, but a smaller gross product.

The purpose of the enclosures was wholly to secure increased rents for the landowners. The suggestions that they were made necessary by "declining soil productivity" or that large-scale farming was necessary for improvement, are refuted by the facts. The evidence of relative yields per acre shows an increase from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century.

Thus the land was monopolised, the common land of the countryside fenced in and the peasant turned into a landless serf. A last effort was made to increase wages and better living conditions through the Warwickshire Agricultural Labourers Union but this, too, failed. The Enclosures Completed

After 1845 the pace of enclosures fell but the damage had long since been done. The ownership of the land became concentrated into the hands of a few thousand territorial lords. The Government periodically appointed Commissioners to look into agricultural distress!

After the First World War (1914-18) the landowner's power over the tenant or labourer came through the tied-cottage system by which, if he incurred his employer's displeasure, the labourer lost not only his job but his home. It also deterred the tenant from applying for a smallholding. This insecurity also encouraged peasants to leave for the towns.

The British System of Local Rates

Another legacy of the enclosures which still survives and favours landowners is the rating system which, as recounted above, was introduced in the Poor Law of 1601.

The system of rating in Great Britain, under which land which is unused escapes rates altogether, and underdeveloped land is assessed only on the annual value of the actual development whatever its value for other purposes may be, encourages under-use or even the withholding of land from use altogether.

The Poor Law of 1601, the origin of the rating system, clearly bears the stamp of the landowning class who forced the original law through Parliament. Although, in an incidental and haphazard way, some of the value of landholdings is taken into account in assessments (although even this has been whittled away over the year with various measures of "derating") the rates are primarily a tax on buildings and other man-made improvements to the land. Before the Poor Law of 1601, the primary source of national revenue was land. This meant that the King and Government were taking, for the benefit of the Exchequer, a share in the rents paid to landlords by labourers, industry and commerce for the use of land. After 1601, the users of land were, in effect, paying twice -- once in rent to their landlords and, again, in the tax on their homes and other buildings.

The Effects of the Enclosures

The history of the enclosures, from about 1200 to 1895, is the story of the progressive exploitation and impoverishment of the English peasant and labourer. In 1795, according to Geary[5], the labourer obtained about one-eighth of what was earned by the same labour in the fifteenth century. Dispossessed of his land, deprived of his sense of family independence, forced to seek work in the industrial areas, mostly at beggarly wages, and frequently unemployed and destitute, his position was as abject as any landless serf.

There can be no doubt that the immediate responsibility for this pauperisation of a once-proud, albeit lowly, member of English society lies with the process of private land monopoly. Throughout the centuries from Saxon times to the reign of Victoria, the landowners stole the common land from the common people, the monopoly gradually being concentrated into fewer and fewer hands.

But the main responsibility lies at the door of successive governments, especially those of later centuries, because, although they occasionally made token efforts to prevent enclosures, they failed to give the problem the attention it deserved; even though it is clear from such works as More's Utopia that the effect of the enclosures in creating unemployment, poverty and high prices was well understood. The injustice of private land monopoly existed before the enclosures, but the enclosure process extended and deepened that injustice and finally established it as a permanent feature of the British social scene.

Thus did successive British governments fail in their trusteeship and deprive the vast majority of working folk of their natural inheritance. In Chapter Five we will see that, in Britain, governments eventually came to recognise this breach of trust but that their efforts to remedy it were largely abortive.

CHAPTER FOUR The Economics of Land Tenure

IN THE PRECEDING two chapters we traced the way in which the land of Britain, having being owned partly in common and partly by large numbers of individuals using their smallholdings directly for their family livelihoods, fell into the hands of a comparatively small number of landlords who became the owners of large estates. The process by which this fundamental change came about has been described in relation to rural areas but it applied equally to urban land, which today is as much privately owned as is the land of the countryside. Moreover, in considering the economic and social conditions of the people, the urban areas of a country -- the areas of dense population and high development - - are of very great importance indeed, for reflected in the value of the land is the benefit of the division of labour of those who live and work there.

The division of labour is the process whereby mankind specialises in particular products or processes. Primitive man had to cut himself a stick to spear a fish, a tiller of the land had to fashion a rude wooden spade. In due course the fisherman thought of a net; the tiller made use of stone and then iron to plough, and the consequence was greater production for less effort. As time went on, instead of every man doing everything for himself, some began to specialise in particular functions. Some fishermen found it more profitable just to make nets and not to fish at all, and those tillers with a bent for making tools began to devote themselves fulltime to tool-making.

The development of man's productive processes has proceeded steadily over the centuries until in today's highly complex world we are all specialists of one kind or another. Whether we work in factories, offices, storehouses, shipyards or anywhere else, we all tend to specialise more than our counterparts did a few generations ago.

Side by side with this growth in specialisation has come astonishing progress in technology, transport and the development of industrial processes.

The virtual explosion in the volume of wealth that these advances in methods and technology have brought about should have the consequence that labourers would now live a well supplied life with very short working hours. Not only is this not so, but the contrary is true. Labourers make only a bare living for working most of their waking hours and many are unemployed. Primarily because of the historical events recounted in Chapters Two and Three (some would say because of new technology -- but that is not basically so) he cannot turn to providing for himself because no land is available for him to do so. In countries where land monopoly is present without social services to take care of those who are landless and unemployed, able-bodied men and their families die of hunger.

In conditions of land monopoly the landowner takes, through the land rent paid to him, an increasing share of the wealth produced. Hence it becomes clear that, just as in the rural areas in former times the labourer was kept out of work or only on subsistence wages, the same applies to his existence in a more sophisticated society. Indeed it could be responsibly asserted that labour (those who work) and capital (those who provide the buildings and equipment for industry) have not had the benefit of the revolution which their efforts brought about.

Let us, at this juncture, look dispassionately at the economics of the situation. Consider these words by David Ricardo (1772-1823):

The rent of land is determined by the excess of its produce over that which the same application can secure from the least productive land in use.

This has been called Ricardo's "law of rent" from the fact that, although not the first to enunciate it, Ricardo first brought it prominently to notice.

As will be seen later, the law of rent applies to land used for other purposes as well as for agriculture. But the term "land" refers to natural resources only and does not include any man-made improvements such as buildings which may be erected on it.

The least productive land in use is called "the margin of production" and indicates the point where production is such that it yields only sufficient to pay wages. Land on which labour could not make a living -- examples are the top of Ben Nevis or the centre of a desert -- is termed "below the margin".

All wealth (by which we mean valuable man-made things) is produced by labour (the work of man) applied to land (natural resources). Try to think of any material thing where this is not so and you will not succeed. For practical purposes, capital (e.g. the factory, the machine tools) is also a factor of production but it should be remembered that these things are themselves ultimately the product of land and labour.

When wealth is produced, it is regarded as being "distributed" among the factors responsible for its production. The share going to land is called rent, the share to labour is called wages and that going to capital is called interest. The process is summarised in the following table:

The Distribution of Wealth

Factors of Production	Factors entitled to resultant production
WEALTH (SHARED BETWEEN)
Land	Rent
Labour	Wages
Capital	Interest

Consequently, whatever proportion of produce goes to one factor leaves less for the other two.

It is now most important to expose a widespread fallacy -- namely that capital, as personified by the employer, is the enemy of labour. Capital may be defined as that portion of wealth which is designed to produce more wealth, for example, a factory building or machine tools. But capital, as a man-made product, is infinitely replaceable. If it becomes more profitable to produce capital goods than goods for consumption, labour turns to the production of such capital goods, thereby providing the competition which will reduce its price. This thesis is written with a ball point pen. It cost a few pence. There was a time when the same pen cost £1.50.

That is not true of land, however, for land is not man-made. It is limited in amount and so the monopoly of it produces higher and higher rent as demand for land increases and, indeed, decreases as demand decreases. The level of rent, i.e. the value of any piece of land, depends on the presence and industry of the people in the area where it is situated and has nothing to do with the landowner as such. It cannot even be said that he provides the land, for land is a natural resource. The truth is that, in the process of producing wealth, the landowner plays no part except to take the rent. And in taking the rent he takes the products of other men's work.

Wherever people live and work, make roads, install street lighting, provide police forces and other services, a value attaches to land which includes the value of the division of labour, the latter becoming increasingly significant as population grows. It is not necessary to do more to prove this than to point the reader to facts already within his knowledge; for example, that in the centres of large cities land has high value and in the depths of the country, low value.

Moreover, it is a fact that, under the present system of land tenure, with land in the dominant position (since labour and capital cannot produce anything without land) rent tends to a maximum while wages tend to a minimum. Every development in science and technology which increases the general yield of production ultimately finds its way into higher rent. Inventiveness, hard work and astuteness may bring temporary prosperity to labour and capital but the lion's share will ultimately go into increased rent.

So, as we come to the end of the twentieth century, we look back on the evils of land monopoly, not only in the rural areas but in the towns and cities where the more advanced division of labour produces the greatest wealth. Over the whole scene the main feature is the same: increasing economic rent.

Land monopoly was established by powerful people whose power was reinforced by an educational standard which was quite out of the reach of the masses. This stood them in good stead when they sought legislation (e.g. the Enclosure Acts) to buttress their privileges.

The word "privilege" is used advisedly for no one can establish a true title to land. Land is a natural resource which, whether one believes in the biblical Creation or not, can hardly have been provided for the exclusive benefit of a few private individuals.

Clearly then, those representatives of the nation who, for many years, met in Parliament as successive governments, have failed in their trusteeship. For it is evident that they allowed the natural inheritance of all people to be diverted to a comparative few who, by the processes described above, and by the economic power which results from this breach of trust, transfer other men's wages into their own pockets.

As education advanced, this situation was more widely recognised and the fight for social justice began. The story is an enthralling one which we shall pursue in the next chapter. There we shall learn how the injustice was perceived but also how the attempted solutions were misguided and ultimately ineffective. I shall then describe a modern method for achieving social justice and restoring to mankind its rightful inheritance.

CHAPTER FIVE The Search for a Remedy

THE BETRAYAL OF the trust was there for all to see. Hunger and want in the midst of plenty is something that was seen to be unnatural and wrong. It starved the bellies of little children but pricked the consciences of those who benefited from it. Although the consciences were not strong enough to inspire reform, it was inevitable, as education spread, that the evil of land monopoly would be recognised and condemned. The condemnation came from two widely separated sources, the one unknown to the other. Both men involved realised that the only effective way to attain economic justice for the people was for the economic rent of land to be taken for public purposes in substitution for the taxes which had -- in Great Britain at any rate, by the means described above -- been imposed upon labour and capital.

The first of the two was Henry George who, in America in 1871, wrote a 28-page statement on Our Land and Land Policy. After its publication he came to realise that it would be necessary to provide a full investigation of the case for the taxation of land values which he asserted was the way to take the economic rent for public purposes. He therefore spent seven years pursuing his ideas and writing Progress and Poverty, a book which was published in 1880 and is the leading exposition on this question.

The other source was Dr. Thomas Nulty, Bishop of Meath, who wrote an essay Back to the Land which was addressed and dedicated to the Clergy and Laity of the Diocese of Meath at Mullingar on 2nd April 1881. The essay is noted by Henry George in a book called The Condition of Labour. Nothing that is said here is any substitute for reading Progress and Poverty and Dr. Nulty's essay.

What is important for the purpose of this thesis is to record that Henry George, in the 1880s, came to Britain campaigning for this reform and propagated his ideas with great effect. In Britain at that time, democracy was reaching to a deeper understanding of reality because education was helping people to understand public affairs. The Royal Commission on Local Taxation, which reported in 1889, gave considerable attention to the possibility of raising municipal revenues from land values, and early in the twentieth century a number of bills were introduced in Parliament to achieve this, i.e. to introduce site-value rating. Although all these bills passed second readings in the Commons by considerable majorities, they were subsequently so amended by the House of Lords as to make them worthless.

The Liberal Party took up the case for land-value taxation and, while in government, with Lloyd George at the Exchequer, they included a measure of land-value taxation in the 1909 Budget. The taxes in the bill were mild ones and did not by any means provide for the whole of the economic rent to be taken in taxation for public purposes. The main provision was for an Increment Value Duty of twenty per cent on any increase in land value occurring after 3Oth April 1909, to be paid whenever land was sold, transferred etc. There was also to be a tax of a halfpenny in the pound on undeveloped land although, to this, there were a number of exceptions. The essential point was that Lloyd George's proposals did not fall upon existing land values, only on future increases.

Despite the mildness of the measures proposed, there was great opposition to them and the Finance Bill was rejected by the House of Lords, then populated by hereditary peers, mainly landowners, and their supporters. This provoked a constitutional crisis resulting in the Parliament Act of 1911 which broke the power of the Lords by abolishing its right to reject or delay finance legislation passed by the Commons. (It also severely limited the Lords' power to delay indefinitely the passage of other, non-finance, legislation).

In the event, the measure providing for the Increment Value Duty was not implemented before the Second World War and was suspended during that war. After the war the Duty legislation was finally repealed.

One heirloom from that legislation, which survived until its abolition in 1981, is what was then called the IVD Form (Increment Value Duty Form). This was a form which had to be completed at the time of the transfer of any land, giving particulars of the transfer including a description of the property and its price. These particulars became so valuable as records, and proved so useful to District Valuers for the purpose of valuation for other taxation, including Estate Duty, that even though the taxing measure itself was repealed, the form, now known as the Particulars Delivered Form (Form Stamps L (A) 451), is to this day filed on each occasion of a transfer of landed property.

The years following the war, not surprisingly in view of the huge expenditure of resources that had taken place, were years of great hardship for working people; unemployment was rife and in 1926-27 came the General Strike. It was not until 1931 that the land question was tackled again.

This time it was a Labour Government, with Philip Snowden as Chancellor of the Exchequer, which took action, and once again the vehicle was the Budget. The Finance Act 1931 enacted that there should be a tax of one penny in the pound on the capital value of all land. For the first time the hopes of those who had been advocating land-value taxation were realised because this was not an increment-value duty but a straightforward duty on the value of land excluding any improvements upon it. It set as the first valuation date, 1st January 1932. Subsequent valuations were to be quinquennial.

No sooner had the 1931 Act arrived upon the statute book, however, than there came a national financial crisis, or so it was called, as a result of which a National Coalition Government was elected. The land-value tax provisions were put in abeyance. (An enduring recollection of those times is that the financial crisis was said to have been caused by the fact that it was proposed to add £2 million per annum to the unemployment fund, and in the course of the election it was announced that if a National Government were not elected it would be necessary to confiscate Post Office deposits. In those days the savings of working people were deposited mainly in the Post Office Savings Bank at a rate of interest of two-and-a-half per cent. Eight years later our country embarked upon a war which was to cost £14 million a day from 1939 to 1945.)

The land-value tax provisions were eventually repealed by a Conservative Government which came to power as a result of the General Election of 1935.

After the Second World War, attention was turned again to this fundamental question, and the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 was passed, based substantially on the Uthwatt Report which dealt with compensation and betterment. The object was the effective transfer to the State of all development rights in land. Under the legislation, planning permission was required for any development. No compensation was payable where planning permission was refused but, if it were granted, betterment accrued to the State through the imposition of a development charge which was payable to a new body, called the Central Land Board, set up under the Act. The development charge was payable before the development commenced.

The Act required local authorities to draw up what were called Development Plans for their respective areas setting out their proposals for the kinds of development they wished to see take place. (The areas for development were called "scheduled land"). These Development Plans took some years to produce but were ultimately completed and operative in the mid 1950s.

The mood of the time and the purpose of the legislation harked back to 1909 as is indicated in a paragraph in the White Paper (Land).

Side by side with the need to secure positive planning, the nation has to deal with another problem, that of land prices and betterment. The growth in value, more especially of urban sites, is due to no expenditure of capital or thought on the part of the ground owner, but entirely owing to the energy and enterprise of the community... It is undoubtedly one of the worst evils of our present system of land tenure that instead of reaping the benefit of the common endeavour of its citizens a community has always to pay a heavy penalty to its ground landlords for putting up the value of their land. (Rt. Hon. David Lloyd George - Official Report, 29th April 1909, Vol. IV, col. 532)

The public ownership of development land will secure these increments for the community that has created them.

The intention of the 1947 Act was that land should be transferred at its existing-use value and that the development value, in the form of a development charge, should be paid to the Central Land Board. There were detailed provisions for obtaining planning permission before any development could take place and a global sum of £300 million was set aside as a fund to compensate owners for loss of development value. (The sum of £300 million was criticised, at the time, as being too small. It was said that the claims on the global fund of just one of the Joint Stock Banks would have amounted to more than that sum which was supposed to satisfy all claims, an indication of the value of the land of this country which would be far greater today.)

Not many plots were sold at the existing-use value but I recall that plots of land on a new estate were changing hands on sale by a large landowner at £25 per plot, the development charge of about £120 being payable to the Central Land Board.

It was clear to many observers that the development charge provisions of the 1947 Act constituted a powerful deterrent to the sale or development of land by landowners. Much store was, therefore, placed on Section 43 of the Act which gave powers to the Central Land Board to acquire land compulsorily at existing-use value and to re-sell it at that value plus the development charge. This was a key section and upon it rested the whole effectiveness of the Act. The legislators, no doubt, hoped that the very presence of these compulsory powers would impel landowners to sell at something more than existing-use value. In a very few cases and for a short while it did, but the compulsory powers were diffidently and sparsely used, only about twelve purchases under them being made in the whole country. The vast majority of owners did not part with or develop their land but sat tight awaiting a change of government and, with it, a change of legislation. In due course, a new government was elected and changes were introduced taking away the essential provisions of the original Act.

Under the Town and Country Planning Act 1953 the development charge was abolished and the compulsory purchase powers of the Central Land Board removed. However, local authorities were given the right to acquire land for public purposes at existing-use value. But this caused an outcry because any landowner selling to a local authority compulsorily received next to nothing compared with the sale by another owner of similar land to a private purchaser. Consequently, under the Town and Country Planning Act 1959, the special arrangements favouring local authorities were brought to an end and the open market value became payable for land compulsorily acquired by local authorities. For valuation purposes certain assumptions were to be made, including an assumption that planning permission would be granted for the purpose indicated in the Development Plan.

With the passing of the 1959 Act, the owner of scheduled land became free to hold it out of use indefinitely, the worst that could happen to him being that a statutory authority would acquire the land compulsorily, an event which would bring him full value in compensation, including amenity value. Broadly speaking, that is what the landowner always did and still does. In growing communities where the demand for land increases, sending up values almost week by week, he has every incentive to sit tight.

Planning applications to develop land outside the scheduled area were, in the main, refused because it was said that land is reserved in the Development Plan for the kind of development for which the permission was sought." Although this was unreal when the owner of the land would not part with it, it was unblushingly asserted in appeal after appeal. In cases where planning permission was given there was a bonanza for the owner. This serves to indicate the enormous value concentrated in scheduled land -- which all unscheduled land also becomes when planning permission is granted for its development.

The evil results of this monopoly are well known. They extend beyond land being held out of use. The artificial scarcity makes all land dearer and, because of lack of competition, tends to make building operations inefficient. It takes from house-dwellers and industry an increasing share of the results of their efforts.

The Development Plans were prepared by experienced town planners who knew their respective areas and who estimated the development needs for years to come. The fact that in almost every area available land did not meet these needs could mean that the estimates were wrong, but this is difficult to believe and on investigation is shown to be untrue. The reason why there appears to be a shortage of building land is that much of it is held out of use. Owners naturally postpone sale until they feel that the top price has been reached. In conditions of monopoly the price spiral is continuous and the disposal of land for development is indefinitely postponed. The situation is made worse by the refusal of planning permission for land development outside scheduled areas.

Administratively, the system stood condemned too. On the decisions of local Planning Committees depended enormous sums in land values. By a simple decision to grant planning permission, a Committee could hand a landowner a bounty amounting to millions of pounds, all wholly unearned by him.

It was not surprising that graft appeared and that normally good men succumbed to the temptation to take something for themselves from a process which could legally hand over a king's ransom for no effort. At all events, there were cases where members of Planning Committees, and sometimes officials who administered the system, succumbed to the temptation to take bribes and were publicly condemned and punished in communities where, hitherto, they had earned the highest respect.

Lord Justice Harman, in the case of Britt v. Buckinghamshire County Council (All England Reports 19632 179), presumably had this in mind when he said of Town and Country Planning: "This is a subject which stinks in the noses of the public."

So, at this stage, by the machinery of the 1959 Act and through the reluctance of landowners to make land available for development, local authorities as well as the public were obliged to pay constantly increasing prices for land, the value of which they themselves had created.

The next attempt to deal with the land question in Britain was the Land Commission Act 1967. It had a difficult passage through its parliamentary stages and was criticised for its complexity. It was still not the true remedy. It went back in important respects to the old repealed sections of the 1947 Act and repeated many of the defects it contained. The main one was to reintroduce the development charge. Although the new levy was to be at forty per cent instead of the one hundred per cent under the old Act, it was still charged at the point of development or sale. Inevitably, just as for the 1947 Act, this had the effect of discouraging development and, very quickly, the tendency among landowners became neither to sell nor to develop. There was provision in the Act for powers for compulsory acquisitions but the sums involved in any major purchase of land were now so enormous that few local authorities could contemplate them. It is not surprising that public authorities generally decided not to purchase in the hope that someone, sometime would lay out the money and develop for them.

In any event, the provisions of the 1967 Act were not to the liking of some politicians and, following the change of government in 1970, it was repealed. The repeal came before the Land Commission had been given the wider powers of acquisition envisaged for it under the Act. It did not, therefore, play the full role in the management of the country's land resources which the authors of the 1967 legislation had intended.

After the 1974 election, the new Government tried again. This time there were two pieces of legislation: the Community Land Act 1975 and the Development Land Tax Act 1976.

In the associated White Paper (Land) the Government explained that its objectives were twofold: first, to establish a permanent means of enabling the community to control the development of land in accordance with its needs and priorities, and secondly, to restore to the community the increase in the value of land arising from its collective efforts. The paper explained:

It is not generally disputed that the community itself must control the development of land, and the planning system that has evolved has often been a potent force in preventing development that is harmful to the community. But our system of planning control is largely a negative one. The community via its elected local authority and, in the final analysis, central Government, can veto proposals for development, but the initiative is left largely in private hands. The community does not at present have sufficient power always to plan positively to decide where and when particular developments should take place. Public ownership of development land is designed to give this power to its rightful owner, the community.

The paper continued.

It is also emphasised that the public ownership of development land will secure these increments of land prices and betterment for the community that created them.

The main purpose of the Community Land Act 1975 was to empower local authorities (in Wales, a special Board) to acquire land needed for major development and pass it on to developers. They were to acquire it at its existing-use value and re-sell it at its development value thus making a morally justifiable profit for the community.

The Development Land Tax Act 1976, as its title implies, made provision for a levy to be paid, i.e. whenever land changed hands between private or commercial interests. This time, the plan was to identify and appropriate for the community that part of the sale price which was attributable to the community's permission to develop.

Between the two Acts it might have seemed that the Government's objectives, as set out in the White Paper, would be achieved. The Community Land Act would cover the land activities of the local authorities and, at least in respect of major projects, enable the community to control the development of land in accordance with its needs and priorities," while the Development Land Tax Act looked after the community's interests whenever land changed hands other than via the local authorities.

The reality, however, was very different. The local authorities, in general, did not have sufficient resources to buy land on the scale that would have been required. Thus, they tended to wait for owners to submit planning applications or notices of intention to dispose of land (the latter being required under the Community Land Act) and to decide only at that stage whether to acquire the land in question[6]. In the event, landowners generally sat tight, neither offering land for sale nor applying for permission to develop.

The Development Land Tax was similarly unfruitful. As with all the previous legislation since 1947 which had attempted to secure land values for the community, the 1976 Act suffered from the defect that the proposed tax, levy, development charge or whatever the politicians of the day decided to call it was to be charged at the point of development. The consequence was that, as in the past, owners of land had no incentive to sell or develop their land; indeed their vital interests lay in holding onto it, however unproductive its current use might be,. and wait for a change of government which, they expected, would lead to the repeal of the taxing provisions. (In the meantime, the land could well be increasing in value, the rise accentuated by the consequent artificial scarcity.)

The two Acts were operated together for a time but, almost from the beginning, the results were obvious; they were effective neither in increasing the supply of land for development nor in bringing in the tax revenue. But even more than this, their influence in actually drying up the supply of land for development undoubtedly led to higher prices for land which, in turn, led to higher prices for houses -- not only new houses but existing ones as well. This, of course, made, and continues to make, great inroads into the living standards of working people, not only those purchasing houses but also those unable to buy, who suffer increased rents.

There was one group whose position did not suffer significantly from these two ineffective pieces of legislation -- the owners of land. They sat tight, awaiting a further change of government, and repeal.

That change of government took place in 1979. Shortly afterwards, the Community Land Act 1975, with its compulsory purchase powers, was repealed. The taxing Act, however, i.e. the Development Land Tax Act 1976, was allowed to continue but was amended in certain important respects. For instance, the exemption before the tax came into operation was increased to £50,000. The permitted addition often per cent to the existing-use value or the price of purchase, as the case may be, was increased to fifteen per cent and the rate of eighty per cent tax reduced to an overall sixty per cent. Under the 1976 Act, by contrast, the tax was to have increased to one hundred per cent on a day to be appointed, though no appointment was ever made. The tax was finally abolished in the 1985 Finance Act.

The conclusion of this chapter must be that the basic flaw -- the basic mischief -- in the social anatomy of Britain is the private monopoly of land. Without this, the scales would not be so cruelly tilted against the ordinary citizen and measures such as the Community Land Act and the Development Land Tax Act (which, in the ultimate, only made matters worse) would not have been devised to palliate (we cannot say "solve") his problems.

The breach of trust is thus clearly exposed; the wrong people are benefiting from the trust property. Strictly, perhaps, we should speak not of a complete breach of trust but of a gross -- almost criminal -- mismanagement under which a favoured few of the intended beneficiaries take possession of the whole of the trust property, thus placing themselves in a position to exploit the rest and to rob them, continuously and systematically, of a substantial part of their rightful earnings.

The only threat to the dominance of the favoured few lies in the possibility that eventually a government will, at long last, grasp the nettle and introduce an effective measure of land reform.

CHAPTER SIX The Breach of Trust Around the World

WE HAVE DEALT with the fundamental breach of trust in Great Britain. But social evils caused by unjust systems of land tenure are found in most countries of the world.

In primitive societies the problem hardly arose. When the tobacco --, later the cotton-growers, of America kidnapped the natives of Africa and transported them into slavery they were not seizing undernourished men. The homelands of the African native yielded food, shelter and some comfort for all. But when, ultimately, the descendants of those slaves were freed by legal edict, they found that, in land-monopolised America, they were unable to make a living. They could not go back to Nature's bounty which their forefathers enjoyed, but were in a setting where all land was privately owned and, with no resources to acquire any, they were worse off than they had been as slaves. Within weeks, many were back begging for employment from their original owners on terms worse than slavery. Others went further afield looking for work only to find that land monopoly was established everywhere.

Stephen Collins Foster, in his song Swanee River or The Old Folks at Home, wrote lamenting the old home and the old days and expressing the bewilderment of the ex-slaves as they tramped the country looking for work:

All up and down de whole creation sadly I roam

Still longing for the old plantation and for the old folks at home.

The fact was that, with emancipation, the former slave owner had no interest in the physical wellbeing of his former slaves and was now concerned only to hire labour on the cheapest terms.

North America

Before we look around the world let us remember that although the current anxiety is for the deprived and hungry in the Third World, there can be deprived and hungry people in more sophisticated societies. The development of the New World was a shining example of the economics outlined in Chapter Four. The early settlers in North America were heading for the margin of production, i.e. the place where the land does not yield a rent and where, consequently, the labourer keeps all he earns. The resulting progress was such that the world's most powerful nation with one of the highest standards of living came into full bloom in the space of two hundred years. Yet consider the invitation on the Statue of Liberty contained in the sonnet written by Emma Lazarus in 1903:

Keep ancient lands your storied pomp cries she with silent lips.
Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free; the wretched refuse of your teeming shore send these, the homeless tempest-tost to me.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

The important fact is that these words were not addressed to primitive peoples living in the undeveloped areas of Africa or Asia. They were directed to the landless victims of land monopoly in the more sophisticated countries of the world.

Russia

One such country was Russia. It is not generally known that, long before the Russian Revolution of 1917, land reform was in the air. The traditional cry of the serfs to the landowners was "We are yours, but the land is ours." In 1865 Tsar Alexander II said to the nobility "It is better to abolish serfdom from above than wait until the serfs begin to liberate themselves from below." The reform freeing the serfs was introduced and was carried out by the Ministry of the Interior, headed by deputy minister Nickolay Milyutin. The effort was assisted by a few progressive landowners but, in the main, landowners were determined that if they could not prevent the abolition of serfdom they would give the freed peasants as little land as possible. The result was a bitter disappointment to many peasants as well as to radical intellectuals.

In 1870, reforming activity revived, its centre being the universities. In 1873 and 1874 hundreds of young students men and women -- sought to rouse the peasants with their speeches. The young people were arrested; some were imprisoned and hundreds were deported to remote provinces of Siberia.

In 1876 a new party called "Land and Freedom" was founded but in 1879 an extremist element broke away, took the name "People's Wing" and made its aim the assassination of the very Tsar Alexander II who had earlier ordered the land reform. Alexander II and his family were assassinated on 13th March 1881.

Thus was economic reform abandoned for terrorism. This was an example of how men resort to violence when peaceful opposition to injustice appears to have failed. The desperate condition of the common people before the Russian Revolution was not caused by avaricious employers but by the fact that land was owned by the very few who, backed by the law, denied access to it to the many.

France

The French Revolution, similarly, was provoked by private land monopoly. On the eve of the revolution, French society was polarised, with the nobility and clergy on the one side and the rising business class on the other. The middle class was relatively small. The majority of the peasants were either hereditary tenants who paid a fixed money rent or serfs who paid rent in the form of labour services of about three days a week. The peasants paid other burdensome feudal dues and taxes as well, from which the nobility and clergy were exempt. Poverty among the peasants, which was intolerable enough in itself was exacerbated by their servile status. The revolution overthrew the former regime and feudal order, and introduced land reform. This reform, however, was superficial, having no relation at all to land-value taxation, and the economic effects of the revolution were limited.

The Third World

The problem of hunger and poverty in the world, especially in what is called the Third World, concerns us all.

Since 1945, enormous funds have flowed in for relief. Hundreds of millions of pounds have been expended by Oxfam alone, and official aid by the United Nations and its member nations and the aid organised by the voluntary associations of the United Nations the world over, Christian Aid, and other similar bodies, must amount to an enormous total. Yet hunger and poverty has increased until the number of victims is staggering and is said to comprise more than half the world's population. These facts lie heavily upon the human conscience.

Yet the people in general are guiltless How can people in Europe, for example, be responsible for the deprivation of people in, say, India whose land is capable of producing sufficient food to feed all the people on earth? In India we see not only deprivation but also huge concentrations of wealth; here are the finest diamonds, the most magnificent palaces. The cause and effect are of the pattern already described.

Ethiopia

The failure to deal with the social evil of private land monopoly leads not only to deprivation, poverty and high death rates among the young but also to conflict, for in the last resort men and women will not submit to such deep injustice. A recent example has been Ethiopia. Before the revolution seventy-five per cent of the produce of the working people was taken by the landowner.

Iran

In the Sunday Times of 2nd November 1978, in a special feature on Iran, it was stated that "in 1963 the Shah sidestepped Parliament, then dominated by the landowning interests, by holding the country's first -- and perhaps last - referendum to approve his reforms..." -- and we know what happened to the Shah.

Kenya

In comment concerning Kenya in the Daily Mirror of 23rd August 1978 on the death of Jomo Kenyatta, a statement of his was recalled as follows:

When the missionaries arrived, the Africans had the land and the missionaries had the Bible. They taught us to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them they had the land and we had the Bible.

A sad commentary was made by Lord (Fenner) Brockway when asked in an obituary interview at that time what economic progress had been made during Mr. Kenyatta's leadership. His reply was: "Not much, because the white landowners were replaced by black landowners."

Korea

A report from Mr. Archer Torrey, an American missionary at Jesus Abbey, Kangwondo Province, refers to land reform there. The following is an extract:

The South Korean land reform was introduced only a few months before the outbreak of the Korean War, i.e. sometime after land reform was reputed to have been introduced in North Korea. When the war ended and the borders were sealed, it was discovered that more than half the population of North Korea had moved south and only a handful from South Korea had moved north. Whatever 'reform' had been instituted in the North it did not hold the people. South Korea was overwhelmingly agricultural and yet had to absorb a fifty per cent surplus population, amounting to some ten million people. This provided the manpower for a rapid transition to industrialisation (as did the Enclosure Acts in England) but this manpower was also augmented by a mass migration to the cities from the rural areas, and the rural population dropped from eighty-five per cent in 1957 to forty-five per cent in 1967. The forty-five percent which has remained now feeds the entire country and enjoys a higher standard of living than the average white-collar urban worker.

Elsewhere in the report Mr. Torrey says that what he calls "the miracle of Korea" has involved

the fastest growth rate in the world, a three-and-one-eighth per cent unemployment rate, a rural income higher than the white-collar income, a booming export trade in light and heavy manufactures as well as services, an embarrassingly high dollar surplus, almost complete agricultural self-sufficiency and no population problem in spite of having one of the world's densest populations.

Pakistan

In the Financial Times of 11th August 1978 it was said that

Land reform would do a lot to alleviate Pakistan's agricultural problems. Indeed both Ayub Khan in the early 1960s and Mr. Bhutto up to 1977 aimed to reduce the gap between the rural rich and poor by limiting land holdings. Officially no farmer was allowed to own more than one hundred acres, but enough loopholes were left in the law to allow most big landowners to slip through. Many argued that Mr. Bhutto fell from power because the landlords who made up his power base in the populous Punjab feared he planned to introduce more rigorous land reforms.

Spain

In a report in the Observer colour magazine of l6th November 1980, Ronald Fraser writes about the farm lands of Andalusia:

Here in a region more than half the size of England, casual labourers fight an interminable battle to find work on the large estates for more than two to three months of the year. When they fail they have no unemployment pay, no land of their own, no possibility of other permanent work in villages and townships...

Mr. Fraser comments that this provokes the slogan "the land for him who works it" painted on a whitewashed wall. It is the same slogan as was used fifty years ago before the civil war. He adds:

There are a number of large landowners: 6,400 estates cover eleven million acres -- over half of Andalusia's farmland. They make up only one-and-a-half per cent of all Andalusian farmers. At the other end of the scale 450,000 smallholders - two-tbirds of the farming community -- have to make do with one million acres...

Mr. Fraser goes on:

Four local families and two non-Andalusian companies own the bulk of the land here. Yet nine hundred village families have to earn their livelihood from the land. It is a life of misery, of constant migrations, of belonging nowhere... The Andalusian labourer today has nowhere to go in search of work. The gates to Western Europe and Spain's industrial cities have been closed by the depression. In the past two years, many emigrants have been forced to return. Meanwhile, 60,000 youths enter the labour market each year. With all exits firmly sealed, twenty-five per cent of the Andalusian workforce is again engaged in seeking a living off the land. Eighty per cent of them are landless. As in the past, there is again land without men and men without land.

The burden of the report was to draw attention to the results of land monopoly in the area and the way in which labour-intensive crops have been abandoned for crops which can be grown and harvested with the aid of machines, with resulting unemployment. But it is land monopoly which is the underlying evil and Mr. Fraser and Mr. Cohn Jones, his photographer, performed a public service in reporting it.

Zimbabwe

Walter Lidell, a noted expert on Rhodesian affairs, reported before the new Zimbabwe State was founded, that although Rhodesia's farming area was said to be divided "equally between blacks and whites," the equality was a sham.

There are 11,680,000 black farmers and only 6,700 whites which means that every white farmer has access to a hundred times as much land as a black farmer. The black lands have far more farmers than they can support. It takes an average of 385 pounds of maize a year for one African's basic food. Last year the blacks' half of Rhodesia produced only 231 pounds per head.

Brazil

On 7th December 1980, in an article in the Observer headed "Brazil's Indians to be 'integrated'" , Mr. Jan Rocha in Sao Paulo reported:

The Brazilian Government will launch a massive publicity campaign next year to disarm critics of its Indian Policy and sell 'integration' as a solution to the Indian problem...

Mr. Rocha continued:

Under the Indian Statute, demarcation of all tribal lands should have been finished by 1979. But only a few reserves have been defined and the lack of clear boundaries has led to many conflicts between Indians and invaders. In August, twenty-one people, including small children and pregnant women, were slaughtered by Kayopo Indians in Para state after they heard that 1,800 men would be moving into their land to clear the forest. Pro-Indian organisations recognise that integration is inevitable, but they want the Indians to be given more time to adjust. They do not see why the Indian should be thrown into white society at the lowest level, destined to become labourers or maids and in many cases prostitutes or alcoholics.

El Salvador

From the evidence of a BBC 1 television documentary broadcast on 21St February 1981, it seems clear that there is a new religious awakening to the true nature of land monopoly. The documentary, by Colin Campbell, demonstrated the injustice of the land tenure situation in El Salvador.

Viewers saw a brave British nun working among El Salvador's wretched poor whose protests have met with blood-letting by the existing government, intent on propping up land monopolists and privilege.

It was revealed that there had been twelve thousand cases of people being shot or clubbed to death in a year.

There has been conflict between the jealous rich and the angry poor. It is said that the country is owned and run by two hundred abundantly wealthy people known as the Fourteen Families and that the army exists to maintain their economic ascendancy. It is generally regarded as subversive to be poor.

The Roman Catholic Church, in a radical indictment of present conditions, has pointed to the injustice of the land system and the consequent deprivation and untimely death of poor people. The communists, who are used to the prospect of counter4evolution by powerful people, have come to help and may in the end install communism with all its tyranny when land reform is all that is required.

The Future

The news media will no doubt, from time to time, report future evidence of the breach of trust in places around the world. Such evidence usually consists of news that the deprived beneficiaries have revolted against the trustees -- their governments. Certainly, wherever there is a trouble-spot in the world, the chances are that the underlying cause of the conflict relates to the ownership or control of the land.

PART TWO