.

Free Trade Triumphs.

A few hours after I had been asked by my colleagues on the "United Committee for the Taxation of Land Values" to write on their behalf a paper to be laid before this Congress, I read in a widely-circulated London Liberal and Free Trade newspaper the following paragraph :-

FREE TRADE TRIUMPH

Village Prosperity Built Up by Engineering Firm

Another instance of the "rain" wrought by Free Trade has come to light at Leiston in Suffolk, where are situated the works of Messrs. Garrett and Sons, engineers.

Since 1907 the population of Leiston has increased by over 1,000, and ninety new houses have been erected. Owing to the increase of work at Messrs. Garrett's, the number of men employed there has gone up from 900 in 1905 to 1,200 at the present time.

Last week, some building plots were offered for sale at Leiston, and were greedily snapped up at a price which works out at something like £390 per acre. Yet Leiston is only a small place quite out of the beaten track, and is not at all the spot where one would expect to find a flourishing manufactory with a continually increasing business. But by the excellence of their products Messrs. Garrett have succeeded in building up a business which sends goods all over the world .- London DAILY CHRONICLE, May 31st, 1910.

The increased production of wealth, the multiplied openings for useful employment, the more plentiful supply of goods for use at home and for exchange against the good things which other countries are able to offer us, are all matters for congratulation to Free Traders, and are all in line with Free Trade theory. But what, from the Free Trade point of view, is the exact significance of the rise in the value of land which the same paragraph also records? Is it a part of the "Free Trade Triumph" that men who have invested neither capital nor labour in the business to which this "village prosperity" is due should be able thus to levy toll upon the first need of a growing and industrious community - upon their need for land upon which they may live and work ? Not many years ago 1 was assured,-not once but many times, - by landlords and their friends in Suffolk, that land was of so little value that farms could be had, - always, be it noted, in some other part of the county, - rent free by anyone who would pay the local taxation upon them. Yet here, in a remote corner of Suffolk, the enterprise of Messrs. Garrett and the industry of their workpeople, - not being hindered by a protective tariff, - have found a good use for some of this land, and the price has already reached £390 per acre.[1]

About a month before this paragraph appeared, the late King Edward VII gave his assent to Mr. Lloyd George's Budget for 1909-10. This, too, was hailed by the Liberal press as a " Free Trade Triumph." In the year-long Parliamentary struggle over Mr. Lloyd George's proposals, the Budget was defended by its friends and denounced by its enemies largely on the ground that it was inspired by the intention, and would have the effect, of postponing indefinitely that return to Protection which in England calls itself "Tariff Reform." The British Chancellor has undoubtedly shown that the fiscal resources of Free Trade are not, as the Protectionists pretend, exhausted; that it is possible, within the lines of a Free Trade Policy, to meet the demands for an increasing national revenue. The passing of the Budget has destroyed the case for a Protective Tariff, so far as its alleged necessity as a means of raising revenue is concerned.

It is true that, as to the revenue of the current year, Mr. George provides nearly all his resources by well-worn expedients - e.g. by an enlarged income-tax, by increased duties upon alcohol, tobacco, motor cars, by additional stamp duties and death duties, and so on. Some of the taxes which he has increased, like many others which he has refrained from reducing or abolishing, are clearly indefensible on Free Trade principles. In one case, at least, an increased tax appears even to have resulted in a diminished revenue. Even the new land taxes produce comparatively little; and, against that little, must be charged, for some time to come, the cost of making the national Valuation of the Land.

But it is precisely this Valuation - the one thing in the Budget which is at once new and of great importance - which carries with it all of promise and potency for the future which the Budget has to offer. It explains at once the bitterness of the opposition with which for a whole year it was assailed, and the strength of the enthusiasm which ensured its ultimate victory.

It is no mere accident which thus brings together, in the economy of a small manufacturing village on the East Coast, and in the wider range of the greatest politico-economic struggle of modern times, the question of Free Trade and the question of Land Values. For upon the foundation of the valuation clauses of the Finance Act (1909-10) we may rear, and soon shall rear, an edifice which will prove at once the crown and glory of the Free Trade movement and an impregnable barrier against a return to Protection.

Tariff for Revenue only

We, on whose behalf I have the honour of now addressing you, claim to be thorough-going Free Traders. We believe that the only effective reply to the demand for less Free Trade is an agitation for more Free Trade, - for the carrying of Free Trade to its logical conclusion. To the demand for the "Reform" of the existing British Tariff, we oppose a demand for its total abolition. To us, "Tariff Reform" even in the American sense of Tariff reduction, is as inadequate a presentment of our ideal as Slavery Reform would have seemed to the Abolitionists, or as a mere lightening of the tax on corn would have seemed, and did seem, to Cobden and the League. We have little sympathy with the spirit which led the President of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce to resign[2] because the Chamber supported Cobden in his demand for the total and immediate repeal, rather than the mere reduction, of the Corn Tax. It took less than eight years to prove that Cobden was right, not only as to principles, but also as to tactics. If, as seems probable, the first campaign in the battle for universal Free Trade is to be fought to a finish in the place where it began, the victory can only be assured by the adoption, on the part of British Free Traders, of an aggressive policy. Merely defensive tactics will not long avail against the assaults of the persistent, wealthy, and selfish interests which look to make their profit by the re-establishment of Protection. We cannot afford to confine ourselves to the defence of the position we already hold. For this means the maintenance of a Tariff, though it be a "Tariff for revenue only," which may at any time serve as a "jumping-off place" for Protection.

For the abolition of Protection, which we in Great Britain achieved two generations ago, is not the same thing as the establishment of Free Trade. Do we not still maintain at enormous expense, much of which is necessarily purely wasteful, a ring of Custom houses round our coasts? Under the old Tariff those whom the Law called " smugglers," and punished when caught, called themselves "Free Traders." It is still a law-made crime to be a Free Trader in tea, codec, cocoa, sugar, saccharin, dried fruits, tobacco, alcohol in. its various combinations, and many other things. 11 is still illegal to engage in many trades, businesses and professions without paying an excise duty or taking out a license. It is still illegal to pay one's trade accounts in a businesslike way without also paying a fine of a penny on each cheque and (for sums over £2) of a penny on each receipt, it is still impossible to make a written agreement, enforceable at law, without paying the Government to put a stamp on it.

Of course, these taxes are not., in avowed intention, protective, though some of them are undoubtedly protective in actual effect. They are " for revenue only." But it is precisely these taxes on trade for revenue only that are most difficult to defend. Nearly all the arguments against Protective taxes can be used against them; can especially be used with crushing force against the remaining taxes on food. It is easy, for instance, to show that they raise the price against the consumer by a larger amount than the Government gets in taxation; that - especially when "fixed" (like the tea duty) and not ad valorem - they fall most heavily upon the poorest people: that the necessity for advancing the amount of the tax for the consumer (even at an ultimate profit to the trader) compels the employment of larger capitals, and tends to foster monopoly: that the necessity for preventing smuggling largely increases the cost of collection, and correspondingly reduced the net yield to the Exchequer.

The question of taxation upon alcoholic drinks raises other questions besides that of taxation, and would lead us into thorny paths into which I have no right to invite you now. Speaking for myself alone, I can see no good reason why the principles of Free Trade should not apply even to what in England impudently calls itself "the Trade." .But I may at least point put that one of the results of the very heavy taxation on this particular form of manufacture, of constant and minute Government interference with all its processes of production and exchange, of an onerous system of licensing both for manufacture and sale, has been to call into existence a powerful and highly-organised monopoly, which is one of the most sinister influences in British politics. Yet, so insidious is the argument for Protection, that the majority of the members of this trade, constantly complaining with the utmost bitterness of the taxation and Government interference from which they suffer, consistently support candidates who are in favour of extending such taxation and interference to many other trades. "It's very good fun tying a kettle to a dog's tail - so long as it isn't our dog."

But while most of the arguments against Protective taxes can be used with equal cogency against these taxes on trade " for revenue only," there is, in the latter case, no possibility of pretending that anyone is "protected" by them against foreign competition; or that they "make work" for anybody except customs and excise officers: or that they are "paid by the foreigner," for every duty of customs on a foreign product is balanced by a duty of excise on its home-made equivalent.

Some of the British Tariff Reformers are astute enough to see and to use these facts, and they try to bribe the people into consenting to a tax on foreign manufactured goods by a promise of the reduction or abolition of the existing tariff on the foods and simple luxuries of the poor. I have seen, side by side, the posters of the Anti-Tea-Duty Association and of the Tariff Reform League, used equally on behalf of a Protectionist candidate. In the one case, the Liberal Government was denounced for depriving the workman's wife of her comforting cup of tea by neglecting to repeal the tea tax; on the other, of depriving her husband of his job by refusing to "make the foreigner pay" a tax on the manufactures he sends us, by means of a Protective Tariff. (No one asked, so far as I know, how the workman's wife would be benefitted by the abolition of a tax on Chinamen, or why, if a tax on a Chinese product is paid by the British tea drinker, a tax on German productions must necessarily be paid by Germans.)

If these things can take place publicly in a country where a measure of Free Trade has been enjoyed for two generations, does it not argue some lack of definiteness, some glaring defect of method, in the presentation of the case of Free Trade by its advocates?

The Moderates who secured a majority three years ago on the London County Council objected to the Municipal steamboat service on the River Thames. They did not content themselves with reducing the number of passengers carried by the boats. They got rid of the boats altogether. They thus not only showed that they had the courage of their convictions, but they made it much more difficult for a future Progressive majority to re-establish the service. When British Free Traders have the like courage of their convictions, they owill not be content with reducing the number or the amount of customs duties, thus making them more costly to collect in proportion to the amount collected. They will abolish the custom houses, and thus destroy the machinery which they are now keeping ready to the hand of the Protectionist.

I am old enough to remember the abolition of the tollgates which placed across all our main roads a legalised hindrance to the free passage of persons and goods from one part of England to another. I remember well the speech in which, nearly 24 years ago, a Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer announced the abolition of the octroi upon coals coming into London from the Northern and Midland coalfields. I hope to live long enough to see such an extension of Free Trade as shall enable the people of any other nation whatever to send us, in exchange for what we produce, the best results of their own labour and local advantages, as freely as Scotland now trades with England, or Newcastle with London. And it is perhaps of good augury that the son[3] of the Conservative Chancellor who abolished the last of our internal tariffs was till lately the President of the Board of Trade and is still a member of a Liberal Cabinet which is strong enough, if it be but bold enough, to apply to our international commerce the same principles of freedom as his father applied to the trade of London with the coal-producing areas outside.

The Alternative to Tariffs

On its fiscal side, therefore, the problem which an aggressive Free Trade policy has to face is: Given the abolition of all those taxes which hinder the free exchange of goods between our own and other countries, and which impose burdens upon the materials, and processes and the results of .industry at home, how is a Free Trade Finance Minister to replace the revenue which he is thus called upon to sacrifice?

The trend of events, the course of public discussion, the proposals of the last great Free Trade Budget all alike point to the natural and inevitable alternative. There is practically no dispute about it. The friends, no less than the foes of Tariff Reform, recognise that in setting up the machinery for a universal valuation of the land of the United Kingdom, Mr. Lloyd George has laid the foundation for that taxation of land values which will make Tariffs not only unnecessary but impossible. The alternative was put to the electors at the test General Election bluntly enough: Shall we tax land values, or tax the food of the people? The answer was so clear and emphatic that even the House of Lords hastened to pass in April the Budget which they had "referred to .the people" only five months before.

The issue is made all the more clear and simple by the very sharpness of the contrast between land value taxation and other forms of taxation. Land differs from every other subject of taxation in being the gift of nature, the first essential of all production, the workshop of the human race, the reservoir from which labour draws all wealth. The fact that land is limited in quantity, and cannot be produced by labour but only used by it, gives rise to the seeming paradox that whereas we make commodities dearer by taxing their value, the normal effect of taxing the value of land is to make land cheaper. Land cannot be concealed, as men conceal their wealth or their incomes, from the tax-collector: it cannot be "smuggled" as men smuggle tobacco or saccharin. A tax upon land values is a direct tax which cannot be "shifted." A tax upon land values is not a tax upon any industry - unless, indeed, the mere ownership of land, as distinct from its use, be deemed an industry.

Above all, land values are recognised as a peculiarly fit basis for taxation because they are the creation, not of-the " owner " as such, but of nature, and of the people who live and work on and around the land. It is the presence, the growth, the industry and the public expenditure of the population that gives the value to land. I have worked out this proposition in some detail, mostly with reference to the great City of London, elsewhere[4] and need not go over the ground again now. It has nowhere been more clearly and tersely stated than by the late Professor Thorold Rogers: -

Every permanent improvement of the soil, every railway and road, every bettering of the general condition of society, every facility given for production, every stimulus supplied to consumption, raises rent. The landowner sleeps but thrives. He alone, among all the recipients in the distribution of products, owes everything to the labour of others, contributes nothing of his own. He inherits part of the fruits of present industry, and has appropriated the lion's share of accumulated intelligence.[5]

By "rent," Rogers means, of course, exactly what I mean in this paper by "land values," "economic rent"; the value of land apart from the value of the improvements which labour has made in or on it.

Once more we find Free Trade directly related to the question of land values. For the "bettering of the general condition of society" which we seek to bring about by the establishment of Freedom of Exchange, the "stimulus supplied to consumption" by the cheapening of commodities, the "facilities given for production" by the free international exchange of what each nation can produce most easily, all come exactly within Rogers' enumeration of the causes that increase land value. We have already seen it confessed in the case of Leiston, where increased enterprise and industry have, in accordance with law, crystallised into land value. It is a commonplace of recent economic history that, since the abolition of Protection in Great Britain, there has been an immense growth of manufacture and commerce, and of great towns, and of municipal expenditure, and of urban land values. It is the town landlord who most surely reaps the benefits of Free Trade, as we now know it; just as it was the rural, landlord who chiefly profited by the old protective taxes on food, and who is now, naturally enough, among the foremost advocates of a return to Protection. For although the corn tax was undeniably an injury to the community as a whole, i it conferred upon the farmers the advantage of artifically-enhanced prices for their produce, and thus enabled and encouraged them to pay, and the landlords to exact, higher rents for their farms. The fall in rents did not follow nearly so quickly upon the fall in prices, after the repeal of the Com Laws; and the farmer, attributing the trouble to Free Trade, is thus prone to look back upon the times of Protection as his good times, and to long for their return. But, as I hope to show presently, even in the farmer's case, his just complaints will find their remedy in the taxation of land values.

So, if the general benefits conferred-by Free Trade are to be secured to* the community in general, we shall have to tax land values; to draw on the "social bank," or land value fund, into which are paid the profits of the general progress in intelligence and industry, and the savings made possible by such reforms as the abolition of Protection and the extension of co-operation. At present, the public makes all the deposits, but has no cheque-book. That is in the hands of the landlord.

Protection and Unemployment

But the appeal of the Tariff Reformer does not derive its strength from purely fiscal considerations. Its aims profess to be largely, if not mainly, economic and social. Its advocates argue as if a tax on foreign goods would yield a large revenue, to be spent in great but undefined schemes of "social reform," and, at the same time, keep out the foreign productions, and thus solve the problem of unemployment. As each argument stated separately may be made to sound plausible, many who hear them both fail to realise their inconsistency with each other.

On its worst side, - on the side where the spirit of Protection is most sharply opposed to the spirit of Free Trade; in their respective attitudes towards international relations, - it seems at times to be wantonly fostering a hatred of foreigners. But, of course, the argument is seldom offered for public consumption in quite so crude a form as that. The British nation will never adopt the policy of cutting off its own nose merely to spite some other nation's face. On the public platform, the Protectionist appears as the Patriot who, recognising that the interests of one nation are irreconcilably opposed to the interests of the others, and remembering that "blood is thicker than water," nobly prefers to champion the interests of his own people. "Let us be just to Englishmen before we are generous to Germans ! "

On the chronic presence of unemployment, here and now, in Great Britain, under Free Trade, the Protectionist bases the appeal upon which he mainly relies. It has been the text from which millions of sermons have been preached - in speeches on the platform, in articles in the newspapers, in pictures on the walls. It is in "hard times," when unemployment is most rife, that the Protectionist find the most eager listeners among our working men.

What is the value, we are asked, of the "so called blessings of Free Trade "to a man who can find no employment by which to earn even a" cheap loaf " ?

The blessings of Free Trade have been enjoyed so long that they are already held in the small account which attaches to things that are taken for granted. The municipal electric tramway service in London is only a few years old. It was hailed as a vast improvement on the old method of horse-traction, and so it daily proves itself to be. Yet one may hear such a volume of complaint on a single morning over a temporary delay as will outweigh all the expressions of thankfulness that are uttered in a month. The appreciation of a permanent improvement to which people have become accustomed is usually not nearly so strong as the irritation caused by a temporary inconvenience. But unemployment, to the victim of it who has nothing but his labour to live by, is much more than an inconvenience. It is a calamity.

The problem of unemployment is thus the modern riddle of the Sphinx. It is propounded to the advocate of every social and economic reform. British Free Trade must solve it or die.

The workman does not find his needs satisfied by statistics of unemployment under Protection in Germany or the United States Even if he believes them, they do not help his case: and when he finds them contradicted by the DAILY EXPRESS or by a street corner orator of the Tariff Reform League, he probably does not even believe them. What he knows is, that in a "Free Trade" country and in spite of "Free Trade," he is out-of-work. He is constantly being told that he is out of work because of Free Trade. If the propaganda of Free Trade is to be confined to a defence of Free Trade as it is, - i.e. of the condition of things under which he and many of his fellows are even now workless, and, if not actually starving, at least in danger of starvation - he will, sooner or later, cast his vote, if he has one, against Free Trade.

Once again I venture to suggest that the formula which meets the needs of the case is: not "Less Free Trade": or "Free Trade as it is": but "More Free Trade; Free Trade in its fulness." It will do no harm to tell that workman of the good results that have already followed the partial application of Free Trade principles to international exchange. We may fairly ask him to aid us in the rapid completion of the work begun by the Anti-Corn Law League, by abolishing the remaining duties of customs and excise. But we are bound to tell him that, even then, only the one half of trade will be free: that we must take another and greater step forward, by adding, to the Freedom of Exchange for things already produced, the Freedom of Production, itself.

Freedom of Production

In the last analysis, all wealth is produced from land by labour. These are the two finally necessary factors in production. Capital is a useful auxiliary to production, but not a fundamentally necessary factor, for capital itself is the child of land and labour.. The problem of employment is therefore, at bottom, the problem of obtaining access for labour to land. But in long-settled countries like those of Europe, where the land is privately owned, access to land can only be obtained by permission of the landholder. When this permission is withheld, production becomes impossible, and trade is cut off at its root. This is a worse evil than Protection. For while Protection may and does hinder trade, landlordism may, and often does, make it impossible to produce anything to trade with.

The landlord who allows the worker to use "his" land is at least giving him a chance to live. It may be only a poor chance; he may have to work hard, and to fare harder, for he must share what he produces with the landlord, in the form of rent.

But what if the landlord, stopping the very source from which all production flows, demands such onerous terms for the use of his land that the user cannot meet them and live; or even refuses to allow his land to be used on any terms whatever? He is driving into the ranks of the unemployed, and subjecting to danger of starvation, the men who might be growing corn, and milling it, and baking it into bread; or the men who might be hewing coal and ironstone, and burning the one to smelt the other, and fashioning the pig-iron into steel, and the steel into machines; or the men who might be digging the china-clay and tin out of the land and making them into pots and pans; or the men who might be shaping the clay into bricks; or the men who might be building houses or workshops on the valuable but vacant building land in and near our towns; or the men who might be splitting slate in the quarry to roof them.[7]

The landlords who "hold up" land are responsible, not merely for the unemployment of those whom they shut out from their own land, but for the low wages of those who are in work. For nothing keeps down wages so effectively as the presence of a mass of unemployed men, who must work for some wages, however pitiful, or starve ; and nothing " makes unemployment" so constantly and so effectively as the withholding of land from productive use.

This, then, is our answer, as Free Traders, to the fairy tale of the Tariff Reformer: that the competition of foreign-made goods is responsible for our English out-of-works. The true cause is the withholding of English land from the best uses of productive labour.

Once more, then, I plead for the taxation of land values, not merely as a means to the completion of Free Exchange, but as the means of adding the necessary complement to it - Freedom of Production. To abolish the taxes which now fall upon the materials, the processes and the results of industry, and to concentrate taxation on land values apart from improvements: that is the programme which I have to commend to your consideration. To value the land, all the land, and nothing but the land: that is the first step. To tax the value, when thus ascertained; tax it whether the "owner" is using the land or not; and with the proceeds of that tax to abolish as quickly as may be the existing taxes upon labour and trade and improvement and thrift: that is the second step - and the third. To increase the tax upon land values till nothing is taxed at all except monopoly values; that is the end and the completion and the crown of the just and beneficent movement which was initiated by the genius and devotion of Cobden 72 years ago.

Peace and Goodwill

So wide and so deep are the relations between man and land, that a radical reform of the laws affecting them is sure to have varied and far-reaching results. We are all familiar with many forms of social misery which we believe to be due to what we call bad land laws. We have not yet fully worked out the beneficent effects to putting them on a just basis. I do not propose to try to do so now. But I should like to make a suggestion or two, which may be of special interest to us, men of many nations, now meeting at the invitation of a Club, whose motto is "Free Trade, Peace and Goodwill among Nations."

The placing of taxation on a land value basis affords the only hope that I can see of healing the long-standing conflict of interests between "town" and "country." It is the agrarian party, in our own and other countries, which clamours for Protective taxes on food; the working masses in the towns which have the most obvious reasons for resisting them. It is in the rural districts of my own country that the burden of our existing system of taxation is felt to be heaviest; for the poorer districts, like the poorer citizens, always carry more than their fair share of the load when trade and industry are burdened with taxation. But, as land values are highest where natural and civil advantages are greatest, where production is most intensified and the growth of wealth most rapid, the adoption of land values as the basis of all taxation, national and local, will not only relieve agricultural industry of the burdens which now fall upon and discourage the making of improvements upon land, but will also relieve the burdens of the agricultural districts, where land values are low, by enabling them to share in the land values of the towns, where they are high. For neither town nor country " lives to itself alone." The cultivators of the soil, who feed the town markets with their produce, and draw from them their supplies, are making a large part of the trade which increases the demand for land, and the value of land, in the towns where the markets are held.

If land values were the basis of national taxation, the well-founded complaint of poor and agricultural Ireland that she is unfairly burdened as compared with her wealthier partners in the United Kingdom would ipso facto be redressed.

Nor are the land values of any country the sole creation of the people who live in it. The commerce of the world flows into British ports, and all nations in their degree have their share in the making of the land values of London and Hull and Liverpool and Glasgow. The formal internationalisation of land values is not within the scope of any politics that we can now foresee. But Free Exchange between all countries, combined with taxation of land values in each country, would tend to bring about practically the same result. For while the taxation of land values will bring into .the best productive use all the natural opportunities of each country, the tendency of absolutely Free Exchange would be towards the equalisation of those advantages over all the face of the earth, each sending to each what it can produce in the greatest perfection. Even now, under the grey skies of a London winter, you may buy bananas, ripened under a tropical sun, for three a penny.

Cobden and Land Taxation

In pleading thus for the extension and completion of Free Trade, I am not asking you to accept any new principle. Cobden regarded the repeal of the Corn Laws as merely "laying the foundation of Free Trade."[8] Almost all that I have advocated has been implicit in the British Free Trade propaganda from the first, though it is mainly owing to the labours of the great American Free Trader, Henry George, that its importance has become, of late years, more clearly and widely understood.

At the very beginning (Dec. 1838) of the movement which led to the formation of the Anti-Corn-Law League, the Manchester Chamber of Commerce adopted, at the instance of Richard Cobden, the following petition:

Holding one of the principles of eternal justice to be the inalienable right of every man freely to exchange the result of his labour for the productions of other people, and maintaining the practice of protecting one part of the community at the expense of all other classes to be unsound and unjustifiable, your petitioners earnestly implore your honourable house to repeal all laws relating to the importation of foreign corn and other foreign articles of subsistence: and to carry out to the fullest extent, both as affects agriculture and manufactures, the true and peaceful principles of Free Trade, by removing all existing obstacles to the unrestricted employment of industry and capital."[9]

That, in Cobden's belief, one of the "existing obstacles" was the denial to labour of access to land, is clear from the terms in which he referred to the condition of the agricultural labourer, in a speech which procured him the honour of repeated attacks in THE TIMES,[10] whose Editor accused him of advocating "spoliation," of being an "incendiary," of having no object "but to throw one more bone of contention between the working classes and the landed aristocracy."

"The English peasantry (he said) has no parallel on the face of the earth. You have no other peasantry like that of England - you have no other country in which it is entirely divorced from the land. There is no other country of the world where you will not find men turning up the furrow in their own freehold. You won't find that in England."[11] In his last public speech 5, Cobden said:

"If I were five and twenty or thirty instead of, unhappily, twice that number of years, I would take Adam Smith in hand, - I would not go beyond him, I would have no politics in it - I would take Adam Smith in hand, and I would have a League for Free Trade in Land, just as we had a League for Free Trade in Corn. You will find just the same authority in Adam Smith for one as for the other ; and if it were only taken up as it must be taken up to succeed, not as a political, revolutionary, Radical, Chartist notion, but taken up on politico-economic grounds, the agitation would be certain to succeed ; and if you can apply Free Trade to land and to labour too - that is, by getting rid of those abominable restrictions in your parish settlements, and the like,- then, 1 say, the men who do that will have done for England probably more than we have been able to do by making free trade in corn."

Prof. Thorold Rogers[13] interprets "Free Trade in Land" as if it meant little or nothing more than the abolition of the custom of primogeniture and of the law of settlement, accompanied by simplification of title. But it is clear that the question of land taxation bulked largely in Cobden's mind whenever he thought of the Land Question.

For instance, in a speech at Derby, on Dec. 10th, 1841, he sketched the history of the Land Tax of William and Mary, paid upon a valuation which, even when he spoke, was nearly 150 years old, and asked the middle classes to contrast the way in which the landlords had escaped their fiscal obligations with the way in which they themselves were taxed upon their windows and dogs, and horses and carriages, and sugar, and coffee, and tea, and so on; and he added:

"It is a war on the pockets that is being carried on: and 1 hope to see societies formed calling upon the legislature to re-value the land, and put a taxation upon it in proportion to that of other countries, and in proportion to the wants of the State. I hope I shall see petitions calling upon them to re-value the land, and that the agitation will go on collaterally with the agitation for the total and immediate repeal of the Corn Laws, and I shall contribute my mite for such a purpose. There must be a total abolition of all taxes upon food, and we should raise at least £20,000,000 a year upon the land, and then the owners would be richer than any landed proprietary in the world." [14]

And again, four years later:

"I predict that if Sir Robert Peel provokes a discussion upon the subject of taxation in this country, that he will prove as great an enemy to the landowners as he is likely to prove, according to their views of the question, in his advocacy of protection for them. I warn Ministers, and I warn landowners and the aristocracy of this country, against forcing upon the attention of the middle and industrious classes the subject of taxation. For great as I consider the grievance of the protective system ; mighty as I consider the fraud of the Corn Laws, I verily believe, if you were to bring forward the history of taxation in this country for the last 150 years, you will find as black a record against the landowners as even in the Corn Law itself. I warn them against ripping up the subject of taxation. If they want another League, at the death of this one - if they want another organisation and a motive - for you cannot have these organisations without a motive and a principle - then let them force the middle and industrious classes to understand how they have been cheated, robbed and bamboozled upon the subject of taxation."[15]

In 1852, he is speaking of the London ground-landlords in terms which Mr. Lloyd George might have used at Limehouse, and on Novr. 22nd, 1857, he writes to Mr. White, M.P.:

"The great increase of our Manufacturing system has given such an expansive system of employment to the population, that the want of land as a field of investment and employment for labour has been comparatively little felt. So long as the prosperity of our manufactures continues, there will be no great outcry against the landed monopoly. . When 1 was travelling on the Continent, I found among the thinking part of the population in France, Italy, and Germany a great feeling of surprise that the men who had abolished the Corn Laws had not also abolished the monopoly in land." [16]

Well, the movement for the abolition of land monopoly has come at last, though Cobden did not live to see it. It had to wait for the new impulse given to thought on the Land Question and the Free Trade Question by Henry George. The "new league" to which Cobden looked forward is here. It is called the "United Committee for the Taxation of Land Values." It arose, as the great Anti-Corn Law League arose, from a combination of local Leagues. It is inspired by the same enthusiasm, and is working by the same methods (though as yet without the help of so great funds) as its great predecessor. Can anyone doubt where, at this day and under present circumstances, the sympathies of Cobden would be found?

Note how much of the argument I have been trying to put before you is implied in his argument, sixty years ago, about the Poor Rate:

"The poor have the first right to a subsistence from the land and there is no other security so good as the land itself. Other kinds of property may take wings and fly away. Moveable property has very often been known to 'flit' the day before quarter-day; capital employed in trade may be lost in an unsuccessful venture in China; wages sometimes disappear altogether; and, therefore, the real and true security to which the people of this country should look, is in the soil itself. But 1 have another reason why this property should bear these local burdens, and it is this, - it is the only property which not only does not diminish in value, but, in a country growing in population and advancing in prosperity, it always increases in value, and without any help from the owners."[17]

Conclusion

It is a great task, this, the completion of Free Trade, to which we invite you. Towards its achievement, we ask your co-operation and offer our own. We shall be told, as Cobden was told, just as he was entering on the seven years' educational campaign which changed the mind of a House of Commons and converted a hostile Prime Minister, "You will overthrow the Monarchy as soon as you will do that."[18] About the same time, a Prime Minister declared, in his place in the House, that the repeal of the Corn Laws would be the most insane proposition that ever entered the human mind.[19] We shall perhaps be called, as he and his League were called, "levellers."[20] We know that all the vocabulary of abuse which was used last year against the Valuation clauses of the Budget had already been used against the proposal to abolish the Corn Laws,[21] and that it will probably be used again as soon as the next step is proposed to be taken. But we comfort ourselves with the knowledge that the Corn tax was repealed, and remains repealed: and that the new valuation of the land, for which Cobden proposed to petition, is at last provided for by law. And when it is completed, it will be used.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

1. (During the Congress, my colleague and co-delegate. Mr. S. H. Starnes, called my attention to a passage in Wilfreid C. Robinson's Antwerp: An Historical Sketch (Washbourne, 1904; p. 252). On August 10th, 1795, the Scheidt, which had been closed by the Dutch against the over-seas trade of Antwerp for 100 years, was declared free, and was placed under the safeguard of the French Republic. "It is said," adds Robinson (quoting Nameche, Hist. Nat. XXVIII, 27), "that the very day after the publication of this decree, the value of houses and land in Antwerp was increased tenfold." It is clear, in spite of the wording of this statement, that this increase of value was an increase of land value only; the structural value of the houses could not have been increased by a measure which could only have the effect of cheapening the bringing-in of building materials. Antwerp was then enclosed within narrow limits by its fortifications, and the artificial scarcity of land accentuated the rise in land values which followed immediately on the extended freedom of international exchange. Internatinal Exhibitions have a close relation to international commerce. M. Charles in his Fuehrer durch die Bruessler Wel'ausstellung (Brussels, 1910) states that the making by the City of Brussels of the magnificent approach to the Brussels Exhibition caused a tenfold increase in the land values of Ixelles.)
2. Dec., 1838. Cowing, Richard Cobden, pp. 59-60.
3. Rt. Hon. Wmston Churchill, MP
4. Verinder. The Great Problem of our Great Towns.
5. Thorold Rogers, Political Economy, ch. XII.
6. Just as vice is wholly bad for the community. Yet, as I have shown, in districts where vice is general and profitable, rents may be, for that reason, abnormally high. (The Great Problem, etc., ch. VI.)
7. VERINDER. THE GOVERNMENT AND THE UNEMPLOYED. (English League fur the Taxation of Land Values, Leaflet No. 7.)
8. Speeches, i. 406.
9. Speeches, i. 352.
10. See Thorold Rogers, Cobden and Political Opinion 99 ff.
11. At Rochdale, Nov. 24, 1863 (Speeches, ii. 116, 117).
12. Rochdale, Nov. 23, 1864 (Speeches, ii. 367).
13. Cobden and Political Opinion, ch. III.
14. I am indebted for the quotation to my friend and colleague, Mr. John Paul. This speech is not included in the two volumes of collected speeches.
15. London, Dec. 17, 1845 (Speeches, i. 344).
16. Morley. Life of Cobden, ii. 215.
17. Leeds, Dec.18, 1849 (Speeches, i. 419, 420).
18. Life, i. 147; Speeches, i. 345.
19. Life, i. 171.
20. Gowing. Richard Cobden, p.65.
21. Life,i. 155.