The Agrarians :

On the way to the English pre-Marxian socialists, it may, however, be as well to glance at certain representatives of agrarian socialism, who taught the doctrine of theft and spoliation as applied to land. For this purpose it may be sufficient to cite Spence and Ogilvie.

(a) SPENCE

Thomas Spence (1750–1814) is in himself rather a poor creature of little capacity and less gifts; but, oddly, he became a symbol and played a certain part in history. At the age of 25, Spence, who was a school-teacher, delivered, to the Philosophical Society of Newcastle-on-Tyne, a lecture on The Real Rights of Man, ‘for printing of which,’ as he boasts, ‘the Society did the Author the honour to expel him.’ The parents of his scholars seem to have conferred upon him a somewhat similar honour. It is not much of a lecture, but it carried Spence through life, and it has been printed more frequently than its exiguous merits justify. The rest of his life was devoted to political agitation of various kinds. He formed a sect, the ‘Spenceans,’ and framed a constitution for the ‘Spencean Commonwealth.’ He was sent to prison when, passing beyond philosophic dissertations on natural law, he exhorted his hearers to scalp the landed proprietors. Among his various journalistic adventures he edited for a short time a periodical with the pleasing title, Pigs' Meat, or Lessons for the Swinish Multitude: he was, however, seldom so inspired. But though he may claim the honour of having been made the subject of a biography, his ideas, such as they were, are all contained in the few pages of the Newcastle lecture which launched him on his career.¹

The essence of the lecture is an appeal to natural law, under which all have an equal property in the land: in the language of a more recent generation, ‘God gave the land to the people.’ Nor can this right be bartered away, for succeeding generations are also interested, and in this matter ancestors have no right to deprive their posterity of their due inheritance. Consequently, it follows that at any given time the land belongs to the living inhabitants of any country. In fact, however, the land has been claimed by a few, without whose permission others may not live. The first landholders were usurpers and tyrants, and all who have come after have owned by virtue of inheritance or purchase from the original usurpers. The landowner may in law oblige every living creature to remove off his property, and if they acted in concert, and took their property into their hands, ‘all the rest of mankind might go to heaven if they would, for there would be no place found for them here.’²

Spence's remedy is that the inhabitants of each parish should meet and take over their long-lost rights. The land being thus vested in the parish or corporation, the rent would be paid into the parish treasury, and used for all manner of laudable ends, instead of being applied ‘to support and spread luxury, pride and all manner of vice.’³ Beyond this, Spence moves away into a world of Godwinian anarchy in which the central government fades away, and we are left with a world of parish councils, who contrive to do very little, for the excellent reason that there is very little for them to do. ‘Government does not meddle in every trifle,’⁴ having the good sense to leave most things to the inactivity of the parish councils. Moreover, there will be no taxes apart from the rents that flow into the parish treasuries; for with a central government that has abdicated or been emasculated, expenditure will be wondrously cut down: there will be no custom-house men, no collectors, no army, no pensioners, ‘nor such like ruination vermin to maintain.’¹ Civil servants have had many hard things said about them, but this is as unkind as any. The end of Spence is thus a world of Godwinian parish councils, maintained by the rent of the land which has been vested in the parish.

(b) OGILVIE

Of entirely different calibre is William Ogilvie (1736–1819), a Professor in King's College, Aberdeen, who in addition to professing humanity, also professed a practical interest in agriculture. His Essay on the Right of Property in Land appeared in 1782, and as befits professorial dignity, it would appear to have been his sole contribution to current controversy. As he indicated on the title-page of his work, Ogilvie also is interested in the Law of Nature, and its bearing on this issue. The earth, he holds, was given to man ‘in common occupancy’²; but from this general right, no one can derive a title to more than an equal share of the soil of the country.³ This title to an equal share is, moreover, indefeasible; it is a birthright which cannot be renounced. It is antecedent to municipal laws and cannot be abolished by them. It is the duty therefore of the State to reserve for its citizens the opportunity of entering upon this birthright, should they so desire.⁴

It is odd that Ogilvie, with others of the same tendency, groping after the teaching of Natural Law in these matters, should so invariably have interpreted the ‘Law of Nature’ as applying within the frontiers of a State to the inhabitants of that State; for there is here a glaring and obvious fallacy. It is always somewhat risky to endeavour to codify too precisely the contents of Natural Law, or to pry too curiously into the mind of the Creator, forgetful of the words of a high authority in these matters that ‘verily, thou art a God that hidest thyself.’ Even if, in the careful language of Locke, ‘God gave the earth in common to all men,’ it does not follow that he gave the soil of England to the English, or the soil of France to the French; and indeed, looking over the history of the last two thousand years, it is extremely probable that he did not. From the basic principle that ‘God gave the earth in common to all men,’ Ogilvie may not properly infer that any one of us is entitled to the 46-millionth part (approximately) of the soil of Great Britain (with possible modifications in respect of Northern Ireland); on the contrary, my lawful claims would be to the appropriate aliquot part of the surface of the whole world, and the like claim would be vested in every inhabitant of China, Peru and Liechtenstein.

Reverting to Ogilvie, the difficulty with which he is confronted springs from his realisation that, interwoven with the right we each have to hold our proportionate share of the soil, is the other right, based on labour in respect of improvements effected.¹ For he is too much of a practical agriculturalist to be willing to forget this. To combine these two possibly conflicting principles should be the object of all agrarian laws.² In his endeavour to disentangle what is due to a cultivator who is in possession of more than his appropriate fraction and who has effected improvements in all the land which he occupies, Ogilvie divides the purchase price of land into three portions. There is, firstly, the original value of the soil (the bloodless elusive ghost which hereafter Ricardo is destined to pursue); there is, secondly, the value of the improvements due to the proprietor or his predecessors; and, thirdly, there is the ‘contingent or improvable value,’ by which is meant the value it may yet receive from cultivation—a hypothetical potential increase. Any landowner is entitled to all three portions in respect of the land that may be assigned to him as his due share; but in respect of his excess holding beyond his quota, he is entitled only to the second portion; to the original and to the contingent value of his excess holding he can have no claim.³ It is a pleasing academic solution, but would be a maddening problem to submit for the determination of a chartered accountant in any particular case.

Not merely does Natural Law call, so far is is practicable, for a settlement of the population on the soil, but such a course is also manifestly in the public interest. Ogilvie could scarcely be of his time without being a Utilitarian, believing that the end of the State is the increase of public happiness; as a Professor of Humanity, he could scarcely fail to identify happiness with virtue; as a part-time agriculturalist, he knew that the cultivators of the soil were the most virtuous of men. There is indeed a pronounced physiocratic strain in Ogilvie, who believed that labour devoted to agriculture increased public wealth more than if applied in any other direction. He is indeed somewhat depreciatory with regard to the importance of manufactures and commerce. ‘That nation,’ he observes, ‘is greatly deceived and misled which bestows any encouragement on manufactures for exportation or for any purpose but the necessary internal supply’—at least, until agriculture has reached its fullest development.⁴

If a multiplication of workers on the land would thus be advantageous in every direction, so contrariwise the ‘exorbitant right of property in land’ brings with it many pernicious consequences. It is in his discussion of this aspect of the question that Ogilvie qualifies for admission to a section leading to the forerunners of Marx. Owing to this engrossing of land by a few men ‘the happiness of mankind has been for ages more invaded and restrained, than by all the tyranny of kings, the imposture of priests, and the chicane of lawyers, taken to gether, though these are supposed to be the greatest evils that afflict the societies of human kind.’¹ ‘By exacting exorbitant rents,’ he adds, ‘they exercise a most pernicious usury, and deprive industry that is actually exerted of its due reward.’² It is a monopoly tending to the starvation of the population at large no less than would a monopoly of bakers, so that in the end, as he observes alliteratively, ‘the race becomes dwarfish, debilitated and deformed’³ While the landlords object to the taxes imposed by the State, and clamour against pensions, they should remember that ‘their own large incomes are indeed pensions, and salaries of sinecure offices.’ ‘Whoever,’ he adds, generalising, ‘enjoys any revenue not proportioned to such industry or exertion of his own, or of his ancestors, is a freebooter, who has found means to cheat or to rob the public, and more especially the indigent of that district in which he lives.’ Moreover, the hereditary revenue of the landholder increases without any effort of his: ‘It is a premium given to idleness.’⁴

This is the voice of a Boanerges, rather than of a Professor of Humanity. It will be observed that rent—or at least exorbitant rent—is attacked because it deprives industry of its due reward; and it is further implied that revenues should be proportional to industry or exertion—although indeed in the crucial passage he is prepared to allow our ancestors to work for us. But when Ogilvie turns from denunciatory analysis to practical proposals, his roaring becomes as innocuous as the cooing of the amorous turtle-dove. Indeed, in the light of his talk about freebooters, Ogilvie may well have been astonished at his own moderation. For what it all comes to is that every citizen of the age of twenty-one may claim a holding of not more than forty acres, to be assigned in perpetuity for residence and cultivation. Into the details and possible modifications of the scheme it is unnecessary to enter; but the holding is not to be had free. There is to be a rent, even if a fair rent, payable to the landlord, and also a temporary rent payable to the former tenant. Also, even if it is tucked away in a footnote, the claimant must show that he is a man of some substance. It is significant also of Ogilvie's gentleness in practice that among the lands which may not be taken for this purpose is ‘the farm or park belonging to the lord of the manor,’ that is to say, the freebooter's own special farm. More astonishing is the suggestion that the new holder of land should ‘pay to the lord of the manor certain aids and services of a feudal nature, so regulated as to produce that degree of connection and dependence which may be expedient for preserving order and subordination in the country without danger of giving rise to oppression and abuse.’ Thus, despite the vehemence of his denunciations, when it comes to practice, Ogilvie produces no more than a modest measure for the encouragement of small holdings, encumbered by conditions that are extremely discouraging.¹

Perhaps not in themselves of great importance, yet significant as showing how utterly remote Ogilvie fundamentally was from any proletarian or democratic instincts are certain observations he makes on the problem of how these changes may be brought about. His suggestion is that the reform might be effected by a conquering monarch at the head of his victorious army; and he goes so far as to suggest that the attainment of such a reform ‘might even in the eye of reason and philosophy almost justify the ambitious desire of conquest in the breast of a heroic prince.’² Also ‘princes sitting on disputed thrones’ might use the scheme as a bribe to render their seat more easy.³ It is the figure of Frederick the Great that he has here in mind. It is rather odd to look to the generous disposition of a heroic Hitler or a triumphant Tamberlaine for the achievement of agrarian reform.

Such are Spence and Ogilvie, representatives of the tradition of agrarian socialism; they may not have much in common with the pre-Marxians, but at least in respect of one kind of property—land—they popularised the ideas of theft, robbery and spoliation.