For we feed our cattle and poultry on the land, and get from the land corn, malt, hops, iron, timber, and every other thing we use, except fish and a few sea-drugs; and we could not get fish without nets and boats, nor make nets and boats without fibre and wood and metals. Stand a decanter and a tumbler on a bare table. Call the table Britain, call the decanter a landlord, and call the tumbler a labourer. Now no man can produce wealth without land. If, then, Lord de Canter owns all the land, and Tommy Tumbler owns none, how is Tommy Tumbler to get his living? He will have to work for Lord de Canter, and he will have to take the wage his lordship offers him. Now you cannot say that Britain is over-populated with only two men, nor that it is suffering from a superfluity of labour when there is only one labourer. And yet you observe that with only two men in the country one is rich and the other poor. How, then, will a reduction of the population prevent poverty? Look at this diagram. A square board, with two men on it; one is black and one is white. [Illustration: Fig. 3.] Call the board England, the black pawn a landlord, and the white pawn a labourer. Let me repeat that every useful thing comes out of the land, and then ask this simple question: If _all_ the land--the whole of England--belongs to the black man, how is the white man going to get his living? You see, although the population of England consists of only two men, if one of these men owns _all_ the land, the other man must starve, or steal, or beg, or work for wages. Now, suppose our white man works for wages--works for the black man--what is going to regulate the wages? Will the fact that there is only one beggar make that beggar any richer? If there were ten white men, and _all_ the land belonged to the black man, the ten whites would be as well off as the one white was, for the landowner could find them all work, and could get them to work for just as much as they could live on. No: that idea of raising wages by reducing the population is a mistake. Do not the workers _make_ the wealth? They do. And is it not odd to say that we will increase the wealth by reducing the number of the wealth makers? But perhaps you think the workers might get a bigger _share_ of the wealth if there were fewer of them. How? Our black man owns all England. He has 100 whites working for him at wages just big enough to keep them alive. Of those 100 whites 50 die. Will the black man raise the wages of the remaining 50? Why should he? There is no reason why he should. But there is this reason why he should not, viz. that as he has now only 50 men working for him, he will only be half as rich as he was when he had 100 men working for him. But the land is still his, and the whites are still in his power. He will still pay them just as much as they can live on, and no more. But you may say that if the workers decreased and the masters did not decrease in numbers, wages must rise.