British Socialism: An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical ProposalsBarker, J. Ellis
History
British Socialism: An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals
Barker, J. Ellis
Socialism; Socialism -- Great Britain
Others base their demand for the spoliation of landlords upon the
Bible and upon the ideal of a "Divine brotherhood," forgetting that
the Bible contains a commandment "Thou shalt not steal," as well as
many warnings against lying, deceit, cant, and covetousness. One of
the champion Bible-Socialists, for instance, writes: "If all men are
brothers, as Christ undoubtedly taught, then the land, the source of
wealth, the means by which men can earn their livelihood, should not
be the property of any set of individuals, but should belong to the
whole community. The fact of a man being born into the world gives him
the divine right to the opportunity of earning his living, and that
right cannot be enjoyed so long as there is a single man on earth
deprived of access to the land from which to earn his bread. When the
spirit of brotherhood prevails, it will be a simple and a natural
thing to arrange that these things shall be used not in the interests
of the few, but for the common good. There are innumerable signs that
the hearts and minds of men are now turning in this direction, and
that they are coming to see that the only just and permanent
arrangement is the divine solution of working on the basis of
universal brotherhood."[421] There is a fraternity among Sicilian
bandits. The "Divine brotherhood" of the writer would be based on
robbery, and have robbery as its object.
Others demand the confiscation of all land by relying upon
misrepresentation: "If the injustice of the land monopoly is great in
the country, by robbing the grower of his improvements or scaring him
from making any, by robbing the nation of its own legitimate
independent food supply, and by laying waste vast tracts of the
surface, the injustice is even greater in the towns, if only by reason
of the greater numbers whose interests are now involved: (1) by
flooding the town labour markets with surplus labourers, and so--by
their competition between each other for jobs of any sort at any
terms, rather than starve--keeping wages down at the privation point;
(2) by robbing the town workers of that proper and legitimate home
market which a flourishing and proportionately numerous agricultural
population would afford; (3) by the bloated rentals in cities, only
made possible by driving and crowding the people into our unnaturally
swollen centres; and (4) by the continuous re-investment of those
enormous rent extortions in all those secondary monopolies of transit,
finance, and business generally, which can only arise from the primary
monopoly of the soil, and which complete this devil's chain of the
subjection of labour and the dependence of the community."[422]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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