"When the 'sacredness of property' is talked of, it should always be remembered that this sacredness does not belong in the same degree to landed property. No man made the land. * * * The claim of the land-owners to the land is altogether subordinate to the general policy of the state. * * * Subject to this proviso (that of compensation) the state is at liberty to deal with landed property as the general interests of the community may require, even to the extent, if it so happen, of doing with the whole what is done with a part whenever a bill is passed for a railroad or a street."--_J. S. Mill, Principles_, book ii. chap. ii. In regard to the disposal of property at the death of its owner, the same author is of opinion that "a certain moderate provision, such as is admitted to be reasonable in the case of illegitimate children, and of younger children" is all "that parents owe to their children, and all, therefore, which the state owes to the children of those who die intestate." The surplus, if any, he holds "it may rightfully appropriate to the general purposes of the community."--_Ibid_. Extremes generally meet. From the days of Adam Smith to the present time the policy of England has looked in the direction that led necessarily to the impoverishment of the small land-owner, and to the consolidation of land, and during the whole of that period we have been told of the superior advantages of large farms and great tenant-farmers; but now, when the injurious effects of the system are becoming from day to day more obvious, the question of the existence of _any right_ to land is being discussed, and we are told that "public reasons" existed "for its being appropriated," and if those reasons have "lost their force, the thing would be unjust." From this to confiscation the step would not be a very great one. No such idea certainly could exist in the mind of so enlightened a man as Mr. Mill, who insists upon compensation; but when a whole people, among whom the productive power is steadily diminishing as individual fortunes become more and more colossal, are told that the proprietors of land, great and small, receive compensation for its use, for no other reason than that they have been enabled to possess themselves of a monopoly of its powers, and that rent is to be regarded as "the recompense of no sacrifice whatever," but as being "received by those who neither labour nor put by, but merely hold out their hands to receive the offerings of the rest of the community,"[154] can we doubt that the day is approaching when the right to property in land will be tested in England, as it has elsewhere been? Assuredly not. Ricardo-Malthusianism tends directly to what is commonly called Communism, and at that point will England arrive, under the system which looks to the consolidation of the land, the aggrandizement of the few, and the destruction of the physical, moral, intellectual, and political powers of the whole