CHAPTER VIII.

The planet Mars is held to be the inheritance of those who are born upon it. Admitting the self evident and uncontrovertible justice of this view, our government ages ago assumed the ownership and property control of it in trust for the equal benefit of all. It has proceeded in accordance with this view to grant its uses for all the purposes of industry and pleasure, in such a manner as to bestow the income of its rent equally upon every living inhabitant. I can only give you some outlines of our admirable manner of accomplishing this purpose.

Our agricultural districts are divided into small farms, even in size, with graded rents in accordance with the richness of their soils, and other conditions. Sub-letting is not allowed, and a chief purpose in making these allotments is, that the family residing upon each farm will be able to perform all the labor required. This is in accordance with a principle which our government carries out in all possible ways, to bring labor and capital into partnership. The cultivator of the soil goes on with his[Pg 151] improvements, in the assurance that they are as secure to him as though his title were perpetual; for in the event of a change of tenancy, which is exceedingly rare, a fair value is returned to him for all the fixed property which is the product of his labor. It is provided that there shall be no competition in the occupancy, and as the rent is but a nominal sum, he feels no insecurity in his possession. Agricultural rents are graded annually, and are payable shortly after harvest. They may be either higher or lower than those of the preceding year, depending entirely on profits.

Landlordism, as it exists with you, is unknown amongst us. The rapacity which under your unjust system is admitted to an ownership in which no competition can possibly exist, and at the same time is permitted to avail itself of that unlimited competition which the pressure of public necessity induces, has neither foothold nor abiding place upon our planet. Under our system, you will perceive that any increase of the profits of land is met by the tenant with an increase of rent, and all those natural causes which advance the value of landed property add to the government income, and in that way are shared by all. Our government derives its sole support from rent,[Pg 152] and no other tax or exaction is known. With a percentage of the profits from the use of the land, which is never burdensome to the tenant, it has been enabled, and has found it to its interest, to carry out agricultural and municipal improvements and enterprises which individual ownership would never undertake. It has drained our marshes, and reclaimed our desert lands in the most efficient manner, without the necessity of creating, as with you, an exacting monopoly, which would claim of industry its lion’s share of profits from the work.

The government interest in our municipal progress, by virtue of its holdings, has led it to carry out in the most complete manner those sanitary enterprises which render city life safe and enjoyable. With its advantages of sole ownership of city land, it is enabled to enforce certain uniform rules of taste in house and street construction, which have made our cities as complete and harmonious as single works of art; their symmetrical combinations of lines and curves as consistently meeting each other as in a separate architectural elevation.

As I have already hinted to you, a cultivation of the beautiful in art and nature is a part of our religion, and we indulge in the gratification of esthetic inclinations as[Pg 153] one of the greatest charms of life. Our government erects no buildings except public ones, and in their construction and fittings is manifested that universal love of the grand and beautiful which everywhere prevails. Your imagination is scarcely able to conceive the magnificence of our temples of worship, and the charming perspectives of our streets and highways. Yet even our industrious attention to all this pleasing effect for the eye is held to be a matter of secondary importance, when compared with the health-giving measures and regulations which prevail.

From the ground rents alone of every municipality, free and abundant water, light and heat are supplied to every inhabitant; and from the same source of income a complete insurance is furnished against individual loss from accidents, and all our dead are disposed of without cost to relatives and friends. We place no dead bodies in the earth as you do, considering such a practice not only barbarous, but dangerous to the health of the living. On the contrary, we extinguish them in a manner which you cannot follow from a lack of the required advance in chemical science. Ever since our discovery of the elementary unit we have had the power to reduce all[Pg 154] matter into its original state, and it serves us well, that with our chemical appliances and due solemnity not a vestige of the dead is left to be preserved, except their memories.

For the purpose of exhibiting to you the marked difference of effect on labor and industry between private and government ownership of land, let us trace the institution and progress of one of your cities in comparison with one of ours. These combinations of individual enterprise are to be found upon your planet in all stages of growth, and may be most conveniently observed by you in this vicinity in their earlier periods of development. They are instituted mostly with you in a fortuitous way, a few individual interests forming the nucleus around which capital and labor are attracted, under the outlook of increased population and trade, to supply and create the various products of industry demanded. The whole land surface of your new city, including its prospective limits, is immediately appropriated at a trifling cost, by a single one or a smaller number of owners, under laws conveniently designed for their purposes. From this time forward the most extraordinary exactions from industry begin. Every stroke of the hammer and[Pg 155] revolution of the fly wheel adds to the value of these possessions, until in a short time there is no limit to the price or rent of them, but the ability of industry to stand the tax.

During the earlier stage of your city’s growth, conditions exist which disappear later. Labor is specially favored. The demand for it is as great as the supply, if not greater, and its savings enable it to get a share, by small investments, in the steady advance of land values. Your new city, supposing it to be a metropolis, is invested with all the elements of prosperity. Capital comes to it abundantly from abroad, induced by the opportunities of profitable investment, and labor is equally attracted by high pay. Population increases, together with all the enterprises of industry, and your land, conveniently divided into small lots, changes hands from one purchaser to another, each realizing a satisfactory and handsome profit. The monopolizing influences of land ownership are not generally felt, because of the large and unoccupied area of surface, and the facility to all in the acquirement of titles. Labor enjoys an era of remarkable prosperity outside as well as within the limits of your city. Your government has donated to it millions of[Pg 156] acres of fertile agricultural lands, whose surface, for the most part, requires no great outlay of capital to fit it for the uses of husbandry; and altogether, the general contentment and thrift indicate that all material interests are equally equipped and uniformly successful in the struggle of life. Labor goes cheerfully to its daily toil, and returns to its abundant board with a hope and ambition it has seldom known before. All human purposes appear in a flourishing state, except, it may incidentally be observed, that your religion at this period droops, without its usual attention and support.

You are now, we shall suppose, at the end of the second decade in the history of your city, and many changes are observable, due to the progress of your society and civilization. Your metropolis may contain now about one hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants. The market value of its land surface, about three miles square, has increased, from the government price at which it was purchased by the single or half dozen purchasers, from about seven thousand to three hundred and fifty millions of dollars, and the whole value of the products of industry upon it may be reasonably estimated at a like sum. With the privileges and partnership[Pg 157] which labor has enjoyed in this great increase of values, it is so far quiet and satisfied; but unfortunately the inevitable outcome is not so promising to it. The evil effects of your private ownership become more and more apparent as your city advances, and when, under the promptings of human greed and selfishness, your landlords have fairly commenced their raid upon the industries of the city. They now exact from you a tax in the form of land rent alone which consumes yearly the twentieth part of all the products of industry upon their possessions. This enormous tax is exacted without the return of any service whatever except the privilege of a dwelling place.

Your inhabitants are called upon also to provide for the necessities of government, and an additional tax is levied therefore, which takes from the profits of labor and capital an amount equal to the tenth part of all their savings. Because the privilege of becoming a land owner is equal to all, and is the hope of most of you, you have permitted the transformation of this gift of nature into a monopoly, the most arbitrary and consuming that can be conceived.

This gift of nature, however, is not the only one diverted from its equitable distribution, and permitted to[Pg 158] become the material of unrighteous exaction. The process of the water, heat, and light supply, so manifestly among the duties of your government to institute and superintend, is given, like your land, to the management and control of private individuals; thus converting these indispensable elements of life and comfort into money getters for wealth, and subtracting to an unnecessary degree from the profits of industry and the savings of labor.

We shall now suppose that your city has arrived at the termination of its fourth decade. Its population has increased two-fold, and its land value has quadrupled; but it is noticeable that your products of industry have not kept pace in their value with this enormous appreciation, and your ground rents alone now consume every ten years the whole cost of all buildings and their contents. In other words, every vestige of the accumulated labor of your city goes into the pockets of its landlords every ten years. Change now becomes apparent in social life. Competition has now reduced the wages of labor, and it has very nearly lost its ability to share in some of the minor operations of capital. The struggles of increasing numbers, precisely the same influence[Pg 159] which has depressed wages, have advanced land. Labor has lost much of its old buoyancy and hopefulness. While raiment and food, the products of its own industry, have fallen in price, with a tendency to make up for its reduced income, every other one of its living expenses is greatly increased. Allowing it its proper place with matrimonial ambitions and hopes, the remarkable proportion of one fourth of its hard-earned wages is demanded of it in land rent alone, for a dwelling spot in the midst of a region which nothing else but its own energies have produced from a wilderness. Every single one of the bounties of nature, except the air and sunshine, are inaccessible without the charges of an intercepting medium. The heat, and light-giving materials of the earth, together with water, the most useful and abundant of all, are served out to it burdened with all the costs and profits levied by an organized and irresponsible few.

The capital engaged in your industries adjusts itself to all these burdens, and is quiet under them, because it can readily reimburse itself by transferring all expenses and costs to prices. There is no such escape for labor, which not only pays these monopoly exactions directly, but as a consumer is obliged by an indirect method to foot a large[Pg 160] share of these bills for capital. Capital remains contented under these extraordinary demands for another reason. All monopoly enterprises, and especially that one of land, furnish the safest and most profitable reservoirs of investment for its surplus earnings, and when it does not already participate it looks forward to a partnership in their profits.

You can readily understand, then, why the toilers of your city, at this period of its history, should show signs of sinking back into that dependent condition which characterizes them elsewhere upon your planet. A few among them, with great fortitude of restraint and large acquisitiveness, manage to lay by some of their earnings, but the margin between income and expense is so narrow that such a practice is not general. So that from the disabling vicissitudes of life, and a carelessness of habit induced by lack of ambition, comes that distressful state of existence, unknown on our planet, but common enough on yours, where a human being, with abundant stores of food and raiment surrounding him, suffers for enough of them to supply his moderate wants. Poverty, which before had been only exceptional and sporadic, assumes now the proportions of a numerous class among you, and[Pg 161] out of which, by a lack of the opportunities of knowledge, crime as naturally appears as weeds in a neglected husbandry.

Another and significant change now becomes apparent in your social state. During the first stages of your city’s existence, there had been no money invested except as capital. Every dollar laid out in that way had been shared by labor. Any increase in the volume of capital brings a corresponding prosperity to those who toil; but the accumulations from the profits of capital have not generally been added to it, and in many cases the capital itself has been led away into the many profitable monopoly enterprises which abound. These now flourish as they never did before. Increase of population and trade has stimulated the various industries to increased supplies, but the prices of all commodities instead of being raised are lowered. The free and open competition within the precincts of capital and labor has effected this; not greatly to the detriment of either, because the producer in one department of industry is a consumer in many of the others, and capital has increased its volume of business to make up for smaller profits. But you have within the borders of your city those money-making contrivances[Pg 162] peculiar to your planet, wherein the natural effect of competition is entirely reversed, and where the universal law of supply and demand is completely abrogated. The worst and most disastrous of these is your system of land ownership.

Into this, and the other of your monopolies, capital pours its surplus, and finally retires to them with its accumulations, deserting its partnership with labor, and appearing on the scene in the new form of wealth. From a few instances, so rare as to be conspicuous, your holders of large money accumulations become now a numerous and influential class. While your society at one end has been sinking into poverty, it blooms at the other with signs of unusual thrift. With an increase of luxury on one hand, and of want on the other, your city is now approaching the normal state. A few decades more it will have established within itself those relations between wealth, capital, and labor which are as inevitably the outcome of your land ownership system, as drouth and famine are the outcome of a lack of moisture in the soil.

We shall say now that your city contains a half million of inhabitants. Its surface is not extended in proportion with its increase in population, the cost of space inducing[Pg 163] a greater crowding of houses and people. Your labor products, and the land upon which they rest, have been so constantly receding from each other in values, that now, with all the forced economy of space, your piles of goods, merchandise, and houses, if sold at their market value, would not furnish more than a quarter enough of money to purchase the ground beneath them. This enormous increase in the value of your city land is mostly the result of the opportunities its owners enjoy to prey upon the industries, and at this stage the following very remarkable conditions may be observed: While the city’s capital, properly so called, is about three hundred millions of dollars, and the number of its workers in industrial pursuits about one hundred thousand, the aggregate earnings of both labor and capital combined have one quarter of the whole swept away by the demands of your landlords, estimating ground rent alone. And this enormous exaction, remember, is imposed without rendering any service in return. None of your economists will deny that this large drain does not come directly from the industries of your people, and its exhausting effects are daily seen in the gradually hardening lines in the lives of those who toil. In an early period, twenty persons in[Pg 164] every hundred of your workers owned a portion of your city’s surface. Now only four per cent are land owners, and within a few decades not more than five in a thousand will dwell or pursue their avocations without the virtual consent of some superintending ground owner, upon whose mercy in abstaining from ejectment or extortion they will remain in constant uncertainty.

The ownership of your city lots will now have gone almost exclusively into the hands of your leisure class; and the vast sums of money drawn monthly for rent, instead of being, as formerly, partly returned as capital, to assist labor in the various industrial enterprises is now either dissipated in luxury, expended in new possessions, or invested in some of the many monopoly undertakings of the day. The effects of this unjust burden are daily apparent. It reduces the possible savings of labor and the accumulations of industry to such a minimum that success in these is the exception rather than the rule. It is mostly because of this monopoly of land that life among your masses is a continuous and uninterrupted struggle; and to this more than all else is due that unequal distribution of wealth which affords only the few that cultivation and knowledge which elevates them,[Pg 165] and that dooms the many to an unceasing wear of nerve and muscle to sustain themselves.

You cannot fail to have observed, as one of the most promising signs of your destiny, that wherever humanity in the midst of civilization is freest from the cares of sustenance supply, it inclines to devote its leisure to a cultivation of the mind. The crudeness and vulgarity of some, and the refinement of others, are entirely due to difference in opportunities of development, and between these two there must always exist a great repulsion. What good can you therefore expect of mankind as a whole, so long as by your methods a few only are vouchsafed the opportunities for knowledge?

The forces at work within your society have now, we we will say, brought up your population and general conditions to the standard of those which may be found in the older portions of the Earth. Your poverty is more intense and widespread, with its corresponding increase in crime, while your wealth has become more munificent and ostentatious. Impelled by the necessities of life and a brave emulation, all your industries will be found in the highest strain of action. The accumulated products of labor and its multiplied activity have given to you a semblance[Pg 166] of prosperity and success. But while in the course of your progress you have created new necessities and wants, you have made no just provision by which they could be, as near as possible, equally shared; and as a consequence the apparent as well as the silent and concealed miseries of human life were never greater.

There is to be observed now a marked increase in the spread and influence of your religion. As the hope of success in life becomes lessened, and as the heartaches and distresses increase by your uneven struggles, the suffering and disappointed masses turn naturally to another existence for what has been denied them in this; and it can be said of all your religious theories, that their contrivances to make you suffer uncomplainingly the outrages of authority are the best that could have been devised. The few among you enjoying the bounties of life, surrounded by that want and privation whose voices they cannot escape, and whose strong arms they cannot fail to observe, turn instinctively to your religious doctrines with a sense of safety and protection. The few favored ones, looking over the vast multitude of their less fortunate brothers, are conscious that the superabundance they enjoy has been doubtfully acquired, and they are quick to[Pg 167] embrace that convenient justification, which ascribes the greater ills and burdens of the many to a preconceived and unalterable arrangement of the divine will.