Page:Conventional Lies of our Civilization.djvu/277

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.

THE LAND NATIONAL PROPERTY.
263

to tenant farmers. There is nothing to prevent society from placing the manufacturer and the tillers of the soil upon the same footing as the English tenant farmer, with one great proprietor as the master of them all: the State. This arrangement of the economic world would make it possible for the single individual to accumulate personal property by his sagacity and industry as at present, although not to such an enormous extent as the fortunes of the pirates and parasites of our modern civilization. The talented, the industrious man would find in a more luxurious manner of living the reward for his greater ability or efforts, the man of mediocre capabilities and the indolent man, would be obliged to live more frugally, while the individuals who shirked or refused to work would be the only ones condemned to want. The accumulation of enormous quantities of land in the possession of one single tenant could not occur, as he would experience such difficulty in finding laborers to till his land, owing to the fact that as any one willing to work could rent land from the State, no one would have any inducement to drudge for another when he could be his own master and enjoy the blessings and fruits of independence. The development of the system leads necessarily to a condition in which each individual would require only so much land as he alone, or with the help of his family, could successfully cultivate. The unnatural development of manufacturing industries at the expense of the agricultural, would thus be prevented. For as the individual would have it in his power to become an independent farmer as easily as a, factory operative, he would not enter upon the latter career unless it offered him a pleasanter and more profitable existence than farming, and the multitudes now seeking work in such numbers in the factories, underbidding each other, and satisfied with the very smallest possible