which Mr. Laidler discovers in "Social Statics" and attributes to Mr. Spencer.
However, these are matters of opinion; and as Mr. Spencer, leaving the main issue aside, has put me on my defense, I hope I may say a word or two to show how very easy that process is; for, surely, nothing can be easier than to refuse to be charged with the consequences of opinions one does not hold. Mr. Spencer says that I "admit that all land-holders hold their land subject to the supreme ownership of the State"; and his remarkable inability to see that we disagree on the land question flows out of this assumption. But I admit nothing of the kind. If I declare that, under certain circumstances, the State has a right to shut me up and to make me work on the tread-mill, or to hang me, or to dispose of me and my property in any other way, it does not appear to me that "by implication" I admit that I hold my property, my liberty, and my life, "subject to the supreme ownership of the State." Surely the State is not my owner—I am not a serf—because I admit the right of the State to do these things! It is absolutely unintelligible to me that on such grounds as those alleged any one should try to force me to the conclusion that "the community, as supreme owner, with a still valid title, may resume possession if it thinks well."
And this leads me to another point. What historical ground is there for the assumption that the community (in the sense of "the State") ever had a "valid title" as universal land-owner? I am not ignorant that there have been and are such things as "village communities"; and if any one chooses to assert that communal ownership is the primitive form of land-holding, I am willing, for the sake of argument, to admit that such is the case. Let the further assumption that no agencies save force and fraud have broken up the communal organization (astonishing as it is) be accepted. Well, then, I see that a sort of an argument (though I think a very fallacious one) in favor of going back to ownership by village communities might be founded on these data. But what has that to do with State land-ownership, which has not the remotest resemblance to the communal system of antiquity?
Mr. Spencer addresses a sort of argumentum ad hominem to me. It is hardly chosen with so much prudence as might have been expected. Mr. Spencer assumes that, in the present state of physiological and medical science, the practitioner would be well advised who should treat his patients by deduction from physiological principles ("absolute physiological therapeutics" let us say) rather than by careful induction from the observed phenomena of disease and of the effects of medicines.
Well, all I can reply is, Heaven forbid that I should ever fall into that practitioner's hands; and if I thought any writings of
