Agrarianism.—The Latin word agrarius was applied historically to laws, or their partisans, favoring the division of Roman public lands among the poorer citizens. So the English words, agrarianism, and agrarian generally, imply theories and movements intended to benefit the poorer classes of society by dealing in some way with the ownership of land or the legal obligations of the cultivators. In modern German, indeed, the prefix Agrar is used to mean rural or agricultural, and a German political party, roughly corresponding to the former “country party” or “landed interest” in England, is called die Agrarpartei, often translated as the Agrarians, though unlike the stricter use of agrarianism given above. Keeping to that stricter use of the word, we can distinguish two social movements running through history, one being agrarian reform, the other agrarian revolution. The border line is indeed obscure, but the difference, as of night and day, fundamental.
Let us look first at the movements of agrarian reform. Conspicuous is the case of the Hebrew Prophets. How far the land organization of the Mosaic Law was ever in full working order is disputed, probably unascertainable. What can be ascertained is the growth, pari passe with the growth of wealth and commerce under the kings, of ill-treatment of the Hebrew peasantry, mainly by overtaxation to pay for a luxurious court, by cornjobbery and monopoly, and by usurious loans, which made the peasant a debtor-slave or totally dispossessed him. And we see lawless dispossession: witness the frequent complaints of the oppression of widows and orphans, and the case of Naboth’s vineyard. Against this oppression the Prophets protested so vigorously that by some moderns they have been taken to be Socialists. But they were eminently social reformers, not revolutionists. They incited to no act of human vengeance upon evildoers, nor to revolt against authority, even when it was misused; but they denounced immorality in home life, fraud in commerce, harshness to debtors, injustice to the poor; and as, under the technical conditions of production in antiquity, the main social problem was the preservation of a free peasantry, and the social question primarily an agrarian question, the Prophets appeared as agrarian reformers, with the not impracticable aim that each man should dwell in security under his own vine and his own fig-tree, on his father’s inheritance. Their exhortations, in fact, kept before the Israelites a high social ideal; and by recalling the ancient law that bond-servants should be freed every seventh year, and that loans in kind and money should be gratuitous, the growth of the slave-cultivation of Punic, Greek, and Roman civilization was restrained, and Palestine preserved as a land of Jewish peasant proprietors.
In secular history two conspicuous examples of agrarian reform are those of Solon in Attica and of the Gracchi in Italy. The release of debtor-slaves and the removal of unlawful enclosures seem the main features of Solon’s economic legislation, of which indeed full trustworthy details are wanting. The character of the Gracchan reform is more accurately known, being mainly to promote the colonization of the public lands by small farmers in accordance with old laws which had been disregarded. The Gracchan land laws were akin to those of modern Australasia. They were partly successful in reestablishing and protecting the free peasantry, but were ultimately frustrated, chiefly through the fatal permission to mortgage and sell, allowing the small holdings to be absorbed by latifundia cultivated by slaves. After the advent of Christianity, the two great processes of agrarian reform were: first, the transformation of rural slaves (often working in chains and sleeping in ergastula), into serfs (coloni), attached to the soil; and secondly, in feudal times, the mitigation of the burdens of serfdom, and the transformation of serfs into a free peasantry, from that of England, in the fifteenth century, to that of Russia, in the nineteenth, a gradual movement from restraint to freedom, from feudal immobility to free trade in land, and to unrestricted agricultural improvements. But then also, as a parallel movement, the checks to usury were withdrawn, as well as those to over-indebtedness, exhaustive cultivation, wholesale evictions of the peasantry, appropriation of vast tracts by individuals or companies, and the opposite evil of subdividing small farms into fragments; so that the seeming freedom of the rural classes was leading to poverty and oppression, while reckless competition was leading to the waste of national resources. Hence agrarian reform, suited to the new conditions, social and technical, of rural life, became a necessity, and is in process of being carried out.
The following are some examples: (I) Legislation in the United States (1862), Canada, Australasia, and some other colonial countries, favoring colonization and bond fide agricultural settlers, as against the occupation of vast tracts for pastoral or speculative purposes; (2) analogous laws in older countries favoring the creation of small holdings, allotments, and gardens, like the British of 1882-92 and the creation of Rentenguter in Germany (1890-96); (3) the American Homestead Exemption Laws, spreading since 1849 to most of the States, the maximum value protected from seizure for debt being $5,000 in California; the maximum area 240 acres in Mississippi. These laws have been imitated elsewhere, and the secure homestead, under the title of le bien de famille, is advocated by the Catholics of France; (4) renewed usury laws, notably in 1880, for Germany, and in 1900 for the United Kingdom and parts of British India; (5) establishment of a special peasants’ law in Germany (Anerbenrecht), enabling one son to preserve the small inheritance; special favors by the Belgian law of 1890 to the succession to small holdings; (6) special legislation against eviction and unfair rents, by the Irish Land Laws of 1881 and 1887, and the Scotch Crofters’ Holdings Act of 1886. Parallel to such legislation, and its essential auxiliary, has arisen the modern agricultural cooperative movement, resulting in associations like those of the Patrons of Husbandry, the Farmers’ Alliance, and others, in the United States, or the Raiffeisen popular banks among German and Italian peasants, or the peasants’ league (Boerenbond) of Belgium, or the agricultural cooperative societies of Ireland. And just as the new agrarian legislation is the expression in modern form of the fundamental needs of rural life, protected at other times by feudal immobility, so the new cooperative movement is the expression of the need of mutual help, protected at other times by the patriarchal family and the village community.
Let us turn from the movements of reform, seen in rural history, to the movements of agrarian revolution. These were conspicuous in the declining days of classical Greece. Hereon Roscher said well: “In the Greek world all that we call tradition, and the feeling of national honor, national destiny, and national justice, had in fact been supplanted by rationalistic argumentation, and the argumentation directed with terrible exclusiveness to the opposition between rich and poor” (Nationalokonomie, § 204). This opposition, in conformity with the technical and legal conditions of the time, took the form, not of any system of land-nationalization, but simply of cancelling debts and redividing lands, revolution alternating with counter-revolution. In time, the agrarian struggles became mixed up with the national movement for Greek independence against Roman dominion, the Romans everywhere taking the side of the rich against the poor (Livy, XXXV, xxxiv). These social revolutions are of importance to us as showing some significant analogies with our own times. It is otherwise with the peasant risings of later times such as the French Jacquerie in the fourteenth century; the English insurrection under Jack Cade in the fifteenth; the German Peasants’ War in the sixteenth, and the burning of the chateaux of the French Revolution: all being efforts to remove by violence the legal obligations attached to land or its tillers, and, therefore, being revolutionary agrarianism; but all remote from the agrarian problems of the modern Western World, and very different even from those of the modern Russian Empire.
Rather, it will be more profitable, before dealing with the Single-Tax Theory, to glance at the precursors of Henry George. (I) The Physiocrats taught that land alone yielded a net produce, was thus the ultimate source of taxation, and should be made the immediate source, and all simplified by a single tax (impot unique) on land. (2) Thomas Spence (1750-1814) urged that landowners should be dispossessed without compensation, and all land held inalienably by the commune. (3) William Ogilvie’s “Essay on the Right of Property in Land” (1782) denounced the pernicious monopoly of landowners as the cause of social misery, and urged a distribution of land among genuine cultivators of inalienable hereditary small farms. (4) Ricardo (1772-1823) thought land, labor, and capital to be the three factors of production, yielding rent to the landlord, wages to the laborer, and profit to the capitalists, the increasing demand for food from the increasing population inevitably giving the landlord an ever-larger share of the total produce, and leaving less for wages and profits. (5) J. S. Mill followed Ricardo in believing that, through the progress of society, an ever-increasing unearned sum flowed into the pockets of the landlords, but no longer, like Ricardo, appealed to the rights of property in defense of it, but emphasized it by giving it the name of “unearned increment”; and though, in view of the frequent recent changes of ownership, he left past acquisitions untouched, he urged that the State should take not the past, but any fresh unearned increment in the future. Then the American Henry George (1839-97) set forth most attractively in his “Progress and Poverty” (1879) the theory that not merely all future, but all actual unearned increment should be intercepted, the method being the total appropriation of rent by taxation, a single tax on land values replacing all other taxes. This “simple yet sovereign remedy” would raise wages and profits, abolish poverty, lessen crime, elevate morals, and purify government. Indeed this single-tax theory appeared to its author so self-evident that he reproached the Pope for not having, in his Labor Encyclical (Rerum Novarum, 1891), accepted its reasoning (Open Letter to Pope Leo XIII, New York, 1891). “Progress and Poverty” was translated into eleven languages; a Land-Nationalization Society, still existent (1906), was founded, in England, under Dr. A. Russel Wallace (author of “Land Nationalisation”, London, 1882), who indeed allowed to actual landlords what George calls “the impudent plea” of compensation; the single-tax was advocated by Flurscheim in Germany, and, under the persistent misnomer of “land-reform”, still has a German Society to support it (Adolf Damaschke, “Die Bodenreform”, Berlin, 1902).
Henry George has been criticized from the economic, the juridical, and the socialist standpoint on the following grounds: (a) That “rent”, in the sense of an unearned increment, is not confined to land, but is seen in all forms of production, wherever a common market price yields a surplus to those who can produce more cheaply than their competitors. (b) That we cannot separate “the original powers of the soil from the land as transformed by culture” (e.g. drainage or accessibility), or separate “property in things created by God” from “property in things made by man”, much of so-called “rent” being merely interest on previous expenditure, and the part that is really unearned increment rarely ascertainable. (c) That neither theoretically nor historically true is the alleged tendency to a perpetual rise of rent; the amount depending on differential advantages, the difference incessantly fluctuating up and down, according to every change in production, consumption, and communication; and the final twenty years of George’s life witnessing a serious decline in the value of farming-land in the United Kingdom and in New England. (d) That in one vast section of British India, where for many years the State has attempted by periodical land-settlements to absorb the unearned increment, and the single-tax system is in great measure in force, the population is no better off, but rather more penurious, than in the other vast section, where no such system is in force, but the Permanent Settlement of Bengal instead. (e) That a great unmerited loss is inflicted on those who have recently bought land, or have received land as their part of a testamentary estate, while those who have recently sold land, or have received cash as their part of a testamentary estate, escape scot-free. (f) That if individuals may not take to themselves the land that God has given to all, no more may nations; and the Irish soil thus belongs no more to the Celts than to the Saxons, the United States no more to the Americans than to the Chinese. Further, from the socialist standpoint (g), that George offers an illogical half measure, recovering for the workers only one portion of the “surplus product”, and leaving competitive anarchy and capitalist exploitation untouched; whereas incomes, in the shape of dividends and interest, are just as much “unearned income” as incomes in the shape of rent.
But though there is discord between revolutionary agrarianism and collectivism, they are alike in opposition to the uniform teaching and tradition of the Catholic Church on the lawfulness of private ownership of income-yielding property, whether it be named “land” or “capital”. And they are alike in opposition to the ideal of all great statesmen from Solon to Leo XIII, namely, flourishing populations of small farmers or peasants. Thus George attacks any wide distribution of landed property, asserts the productivity of large farms to be the greatest, the tendency of small farms to disappear, the misery of their holders, the pity of multiplying them (Progress and Poverty, VI, i.). Equally hostile is the brilliant socialist Karl Kautsky, “Die Agrarfrage” (Stuttgart, 1899), asserting the technical inferiority and social misery of the small farmer; and, instead of his “sham independence”, promising him “redemption from the hell wherein his private property keeps him chained”. Neither George nor Kautsky are true to facts, but both are good witnesses to the importance of agrarian reform as fatal to agrarian socialism. The misuse of the rights of property, such as the misdeeds of Scotch and Irish landlordism, and of the tenement-owners of Europe and America, are the food that feeds agrarian socialism. To make such misdeeds impossible is the task of social reform under a wise government. Nor is it accidental that the Encyclicals of Leo XIII form a manual of social politics. For as grace rests on nature, the religion that is alone truly Divine, must also ipso facto be truly human. But the instinct of private property is truly human; and the proper unfolding of human liberty and personality is historically bound up with it, and cannot develop where each person is only a sharer in a compulsory partnership, or, on the other hand, where property is confined to a privileged few. Suitably, therefore, the same Pope who had defended the true dignity and true liberty of man urged the diffusion of property as the mean between Socialism and Individualism, and that where possible each citizen should dwell secure in a homestead which, however humble, was his own.
CHARLES STANTON DEVAS