p. 145My Dear Mr. Blatchford,
In the course of your letters, you have given me some insight into the sort of social system that in your judgment would ensure a fair share of the good things of life to all. I cannot better respond to your efforts in this direction than by expressing some thoughts in the same line.
I am in love with most of the objects you propose, though in strong dissent from your proposed methods of effecting them. I agree with you as to the mischiefs that come from a system of unfettered individualism and unrestricted liberty of competition and aggrandisement. It has developed an exaggerated individual importance, the adjunct of congested wealth on the one hand, and on the other hand, it has debased vast masses of mankind by disconnection from hereditary estate and subjection to incessant toil for a bare subsistence.
Between the two extremes, the true aims of human life have been lost and abortion of all kinds produced. Mankind, instead of living together as the common and delighted sharers of mutually ensured benefaction, are insulated from each other by exigencies which compel them to be competitors, and reduce them to the position of a scrambling crowd of dogs, quarrelling over food thrown promiscuously among them.
There ought to be an end to the frightful inequalities which are the bane of the present system. It ought not to be possible for such splendour and squalor to coexist side by side. It ought not to be possible to create large estates. There ought to be not only such a distribution of the land among the population as would afford the basis of a social equilibrium, but such a p. 146 system as having once established such an equilibrium would protect it from the gradual overthrow that comes more or less to all systems from changes in human circumstances. There ought to be such a system as by its own automatic operation would render it impossible for the community to be impoverished. There ought to be no impoverishment of the community on the one hand, and no amassing of immense individual fortunes on the other. There ought be no brutalising depths of poverty side by side with Parnassian heights of inflating opulence such as oppress and disgrace the civilisation of this much vaunted but most-afflicted age.
Where are we to find a system that would work in this desirable way? You recommend the suppression of individualism. I have shown many reasons why this is out of the question. Individualism is a law of nature, and must be allowed for in any system that is to work out the good of the community. Nevertheless, it ought to be impossible for individual avarice and the exigencies of individual misfortune to interfere with the general good. It ought not to be in the power of capable greed to add field to field till there is no room for the less gifted. It ought not to be in the power of any man to annex vast areas which are for the common weal. It ought not to be in the power of misfortune to remove the population from the land and huddle them into pens.
There is no doubt that you are right in thinking that a right settlement of the people upon the land lies at the root of the question. The land is the source of all that man requires; and it ought to be so distributed and kept distributed as to make its benefits accessible to all. It is evident that before this could be done, there would have to be very radical changes calling for very drastic measures. The land is now monopolised, and would never be given up by its present owners. To buy them out would frustrate the objection of division by saddling the land with a charge which would give us the same evil in another shape. And you say you are not going to seize. I do not see on your plan how the world is ever going to get at the right reform. What is wanted is what you say you do not propose. You must get p. 147 rid of the present monopoly without leaving a compensation burden behind.
The ground wants clearing as it only can be done by irresponsible and irresistible power.
Let me call your attention to a historic illustration of this process, which is not so foreign to the point as you may at first thought imagine. When Israel came out of Egypt, the land for which the law of Moses was designed, was cleared by the hand of divine power co-operating with them. The order was “Slay utterly old and young, leave nothing alive that breatheth.” This order related to the Canaanites, who were sunk in wickedness. Extermination cleared the land. On the land thus cleared, a new settlement was made on a system that has never been approached by human legislation for wisdom and beneficence. No questions of compensation were in the way.
You will think this goes beyond even the wildest dreams of the Anarchists. But you will observe, I am not making a proposal. I am only calling your attention to what was done in a historic case with special reference to the fact that the Bible holds out to us the prospect that what was done on a small scale under Moses will be done on the universal scale under Christ, when the time comes to “pull down the mighty from their seats, and send the rich empty away.”
The land will be divided among the people; to every family a possession, according to their number, each holding an inalienable family possession which cannot be sold or permanently mortgaged. If the family get into difficulties, they can let the land for so much until the year of jubilee—a year recurring once in 50 years. This letting would be a kind of mortgage unknown in our times—a self-extinguishing mortgage on which no interest has to be paid. At the jubilee, the law would compel the restitution of the land to its original owners without the repayment of any money. The result of this will be to limit the borrowing powers of the family; the only sum they can raise on the property is the value of its occupancy during the number of years that might have to run to the year of jubilee. This puts it out of their power to permanently beggar themselves; the family lands p. 148 are bound to come back in a certain number of years. There is no question of injustice to the lender or buyer in such a case. The buyer or lender would get back the sum advanced, by the fruit of the land during the years of occupancy.
Such was the law in Israel. It prevented many evils well known to Gentile life. It stood in the way of the creation of large estates. It kept the land in its original distribution among the mass of the people. It preserved social equilibrium by nipping in the bud those fearful inequalities that are the bane of modern life. A modern mortgage lasts for ever, and adds unpaid interest to principal in an ever-increasing burden which at last sinks the property into perdition.
This is a great difference. All Israelitish mortgages were killed by time, and left property unencumbered, at last to come back into the hands of its original possessors. The one is full of blessedness, the other is full of woe. The one is the device of beneficent wisdom, the other the outcome of human avarice. The one secures the general diffusion of the goodness of God, the other allows of astute men fleecing their neighbours under the guise of legitimate legal formalities, and enables them to scramble to eminence over the prostrate bodies of the helpless.
To the general body of people in our day the subject may not appear to have any interesting or obvious bearing on human welfare. They know nothing of the possession of property beyond the tables and chairs which they use in the consumption of hard-earned daily meals, and the subject of mortgages and land laws is to them a far-off and repulsive legal affair. But the subject comes very near for all that. One of the cures for the world’s present social derangement lies in the application of a wise land law; and no land law now in force is wise. The only wise land law is the law that God gave to Israel.
The proposed “nationalization” of the land might be an improvement upon the present utterly bad system; but it would not come near the Mosaic land-law which, while conserving the economic interests of the community, fostered family life in the strongest and most ennobling form.
“Nationalization” would leave land open to traffic and exploitation as now—in a different way, but with the same p. 149 unhappy results. “Familization” is the true system, with a periodic year of release and general free restitution.
This system is unattainable except at the point of the sword. Divine coercion alone can bring it. It is interesting, meanwhile, to be able to realize the excellence of the system as a feature of the divine law once in vogue on the earth, in view of the express Bible prophecy that it will be re-established for all the earth when Christ reigns. It was established by the sword in that case, and it will be established by the sword again.
Such a land law firmly administered by the right sort of rulers would diffuse the wealth of the world among all classes. Still, poverty would creep in here and there, through special incapacities. For this also, the Mosaic land law provided. Every seventh year, the land was to be allowed to lie fallow. Agricultural science has discovered the virtue of giving the land an occasional rest to prevent the exhaustion of its fertility: this may have been included in the objects aimed at in the Mosaic law. But the specified object opens out quite another line of consideration: “that the poor of thy people may eat, and what they leave, the beasts of the field shall eat” (Ex. xxiii. 11). The land, left to “rest and lie still” during the seventh year, would bring forth “that which groweth of its own accord” (Lev. xxv. 5). This was to be at the service of all comers, with one condition only—that they were poor. That year, there would be no trespass laws. There would be common thoroughfare over all lands, with a free welcome to whatever might be found useful.
The priestly tribe of Levites were not to have any inheritance in the land. They were to find their maintenance in another way. They were to be supported by a fixed contribution of a tenth from the produce of all the land. Nevertheless, they were to have cities of their own, though no fields or estates in the country (Joshua xxi. 1-3). “All the cities of the Levites within the possession of the children of Israel were forty and eight cities with their suburbs” (verse 41). These cities were scattered throughout the territories of all the other tribes. The enumeration of their several localities is minutely set forth in Joshua xxi.
p. 150 The business of the Levites rendered this distribution necessary. Their business was to keep God before the mind of the people and to instruct them in the law: “The priest’s lips should keep knowledge, and they should seek the law at his mouth: for he is the messenger of the Lord of Hosts” (Mal. ii. 7). They were intended to be a spiritualising element in the population. The tribe of Levi was separated for this very purpose (Num. viii. 14: xvi. 9). How excellent a feature in national life was this—the wide scattering through all the land, of these Levitical cities as radiating centres of light and wisdom—protecting the surrounding population from the mentally benumbing effects of a merely agricultural life while not interfering with the invigorating and broadening tendency of an out-of-door and opulent occupation.
The system has been imitated and reproduced somewhat in the parochial system of Christendom: but with the lamentable result of a mere travesty. To an extent, no doubt, it has had an ameliorating effect on the rude populations of Europe. But there is a great difference between the divinely-appointed Levitical system working under suitable conditions in a country divinely arranged in all its details, and the artificial arrangements of a merely human ecclesiasticism, established with human ends in countries where the population has no divine relation.
No better social arrangement could have been contrived than an agricultural community territorially impregnated with the elements of a divine civilisation. That it was a failure we know: but this was not the fault of the law, but of the people, and principally of the teachers: “Ye (priests) are departed out of the way: ye have caused many to stumble at the law: ye have corrupted the covenant of Levi, saith the Lord of Hosts.” It was against them that the denunciations of Jesus were principally directed under the name current for them in his day, Scribes and Pharisees. The reproduction of the system under Christ will be attended with very different results: “I will settle you after your old estates, and do better for you than at your beginnings.” “I will give you pastors after mine own heart that will feed you with knowledge and understanding.” “The people also shall be all righteous: they shall inherit the land for ever.”
p. 151 When we extend our view beyond the settlement of the people in families on the land, on the basis of inalienable inheritance (subject to unconditional and compulsory release every fifty years), to the further laws given to bring individual life under reverence, and purity and gratitude, and to rouse up public life into recurring seasons of joyous social activity, we see features of public law that have not ceased to be adapted to the social, religious, and political needs of man. They are features of public life that would never be seen in a Socialist republic of the merely human type. They will be established by the strong arm of man’s truly social Friend when He returns to finish the work of which He laid the foundation 1,800 years ago. So, at all events, believes
Your not mad, though apparently fanciful, friend,
JOHN SMITH.