as the duty of the State to secure the conditions of
self-maintenance for the normal healthy citizen. There are two lines
along which the fulfilment of this duty may be sought. One would consist
in providing access to the means of production, the other in
guaranteeing to the individual a certain share in the common stock. In
point of fact, both lines have been followed by Liberal legislation. On
the one side this legislation has set itself, however timidly and
ineffectively as yet, to reversing the process which divorced the
English peasantry from the soil. Contemporary research is making it
clear that this divorce was not the inevitable result of slowly
operating economic forces. It was brought about by the deliberate policy
of the enclosure of the common fields begun in the fifteenth century,
partially arrested from the middle of the sixteenth to the eighteenth,
and completed between the reigns of George II and Queen Victoria. As
this process was furthered by an aristocracy, so there is every reason
to hope that it can be successfully reversed by a democracy, and that it
will be possible to reconstitute a class of independent peasantry as the
backbone of the working population. The experiment, however, involves
one form or another of communal ownership. The labourer can only obtain
the land with the financial help of the State, and it is certainly not
the view of Liberals that the State, having once regained the fee
simple, should part with it again. On the contrary, in an equitable
division of the fruits of agriculture all advantages that are derived
from the qualities or position of the soil itself, or from the
enhancement of prices by tariffs would, since they are the product of no
man's labour, fall to no man's share, or, what is the same thing, they
should fall to every man, that is, to the community. This is why Liberal
legislation seeks to create a class not of small landlords but of small
tenants. It would give to this class access to the land and would reward
them with the fruits of their own work--and no more. The surplus it
would take to itself in the form of rent, and while it is desirable to
give the State tenant full security against disturbance, rents must at
stated periods be adjustable to prices and to cost. So, while
Conservative policy is to establish a peasant proprietary which would
reinforce the voting strength of property, the Liberal policy is to
establish a State tenantry from whose prosperity t