] _Socialism and the Single Tax_, p. 7.

[421] Ward, _Are All Men Brothers?_ pp. 14, 15.

[422] Hall, _Land, Labour, and Liberty_, p. 12.

[423] Blatchford, _Some Tory Socialisms_, p. 6.

[424] Headlam, _Christian Socialism_, p. 14.

[425] _Forward_, October 12, 1907.

[426] _Independent Labour Party Report, Annual Conference, 1907_, p.
59.

[427] _Times_, October 12, 1907.

[428] Headlam, _Christian Socialism_, p. 7.

[429] Blatchford, _Some Tory Socialisms_, p. 3.

CHAPTER IX

SOCIALIST VIEWS AND PROPOSALS REGARDING CAPITAL AND THE CAPITALISTS

We have seen in Chapter VIII. that Socialists claim that "Man has a
right to nothing but that which he has himself made," that therefore,
"No man can have a right to the land, for no man made it." May, then,
owners of property keep at least that part of their property which is
not invested in land?

The reply is, of course, in the negative. "As land must in future be a
national possession, so must the other means of producing and
distributing wealth."[430] "Supposing we assume it true that land is
not the product of labour and that capital is; it is not by any means
true that the rent of land is not the product of labour and that the
interest on capital is. Since private ownership, whether of land or
capital, simply means the right to draw and dispose of a revenue from
the property, why should the landowner be forbidden to do that which
is allowed to the capitalist, in a society in which land and capital
are commercially equivalent? Yet land nationalisers seem to be
prepared to treat as sacred the landlords' claim to private property
in capital acquired by thefts of this kind, although they will not
hear of their claim to property in land. Capital serves as an
instrument for robbing in a precisely identical manner. In England
industrial capital is mainly created by wage workers--who get nothing
for it but permission to create in addition enough subsistence to
keep each other alive in a poor way. Its immediate appropriation by
idle proprietors and shareholders, whose economic relation to the
workers is exactly the same in principle as that of the landlords,
goes on every day under our eyes. The landlord compels the worker to
convert his land into a railway, his fen into a drained level, his
barren seaside waste into a fashionable watering-place, his mountain
into a tunnel, his manor park into a suburb full of houses let on
repairing leases; and lo! he ha