 Welcome to George H. Smith's Excursions into Libertarian Thought, a production of Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm your host, Terence West. Herbert Spencer, Henry George, and The Land Question, Part 4 by George H. Smith. Smith explains and criticizes two more of Spencer's arguments against private property and land. In my last essay, I explained Herbert Spencer's primary argument against private property and land. If, in theory, all habitable land on Earth could become privately owned, then the class of non-owners would have no right to arresting place on Earth. The landless could live only by the sufferance of their fellow men, and therefore would be practically serfs. Spencer concluded that the existence of such a class is wholly at variance with the law of equal freedom. I shall criticize this argument at a later time. Meanwhile, this essay explores two other arguments by Spencer against private land ownership, as presented in Chapter 9 of Social Statics. Spencer's second argument is historical in nature. If we trace current land titles sufficiently far into the past, we will find that they originated in violence and conquest. The original deeds were written with the sword rather than the pen. Not lawyers, but soldiers were the conveyancers. Blows were the current coin given in payment, and for seals, blood was used in preference to wax. Could valid claims be thus constituted? Hardly. This argument had been popular in England since the early 17th century. Even libertarians who defended private property and land frequently invoked the Norman Yoke Theory, which traced most of the land ownership in England to the Norman Conquest of 1066, after which William the Conqueror, or William the Bastard as he was called by Thomas Paine and other radicals, confiscated huge tracts of land and gave them to his relatives and supporters. Thereafter, laws of primogeniture and entail prevented those estates from being subdivided into smaller parcels and sold in a free market. Although this history helps to explain why libertarian hostility to the status quo in land was more widespread in Britain than in America, the Norman Yoke Theory did not necessitate opposition to private land ownership per se. On the contrary, many British libertarians, such as Thomas Hodgkins and Oberon Herbert, viewed the Norman Conquest as an egregious violation of private property rights in land, and they sought a remedy in the abolition of laws restricting free trade in land, believing this would be the most equitable course of action. Even Spencer eventually came to embrace this remedy as a practical manner. But in social statics, he emphasized that illegitimate land titles cannot be rendered legitimate through the passage of time. Does sale or bequest generate a right where it did not previously exist? Would the original claimants be non-suited at a bar of reason? Because the things stolen from them had changed hands, certainly not. And if one act of transfer can give no title, can many? No. Though nothing be multiplied forever, it will not produce one. Even the law recognizes this principle. The existing holder must, if called upon, substantiate the claims of those from whom he purchased or inherited his property. And any flaws in the original parchment, even though the property should have had a score intermediate owners, quashes his right. This argument, it should be noted, is completely irrelevant to Spencer's case against privately owned land. Since Spencer did not believe that there is any method, whether violent or nonviolent, by which private property and land can be justified, it does not matter in the least for his overall case if current titles can ultimately be traced by conquest. Even without such conquest and violences, even if all land titles can be traced to peaceful homesteaders from centuries past, such facts would make no difference whatsoever to Spencer's position. That Spencer understood this point is revealed a little later in Chapter 9 where he wrote, Not only have present land tenures an indefensible origin, but it is impossible to discover any mode in which land can become private property. So why, we may ask, did Spencer include and emphasize an irrelevant historical point? We cannot say for sure, but I suspect that Spencer, fully aware of the emotional power of the Norman Yoke theory, stressed it for rhetorical effect. In later years, after Spencer had modified his position on land, he became a severe critic of his earlier historical argument about present land titles. In Justice, 1891, which would become Part 4 of the Principles of Ethics, Spencer included an appendix on the land question. He wrote that the masses of landless men should regard private land ownership as having been wrongfully established is natural and as we have seen, not without warrant. But if we entertain the thought of rectification, there arises in the first place the question, which are the wronged and which are the wrongers? Passing over the primary fact that the ancestors of existing Englishmen, landed and landless, were, as a body, men who took the land by violence from previous owners, and thinking only of the force and fraud by which certain of those ancestors obtained possession of the land, while others of them lost possession, the preliminary question is, which are the descendants of the one and of the other? It is tacitly assumed that those who now own lands are the posterity of the usurpers, and those who now have no lands are the posterity of those whose lands were usurped. But this is far from being the case. Spencer went on to argue that many current landowners in England were not the descendants of conquerors, whereas many of those descendants owned no land at all. Hence, the bitter feeling towards the landed, which contemplation of the past generates in many of the landless, is in great measure misplaced. The landless themselves are, to a considerable extent, descendants of the sinners, and those they scowl at are, to a considerable extent, descendants of the send against. Spencer presented a more powerful variant of this point in a letter to the Daily Chronicle on August 29th, 1894. My argument in social statics was based upon the untenable assumption that the existing English community had a moral right to the land. They never had anything of the kind. They were robbers all around. Normans robbed Danes and Saxons. Saxons robbed Celts. Celts robbed the Aborigines, traces of whose earthhouses we find here and there. Let the English Land Restoration League find the descendants of these last, and restore the land to them. There never was any equity in the matter, and re-establishment of a supposed equity is a dream. The stronger peoples have been land thieves down to the present hour. A similar point had been made four years earlier by Oberon Herbert, a libertarian defender of private land ownership, in a symposium on the land question from 1890. His remarks again illustrate the enduring influence of the Norman Yoke problem among British theorists. If land was taken from Saxon by Norman, it has been previously taken by Saxon from Britain, and by Britain from the long-headed race. Ancient history gives no true title for another taking of the land by the landless, since it discloses no true previous title existing anywhere. If property has been stolen and restitution has to be made, you must be able to show the person from whom it has been stolen, and to whom it is to be restored. Moving now from Spencer's arguments, both early and late, about the historical origin of land titles, we encounter his next major argument, which is an attempt to rebut the common Lockean argument that he who mixes his labor with land can legitimately claim ownership of that land. Spencer cast his discussion in the form of a dialogue, and such philosophical dialogues rarely present the strongest case for the other side. This is certainly true of Spencer's dialogue in which the defender of private property in land, an American back woodsman, is easily bested by his more sophisticated adversary. Here's a major part of the dialogue. Hello you sir, cries the Cosmopolite to some back woodsman smoking at the door of his shanty. By what authority do you take possession of these acres that you have cleared, round which you have put up snake fence on which you have built this log house? By what authority? I squatted here because there was no one to say nay, because I was as much at liberty to do so as any other man. Besides, now that I have cut down the wood and plowed the ground, this farm is more mine than yours or anybody's, and I mean to keep it. I sow all you say, but I do not yet see how you have substantiated your claim. When you came here you found the land producing trees, sugar maples perhaps, or maybe it was covered with prairie grass and wild strawberries. Well, instead of these, you made it yield wheat or maize or tobacco. Now, I want to understand how by exterminating one set of plants and making the soil bear another set in their place, you have constituted yourself lord of the soil for all succeeding time. All those natural products which I destroyed were of little or no use, whereas I caused the earth to bring forth things good for food, things that help to give life and happiness. Still, you have not shown why such a process makes the portion of the earth you have so modified yours. What is it that you have done? You have turned over the soil to a few inches in depth with a spade or a plow. You have scattered over this prepared surface a few seeds, and you have gathered the fruits which the sun, rain, and air help the soil to produce. Just tell me, if you please, by what magic have these acts made you sole owner of the vast mass of matter, having for its base the surface of your estate and for its apex the center of the globe, all of which it appears you would monopolize to yourself and your descendants forever. Well, if it isn't mine, who's is it? I have dispossessed nobody. When I crossed the Mississippi yonder, I found nothing but the silent woods. If someone else had settled here and made this clearing, he would have had as good a right to the location as I have. I have done nothing, but what any other person was at liberty to do had he come before me. Whilst they were unreclaimed, these lands belonged to all men, as much to one as to another. And they are now mine simply because I was the first to discover and improve them. You say truly, when you say that whilst they were unreclaimed, these lands belonged to all men, and it is my duty to tell you that they belong to all men still and that your improvements, as you call them cannot vitiate the claim of all men. You may plow and harrow and sow and reap you may turn over the soil as often as you like but all your manipulations will fail to make that soil yours, which was not yours to begin with. Let me put a case. Suppose now that in the course of your wanderings you come upon an empty house which in spite of its dilapidated state takes your fancy. Suppose that with the intention of making it your abode you expend much time and trouble in repairing it. That you paint and paper and white wash at a considerable cost bringing it to a habitable state. Suppose further than on some fatal day a stranger is announced who turns out to be the heir to whom this house has been bequeathed and that this professed heir is prepared with all the necessary proofs of his identity what becomes of your improvements. Do they give you a valid title to the house? Do they quash the title of the original claimant? No. Neither then do your pioneering operations give you a valid title to this land. Neither do they quash the title of its original claimants human race. The world is God's bequest to mankind. All men are joint heirs to it. You amongst the number and because you have taken up your residence on a certain part of it and have subdued, cultivated beautified that part, improved it as you say you are not therefore warranted in appropriating it as entirely private property. At least if you do so, you may at any moment be justly expelled by the landfill owner society. Spencer did not endow the back woodsman with the mental acuity to ask even the most obvious questions. For example, if as Spencer maintained throughout his life, individuals are the ultimate elements of society and if a society can possess no rights in addition to the rights of individuals then if individuals cannot own land how can society possibly own land either? How, in other words can society claim a right that no individual can legitimately claim when society itself has nothing more than a collection of individuals who exhibit recurring patterns of interaction or if the earth is God's bequest to mankind then how could a non-believer, as Spencer became within a few years after this dialogue was written possibly defend the same argument? It would be more accurate to say that the earth was originally unowned due to legitimate claims of individual ownership every person had an equal right to use unowned land. This, the equal right of Yusufrak to unowned land was defended by the enormously influential Samuel Pufendorf writing in 1672 about the original negative comments Pufendorf's view was accepted by many subsequent natural law philosophers including John Locke, who was admittedly unclear on this particular controversy but nowhere did Spencer consider the negative comments approach. Nowhere did Spencer consider the possibility that land was originally unowned, in which case private ownership would not violate the prior rights of anyone so long as every person has an equal right to acquire property in land so if the mere transformation of land a natural resource that no human created cannot justify private property in land then why wouldn't the same type of argument preclude all private property? Every manufactured object from axes to houses to computers may be viewed as the transformation of natural resources that no human created so if no person properly claim ownership of those natural resources including land then how can we claim private property in any artificial object since all such products contain natural resources in some form wouldn't all products of human labor and ingenuity ultimately belong to society if only society can own natural resources if the backwoodsmen overlooked these another fairly obvious objection to Spencer's case against private land ownership they did not escape his real life critics as we shall see in the next installment of this series. This has been Excursions into Libertarian Thought a production of Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. To learn more about Libertarian philosophy and history visit Libertarianism.org. I'm Terence West. Thanks for listening.