Rights and No Rights.

My Dear Mr. Blatchford,

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OUR seventh letter is very clever, but wrong, as I believe. I may not be able to show you this quite clearly, but I must try. England expects every man to do his duty."

In this chapter, you try to define to me what gives a man a right to a thing. The object of your definition is to sustain your contention that the rich have no right to the things they possess. I think I will be able to show that you destroy your own argument. You lay down some extraordinary doctrines I must say, doctrines that you could not stick to in your own affairs.

You say a man has a right to that only which he has produced by the unaided exercise of his own faculties, and that he has no right to that which is not so produced. This is pretty and plausible, but let us define terms a little. What is a right, Mr. Blatchford ? Is it not that which is reckoned or recognised as proper for a man to have, by those to whom he may stand related, whether fellowmen, or Glory," who made him? If so, whatever law may be current would settle the question of right. If the law say it is right for a man to possess this or that, then it is right, for there is no other standard of secular right than recognition by a man's fellows and their readiness to enforce it.

If a man's right is not the consent of the community for him to possess, then I do not see what is a right, or how it can be made out. You say a man has a right to what he produces. Why? How does this give him a right? Suppose two men, one strong and the other weak. The two men work at something requiring strength; the strong man is able by his superior strength to produce three times the quantity the weak man is able to produce. The weak

man is not able to produce enough to live; the strong man is able to produce more than enough. His strength has enabled him to do this. Now, he did not make his strength, and you say a man has no right to what he does not make; therefore, he has no right to his strength, and therefore he has no right to what his strength has enabled him to produce, for as you say on the subject of land further on, if a man have no right at the start, he can have no right in the run of the thing. So I say, by your own argument, if a man has no right to his strength, he can have no right to possess or sell that which his strength produces.

It seems to me you are caught in your own trap here, Mr. Blatchford. Your philosophy is not deep enough. Your notions of right are on the surface. Right is really an artificial idea, and comes from law. There is no right among beasts, because they have no capacity to stand related to law. A tiger seizes a deer, and before he has eaten it, a lion comes along and by his greater strength takes the deer from the tiger. Does the lion do wrong? Has the tiger a right to the deer? It is a question of which is stronger, merely-it is a case of might being right. It seems to me that this is what your philosophy of right comes to as regards man --that the strong man's strength gives him right and the weak man's weakness deprives him of right; for you say, "If I, by my strength, produce an article, I have a right to it."

On reflection, you will find my definition correct.

Right to a thing is that which is recognised as proper by the consent of God or man. If this is so, the discussion you have raised as to the possession of the land by the rich is placed upon a totally different footing. You say the title to all land possessed by private owners is conquest or theft; how can you make this out, Mr. Blatchford? Take, to begin with, the case of a country previously unoccupied, Australia, or the wilds of Africa, or even Great Britain. When men first landed on these shores, they found the land unoccupied, and took it. Do you call this theft? Theft is unlawfully taking from somebody who previously possessed. In this case there was nobody to take it from, therefore it could not be theft; and it could not be conquest, for there was nobody to conquer.

But you say somebody took it from them afterwards; perhaps, but that could not be theft, because you say the land belongs to

nobody by right, and if so, land can never be stolen. Conquest is only another name for the same thing on a larger scale.

You say the land held by English peers has been in great part "plundered from the Church." What, Mr. Blatchford? Had the Church a right to it, then? Surely you do not think so. If not, how could it be plundered from the Church, seeing that plunder is wrongful taking? You do not plunder a forest that belongs to nobody if you cut down the trees. Your argument tumbles back upon itself at every step.

But you say man under no circumstances has a right to the land, because he has a right to nothing but that which he himself has made. Surely you have not thought this out. Has a man a right to his life? Surely you cannot say "No" here. Did he make it? No. See where you are. Have you a right to breathe the air? Will you say no? In fact, you mention this as a human right that cannot be alienated. Did you make the air, then? Or your lungs? Have you a right to the mutton on your dinner-table? Did you make the mutton?

I might run

Oh, Mr. Blatchford, your principle is wrong. through a hundred other things with the same result. You will have to revise your doctrine of right; you will find my definition answerable to all cases, namely, that right is a title recognised by God or man, and this is a question of law, and not of production. If we had no right to anything but what we had made, we should starve, and go naked, and die, within the week, for we both wear and eat things we never made or could make, yet our title is indefeasible. We have a right to them, though we did not make them.

The land is certainly as much subject to the recognition of title as anything else. Human law recognises it in all countries; divine law recognised it under the law of Moses, under the most salutary conditions ever heard of upon the earth in any age or country. There is no land law comparable to the Mosaic system; but this is only by the way.

You say a man can have no more reason for private ownership of land than he could set up for monopolising the sea or air. This is a fallacy, according to your own argument. Your definition of the ground of right is-man's contribution to the utility or value of

a thing. He has no right, you say, to that which he has not made, but to that which he has made he has a right. Now, in the degree to which this might apply to land, he could establish a right to the land, on your own principle, for land in itself is not valuable. As you show in another connection, land requires labour and skill to make it valuable. Now, if a man by labour of his own hands, or the skill of his brain applied through the hands of another, cultivates and makes land valuable, has he not got a right to it, according to your own showing?

But how could this apply to sea or air? He could not affect or alter them in the least degree; he could not improve them; he could not modify them; he could not establish such a title as your principle would create, and as you yourself are prepared to recognise. He can do so in the case of land; he can make it fertile.

Thus you see you have your answer, Mr. Blatchford, and your argument against the possession of land on this head falls to the ground.

The fallacy vitiates all your illustrations. You say William the Conqueror stole an estate from Harold and gave it to one of his barons, who afterwards lost it by confiscation to the Crown, which handed it to a favourite, whose descendants possess it at the present day. You say the present possessors can have no right to that which was stolen in the first instance, but how could William the Conqueror steal that which did not belong in the first instance to Harold? For this is your contention all the way through-that no man has a right to the land: therefore land cannot be stolen. If you alter the terms of your argument to suit the stress, your argument will disappear. If the land belonged to Harold, then it might belong to William, and if the circumstances justified it, he might lawfully give it to a Norman baron, and the Norman baron might lawfully lose it to the Crown if treason is a punishable thing, and then, subject to the fluctuations recognised by the land law, it might at last become the property of some unworthy person whose descendants lawfully possess it at the present day, notwithstanding the unworthiness of their ancestor. It is either lawful all the way through, or unlawful. You cannot have theft at the beginning without lawful possession in the person from whom it was stolen; and if you have lawful

possession there, you may have lawful possession all the way through, for lawful possession is possession according to law.

In either case, Mr. Blatchford, your argument is gone. Get hold of the idea that lawful possession is that which is recognised by law, and your difficulty will be at an end. It will then become a simple question, what are the best laws, and not what is the ground of individual right to possession.

To talk of "restoring the land to the English people, from whom it has been stolen," is inconsistent with your argument that the English people did not make it, and therefore have no right to it. If they have no right to it, it never could have been stolen from them.

Your language is vigorous, and sounds heroic; but when closely looked into, it sounds very much like what is called "clap-trap." Nevertheless, I remain,

Your admiring friend,

JOHN SMITH.