in houses dovetailed into each other, with everything of nature-winds, flowers, verdure, the healthy smell of earthshut out and replaced by a thousand miasmas-is it, I say, to be credited that this is the normal condition of beings. born with natural cravings for activity and pure air, with an intelligent eye for nature's manifold beauties, with bodies requiring to be exercised no less than heads? The very necessity for drains tells against us. All manure was meant directly to nourish the land it accumulates on-not to pollute our streams and rivers. Cities as they now are, are the abscesses of nature. The soil and terrestrial space are not meant for the rearing of food only, but to be dwelt and moved about on-to be daily enjoyed in all the variety of agreeable sights, sounds, and odours they afford us."

This important, thoughtful, and suggestive work, published in our own time, and dealing most thoroughly with the evergrowing evils of our social economy, has remained almost absolutely unknown. With the exception of the works of one or two land-nationalizers, I have never seen it even referred to by the host of political writers, who weakly and ignorantly dabble in the great questions affecting the real wellbeing of our whole population.

Our Society being established, it seemed necessary to prepare something in the form of a handbook or introduction to the great problem of the land; and I accordingly devoted my attention to the subject, studying voluminous reports on agriculture, on Irish famines, on Highland Crofters, and numbers of special treatises dealing with the various aspects of this vast and far-reaching question. My book was published in March, 1882, under the title "Land Nationalization: its Necessity and its Aims," and gave, in a compact form, the only general account of the evils of our land system as it exists in England, Ireland, and Scotland; a comparison with other countries or places in which a better system prevails, together with a solution of the problem of how to replace it by the only just system, without any confiscation of property or injury to any living individual. The book has

had a large circulation, and in a revised edition, is still on sale; and, together with numerous tracts issued by the society, has done much to educate public opinion on this most vital of all political or social questions.

As, however, it was quite certain that it would take a very long time before even the first steps towards landnationalization would be taken, I took every opportunity of advocating such other fundamental reforms as seemed to me demanded by equity and to be essential to social well-being. One of the earliest was on the subject of interest, about which there was much difference of opinion among advanced thinkers. A discussion having arisen in The Christian Socialist I developed my views at some length in an article which appeared in the issue of March, 1884. As it still appears to me to be logically unassailable, and is upon a subject of the very highest social importance, I give it here:

HAVING read Professor Newman's defence of interest and your remarks thereon, I wish to make a few observations on the general question. Your position, and also that of Mr. Ruskin, appears to be that money should be lent only as an act of benevolence or charity, and that lending it in any other way is not only, in most cases, economically and socially, injurious, but is also morally wrong. With the first part of this proposition I am very much inclined to agree, but not with the second. Looked at broadly, I believe that the power of obtaining interest on capital, however great, with the corresponding desire of the owner of capital to obtain interest on it, is, next to the private monopoly of land, the great cause of the poverty and famine that prevail in all the most advanced and most wealthy communities. To prove this would occupy too much space; but I may just notice that bankruptcies, with the widespread misery they inflict; the speculations of promoters and financiers often bringing ruin on hundreds or thousands of deluded investors; and the vast loans to foreign despots, which can only be paid by the sweat and blood of their unfortunate subjects, are the direct, and in the present state of society, the necessary results of the interest-system. Professor Newman says that if

it were to cease, business would be lessened by one-third. But only rotten and speculative business would be stopped; commercial men would then be what they only now appear to be, and no really necessary business would cease to be carried on. The late William Chambers has stated (in his "Life of Robert Chambers") that their vast bookselling, printing, and publishing business was established and carried on from first to last without one penny of borrowed capital; and that, as a result, panics and financial crises which brought ruin to some of their competitors, only caused them a little temporary inconvenience. I believe, therefore, that it would be for the benefit of the community if loans of money, or advances of goods on credit, were not recognized by the law, but were made wholly at the risk of the lender; but I do not see that it follows that he who lends, even under these circumstances, and takes interest for his loan, is doing what is wrong. For I cannot perceive any essential difference in principle between lending on interest, and selling at a profit. If I buy a shipload of drugs or any other goods at wholesale price, warehouse them, and sell them in the course of a year at the current market rate, making a profit of, say, 15 per cent. on my money, am I doing that which is morally wrong? Of the amount gained by me, we may put perhaps I or 2 per cent. for my personal trouble in the matter, 2 or 3 per cent. for risk of loss, 5 per cent. for interest on capital, and the other 5 per cent. for surplus profit. Is this 10 per cent. illegitimate gain? and am I morally bound to sell my goods at so much below the market rate as to leave me only fair payment for my time and risk? If it is wrong to take interest for the money which, when lent to another man enables him to do this, surely it is wrong to take a larger share in the shape of profit; and this really means that all trade is immoral which returns more than payment for personal labour, and insurance of the capital employed. But if so, it should be so stated, and the question should not be confined to interest on money loans only, and, in fact, Mr. Ruskin does not so confine it. The quotation you make from Mr. Ruskin does not, however, seem to me at all to the point. You freely lend your friend an umbrella in his need, and you would even do the same to the merest acquaintance or neighbour, but if your neighbour called every day for your umbrella on his way to the city, and other neighbours followed his example, so that you ceased to have the use of your own umbrellas, you would soon have either to refuse to lend, or to charge a rent for the use of them, and if this were convenient to your neighbours, and they were willing to pay you sufficient to cover the wear and tear of umbrellas, your time and trouble in looking after them, and interest on your capital invested in them, it will require arguments very different from any yet advanced to satisfy me that you would be morally wrong in doing so. In like manner, though you lend your friend or neighbour cab-money, or give

him a bed for a night on rare occasions when he urgently requires such aid, you would give none of these things repeatedly to a mere acquaintance. Yet, if circumstances rendered such accommodation very useful to a considerable number of persons, and you or some one else found it profitable to supply such accommodation, you would charge rent for your beds, and interest for your loans, and the transaction would differ nothing in principle from that of every tradesman who sells goods at a profit, of the innkeeper who charges beds in his bill, or of the jobmaster who charges for the use of his horses or his carriages. Nothing deserving the name of proof has yet been given that either of these things are immoral. Whether it is a good and healthy state of society in which large numbers of persons get their living by such means, is another matter altogether.

The difference of opinion on this question of usury arises mainly from the different standpoints of the disputants. Seeing that it is bound up with many of the evils of modern society, and believing that it should have no place in a system of true Socialism, you and Mr. Ruskin denounce it as immoral. Professor Newman, on the other hand, looks at it as a question of modern society, and finds nothing in its essential nature contrary to justice, and here he seems to me to have the best of the argument. No doubt, in a more perfect state of society, in which private accumulations of capital were comparatively small, and the land and its products were freely open to the use of all, usury would have little place, because loans of money would rarely be needed; but when they were needed, I cannot see any grounds for maintaining that it would be morally wrong to lend money on interest. On the contrary, such loans would then retain their use without the evils their wide extension now brings. There would be no great capitalists, and if one man lent to another it would be a convenience to the borrower, and certainly some loss to the lender, because, as Professor Newman well puts it, £100 paid one year or ten years hence is not as valuable as £100 paid to-day. To say that it is so is really to say that it has no value to-day, for if its payment can be delayed one year without loss it can two, or three, or ten, or a hundred, or a thousand! Where are we to stop? If we suppose a perfect social state, we suppose all men to be producers, and as capital is an aid to production, no man can give up the use of his capital to another without loss. The true solution of the problem is, I believe, to be found in the proposition that all loans should be personal, and, therefore, temporary; and that, as a corollary, the repayment of the capital should be provided for in the annual payments agreed to be made by the borrower either for a fixed period (if he live so long), or for the term of his life. This would abolish the idea of perpetual interest, which is as impossible in fact as it is wrong in principle, while it would avoid the injustice of compelling one man, or set of men, to

pay the debts of a preceding generation from which they may have received no real benefit.

This question of interest thus becomes involved in the wider question of the tyranny of capital over labour, and its remedy. At present, civilized Governments act on the presumption that great accumulations of capital are beneficial, and even necessary, to the well-being of the community, and all legislation favours such accumulations. When the people are once convinced that the reverse is the case, and legislation is directed to favour small holders of capital, and to check its inordinate accumulation, most of the evils complained of will cease. Το this end the first step would be to get rid of all Government funds, guaranteed loans, railway stocks, etc., which are the main agents and tools by which capital is accumulated and money is made to breed money. This could be done in every case by making such stocks nontransferable after a certain date, and then declaring the payments to be terminable at the death of the holders and their living heirs, just as I propose to do in the case of landlords. The railways should be taken by the State, existing shareholders receiving annuities of the amount of their average dividends, payable in like manner to themselves and their living heirs. The Limited Liability Act should be repealed, because it has served only to foster the worst and most iniquitious speculations, and has deluded the public into the idea that they could safely share in the profits of commercial enterprises of the nature and management of which they are profoundly ignorant. There would remain no safe investments for money, except in some branches of agriculture, manufactures, or commerce in which either the investor or some relation or friend was personally interested, and thus would be brought about the diminution and practical abolition of usury as a system, and of whole classes living idle lives on the interest of money derived from the accumulations of previous generations.

Of course, it will be said that the plan here proposed is wholesale confiscation and repudiation; but a little consideration will show that it is nothing of the kind, and that it is really the best thing that can happen even to the individual holders of the stocks dealt with. In the case of the National Debt, for example, fundholders are now threatened with a reduction of interest of a quarter per cent., and later on of a half per cent.; and they will be forced to accept it, because the interest on the public debt regulates that of all other good investments, which will inevitably rise in price enormously if any considerable portion of the amount now invested in the funds seeks other investments. The offer to pay off fundholders at par, will, therefore, be illusory, and the vast class who live upon their dividends will inevitably have their incomes reduced one-twelfth or one-sixth, while the cost of living goes on continually increasing. Would they not be far better off to have their present incomes secured to themselves and their