How some utopians have thought that a good community rested at bottom on the right division and use of land; and what sort of communities these land-animals projected. BEFORE the Industrial Revolution upset the balance of social power, there were little villages in England where, on a limited scale and to no very grand purpose, a quiet and placid and fairly jolly existence must have been the rule of things. These villages were those in which the land was either held in freehold by small proprietors, or where there still remained for the use of each inhabitant certain common pastures and wastes. Under this regime there was a fair degree of prosperity with which only the wind and the weather and war could interfere. Something of the savor of this life Mr. W. H. Hudson finely conveys in his A Traveller in Little Things; and a century ago Cobbett made a series of excellent snapshots in his Rural Rides. When the mediæval order broke down the great proprietors began to seize this common land; and during the eighteenth century, under the incentive of big-scale scientific agriculture, the seizure went on at a merry pace. The peasant without land was forced to migrate to the new towns, as the Hammonds have pictured in their graphic work on the Town Laborer; and the labor of the peasant and his family fed the machines which the Watts and Arkwrights were developing in the eighteenth century. Industrial progress and social poverty went hand in hand. The period before the The early part of the nineteenth century is remarkable for the fact that men of common stock, usually self-educated, began to apply their wits to improving the conditions of the class to which they belonged; and in particular there was in London a peasant named William Cobbett, a tailor named Francis Place, and a stationer named Thomas Spence who devoted a good part of what remained over from their working days to plans for bettering man's estate. Thomas Spence had a shop in High Holborn from which he published little pamphlets of rough philosophy, called Pig's Meat; in 1795 he issued A Description of Spensonia, which was followed in 1801 by The What is a parish and what is its work? Look around the English countryside and see. A parish, to begin with, is a "compact portion of the country, designedly not too large that it may the more easily be managed by the inhabitants with respect to its revenues and the police." "The parishes build and repair houses, make roads, plant hedges and trees, and in a word do all the business of a landlord. . . . A parish has many heads to contrive what ought to be done. Instead of debating about mending the state, . . . (for ours needs no mending) we employ our ingenuity nearer home, and the result of the debates are in every parish, how we shall work such a mine, make such a river navigable, drain such a fen, or improve such a waste. These things we are all immediately interested in, and have each a vote in executing." There is a rough, homespun quality about this utopia, and it needs a visit to the English villages of the New Forest or the Chiltern Hills, where some of the common lands have been kept, to see what a rural utopia would be like if it could keep itself free from invaders who sought to live off the fat of the land without contributing their labor. Spence was not altogether blind to the necessity of keeping watch over this constitution of equality; and he places his utopia in the care of two The next utopia, Freeland, marks a transition between the utopia in which the land alone is held by the community and that in which land and capital and all the machinery of production belongs to a national state. The writer of this utopia was an Austrian economist, Theodor Hertzka; and he first published his view in considerable detail, with reference to current economic doctrines, in a book called Freeland: A Social Anticipation. He condensed these doctrines in another book called A Visit to Freeland, or the new Paradise Regained, an attempt to picture his freeman's commonwealth in action. These books formed the center of a whirlwind of agitation; a magazine sprang up; societies were organized in various cities in Europe and America; and a definite attempt was made to colonize a certain section of Africa, selected by Hertzka; an attempt which, alas! met with speedy failure as a result of the obtuseness and international jealousy of various colonial officials. The first book was published in 1889; and all this happened in the early nineties. Perhaps the only practical effect of it was—and this is mere conjecture—to turn the thoughts of certain Zionists, like Israel Zangwill, from establishing Zion in Jerusalem to building it up again in some more suitable region in the heart of Africa. Freeland may be described as an individualist Utopia on a social foundation. Hertzka was filled with sympathy and admiration for the doctrines that Adam Smith set forth in The Wealth of Nations; and he desired A visit to Freeland teaches us little about the arts of social life or the constitution of a good society. What we can learn is one of the methods by which—on hypothesis anyway—the industrial mechanism might be controlled. In Freeland there are five fundamental laws; and of these the first is the most important; namely, that: Every inhabitant has an equal right to the common land and to the means of production which are furnished by the state. The other fundamental laws have to do with the support of women and children, old men, and those otherwise unfit to work, all of whom have the right of maintenance, (The visitor has his boots blacked by one of these associated menials, and his hostess explains how the services of a caterer and a valet may be obtained by calling up a central distributing agency.) The sole condition upon which a person or company is allowed to engage in business is that the public be kept informed of all business transactions. "The companies are therefore obliged to conduct their bookkeeping openly. The prices at which goods are bought and sold, the net profits and the number of workmen, Observe that Hertzka reckons with the fact that in an industrial society, access to machinery is just as important as access to the land, since, in a manner of speaking, all our modern activities, even agriculture, are parasitic upon machinery. Hence the collection and distribution of capital is managed in the interests of the whole community; the first being taken care of by a yearly tax, which obviates the need—and perhaps the possibility—of individual savings, whilst the capital is distributed without interest to the companies that make application for it. The community pays for the plant through the added charge which is laid on consumers; the credit advanced is cancelled out through production. This arrangement does away with the standing charge for capital which is maintained under present day production for profit even after the original capital has been paid off in dividends; and above all, it does away with the practice of capitalizing increased returns in such a way as to enlarge the amount of the standing charge for capital. The social use of capital to advance production, rather than to provide fixed incomes for a rentier class, is recognized in Freeland. Since our visitor is an engineer, he turns to a plant devoted to the manufacture of railway equipment; and notes that it is run under the following statutes. 1. Everyone is free to join the first Edendale Engine and Railway Manufacturing Co., even if he also belongs to other companies. Everyone is also permitted to leave the company whenever he chooses. The board of management decides in what branch of the works the members shall be employed. What sort of life arises out of this kind of industrial association, these provisions for the common use of machinery and land? It is all rather dry and colorless, a sort of picture postcard view of the Promised Land. We are told that there are a great number of public buildings in Edendale—an administrative palace, the Central bank, the University, the Academy of Arts, three Public Libraries, four Theaters, the grand central goods warehouse, a great number of schools and other buildings. In addition, extraordinary means are taken to provide for public cleanliness, and the aqueducts in Edendale—we seem to be reading a Chamber of Commerce report!—are "almost without any equal in the1
4
5