if a man chooses to have wrong ideas, and by acting upon them injures the welfare of the right-minded, in the name and on behalf of true liberty, which is compromised by his perverseness, to the prison or the scaffold let him go. The intellectual machinery was never wanting, and the desired ends were rapidly and effectually obtained.

We are not quite so far advanced in England. In France the intellectual machinery is sought mainly as justification. The thing desired is done property is plundered, men and women are thrust into prison, tyranny is seized by the few, and then fine phrases are employed to show how natural and rational this process is, how firmly it rests on the deepest instincts of the human intellect. But in England, these ends, as yet, are not wished for by many persons: the old principles still predominate. The actual impediments to the practice of confiscation and the construction of a new society are still too strong to be overcome. Ideas consequently are wanted here, not for glossing over things done, but for exciting the requisite desires, for converting minds to the desire of new modes of life. In France they are employed as varnish; in England they are needed as leverage.

The manufacturers of these ideas, these upheaving levers, if not numerous, are at least exceedingly energetic. They work with the delightful consciousness of being regenerators of human existence. Conspicuous amongst these makers of ideas is Mr Mill. He has no equal in England for the range, the variety, and the subtilty of those intellectual considerations which are to recast English society in a fresh mould. It cannot be denied that Mr Mill possesses great intellectual force, and that is the very quality which gives him such pre-eminence in the manufacture of ideas. He stimulates

wonderfully. The form of his thinking savours so strongly of pure intellect, his thoughts roll out so as if from the very workshop of reason itself. It is not to be wondered at, therefore, if Mr Mill has had many followers. The keenness of his language, and the originality and intellectuality of his thoughts, fascinate readers just in proportion as they are themselves fond of logical and argumentative processes. The breadth of his influence, therefore, amongst acute and clever men, can create no surprise; and yet there is a feature in Mr Mill's career which never ceases to fill us with unbounded astonishment. He has been singled out amongst living men as the highest example of an authority. The word authority has for a long series of years been peculiarly associated with his name. Even when writers ventured to differ from him-and they have not been few or undistinguished-their invariable practice has been to preface their dissent from his opinions with a loud proclamation of his authority. An apology seemed to be always necessary before the expression of disagreement could be risked; and it was freely given by men extremely antipathic to his views. No Catholic could show greater diffidence in differing from the Pope than that exhibited by writers of every view in opposing one who was so emphatically the embodiment of authority. The existence of such a feeling is for us a cause of incessant wonder, for there is no writer of equal eminence who, in our judgment, is less entitled to claim authority than Mr Mill. Authority is the one attribute for which his writings can furnish no justification. Whatever Mr Mill writes, we freely grant, always merits consideration, often the highest consideration; but authority is exactly the quality which is always missing. By authority we mean

respect for his assertions, as from an inferior to a superior, as from one less to one more enlightened, as from one bound to accept to one qualified to impose a judgment. We submit to the authority of a great judge or an eminent physician: we follow their counsels, not because we review and assent to their reasons, but because we are ignorant and they have knowledge. But we have no such feeling towards Mr Mill, and we think that no one else ought to have it; for the simple reason, that Mr Mill fails in judgment. He is the last man whose prescriptions we should be inclined to swallow simply because we held that he knew. A long experience has taught us-and the teaching is manifestly spreading - that his dicta may be acute, excessively clear, highly intellectual, and full of valuable suggestions; but they are not the final sentences of a judge. We must investigate and accept the reasonings on which they are founded before we can obey them. The disturbing forces in Mr Mill's mind which pervert the faculty of judgment are many, and their action is incessant. He is destitute of true fairness; he seldom does justice to the position of his opponent. He constantly neglects to notice his reasoning. Hence his general propositions are for the most part inexact; they rest on a partial induction; they are not the resultants of all the facts. The reason of this singular weakness in a writer endowed with so much mental power, is the feminine passionateness of his nature, the quickness with which his feelings are excited, even on the most abstract subject, and the consequent eagerness to establish his own side, and his dislike of giving due weight to the side of his adversary. It is too true, as Mr Bouverie hinted in the House of Commons, Mr Mill is more of a

sophist than a philosopher. He has written much with a philosophical air, and in a philosophical form, but he has established no philosophy. He has laid down no philosophical first principles on any subject which we can rely on for their exactness and their certainty.

On no subject has Mr Mill declaimed with so much passion and so much pertinacity as on land: here it it is that his intellectual force sprouts up with new ideas. Formulas about land have been poured out by Mr Mill in never-ending streams, in and out of Parliament, in formal treatises on political economy, in pamphlets and addresses, in public and private action of every kind. He seems ever to feel that his one specific mission is to preach and teach about land. On this great theme the manufacture of ideas never ceases. His last effusion is the most wonderful of all.

He conceives that the acceptance of these ideas by the public has been so great, that he may proceed to embody them in action; and he has constructed a Land Tenure Reform Association, of which he has written the programme and its explanation. It is a marvellous document. It contains the essence of Mr Mill's choicest teaching on land. It is constructed as a lever of invincible power for effecting the darling passion of his mind the placing property in land on a different basis from all other kinds of property. This is the fundamental idea on which all Mr Mill's ideas on land roll; and this idea he thinks to be sufficiently implanted in the minds of Englishmen, as to supply him with a basis on which to rear a society which shall rival the success and the fame of the great AntiCorn-Law League.

Were Mr Mill and his doctrines alone concerned about land, we should scarcely think it worth while to enter on a serious discussion of

their value. But in many countries of Europe, not least in England, speculations about land are becoming exceedingly active. The law on land cannot escape the universal tendency of the age to criticise all laws; and it would be as impolitic as it would be hopeless to try to defend property in land by charging its assailants with revolutionary designs. Many of these persons do intend revolution; they must be met, and can be met, by direct argument. Let us consider, then, what Mr Mill says; let us examine his ideas; let us see how they will bear to be tried at the bar of reason. Mr Mill's central idea is that property in land is a monopoly. Land, he tells us, is a commodity limited in amount, not merely in the same sense as that all earthly things are limited, but in the narrower sense of a special limitation, relatively to the wants of a particular population. Land he conceives as being, according to the true idea, the essential, and we may add inalienable, property of the nation. It cannot pass into absolute ownership to private persons. The State possesses an indefeasible right to interfere with the fruits of the possession of land. It is bound not to meddle with the profits of cottonspinners, but it is a duty which it owes to its subjects to inspect the accounts of agriculture, and to claim the advantages of partnership. The owners of the soil, consequently, possess only a modified right to the results of their property. Nor are the right and duty of the State's interference restricted to the rents of landowners only. The politicians who rule the country are bound to be profoundly versed in the science of agriculture. It is incumbent on them to be thoroughly acquainted with the best methods, not only of culture, but also of possible tillage; it lies on them to revise, from VOL. CX.-NO. DCLXIX.

time to time, the processes they apply to the management of the national property, and if landowners are found to fall short of what science and enlightenment prescribe, to apply by its paramount authority suitable remedies. On this grand foundation of ideas Mr Mill raises a demand for the suppression of tenant-farmers, and the substitution of peasant-proprietorship, first in Ireland, and ultimately in England; and then summons the children of light to array themselves in the ranks of his brilliant creation, the Land Reform League, and to exact of landowners the restitution of gains which neither their toil nor their spinning has created, but which were due to the efforts of the whole people.

Here again Mr Mill, in union with many others, denounces the size of English estates. For him the adding of field to field is a crime against society, not so much for the political dangers which such a proceeding may threaten to bring, but for the social evils it inflicts,the non-residence of the owner on a large part of his estates, the neglect of the landlords' duties, the harsh and immoral management of a steward, the oppression of the labourers, the refusal to provide cottages numerous enough, and fit for the decent lodgment of human beings. Thus Mr Mill would impose by law a limit on the aggregation of land in the same hand. He urges further the abolition of primogeniture and entails; the restriction, if not indeed the extinction, of settlements; and he has even gone so far as to suggest that the right of a landowner to bequeath his lands should be confined within a moderate number of acres. The sweep of the proposals is vast certainly.

Mr Mill towers on the heights of ideas, but he is greatly aided by followers who fly in lower regions.

There are many who shrink from attacking the rights of property in land, but yet who preach with vehemence the remodelling of the laws which regulate the details of the possession of land. They inveigh with passion against the processes by which land is transferred in England. They dwell on the cost, the delay, and the uncertainties of English conveyancing. They paint the wrongs which the poor suffer from their practical exclusion from the acquisition of land by the perverseness and the iniquity of our land - laws. They describe them as shut out from investing their savings in land by the costliness of English methods of transfer; if land could pass as easily as consols or shares in companies, the eyes of the lovers of our common country would be gladdened by the sight of a multitudinous and wealthy race of petty landowners, whose prosperity would give stability to the nation, and whose untiring and uncalculating industry would draw forth unexampled stores from the cultivation of the soil.

A second and still more ardent band of land-reformers impels the onward march of Mr Mill's ideas -the democracy of these modern days, the fierce haters of every form of landed proprietor, who detest with almost equal fury the manyacred English squire and the legion of the petty proprietors of the peasant-farms of France. The ownership of land is doubtless a conservative political force; it excites the sense of property in its stronger form, for it is property in a particular and individual thing, and not merely in value, which might take one shape as readily as another. Land tells on the affections; it is loved as a distinct object, for its beauty, its living qualities, its individual and personal character. The heart clings to it with tenacity, and resents every danger which threatens to take

it away. The democratical spirit finds in its owners the same uniform temper of mind under all circumstances, and it hates them all and everywhere. The world has seen in France how the spirit of the town has been eager to crush the country; how it felt that the resistance offered by the ownership of land was the strongest barrier which lay across the path of Socialism. To tax the land, to lay exceptional burdens upon it, to make its owners see that their property is not as other property, is the darling passion of democracy; and such a feeling, so intense, ploughs the soil for receiving the seed of the fermenting generalities of Mr Mill's ideas.

We cannot discuss on this occasion so immense a subject; but it is a matter of the first importance to examine the character of the first principles which underlie this huge superstructure of theory. The essence of these doctrines, as we have already observed, consists in drawing a fundamental distinction between property in land and all other forms of property. They do not precisely attack the institution of property itself; they do not preach Communism. They did not do so before the exhibition which Communism has made of its nature in France; and they are still less likely to do so, now that the eyes of Englishmen have been enlightened as to what Communism means. the contrary, these ideas accept the institution of property; their main principle is to affirm the illegitimacy of property in land, whilst conceding the unimpeachableness of other kinds of property. Transformed into other words, this principle becomes the assertion that land can never pass into the ownership of a single proprietor. It attacks property in land at its origin. Its title is described as radically imperfect. The State is held to be for all time its real proprietor by the decree of

On

the law of nature and of human life. And be it observed, this does not mean that the State, as master of everything within the nation, is supreme regulator of the possession of land as of all other possessions, but that it is a partner, a sharer in the business of cultivating land for profit, a joint-owner that can never be shaken off, and who is authorised at all times to call for an account of the gains, and to appropriate a portion of them as being strictly its own. Thus the State can interfere with modes of tenure-not merely on the summons of some imperious necessity, some great evil to correct, as formerly in Prussia, and as recently in England in respect of copyhold rights-but also as entitled to see that the best use is made of the property. If need be, it can oust all existing landowners out of their possessions; it can take away from the squire and give to the peasant, not in the name of a political principle, but on the basis of a partner's right, as dealing with men who never were, and never can be, owners of the soil. Thus the revision of tenure from time to time is not a political act, but a commercial one; and it does not require special powers of intuition to perceive how infinitely more easy, more certain to be put in practice, the latter process is than the former. The land lords of England are thus taught a new lesson. The delusion under which they have laboured for ages, that their lands are their own, is thus scattered to the winds. The grand discoveries made by moderns in social philosophy have shown that the notion of complete property in land is an error, like original sin, which dates from the birth of the human race, and needs only to be stated to be seen in its ridiculous nakedness. The omnipotent formula, Nullum tempus occurrit ecclesiæ, is not good for churchmen only; it is valid for the State

men.

against every landowner upon earth. The State can re-enter when it pleases. There is a natural reluctance, no doubt, to effect at one blow so violent a disturbance in the minds and fortunes of so many misguided But a beginning ought to be made. It will give lodgment to the principle; and its development may then be safely trusted to the future. Exceptional taxation can be imposed upon landed property. Something was done in Ireland. Tenants were enriched on the principle that what they gained was not taken from the landlord, for the landlord never owned the soil exclusively, and what the tenants received was only a transfer to them of its share by the State. A great step was thus achieved in educating the country. Let every man henceforth beware of supposing his land to be his own. Let him enter into no arrangements or calculations which forget that he has a partner in the property.

There is not, then, and there can never be, private property in land. Who says so we ask. Who is the universal legislator who has pronounced this decree to the whole human race? In what code is it laid down? Where is the writing to be found? In the heart of every man ? Alas! sentiments, special propositions which can be shown to be inscribed in the soul of every human being, are hard-shall we not say rather, are impossible?—to find. Nay, in this particular case of land, the universal testimony of mankind is totally wanting. The joint-partnership of the State in the land is the brilliant discovery of modern times. The idea was entirely absent from the human race during the countless ages of the past, except where land was held in common, and no property in it whatever was recognised. The inference from this fact is decisive, and is irresistible. There is no law of nature, no spontaneous teaching