Читать книгу Distributive Justice: The Right and Wrong of Our Present Distribution of Wealth - John A. Ryan - Страница 18

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Every concrete right, whether to land or to artificial goods, is based upon some contingent fact or ground, called a title. By reason of some title a man is justified in appropriating a particular farm, house, or hat. When he becomes the proprietor of a thing that has hitherto been ownerless, his title is said to be original; when he acquires an article from some previous owner, his title is said to be derived. As an endless series of proprietors is impossible, every derived title must be traceable ultimately to some original title. Among the derived titles the most important are contract, inheritance, and prescription. The original title is either first occupancy or labour. The prevailing view among the defenders of private landownership has always been that the original title is not labour but first occupancy. If this title be not valid every derived title is worthless, and no man has a true right to the land that he calls his own. Henry George's attack upon the title of first occupancy is an important link in his argument against private property in land.

"Priority of occupation give exclusive and perpetual title to the surface of a globe in which, in the order of nature, countless generations succeed each other!... Has the first comer at a banquet the right to turn back all the chairs, and claim that none of the other guests shall partake of the food provided, except as they make terms with him? Does the first man who presents a ticket at the door of a theatre, and passes in, acquire by his priority the right to shut the doors and have the performance go on for him alone?... And to this manifest absurdity does the recognition of the individual right to land come when carried to its ultimate that any human being, could he concentrate in himself the individual rights to the land of any country, could expel therefrom all the rest of the inhabitants; and could he concentrate the individual rights to the whole surface of the globe, he alone of all the teeming population of the earth would have the right to live."[11]

In passing, it may be observed that Henry George was not the first distinguished writer to use the illustration drawn from the theatre. Cicero, St. Basil, and St. Thomas Aquinas all employed it to refute extravagant conceptions of private ownership. In reply to the foregoing argument of Henry George, we point out: first, that the right of ownership created by first occupancy is not unlimited, either extensively or intensively; and, second, that the historical injustices connected with private ownership have been in only a comparatively slight degree due to the first occupation of very large tracts of land. The right of first occupancy does not involve the right to take a whole region or continent, compelling all subsequent arrivals to become tenants of the first. There seems to be no good reason to think that the first occupant is justified in claiming as his own more land than he can cultivate by his own labour, or with the assistance of those who prefer to be his employés or his tenants rather than independent proprietors. "He has not the right to reserve for himself alone the whole territory, but only that part of it which is really useful to him, which he can make fruitful."[12] Nor is the right of private landownership, on whatever title it may rest, unlimited intensively, that is, in its powers or comprehension. Though a man should have become the rightful owner of all the land in a neighbourhood, he would have no moral right to exclude therefrom those persons who could not without extreme inconvenience find a living elsewhere. He would be morally bound to let them cultivate it at a fair rental. The Christian conception of the intensive limitations of private ownership is well exemplified in the action of Pope Clement IV, who permitted strangers to occupy the third part of any estate which the proprietor refused to cultivate himself.[13] Ownership understood as the right to do what one pleases with one's possessions, is due partly to the Roman law, partly to the Code Napoléon, but chiefly to modern theories of individualism.

In the second place, the abuses which have accompanied private property in land are very rarely traceable to abuses of the right of first occupancy. The men who have possessed too much land, and the men who have used their land as an instrument of social oppression, have scarcely ever been first occupants or the successors thereof through derived titles. This is especially true of modern abuses, and modern legal titles. In the words of Herbert Spencer: "Violence, fraud, the prerogative of force, the claims of superior cunning,—these are the sources to which these titles may be traced. The original deeds were written with the sword, rather than with 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."[14] Not the appropriation of land which nobody owned, but the forcible and fraudulent seizure of land which had already been occupied, has been one of the main causes of the evils attending upon private landownership. Moreover, in England and all other countries that have adopted her legal system, the title of first occupancy could never be utilised by individuals: all unoccupied land was claimed by the Crown or by the State, and transferred thence to private persons or corporations. If some individuals have got possession of too much land through this process, the State, not the title of first occupancy, must bear the blame. This is quite clear in the history of land tenure in the United States and Australasia.

Henry George's attack upon private landownership through the title of first occupancy is therefore ineffective; for he attributes to this qualities that it does not possess, and consequences for which it is not responsible.