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Home , Common land, Georgism, Henry George, James Mill, Land reform, Law of rent

Donald Winch Reform and Popular in Victorian Britain

Paper for a conference on ‘Worlds of Political Economy’ held at Churchill College, Cambridge, 6-7 September, 2002

I

‘In my lectures upon Political Economy about the country, I have found in almost every centre a certain little knot of men of the lower-middle or upper-, men of grit and character, largely self-educated, keen citizens, mostly nonconformists in , to whom Land Nationalisation, taxation of , or other radical reforms of , are doctrines resting upon a plain moral sanction. These free-trading Radical dissenters regard common and equal access to the land as a “natural right”, essential to individual freedom.’

J. A. Hobson’s description of the opinions of the kind of men he encountered in his university extension classes in the English provinces in the 1880s and 90s accords with everything we know about the revival of the movement for during this period. For this was when ’s and Poverty (1879) was selling 100,000 copies, when George was addressing large audiences, and when Land Restoration Leagues, based on his ‘single ’ proposals, were being formed throughout Britain. In 1897 Hobson thought that George had ‘exercised a more directly powerful formative and educative influence over English of the last fifteen years than any other man’.1 He acknowledged that George, through personal magnetism and with the aid of a drastically over-simplified economic message, was tapping into a ‘real, deep-grounded passion or conviction’, a ‘genuine need or aspiration’. Writing his Confessions of an Economic Heretic (1938) forty years later, however, Hobson had reversed this judgement: he dismissed the career of Georgist land reform as ‘interesting testimony to the naiveté of the British mind’.2 Paradoxically, something can be said for both of these conflicting judgements, especially if we treat naiveté more as insular preoccupation with the singularities of British economic circumstances than as evidence of a genuine lack of sophistication.

1 J.A. Hobson, ‘The Influence of Henry George in England’, Fortnightly Review, 68. December, 1897, quotations on pp. 841, 844.. 2 Confessions of an Economic Heretic; The Autobiography of John A Hobson (1938) edited and introduced by Michael Freeden, Harvester Press, 1976, p. 27.

1 Note what is missing from Hobson’s recollections. By 1938, as an eighty-year-old veteran, he had forgotten or become less appreciative of the native roots of anti-landlord sentiment in British public ; less generous in his recognition of the breadth and diversity of the land reform movement; and less willing to acknowledge the positive connections between land nationalisation and other radical causes. In 1897 he had noted that ‘the peculiarly English science of Political Economy’ had often been ‘engaged in undermining the ideas of and social attached to private in land’. He had spoken of a ‘vast reticulation of separate organisations’ designed ‘to enforce existing laws and secure further legislation curtailing the powers of landowners; societies for the preservation of existing public rights over and ; for the protection of tenant rights and the attainment of freedom of cultivation and security of property in improvements; for the registration of titles to land and mortgages; for the abolition of , the enfranchisement of leasehold land, abolition of entail and the removal of all other barriers which separate land from other forms of property, and prevent its free transfer.’3 Hobson had made his own contribution to the prospects for labour on land as a remedy for , and had welcomed the boost George had given to other public issues in the 1890s: railway nationalisation, municipalisation of ground rents, and greater public control over natural .4 If we supply a few of the names of individuals and organisations which made up this ‘vast reticulation’ it becomes apparent that Hobson’s ‘little knot’ was surrounded by much larger knots, and that these were not entirely peopled by members of the lower middle classes. While Hobson may have been technically correct in his retrospective verdict that ‘never was accepted as a working-class creed’ (how would we tell?), the evidence of popular opposition to and of the Chartist land banks in the suggests that regaining access to land had always been part of the aspirations of some, perhaps a great many members of the working-classes.5 Land nationalisation certainly became a rallying

3 ‘The Influence of Henry George’, p. 845. 4 For his own involvement see J. A. Hobson, Cooperative Labour Upon the Land and Other Papers, The Report of a Conference upon ‘Land, Cooperation and the Unemployed’ held at Holborn Town Hall in October, 1894, London, Swan Sonnenschein, 1895. 5 See J. M. Neeson, Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700-1820, Cambridge, 1993; and Jan Marsh, Back to the Land; The Pastoral Impulse in England from 1880 to 1914, 1982.

2 cry for such people later in the century. On the upper side of Hobson’s class dividing line too, the Cobden-Bright commitment to ‘free in land’ shows that it was an issue that could fire the enthusiasms of the mercantile and manufacturing . From the 1860s onward Cobdenites found themselves being overtaken on their left by other middle-class organisations such as ’s Land Tenure Reform Association (LTRA) and ’s Land Nationalisation Society, bodies that were variously dedicated to the creation of proprietorships and the curtailment of private landownership, wholly or in part, through nationalisation, municipalisation, and based on the legitimacy of communal appropriation of the ‘unearned increment’ in rental incomes and urban site values. Weaving between these groups were the activities of another body with middle-class affiliations, the Commons Preservation Society, designed to prevent urban landowners from infringing rights of access to in and around . And if these bodies had not succeeded in keeping land near the top of the public agenda, developments across the Irish Channel would certainly have done so. Finding solutions to the Irish land problem, of course, lay at the centre of Anglo-Irish relations from the Famine of 1845-6 through to Gladstone’s Irish of 1870 and 1881. Some of the ideas of land reformers found their way into ’s ‘unauthorised programme’ in 1885, and into the manifestos of the Liberal and Labour parties during the decades that span the turn of the century. From a party-political perspective they can be seen as attempts to address the perceived needs of the new electorate created by the Second and Third Reform Acts, which added urban and rural working-class males to the middle-class electorate originally addressed by Cobdenites. Finally, of course, the , having decided to do without the benefit of ’s analysis of ’s inherent contradictions, granted a large space in their programme for the ‘law of ’ (‘the very corner-stone of collectivist economy’) and the taxation of unearned incomes.6

In sharp contrast with Hobson, Sidney Webb, in his preface to the reprint of Fabian Essays in 1920, was not inclined to treat past enthusiasms as evidence of naieveté: ‘Tested by a whole

6 See the Webbs’ History of Trade Unionism, revised edition, 1920, Kelley reprint, 1973, p. 162.

3 generation of further experience and criticism, I conclude that, in 1889, we knew our Political

Economy, and that our Political Economy was sound’.7 Given the longevity and diversity of the British movement for land reform during the nineteenth century, it is hardly surprising that it has spawned a large and distinguished body of secondary literature.8 Moreover, given the role played by various versions of the science of political economy in what for a time at least can almost be described as a mass movement, it is clearly a subject through which it is possible -- in the words of our organizers – to explore ‘the dynamics of interaction between the high intellectual plane of development and popular uses and meanings of political economy’. As in the case of , another Victorian movement based on a mixture of economic theory and popular politics, the appeal to scientific authority, though frequent, was highly selective. Some versions of free trade theorising were simply more ‘useful’ to a mass than others, where use could be defined narrowly or broadly. Narrowly, when it involved maximization of the appeal to potential voters or donors: broadly, when it was a matter of assessing conformity with other values, political, intellectual, or moral, that were held by leaders of the movement. In the case of land reform especially, selectivity became outright attack on some authorities when the remedies for reform leap-frogged one another in a more radical direction – one that could readily (if loosely) be labelled as or state . If these remedies drew support from the ‘peculiarly English science of political economy’, something must have gone badly wrong with that version of the science. Alternative sources of authority were needed and found, ones that possessed the sterling fundamentalist quality of uniting explanation with justification. Though chiefly imported from France, where the socialist threat to had raised its head in national politics much earlier than in Britain, the opponents of the English science acquired a small but dedicated following in Britain. Indeed, they

7 As reprinted in the Jubilee edition, 1948, p. xviii. 8 For general treatments, in addition to the specific works cited in later footnotes, see M. Beer, A History of British Socialism, G Bell, London, 1929, Vol. II, pp. 237-45; H M. Lynd, England in the 1880s, New York, 1945; R. Harrison, Before the Socialists; Studies in Labour and Politics, 1861-1881, Routledge, London, 1965; D. E. Martin, ‘Land Reform’ in P. Hollis (ed), Pressure from Without in Early Victorian England, 1974; and R. Douglas, Land, People and Politics; A History of the Land Question in the United Kingdom, 1878-1952, 1976; G. E. Mingay, Land and Society in England, 1750-1980 . London and New York: Longman, 1994.

4 sometimes described themselves as a ‘French school’ carrying a banner inscribed with the message of ‘free exchange’ derived from libre échange in preference to ‘free trade’ – a term which had more mercantile and insufficiently lofty connotations to its adherents. This less-known challenge to the English science constituted a third combatant in what is usually treated as a two-sided Methodenstreit over the future of in Britain during the final third of the nineteenth century, when a new breed of academic and economic was staking out rival claims for a place in the professional sun. In the world outside academe in which it was important both to protect and to demonstrate claims to scientific authority, Chamberlain’s Reform campaign focussed on an issue of public policy that required a professional or ‘scientific’ response. As is now well-known, it provided a field in which the credentials of these two competitive visions could be displayed, with the economic theorists, for the most part, defending cosmopolitan free trade while the economic historians, again for the most part, espousing the national benefits of imperial preference.9 Land reform proposals and socialism were too diffuse to generate any such simple bifurcation between theorists and historians, but they generated considerable zeal among the libre échangistes. For a variety of reasons, none of the members of this third or French school gained professional recognition within universities, and since history is written by the victors that is partly why they are less well known. Nevertheless, since they were, for a time, a vocal section of educated non-academic opinion, appealing to rival authorities within the history of political economy, they too had to be confronted by the would-be professionals.

II

Such in programmatic outline is the background to what follows, but the first and most obvious point to make about land reform is that, unlike free trade in and persons, it never enjoyed the same degree of practical success. Indeed, the record of achievement so short of its original aspirations that one of the leading experts on English land tenure during this period, F. M. L. Thompson, has ranked it alongside republicanism, teetotalism, and

9 For what remains the best study of this episode see A. W. Coats, ‘Political Economy and the Tariff Reform Campaign of 1903’, Journal of , 11, 1968, pp. 181-229 now reprinted, with additional references, in his On the History of Economic Thought, Routledge, London, 1992, vol. I, pp. 284-337.

5 disestablishmentarianism in this respect, while conceding that ‘it was a movement worthy of more than such cranky associates’.10 Judged by the statistics of rural depopulation, the failure of the owner-occupied sector of farming to grow significantly, and the stubborn concentration of land ownership in England (more so in ), the problems addressed were real enough. Yet in becoming a standard element in Liberal and Labour party programmes these problems acquired an emblematic status, especially in the post-1884 era of ‘democratic’ politics. They were sufficiently serious emblems, however, to provoke Conservative anxieties and counter-proposals, as well as the formation of organisations such as the Liberty and Property Defence League (LPDL), which brought together those who believed that they posed a serious threat to private property in general.11 It was here that the ‘French school’ was to prove most useful in expounding a libertarian ideal that raised the ideological stakes by polarising the debate between individualists and collectivists. With the exception of , and the solid piecemeal achievements of the Commons Preservation Society, the changes in the agrarian order that actually took place owed little to the efforts of land reformers. Attempts to substitute owner- occupation for tenancy, and peasant proprietorships for labour, came to little when measured against the impact of persistent forces, especially those released by prolonged agricultural depression after 1873. Rent rolls fell, and if depression did not make agricultural land unsalable, it allowed defenders of to reverse the logic of their critics by pointing to the possibility of an ‘unearned decrement’. A. J. Balfour, addressing the Industrial Remuneration Conference in 1885, thought that depression allowed the tenure of land to be addressed in

‘a spirit of scientific impartiality’. It may have been in this spirit that he likened the efforts of land reformers to halt the downward pressure on urban wage and employment levels caused by rural migration to attempts ‘to drain the German Ocean by cutting a few gaps in a

Lincolnshire sea-wall’.12 Impartial or not, Balfour was justified in drawing attention to the gap

10 ‘Land and Politics in England in the Nineteenth Century’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, XV, 1965, p. 23. 11 For a work that gives prominence to land reform as one of the main threats to which Conservatives were responding see Matthew Fforde, Conservatism and Collectivism, 1886-1914, Edinburgh University Press, 1990. 12 See Industrial Remuneration Conference; Report of the Proceedings and Papers read in Prince’s Hall, Piccadilly under the Presidency of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, London: Cassell, 1885, p. 347.

6 between diagnosis and the likely results of the remedies proposed. In this respect his remark could be inscribed on the tombs of several of the nineteenth-century land reform campaigns. Some convincing hypotheses, political and economic, have been advanced to explain why so little came from so much effort.13 My concern, however, is more with the intellectual character of land reform than with its legislative or economic outcomes. And for once, it is not necessary to apologize for concentrating on some canonical figures in the history of political economy rather than on the popularizers who echoed, often in distorted fashion, their ideas. Balfour’s perceptive survey of the reasons why land rather than was the focus of popular discontent in Britain adduced the following important consideration:

‘To this tendency, produced by party politics, a powerful impulse has been given by the language of theoretical economists. For, according to economic terminology, the products of industry are divided into rent, , and ; the recipients of these three portions being respectively the landlord, the capitalist, and the labourer. And, according to economic theory, the landlord’s share was received by him in exchange for an instrument of production, which, however acquired, was not the result of his or of any human industry, and for one which had besides a constant tendency to increase in , as society advanced, without any expenditure or exertion on his part. He neither made its original, nor earned its subsequent value.’

In this way ‘scientific form’ had been given ‘to any floating jealousy there may be, or rather must be, of a species of , which, from obvious causes, constantly tends to appear larger than it is, and which influences the imagination to a degree out of all proportion to its magnitude, as compared with that of riches accumulated in other and less obvious forms.’14 With the opposite intent, Richard Cobden had made much the same point about scientific form two decades earlier in a speech often cited in the reform literature:

‘If I were five-and-twenty or thirty, instead of, unhappily, twice that number of years, I would have a League for free trade in Land, just as we have a League for free trade in Corn. You will find just the same authority in for the one as for the other; and if it were only taken up as it must be taken up to succeed, not as a political, revolutionary, Radical,

13 In addition to the work by F. M. L. Thompson cited in note 10 above see Harold Perkin, ‘Land Reform and in Victorian Britain’ in J. Butt and I. F. Clarke (eds), The Victorians and Social Protest, David and Charles, Archon Books, 1973, pp. 196-7; and The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780-1880, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1969, Chapter 7, section 4. For studies of the obstructive part played by land surveyors see F. M. L. Thompson, Chartered Surveyors; The Growth of a Profession, London: Routledge, 1968; and by solicitors see A. Offer, Property and Politics, 1870-1914; Landowners, Law, Ideology and Urban Development in England, Cambridge University Press, 1981. 14 Industrial Remuneration Conference, p. 339.

7 Chartist notion, but taken up on politico-economic grounds, the agitation would be sure to succeed.’15

Cobden’s appeal to Smith may have had some strategic elements (as we shall see, it overlooks Smith’s more controversial followers), but it was not an arbitrary choice. The

Wealth of Nations contains some forthright judgements on and entail treated as feudal residues that continued to restrict agricultural development, particularly in Scotland.16 could draw as much ammunition from Smith as he could from a more traditional radical source, the story of the Norman Yoke. Smith had a soft spot for the English yeomanry and his remarks on the superiority of owner-occupation in were to be regularly recycled in the land reform literature.17 But it was two of Smith’s earliest adherents, Robert Malthus and , who were to supply the economic theory summarized by Balfour. They helped to form nineteenth- century opinion on land questions by launching theories that treated economic rent as a unique form of income, and land as a of production with marked peculiarities that differentiated it from capital and labour. Moreover, in making the central problem of political economy the need to find ways of accommodating Malthusian pressures under conditions in which agriculture was believed to suffer from the law of , they focussed on rising rents as one of the main consequences of . This basic model conformed with pre- and post-1815 economic conditions in Britain and was tailored to the English tripartite system of land tenure, according to which landowners received contractual rents paid by capitalistic tenant farmers in search of , employing wage labour in the process. Another assumption almost too obvious to be articulated was that concentration of landownership counter posed the of a rich few against the many, a problem of wealth and income distribution compounded by the political dominance of the landed interest and imperfections in the market for land. At the end of the century, when that dominance had been eroded, the assumption could be voiced in the form of a convincing retrospective

15 Speech delivered November 23, 1864. 16 Wealth of Nations, Glasgow edition, III.ii.6; IV.ii.b.19. 17 ‘Those laws and so favourable to the yeomanry, have perhaps contributed more to the present grandeur of England than all their boasted regulations of commerce taken together’. Ibid., III.ii.14.

8 hypothesis: land nationalisation would not have found so much political favour in a less dynamic economy where any rise in land values was divided among a large number of owner- occupiers.18 Ricardo in particular, though a gradualist on the implementation of reform of the and unconvinced of the desirability of taxation of unearned rental income under British conditions, left the legacy of argumentation that supports Balfour’s case, especially when Ricardo’s conclusions were fortified by the anti-aristocratic logic of James and John Stuart Mill. The younger Mill acted as the link between the early Ricardian-inspired attacks on the landowning interest during the post-1815 Corn Law debates and the revival of land- reforming campaigns from the 1860s onwards. During the Irish Famine he had argued that political economy was not committed to extending English landowning solutions to Irish conditions. Peasant proprietorship along continental lines could be a better partial remedy for a society that needed to exercise greater prudence in population matters, and where custom commanded more respect than contractual solutions. After another shock event, the Fenian ‘outrages’ of 1867, Mill was to return to his concern with finding a policy that would fit Irish circumstances and preserve the Anglo-Irish union. Here his role as one of the leading authorities on political economy was to deny the dogmatic claims of other parliamentarians, chiefly Robert Lowe, that the science dictated a ‘one-size-fits-all’ key to problems on both sides of the Irish Channel.19 Mill had established his public credentials two decades earlier when he published his

Principles of Political Economy with Some of Their Applications to (1848). The work combined a restatement of Ricardian principles with an ambitious attempt ‘to

18 As Balfour said of Continental socialists: ‘It is neither their interest nor their inclination to attack private property in land; not their interest, because such an attack would inevitably array against them the whole body of peasant owners…; not their inclination, because it is the capitalist and shopkeeper, not the landowner, who is the special object of their dislike’; see Industrial Remuneration Conference, pp. 337-8. See also the conclusion of the articles by F. C. Montague on ‘increment, the unearned’ and ‘land nationalisation’ in R. H. I. Palgrave (ed), Dictionary of Political Economy, London: Macmillan, 1896. 19 A large literature now surrounds this subject. See E. D. Steele, Irish Land and British Politics; Tenant-Right and Nationality, 1865-1870, Cambridge, 1974, Chapter II; idem, ‘J. S. Mill and the Irish Question: The Principles of Political Economy, 1848-1865’, Historical Journal, XIII, 1970, 216-36; idem, ‘J. S. Mill and the Irish Question: Reform and the Integrity of Empire’, Historical Journal, XIII, 1970, 419-42; L. Zastoupil, ‘Moral Government: J. S. Mill on Ireland’, Historical Journal, XXVI, 1983, 707-17. For the most recent comprehensive treatment of Mill’s involvement with Irish affairs see Bruce L. Kinzer, England’s Disgrace?: J. S. Mill and the Irish Question, University of Toronto Press: Toronto, 2001.

9 exhibit the economical phenomena of society in the relation in which they stand to the best social ideas of the present time’. provided a model for such an inquiry, but Mill made it clear that from a Ricardian standpoint Smith’s work was ‘in many parts obsolete, and in all, imperfect’.20 It also represented the social philosophy of a previous century. Mill proved successful in his aim to produce a ‘popular’ work. From the outset it was a succés d’estime showing considerable stamina over the long haul.21 Mill stood by his methodological limitation of the scope of the science to ‘positive’ laws derived from hypothetical ‘economic man’ premises, but the design of the work enabled him to expound his own evolving normative conclusions on the ultimate social ends legislators should pursue. In attempting to give the science renewed practical purchase Mill aimed to conciliate its critics and lay the foundations for changes in social arrangements that would meet higher standards of justice in future. The important distinction he made between laws of production that were obligatory, and laws of distribution that were matters of will and the adaptation of institutions to higher goals than mere wealth accumulation, widened the scope for proposals that went beyond, sometimes far beyond, the status quo. It follows that whatever authority Mill achieved with other intellectuals and a wider public was as much moral and political as intellectual and scientific: he aimed to be influential as opposed to being simply an authoritative exponent of an updated science.22 As with all such performances, however, the distinction between ‘science’ and ‘art’ was apt to become blurred, as some of Mill’s successors, particularly those who disapproved of his nostrums, pointed out.23 The grounding for Mill’s ‘crotchets’ was always multi-dimensional;

20 See Principles of Political Economy as reprinted in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, thirty-three volumes, Toronto, 1965-91 (hereafter cited as CW), vol. II, p. xcii 21 Although the sales (2000 in the first four years) were dwarfed by more explicitly popular works such as those of ’s Illustrations of Political Economy (1832-4), six editions of the Principles were required up to 1871,with the cheap People’s edition of 1865 achieving sales of 10000 before Mill’s death in 1873. For these details see J. M. Robson’s textual introduction to the CW, vol. II, and N. de Marchi, ‘The Success of Mill’s Principles’, History of Political Economy, 6, 2, 1974, 119-57. 22 Studies of Mill’s standing as a political moralist can be found in Stefan Collini, Public Moralist; Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850-1930, Cambridge, 1991, chapters 4 and 8; and Bruce L. Kinzer, Ann P. Robson, and John M. Robson, A Moralist In and Out of Parliament; John Stuart Mill at Westminster, 1865-68, Toronto, 1992. 23 See, for example, Joseph Shield Nicholson, a disillusioned ex-pupil of who occupied the Chair of Political Economy at Edinburgh from 1885 to 1925; he thought that Mill had blurred an important distinction between and economics that had previously characterized orthodox post-Smithian political economy, adding that ‘his bias against landlordism and in favour of peasant proprietors…has vitiated his treatment of the land question, and he is largely to blame for the present clamour for the land for the people and the appropriation of the unearned increment’; see ‘A Plea for

10 there was scope for disagreement as to the debt owed to larger moral and political concerns as opposed to those derived from the narrower science of political economy. But Mill did frequently call upon the pure science to support his views on land reform. For him the law of diminishing returns to land was ‘the most important proposition in political economy’.24 Whereas capital and labour could be increased indefinitely, land was limited in extent and quality. The theory of rent, therefore, was reserved for the ‘differential and peculiar’ elements in production as compared with the ‘natural and necessary’ elements represented in wages and profits.25 It followed that social expediency played a larger role in relation to the former than in the case of the latter. On the subject of rent Mill made fewer innovations than on other matters of theory, and when it came to practical conclusions concerning land tenure and taxation he drew less on Ricardo than on his father.26 Ricardo did not question the of the English land tenure system, and his other main disciple, John Ramsay

McCulloch, became one of its leading defenders.27 As a Member of Parliament, Mill played a prominent (he thought decisive) role in the events that led up to the Irish Land Act of 1870. His participation did little to calm the fears of those who believed that any meddling with ‘free contract’ by granting fixed tenure and fair rents in Ireland would have consequences for English landowners.28 Mill, after all, had drawn up the programme of the LTRA in 1869, a programme that went well beyond the case for removing obstacles to the sale of land.29 It included state purchase of land for the purposes of subdivision, the construction of on , reclamation

Orthodox Political Economy’, National Review, VI, 1885, p. 557. Nicholson, perhaps the last academic to include an explicitly Christian dimension in his textbook statement of the principles of political economy, had already attempted to put the subject in a less antagonistic perspective in a work entitled Tenant’s Gain not Landlord’s Loss (1883). 24 CW, II, p. 174. 25 Ibid., p. 485. 26 But Mill junior was a good deal more sophisticated than his father. An account of the theoretical issues raised by Mill’s treatment of rent would have to point out that Mill did not confine rent to agriculture; and that he recognised the differential of location as it affected land, particularly in cities. Rent was also affected by what were later called ‘opportunity costs’ or ‘transfer earnings’, those earnings which arose when land had competing uses. 27 For ’s proposals and Ricardo’s criticisms of them see Elements of Political Economy as reprinted in D. Winch (ed), James Mill; Selected Economic Writings, Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1966, pp. 197-200, 338-42. For J. R. McCulloch, see his Treatise on the Succession to Property Vacant by Death, London, 1848; and A Treatise on the Letting and Occupancy of Land as reprinted in Treatises and Essay on Subjects Connected with Economical Policy, Adam and Charles Black, Edinburgh, 1853. 28 On his contribution to the Irish Land Act see Autobiography in CW, vol I, p.[206]. 29 For a detailed study of Mill’s role in the LTRA see David Martin, John Stuart Mill and the Land Question, University of Hull, 1981.

11 of waste land for the same purpose, and the formation of agrarian to reap the advantages of scale. In an effort to retain the support of working-class reformers seeking outright nationalisation, the programme also included the proposal for a tax on any increase in land values that could not be attributed to improvements made by the landowner. James

Mill had floated this proposal in his Elements of Political Economy (1821). It was a milder version of the ryotwari solution to the Indian land revenue problem advanced in his History of British India (1819), according to which the , acting as the ultimate owner of land, levied taxes directly on ryots or peasant cultivators based on assessments of the ‘original and indestructible properties of the ’.30 During their overlapping periods of as employees of the Company in the period between 1819 and 1857, both Mills were committed to preventing encroachments on the ryotwari system in operation, chiefly in Madras and Bombay, by advocates of the zemindari alternative that was based more on

English notions of private property.31 An uncertain mixture of ideological single-mindedness and administrative experience, therefore, contributed to the son’s confidence in answering objections to the feasibility of carrying out the necessary valuations, whether in India, Ireland, or England. The other clauses in the LTRA programme incorporated the aims of the Commons Preservation Society founded in 1865, with Mill’s disciple, Henry Fawcett, playing a major part. They insisted that waste , and those requiring an Act of Parliament to enclose them, should be permanently reserved for national purposes, leaving the less fertile land around cities to be ‘retained in a state of wild natural beauty, for the general enjoyment of the community, and encouragement in all classes of healthful rural tastes, and of the higher order of pleasures’.32 At this point, then, we can observe the confluence between

30 For Mill’s application of the rent doctrine to India see D. Winch (ed), James Mill, pp. 391-5. The classic study of this episode remains that by Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959, especially Chapter 2. 31 He continued to express these concerns long after the Company’s functions had been taken over by the British government. Thus at the height of the LTRA campaign Mill wrote to Charles Dilke, a supporter, to say that he was concerned to learn that the Bombay ryotwari system was once more under threat from those who favoured the zemindari alternative. He attributed this to ‘a strong reaction in favour of setting up landlords everywhere’ and dreaded to think what would happened when an Irish landlord, the 6th Earl of Mayo, took over as Viceroy; see Later Letters in CW, vol. XVII, p. 1560. 32 See ‘Land Tenure Reform’ in Essays in Economics and Society in CW, vol V, pp. 689-95. Fawcett’s part in the Commons Preservation Society is covered by L. Stephen, Life of Henry Fawcett, London, 1885,Chapter VII. For another contemporary

12 what is now described as ‘romantic ecology’, with its pervasive Wordsworthian overtones, and those neo-Malthusian forms of eco-criticism that Mill pioneered when scouting the desirability of embracing a zero-growth economy on environmentalist grounds.33 While this may have surprised some readers of Mill’s Principles, they would have been prepared for the other clauses in the LTRA’s programme. The separation of production from exchange and distribution, the chapters questioning the absolute right to landed property, and the enthusiastic survey of the merits of peasant proprietorship throughout Europe, summarized a burgeoning literature and provided a rallying point for a new generation of land reformers with serious intellectual credentials. This included, alongside Fawcett, such figures as John Elliot Cairnes, William Thornton, and Thomas Cliffe Leslie; and it ensured Mill a prominent place in the litany of politico-economic experts incanted by later land reformers and attacked by their opponents.34 As political activist Mill also played a more direct role in passing the baton to a new generation when he recruited Wallace, the co-discoverer of the theory of natural selection in biology, to the cause of the LTRA. Wallace was responsible for inclusion of a clause that incorporated preservation of ‘all natural objects or artificial constructions attached to the soil, which are of historical, scientific or artistic interest’. Conservation and preservation of the kind embodied in the founding of the National Trust in 1895 might have had more radical connotations if the clauses of the LTRA had been implemented en bloc in the 1870s. More significantly, Wallace carried the fight into the last quarter of the century by means of his own Land Nationalisation Society formed in 1881. Wallace in turn passed the baton to Henry George, while attempting later to distinguish his own reforms from the ‘no compensation’ programme endorsed by the Georgist Land Restoration Leagues.35 George made one notable

account see G. Shaw Lefevre, English Commons and : The Story of the Battle during the last Thirty Years for Public Rights over the Commons and Forests of England and Wales, Cassell, London, 1894. 33 On ‘romantic ecology’ see J. Bate, Romantic Ecology; Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition, Routledge, London, 1991. For Mill’s environmentalist credentials see D. Winch, ‘Thinking Green, Nineteenth-Century Style: and John Stuart Mill’, in M. Bevir and F. Trentmann (eds), Markets in Context, Princeton University Press, forthcoming. 34 For a useful study of the tensions within this group of late disciples see J. Lipkes, Politics, Religion and Classical Political Economy in Britain: John Stuart Mill and His Followers, London: Macmillan, 1999. 35 See A. R. Wallace, Land : Its Necessity and its Aims, London, 1882. Two unpublished dissertations deal with the activities of the Wallace and George associations; see A. J. Peacock, ‘Land Reform 1880-1919: A Study of

13 convert among the early Fabians, Bernard Shaw, but Mill was to exert a broader and more persistent influence on the thinking of the Fabian movement.36

III

It is clear then that no examination of the role of intellectual-cum-moral authority in land reform matters can bypass the writings and agitational activities of Mill and the circle that surrounded him during the final decade of his life. Such an examination casts doubt on the uniformity implied by Balfour’s diagnosis of the part played by ‘theoretical economists’ making use of deductive theories of rent of the Ricardian type. Fawcett and Cairnes belong to this category, and both of them, in their expositions of the science in the 1870s and 80s, upheld the basic Mill line: the rental return on landed property was subject to laws that differed from those governing other types of property. In Cairnes’s words, it involved ‘a factitious value incident to the progress of society’ that justified state intervention ‘to supply that which the principle of unrestricted has failed to supply’.37 But there was less than complete agreement with Mill on what precise form that intervention should take. Fawcett stopped short of taxation of the unearned increment, and opposed land nationalisation schemes on grounds that reflected, but were probably more rigid than Mill’s own reservations about increasing the state’s role in such matters.38 Cairnes supplied much of the information on which Mill’s later stance on Irish land problems was based, and they were broadly in accord when it came to finding solutions.39 But Cairnes too was only prepared to defend the principle on which taxation of the unearned increment was based.40

the Activities of the English Land Restoration League and the Land Nationalisation Society’, MA thesis, University of Southampton, 1961; and S. B. Ward, ‘Land Reform in England, 1880-1914’, PhD thesis, University of Reading, 1976. 36 See A. M. McBriar, Fabian Socialism and English Politics, 1884-1918, Cambridge, 1962; and W. Wolfe, From Radicalism to Socialism, Yale, 1975, Chapter 2. 37 See ‘Political Economy and Land’, Fortnightly Review, 1870 as reprinted in his Essays in Political Economy; Theoretical and Applied, 1873, pp.192, 198. 38 On the unearned increment see Manual of Political Economy, 6th edition, Macmillan, 1883, pp. 286-7. See also ‘The Nationalisation of Land’, Fortnightly Review, LXXII December 1872, pp 627-43. Mill’s view was that ‘… I do not know that it may not be reserved for us in the future; but at present I decidedly do not think it expedient. I have so poor an opinion of State management, or municipal management either, that I am afraid many years would elapse before the revenue realized for the State would be sufficient to pay the indemnity which would justly be claimed by the dispossessed proprietors’; see speech on Land Tenure Reform, 15 May, 1871 as reprinted in Public and Parliamentary Speeches, CW, vol. XXVIII, p. 419. Charles Dilke, who worked closely with Mill during the period when the LTRA was active, criticised Fawcett and his wife for downplaying Mill’s radicalism on land in their obituary assessments; see ’John Stuart Mill, 1869-1873’, Cosmopolis, 5, 1897, pp. 629-41. 39 For Cairnes’s role in assisting Mill see Kinzer, England’s Disgrace?, pp. 108-18, 191-2.

14 In the case of Thornton and Leslie more fundamental methodological differences make it impossible to equate an interest in land reform with acceptance of the Ricardian version of the science of political economy. Although they shared many of Mill’s views on peasant proprietorships and land tenure reform, especially those relating to Irish problems, both men were critics of Ricardian orthodoxy and the methods of reasoning that underpinned it. Both attacked the wage-fund theory before Mill himself renounced it; and after Mill’s death Leslie was to become one of the leading advocates for an alternative historical and inductive method of inquiry. Though grateful for Mill’s personal support, the formative intellectual influences on Leslie were Henry Maine’s historical jurisprudence and the work of comparative agrarian historians such as Leonce de Lavergne and Emil de Laveleye.41 Especially when confronting the problems raised by land tenure, agrarian and the new form of evolutionary historical jurisprudence furnished evidence that could be used either to reinforce or undermine conclusions derived from Ricardian rent theory.42 Mill himself could make opportunistic use of Maine’s conclusions, but for Leslie, Maine supplied essential insights into the economic past and present that could not be uncovered by the timeless and placeless abstractions of economic theory. As he said when speaking about Mill after his death: ‘It was not possible to weld the abstractions of Ricardo and the actual forces governing economic phenomena into a consistent and scientific system; or to furnish an adequate theory of the origin and growth of human ideas without investigation of the entire history of human society’.43 In his methodological writings, Leslie increasingly appealed to the example of Adam Smith as a model against which the deficiencies of the Ricardians could be measured. A

40 See his appendix to ‘Political Economy and Land’, pp. 230-01 and his obituary assessment of Mill’s political economy in The Examiner as reprinted in A. Bain, John Stuart Mill; A Criticism with Personal Recollections, 1882, pp. 200-01.. 41 On this see R. D. C. Black, ‘The Political Economy of Thomas Edward Cliffe Leslie (1826-82): A Reassessment’, European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 9:1, Spring, 2002, p.334. 42 On the ways in which Maine and his Continental sources, chiefly von Maurer and Nasse, became embroiled in land reform politics see J. W. Burrow, ‘”The Village Community” and the Uses of History in Late Nineteenth-Century England’ in N. McKendrick (ed), Historical Perspectives; Studies in English Thought and Society in Honour of J. H. Plumb, London: Europa Publications, 1974, pp. 255-84. See also C. Dewey, ‘Images of the Village Community: A Study in Anglo-Indian Ideology’, Modern Asian Studies, 6, 3, 1972, 291-328; ‘Particular Polities: Political Economy and the Historical Method’ in S. Collini, D. Winch, and J. Burrow, That Noble Science of Politics, Cambridge, 1983, pp. 247-75. 43 For Leslie’s reflections on Mill see the preface he wrote to his Essays in Moral and (1879) and ‘John Stuart Mill’, The Academy, June 5, 1975 as reprinted in his Essays on Political Economy (1888), pp. 54-9.

15 renewed appreciation of the role of jurisprudence and in Smith’s work allowed Leslie to conceive of a way in which he could effect his own reconciliation of Maine’s jurisprudence with an inductive form of political economy.44

Judged in terms of the rival schools mentioned earlier, one could say that some of the specific types of land reform espoused by Mill had temporarily brought together the two sides of what was later to become the Methodenstreit. But it was Mill’s tax on the unearned increment, the Ricardian element developed by George, the Fabians, and the land nationalisers, that was to divide him not only from Leslie but, far more profoundly, from the third school as well. Employing the simplified national labels, the ‘French school’ could not accept the national and étatist emphases of the ‘German school’ (when contrasted with the cosmopolitan and libertarian ideals of Cobdenism), and they were equally appalled by the dangerous socialistic tendencies of the ‘English school’. The French school made its entry into the lists via Cobden and the Cobden Club. The Club had no difficulty in supporting comparative studies of land tenure systems as part of their aim of achieving free trade in land through abolition of primogeniture and entail and the registration of titles. The work of Leslie on France and de Laveleye on Belgium and Holland appeared in one of the Club’s most serious, one might almost say, academic contributions to this cause.45 It was academic in the sense that it met Cobden’s requirement in not seeking to inflame notions of class conflict based, for example, on popular images that stressed the historic injuries and natural rights of the dispossessed. For similar reasons, the Anti-Corn Law League had found it impossible to accept the Ricardian emphasis on conflict between the interest of landowners and the rest of the community, whether in the short or long term. Adam

Smith became Cobden’s favoured economic authority partly because the Wealth of Nations

44 For example, having reviewed the components of Smith’s teaching, he concluded ‘that his conception of the true scope and method of jurisprudence agreed with his conception of the true scope and method of economic inquiry’; see ‘The Wealth of Nations and the Slave Power’, Essays on Political Economy, , p. 15. For Leslie’s role in the Methodenstreit see G.M. Koot, ‘Irish Social Reform and the Origins of the English Historical School of Economics’, History of Political Economy, VII, 1875, pp. 312-36. My own interpretation of Leslie’s use of Smith can be found in ‘‘‘A Very Amusing Book about Old Times’ in Antoin Murphy and Renee Prendergast (eds), Contributions to the History of Economic Thought: Essays in Honour of R. D. C. Black, Routledge, 2000, pp. 73-95. 45 See J. W. Probyn (ed), Systems of Land Tenure in Various Countries; A Series of Essays Published under the Sanction of the Cobden Club, 1881. For an earlier example see the English translation of Nasse’s essay On the Agricultural Community of the Middle Ages and Inclosures of the Sixteenth Century in England (1871) published by the Cobden Club with the quotation from Cobden quoted on page 10 above as its preface.

16 was a more approachable work than anything written by Ricardo, partly because it came without a which suggested that any gains to other income recipients from free trade in foodstuffs would have to be at the expense of the landowning interest – a distasteful emphasis for any movement claiming that all classes and nations would benefit from the end of protection. Less grandly, the Ricardian case for free trade also depended on a link between wages and the price of subsistence goods that appeared to confirm the ‘cheap labour’ charges brought by the League’s opponents.46 Much of the criticism of Ricardo on the part of Christian political economists earlier in the century, beginning with Malthus himself but encompassing others such as Richard Jones and George Poullet Scrope, had centred on Ricardo’s conflictual interpretation of this law. That Cobden himself should be classified as a Christian economist is clear from his providentialist slogan pronouncing that free trade was ‘the International Law of the Almighty’. Alongside Smith, the only major intellectual influences on Cobden appear to have been the popular Christian teachings of the phrenologist, George Combe, as propagated in his Constitution of Man, a work that had sold nearly 60,000 copies by 1840, and the equally popular economic writings of Frédéric Bastiat, translations of which were still being produced by the Cobden Club as late as 1909.47 Combe and Bastiat, in their different ways, supplied that sense of moral purpose lacking in the writings of secular political economists: a belief in the naturally harmonious world created by God which it was the of his servants to establish on earth by removing the artificial evils of feudal privilege and . The full significance of Bastiat to the Cobdenite position later in the century did not become apparent until Mill had fully revealed his hand in the LTRA programme. By then he had also inflamed respectable opinion by the sentiments expressed in his most impassioned political work, England and Ireland (1868), a pamphlet that went well beyond any of the solutions to the land problem he had previously supported in Parliament and in his Principles.

46 On these differences between Ricardians and the Manchester School see M. Blaug, , Yale, 1958, pp. 204-9. James Wilson, the founder of as an organ that would support the Anti-Corn Law League, was also dismissive of the Ricardian position; see S. Gordon, ‘The London Economist and the High Tide of Laissez-Faire’, Journal of Political Economy, 1955, pp. 464-5. 47 I rely here on an old and a new biography of Cobden; see John, Viscount Morley, The Life of Richard Cobden, T. Fisher Unwin, London, 1879,13th edition, 1906; and Nicholas C. Edsall, Richard Cobden, Independent Radical, Harvard, 1986

17 It earned him a reputation as a rabble-rouser and as the supporter of a sequence of dangerous ‘isms’ that could hardly have been further from the truth: , , and communism. The effect on Cobdenites can best be gauged through the writings of Louis Mallet, an official at the Board of Trade who collaborated with Cobden when negotiating the Anglo-French trade treaty in 1860, and who survived into the 1880s as keeper of the

Cobdenite conscience – one version of it at least.48 The nub of the issue can be found in the idea that under a system of freely-operating markets some surplus value accrued to those who owned a special type of property. When taxation of this surplus was made part of the aims of the LTRA, Mallet successfully moved that Mill’s name be struck off the Cobden Club committee on the grounds that the prospects for free trade in land had been damaged by Mill’s ‘communistic’ alternative. As he said when defending his action, ‘between Feudalists and Communists, there is no chance for Freedom’.49 Although Mill would have rejected the reasons given for the decision, it is doubtful if he was personally disturbed by Mallet’s move: his membership of the committee had become nominal, and he was critical, in private, of the Club’s political priorities.50 As a faithful Ricardian campaigner for abolition of the Corn Laws from his youth, Mill had been active in the cause of free trade for much longer than most Cobdenites. But after the victory of the Anti-Corn Law League in 1846 he had other goals in view, including those that were to bring him into conflict with the Club. His own projections of the long-term benefits of free trade in to the working classes had always been less euphoric than those of the Club, and he was more open-minded on ‘infant industry’ protection in less industrialised countries than an orthodox free-trader should have been.51

48 For the way in which the Cobdenite movement became divided into ‘individualist’ and ‘collectivist’ wings see Anthony Howe, Free Trade and Liberal England, 1846-1946, Oxford, 1997, pp. 136-8. 49 As cited in Clive J. Dewey, ‘The Rehabilitation of the Peasant Proprietor in Nineteenth-Century Economic Thought’, History of Political Economy, 6, 1, 1974, p. 38. 50 Evidence for this has to be sought in his correspondence; see CW, vol. XVI, pp. 1037, 1350; and vol. XVII, p. 1658. 51 See Principles in CW, vol. II, pp. 849-50 and on the infant industry argument pp. 918-19. ‘Mallet told us that when he saw Cobden on his deathbed, the latter observed to him that Mill had done more harm by his sentence about the fostering of infant industries, than he had done good by the whole of the rest of his writings’; see Mountstuart E. Grant Duff, Notes from a Diary, 1889-1891, London, 1901, vol. I, pp. 99-100.

18 The precise economic grounds of Mallet’s objections did not become known more widely until his son, disciple, and proselyte, Bernard, published his father’s economic credo in 1891 under the Free Exchange.52 The book included some unfinished chapters on the law of value and unearned increment which revealed that Mallet had always suspected Mill of being lukewarm on the gospel of free trade; and that he found Mill’s Principles to be a compendium of all that had gone wrong with the English science. Mallet’s critique was fundamentalist in several respects, theoretical, political, and ultimately religious. It turned on the most basic of propositions in the science of political economy, the theory of value, where he called for a rejection of the cost of production approach in favour of one based on the exchange of and the operation of . It took a thorough-going ‘individualist’ view of the danger to personal independence posed by state interference in contractual relationships, one that was far more dogmatically pro-laisser faire than anything to be found in authors such as Smith or Mill. And its politico-economic vision was suffused with the notion of a divinely- organised world, the full potentialities of which could only be realised if the diseases of feudal privilege, protectionism, and socialism -- the latest manifestation of class selfishness -- were eliminated. As in the case of Cobden himself, Mallet’s guiding light was the work of Bastiat. Bemoaning the decline in active support for the free exchange philosophy, and with Mill clearly in his sights, he attributed this to ‘subtler agencies’ that have been ‘slowly undermining the foundations of the intellectual movement which brought about the Free Trade policy, and have lent their aid to the formation and diffusion of a popular opinion favourable to arbitrary and artificial methods of social regeneration’.53 The diagnosis turned on the rift that had arisen between those who had followed an ambiguous Smith, and those who followed the more logical French school of ‘free exchange’ founded by Condillac, according to whom value depends on utility rather than labour or cost of production. We incur costs when the products of labour, land, and capital possess utility and hence value to

52 See also the son’s biography of his father, Sir Louis Mallet; A Record of Public Service and Political Ideals, 1905. 53 Free Exchange; Papers on Political and Economical Subjects, including Chapters on the Law of Value and Unearned Increment, edited by Bernard Mallet, 1891, pp. 227-8

19 us in meeting our needs as consumers, the ultimate arbiter of public interest. Wages, rent, and profits are therefore the effect rather than the cause of value, and are subject to identical causal processes. Land, being Nature’s gift, may be free to all, but it only acquires value when it becomes private property and through human agency provides a ‘service’ to others. Exclusive property creates natural which are justified when they provide a valued service and when, as a result, the price induces us to tailor use to need. An economy is a system, in Bastiat’s phrase, that generates ‘services pour services’, and it operates in an optimal fashion when not subject to restrictions that create artificial monopolies. It allows us to meet our needs with the least labour possible, and in the course of doing so rewards the different contributing factors in a just fashion. Economics was truly, as Richard Whately and others had vainly tried to establish in Britain, a catallactic science of exchanges based on utility.

Mill had rejected this in his Principles by connecting exchange with the distribution rather than with the production of wealth. Exchange was not ‘in the nature of things’ but a matter of ‘temporary accidents arising from the existing constitution of society’.54 Mill’s unrivalled knowledge of French intellectual life enabled him to give good advice to Cairnes when the latter was preparing to follow up his critique of Comte with another devoted to Bastiat. Mill’s welcome to the outcome shows how closely the two men were in their negative assessment of any attempt to show that ‘the economic phenomena of society as at present constituted always arrange themselves spontaneously in the way which is most for the or that the interest of all classes are fundamentally the same.’ 55 Mill had a low opinion of those French economists, such as Louis Reybaud and Michel Chevalier, who stood highest in the opinion of Mallet, Chevalier having been Cobden’s French counterpart when the details of the Anglo-French trade treaty were being drawn up in 1860. Unlike Mill, Cairnes made his living as an academic and was consequently more troubled by anything that threatened the already precarious degree of public interest shown in the

54 Principles in CW, vol II, p. 456. Mill did not attack Bastiat frontally, but he withdrew a reference to Bastiat as ‘a high authority among French political economists’ in later editions of the Principles, and argued at length that Henry Carey, the source of Bastiat’s defence of property in land, had failed to dent the Ricardian theory. See ibid., pp. 299 and 424-8. 55 Later Letters in CW, vol. XVII, pp.1665, 1764.

20 science. He believed that Mill had been faithful to his methodological precepts in maintaining that the conclusions of the science ‘carried with them no obligatory force with reference to human conduct’; it had no authority as far as the choice of those ends that were ‘most worthy of being pursued by human beings’.56 Or, as he maintained in an essay divorcing the science from laisser-faire conclusions, a marriage which he regarded as responsible for mistrust of the science: ‘Economic science has no more connection with our present industrial system than the science of mechanics has with our present system of railways.’57 Hence

Cairnes’s anxiety to refute Bastiat’s Economic Harmonies. Such ‘plausible optimist falsities’ confused the idea that human interests were harmonious with the statement that class interests were at one; they ignored the powerful part played by ‘passion, prejudice, custom, ésprit de corps, class interest’ in human affairs, all those forces that led interested parties to confuse their interests with the , and prevented people from pursuing a higher interest.58 Bastiat’s encounter with French socialists required something less open-ended and more dogmatic than the English science could or should provide, a fusion of fact with abstract right.59 In retrospect Cairnes is normally thought of as the last of the ‘classical’ economists. It is worth noting, however, that the defensive posture he adopted towards the English science when it was attacked by Bastiat’s followers continued to prove attractive to a later generation of post-classical economists.60

IV

56 See his obituary notice of Mill in A. Bain, John Stuart Mill, p. 201. 57 See ‘Political Economy and Laissez-Faire’ in his Essays on Political Economy¸1873, p. 257. 58 ‘Nothing is easier than to show that people follow their interest, in the sense in which they understand their interest. But between this and following their interest in the sense in which it is coincident with that of other people, a chasm yawns. This chasm in the argument of the laissez-faire school has never been bridged. The advocates of the doctrine shut their eyes and leap over it.’ ‘Bastiat’ in ibid., p. 246. 59 Ibid., p. 318. 60 For example, the American economist and critic of the wage-fund theory, F. A. Walker, endorsed Cairnes’s attack on Bastiat, extending it to Carey and George; see his Land and its Rent, 1883, which he described as the work of a ‘Ricardian of the Ricardians, holding that the great thinker has given his name to the economic doctrine of rent has left little for those who should follow him to do; and that any wide departure from the lines laid down by him can only result in confusion and error’ p. v. Henry Sidgwick dismissed the fusion of natural liberty and natural justice ‘of whom Bastiat may be taken as a type’ as uncharacteristic of the views of English economists, whose objections to government interference were based on its tendency ‘to impair aggregate production more than it could increase the utility of the produce by better distribution.’ This did not amount to a belief that existing inequalities were defensible; see his Principles of Political Economy 2nd edn 1887, p. 400. F. Y. Edgeworth, later to be regarded as a neo-classical economist par excellence, was content to repeat these arguments in his article on Bastiat for the Palgrave Dictionary.

21 Cairnes was far too much of a professed Millian for his attack on Bastiat to count with Mallet. Cairnes had merely repeated Mill’s errors in attributing the surplus accruing to land not to nature but to the labour and efforts of the community at large, thereby justifying ‘ appropriation, in the name of science and on the plea of social expediency.’ But if land was not unique in its monopolistic properties, the differences between the rewards to land, labour, and capital were merely ’accidental or temporary, and not such as to afford a foundation for special and exceptional legislation.’61 Rent in fact, as Malthus had argued against Ricardo, was not a sign of the niggardliness of Nature, but a means of measuring its dwindling ‘bounty’ as population exerted increasing pressure on land. Rent operated as a providential device in checking, through rising rental values, the growth of population. It also served as a spur to force the land-hungry to emigrate, and it protected the ‘higher wants of society’ from being overwhelmed by mere subsistence needs. Clearly, Mallet’s use of this kind of providential argument was a survival or revival. It was not a clarion call for a new science based on a utilitarian theory of value of the kind that

William Stanley Jevons in his Theory of Political Economy had announced, first (1871) as a revolutionary discovery, and later (1879) as a well-known truth that had been obscured by the

‘mazy and preposterous assumptions of the Ricardian School’.62 Mallet was only too happy to employ Jevons’s description of political economy as a ‘shattered science’, and to welcome his acknowledgement that ‘the truth is with the French School’. But this did not and could not imply for him, any more than it did for Jevons, acceptance of what in retrospect became known as the ‘marginal revolution’ and ‘neo-’. Mallet regarded Jevons as a distinguished, if perhaps belated convert to the views of Condillac and Bastiat. There were other aspects of Jevons’s Theory which would have been more disturbing to Mallet if he had subjected them to closer inspection; and Jevons’s empirical work as an applied economist led him to embrace several collectivist solutions that were anathema to the free exchange

61 See Free Exchange, pp. 241, 273. 62 See Theory of Political Economy, 2nd edition, 1879, p. xlix.

22 position.63 It is more accurate, then, to describe Mallet’s resuscitation of the French school in Britain as anti-Ricardian rather than as proto-neo-classical. More accurately still, one could describe it as anti-‘Ricardian socialist’, a term given wider by Herbert Somerton Foxwell in 1899 to denote those socialists, the most recent being Marx and Lassalle, who had denied the legitimacy of profits and rent by using the labour theory of value to support the right of labour to the whole produce. In this way Ricardo had done more than ‘any intentionally socialist writer to sap the foundations of that form of society which he was trying to explain’.64 Foxwell felt that, together with ‘the broader treatment of real questions by the historical school’, Jevons and other modern theorists who had brought greater precision to the theory of value had combined to rescue economics from the ironic impasse created by Ricardo and Mill. As we shall see, however, English followers of the French school were not as satisfied by the modern compromise as Foxwell purported to be on this occasion. Bastiat had confronted the ‘Ricardian socialist’ phenomenon in the work of , Considérant, Leroux, and Proudhon around the time of the 1848 revolution. But ’s anticipation of Foxwell’s conclusions in the early 80s, when he lumped together

Marx’s with George’s as direct products of Ricardo’s writings, without further argument, shows that this perception was not confined to Bastiat and his followers.65 When the English members of the French school imported Bastiat for use under British conditions in the final quarter of the century, it was to serve the purpose of uniting followers under their own banner of ‘free exchange’, with ‘free enterprise’ as its corollary. Free exchange provided intellectual weapons that could be used by the LPDL to defend private property against movements like those associated with Henry George and the Fabians as well as the growing trend towards collectivism illustrated by the ‘new’ trade unions, , and greater recourse to paternalistic legislation by both Liberal

63 Bastiat was included on the long list that Jevons assembled in his search for neglected predecessors, and, unlike those mentioned in footnote 57 above, he was willing to recommend Bastiat to his students. But the gifts he recognised were those of popular exposition. Jevon’s own exposition of the theory of rent in his Theory was simply a diagrammatic representation of Ricardo’s theory. For the collectivist tendencies in his work as an applied economist see The State in Relation to Labour, 1882; and Methods of Social Reform, 1883. 64 See Foxwell’s introduction to Anton Menger’s The Right of Labour to the Whole Produce, 1899, p. xli. 65 See hisIndustrial Revolution of the Eighteenth Century in England,1884, as reprinted in 1923, p. 104.

23 and Conservative governments.66 The LPDL answered the appearance of Fabian Essays in

1891 with A Plea for Liberty; An Argument against Socialism and Socialistic Legislation edited by Thomas Mackay, with an introduction by , an a priori opponent of private landownership in youth who, as a result of his The Man versus the State (1884), had now become the spokesman for extreme ‘’. This was followed by another work under the same editorship entitled A Policy of Free Exchange (1894) in which Henry Dunning Macleod supplied the opening theoretical chapter showing the connections between the science of economics and free exchange in a manner reminiscent of Bastiat and Mallet. Macleod existed on the margins of academic life, and had consistently failed to obtain any of the economics chairs for which he applied, and for which his repetitively prolific and prolifically self-advertising writings might have qualified him.67 As with Mallet, Macleod’s chapter argues that the wrong-headed ‘English’ thesis on value had to be replaced by the right-thinking catallactic antithesis. The same collection contains essays by Bernard Mallet and St Loe Strachey, the latter having been rescued from socialism through his conversion to the free-exchange position by the former when they were both undergraduates at Balliol in the 70s.68 The editor Mackay, a retired wine merchant with a legal training, devoted his retirement from business to the affairs of the Charity Organisation Society and to writings on the Poor Law which took the 1834 Amendment Act as the acme of all correct thinking on the subject of the dependent poor and outdoor relief.69 Mackay’s combination of dogmatic , Spencerian individualism, and the theories of free exchange expounded by Mallet and Macleod made him an ideal candidate for editing the publications of the LPDL. He was still

66 See N. Soldon, ‘Laissez-Faire as Dogma: The Liberty and Property Defence League, 1882-1914’ in K. D. Brown (ed), Essays in Anti-Labour History, 1974, pp. 208-33; and E. Bristow, ‘The Liberty and Property Defence League and Individualism, 1882-1914, Historical Journal, 18, 1975, 761-89; and M. W. Taylor, Man versus the State: Herbert Spencer and Late-Victorian Individualism, Oxford, 1992. 67 The best short modern treatment of Macleod can be found in John Maloney, Marshall, Orthodoxy and the Professionalisation of Economics, Cambridge, 1985, pp. 120-33. 68 J. St Loe Strachey, The Adventure of Living; A Subjective Autobiography, Hodder and Stoughton, 1922, pp. 158-163. Strachey went on to be editor of the Cornhill Magazine and then proprietor and editor of Spectator, the leading Unionist journal. 69 See ‘Thomas Mackay: The Anti-Socialist Philosophy of the Charity Organisation Society’ in K.D. Brown (ed), Essays in Anti-Labour History, 19??, pp. 290-316.

24 hoping that the ‘shattered science’ would be reconstituted along correct lines in 1901, and contradicting Foxwell’s complacency by expressing disappointment that ‘the lay public has distinct ground for complaint against the professors of political economy for an exposition of the subject which is not particularly helpful.’ The science still needed to be reconstructed along free exchange lines rather than by ‘the eclectic which is current in the doctrines of the official teachers of the science’.70 Unfortunately, the contributions of Whately, Mallet, and Macleod were fragmentary or purely theoretical, and the most recent practical treatment of the subject had come from those ‘who are not economists by profession.’ When Mackay’s essays were published posthumously in 1913, not long after passage of the National Insurance Act, his editor, Sir Arthur Clay, described the Act as ‘the boldest attack that has been made upon the liberty of the subject since the days of the Stewarts’.71 Mackay’s reference to practical treatments by non-professional economists was exemplified by the writings of the Duke of Argyll and the Conservative novelist W. H. Mallock. The eighth Duke, a Peelite turned Cobdenite turned Liberal Unionist, was the most senior convert to Mallet’s ideas, senior in terms of political experience as well as social rank. Having worked with Mallet on Cobden Club affairs, Argyll had nominated him for a position on the council of India and later promoted him to be Permanent Under-Secretary when Argyll became Secretary of State for India under Gladstone in his 1868-74 administration. Not surprisingly, while holding this office Argyll became a staunch upholder of the zemindari system introduced into Bengal by Cornwallis’s permanent settlement of 1793.72 He broke with Gladstone over the second of the Irish Land Acts, which he saw as a measure that tended ‘to destroy ownership altogether, by depriving it of the conditions which are necessary to the exercise of its functions’. He had defended the regulation of rental contracts according to strict commercial principles (natural economic laws) in a Cobden Club publication in

70 See The Dangers of ; Studies in the Economic Questions of the Day by the late Thomas Mackay, edited by Sir Arthur Clay, London, 1913, pp. 83-4. 71 Ibid., p.11. Clay added that Mackay’s friends ‘may feel thankful that he has been spared the mortification of seeing medieval conditions of status reimposed by an Act passed in the twentieth century under the auspices of a “Liberal” Government!’ 72 See his defence of this in ‘The Prophet of San Francisco’, The Nineteenth Century, vol. LXXXVI, 1884, pp. 555-7.

25 1877, and was a lively opponent of George’s schemes during the 80s.73 As with other libre

échangistes, Argyll was determined to expose the deficiencies of the Ricardian theory of rent, and he was clearly not satisfied that the defects in the ‘shattered science’ had been repaired by Alfred Marshall, representing the new generation of professional economists. These conclusions were announced in a major work entitled The Unseen Foundations of Society; An

Examination of the Fallacies and Failures of Economic Science due to Neglected Elements (1893) in which ‘exclusive possession’ was to emerge as a neglected factor of production alongside ‘Mind’ and ‘Ability’, terms meant to describe the enterprise and initiative of landowners such as the author in investing in agricultural improvements which gave them a just title to the rents they received. Argyll would not have objected to the accusation that he had written a sustained apology for landlordism. What else could be expected of one of Scotland’s largest landowners? Constructing that apology according to strict principles lends interest to the exercise.74

V

Turning abruptly in conclusion to the fin-de-siècle academic economists, those professionals who occupied the meagre number of Chairs devoted to the subject by the end of the century, it is possible to see that some large issues were placed in the balance by popular appeals to political economy on the part of land reformers and their opponents. They had to engage with a large body of literature -- some of it reaching a mass audience -- that either acclaimed the science of which they were the newest guardians for lending support to socialistic schemes, or censured its founding fathers on the same grounds. In both respects, professional pride plus a regard for the superior qualities of modern modes of analysis required them to distinguish popular fallacies and enthusiasms from sound economic inferences. These are broad generalisations to make about a loose-knit group of men, some of whom were

73 See ibid for his attack on George and an Essay on the Commercial Principles applicable to Contracts for the Hire of Land, Cobden Club, 1877. 74 For a general account see John W. Mason, ‘The Duke of Argyll and the Land Question in Late Nineteenth-Century Britain’, Victorian Studies, 21, 1977-8, pp. 149-70.

26 distinctly sceptical about these modes of analysis.75 Like the Duke of Argyll, then, it seems best to concentrate on Alfred Marshall, who had no doubt that such modes existed and had recently been embodied in his Principles of Economics (1890), an original work of synthesis and summary for which he had been preparing himself over a lengthy period. Marshall had self-consciously groomed himself to become Mill’s successor and actually succeeded in becoming the doyen of modern British economics when he published this book, topping it off with the founding of the Economics Tripos at Cambridge in 1903. Late-Victorian professional economics was too thinly peopled and too diverse for any single person to typify it exactly, but Marshall certainly illustrates the dilemmas it faced with regard to popular economic ideas, for and against land reform. First, however, some equally broad generalisations about changes in the political and economic context need to be put in place. Irish unrest, with some help from Mill and his allies, had succeeded, through Gladstone’s Irish Land Acts, in gaining legislative recognition for Irish differences, the benefits of which were later extended to Scottish crofters. But what was happening in the English countryside could hardly convince a succeeding generation of more hard-headed economists that the case for peasant proprietorship or small-holdings in England had been established, outside the realm of market gardening at least. With the benefits of free trade in foodstuffs arriving now in the form of cheap wheat from the Middle West, and the advent of refrigerated shipping, only ‘high farming’ could compete, where this entailed a larger acreage per farm and access to more capital than the advocates of peasant proprietorship normally envisaged. It also exacerbated those features of British society that Wallace and George deplored and attributed to private landowning -- further rural depopulation, emigration to the United States and the ‘new’ colonies of Australasia and Canada, and the overcrowding of towns and cities. Cutting a few gaps in the Lincolnshire sea wall would not reverse this process. Rural labour was being pushed into the towns by agricultural depression and mechanization rather than by the greed of status-seeking landowners. It was also being pulled there by cheaper transport, the spread of education,

75 For the best study of the professional collectivity during this period see J. Maloney, Marshall, Orthodoxy and the Professionalisation of Economics.

27 and rising consumer expectations. This meant too that the best hope for wage earners (when suitably equipped by education to appreciate the virtues of thrift, the need to avoid alcoholic excess, and the benefits of open-air pursuits) came from higher wages and steady employment. Mill’s muted enthusiasm about technology as a means of raising living standards, and his scepticism concerning the prospects for raising wages permanently without significant changes in habits and institutions, did not seem to be confirmed by the evidence; and his hopes for the end of wage-labour as a result of agricultural small-holdings and manufacturing cooperatives were showing few signs of being fulfilled. Any campaign directed solely at the monopolistic features of landowning was bound to raise the question of discriminatory treatment, plus fears that if land became the first it would not be the last form of property to come under attack. In what respects did land differ from other forms of capital? In a society that was no longer dependent on domestic agriculture to meet most of its demand for food and raw materials, how did agriculture differ in essentials from other forms of capitalistic enterprise? If it was accepted that there were in manufacturing, how did the trend towards larger farm size differ in its rationale from the increasing size of industrial enterprises? In a world in which the vagaries of shifts in demand and supply affected both small and large industries, rural and urban, how could granting special status to any one form of employment be justified, especially when it was no longer the main source of wage goods? On such matters an economics which stressed the allocational role of a system of interdependent markets for final goods and the , one in which rewards were determined by a mixture of relative scarcity and the respective marginal productivities of those factors, did have some characteristics that differed from the older ‘classical’ emphasis on aggregate distributive shares, with diminishing returns in agriculture constantly looming in the background. When Marshall mounted three public lectures attacking George (‘by nature a poet, not a scientific thinker’) in 1883, these were some of the facts of life to which he drew attention. After rehearsing the evidence of rising living standards and showing how many of the products consumed by the working classes were the products of industries that obeyed laws

28 of increasing return, Marshall’s third lecture tackled the English land tenure system. Before dealing with its economics, however, he first set aside matters with which the subject had been confused and on which modern economists no longer claimed to have special expertise, ‘discussions of historical fact and of moral obligation, which are the subject of heated political controversy’.76 Given the role played by ideas of historic dispossession in the land reform movement, let alone the entire body of learned writing on the history of land tenure from Maine onwards, this was a bold simplification. It allowed Marshall to suggest that errors of jurisprudence, compounded by pardonable defects in the writings of the older generation of economists, should not be confused with errors of modern economic science. Having listed the main charges brought against private landlordism in England – tyrannical influence, imperfect tenant security, and the inferiority of wage labour to peasant proprietorship – Marshall proceeded to mount a ‘moderate’ defence based on Britain’s record as a pioneer in making agricultural improvements, capped by the following back-of-an- envelope empirical observation: ‘It requires as much capital to buy twenty acres as it does to farm a hundred.’ Rich landlords who were willing to take a low rate of return on their capital, possibly for sentimental or status reasons, performed a useful function; they left the tenant farmer to employ his more limited capital and greater agricultural skills to best account. Marshall’s only reference to Mill and peasant proprietorships manages to be both damning and exculpatory: ‘The belief that the English labourer is not so well off as many peasant proprietors in foreign countries is to a great extent due to the writings of Mill, Cliffe Leslie, and one or two others. But it is answered that the evidence on which they went was slight; that they drew sweeping inferences from exceptional cases; that when Mill wrote, the English labourer was suffering from bad Poor Laws, Corn Laws, and other misfortunes; that since then the position

76 See ‘Three Lectures on Progress and Poverty’ given in 1883, as reprinted in Journal of Law and Economics, 12, 1969 and now contained in Collected Works of Alfred Marshall edited by P. Groenewegen in eight volumes, Overstone Press, Bristol, 1997, vol. I, pp.161-203.

29 of the peasant proprietors has in many cases deteriorated, while that of the English labourer has immensely improved.’77 Nevertheless, Marshall did make a couple of concessions to the land reformers, if not to the schemes advocated by George and Wallace. The first damns with faint praise. Easing the sale of land had some potential benefits: small plots of land, bought ‘not as a commercial , but as one of affection, like the purchase of a dog, often has a healthy influence on character’.78 The second concession is more significant: he accepted, in the case of new countries, that sales of land should be confined to the only for 100 years, with the land reverting to the state for no compensation at the end of the period. In old countries a modified version of this could be enacted: taxation of rental incomes could be remitted in the case of land transferred to the state. Marshall regretted that land had been granted to railways in perpetuity, rather than, as in France, for a limited period. As we shall see, when faced with some of George’s other critics, he was again to make some important reservations that reveal that Ricardian ideas on rent continued to exert a hold on him.

In his Principles Marshall needed to carve out sufficient space between the economic historians on one side and the optimistic libertarians on the other to reveal the virtues of modern (and moderate) economic analysis. Although he paid great respect to the work of economic historians, he also managed to assign their expertise to a corner of the province which he had annexed for his own enlarged version of economic science.79 The economic optimists posed far less of an intellectual challenge. Macleod received only a passing mention, and Bastiat was dismissed in a footnote.80 Despite this summary dismissal, Marshall devoted considerable effort to denying the claims of the doctrine of ‘maximum satisfaction’

77 Ibid., p.185. It is a pity that no questioner asked why Mill and Leslie were still advocating peasant proprietorship as a solution in the 1860s and 70s; and how Mill could have come to this conclusion in 1848, after the passage of the New Poor Law and the abolition of the Corn Laws. Marshall’s view of recent English economic history still had elements of the myth of the ‘hungry forties’ about it. 78 Ibid.,p.186. 79 For the manner in which this was achieved see ‘A Separate Science: Polity and society in Marshall’s Economics’ in S. Collini, D. Winch, and J. Burrow, That Noble Science of Politics, pp. 309-38. 80 Bastiat was someone who ‘in opposition to the socialists, [published] an extravagant doctrine to the effect that the natural organization of society under the influence of competition is the best not only that can be practically effected, but even that can be theoretically conceived. The lucidity of his style caused his works to have great vogue; but he really understood economic science, in the name of which he professed to write, scarcely better than did the socialists themselves.’ See Principles of Economics, 9th Variorum edn with annotations by C. W. Guillebaud, 2 vols, Macmilland for the Royal Economic Society, vol. II, p. 759.

30 he associated with Bastiat. It embodied attitudes of complacency towards economic outcomes that he consistently opposed. , or the distribution of consumers’ and producers’ incomes, always needed to be considered alongside economic efficiency when making judgements. The satisfactions attached to an extra pound of income or expenditure in the hands of the poor were greater than those of the rich.81 Expanding the output of increasing returns industries benefited the community, while doing the same with decreasing returns industries had the opposite effect. As Cairnes had argued earlier, conflicts between private and public interests were legion in economic life. Professional students of the science were capable of arbitrating in such conflicts, possibly by means of Marshall’s measuring rods, the concepts of consumers’ and producers’ surplus. Consumer ‘wants’, though basic to an understanding of demand in modern economies, were neither given nor fixed: they could be influenced by the more important part of economics, that devoted to ‘activities’, the supply side of things in which our daily employments mould our characters, for good or ill. In all these respects Marshall’s economics was about as far from mere ‘hedonics’ (his description of Jevonian or utilitarian conceptions of economics) and catallactics as it is possible to be.

Some of the writings of the libre échangistes and the LPDL were reviewed in the pages of the Economic Journal, the organ of the newly-formed British Economic Association (later the

Royal Economic Society).82 But the only one of them to receive anything like a full response was the Duke of Argyll’s Unseen Foundations. It also seems fitting that Marshall should have given that response, though since he had been attacked in the book and Argyll had become one of the honorary Vice-Presidents of the Association in 1893, perhaps it was almost a duty. Marshall distinguished ‘Ricardian dogma’ from those developments of Ricardian ideas that were a legitimate part of ‘modern analysis’.83 As in his Principles, Marshall stressed that rent was ‘the leading species of a large genus’. It did not differ from the ‘producer’s surplus’ or ‘quasi-rent’ that could be earned by pre-existing capital assets (physical or human) when

81 Principles,vol. I, pp. 17-19, 130-31, 471, 474, 851-2. 82 For these reviews see J. Bonar on Mallet’s Free Exchange, vol. I, pp. 761-5; L. L. Price on Argyll’s Unseen Foundations, vol. III, 1893, pp. 264-71, an exceptionally long review; F. C. Montague on Mackay’s A Policy of Free Exchange, vol. IV, pp. 292-4; E. Cannan on Macleod’s History of Economics, vol. VI, pp. 606-8; Helen Bosanquet on Mackay’s The State and Charity (1898), vol. VIII, pp. 216-8; and L. L. Price on Mallock’s and Evolution (1898), vol. VIII, pp. 363-7; t 83 ‘On Rent’, Economic Journal, III, 1893 as reprinted in Collected Works, vol. 2, pp. 489-507.

31 revenues exceeded prime or variable costs over the short term, the length of which depended on the nature of the business. Marshall’s concessions, however, were limited. Rent on land was still the leading species, and ‘it has peculiarities of its own which are vital from the point of view of theory as well as practice’. The earnings of owner-occupiers in new countries were more in the nature of profits or quasi-rent than rent proper. Even so, ‘a far-seeing statesman will feel a greater responsibility to future generations when legislating as to land than as to other forms of wealth; and even there land must be regarded as a thing by itself from the economic as well as from the ethical point of view’.84 Just as nature conferred advantages on agriculture that were independent of the actions of landowners, so urban land often derived ‘true rents’ from the advantages of situation. Significantly, Marshall added that ‘a special tax on these would not much affect production directly’, thereby endorsing the legitimacy of the original Ricardian principle in the form it had been applied to ryots in India by the

Mills, père et fils. The main thrust of Marshall’s reply is defensive of Ricardo’s view of the part costs of production play in determining value, and even of the doctrine that, under some circumstances, Ricardo was right to state that rent does not enter into the costs of production. It allowed Marshall to conclude -- with a sly dig at Argyll’s lack of appreciation of these professional subtleties -- that ‘the analysis of which Ricardo was the chief builder, has firm if often unseen foundations’.85 One mark of the sea changes that had occurred since Ricardo and Mill had applied their principles to taxation can be found in Marshall’s evidence to the Royal Commission on Local Taxation in 1897. It comes in the assumption behind his opening announcement that ‘taxes are paid by persons, not things’; and that in consequence the inquiry should not relate to ‘the distribution of the burden of taxation between different kinds of property, but to the distribution of the burden between different classes of person with special reference to their

84 Ibid., p. 492. Marshall refers the reader to Book V, chapter 9 of his Principles for a fuller defence of this position. 85 Ibid., p.507. It became a common criticism of Marshall that he had either over-generously ‘rehabilitated’ Ricardo (at the expense of historical truth), or that his modifications to Ricardo’s theory had not gone far enough, resulting in unresolved conflict with other parts of his statement of the conclusions of modern economics. See W. J. Ashley, ‘The Rehabilitation of Ricardo’, Economic Journal, I, 1891, 474-89; and Frank A. Fetter, ‘The Passing of the Old Rent Concept’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 15, 1901, 416-55; and Edwin Cannan, A Review of Economic Theory, 1929, pp. 317-29

32 interests in different kinds of property’.86 In simpler language, tax equity was not a matter of what kind of property the tax-payer owned, but how rich or poor that property made him. This takes some of the heat off landowning as a special plutocratic form of income, and it is reinforced by other Marshall obiter dicta announcing that the law of diminishing returns was temporarily in abeyance and his statement that ‘the ownership of land is not a ’.87 It is noticeable, however, that he considered the Ricardian foundations still to be sufficiently firm for him to recommend a tax on ‘that part of the (annual) value of land which arises from its position, its extension, its yearly income of and heat and and air’, all those influences which give it a ‘public value’ greater than the ‘private value’ based on the outlay of landowners.88 Site values in cities could legitimately be subject to a ‘fresh air’ rate designed to defray local costs of providing gardens, playgrounds, and wider streets.89 In these respects Marshall was paying deference to the kinds of environmental concerns Mill had expressed when hoping for a zero-growth society -- or, rather more realistically, when supporting the Commons Preservation Society.

Postscript

The above narrative links some episodes in the long history of land reform in Britain when seen from the perspective of those who either, by the standards of the day, possessed scientific authority, or sought its support for one reason or another. Producers versus consumers might seem an appropriate simile here, though a better one with the right national connotations for those in my age group is ‘players versus gentlemen’, another way of distinguishing, for cricket lovers at least, between the professionals and the amateurs.90 More neutrally, this came down to insiders versus outsiders, with the insiders attempting to influence outsiders, sometimes by inspiring, sometimes by curbing their enthusiasms, and with the outsiders

86 See Official Papers by Alfred Marshall, Macmillans for the Royal Economic Society, London, 1926, p. 492 87 For the temporary suspension of the law of diminishing returns see ‘Social Possibilities of Economic Chivalry’ in A. C. Pigou (ed), Memorials of Alfred Marshall, 1925. p. 326. 88 Official Papers, p.341. 89 Ibid., pp. 360-01. See P. D. Groenewegen, ‘Marshall on Taxation’ in R. McWilliams Tullberg (ed), Alfred Marshall in Retrospect, 1990, pp. 91-112. 90 I borrow the labels for this contrast from J. Maloney, ‘Gentlemen versus Players, 1891-1914’ in J. Hey and D. Winch (eds), A Century of Economics; 100 Years of the Royal Economic Society and the Economic Journal, 1990, pp. 49-64.

33 trying to become enough of an insider to take possession of whatever authority could be had by so doing. Then as now, some outsiders had as much right to be insiders as the often undistinguished, and inactive holders of academic positions who patronised their efforts. Hobson, with whom this paper began, could well be a case in point: he certainly thought so.91 Jevons had similar feelings earlier when complaining about ‘the noxious influence of authority’ in political economy, that ‘despotic calm’ which he associated with the stranglehold exerted over syllabuses and appointments by Mill and Fawcett.92 Few generalisations can be sustained in these matters, but it is probably true to say that the outsiders wanted the science to be more imperious and absolute in its claims than the cautious insiders believed was compatible with retaining professional respectability – a valuable for insiders.

91 See ‘The Academic Spirit in Education’, Contemporary Review, 63, 1893, pp. 236-47 and his Confessions 92 Theory of Political Economy, pp. 298-300. The complaint has been examined and found wanting by N. de Marchi, ‘The Noxious Influence of Authority: A Correction of Jevons’ Charge’, Journal of Law and Economics, XVI, 1973, pp. 179-89.

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