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Land Reform and Popular Political Economy in Victorian Britain

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Land Reform and Popular Political Economy in Victorian Britain Donald Winch Land Reform and Popular Political Economy 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-working class, men of grit and character, largely self-educated, keen citizens, mostly nonconformists in religion, to whom Land Nationalisation, taxation of unearned increment, or other radical reforms of land tenure, are doctrines resting upon a plain moral sanction. These free-trading Radical dissenters regard common ownership 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 land reform during this period. For this was when Henry George’s Progress and Poverty (1879) was selling 100,000 copies, when George was addressing large audiences, and when Land Restoration Leagues, based on his ‘single tax’ proposals, were being formed throughout Britain. In 1897 Hobson thought that George had ‘exercised a more directly powerful formative and educative influence over English radicalism 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 life; 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 justice and social utility attached to private property 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 footpaths and commons; 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 tithes, 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 cooperative labour on land as a remedy for unemployment, 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 resources.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 Georgism ‘never was accepted as a working-class creed’ (how would we tell?), the evidence of popular opposition to enclosure and of the Chartist land banks in the 1840s 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 trade in land’ shows that it was an issue that could fire the enthusiasms of the mercantile and manufacturing bourgeoisie. From the 1860s onward Cobdenites found themselves being overtaken on their left by other middle-class organisations such as John Stuart Mill’s Land Tenure Reform Association (LTRA) and Alfred Russel Wallace’s Land Nationalisation Society, bodies that were variously dedicated to the creation of peasant proprietorships and the curtailment of private landownership, wholly or in part, through nationalisation, municipalisation, and taxes 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 common land in and around cities. 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 Land Acts of 1870 and 1881. Some of the ideas of land reformers found their way into Joseph Chamberlain’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 Fabian Society, having decided to do without the benefit of Karl Marx’s analysis of capitalism’s inherent contradictions, granted a large space in their programme for the ‘law of economic rent’ (‘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 free trade, 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 political movement 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 communism or state socialism. 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 private property 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.
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