chair, are his "own." Other hats, coats and chairs can be made without limit. But more land cannot be made, nor can anything be substituted for it. No human being can say that he exists independently of land. Land is literally the foundation of human life.
Let us try for a moment to suppose it physically possible for a few individuals to accumulate in their own power the greater part of the air we breathe and to let it out on certain conditions. Would not even the "Liberty and Property Defence League" call for the "nationalisation" of the air? And yet if they did, they would be admitting the principle that some things cannot be private property. Land is the foundation of existence; but when anyone says that it ought not to be in the power of individuals he is called a robber. The robber is he who locks up that without which man cannot exist.
But it is not necessary to take so extreme an instance as air. Let us imagine that a few persons had got into their possession all the current coin of a country, and demanded payment for the use of it as "change." Would anyone be found to tolerate such a state of thing? In Turkey, something very much like this exists—the right to change money is sold by the Sultan to the money-changers. Such a monopoly would not be endured in England by the most thorough-going monopolist. But it does not stop trade in Turkey. And if there were no money at all in circulation, trade would still go on, by means of exchange and barter. In fact, as it is, no country ever pays in coin if it can pay in goods. Money is a convenient token, but it is not the foundation of commerce. The foundation of commerce is the exchange of commodities, not of coin. There is no real analogy between "private" property in money, and "private" property in land.
Political economists have been a great deal too apt to consider economic problems from the point of view of money profits, to consider them with reference to property rather than to life. And so they talk of profits, without defining whose profits. Unless wages rise, or profits are shared, the worker cannot be truly said to "share" in national prosperity. It is true that in good times there are fewer out of work, but when "profits" double, wages do not double. Yet the doubling of profits is set down as the doubling of the general prosperity of the country.
