roprietor of cultivated earth. The
additional value made by cultivation, after the system was admitted,
became the property of those who did it, or who inherited it from them,
or who purchased it. It had originally no owner. Whilst, therefore, I
advocate the right, and interest myself in the hard case of all
those who have been thrown out of their natural inheritance by the
introduction of the system of landed property, I equally defend the
right of the possessor to the part which is his.

Cultivation is at least one of the greatest natural improvements ever
made by human invention. It has given to created earth a tenfold value.
But the landed monopoly that began with it has produced the greatest
evil. It has dispossessed more than half the inhabitants of every nation
of their natural inheritance, without providing for them, as ought
to have been done, an indemnification for that loss, and has thereby
created a species of poverty and wretchedness that did not exist before.

In advocating the case of the persons thus dispossessed, it is a right,
and not a charity, that I am pleading for. But it is that kind of right
which, being neglected at first, could not be brought forward afterwards
till heaven had opened the way by a revolution in the system of
government. Let us then do honour to revolutions by justice, and give
currency to their principles by blessings.

Having thus in a few words, opened the merits of the case, I shall now
proceed to the plan I have to propose, which is,

To create a National Fund, out of which there shall be paid to every
person, when arrived at the age of twenty-one years, the sum of fifteen
pounds sterling, as a compensation in part, for the loss of his or
her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed
property:

And also, the sum of ten pounds per annum, during life, to every person
now living, of the age of fifty years, and to all others as they shall
arrive at that age.

MEANS BY WHICH THE FUND IS TO BE CREATED.

I have already established the principle, namely, that the earth, in its
natural uncultivated state was, and ever would have continued to be, the
_common property of the human race_; that in that state, every person
would have been born to property; and that the system of landed
property, by its inseparable connection with cultivation, and with what
is called civilized life, has absorbed the property of all those whom
it dispossessed, without prov