ve in them; making the agriculturist pay for his
seaweed manure and the fisherman for his bait of shell-fish; which has
desolated whole counties to replace men by sheep or cattle, and has
destroyed fields and cottages to make a wilderness for deer and grouse;
which has stolen the commons and filched the roadside wastes; which has
driven the labouring poor into the cities, and thus been the chief cause
of the misery, disease, and early death of thousands ... it is the
advocates of this inhuman system who, when a partial restitution of
their unholy gains is proposed, are the loudest in their cries of
'robbery'!

"But all the robbery, all the spoliation, all the legal and illegal
filching, has been on _their_ side.... They made the laws to legalise
their actions, and, some day, we, the people, will make laws which will
not only legalise but justify our process of restitution. It will
justify it, because, unlike their laws, which always took from the poor
to give to the rich--to the very class which made the laws--ours will
only take from the superfluity of the rich, _not_ to give to the poor or
to any individuals, but to so administer as to enable every man to live
by honest work, to restore to the whole people their birthright in their
native soil, and to relieve all alike from a heavy burden of unnecessary
and unjust taxation. _This_ will be the true statesmanship of the
future, and it will be justified alike by equity, by ethics, and by
religion."

These, then, are the facts and reasons upon which Dr. Wallace based his
strenuous advocacy of Land Nationalisation.[48] It was only by slow
degrees that he arrived at some of the conclusions propounded in his
later years, but once having grasped their full importance to the social
and moral well-being of the community, he held them to the last.

The first book which tended to fasten his attention upon these matters
was "Social Statics," by Herbert Spencer, but in 1870 the publication of
his "Malay Archipelago" brought him into personal contact with John
Stuart Mill, through whose invitation he became a member of the General
Committee of the Land Tenure Reform Association. On the formation of the
Land Nationalisation Society in 1880 he retired from the Association,
and devoted himself to the larger issues which the new Society embraced.

Soon after the latter Society was started, Henry George, the American
author of "Progress and Poverty," came to England, and Wallace had