nd
nothing more. Were the landlord to be abolished, the soil and the
people who till it would still remain, and the disappearance of the
landowner would pass almost unnoticed."[416] "Rent is brigandage
reduced to a system. So long as the English people are content to be
tenants-at-will on their own soil, and to pay for the privilege, they
will remain virtually slaves."[417] "The tenant earns the rent. The
landlord spends it. If the tenant had not to pay the rent he could
spend it himself, and so it would get spent, and get spent by the man
who earns it and has the best right to spend it."[418]

Whilst some Socialist agitators are unscrupulous enough to make their
followers believe that in the Socialist State they may have land for
the asking, others are so unkind as to destroy that pleasing illusion.
For instance, we learn from a Fabian pamphlet, "A Socialist State or
municipality will charge the full economic rent for the use of its
land and dwellings, and apply that rent to the common purposes of the
community."[419] Another Socialist authority very pertinently remarks:
"It is of not the least consequence to the person who rents the land
whether he pays the rent for it to an individual or whether he Pays it
to the State,"[420] and therefore it is clear that statements such as
"If the tenant had not to pay the rent he could spend it himself," are
merely meant to deceive the simple. Tenants, instead of paying their
rent to a human landlord, would have to pay it to an impersonal State
or municipality, and the latter might prove as grasping and as
heartless as rating committees are now.

Others base their demand for the spoliation of landlords upon the
Bible and upon the ideal of a "Divine brotherhood," forgetting that
the Bible contains a commandment "Thou shalt not steal," as well as
many warnings against lying, deceit, cant, and covetousness. One of
the champion Bible-Socialists, for instance, writes: "If all men are
brothers, as Christ undoubtedly taught, then the land, the source of
wealth, the means by which men can earn their livelihood, should not
be the property of any set of individuals, but should belong to the
whole community. The fact of a man being born into the world gives him
the divine right to the opportunity of earning his living, and that
right cannot be enjoyed so long as there is a single man on earth
deprived of access to the land from which to earn his bread. When the
spirit of brotherhood prevai