ls, it will be a simple and a natural
thing to arrange that these things shall be used not in the interests
of the few, but for the common good. There are innumerable signs that
the hearts and minds of men are now turning in this direction, and
that they are coming to see that the only just and permanent
arrangement is the divine solution of working on the basis of
universal brotherhood."[421] There is a fraternity among Sicilian
bandits. The "Divine brotherhood" of the writer would be based on
robbery, and have robbery as its object.

Others demand the confiscation of all land by relying upon
misrepresentation: "If the injustice of the land monopoly is great in
the country, by robbing the grower of his improvements or scaring him
from making any, by robbing the nation of its own legitimate
independent food supply, and by laying waste vast tracts of the
surface, the injustice is even greater in the towns, if only by reason
of the greater numbers whose interests are now involved: (1) by
flooding the town labour markets with surplus labourers, and so--by
their competition between each other for jobs of any sort at any
terms, rather than starve--keeping wages down at the privation point;
(2) by robbing the town workers of that proper and legitimate home
market which a flourishing and proportionately numerous agricultural
population would afford; (3) by the bloated rentals in cities, only
made possible by driving and crowding the people into our unnaturally
swollen centres; and (4) by the continuous re-investment of those
enormous rent extortions in all those secondary monopolies of transit,
finance, and business generally, which can only arise from the primary
monopoly of the soil, and which complete this devil's chain of the
subjection of labour and the dependence of the community."[422]

The complaints that land is going out of cultivation, that the British
home market has been spoiled, and that towns are overgrown and
overcrowded are unfortunately only too well justified, but these
phenomena are not due to private property in land. Private property in
land is universal, but the desertion of the country and overcrowding
in towns are not universal. These evils are to be found chiefly in
Great Britain, because British economic policy, whilst fostering trade
and the manufacturing industries, has deliberately sacrificed to them
the rural industries. That fact is acknowledged by many Socialists,
as will be seen in Chapter X