as widely known as I can, and thus correct the mistake of those who couple us together as holding views he now opposes.

To fairly weigh Mr. Spencer's present opinion on the land question, and to comprehend his reasons for the change, it is necessary to understand his previous position. Beginning, therefore, with his first declaration, I propose to trace his public expressions on this subject to the present time, and, that no injustice may be done him, to print them in full. In what follows the reader will find what Mr. Spencer has published on the land question from 1850 to 1892, and, by the difference in type, may readily distinguish his utterances from my comments.

PART I.

DECLARATION.

I.

"SOCIAL STATICS."-THE RIGHT TO LAND.

II. THE INCONGRUOUS PASSAGE.

III.

"SOCIAL STATICS."-THE RIGHT OF PROPERTY.

IV. MR. SPENCER'S CONFUSION AS TO RIGHTS.

V. MR. SPENCER'S CONFUSION AS TO VALUE.

VI. FROM "SOCIAL STATICS" TO "POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS."

Our social edifice may be constructed with all possible labor and ingenuity, and be strongly cramped together with cunningly-devised enactments, but if there be no rectitude in its component parts, if it is not built on upright principles, it will assuredly tumble to pieces. Not as adventitious, therefore, will the wise man regard the faith that is in him, not as something which may be slighted, and made subordinate to calculations of policy; but as the supreme authority to which all his actions should bend. The highest truth conceivable by him he will fearlessly utter; and will endeavor to get embodied in fact his purest idealisms: knowing that, let what may come of it, he is thus playing his appointed part in the world - knowing that, if he can get done the thing he aims at well if not-well also; though not so well. -Herbert Spencer, 1850.

IN his first book, "Social Statics," published in 1850, Mr. Spencer essayed to discover some fixed principle that might serve as a starting-point in political ethics and afford a surer guide than shifting notions of expediency or the vague formula of the greatest good to the greatest number. He found it in the principle that "every man may claim the fullest liberty to exercise his faculties compatible with the possession of like liberty by every other man.” Or, as he otherwise puts it, that "every man has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man."

The first deduction he makes from this "first principle" is the equal right to life and personal liberty, and the second, the equal right to the use of the earth.

This first deduction he treats briefly in Chapter VIII., "The Rights of Life and Personal Liberty," saying, “These are such evident corollaries from our first principle as scarcely to need a separate statement."

The second deduction, only next in importance to the rights to life and personal liberty, and indeed involved in them, he treats at length in a chapter which I give in full: