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PART II.

REPUDIATION.

I. LETTER TO THE ST. JAMES'S GAZETTE.

II. "THE MAN VERSUS THE STATE. "

III. LETTER TO THE TIMES.

IV. THIS APOLOGY EXAMINED.

V. SECOND LETTER TO THE TIMES.

VI. MORE LETTERS.

There are people who hate anything in the shape of exact conclusions; and these are of them. According to such, the right is never in either extreme, but always half way between the extremes. They are continually trying to reconcile Yes and No. Ifs and buts, and excepts, are their delight. They have so great a faith in "the judicious mean" that they would scarcely believe an oracle, if it uttered a full-length principle. Were you to enquire of them whether the earth turns on its axis from east to west, or from west to east, you might almost expect the reply-"A little of both," or "Not exactly either." It is doubtful whether they would assent to the axiom that the whole is greater than its part, without making some qualification. Herbert Spencer, 1850.

CHAPTER I.

LETTER TO THE ST. JAMES'S GAZETTE.

WITH the early years of the last decade a marked change in common thought began to show itself; and the doctrine of natural, inalienable and equal rights to land, which Mr. Spencer had avowed as it were in academic groves, began to stir in the hearts and minds of common men, and to make way among the great disinherited. Vaguely and blindly, the land question had come to the front in Ireland, and in this form forced its way into British politics. And "Progress and Poverty," first published in the United States in 1879, had begun, by the close of 1882, to circulate in Great Britain as no economic work had ever circulated before, re-inforcing what Herbert Spencer had said of the ethical injustice of private property in land with the weight of political economy and the proposal of a practical measure for restoring equal rights. Everywhere, in short, that the English language is spoken, the idea of natural rights to the use of land, that in 1850 seemed dead, was beginning to revive with a power and in a form that showed that the struggle for its recognition had at last begun.

Believing in Mr. Spencer's good faith, deeming him not a mere prater about justice, but one who ardently desired to carry it into practice, we who sought to

promote what he himself had said that equity sternly commanded naturally looked for some word of sympathy and aid from him, the more so as the years had brought him position and influence, the ability to command attention, and the power to affect a large body of admirers who regard him as their intellectual leader.

But we looked in vain. When the Justice that in the academic cloister he had so boldly invoked came forth into the streets and market-places, to raise her standard and call her lovers, Mr. Spencer, instead of hastening to greet her, did his best to get out of her way, like the young wife in the old story, who charmed the by-standers with her invocations to Death to take her rather than her elderly husband, but who, when Death rapped at the door and asked, "Who calls me?" quickly replied, "The gentleman in the next room!"

In March, 1882, when Mr. Spencer issued "Political Institutions," and even in August of the same year, when he left England for a visit to the United States, there was on the surface of English society nothing to indicate that such views as he had expressed in "Social Statics" were any nearer attracting popular attention and arousing feeling than in 1850, for the Irish land movement was considered what it indeed was in the main, not an attack on private property in land, but an effort of Irish tenants to become land-owners or to get better terms. But when Mr. Spencer returned, towards the close of November, it was to find that the days of contemptuous tolerance on the part of Sir John and his Grace had gone, and that all that was deemed "respecta

ble" in English society had become roused to the wickedness of those who denied the validity of private property in land.

To explain the change that had taken place in this brief interval I must refer to my own books.

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"Progress and Poverty was received by the English press, as all such books are at first, in silence or with brief derision. Messrs. Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., who first published it in England, in sheets brought from the United States, were on publication able to sell only twenty copies in all the three kingdoms. But ere long it began to make its way, and when, towards the close of August, 1882, a sixpenny edition was issued, it began to sell in tens and scores of thousands, "in the alleys and back streets of England," the Quarterly Review said

"audibly welcomed there as a glorious gospel of justice.”

Hardly was this cheap edition out and beginning to circulate, when, conjoining with it my pamphlet on "The Irish Land Question," which had also been published in England in cheap form, the Times, on September 11, 1882, gave to "Progress and Poverty" a long and fair review. At once the silence of the press was broken, and from the quarterlies to the comic papers the British journals began to teem with notices and references, most of them naturally of a kind that made the Duke of Argyll seem mild when he called me "such a preacher of unrighteousness as the world has never seen," and spoke of my "immoral doctrines" and "profligate conclusions," the

1 Now published under the name of "The Land Question," since its effort is to show that the Irish Land Question is simply the universal land question.

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