Commonsense Socialism

Abstract

If he were to adopt Spence’s scheme of land reform, Howard was still left with the fundamental problem: how was he to implement it, not in some imaginary ideal country but here in England? Spence himself was no help for, as Howard pointed out, he had assumed that the people would by fiat dispossess the existing landowners and establish the system immediately throughout the country, which seemed to imply the revolutionary course that Howard had already rejected. He overcame this impediment, or rather circumvented it, by an imaginative adaptation of the idea of colonisation as planned migration. He first encountered the idea in J. S. Mill’s Principles of Political Economy, which he probably read in the ‘People’s Edition’ published in 1880. There Mill argued the case for capital investment in British colonies overseas as a way of realising greater profits than could be attained in the mother country. To be effective, however, the process of colonisation must be planned, and Mill went on to commend suggestions as to how that might be done which had been put forward by Edward Gibbon Wakefield some forty years earlier. In particular, Wakefield argued that land usage in new colonies should be controlled so that each would develop with a balance of town and country, industry and agriculture. It was the marriage of town and country that Howard had already envisaged, but in far off lands.