3 - The road to freedom

Summary

In 1910 Josiah and Ethel Wedgwood outlined their political philosophy in a series of articles for the magazine The Open Road, which were later republished as The road to freedom. Ethel actually wrote the articles, but as Josiah repeated all of the salient arguments in later works of his own there is no doubt that he agreed with their contents. The book highlighted the deep philosophical differences within the land-reforming camp, and indeed the wider progressive movement, by making explicit the debate between collectivism and individualism, an individualism that, in the case particularly of Ethel Wedgwood, verged upon anarchism. The Wedgwoods attacked the majority of land reformers who, they thought, were aiming ‘to better the world by various forms of benevolent despotism’. This would not only fail to relieve the oppression of the people, they argued, but was ‘actually involving them more irrecoverably in slavery’, as an ever growing army of bureaucrats and ‘experts’ dictated their lives and lived at their expense. The Single-Taxers, on the other hand, wanted to destroy the landlords’ monopoly and give all people access to the land. And as men got the opportunity to taste freedom they would not need to rely on government so much. As Ethel wrote elsewhere, ‘The machinery for protecting the down-trodden worker will be needless, when the worker ceases to be down-trodden.’ By machinery she meant such things as compulsory schooling, police and old-age pensions. Once the workers had a chance to live on the land, large-scale capitalism would also waste away. Life would become simpler, and there would be no more need for distractions like cinemas, music halls or bars.

Although the Wedgwoods may have been proposing a somewhat puritanical and certainly back-breaking solution to society's ills – and one which found few supporters – they none the less reflected ideas and attitudes which were widely shared across the Left of British politics (and beyond). A return to the land was thought by many in all parties to be at least a partial cure for urban deprivation, and the Single-Taxers’ chosen method of funding this rural renewal – by effectively dispossessing the landlords – was a subspecies of the more widely held belief, growing since the late nineteenth century, that certain classes of wealth, essentially the ‘unearned’ income of rentiers and tycoons, was actually an unjustified ‘tax’ on the rest of the community and was therefore ripe for redistribution.