I should myself deny that the mineral treasures under the soil of a country belong to a handful of surface proprietors in the sense in which these gentlemen appeared to think they did.
— LORD CHIEF JUSTICE COLERIDGE, The Laws of Property, Address before the Glasgow Juridical Society, Macmillan's Magazine, April, 1888, p. 407.
It seems an elementary proposition that a free people can deal as it thinks fit with its common stock, and can prescribe to its citizens rules for its enjoyment, alienation, and transmission. Yet in practice this seems to be anything out admitted. There are estates in these Islands of more than a million acres. These Islands are not very large. It is plainly conceivable that estates might grow to fifteen million acres or to more. Further, it is quite reasonably possible that the growth of a vast emporium of commerce might be checked, or even a whole trade lost to the country by the simple will of one, or it may be more than one, great landowner. Sweden is a country, speaking comparatively, small and poor; but I have read in a book of authority that in Sweden at the time of the Reformation three-fifths of the land were in mortmain, and what was actually the fact in Sweden might come to be the fact in Great Britain. These things might be for the general advantage, and if they could be shown to be so, by all means they should be maintained. But if not, does any man possessing anything which he is pleased to call his mind, deny that a state of law under which such mischiefs could exist, under which a country itself would exist, not for its people but for a mere handful of them, ought to be instantly and absolutely set aside? Certainly there are men who, if they do not assert, imply the negative. A very large coal-owner some years ago interfered with a high hand in one of the coal-strikes. He sent for the workmen. He declined to argue, but he said, stamping with his foot upon the ground, "All the coal within so many square miles is mine, and if you do not instantly come to terms not a hundredweight of it shall be brought to the surface, and it shall all remain unworked." This utterance of his was much criticised at the time. By some it was held up as a subject for panegyric and a model for imitation; the manly utterance of one who would stand no nonsense, determined to assert his rights of property and to tolerate no interference with them. By others it was denounced as insolent and brutal; and it was suggested that if a few more men said such things, and a few men acted on them, it would very probably result in the coal-owners having not much right of property left to interfere with. To me it seemed then, and seems now, an instance of that density of perception and inability to see distinctions between things inherently distinct of which I have said so much. I should myself deny that the mineral treasures under the soil of a country belong to a handful of surface proprietors in the sense in which this gentleman appeared to think they did. That fifty or a hundred gentlemen, or a thousand, would have a right, by agreeing to shut the coal-mines, to stop the manufactures of Great Britain and to paralyze her commerce seems to me, I must frankly say, unspeakably absurd.
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