Auberon Herbert, writing in 1890, argued that “if John Smith cannot morally own land, then ten million John Smiths cannot morally own land. The land nationalizer has not yet discovered that a government or state can only possess the same moral rights of possessing and enjoying as the individuals who create it.” (Robert Flint expressed the same objection five years later: “it is difficult to see how collective property in land can be right if individual property in land be necessarily wrong.”)

Moreover, according to Herbert, if land belongs to an entire nation, then “it is the whole nation (minus nobody) who must decide upon the use of it.” It was usually said by land nationalizers that a majority should decide these matters, but Herbert argued that it is mere fiction to claim that a majority can speak for an entire nation. “It may be practically useful (or mischievous) on occasion to treat the majority as the nation, but in philosophical questions a majority cannot possibly be counted for more than what it is–a part of the nation.”

Suppose a nation consists of 100,000 people. If each of these persons has equal rights to the land in question, then all land must remain free and open to everyone–“which,” as Herbert pointed out, “will be rather inconvenient as regards cultivation, building, &c.”–unless everyone, without exception, agrees to some other arrangement. Suppose all 100,000 citizens unanimously agree to modify their rights in some fashion; this new arrangement could not stand unless each new voter in the nation (e.g., children as they become of age) gives his or her consent as well. Even one dissenter in a new generation would nullify all previous agreements.

Although Herbert did not mention Spencer by name in the foregoing remarks, he probably had Spencer in mind. I say this because of one of Spencer’s arguments in Chapter IX of Social Statics, where he considered the possibility that the earth could “become the exclusive possession of individuals by some process of equitable distribution.”