Mr. Mill says: "When the 'sacredness of property' is talked of, it should always be remembered that any such sacredness does not belong in the same degree to landed property. No man made the land. It is the original inheritance of the whole species. Its appropriation is wholly a question of general expediency. When private property in land is not expedient it is unjust." The possession of land involves and carries with it the duty of cultivating that land, and, in fact, individual proprietorship of soil is only defensible so long as the possessor can show improvement and cultivation of the land he holds. To quote again from Mr. John Stuart Mill: "The essential principle of property being to assure to all persons what they have produced by their labor, and accumulated by their abstinence, this principle can not apply to that which is not the produce of labor, the raw material of the earth." Mr. Mill urges that property in land "is only valid in so far as the proprietor of the land is its improver." "In no sound theory of private property was it ever contemplated that the proprietor of land should be merely a sinecurist quartered upon it." Yet, in England and Wales alone, the landlords who received for rent, in the year 1800, £22,500,000, now receive about £67,000,000, and for this have no obligation on them to cultivate. The holding cultivable land in an uncultivated condition in this overcrowded country ought to be made a statutory misdemeanor, the penalty for which should be the forfeiture to the State of the land so left uncultivated, at, say, a twenty years' purchase of its annual return in the neglected or misapplied state in which it was found at the time of conviction. The true theory of landholding should be that the State should be the only freeholder, all other tenures being limited in character; and cultivation ought to be a special condition of tenancy.... The holder of land should either cultivate it with his own hands, or, as would be most frequently the case, by the hands of others; but in the latter case, the landed proprietor is bound to allow the agricultural laborer to live by his labor. By living I mean that the laborer should have healthy food, shelter, and clothing, and sufficient leisure in which to educate himself and his family, besides the necessary leisure for rest from his labors. At present agricultural laborers do not live; they only drag wearily through a career but little higher in any respect than--and often not half so comfortable as--that of many of the other animals on the estate....