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He was

volunteered his services in this war. the Captain of the Elswick battery in that war. He distinguished himself in the war, earned promotions and won a medal with three clasps. At the close of the war, he was appointed the Resident Magistrate of Ermelo in Transvaal, a post which he held with conspicuous distinction for two years, 1902-04. He subsequently returned to England and entered Parliament.

CHAPTER II

EARLY PARLIAMENTARY CAREER.

Captain Wedgwood, as he then was, entered Parliament as Member for Newcastleunder-Lyme in the year 1906 as a staunch Liberal with a clear bent towards Radicalism. By birth, by attainments, by training and by subsequent experience extending over some years and over a fairly wide range of affairs, he was eminently fitted to enter the august House. He belonged to the sturdy new middle class which prided itself on its ability and not on its birth or even wealth. His was originally an artisan family and was well able to sympathise with the lower strata of society. He had a sound education, a careful training, a wide experience of men and things. He was therefore eminently fitted to take an intelligent interest in the debates in the Commons and contribute to their fruitfulness by observations which are the results of common sense acting on study and experience. He was still a young man, was but thirty-four years old, and had that cultured leisure and youth

which combines earnestness with ability and ability with experience and which therefore results in safe yet fruitful action. To these qualities, he added in himself an amount of sturdy, but polite, independence which, while ever prepared to hear, was not afraid to strike when a right contingency for it arose. Suaviter in modo, fortiter in re.

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Wedgwood's early Parliamentary career, it is not proposed here to say much. The many purely British issues of a more or less local character which he gallantly fought in the Commons are not likely to be of interest to the average Indian reader. We must be content with saying that he discharged his duties as Member of Parliament as a staunch Liberal, leaning to the Left Wing of that Party, if we may import Continental party politics phraseology into English Party politics. Of one thing, however, we cannot fail to set something down here, not only because it is somewhat typical of all his later activities, but also because the matter by itself was not one of local, but of universal, importance. We

refer, of course, to the great campaign for the taxation of land values.

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The history of this most interesting agitation is too long to be entered into fully here. We must, however, set down some of the salient features of it and point out the part that Wedgwood played in this campaign; for, it was not only an interesting campaign by itself, but it also illustrates what sort of man Wedgwood is. As President of the English Land Values Taxation League, Wedgwood threw himself heart and soul into this agitation. The English League, as its Scottish counter-part, arose out of the English and Scottish Land Restoration Leagues. These latter societies were started in London and Glasgow respectively to put into practice the lessons derived from the doctrines expounded by Henry George in his work Progress and Poverty and on his lecturing tours through England and Scotland. Stated broadly, the doctrines were that with the increase in industrial progress, there will be greater and increasing poverty, unless there was no monopoly in land.

The arguments of George may perhaps be summarised as follow: Every industry is dependent directly or indirectly on the products of land. Progress in industry means greater demand for land as well as for labour, more for land than for labour. In the competition between the land-owners and labour for the fruits of this industry, labour, having no monopoly and being perishable, will go to the wall. Therefore, if labour, that is, the general population, is to benefit by progress in industry, it can only be by ensuring that landowners are deprived of the increased rent due to increased demand for land and distributed to labour or the general public either by the taxation of land values or, better, by that more extreme variety of the reform suggested, namely, by the adoption of tax on land alone, that is, of the single tax system. The theory is that every industry or occupation being dependent on land, any tax on land could be shifted to the necessary extent on others, based on the theory of the diffusion of taxes, the landowner or cultivator being not affected in any way because only unearned increment will be taken away from him by taxation.

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