These, then, are the facts and reasons upon which Dr. Wallace based his strenuous advocacy of Land Nationalisation.[48] It was only by slow degrees that he arrived at some of the conclusions propounded in his later years, but once having grasped their full importance to the social and moral well-being of the community, he held them to the last.

The first book which tended to fasten his attention upon these matters was “Social Statics,” by Herbert Spencer, but in 1870 the publication of his “Malay Archipelago” brought him into personal contact with John Stuart Mill, through whose invitation he became a member of the General Committee of the Land Tenure Reform Association.  On the formation of the Land Nationalisation Society in 1880 he retired from the Association, and devoted himself to the larger issues which the new Society embraced.

Soon after the latter Society was started, Henry George, the American author of “Progress and Poverty,” came to England, and Wallace had many opportunities of hearing him speak in public and of discussing matters of common interest in private.  In spite of the ridicule poured upon Henry George’s book by many eminent social reformers, Wallace consistently upheld its general principles.

His second work on these various subjects was a small book entitled “Bad Times,” issued in 1885, in which he went deeply into the root causes of the depression in trade which had lasted since 1874.  The facts there given were enlarged upon and continually brought up to date in his later writings.  Articles which had appeared in various magazines were gathered together and included, with those on other subjects, in “Studies, Scientific and Social.”  His last three books, which include his ideas on social diseases and the best method of preventing them, were “The Wonderful Century,” “Social Environment and Moral Progress,” and “The Revolt of Democracy”; the two last being issued, as we have seen, in 1913, the year of his death.

In “Social Environment and Moral Progress” the conclusion of his vehement survey of our moral and social conditions was startling:  “It is not too much to say that our whole system of Society is rotten from top to bottom, and that the social environment as a whole in relation to our possibilities and our claims is the worst that the world has ever seen.”

That terrible indictment was doubly underscored in his MS.

What, in his mature judgment, were the causes and remedies?  He set them out in this order: 

1.  The evils are due, broadly and generally, to our living under a system of universal competition for the means of existence, the remedy for which is equally universal co-operation.

2.  It may also be defined as a system of economic antagonism, as of enemies, the remedy being a system of economic brotherhood, as of a great family, or of friends.

3.  Our system is also one of monopoly by a few of all the means of existence—­the land, without access to which no life is possible; and capital, or the results of stored-up labour, which is now in the possession of a limited number of capitalists, and therefore is also a monopoly.  The remedy is freedom of access to land and capital for all.