484 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



we have Henry C. Carey's word for it that no farming district or 

 county or township will sell to-day for as much as it has cost to 

 bring it to its present state of productiveness. I do not agree 

 with Mr. Carey in this. I only mention it to show what a chasm 

 of divergence will open whenever the Government shall under- 

 take to define distinguishable betterments and separate them 

 from undistinguishable ones for the purpose of securing what 

 Mr. Clarke calls " a firm foothold " for the inscribing of the fair 

 rental value of each piece of land in the public accounts. Still, 

 this difficulty may not be insuperable. 



I propose to examine Mr. Clarke's pamphlet rather than Mr. 

 George's book, because the former, although drawn almost wholly 

 from the latter, embraces in small compass and with eminent 

 fairness all that is needed to set out the single-tax argument, and 

 does not lure us into by-ways as Mr. George often does. 



" Why should land be singled out, and its holder made to bear 

 a burden from which the owners of other sorts of property are 

 exempt ? " 



This question is answered by Mr. Clarke, first on economical 

 and then on ethical grounds. On economical grounds : " Because 



(1) material progress in a community where absolute private prop- 

 erty in land is maintained by law, acts, by force of that fact, like 

 a wedge thrust midway into the social structure, to raise a few 

 without effort or merit on their part, and to grind down the 

 masses of men, however meritorious they may be ; and because 



(2) property in land being qualified in the way proposed, poverty 

 will be abolished for that increasing class in civilized commu- 

 nities who are willing to work, but have few opportunities to do 

 so advantageously." 



We are not authorized to infer from this statement that in a 

 community where absolute private property in land is maintained 

 by law, e. g., the United States, " a few " belonging to the landless 

 class never get unduly elevated, or that land - owners never get 

 ground down, in both cases regardless of merits, or out of all pro- 

 portion to merits ; nor can we infer that in a community where 

 the state is the landlord, e. g., British India,* a few are never ele- 

 vated and the masses never ground down, regardless of their mer- 

 its respectively. But we may fairly demand that the writer shall 

 point out his "few" before he asks us to accept his statement. 

 Do land-owners in the United States get rich faster than other 

 people ? To say that the Astors are very wealthy, and that they 



* De Laveleye, in his work on " Primitive Property," gives the reason for holding that 

 the state is the real landlord in India. "Where the land-tax rises so high," he says, "as to 

 absorb nearly the whole produce and to leave the cultivators only the bare means of sub- 

 sistence, it is obviously an actual rent that is paid ; and if it is the state that receives such 

 a tax, it may be considered as the true proprietor." 



