AGRICULTURE AND THE SINGLE TAX. 485 



have their counterparts as land-owners in all our lesser cities, does 

 not answer the question, because the Vanderbilts, the Havemeyers, 

 the Drexels, the Rockefellers, the Carnegies, the Armours, and 

 the Pullmans are also very rich, and they do not own land to any 

 large extent. Can anybody point to a similar group of rich men 

 whose income is derived from agricultural land ? 



Any man of fair intelligence can answer the question for him- 

 self. The opportunity has been open to me, for example, to get rich 

 by land-owning ever since I arrived at man's estate. It has been 

 open to me to acquire land at all prices, from nothing per acre up- 

 ward. I was once domiciled for a short time at a place where land 

 was obtainable at the former price good arable land, underlaid 

 by a workable vein of coal. I filed an entry on one hundred and 

 sixty acres of it at the United States Land-Office at Lecompton, 

 Kansas ; but, happening to receive an offer of twenty-five dollars 

 X^er week to work on a newspaper shortly afterward, I abandoned 

 my claim, and I am sure that I made no mistake in the point of 

 view of dollars and cents. I took up my abode in the city of Chi- 

 cago when there were only sixty thousand inhabitants there. The 

 growth of that place has been, since that time, one of the remark- 

 able phenomena in the world's history, and a great part of this 

 growth took place under my eye ; yet I have never seen the time 

 when I thought I could make better use of my small capital by 

 becoming a land-owner than by following other pursuits. But I 

 have had some experience as a land-owner. The land that I have 

 at one time and another owned, whether urban, suburban, or agri- 

 cultural, or taken altogether, has not served me as well on the 

 whole as other investments. 



I make this personal reference because I know that my expe- 

 rience tallies with that of many others. Mr. Henry George, for 

 example, has fairly earned all that he possesses of this world's 

 goods. I venture to ask whether the same amount of labor, dili- 

 gence, and foresight that he has bestowed upon his own vocation 

 of book-writer, journalist, and publisher, if applied to the acqui- 

 sition and use of land, would have netted him as much. Undoubt- 

 edly both he and I, by the use of hind-sight, can see where we 

 might have made larger gains by becoming land-owners than we 

 have ever made. But so, too, by the use of hind-sight we can see 

 how we might have made as much or more in still other ways. 

 We might have invented a telephone, for example. 



Before proceeding it should be noted that Mr. Clarke expressly 

 repudiates the idea that the single-tax argument rests upon the 

 idea of an " unearned increment." The rise in land values due to 

 the growth of population has nothing to do with it, or at most 

 only serves to set it in a more glaring light. 



" The argument for the land-value tax " (he says) " is very apt 



