178 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



for this increment entirely tlirough taxes, interest, and improve- 

 ments. I am not sure that the man who said he had seen the 

 time when he could buy all the ground Chicago stands on for a 

 pair of boots, and only hesitated to do so because he lacked the 

 boots, would have made such a wonderful bargain as might be 

 supposed, provided he had had to pay for everything necessary 

 in order to hold it, and had held it up to date. 



But suppose, in Chicago's case, there would have been a prof- 

 itable purchase for him who thought he saw the opportunity. 

 His capital embarked, his possible risk, his care and time, would 

 entitle him to the outcome. But what shall be said of a town 

 not a hundred miles away from Chicago, which was laid out on 

 the same lake with equal expectations, whose broad, houseless 

 avenues now are — as for thirty years they have been — a silent 

 comment on something quite different from the so-called " un- 

 earned increment " ? And what of other similar would-be cities — 

 frogs that, like ^sop's, burst themselves irretrievably, or those 

 who took stock in them, in trying to attain the ox's magnitude ? 

 The situation in reference to disaster with the city lot is full as 

 appalling — if foresight and gain are appalling — as it is in the 

 direction of profit. If society has a claim upon this profit in the 

 socialistic way which George and his followers claim it has, then, 

 to make the equities right and even, it ought to shoulder, with- 

 out a whimper, the losses which have befallen the land-owners 

 who have suffered from the " earned decrease." 



Probably, if we go outside of a few large towns (the area of 

 all towns being an insignificant part of the planet), it will be 

 found that what I call the " earned decrease " is a more surprising 

 factor in the history of land than any other fact connected with 

 it. Just now there is no farming in this country to speak of east 

 of a line drawn as the Alleghany Mountains run, and very little 

 east of the Mississippi River, that is really comparable in its 

 profits with the profits of almost any other business that is good 

 from skillful management. The farmer himself is a toiler who 

 has— with a day's labor at least from twelve to thirteen hours 

 long— constant obstacles against his rise, and the majority of 

 farmers in the older States are little better off to-day than when 

 they began their business twenty, thirty, or more years ago, pro- 

 vided they began without capital already earned. Who does not 

 know, too, that the owner of land works harder than any man 

 he employs ? — frequently with less success, and always with an 

 amount of harassing anxiety that the hired man rarely expe- 

 riences, and can not, in fact, possibly experience in kind. 



One only needs to make a study of the farms, as they stand all 

 through the country, to discover that it will need a more power- 

 ful catholicon than access to land to cure all our social ills. Nor 



