5 io THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



If the truth were fairly told, I am afraid that the farmer who owns 

 the land gets less for his labor in raising his potatoes than I, who own 

 no land, get for my labor in obtaining the means whereby I am en- 

 abled to purchase the potatoes.* 



In truth, we each of us obtain by the present social co-operative 

 system a vast deal more of the bounties of Nature than we possibly 

 could if in possession of land with nothing but our individual efforts 

 to rely upon ; and if w T e look the world over, we shall find tbat those 

 communities enjoy the greatest abundance in which there is a great di- 

 versity of industry, an unrestricted accumulation of wealth, and where 

 private ownership has been guaranteed by the authority of the state 

 and supported by the consent of the people. 



But private ownership of land is a monopoly, say Mr. George and 

 his followers. Land belongs to the whole community ; the state, 

 therefore, should be the common landlord ; and the first great step 

 in a general act of readjustment is to appropriate the rental value of 

 land by taxation. Improvements, it is magnanimously conceded, are 

 not to be taxed ; but land only to the full extent of its rental value. 

 But what is the rental value of agricultural land apart from its im- 

 provements ? According to Ricardo, all that land produces above the 

 lowest point of production that will support the laborer goes, by 

 virtue of the competition that always exists, to the landlord as 

 rent. In this country freeholds are so general that we have little 

 practical exemplification of the operation of the laws of rent ; but, 

 should the state become the common landlord, these laws would be 

 sure to manifest themselves. According to this theory, if land yield- 

 ing ten bushels to the acre is sufficient to subsist the worker thereon, 

 then all land that yields more than ten bushels to the acre has a rental 

 value equal to this excess. That is to say, the Georgeian plan of taxa- 

 tion, in so far as it affected agricultural lands, would, on all the farms 

 of the country, absolutely confiscate the entire results of labor above the 

 mere point of subsistence. 



Ricardo's theory of rent may not be mathematically true, but it is 

 unquestionably approximately true, because in the briskness of com- 

 petition, in the struggle for subsistence, land must, if sought for at 

 all, command a rental value proportionate to its yield above a certain 

 minimum point. Mr. George will say that this is not what he means. 



* The following statement, in a recent article by Edward Atkinson, illustrates how 

 completely the product of the land falls to the benefit of the whole community : " One 

 man working the equivalent of three hundred days in the year, or three men working one 

 hundred days in the harvest-season on the far plains of Dakota in the production of 

 wheat, aided by one man working three hundred days in milling and barreling the flour, 

 and supplemented by two men working three hundred clays in moving wheat and flour 

 from Dakota to New York, and in keeping all the mechanism of the farm, the mill, and 

 the railroad in good repair — four men's work for one year places one thousand barrels of 

 flour at the mouth of the baker's oven in the city of New York — a yearly ration of bread 

 for one thousand men and women." 



