CHAPTER XIV 

 TAXATION AND LAND 



LATIFUNDIA per did ere Italian, 

 Pliny wrote. "Big farms ruined 

 Italy." Will America perish in the same 

 way? I have long been convinced that the 

 break between land and people by the gen- 

 eral prevalence of the Roman or feudal 

 tenure has become a terrible evil, and that 

 it operates much as Henry George de- 

 scribes, diminishing production, congesting 

 wealth, and multiplying injustice, poverty 

 and vice. An increasing number of able 

 English and American writers share this 

 view; and it is masterfully argued in the ex- 

 traordinary Italian work, Achille Loria's 

 "Analysis of Property under the Capitalist 

 Regime," published at Turin in 1889. 



To turn the golden stream of economic 

 rent partly or mostly into the state's treas- 

 ury, where it would relieve farmers and the 

 general public of taxation in burdensome 

 forms, seems to me extraordinarily desir- 



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