828 THE QUESTIONS OF THE DAY. 



lions. For generaiions we have been accusLomed to think of 

 land values in a large way with little or no definite thought as 

 to income, or indeed any means of ascertaining it, since the 

 majority of farms are occupied by their owners, who do not 

 know what part of their income is attributable to their use of 

 bare land. In the business portions of large cities tl)e value of 

 ground rents is very well known, but this knowledge grows 

 less as we push into the residence and suburban districts, 

 and tends to disappear as we get into the country, where, 

 indeed, there are only the most hazy ideas of what ''rent" 

 really is. For the purposes of a single-tax discussion, we must 

 consider "rent" as the sum which a capitalist farmer could 

 afford to pay for a year's use of bare land, in tlie expectation 

 of making a profit on it. What some poor "cottier" might 

 be willing to pay for a small patch for the purpose of living 

 on it and raising a crop is not "rent" in any sense applicable 

 to this discussion. As to real "rent" of agricultural land in 

 the United States we have almost no data, and consequently 

 none but purely arbitrary estimates of land value. Somewhat 

 careful reading of a considerable number of advocates and 

 opponents of the single tax leaves me wholly disinclined to 

 accept the general estimates of any of them as a proper basis 

 of reasoning. In (xreat Britain, where rent is actually paid 

 upon a great part of the agricultural land, tlie data are of 

 course better, but even there are unsatisfactory, as land and 

 improvements are confounded in one valuation. Mr. Thomas 

 G. Sherman* estimates that upon the average of city and 

 country lands sixty per cent of the total rental of improved 

 lands is to be considered as economic rent — that is, the rent 

 of the bare land, and all his estimates of the workings of the 

 single tax in Great Britain and the United States, and in city 

 and country, are based upon that estimate. But certainly if 

 this approaches accuracy for city property it does not do so for 

 country property. Mr. W. 11. Mallock, Edward Atkinson, and 

 others, insist that the total ground rent of the world would not 

 pay the world's taxes. We not only do not know what the 



Natural Taxation," G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1895. 



