112 COMMISSION OF CONSERVATION 



and not his original ideas or intentions, will most likely determine 

 his future action. In recent years the fever of land speculation 

 has been the first influence to grip him in his social life; his natural 

 inclination to be migratory and unsettled in disposition is encour- 

 aged. He finds land speculators apparently making money without 

 effort and farmers struggling to make ends meet, notwithstanding the 

 natural advantages of the soil and climate. If he takes a farm near 

 a town he finds himself severed from the market by large areas of land 

 which has produced profit to the speculator without effort and is 

 lying idle and unused. He is cut off from social intercourse, and facili- 

 ties for co-operation and education, largely because of speculation. 

 In that kind of environment can we expect a man to settle down 

 and become an industrious producer and a contented citizen? 



Does Speculation Pay? 



But it is a mistake to assume that the average speculator really 

 makes money. What he makes in times of boom he usually loses 

 in times of depression — unless in the few exceptionally lucky cases. 

 The loss in real estate operations, due to the expensive methods 

 necessarily employed to force more land on the market than is re- 

 quired, to accumulation of compound interest charges on the capital 

 invested, to loss of deposits and waste in local improvements, to pay- 

 ment on borrowed money, etc., must, in many cases, absorb all the 

 profits realized — although these may appear substantial when one 

 side of the balance sheet only is considered. Thus we have the great 

 monetary losses of those of the general public who have bought lots, 

 the loss in production due to idle land, and, as a rule, no benefit to 

 the speculator. Happily this fact is being realized by large corpora- 

 tions like the railway companies in Canada, and by leading men in 

 the real estate exchanges of America, and there is a growing tendency 

 to promote planning and development schemes so as to stop injurious 

 forms of speculation. In Canada, more than in the United States, 

 we are in need of outside capital, and, if we are to obtain it, we must 

 re-establish confidence in real estate investment, and in the economic 

 soundness of our methods. 



Taxation and Assessment 



The questions of land taxation and land assessment in Canada 

 would require a special report to deal with them, and only brief refer- 

 ence can be made to them here. 



Important problems of taxation arise in connection with the 

 sub-division of rural lands to accommodate, what is to a large extent, 



