116 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 
community, independently of any trouble or outlay incurred by 
themselves. They grow richer, as it were,in their sleep, without 
working, risking, or economising.’ (Principles, Bk. V, ch. ii, § 5.) 
Perhaps the disciple went a little beyond his master, Ricardo, in 
asserting so roundly that in a prosperous society the landlords must tend - 
to get a larger and ever larger proportion of the whole income, but there 
can be no doubt that this was the impression which the Ricardian school 
conveyed to the public, and which formed the foundation for Henry 
George’s scheme of land nationalisation and the agitation for land-value 
taxation. If the school had only meant to teach that the land became 
more valuable absolutely—in the sense of being worth a larger absolute 
amount of commodities rather than a larger proportion of all the com- 
modities and services constituting the community’s income—they could 
not have supposed land so peculiar, since it would share this characteristic 
with many other things—with anything which was more limited in supply 
than the generality. 
To grasp the completeness of the change of view which has taken place 
in the last hundred years, we must notice that Mill and the whole school 
which he represented were thinking not of the few lucky landlords who 
have inherited land which has been selected by nature or accident as the 
site of a city, but of the ordinary rural agricultural landlords. So far have 
we moved that the land-value taxers of to-day quite cheerfully propose 
to exempt all ‘ purely agricultural value ’ from the imposition which they 
advocate. 
Envy of the happy owners of such urban land as rises in value more 
than enough to recoup what they and their predecessors in title paid in 
road making, sewering and other expenses of ‘ development’ plus loss, if 
any, in waiting for income, still plays a part in contemporary politics, but 
the economist foresees that there will be at any rate less of such rise of 
value when the adult population ceases to increase and the demand for 
additional houses and gardens consequently disappears. He realises that 
if any such rise continues, it will be due to the people being not only able, 
as they doubtless will be, to occupy a larger area with their houses and 
gardens, but also desirous of doing so. He will think this quite possible, 
but will not be confident about it, when he reflects that the vast spread of 
villadom may be only a temporary phenomenon, and that the married 
couples of the future, childless or with small families, may be more content 
with flats in towns and little bungalows with tiny curtilages right in the 
country. 
The disappearance from economic theory of the picture of the vampire 
landlord taking an ever-increasing proportion of the whole produce of 
industry which was itself decreasing per head of workers, leaves the 
theoretic arena open for discussion of the sharing of the whole produce 
between earnings of work and income derived from possession of property 
of all kinds. 
As to this, the economists of a hundred years ago had nothing to say. 
If they thought of the question at all, they mixed it up hopelessly with 
the rate of interest on capital, imagining property to receive a smaller 
proportion when the rate of interest fell, and wice versa. The Socialists, 
who followed them in fact the more closely the more they denounced them, 
