earth, the land on which people lived and moved rose to a fabulous value, the profit of which seemed to go to a few exclusively. The man who owns a lot in London sees it double and quadruple in value, and then double and quadruple in value again many times, not by any improvements he puts upon it, nor by any labor which he himself does, but simply by the increase of population about him, and the demands growing out of the multiplied business and wants which a population unparalleled in numbers creates. According to Mill and Spencer,[1] it is society, then, which makes this value of the land, and not the owner of the land. The increase which befalls it is not earned by him, but is the result of the growth of society. Why not, then, give back to society what society makes? In looking at England away from London, and at Scotland, the land problem is, in addition to this increment, made complicate by absurd laws of entail and transfer beyond anything which any other civilized country knows. Out of all this aggravation, a part of which can be reached by the modification of or the repeal of unjust laws, the "unearned increment" was suggested.
But neither Mill nor Spencer proposed to restore equality where they indicate inequalities by a wholesale system of spoliation on the innocent owners. They have not spoken of the wickedness of owning land by comparing it with the ownership of slaves, and in the same breath alleging that a full rental tax, a confiscation tax, indeed, will leave every man's ownership unimpaired. These are the absurdities which have been let loose in America only, where land can still be had for the asking, and where the appalling problem is for the man who owns land to compete—other things being equal—with the man who is not so unfortunate. It was said jocosely once, by a newspaper humorist, that a man living on a small, rocky farm in Maine, on an unfrequented road, felt visibly ashamed one day when a well dressed traveler (as he stood in the front yard) passed his door and looked somewhat inquisitively at the dilapidated house and out-of-joint fences. As the traveler drew nearer, the supposed proprietor hastened to remark: "I am not so durned poor as ye think I be, neighbor; I don't own this 'ere land!" The joke is now too universal to be any longer humorous to the average land-owner.
Suppose we were to admit that some injustice exists in the irregular distribution of the rapid increase of land-values in large towns. The inequality is one which no legislation could
- ↑ After calling this spirit from the "vasty deep," both Mill and Spencer failed to lay it, or to suggest any means whereby it could be placated. Allodial ownership, whether rightful or wrongful in the beginning, was to them at this present moment a right and a fact too overwhelming to be whisked away by a mere breath of metaphysical analysis.
