we have Henry C. Carey's word for it that no farming district or county or township will sell to-day for as much as it has cost to bring it to its present state of productiveness. I do not agree with Mr. Carey in this. I only mention it to show what a chasm of divergence will open whenever the Government shall undertake to define distinguishable betterments and separate them from undistinguishable ones for the purpose of securing what Mr. Clarke calls “a firm foothold” for the inscribing of the fair rental value of each piece of land in the public accounts. Still, this difficulty may not be insuperable.
I propose to examine Mr. Clarke's pamphlet rather than Mr. George's book, because the former, although drawn almost wholly from the latter, embraces in small compass and with eminent fairness all that is needed to set out the single-tax argument, and does not lure us into by-ways as Mr. George often does.
“Why should land be singled out, and its holder made to bear a burden from which the owners of other sorts of property are exempt?”
This question is answered by Mr. Clarke, first on economical and then on ethical grounds. On economical grounds: “Because
(1) material progress in a community where absolute private property in land is maintained by law, acts, by force of that fact, like a wedge thrust midway into the social structure, to raise a few without effort or merit on their part, and to grind down the masses of men, however meritorious they may be; and because
(2) property in land being qualified in the way proposed, poverty will be abolished for that increasing class in civilized communities who are willing to work, but have few opportunities to do so advantageously.”
We are not authorized to infer from this statement that in a community where absolute private property in land is maintained by law, e. g., the United States, “a few” belonging to the landless class never get unduly elevated, or that land-owners never get ground down, in both cases regardless of merits, or out of all proportion to merits; nor can we infer that in a community where the state is the landlord, e. g., British India,[1] a few are never elevated and the masses never ground down, regardless of their merits respectively. But we may fairly demand that the writer shall point out his “few” before he asks us to accept his statement. Do land-owners in the United States get rich faster than other people? To say that the Astors are very wealthy, and that they
- ↑ De Laveleye, in his work on “Primitive Property,” gives the reason for holding that the state is the real landlord in India. “Where the land-tax rises so high,” he says, “as to absorb nearly the whole produce and to leave the cultivators only the bare means of subsistence, it is obviously an actual rent that is paid; and if it is the state that receives such a tax, it may be considered as the true proprietor.”
