property with philosophic accuracy. That which may be rightfully individual property is the results of man's labor and energy applied to natural opportunities. Those results should be the man's very own; his own, to consume, to sell, to give away, to bequeath, nay, to destroy, if he so likes. But how about the natural opportunites themselves? the field, the meadow, the prairie, the mine, the quarry, and the sea-the land, air and water? From them all men must derive everything they have, but mankind made them not. They were here before any man now living came; they will be here when all men now living are dead. They are not the product of any man's industry, or skill, or energy. They are the creation of God, and of Him alone. They cannot be, then under any true system of economic philosophy, the subject of individual property. Individual men, indeed, claim to own the land, if not the air and sea; but to whom does the land really belong? Did God create the iron mine for the heirs of John Smith, who squatted on the crust above its surface a century ago, or did He create it for all the children of men? Do the green prairies of America belong to all men, that can and will use them, or to the descendants of some English Lord, who live on the sweat of other men's brows? Does not the earth belong in usufruct to the living, as Thomas Jefferson a century ago declared? Is it true that our native land is not so far our land, that we have a right to fill a flower pot from its surface? We are land animals and can live nowhere else; are we to live upon the land only at the sufferance of individual men who claim to own it?

This idea never has been and never can be accepted as the true one. Fictions concerning social convention, social compact, vested rights, the trusteeship of the land owner, the iron necessity which compels a system philosophically unjust, a thousand other manufactured sophistries are introduced to justify the continuance of the present system of land tenure, but nothing is, or can be urged in justification of any natural right on the part of individuals to the ownership of the soil.

In some sense then it is admitted by all that it is to the community of the living that the land belongs, and by land, we mean, all natural opportunities. If then land—that is natural opportunities-belongs to the community, then land is the just and natural source, is it not, of the necessary revenues of the community? If it is not to individuals, but to the whole mass of the people that the land belongs, then without injustice and without violation of natural right, the people, as a whole, may, by any proper expression of their will, take and use those opportunities. That they should do this is the theory, and the whole theory, of the advocates of the Single Tax.

Remove, we say, all the burdens that rest so heavily on industry and energy; remove the tariffs and the excises, the taxes on houses and crops, and farm improvements; the taxes which everywhere fall upon the laborer who is willing and anxious to work, and gather the income necessary for all the purposes of government, as it now exists; yes, for all those purposes and a thousand other grand beneficent ones properly within its function, from those natural opportunities which belong to the people in their collective capacity, and are not the true property of indivi

duals. Abolish, in other words, all other taxes whatsoever, and levy a tax, if you will call it so, on land values. On land values, pure and simple, mind you; not on improvements of any sort or kind, for improvements are the property of the men who made them, and those to whom they have given them.

But this land TAX, if you call it so, should and would in reality be the fair RENTAL of the land.

How simple and how just it is, and how practicable, too! The land belongs to the community. It belongs to all the people who live upon it. But since improvements must be made upon it, since labor and energy must be continuously and persistently used upon each particular part of it to make it so yield its useful products, as that it shall reach even a proportion of its highest profit, and as no person will bestow these things upon land to which he has not a tenure, stable, permanent and continuous;• therefor, no people above the grade of tent-dwellers and herdsmen can use land in common, nor will civilization advance without security of possession and fixity of tenure. Assurance of permanency and continuity of tenure for their use, is necessary then to the best use of almost all natural opportunities; how necessary, the miserable state of cultivation, in rack-rented localities where the man who uses the soil is always in imminent danger of eviction, will attest.

But the conclusion so often drawn that because the man who uses land must have assurance and permanency of tenure, therefore to the derogation of natural justice and in the face of God's own law, he, his heirs and assigns must have the absolute private ownership, is in the highest degree absurd. As a matter of fact, the vast proportion of the men who use the land directly do not own, nor claim to own, a single inch of it. They pay the rental value of it, they pay much more than the true rental value of it to other men, who do so claim to own it.

The Single Tax means only this: These men and all men who use as individuals the land which belongs to all, who have the privilege of monopolizing and using for their own advantage any portion of that which is the inheritance of the entire community, shall retain their tenure as long as they choose, provided only they shall pay the rental value of what they use, not to those individuals who claim to own it by authority drawn in the last resort from some long dead European king, but to the community which does own it in very truth and deed.

And thus without the use of the ugly word " 'confiscation," and without running counter to present institutions, but in the direction of existing customs and speech and thought, by a practicable, obtainable reform we can, if we adopt the Single Tax, abolish all burdens and taxes upon industry and capital, and by taking ground rents for the use of the State instead, can. without formal interference with tenure, take back for the community, for all the people, that of which they have so long unjustly been deprived.

To the extent alone that this abolished all unnecessary and unjust taxation of capital and industry (and President Cleveland never said a truer word than that "all unnecessary taxation is unjust taxation"), it

would be a reform in governmental and economic methods, more beneficial and far-reaching, as I believe, than the world has known for centuries.

But such a relief to the burdens of industry and true capital, great as it would be, is but the beginning of the results that from this great reform would revolutionize for their infinite improvement the social conditions of the world. Do you say it would ruin the land-owners and the landlords? I tell you it would really injure no one but those men who, for speculation, hold land unimproved or improved only to an imperfect extent. Their contribution to the community would be at once increased to the amount of which they are depriving it, and their hope of realizing in the future from the increase or rise in value which they have done nothing to bring about would be destroyed. Do not talk of vested rights. Vested wrongs, though they be centuries old, do not become vested rights. Captain Kidd could leave no vested right to a career of piracy to his descendants. Nor could even great and good men like Washington and Jefferson leave a true vested right in human slaves to their children. I decline to believe that James the First or Second could give away to the ancestors in title of the man who claims to own the land on which stands the house I live in, the rights of my children to-day to the land of America.

It was not a robbery of the human race that took place once for all, when parceling out the land in individual ownership began, or when, from tenure philosophically correct, there came tenure unjust and ruinous. It is a fresh and continuous robbery that goes on every day and every hour. And what is the result of that robbery? If you say that our proposition will injure some landlords and some land owners, who would reap where they did not sow, and gather where they did not scatter, I ask you whom it would benefit? And I will answer it for you, too. It will benefit those whom this robbery of their heritage has debased, and embittered, and embruted. It will benefit those little children that this robbery has taken from play and school and compelled to work-those 'young, young children that are weeping, weeping bitterly in the play-time of the others, in the country of the free.' It will benefit those families, crowded eight and ten persons together, into a single squalid room, herded like swine. It will benefit those lads and girls, who might be useful men and women, who are reared now through the effect of this robbery for the penitentiary and the brothel. It will benefit those young girls who shiver as they sew for bread; those tattered and barefooted children who make their home in the streets. It will benefit those classes in manufacturing districts who are stunted and deteriorated by want-classes in which female virtue is all but lost, and family affections all but trodden out. It will benefit those men who now are traveling thousands of miles for some place to locate their families; for a home, and finding none; it will benefit those men, who, though it is as iron in their souls, are obliged to depend upon the labor of their women and children in addition to their own to eke out a miserable existence; it will benefit those who are freezing and starving today in our great cities; it will benefit those who work for the merest of pittances, sixteen and eighteen hours a day; it will benefit the millions of

unemployed men of America, from whom is recruited the daily increasing army of paupers and criminals.

These are the people that our reform would benefit, not only because all legitimate industry by one tremendous bound would show instantaneous relief from unjust taxation, but because of its effect on that which keeps these people wretched, the iron law of wages, a result of other laws of supply and demand and of human nature that make it inevitable that employers will not pay what they can, but what they must, and make wages always therefore tend to the lowest point at which men can live and reproduce the race. The tendency of wages now to this point is the inevitable result of laws as natural and as universal in application as the law of gravitation itself.

To attempt to restrain their operation for any great length of time by legislation as to hours of labor, or even by trades-union organization is futile and desperate. The one thing, and the only thing which can and does prevent wages reaching this lowest point, is the ability of men to evade wage-working altogether and to apply directly and for their own benefit their labor, mental and physical, to natural opportunities. The ability of men to do this depends upon their ability to get to the land and to work on it for themselves. We often hear the wage worker, discontented with his lot, advised to go upon the land. The advice in one sense is sound enough, but the pertinent inquiry remains, under our present system, upon what land? Upon whose land? The half-starved wretches, clustering now in thousands around Oklahoma, the emigrants of whom we have read, who have searched three thousand miles of country for a suitable homestead and been obliged to return without it, find it difficult to answer these questions. It is true that, as bad as things are in America, it has been easier in our comparatively sparsely settled country, which has always had an enormous public common domain, for men to get upon the land, in other words, for men to apply their labor to natural opportunities without seeking employment from others, than it has been in other countries older and more densely crowded. To this fact alone is it due that wages have kept higher. all things considered, here than elsewhere. But even here, through our wasteful way of investing settlers with private titles, the end has well nigh come. Practically for the wage-workers of our large cities it was long ago reached. Hence is the tendency to-day of wages always downward; hence is the army of the unemployed; hence the hundred thousand tramps who trudge by and through many an unused field, where they would willingly work if they were not warned away; hence the nameless misery, to which I have alluded, which exists in the crowded hovels of our great cities.

To relieve this misery, noble and good men and women have ever been striving; but it has been palliatives only, mistaken sometimes for remedies, which they have endeavored to apply. The human mind, thank God, is so constituted that we cannot see this misery in individual cases without desiring to relieve it, and hence comes charity, which is beautiful, and in individual cases beneficient both to giver and recipient. We must reverence the spirit which organizes great charities and gives them great en

dowments, but we must remember that it is justice first and charity afterwards, which is demanded of us. And we must remember, too, alas, that under the operation of the iron law of wages that I have described, if we make it possible through charity for individuals to live upon a less wage for their labor, we infallibly tend to make other men's wages, who are not recipients of charity sink to that point. We hear very much of the necessity and advantage of educating the poor in thrift, economy and temperance, but thrift, economy and temperance can only avail one man in so far as they make him superior to the general level. If by their diffusion, the general level is brought up to a higher point, the increased application under this same law of wages will secure but the old rate, and he who would get ahead must work harder still.

Enthusiastic and able men have fancied and have preached that in cooperation will be found the solution of the problem of how the laborer could get a just return for his labor; but co-operation can do nothing but reduce the cost of bringing commodities to the consumer, and increase the efficiency of labor; and increasing the productive power, under our present system, means no increase in the wage of the worker. It means only that the so-called owners of land, the source of all wealth, can command a greater return for the use of that land. And the same objection of their inefficiency, must be made to all the suggestions, which, without disturbing the present central feature of our economic system, the monopolization of land, propose better fiscal and economic legislation and the abolition of bad and injudicious laws. I agree most heartily with those who would abolish tariffs and give us unrestricted freedom of trade. But freedom of trade in the end, while it vastly increases the aggregate wealth of a country, and while it does delay its unequal and unjust distribution, cannot in the end prevent that injustice. For again, the same rule as to wages and the wage worker prevails. And again, it is to the landlord that the ultimate advantage accrues. "Come with me," said Richard Cobden to John Bright in 1841, when the agitation for the repeal of the Corn Laws began, “and we will never rest until it is impossible in England for wives and mothers, and children to die of hunger.' They carried their labors under the compact then made to a successful determination. To the immense material advantage of Great Britain the Corn Laws were long ago repealed, but hunger still exists in London, and women and children die of it. Under our present system, if all men became temperate, and virtuous and industrous; if, upon all other subjects than this vital one of the land, bad laws, bad customs and bad political economy were abolished; nay, if the skill and energy of mankind were increased one hundred fold; nay, if God made ten blades of grass to grow wherever one grows to-day, the result will be the same. Rent would increase and wages would tend to the starvation point.

Now, a few years ago there came to the well nigh hopeless seekers for that which should relieve what has aptly been called, the deep melancholy of our existence, the revelation of a new gospel, the gospel of fair play! And this new gospel was no palliative, no nostrum to check the progress of disease. It was in truth a remedy striking at the fatal germ. All the