The Next Step Toward Real Democracy UC-NRLF EMILO. 10RGENSEN CY-2c, U. S. > ivy, 1918- v "?; Secretary o/ the CTh^-af^- Si. \glei*.< Club Publi^f-.ed by THE CHICAGO SINGLET AX CUiB 1440 American Bond and Mortgage Building CHICAGO, ILLINOIS Price, Paper Coi't-r $ ~j Cloth Loi'cr i y GIFT F The Next Step Toward Real Democracy One Hundred Reasons WHy America SKould AbolisH, as Speedily as Possible, All Taxation upon the Fruits of Industiy, and Raise tne Public Revenue by a Single Tax on Land Values Only By EMIL O.. TORGENSEN (Y-2c, U.'S. Navy, 1918-19) Secretary of the Chicago Singletax Club Published by THE CHICAGO SINGLETAX CLUB 1440 American Bond and Mortgage Building .CHICAGO, ILLINOIS Price, Cloth Cover $1.25 Pa^er Cover .75 COPYRIGHT, 1920 BY EMIL O. JORGENSEN To that great, patriotic and powerful body of men the ex-Soldiers, -Sail- ors and -Marines of America in whose hands, more than in any one else's, the destiny of our nation lies, this book is respectfully dedicated. T 4331 1>7 iii "We held these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they are en- dowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of gov- ernment becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it." Declaration of Independence. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I desire to take this opportunity to express my sincere gratitude to the many friends who have contributed in any way toward making this little book what it is. Particularly do I wish to record my deep obligation to my brothers, Oscar and Edwin, for their unselfish support and sacrifice, without which this work could doubtless not have been completed; to my brother John for kindly favors rendered in moments of difficulty; to Mr. Henry L. T. Tideman, Mr. Hugh Reid, Mr. Otto Cullman, and Mr. Luther S. Dickey of Chicago, for substan- tial assistance in preparing the manuscript; and to Mr. John Z. White, the well-known Single Tax lecturer, for examination of the proof sheets and for much valuable criticism and advice. Finally, I can not refrain at this time from acknowledging my great indebtedness to Mr. Louis F. Post, now Assistant Secretary of Labor, Washington, D. C., who, because of his kindly encouragement and personal guidance many years ago, did so much to lead me into the paths of economic truth. THE AUTHOR Chicago, July, 1920. "Every program, every measure in every pro- gram, must be tested by this question, and this question only: 3. It is Simple 6 y It is Adequate to the Needs of Govern- ment , 7 V^5. It is the Only Tax Reform that Guar- antees the Right of Private Prop- erty 8 6. It is the Only Tax Reform that is in Pull Accord With the Moral Law___ 10 t. It is Practicable 12 V.. ^. ^14, Vl5. PART II It Will Give Us a Tax System that Does Not Discourage Production and Encourage Idleness, but Which Dis- courages Idleness and Encourages Production 13 It Will Give Us a Tax Syrtem that is Not Complex and Costly, but Simple and Inexpensive 15 10. It Will Give Us a Tax System that Is Not Injurious to the Public Morals, but that Is Practically Free from All Temptation to Fraud and Per- jury 15 11. It Will Give Us a Tax System that Does Not Fall Upon Individuals in Proportion to Their "Ability to Pay," but in Proportion to the "Benefits Received" from the Gov- ernment 17 12. It Will Give Us a Tax System that Does Not Molest "Earned" Incomes, but Which Taxes Only Those that are "Unearned" 18 PART III It Will Break the Monopoly of Agri- cultural Land 20 It Will Break the Monopoly of Coal, Oil and Mineral Land 21 It Will Break the Monopoly of Timber Land 23 It Will Break the Monopoly of Water- power Land 25 x/17. It Will Break the Monopoly of Urban Land 26 1/1&. It Will Break the Monopoly of Rail- road Rights-of-Way, Pipe Lines, Terminals, Water Fronts, Stock Yards, and Public Franchises 27 PART IT 19. It Will Destroy the Injurious Power of the Trusts 28 20. It Will Free Competition in Industry.. 31 21. It Will Eliminate Multi-Millionaires and Sweep Away Overgrown For- tunes 31 is 22. It Will Insure a Just Distribution of Wealth 33 23. It Will Lower the Cost of Living 36 24. It Will Reduce the Rent of Land 37 25. It Will Stop the Traffic in Speculative Land Values and Tremendously In- crease the Demand for the Products of Labor 38 26. It Will Settle for All Time the Per- plexing Problem of Markets 40 vii Chapter Page PART V V" 27. It Will Eliminate Involuntary Un- / employment 41 28. It Will Raise the True Wages of Labor 41 29. It Will Dispense With the Need of Labor Organizations; Abolish Strikes, Lockouts, Boycotts, Riots, and Massacres in Industry 42 30. It Will Check the Growth of Syndical- ism, Bolshevism, Communism, An- archism, and Similar -Revolutionary Movements 44 31. It Will Clear the Channels of the Monetary System 44 32. It Will Prevent Panics and Industrial Depressions 45 33. It Will Remedy the Tariff Problem ___ 47 34. It Will Remedy the Immigration Prob- lem 47 35. It Will Stimulate Enormously the Production of Wealth 47 PART VI V36, It Will Abolish Involuntary Poverty.. 49 37. It Will Solve the Child Labor Problem 51 38. It Will Stop the Exploitation of Female Labor 51 39. It Will Dispose of the Illiteracy Ques- tion 52 40. It Will Diminish Crime and Wipe Out Commercialized Vice 52 41. It Will Promote Sobriety 53 42. It Will Decrease the Desertion of Wives and Infants 54 43. It Will Check the Increase of Insanity 54 44. It Will Stop Overwork 55 45. It Will Improve Sanitation 55 46. It Will Reduce to a Minimum Sickness and Disease 56 47. It Will Encourage Marriage and Check the Divorce Evil 56 48. It Will Lower the Death Rate 5 PART VII 49. It Will Solve the Tenement Housing Problem 58 50. It Will Encourage Municipal Improve- ment 60 51. It Will Reduce the Cost of Tax De- partments 60 52. It Will Reduce the Cost of Fire De- partments 61 53. It Will Reduce the Cost of Police De- partments 62 54. It Will Reduce the Cost of Public Health Departments 62 55. It Will Reduce the Cost of Public Charity Departments 63 56. It Will Diminish the Expense of Public Parks, Playgrounds, Zoological Gar- dens, Schools, Libraries, Bridges, Courthouses, Post Offices, Etc. 63 57. It Will Diminish the Expense of Lay- ing Pavements, Sidewalks, Conduits, Sewers, Water and Gas Mains, Car Lines, Etc. 64 58. It Will Lower the Cost of Freight and Passenger Transportation 65 59. It Will Lower the Expense of Build- ing Homes 66 60. It Will Lower the Expense of Erect- ing Factories, Mills, Plants, and Office Buildings 67 61. It Will Lower the Expense of Con- structing Churches, Hospitals and Similar Institutions 68 viii Chapter Page 62. It Will Disintegrate the Slums 68 63. It Will Facilitate the "Back to the Land" Movement 69 64. It Will Increase the Taxes in the Richer Districts of Cities 70 65. It Will Decrease the Taxes in the Poorer Districts of Cities 71 PART VIII 66. It Will Break Up Big Landed Estates and Speculative Holdings in the Farming Communities 72 67. It Will Solve the Farm Tenancy and Farm Mortgage Problems 75 68. It Will Enlarge the Farmer's Market and Give Him a Better Price for His Produce 77 69. It Will Increase the Agricultural Pro- duction 78 70. It Will Improve the Conditions for Rural Co-operation 81 71. It Will Reduce the Price of Practically Everything the Farmers Buy 82 72. It Will Lower the Farmers' Federal Taxes 83 73. It Will Lower the Farmers' State Taxes 84 74. It Will Lower the Farmers' Local Taxes 86 75. It Will Reduce the Cost of County Government 88 76. It Will Reduce the Cost of Farm Transportation 89 77. It Will Solve the Rural School and Church Problems 90 78. It Will Elevate the Agricultural Life 92 79. It Will Halt the Movement to the Cities 93 PART IX 80. It Will Remove the Opposition to Foreign Immigration the First Cause of International Irritation 93 81. It Will Remove the Opposition to Foreign Imports the Second Cause of International Irritation 94 82. It Will Remove the General Hunger for Foreign Territory the Third Cause of International Irritation 95 83. It Will Remove the General Hunger for Foreign Markets the Fourth Cause of International Irritation 96 84. It Will, When Applied Universally, Crush Militarism, and Disband Armies and Navies Off 85. It Will, When Applied Universally, Abolish War 98 PART X 86. It Will Force Into Productive In- dustry Hundreds of Thousands of Useless Real Estate Speculators, Monopolists, Landlords, and Similar Parasites on Capital and Labor 99 87. It Will Release for Productive Pur- poses Scores of Thousands of Tax Assessors, Tax Collectors, Detec- tives, Policemen, Jail Keepers, Social Workers, Charity Dispensers, and Laborers Engaged in Building and Keeping in Repair Prisons and Reformatories', Almshouses, Hos- pitals, and Asylums for the Sick and Insane 100 ix Chapter Page 88. It Will Release for Productive Pur- poses Untold Numbers of Doctors, Lawyers, Judges and Jurymen 100 89. It Will Release for Productive Pur- poses Untold Numbers of Soldiers, Sailors, Ship Builders, Mechanics and Laborers Employed in Military Establishments, and in the Upkeep and Manufacture of Munitions of War 101 90. It Will Reduce All Governmental Ex- penses Federal and State as Well as County and Municipal 102 PART XI 91. It Will Conserve the Fertility of the Soil 104 92. It Will Conserve the Forests and Minimize the Danger from Flood, Fire, and Soil Erosion 106 93. It Will Conserve the Nation's Coal, Oil, and Mineral Resources 107 94. It Will Eliminate the Danger of Ultimate Overpopulation of the Earth 108 95. It Will Purify Politics National, State and Local 109 96. It Will Liberate the Press, the School, and the Church from the Thraldom of Special Privilege 110 97. It Will Give the Fullest and Freest Opportunity for Co-operation in In- dustry 110 98. It Will Lessen the Consuming Greed for Wealth 111 99. It Will Remove Class Distinctions, Break Down Racial Prejudices, Ban- ish Fears and Hatreds of Foreign Peoples, and Scatter Wide the Seeds of Friendship and Good-Will 111 100. It Will Blaze the Pathway for the NEW INDUSTRIAL DAY 111 PART XII Progress of the Single Tax Movement 113 ILLUSTRATIONS Page "See Through It?" 4 Comparison of Ground Rent and Taxes in New York City 7 The Single Tax Idea at Work 11 Affably Benign to Sterile Monopoly .... 13 Sternly Severe to Fruitful Industry .... 14 People Value Belongs to the People .... 16 The Nature of Income 19 Land Monopoly in the United States ... 20 Land Value Who Ought to Own It? ... 22 Who Owns the Lumber Supply? 24 Who Controls the Water Power? 26 "Three-Fifths of the Average American City Consists of Vacant Ground" 27 Who Controls the Stockyards? 28 Difference Between Land and Wealth ... 29 Unearned vs. Earned Incomes 32 The Rise of Land Values 34 The Distribution of Land Values 35 Taking It All 38 The True Road to Higher Wages 41 The Lord Giveth and the Landlord Taketh Away 49 The Result 50 Another Holdup 57 Land Speculation and Charity 63 The Enormous Waste of Cities 64 This Condition Will Exist So Long as This Condition Lasts 66 A 100% American Billboard 67 A Few Acres and Liberty 69 Where City Land Values Are 70 Comparison of Present Taxes and Single Tax in Washington, D. C 71 Who Owns Our Agricultural Land? .... 73 The Toll of Landlordism 76 Whose Country Have I Been Fighting For? . 76 City Land Values vs. Farm Land Values . . 83 The Farmer and the Single Tax 85 The Land Speculator and the Single Tax . . 86 The High Cost of Land Speculation .... 90 A Non-Essential Citizen 99 xi What It Is and Why It Should be Adopted "Single Tax" is the name given to the reform proposed in 1879 by Henry George in his great work "Progress and Poverty." It is not, as some suppose, a tax upon bachelors. Neither is it a tax upon incomes, or inheritances, or upon the things that bachelors and other men produce, such as houses, crops, machinery, factories, mills, locomotives, etc. Things like THE SINGLE: TAX By Henry George "We propose to abolish all taxes save one single tax levied on the value of land, irre- spective of the value of the improvements in or on it. "What we propose in not a tax on real es- tate, for real estate includes improvements. Nor is it a tax on land, for we would not tax all land, but only land having a value irre- spective of its improvements, and would tax that in proportion to that value. "Our plan involves the imposition of no new tax, since we already tax land values in tax- Ing real estate. To carry it out we have only to abolish all taxes save the tax on real es- tate, and to abolish all of that which now falls on buildings and improvements, leaving only that part of it which now falls on the value of the bare land, increasing that so as to take as nearly as may be the whole of eco- nomic rent, or what is sometimes styled the 'unearned increment of land values.' " these, will, under the Single Tax system, be exempt from all taxation. The Single Tax is simply one tax and one only levied upon land, not according to its area, but according to its actual "market" or "selling" value. And by "land," of course, is meant the earth itself in other words, all natural opportunities, such as mineral, timber, and agricultural ground, waterpower rights, urban lots, rail- road rights-of-way, and public franchises, re- gardless of any improvements. Why should we make this change in our pres- ent revenue system? To answer this question adequately and intelligently is the aim and purpose of this book. Following are one hun- dred reasons why we should, not only for our own good, but for the good of the whole world, abolish, as speedily as possible, all taxation upon the products of human industry and raise the public funds by a single tax on land values only. 1 It Is Just. The justice of abolishing all taxation upon the fruits of human enterprise and appropriat- ing for the benefit of government the economic rent of ground lies simply in this SEE THROUGH IT ? Cartoon by J. W. Bengough. that it will take for society only what belongs to society and leave to individuals only what belongs to individuals. "The rental value of natural bounties . . . is clearly by the law of justice a public fund, not merely because the value is a growth that comes to the natural bounties which God gave to the community in the beginning, but also, and much more, because it is a value produced by the community itself, so that this rental value belongs to the community by that best of titles, namely producing, mak- ing, or creating." The Rev. Edward Mc- Glynn in His Doctrinal Statement to the Au- thorities of the Church of Rome, Dec., 1892. X "There are certain things in the world which are not the product of man's industry and to which, therefore, the individual man has no natural right . . . Air, light, the ocean, the navigable rivers, come under this category. So do the land and its contents. ... A third source of value ... is the public franchise. . . . This right is a crea- tion of the state; the value inherent in this right belongs naturally to the state." Dr. Lyman Abbott, "The Industrial Problem," pp. 139, 140. "The Single Tax simply means to take, in the way of taxes, for the benefit of the whole community, that annual rental value given to land because of its situation, by the commun- ity itself. Where is the injustice in this?" William Lloyd Garrison, Jr., Saratoga, N. Y., 1890. "I believe that the principle at the heart of the Single Tax agitation that the fiscal reve- nues should be derived from the social es- tatea (the regalia principle in ultimate ev- acuee), from the sources to which the justift- action for private property do not attach la right and vastly important. The renta of mines, forests, water fails, franchisee, town lota, and also, If practicable, of agricultural landa, ahould be retained aa flacal properties." Prof. H. J. Davenport, in "The American Economic Review," March, 1917. ^ "A tax laid on toola or any other creation of human labor violate* a right of property because it takes from the man who has cre- ated it, part of the thing which he haa made. A tax on land values, however, takea from the individuala nothing that of right belongs . to them." Professors Scott Nearing and Frank D. Watson, "Economics," p. 464. >("The private appropriation of land valuea, or the private appropriation of the natural PUBLIC revenues . . . is a direct violation of the fundamental principle on which the in- atitution of private property rests, a direct violation of the great ethical or social com- mandment, 'Thou shalt not steal.' " Lewis H. Berens, "Toward the Light," p. 143. 2 It is Sound. By soundness is meant unshiftability. The Single Tax cannot be shifted. It stays where it is put. Taxes imposed upon imports, upon manufactures, upon money, upon buildings, or machinery, or stocks of goods, are always passed on in higher prices to the "ultimate con- sumer." But not so the land value tax. There is no way in which the landowner can pass this tax on, no way in which he can raise the rent. For unlike taxes upon the products of industry which make such products scarcer and dearer, taxes upon land values make the mar- ket supply of land more abundant and conse- quently cheaper. TJie price of land, therefore. will go down under t^Q in g io "A tax on commodities is always trans- ferred to the consumer. A tax on rent can not be transferred. Prof. ThorOld Rogers, "Political Economy," 2nd Edition, p. 285. "A tax laid upon rent Is borne solely by the owner of the land." Bascom, "Treatise," p. 159. "A land tax levied in proportion to the rent of land, and varying with every variation of rents . . . will fall wholly on the land- lords." Walker, "Political Economy," p. 413. "A tax on rents fails wholly on the land- lord, There are no means by which he cnn shift the burden upon any one else." John Stuart Mill, "Principles of Political Economy." Book V, Chap. Ill, Sec. 2. "A tax on rent would affect rent only; it would fall wholly on landlords, and could not be shifted. The landlord could not raise his rent." Ricardo, "Principles of Political Econ- omy and Taxation," Chap. X, Sec. 62. "Though the landlord i* in all cases the real contributor, the tax is commonly ad- vanced by the tenant, to whom the landlord is obliged to allow it in payment of the rent/' Adam Smith, "Wealth of Nations," Book V, Chap. II, Part II, Art. 1. "A tax upon ground rent can not be shifted upon the tenant by increasing the rent." C. B. Fillebrown, "A B C of Taxation," p. 31. "Not only the entire school of Ricardo and Mill, but also nine-tenths or more of other economic writers make it a fundamental doc- trine of their science that such a tax never can be transferred to tenants." Thomas G. Shearman, "Natural Taxation," p. 129. "If land is taxed according to its pure rent, virtually all writers since Ricardo agree that the tax will fall wholly on the landowner, and that it can not be shifted to any other class, whether tenant-farmer or consumer." E. R. A. Seligman, "Incidence of Taxation," p. 222. 3 It is Simple. One of the first essentials of any great re- form is that it be simple and easy of execution. This essential the Single Tax has. The govern- mental machinery through which it can be ap- plied already exists. No additional adminis- trative departments or duties are necessary. All that we have to do is to discontinue such taxation as is now levied upon the products of industry, and increase the tax upon the value of natural opportunities, irrespective of im- provements, and the task is done. "There are some methods of getting access to the earth which are easier than others. The easiest, perhaps, that has been contrived, is by means of taxation of land values and land values alone. One trouble with it which makes it almost impossible to achieve, is that it it so simple and so easy. You can not get people to do anything that is simple; they want it complex so they can be fooled." Clarence Darrow, in "Everyman," December, 1916. "The method of solving the land problem has been elaborated by Henry George to such a degree of perfection that UNDER THE EX- ISTING STATE ORGANIZATION AND COM- PULSORY TAXATION it is impossible to in- vent any other better, more just, practical, and peaceful solution." Count Leo N. Tol- stoy, in "A Great Iniquity." "The Single Tax will wait, I fancy, for years, since it is so fundamental, and man- kind never attacks fundamental problems 6 until it ha*i exhausted all the uperflclal ones." Brand Whitlock, Embassador to Bel- gium, "Forty Years of It," p. 169. "Tin- Single Tax method of securing equal rlKhtH to land avoids the objection* which adhere to all other methods. There would be no avoidable hardship, no sudden and pro- found change In Nocinl relations, no Interfer- ence by state officials with the allotment and use of land, and no power to fix rents arbi- trarily or enforce rackrents. The exaction of the rent charge would compel holders to make the most profitable use of all land and at the same time there would arise the most abso- lute security of property." Max Hirsch, "De- mocracy Versus Socialism," p. 382. 4 It is Adequate to the Needs of Government. It is sometimes questioned whether the Sin- gle Tax will provide sufficient revenue to run government. It is a strange questioning. There COMPARISON OF GROUND RENT AND TAXES IN NEW YORK CITY (1911-1917) Gross Ground Rent Hew York City 6 years - $2,014,542,982 Total rent of land collected by landowners OVER AND ABOVE ALL TAXES - $1,469,439,445 Total Tax Burden New York City 6 years - $932,162,298 Total personal and improve- ment taxes - $387,258,756 Total land value taxes - 1544,903,537 Total rent of land taken in taxation - Annual Report of Commissioner of Taxes and Assessments of the City of New York, 1917. is no reason under the sun why the capital and labor which now support both the government and the monopolists cannot support the govern- ment alone! As a matter of fact, the economic rent of the earth far exceeds, even in these post-bellum days, the legitimate expenses of all government federal, state, county, and municipal. "The adequacy of land values to meet all public expenses Is sometimes questioned, but not by those who give due weight to the enormous land values in cities, towns, and villages. Be that as it may, however, the in- dustry wli it'll now supports both the govern- ment and the landowners could obviously sup- port the government alone, and with no IN- CREASE of load over the present, to say the least!" Prof. L. J. Johnson, in "Harper's Weekly," July, 1913. Hit "The gross ground rent of the land of the city of Boston is, by careful estimate, not less than $50,000,000. Of this amount there is al- ready taken in taxation, $10,000,000, leaving to the landowners of today a net ground rent of $40,000,000." C. B. Fillebrown, in a paper read before the National Tax Association In Columbus, Ohio, in 1907. "It is idle to waste breath arguing that a tax on land values only would not meet our public expense and hence we do not want the Single Tax. We are paying what should be the Single Tax now, all the time, in every price or lease value of a piece of land. We are paying the Single Tax now to landlords. "What we want is to pay it into our public treasuries and get the good of it." Lona Ingham Robinson, in "The Black Art of Our Land Tenure," p. 14. "That the value of the land alone would nffice to provide all needed public revenues municipal, county, state and national there can be no doubt." Hon. Warren Worth Bailey, in the House of Representatives, January 24, 1917. "The Committee estimates that the aggre- gate unearned profits of land speculators, owners of natural resources and natural monopolies is approximately six and a half billion dollars this year, while the producers of the country have to pay nearly two and a half billion dollars in taxes, because land- owners are permitted to retain most of the ground rent." Chairman Frederic C. Leu- buscher at the Conference on the High Cost of Living, Washington, D. C., July 30, 1917. See "The Public," of August 3, 1917. 5 It is the Only Tax Reform that Guarantees the Eight of Private Property. There is a persistent tendency on the part of many good people to associate the Single Tax doctrine with "land nationalization," and not infrequently with Socialism, Anarchism, and Communism. This is a great mistake. There is no "public ownership" or "nationallza- S tion of land" involved; no meddling with exist- ing titles to ground contemplated. The private use, possession, and ownership of the earth, and the perpetual right of the individual to "sell, bequeath, and devise" it, are indispensa- ble conditions to the survival and progress of society, and these conditions the Single Tax will not disturb in any manner. In truth, they will be much more firmly established after this reform has been inaugurated than they are now. "I do not propose . to confiscate pri- vate property in land . . . What I propose ... to, TO APPROPRIATE RENT BY TAX- ATION." Henry George, "Progress and Pov- erty," Book VIII, Chap. II. "A tax on ground rent is only a tax on the private power of taxation, and must not be confused with the theories of land confisca- tion, socialism, or land-nationalization." Schuyler Arnold, in "The Single Tax Review," Nov.-Dec., 1914. "The value of land has nothing to do with the validity of its title. If a man holds title to a parcel of land of no value, he is never- theless a landowner." John Z. White, in "The Single Tax Review." The land [under the Single Tax] would not be owned In common, but land values would be enjoyed in common." Eliza Stowe Twitchell, in "The Single Tax Review," Nov.- Dec,. 1916. "Call it what you please state ownership, state landlordism, ownership in common, communism, nihilism, anarchism, or anything else; but the fact, nevertheless, remains that, under the Just and righteous land system which we are trying to explain, the land will continue to be bought and sold under the same form of paper deeds, precisely as it is bought and sold today." Henry F. Ring, in "The Case Plainly Stated," p. 15. What does the Single Tax contemplate? Taking from a man that which is his own? On the contrary, it insists on absolute respect for such possession, which, under our cus- toms and laws is so ruthlessly disregarded. It proposes to disturb no title and to bring no confusion by its beneficent arrangement." William Lloyd Garrison, Saratoga, N. Y., 1890. "The Single Tax is not land nationalization. The ownership of the land by the state to not contemplated." Frederic C. Howe, "Privilege and Democracy in America," p. 269. "The Single Tax would leave the title to the land with the present owners and merely socialize the unearned rental values." Prof. Walter Rauschenbusch, "Christianizing the Social Order," p. 423. "The taxation of land values Is really no interference with security it only means tiut that which does gain by the rate* [taxes] should contribute to the rates." A. J. Balfour, in the Free Trade Hall, Man- chester, England, November 17, 1909. 'I do not think that anyone would suggest that the alterations [in taxation] from im- proved value to site value is Socialism, or any extravagant or novel proposition." Lord Cecil Robert, England, in the House of Com- mons debate, November, 1909. "Single Tax is not Socialism. It is not Bolshevism. It is not anarchy. It is not con- fiscation. ... Private ownership of land will not be abolished, and titles will not be disturbed." Harry H. Willock, in "Commerce and Finance," July 23, 1919. "The proposal to tax land values to the ex- clusion of labor values should not be confused with either Socialism or Communism. It is individualism, pure and simple. It secures to the individual all that he produces as an in- dividual and also his share of the social value that he helps to produce as a member of the community. It involves no new ideas of property, no change in land titles, no increase of officials, and no complication of accounts." "The Public," December 7, 1918. "The Single Tax reform would work injus- tice to nobody. The old homestead, with it acred memory of the joys of childhood, would still descend from father to son. The well-tilled farm would still pass from father to children. There would be no destruction of title deeds." Benjamin F. Lindas, in "The Single Tax Review," May-June, 1917. "The Single Tax is not land nationalization. No right of occupancy or improvement or sale or devise is taken from the owner; noth- ing except the right to collect natural taxes from other people, and to be himself ex- empt." C. B. Fillebrown, "A B C of Taxa- tion," p. 89. "The adoption of natural [single] taxation would secure to the owner of every product of human industry and skill an absolute and indefeasible title to such property; so that it could not be taken from him, even for taxes, without full compensation for its market value; a title, therefore, far superior to any which can now be held by any human being." Thomas G. Shearman, "Natural Taxatkm," p. 222. I It is the Only Tax Reform that is in Full Accord with the Moral Law. "It would seem as if Providence had des- tined the land to serve as a large economical reservoir, to catch, to collect and preserve the overflowing streams of wealth that are constantly escaping from the gr^eat public in- dustrial works that are always going on in communities that are progressive and pros- 10 perous." Bishop Thomas Nulty, in his lettei to the clergy and laity of the diocese of Meath, 1881. "Our present social system stands con- demned by all humane men and women. We must make an end of It, and in its place adopt either Socialism or the Single Tax. There is no other alternative. Let UN choose that which accords best with the natural law of human liberty the Single Tax." Arthur H. Weller, in "The Westminster Re- view," November, 1908. THf VALUE WKICH 5WN6S UP WH POPULATION co*5 THE LAW . "THf MflN WHO OVWJ 7rt IAND SHALL OWN THE VPUIE NO MATTER. H6W IT CCMES" .I I. CcafcCS3C- i-fc-T*" I PUBLIC \\ ', ,4 TREASURY L JLJ r4fe.,it,.^.3fcscW THE LAtV (/KITOUGMTtt 8F> THK MAH WHO OWNSTCEUKO SWRLJL ray s VALUE To ITS i.?.f. .TfBiV. rii Cartoon by J. W. Bengrough. "The Single Tax is absolutely in harmony with natural justice as between man and man; it accords with those eternal and self- evident principles of freedom that are the foundation of our American society; it Is ideal; it is forceful; it is practical." John Z. White, in "The Arena," April, 1906. "What is the Single Tax? It to a self- consistent, truly scientific and Christian the- ory of the solution of some of the most vex- ing problems of the civilization of today. That the truth contained in this theory would, if applied, transform the political, in- dustrial, social and religious condition* of today, other things being equal, is the grow- ing conviction of thousands of intelligent men throughout the world. For one, I be- lieve this with all my heart. Not only so, but on the other side, I am convinced that society cnn not be permanently improved morally or religiously without the truth con- tained in the theory of the Single Tax/' S. S. Craig, ia "The Arena," January, 1899. "There is very little reason to believe that the practical injustice to individuals that would grow out of the adoption of the Single Tax theory In any way which would be pos- sible in America, would be so great as the injury which has come to individuals through the use of steam and electricity, through the influence of labor and of cap- ital, and through the consequent necessary changes in industrial conditions and in val- ues depending on those conditions." Dr. Ly- man Abbott, in "The Rights of Man," p 142. 11 "The Single Tax guards the liberty of the individual and the rights of society. It rec- ognizes the truth in individualism and the truth in co-operation. ... It stands for freedom as against restriction. It believes in the Declaration of Independence and in natural rights and makes them effective, while it sweeps away special privileges and vested rights." George Sidney Robbins, in "The Arena," April, 1895. "The great merit of the Single Tax is its adaptibility. Indeed, it would be difficult to conceive of a religious or social propaganda which does not need to include its essential doctrine. Especially should all Christian As- sociations, taking their name from the great religious and social reformer of Judea, feel Interested in the ethical side of the Single Tax, which embodies the essence of Chris- tianity." William Lloyd Garrison, in "The Arena." January 18, 1899. "There is in the Single Tax, or natural taxation, nothing of technical socialism, which means the assumption by society of functions that are primarily individual . . . There is in natural taxation no communism, if by communism is meant the compulsory pooling of the products of human labor. . . . There is in natural taxation no taint of the anarchism of disorder. It is the rec- ognition of the ideal anarchism of law, so perfect, self-adjusting, self-operating, that no external force is needed to carry it into execution." C. B. Fillebrown, in "The Arena," January, 1899. 7 It is Practicable. t The practicability of the Single Tax may be read in history. Nowhere, of course, has the full measure been applied, but in many parts of the earth a substantial step in that direc- tion has been made. It has, for example, se- cured a firm foothold in New Zealand, in Aus- tralia (Sidney, a city of 700,000 population, now draws practically all its revenue from land values exclusively), in Kiao-Chau, China, in numerous cities in Germany, and especially in the great agricultural provinces of western Canada. And wherever the principle has been most extensively applied, there it has given the greatest satisfaction. [For further discus- sion of this topic see final chapter.] "When any man of good intelligence, good conscience,, a, civic mind, and the courage of them all, begins investigating the Single Tax, he is on the road to becoming a convert. "His investigations will sooner or later bring him to these conclusions: (1) That the Single Tax is just; (2) that the Single Tax is the most efficient, unescapable and easily col- lected tax that can be devised; (3) that the public income from the Single Tax will be 12 ufflcient to defray the expense of va*t gov- ernment Improvement* of great utility, which can not be attempted under the prenent y- tem of taxation; and (4) that the Single Tax will bring about a great equalization of In- dustrial opportunity.'* R. Bedichek, in "The Public," June 28, 1912. PART II 8 It Will Give Us a Tax System that Does Not Discourage Production and Encourage Idleness, but which Discourages Idleness and Encourages Production. One of the worst defects in our present sys- tem of taxation is that it hinders improvement. It lessens the incentive to accumulate, to build, and to beautify. The more a man does to ad- vance the material interests not only of him- self, but of the whole community, the more he is fined for doing so. Thus he who puts up a two-story house is taxed more than he who puts up only a one-story house; he who trans- forms an old, decayed, unsanitary, and unsafe factory building into a modern, safe, and healthful one, is taxed more than he who lets the old one stand; he who plants an orchard, a garden, or a field, is taxed more than he who lets his land lie waste, a breeding place for mosquitoes, pestiferous weeds and insects, or a dumping ground for junk and garbage. The Single Tax will reverse the order. It THE STRANGE FISCAL BEHAVIOR OP UNCLE SAM Affably Benign to Sterile Monopoly will not reward the slothful and punish the thrifty, but will reward the thrifty and punish the slothful. No matter how enterprising or industrious an individual is, no matter how much he produces, or repairs, or beautifies, he 13 will not be taxed more on that account; while, on the other hand, no matter how Indolent or unprogressive a man may show himself, no matter how little he does to improve the land Sternly Severe to Fruitful Industry Courtesy of "The Single Tax Review." he lives or works on, he will not, for this reason, be rewarded by lower taxation, but will have to pay as much as if he made the finest and most desirable of improvements. FIGURES THAT SPEAK FOR THEM- SELVES. A Comparison of Building: Operations In Seattle, Wash. (pop. 1912, 265,000), and Vun- eolver, B. C. (pop. 1012, 101,000.) SEATTLE. 19O1 94,569,788 (Ijnpts. taxed) 19O2 6,325,108 " 1903 6,495,781 1904 7,808,120 1005 6,704,784 19O6 11,920,488 " " 1907 13,572,770 1908 13,377,329 1909 19,084,853 1910 17,163,080 " " 1911 7,491,156 1012 8,415,325 " VANCOUVER. 1901 $ 731,716 (50% Impts. Taxed) 1902 883,607 19O3 1,426,148 " 19O4 1,968^01 " " " 1905 2,653,000 " 1906 4,308,410 25% " " 1907 5,632,744 1908 5,950,893 1909 7^58,565 1910 13,150,365 Impts. Exempted 1911 17,652,642 " 1912 19,288,332 " 14 9 It Will Give Us a Tax System that Is Not Complex and Costly but Simple and Inex- pensive, A second defect In our present system of taxation is its bewildering complexity and enormous cost of collection. At all times of the year a great horde of officials must be main- tained to peer and pry into the private affairs of the people, to assess goods of a myriad kinds and of unknown quantities and values, to un- cover countless numbers of frauds and evasions, and to bring before the bar of justice those who either ignorantly or intentionally have rendered false returns. In 1919 it cost the taxpayers of the nation $10,020,851 to collect the customs taxes; $20,149,911 to collect the in- ternal revenue taxes; and from $25,000,000 to $40,000,000 to collect the general property and other taxes. See how much more economical the Single Tax is. There will be no customs duties under this system, and no internal revenue duties. From $25,000,000 to $35,000,000 will thus be saved to the people each year. But this is not all. Land cannot be hidden or carried off like other property; its value can readily be ascertained, and, once the assessment is made, nothing but a receiver is required for collec- tion. Thus another $15,000,000 or $20,000,000, or a total of from $40,000,000 to $55,000,000 can easily be saved annually in the cost of the en- tire tax machinery. "The Single Tax Is a simple and certain method of collecting taxes fairly. The land can not be hidden, and Its value Is either -well known by every citizen of the neighborhood, or can easily be learned. There is no Inquisi- tion Into the private affairs of citizens and no temptation to false swearing or tax dodging." W. S. U'Ren in "The Annals of the Ameri- can Academy," March, 1915, p. 225. "Another advantage of the Single Tax is Its simplifying effect upon the mechanism of taxation. The present land tax -would be retained, but the Intricate system of Internal revenue and tariff collection would be abol- ished, and a great saving in the collection of taxes thus affected." Professors Burch and Nearingr, "Elements of Economics," p. 339. lO^it Will Give Us a Tax System that is Not Injurious to the Public Morals, but that is Practically Free From All Temptation to Fraud and Perjury- It is estimated that, under the existing tax regime, and as a result of indiscriminate ly- ing, cheating, dodging, bribery, false-swearing, 15 and evasion of the grossest sort, almost four dollars' worth of personal property escapes in the United States for every one that is turned in to the assessor. This frightful dishonesty Cartoon by J. W. Bengough. and corruption in the gathering of the public funds will not be possible under the Single Tax. For "land lies out of doors." It cannot be hidden nor accidently overlooked. Its value cannot be greatly misapprehended nor mis- stated. Nor is its under-appraisement possible to any appreciable extent without the conniv- ance of the whole community. Land values of a neighborhood are matters of common knowl- edge. Any intelligent resident can justly ap- praise them and every other intelligent citi- zen can fairly test the appraisement. "Public collection of land values, through taxation . . . would give us a tax that none could dodge or shift a tax that could be as- sessed and collected with a minimum of ex- pense, without inquisitorial methods, and with at least a reasonable approach to fair- ness and accuracy." Prof. L. J. Johnson, in "Harper's Weekly," July, 1913. "With the Single Tax in force and nses- ment rolls published and distributed to every taxpayer, the people would have only one .tax to watch; it being all-important, there would be every reason and opportunity for securing fair and full assessments." Byron W. Holt, "Municipal Affairs," June, 1899. "The taxation of land values -will produce more revenue than we need, and we won't have to subject our citizens to the ordeal of the seventh degree, or put them in a position where they will have to lie, perjure them- selves, and send their souls to hell." J. J. Pastoriza, Tax Commissioner of Houston, Texas, in a Letter Addressed to Mr. E. W. Prescott, of Boston, Mass., April 26, 1914. "The Single Tax would be an enormous improvement over the existing system, or over any other system which I think could 16 be devised. It would reduce taxation to a basin of absolute certainty and falrneM, ren- dering evasion impo.xiiible." Charles Francis Adams. Cited by Dr. Lyman Abbott in his "Rights of Man," p. 140. 11 It Will Give Us a Tax System that Does Not Fall Upon Individuals in Proportion to Their "Ability to Pay," but in Propor- tion to the "Benefits Received" from the Government. The old principle still underlying the exist- ing scheme of taxation is that each citizen should contribute to the support of govern- ment according to his "ability to pay." But this old principle is not merely unjust and immoral; it is THE MAIN CAUSE OF THE GROWING INEQUALITY IN THE DISTRIBU- TION OF WEALTH! The community has no more right to make men pay for community benefits according to their ability than merchants have to make them pay for goods according to their ability. Men pay for their groceries and their cloth- ing according to what they get. They should pay for community benefits on precisely the same plan. Only if it were found impossible to ascertain what benefits an individual received, would it be permissible to fall back on the clumsy and unfair principle of taxation according to ability. "But," as the Rev. S. G. Bland has well said, "to ascertain what benefits any man derives from living in a certain community is not impossible. It is not even difficult. He cannot live in such a community except on the land, and the price men are willing to pay for land represents precisely what in the gen- eral judgment are the advantages which that community provides for that location. Every- thing is taken into account in fixing that value police and fire protection, schools, churches, roads, sidewalks, social and business opportunities. The price a man is willing to pay for any piece of land apart from improve- ments is his own acknowledgment, without any evasion or falsification, that he thinks it worth that much, at least, to be a landowning member of that community. The community, then, has the right, according to its needs, to tax that man precisely in proportion to the value of the real estate he owns. If his real estate is very valuable he is enjoying great benefits and should pay proportionately. If his holdings are of little value he should pay lit- tle. If he owns no land he should pay nothing. 17 "It is obvious no man can live in that com- munity except as a landowner unless he ob- tains permission to live on somebody else's land. To obtain that permission he will have to pay that landowner at least all the latter thinks the privilege of using that land is worth. This includes all the benefits that the com- munity confers. Consequently every tenant pays for community benefits in his rent. If a further tax is imposed on him he is being com- pelled to pay his taxes twice." "By collecting the annual value of every site we call upon the user of each site for a tax or rate which is justly proportioned to the benefits which he derives from his position as user of that site." W. Chapman Wright, In "The Westminster Review," March, 1902. "A tax on the value of land would put taxation on the correct basis of obligation to pay for value received, instead of on the sole basis of ABILITY to pay. IT WOULD ALSO, HOWEVER, CONFORM TO ALL IN THE ABILITY-TO-PAY PRINCIPLE WHICH IS SOCIALLY OR ETHICALLY JUSTIFI- ABLE." Prof. L. J. Johnson, in "Harper's Weekly," July, 1913. "The Single Tax is a tax on privilege and would reverse the old order by which a man is called to pay to the state according to his ability, substituting therefore a better prin- ciple of payment, namely, that for benefits received." John B. Middleton, in "The West- minster Review," June, 1907. "Land value is the true measure of the ben- efits which the community plnces within the reach of its members." Frederick Verinder, "Land, Industry, and Taxation," p. 64. "The community has no right to exact con- tributions from its members in proportion to their ability to pay; but it has an undoubted right to claim that each should contribute toward the necessary public expenditure in proportion to the value of the advantages or opportunities, or the special benefits, it Im conferring on him." Lewis H. Berens, "To- ward the Light," Chap. XV, p. 145. "The Single Tax operates universally on all. No one can possibly escape. No one can shirk his duty. No one can shift the burden on another's shoulders, and the pressure will not be felt, being ewial in all directions and per- fectly adjusted to the advantages received.*' Dr. J. H. Stallard, "The True Basis of Economics," p. 100. 12 It Will Giro Us a Tax System that Does Not Molest "Earned" Incomes, bnt Which Taxes Only Those That Are "Unearned." Another serious fault of our present mode of taxation a legitimate offspring of the vicious "ability-to-pay" principle is that it 18 makes no discrimination between Incomes that are EARNED and Incomes that are UN- EARNED. It does not distinguish between those that are rightfully obtained through THE NATURE OP INCOME The Factor* of Production Land The Factor* of Distribution Rent _ _ Income . Unearned Labor Wages. ( Earned Capital Interest _ human industry and those that are obtained simply from the rent of natural opportunities. This fault the Single Tax will correct. It will not place EARNED incomes in the same cate- gory with the UNEARNED, but will leave the first unmolested, while it levies only on the second. Absolute justice, equality, and fair- ness in the distribution of governmental bur- dens, will thus be attained. "The first and paramount consideration in taxation should be equality of burden, and only by taking the rental value of land tn taxes can such equality be secured." Tom L. Johnson, "My Story," p. 67. "Take land values for public revenue and you distribute fairly the cost of government, besides letting the citizen oft with one pay- ment instead of the two he makes now) he now pays once to the individual landowner and once to the tax gatherer." Bolton Hall, "Thrift," p. 200. "The Single Tax on land values is a natural tax, and therefore the best tax." John Bagot, in "The Westminster Review," October, 1909. "An Income tax has always been a favorite form of tax, because it ha been regarded a well calculated to bear upon "each according to his ability." The taxation of ground rent would surely be the purest possible exemplifi- cation and application of the principle of the income tax, because it would fall upon ail those incomes 'which are unearned, which are in their nature perpetual, and which are amply able to bear the whole burden of tax- ation." C. B. Fillebrown, "A B C of Tax- ation," p. 25. "The tax upon land values is the most just and equal of all taxes. It falls, only upon those who receive from society a peculiar and valuable benefit, and upon them in propor- tion to the benefit they receive. It is the taking by the community, for the use of the community, of that value which is the crea- tion of the community. It is the application of the common property to common uses." Henry George, "Progress and Poverty," p. 418. 19 PART III 13 It Will Break the Monopoly of Agricultural Land. Few persons realize the colossal extent to which the agricultural area of the United States is now monopolized by private individ- uals who are not using it, and the serious in- dustrial consequences to which this may soon lead, unless the monopoly is broken. The De- partment of Agriculture on January 28, 1914, stated that of the 1,900,000,000 acres in the United States, 1,501,000,000 acres are usable for agricultural purposes. Since the Census Re- port of 1910 shows only 478,000,000 acres to be in farms and improved, and further since the government itself owns less than 430,000,000 acres of the above, this means that almost 600,000,000 acres of potential agricultural land Is in the hands of private monopoly. In other words, for every acre of farm land in use, about one and one-third acres (owned by private individuals) are held out of use! But this is not the most serious part of the evil. By far the greater portion of this enor- mous area is in the grasp of a mere handful of LAND MONOPOLY IN THE UNITED STATES (Total Area, 1,903,289,600 Acres) E| - Total government land. 427,200,000 acres - 22^ - total improved farm land, 1910, 478,451,750 acres - 25 j j - Total privately owned land not under cultivation, 997.643,250 acres - 52% Census Report of 1910. 20 people. Full information Is nowhere to be ob- tained, but such data as is available portrays vividly the high degree of concentration of land ownership. Thus in Arkansas 265 holders own 3,318,000 acres, or almost one-half as much as all the improved acreage of the 214,- 678 farmers in the state. In Colorado 14 known holders own 3,355,000 acres, as against 4,302,101 improved acres owned by 46,170 farmers. In New Mexico, again, the Holland Land Company has 4,500,000 acres more than three times the combined improved acreage of the 35,675 farm- ers in that commonwealth. Numerous other states, such a Texas, Florida, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Minnesota, North Dakota, and Cali- fornia, reveal even worse conditions. Finally 20,647,000 acres of land in the United States an area as large as Ireland is owned by only 29 foreign syndicates and landlords! For this grave situation there is no ade- quate solution save the land value tax. It alone can produce the desired results. It alone can pry loose this huge empire of unused soil from the clutch of monopoly, and give it to those who will build homes upon it, and who will supply a fast starving world with the necessaries of life. [See Chapter 66]. 14 It Will Break the Monopoly of Coal, Oil, and Mineral Land. As with the agricultural lands, so with the coal, oil, and mineral resources of the nation not merely is much the greater part held out of use, but it is concentrated in the hands of a very few people. Of the 16,153,000,000 tons of anthracite coal underlying the great fields of Pennsylvania, for example, more than 44 per cent is owned by the Reading Company alone. Sixty thousand acres of Connellsville coal, which Charles M. Schwab, in testifying before the Industrial Commission in 1901, said "you could not buy for $60,000 an acre," is owned by the United States Steel Corporation. 3,538,506,328,300 tons of bituminous coal are scattered throughout the country enough to last the people of the United States at their present rate of consumption for more than five thousand years but all owned or con- trolled by an insignificant number of men! The distribution of our 6,000,000 acres of oil lands is no better. How much the Standard Oil Company itself is in possession of, there is no telling. That the amount is extensive, however, is quite evident from its colossal dividends. On April 15, 1911, just before the 21 dissolution by the Sherman anti-trust law, the market value of the stock of the companies included in the Standard Oil Company was $906,233,984. On April 1, 1917 six years later -the market value of this same stock was $2,154,482,627! In these six years, according to Messrs. Carl H. Pforzheimer & Company, in shadow fa Ldn ot"h> if* People? If tie Valut isattacheji* tie people ft Cartoon by J. W. Bengrough. their book "Standard Oil Issues," the total amount of dividends distributed, "aggregate upward of a billion dollars." The words of Mr. Henry H. Klein, First Deputy Commis- sioner of Accounts, New York City ("Standard Oil or the People," p. 17), are illuminating: "At least a score of Standard Oil families are worth more than $25,000,000 each, acquired during the past thirty years, and some of them have from $50,000,000 to $250,000,000. John D. Rockefeller's private wealth is estimated at $900,000,000, and it may exceed one thousand million dollars if fully determined." Passing to the minerals we find in many cases even a higher degree of concentration. Of the 4,784,930,000 tons of available iron ore, for instance, the larger portion is controlled by the United States Steel Corporation. Its net profit in 1916 was $271,531,730 and in 1917 was more than $450,000,000. The Anaconda Copper Mining Company of Montana showed a net profit in 1916 of $58,892,- 980; the Phelps Dodge Corporation of Arizona, $21,974,263; the Kennecott Copper Corporation, $27,884,623. One of Ex-Senator W. A. Clark's mines United Verde for which he recently refused $75,000,000, was lately reported to be paying him a monthly dividend of $2,000,- 000. Finally, the Utah Copper Company is said to have in sight at its mines at Bingham 800,- 000,000,000 pounds of copper ore. And copper is today selling for 23i cents a pound! It is needless to go further. A like condition prevails in practically every other field, both mineral and stone lead, zinc, gold, silver, salt, sulphur, borax, potash, granite, rock phosphate. Unless a remedy such as that proposed by Henry George is applied, which will strike at the root of the evil, we may see ere long a centralized control of natural resources, so strong and powerful that nothing can dislodge It, short of bloody revolution! "If this principle, the principle of the Single Tax were fully applied, laud monopoly would evidently be impossible. Vacant city lot* could not be held long for higher prices, if the owner had to pay as heavy a tax an the owner of improved lots having an equal value. Farming land could not be kept out of use by the thriftless or the greedy, nor by land-grant railroads, if the unimproved were taxed as much as the improved, the loca- tions being of equal value. The coal and the ore mines of the country could not be monopolized and closed against mining, if coal land were taxed well up to its market value whether worked or not. In every di- rection this tax would put fines upon land monopolists, thereby discouraging land mon- opoly and opening to general use all the natural opportunities which are now closed by owners who expect to reap a harvest of higher prices in the future." Louis F. Post, Assistant Secretary of Labor, "Ethics of De- mocracy," p. 135. 1& It Will Break the Monopoly of Timber Land. Just as the Single Tax will destroy the mo- nopoly of coal, oil and mineral land, so also will it, when properly applied, destroy the mo- nopoly of timber land. How greatly needed such destruction is, is evident not merely from the fact that the present commercial value of the privately owned standing timber in the country NOT INCLUDING THE VALUE OF THE LAND, was estimated by the government in 1913 as "at least $6,000,000,000," but because it, like the coal, oil, and mineral resources, is now owned by a mere handful of financiers. The following sentences, taken from the report on "The Lum- ber Industry " (Bureau of Corporations, Wash- ington, 1913, Pt. I., pp. XVII-XXI), shows the present extent of the concentration of Amer- ica's privately owned standing timber: "Five-elevenths of the country's privately owned standing timber is in the Pacific North- west (California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, 23 and Montana), 1,013 billion feet. One-half of this is now owned by 37 holders. * * * In the Southern pine region there are 634 billion feet of privately owned timber. * * * Sixty-seven holders own 39 per cent, of the long leaf yellow pine, 29 per cent, of the cypress, 19 per cent, of the short leaf and lob- lolly pine, and 11 per cent, of the hardwoods. WHO OWNS THE LUMBER SUPPLY? JH - Standing timber owned by 1,802 big timber holder a , 1,208, 800, 000, OCX) board feet - 43# I f - Standing timber owned by remainder of population, 988,000,000,000 board feet - 35# tyl/lft - Standing timber owned by state and national governments, 629,000,000, 000 board feet - Federal Report on "The Lumber Industry," Pt. I, p. 12. Government Printing Office, 1914. In Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan, there are 100 billion feet of privately owned timber. In Wisconsin 96 holders have three-fourths of all the timber. In Michigan 110 holders have 66 per cent. In Minnesota 6 holders have 54 per cent, of the very valuable white and Nor- way pine, 16 per cent, of the other conifers and 2 per cent, of the hardwoods. Taking all three states, 215 holders have 65 per cent, of all the timber. * * * Three vast holdings alone, those of the Southern Pacific Company, the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company, and the Nor- thern Pacific Railway Company (including their subsidiary companies) together have 238 24 billion feet. These three holdings have enougu standing timber to build an ordinary five or six room frame house for each of the 16,000,000 families in the United States in 1900. If sawed into lumber and placed in cars, their timber would load a train about 100,000 miles long." "At a time when Congress is much per- plexed for a source of revenue which will not penalize business, It could study, very profit- ably, the effect of the war on land value**. The Investigation would show how land val- ues are the product of population, how they are public wealth now taken by private in- terests. The truth is so apparent, on investi- gation Congress might conclude to liberate Industry and business from taxes and super- taxes and avail itself of the land values cre- ated by society as revenues with which to pay the administration and maintenance of soci- ety's government." Circular of Division of Public Works, United States Department of Labor, February, 1919. "Tax reform should seek to remove all bur- dens from capital and labor and impose them on monopolies." Prof. John R. Commons, "The Distribution of Wealth," p. 258. "We recommend! "The revision of the tax- ation system so as to exempt from taxation all improvement* and tax unused Ir.ud at its full rental value." Final Report of the Com- mission on Industrial Relations, p. 132. 16 It Will Break the Monopoly of TVaterpower Land. "Eighteen corporations," says the great ex- ^/ ponent of conservation, Mr. Gifford Pinchot, "control more than one-half of the total water power used in public service throughout the United States. Furthermore, 120 public service corporations own and are holding undeveloped , and out of use an amount of water power equal / to four-fifths of all there is developed and in use by all the public service corporations In the whole United States." "By diverting ground rents and royalties from private pockets into the public treas- ury, the monopoly of natural opportunities would cease. No longer would it be profitable to own and hold idle valuable building lota> farming land, mineral deposits, water powers, water fronts, or any other of the gifts of nature to man." L. F. C. Garvin, Ex-Gov- ernor of Rhode Island, in "The Single Tax Review," January-February, 1917. 25 WHO CONTROLS THE WATERPOWER? 139 - Waterpower controlled by 59 cor- porations, 3,621,423 h.p. - 65.9$ t j - Waterpower controlled by eJLl other private individuals, 1,693,751 h.i - 29.8?$ - Waterpcirer controlled by naumicipal governments, 231,525 h.p* - 4.3# / See "Electric Power Development in the United States," Pt. II, pp. 79-80. Dep't of Agricul- ture Report, 1916. 17 It Will Break the Monopoly of Urban Land. It is conservatively estimated that not less than $20,000,000,000 worth of land in the vil- lages, towns and cities of America is being held out of service by. speculators for a still further enhancement in price. In other words, from one-third to four-fifths of every urban center in the nation, whether old or young, is vacant property. In the aged city of Boston, for example, the proportion is: Occupied, 45 per cent.; vacant, 43 per cent.; marsh, 12 per cent. This immense blockade to legitimate business can be stopped only in one satisfac- tory way by taxing the unused land as much as the used land due consideration being given, of course, to location. "Taxing economic rent into the public treasury would destroy monopoly of natural opportunities in the urban centers just as it would destroy land monopoly elsewhere." Henry George, Jr., "The Menace of Privilege," p. 393. 26 "The burden of municipal taxation nhould be mo shifted an to put the weight of taxation upon the unearned rise in value of the land Itnelf, rather than upon the Improvement*." Col. Theodore Roosevelt, in "The Century," October, 1913. "We should no longer hesitate to force un- used land* into uwe by exempting all improve- ments from taxation and by placing a tax on non-productive* the name na on productive, land." Matthew Woll, Assistant to Samuel Gompers as Chairman of the Committee on Labor of the Advisory Commission of the Council of National Defense, before the Bos- ton Conference on Housing, December, 1918. THREE-FIFTHS OF THE AVERAGE AMERI- CAN CITY CONSISTS OF VACANT GROUND Unimproved jj# Improved land Estimated by John Z. White, Chicago, 111. 18 It Will Break the Monopoly of Railroad Rights of Way, Pipe Lines, Terminals, Waterfronts, Stockyards, and Public Franchises. Railroad rights of way and public franchises are usually not thought of as land titles, but that is what they are. By an act of sovereign authority they confer rights of control for transportation or transmission purposes over narrow strips of land at terminals and between terminals. The value of these rights of way and public franchises are land values and will be so treated under the Single Tax. The application of this fiscal reform will, according to the calculations of Mr. Benjamin C. Marsh, squeeze from six to eight billion dollars' worth of "water" or land value out of the railroads alone, while in the case of street car systems, telegraph and telephone lines, electric light 27 and power, waterworks, steam heating compan- ies, etc., from one-third to two-thirds of their present fictitious capitalization will be elimi- nated. A similar effect will be registered on corporations controlling stockyards, pipe lines, and water fronts. WHO CONTROLS THE STOCKYARDS? Out of a total of 83,058,785 head of stock re- ceived at all stockyards in the United States, 64,113,530, or 77.2%, are received at yards con- trolled by five big packing: interests: |B - Stockyards controlled by the "Bic Five" packing companies - 77.2$ I 1 - Stockyards controlled by all other companies, 22.8^ S See report of "The Federal Trade Commission on the Meat Packing Industry," Pt. 1, p. 131. "When we consider that the lands to be taxed are not only town building sites and coal fields, and the immensely valuable lands that lie in or near the large cities or border our harbors, and the millions of acres of virgin farm lands, but also railroad rights- of-way, vast mineral resources, etc., then we see that in land value taxation we have an easy, simple method of forcing the hand of monopoly to relax its hold upon natural re- S sources." Bolton Hall, in "The Annals of the American Academy," May, 1915. PART IV 19 It Will Destroy the Injurious Power of the Trusts. When it is proposed to remove all tax bur- dens from improvements and personal property from stocks and bonds, machinery, sky- 28 scraper office buildings, mills, plants, factories, and the like many good folks take fright and fear that this will tend to strengthen the auto- cratic power of the trusts. On the contrary, it will completely dissipate It. For trusts do not derive their influence from commodities that are reproducible, but from commodities that are NOT reproducible. Their tribute-levying DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LAND AND WEALTH The older land gets and the more It is lifted, the MORE VALUABLE it becomes. The older wealth gets and the more it IK used, the LESS VALUABLE it become*. The following illustration, typical of all other forms of wealth, shows how the old Hotel Boylston, at the southeast corner of Boylston and Tremont streets, in Boston, steadily declined in value, while the land on which it stood, at the same time, steadily increased in value: li The BUILDING decreased in vn3 in twenty-five years to nothli .Valuation L897 Is r The LAND increased in value in twenty-five yearo raore than threefold 8 From "The A B C of Taxation", by C. B. Fille- brown, p. 22. power is not secured from the ownership of the things made by man capital but from the ownership of the things made by nature monopoly mill sites, water fronts, coal, oil, gas, timber, mineral resources, and the like, together with the products of the legislative bodies of states, such as patent and tariff priv- ileges, rights of way and public franchises. These, and these alone, are the things that make trusts bad and dangerous. Concentrate the whole burden of taxation upon these mo- nopolies and the trusts' strength will not grow, but vanish, just as Samson's strength vanished with the cutting of his hair. 29 "If the people really want to destroy the*e no-called "trusts," they must abandon the fiction of taxing the capital stock, the bonds, and the working plants of these great cor- porations, and apply the whole power of taxation to the monopolistic feature that is the basis of them all." Oliver R. Trow- bridge, "Bisocialism," p. 377. "Tax the social value of land and there would be no further need for anti- trust leg- islation or of laws for the control of public utilities." Albert J. Nock, in "The American Magazine," November, 1912. "The Single Tax would be fatal to all the trusts and monopolies that depend either on land monopoly or some form of unjust tax- ation for support. When it is borne in mind that under it there will be neither protective tariff nor revenue tariff; that there will be no Internal revenue duties; no local or stnte taxes, either direct or indirect on industry and its products, it should be easy to see that the trusts now fostered by one or more of these forms of special privilege will have lost their power to monopolize the industries they now control." Daniel Kiefer, in "The Single Tax Review," January-February, 1915. "Monopoly of landed property is even the basis of monopoly of capital and by the capi- talists." Karl Marx. See his Gotha-plat- form letter, reprinted in "The International Socialist Review," Chicago, May, 1908. "If we were to tax Mr. Rockefeller up to the full value of the oil wells, iron mines, and rlghts-of-way that his company holds . . . the fangs of that trust would be drawn." Bolton Hall, in "The Arena," Oc- tober, 1901. "Until the Single Tax makes all of our mineral resources equally available to all the community, thus destroying the special profits now accruing to those able to hold land out of use, the most oppressive trusts in exis- tence will find their way clear to retain their power, despite anti-trust laws, interstate commerce laws, and all the publicity we may by law give their operations." Jackson H. Ralston, in "The Arena," October, 1901. "A tax taking for public use all the econo- mic rent of the hard coal lands lands un- worked as well as lands worked would de- stroy the Anthracite Coal Trust . . . Ap- ply such a tax to the Steel Trust, to the Oil Trust, to the Lumber Trust, to the Salt Trust, to the Borax Trust, to the hundred and one great industrial combinations and they would go to pieces in the same fashion as the Coal Trust would." Henry George, Jr., "The Men- ace of Privilege," pp. 389-391. "There could be no oppressive organization of capital [under the Single Taxi because capital would have no privileges." Tom L. Johnson, "My Story," p. 155. 30 20 It Will Free Competition in Industry. The restraint of trade, the commercial han- dicaps, and the "jug-handled competition" from which all honest industry constantly suffers, and which are the fundamental causes of prac- tically every business failure, are the inevitable results of monopoly and special privilege. As these monopolies and special privileges will be removed when land values exclusively are taxed, it goes without saying that capital and labor will be liberated from the bonds which now shackle them, and free competition the "life of trade" will be permanently restored to its own. "It Is only by the substitution of the Single Tax on land values for all other rates and taxes that trade and Industry can really be set free." John B. Middleton, in "The West- minster Review," June, 1907. "The Single Tax, by destroying: land mon- opoly, the basic and most dangerous form of special privilege, restores free competition to a condition of full vitality, giving to every worker the freedom characteristic of primi- tive and pioneer conditions of production, while increasing his powers to produce and his share of the common product by the enor- mous advantages gained through modern ma- chinery, Intensive large scale production, ex- pert supervision and the most efficient di- vision of labor and specialization in the direction of the expenditure of energy." James F. Morton, Jr., in "The Single Tax Year Book," p. 233. "Single Tax seems to me to be the basic reform of all; the shattering of the fetters of tradition} the destruction of every obstacle that stands between man and the earth upon which he must live; the release of the inert and unused forces of human labor; the death- knell of unnatural speculation, and, for the first time in the history of the world, the entering wedge of the irresistible power of actual freedom." Benjamin F. Lindas, in "The Single Tax Review," May-June, 1917. 21 It Will Eliminate Multi-Millionaires and Sweep Away Overgrown Fortunes. Socialists and other radicals, when asked to name the underlying cause of large fortunes, invariably answer capital. Why is this? Evi- dently, It is due simply to a failure to recognize the essential difference between "capital" and "monopoly" in other words, the failure to dis- tinguish properly between what is really "capital" and what is mere "capitalization." Take the United States Steel Corporation, for example. This corporation has a capitalization 31 of some $1,500,000,000. But this colossal cap- italization is not based on the earning power of its pure capital its great furnaces, rolling mills, ships, docks, etc., for these, all com- bined, are not worth more than $300,000,000 or UNEARNED VS. EARNED INCOMES $1,899,836,618 BapMmmmiiummsMHBTaip* $li 885, 846, 491 THIS SPACE SHOWS THE TOTAL VALUE OP MORE THAN 50 IMPORT- ANT FARM CROPS PRODUCED OH ALL AMERICAN FARMS (SEE CEN- SUS REPORT) IN 1909: Cereals Whoat ... . $657 666 801 THIS SPACE Barley 92 458 671 Buckche&t 9 330 590 SHOWS Kafir corn 10 816 940 THE NET GROUND RENT Emmor and spelt.. 6,584,050 (IHCLUDINO $90, Minor Field Crops a EARNED PROFITS All other 595,674 Vegetables Potatoes 166 423 910 RECEIVED IN TWELVE YEARS Sweet potatoes... 35,429,176 Dry edible beans. 21,771,482 Other beans 241,060 (1906-1917) Other vegetables. 216^257)068 Sugar Crops sjid Products BY THE LANDOWNERS Sorghum cane 10,174,457 Sugar cane 26,416,952 Uapla sugar 6,177,805 Orchard Fruits OP THE Peaches 28,781,078 BOROUGH OP MANHATTAN Plums and prunes. 10,299,496 m* vf IV11 others 629 403 Small Fruits Grapes 22 027 961 - From The Annual Re- port of Commissioners of Taxes and Assess- ments of the City of EOT York, 1917 Strawberries.. . 17,913,926 Blackberries.. - 3,909,831 Raspberries... . 6,122,277 Cranberries... -1-.-7C6.613 All other 1,262,834 Subtropical Fruits /VP9 4UT> & OT * * IS* All other. - 143 467 IS TTTENTY-TirO SQUARE MILES 1/13 OF TEE ft*. AREA OP THE WHOLE CITY Walnuts 2 297 336 uTrt T oWUAKE 0? A TOWNSHIP. OR EQUAL IN SIZE TO EIGH- TY-EIGHT 160 ACRE All other 466)772 Seeds Cotton seed 121,076,984 urass seed 16,137,683 Flower and vege- table eeeds?.. 1,411,013 Miscellaneous.... 768,626 Miscellaneous Flowers and piartii _3_4J872J3t9 Grand Total, $1,885,846,491 $400,000,000; it is based on the earning power of the monopolies it owns on its immense coal, timber, and ore lands, its water fronts, railroad sites, together with its numerous tariff and patent privileges. Or take the Stand- ard Oil Company as another illustration. The market value of the stocks of the various com- panies included in this great octupus, on April 1, 1917, was $2,154,482,627. But only a small 32 part of this enormous sum really represented capital. The major portion represented merely the power to appropriate the fruits of other men's toil in short, monopoly. The same holds true of every other industry, whether mining, lumbering, manufacturing, transporta- tion, communication, or exchange. It is not the ownership of capital itself, that is respon- sible for over-grown fortunes, but monopoly, or land values. Throw the entire burden of taxation on these land values, and the great fortunes will be laid in the dust. "If the size of fortunes i taken Into ac- count, it will be found that perhaps 95% of the total values represented by these million- aire fortunes is due to those investments classed n land values and natural monopo- lies, and to competitive industries aided by mien monopolies." Prof. John R. Commons, "The Distribution of Wealth," p. 253. "All the unwieldy fortunes, and all which have had an undesirable origin, owe their existence to some form of monopoly, which could not hrive existed under the natural ays- tern of taxation." Thomas G. Shearman, "Na- tural Taxation," p. 211. "Whoever examines such large fortui whether they are those of territorial mag- nates, as the Duke of Westminster and Bed- ford, the Enri of Durham, the Marquis of Bute, or the Astor family; or whether they arc those of commercial and industrial mag- nates, an the Rothschilds, Rockefellers, Goulds, Vanderbilts, and others can see at once that they mainly consist, not of real wealth, but of the value of monopoly rights." Max Hirsch, "Democracy Versus Socialism," p. 398. '"When you investigate the source of the Incomes [of capitalists], their 'capital' prove* to be nearly all land." Louis F. Post, As- sistant Secretary of Labor, in "The Taxation of Land Values," Note 86. "The chief sources of the enormous indi- vidual wealth In this country are these three i Land, natural forces, state franchises. The multi-millionaires have accumulated their multi-millions, not chiefly as a product of their own Industry; they have accumulated them by getting possession and control of the land and Its contents, the natural forces of the world, and the franchises which the state has created." Dr. Lyman Abbott, "The Industrial Problem," pp. 140, 141. 22 It Will Insure a Just Distribution of Wealth. Not merely, however, will the Single Tax cut down the incomes of the predatory rich; it will give to all who produce, or who render a service to mankind, the full fruits of their 33 toil. This will be more clearly seen if we con- sider for a moment the factors of production and distribution as they are recognized in political economy. Three things, say econo- mists, are required to produce wealth land, labor, and capital. Land, of course, refers to nature, the whole material universe oceans, lakes, agricultural soil, coal deposits, mineral beds, forests, urban ground, waterfalls, rail- road sites, etc. Labor refers to human exer- tion, and capital again, simply to the "tools of production," or to that part of wealth which is used to produce more wealth. Three things, also, divide the wealth pro- duced rent, wages, and interest. Rent is that part of the wealth produced which goes to the landowner for the use of the land; wages, that 1607 THE RISE OP L.AND VALUES 1700 1800 1900 * Value of land in 1919 - 125,000,000,000 1 Value of land in 1607 - "0" - __^^ y (Estimated from the latest official data.) part of the wealth produced which goes to the laborer for services performed; and interest, that part of the wealth produced which goes to the capitalist for the service of capital. Now the tendency of material progress (and by material progress we mean increase of population, improvements in the arts of pro- duction and exchange discoveries, inventions, scientific knowledge, etc.), is always to in- crease the tribute of the landowners; never to increase the earnings of the capitalists and laborers. It is never to advance proportion- ately either wages or interest, but always to advance rent, to raise the value of land. Thus agricultural land that owned by speculators as well as that owned by farmers has, in 300 years, under the influence of material progress, risen from to more than $38,000,000,000; coal, oil, gas, and all mineral deposits from to more than $27,000,000,000; forests from to more than $6,000,000,000; railroad rights of way and public franchises from to more than $15,000,000,000; and town and city lots 34 from to more than $40,000,000,000 In short, all land has, within this period of time, risen from to a grand total of approximately $125,- 000,000,000! Upon this gigantic sum the land- TI1I-: DISTRIBUTION OF LAND VALUES Urban land $40,000,000,000 Agricultural land 38,000,000,000 Oil, gas, and mining land $27,000,000,000 Franchises and R.R. right s -of -fray $15,000,000,000 Timber land 16,000,000,000 Water fronts and water powers $2,000,000,000 owning classes are now collecting a rent vari- ously estimated at from $4,000,000,000 to $6,- 000,000,000 a year, above all taxes! This unsocial tendency the Single Tax will stop. No longer will the non-producers gain at the expense of the producers, but the pro- ducers will gain at the expense of the non- producers. By taking the economic rent away from the landowners and turning it, in lieu of taxation, into the treasury of the state, the capitalists and laborers will receive in the future all that they are rightly entitled to receive the full advantages of material prog- ress, the complete benefits of advancing civil- ization. "Every Improvement In the circumstance* of the society tends either directly or indi- rectly to raise the real rent of land, to in- crease the real wealth of the landlord, his power of purchasing the labour or the pro- duce of the labour of the people." Dr. Adam Smith, "Wealth of Nations," Book I, Chap. XL "The ordinary progress of society which increases in wealth is at all times tending to augment the incomes of landlords! to give them a greater amount of the wealth of the community independently of any trouble or outlay incurred by themselves. They grow richer as it were, in their sleep, without working, risking, or economising." John Stuart Mill, "Principles of Political Economy," Book V, Chap. II, Sec. 6. "The large additions to the wealth of the country [England] has gone neither to profits nor to wages, nor yet to the public nt large, 35 bat to swell n fund ever growing: even while its proprietors sleep the rent roll of the owner* of the soil." J. E. Cairnes, "Some Principles of Political Economy Newly Ex- pounded." "Every permanent improvement of the soil, every railway and road, every betterment in the general condition of society, every facil- ity given to production, every stimulus sup- plied to consumption, raises rent." Prof. Thorold Rogers, "Six Centuries of Work and Wages." 2a It Will Lower the Cost of Living. How will the taxation of land values lower the cost of living? In several ways: (1) Production will be enormously increased. Natural resources of all kinds being available on every side and capital easier to secure, the output of food, clothing, and shelter will be vastly greater than it is today. (2) The consumer will be relieved of the payment of all taxes on the products of in- dustry. Under our present system, as business men and economists well know, the "ultimate consumer" must always pay, in the price of the goods or services he buys, for all taxes levied upon working capital in any of its forms, whether in the shape of depots, rolling stock, elevators, ships, machinery, factories, office buildings, or warehouses, and whether owned by railroads, transmission companies, miners, lumbermen, manufacturers, wholesalers, or re- tailers. (3) The private tribute collected by cor- porations from consumers as a result of the taxes levied upon business will be stopped. Take, for example, the excess-profits tax. This tax, in 1919, yielded the government over $2,000,000,000 of revenue. But for the $2,000,- 000,000 that the government got, from $5,000,- 000,000 to $10,000,000,000 more, according to various estimates, were taken from the con- sumers in higher prices of goods. Chairman William B. Colver of the Federal Trade Com- mission in an address delivered before the National Wholesale Dry Goods Association in New York (January, 1920) said: "The excess-profit tax, in my opinion, is one of the cornerstones of the present unhealthy and intolerable price structure in this country. The excess-profits tax is passed on and multiplied until about four or five dollars is taken out of your pocket, my pocket, and the pocket of the man on the street for every dollar that finally gets to the public treasury." The same profiteering is true in the case of the indirect taxes particularly the tariff duties. For every dollar that the tariff puts 36 into the national treasury, a great many more dollars are taken away from the public and placed into private hands. Mr. Lee Francis Lybarger in his illuminating work, "The Tariff," (Chap. XVII, p. 66) says: "Taking the entire Payne-Aldrich Tariff it would be a safe estimate to say that for every dollar it gives the government it puts seven dollars into private hands. Every year our government under our direction in order to raise $300,000,000 for itself, takes out of our pockets something like eight times that amount or $2,400,000,000." All told, therefore, from two hundred to five hundred dollars a year would be a moderate estimate of the average amount that each family in the nation will gain in lower prices by the deflection of all taxes from the products of industry to the value of land. "The abolition of Indirect taxes and mon- opoly charges would add from $100 to $200 a year to the purchasing power of each fam- ily. The price of commodities would fall to this extent. But this is not all. The aboli- tion of all taxes upon houses, building, and things which labor produces would still fur- ther reduce the cost of living. It would cheapen the cost of everything consumed. For taxes upon labor products are shifted on from the producer to the consumer until they are finally lodged with him who buys, with these taxes abolished prices would still fur- ther fall." Frederic C. Howe, Ex-Com- missioner of Immigration, in "Privilege and Democracy In America," p. 277. "A tax on the monopoly value of land can not be shifted * * * Competition, there- fore, beginning at the source of production must beneficially affect the laborer, raise his wage, lower the cost of commodities, and re- move the irregularities in the distribution of wealth." Francis Neilson, "The Old Free- dom", p. 171. 24 it Will Reduce the Rent of Land. Another way in which the taxation of land values exclusively will lower the cost of living is by reducing the rent of land. The present rent is too high. It is fictitious. It is the inevitable consequence of land speculation the inevitable result of holding desirable land out of use. Since the application of the Single Tax will make unprofitable the monopolization of vacant land, and further since this vacant land now exceeds both in country and city, the amount which is in actual use, we may safely expect, under this reform, to see the rent of all ground considerably reduced. 37 TAKING IT ALL, From The Chicago Daily News. "The direct tendency of (land value) taxa- tion is to break down land monopoly, and thus to reduce rents." Lewis H. Berens, "Toward the Light," p. 146. "A tax upon the value of bare land-forms, irrespective of improvements, . . . tends to decrease the rental values of all land-forms." Oliver R. Trowbridge, "Bisocialisra," p. 256. "The taxation of land values will have th effect of reducing the rent paid for the use of land. There will be competition among the "owners" of sites rather than among: the users of sites." W. Chapman Wright, in "The Westminster Review," March, 1902. 25 It Will Stop the Traffic in Speculate Land Tallies and Tremendously Increase the De- mand for the Products of Labor. It is a common belief among the large ma- jority of men that the presence of land in the market that is to say, the habitual buying and selling of land values, whether mineral, timber, waterpower, agricultural, urban, or public franchise is not detrimental to the interests of producers is, in fact, a "good thing." A more terrible mistake has never been made. For of all the factors injurious to the pro- ducers as such, that of the traffic in land val- ues is the most destructive. The reason is sim- ple. When men buy speculative land values they furnish employment to no one, for land is a creation of nature. It does not have to be produced. When men buy other things than land, such as food, clothing, shelter, luxuries or conveniences of any kind, they furnish em- ployment, in varying degrees, to every laborer in the country. For unlike land, these things must be made by labor before they can exist. Now, since "men cannot keep their cake and eat it too," it is clear that the higher the price of the land they buy, the less they will have to spend for the products of labor, while conversely, the lower the price of the land they purchase, the more they will have to spend for such products. It follows, therefore, that if the selling value of land is greatly re- duced by the Single Tax method, if land be made cheap to men so there is no necessity for them to pay great sums for it, they will not merely enjoy many more of the comforts and luxuries of life, but the demand for consump- tion will be tremendously increased. How much larger a market for goods than already exists, will thus be created, can only be Im- agined. The total amount of land of all kinds now sold in the United States each year, aver- ages, according to the best of estimates, fully $3,000,000,000 a year. Reducing this by no more than one-half and the new market that will spring into existence from this source alone will be equal to thirteen times the value of all the goods sold to the countries of Asia in 1914; twelve times the value of all the goods sold to the countries of South America; or equal to the value of all the goods exported to all the countries of Europe in the same year. TAX VIEWS OP THREE GREAT AMERICAN LABOR LEADERS "The Single Tax is the only thing that has in it the final solution of our industrial prob- lems. It is the only thing that will give the working man a chance, and to Labor, it own." Frank P. Walsh, Former Joint Chair- man with William H. Taft of the National War Labor Board, in an Address in Labor Temple, Kansas City, Mo., November 6, 1912. "I believe in the Single Tax. I count it a great privilege to have been a friend of Henry George and to have been one of those who helped to make him understood in New York and elsewhere." Samuel Gompers. President American Federation of Labor, in an Address at San Francisco, Cal., Dec. 1, 1913. 39 "With the Single Tax fully realized* there would be no more possibility of subjugating labor and monopolizing business with paper agreements, than of holding back the water* of Niagara with a paper dam." Louis F. Post, Assistant Secretary of Labor, in "Ethics of Democracy," Part IV, p. 141. 20 It Will Settle for All Time the Perplexing Problem of Markets. Not only, however, will the elimination of speculative land values from public franchises and city lots to agricultural ground and timber rights, prodigiously enlarge the demand for consumption, but the greatly reduced prices that will result from the Single Tax, will oper- ate in the same way. Think what an increase in purchasing power, resulting from no taxes and lesser rent, and amounting at least to $300 per family each year, means to the people. More and better food, more and finer clothing, more and bigger houses to live in, more comforts and luxuries, more trips to the mountains or the sea shore, more of everything that makes life worth living. Every rural district and metropolitan center will see consumers crowd- ing the retail houses. The retail houses, ex- hausted of stock, will rush the wholesale mer- chants; the wholesale merchants, the manu- facturers; the manufacturers, the miners, the lumbermen, the fishermen, and the farmers. Every wheel of industry will be called into play. Every producer from railroad president to messenger boy will be stimulated to activ- ity. No longer therefore will the supply of goods exceed the demand, but the demand for goods will exceed the supply. Nor is there the least danger that this con- dition will cease until all human wants have been satisfied. For so long as economic rent is taken for public purposes and the fruits of industry remain untaxed, the purchasing ability that will be given to consumers from the very first, will not diminish, but grow. Every in- crease in productive power will further reduce prices, while land and fictitious stock specula- tion at the same time will remain lifeless. "The adoption of the principle of the taxa- tion of land values offers, I believe, the only means of reviving trade, the only means of placing industry on a sound, honest and per- manent footing." Arthur Withy, in "The Westminster Review," June, 1895. "The Single Tax would give all men an approximately equal chance to earn a living; nd it is the only remedy yet proposed that 40 I* at all likely to do so." T. Scanlon, in "The Westminster Review," December, 1905. "Effective demand for goods would [under the Single Tax] always exceed the output." Tom L. Johnson, "My Story," p. 155. PARTY 27 it Will Eliminate Involuntary Unemploy- ment With the effective demand for the products and services of labor constantly outstripping the supply, and further, with natural opportu- nities open to whoever desires to use them, there can be no such thing as involuntary unemployment. "For the first two hundred years of it* settlement the United States had no tramp at the edge of starvation. Is it possible foi us to reconstruct the economic conditions which existed during: these first two hundred years? It seems to me that it is. ... Fifty-five per cent of the arable lands are at present held out of use. . . . Any system of taxation whereby land values were taxed to such an extent that it would be unprofit- able to keep them unused would bring about this desirable condition." William C. Gorgas, Surgeon-General, U. S. A., [Ret.] in "The Con- structive Quarterly," June, 1916. "The taxation of land values would tre- mendously increase the demand for labor. This increase in the demand would have the snine effect upon wages as a decrease in the supply. All of the land in the country would seek tenants and workers. Mines would have to be operated to meet the burdens of taxation. So would city sites. So would farm*. Almost immediately men would be masters of the situation. The wage-earner would find his nominal wages greatly in- creased, and the price of all the necessities of life correspondingly diminished." Fred- eric C. Howe, Ex-Commissioner of Immigra- tion. "Privilege and Democracy in America," p. 281. 28 It Will Kaise the True Wages of Labor. The price of labor, like the price of every- thing else wheat, corn, iron, etc. is deter- mined by the law of supply and demand. When labor is scarce, wages are high; when labor is plentiful, wages are low. Since the Single Tax will bring about a permanent condition of more jobs than men, instead of as now, less jobs than men, wages will not merely rise above their present low level, but they will stay there. How high wages will go, competi- tion, of course, only can determine. The limit will not be reached, however, until the full value of the goods produced, or services ren- dered, has been approached. 41 "Under the Single Tax jobs would be hunt- ing for men, instead of men hunting 1 for jobs. The inevitable effect of that would be the dlsbandment of the army of unemployed, in- pendence of workmen." Louis F. Post, As- sistant Secretary of Labor, "Ethics of De- mocracy," p. 139. "The Single Tax . . . will at once place employers and employees on terms of equality and enable the workers to demand good wages and to refuse bad wages, and thus establish perfectly equality of opportunity and absolute justice for all." Arthur H. Weller, in "The Westminster Review," No- vember, 1908. "A tax on land values will open up land freely to agricultural production in all its branched, assuring greatly widened oppor- tunities of employment, higher wages, and re- duced cost of living." R. L. Outhwaite, Member Parliament, England, in "Land Values," (London), December, 1916. THE TRUE ROAD TO HIGHER WAGES 29 It Will Dispense With the Need of Labor Organizations; Abolish Strikes, Lockouts, Boycotts, Riots, and Massacres in Industry. There is nothing mysterious about labor unions, or strikes, or boycotts, or industrial wars. Their origin is perfectly clear. They are the inevitable result of economic injustice of wages insufficient to maintain a decent standard of life, of excessive hours of toil, of needless occupational risks, and of the ruth- less exploitation of labor by monopoly and spe- cial privilege. Under the Single Tax, however, these conditions will pass away. Not merely will the cost of living be lower and employment far more abundant, but wages will be higher, will be equal to the full value of the work per- formed. There will thus be no occasion for men to strike for higher pay or shorter hours of toil, or to exercise violence in any way in securing economic justice. For if men are dissat- isfied with the terms and conditions of one employer they can easily and quickly go to another. Or, if working for others does not ap- 42 peal to them, then, natural opportunities being equally free to all, they can conveniently em- ploy themselves. The oppressive power of "capitalism," therefore, will be gone. Labor will be master of the situation. And with la- bor ruling supreme in the realm of industry, strikes, lockouts, boycotts, riots, and industrial warfare, will pass into history. "With the release of all industry from tax- ation . . . such an era of general pros- perity and active enterprise would ensue that there would be plenty of employment for all and strikes and lockouts would cease." Charles E. Benton, in "The American Journal of Politics," April, 1893. "There could be no coercive labor unions [under the Single Tax] because every worker would be his own all-sufficient union." Tom L. Johnson, "My Story," p. 155. "If economic rent were appropriated by taxation, there would be no occasion for trade unions, and working men would no longer be required In self-defense to submit to the tyranny of labor organizations. . . . Walking delegates, strikes and boycotts, would be unheard of." Henry F. Ring, "The Problem of the Unemployed," p. 237. "American laborers would then think no more of organizing against 'capital,' as Priv- ilege is mistakenly called, than they would think of organizing against a race of men whose only records are a few scattered ruin* and picture writings engraved on fragments of stone. Strikes and lockouts, sweeping en- Joining orders and the glisten of bayonets in industrial affairs would belong to a past and forgotten age/* Henry George, Jr., "The Menace of Privilege," p. 412. "The so-called conflict between capital and labor is at bottom a conflict between capital and labor on the one hand and the owners of opportunities on the other." Prof. John R. Commons, "The Distribution of Wealth," p. 249. "Nothing else [than the Single Tax] is needed to acompllsh the emancipation of the workers and all schemes for organizing per- sons and things in which the soul of the Socialist delights are, insofar as they restrict Individual liberty, unnecessary and mis- chievous." Arthur H. Wheeler ,in "The West- minster Review," November, 1908. "Tax the social value of land and . . . there would be no need for labor legislation, for if the land is kept in competition for labor in a free market, as under natural tax- ation it would inevitably IK-, wages, hours, and conditions of labor would regulate them- selves automatically." Albert J. Nock, in "The American Magazine," November, 1912. 43 80 It Will Check the Growth of Syndicalism, Bolshevism, Communism, Anarchism, and Similar Revolutionary Movements. Like strikes and violent conflicts in industry, so are all revolutionary movements, such as syndicalism, anarchism, and bolshevism, the logical fruits of economic injustice, and must necessarily disappear when such injustice has been removed. "The Single Tax will do away with the violent movements where passion and bitter- ness are threatening the social order, such, for instance, as the I. W. W. revolt and the like." Robert D. Towne, in "The Aero," No- vember, 1917. "I am afraid that people will regard what I say as stupid, but I must say it: The lead- ers of the revolutionary movement, as well as the government officials, are not doing the only thing that would pacify the people at once. And the only thing that would pacify the people now is the introduction of the sys- tem of Henry George." Count Leo N. Tol- stoy, Russia. Quoted by Herman Bernstein in the "New York Times," July 20, 1908. "The truth in the Single Tax doctrine i worth following,'. It is worth living for, and if need be, dying for. It is a truth that will make men free. It will make them inde- pendent. It will make them lords of their own destinies, masters of their own fortunes." Warren Worth Bailey, Ex-Congressman from Pennsylvania, in an Address Before the 42nd Annual Conference on Charities and Cor- rections, Baltimore, Md., May 15, 1915. 51 It Will Clear the Channels of the Monetary System. Strange though it may appear, the removal of all taxation from banks, banking equipment, money, and all instruments of credit, will do more to settle the currency question in the United States than any other act which is a legislative possibility. For money is to com- merce and industry what blood is to the human body. If its freest circulation is retarded or restricted, industry will suffer just as the human body will suffer when the flow of blood is shut off. Now, the effect of the taxation of banks and money is like the effect of the taxation of every other product of labor it tends to make banks and money scarce and consequently dear. This principle holds good in towns and cities as well as anywhere else, but if we would see the working of it in all its baldness, we must go to the agricultural districts. Here the transactions being comparatively small in 44 size and few in number, the legitimate banking business is not a get-rich-quick scheme at any time, and when heavily taxed by the farmers, as it invariably is, it is distinctly unprofitable. The result is that an incorporated bank in the rural communities, capable of lending money profitably to the farmers at from 3 to 8 per cent, is rarely found. The further result is that farmers wanting credit or loans, are com- pelled to appeal to local storekeepers or money lenders, who, because of their ineffi- ciency, their lack of facilities, and the great risk and expense involved in assuming the function of bankers, must charge their patrons anywhere from 10 to 60 per cent! In the southwestern states, for example where legiti- mate bankers have never been able to pene- trate the rural districts, simply because of the crushing taxes imposed upon them by the farmers themselves, the Federal Commission on Industrial Relations, in its investigation of agricultural conditions in 1915 (See Final Report, p. 129), found: "The average interest rate on all farm loans is 10 per cent., while small tenants in Texas pay 15 per cent or more. In Oklahoma the conditions are even worse, in spite of the en- actment of laws against usury. Furthermore, over 80 per cent, of the tenants are regularly in debt to the stores from which they secure their supplies, and pay exorbitantly for this credit. The average rate of interest on store credit is conservatively put at 20 per cent, and in many cases as high as 60 per cent." Until people abandon the shortsighted policy of taxing banks, deposits, notes, mortgages, and other instruments of credit and exchange, "cheap" and plentiful money is a financial impossibility. "The adaption of natural [Single] taxation would solve the American currency problem, by opening banks of deposit in every nook and corner, free of taxation; thus giving to every farmer precisely the same facilities for exchange as are enjoyed by the wealthiest merchant or manufacturer, and making a large supply of either coin or notes super- fluous." Thomas G. Shearman, "Natural Tax- ation," p. 222. 32 It Will Prevent Panics and Industrial Depressions. "A financial panic," says Henry F. Ring ("Problem of the Unemployed," p. 97), occurs as follows: "When, after a period of dull times, one of comparative prosperity arises, and many peo- ple begin to 'save money/ much of the wealth 45 which thus accumulates is naturally invested in land. It goes into city and town lots, and farming lands, and into stocks and securities based in large part on the ownership of land, including the ownership of mineral deposits, and the riglits-of-way and immensely valuable terminals of railroads, and privileges enjoyed by public utility companies. Stocks based on land begin once more to slowly increase in price, as more and more wealth accumulates to be invested in something from which ulti- mate gain or a permanent revenue can be derived. Soon prices begin to advance more rapidly. This renders such investments at- tractive from a speculative and gambling point of view, and prices advance with greater and greater rapidity. This stimulates further in- vestment and prices advance still niors rapidly, and go still higher and higher. After awhile a speculative craze takes hold of many peo- ple, and the prices often reach the point at which it is impossible for employers to reap any reward in connection with new enterprises upon vacant lands, after payment of prevailing rates of interest on the amount required in purchasing them. It is invariably the case, just before the "boom" bursts and the panic begins, that the natural opportunities for em- ployment, such as the vacant farming lands referred to as held at one hundred and fifty dollars per acre, the unused factory sites, min- eral deposits and water fronts, the idle busi- ness and residence lots, all become so dear, and so much wealth is demanded for the mere privilege of using them, that capital sees no profit in giving employment to labor in con- nection with them. Meantime, the laboring population is naturally increasing. Surplus labor resulting from such increase can only obtain work in connection with these unused lands, which are held at prohibitive prices. And rents also advance in sympathy with the increase in land values. The householder and business man are required to pay more and more to the landlord, and the longer the "boom" lasts, the higher and higher is the amount of tribute which the land owner de- mands. Finally, when the burden upon wealth- producing enterprises can be borne no longer, when prices charged for wealth-producing op- portunities have been so inflated that future valuations can be no longer discounted even in the mind of the most credulous and optimis- tic of speculators, the crash comes. It usually comes suddenly, but it may come gradually. 46 Its coming under existing conditions is as inev- itable after a period of prosperity as the com- ing of winter after summer." The moral is plain. Destroy the gambling value of natural opportunities so that "booms" in real estate and fictitious stocks and bonds cannot take place, and recurring panics and industrial depressions, will soon be among the things that were. "There In hut one cure for recurring busi- ness depression. There In no other. That is the Single Tax the abolition of all taxes on the employment and produce of labor and the taking of economic or ground rent for the use of the community by taxes levied on the value of land, irrespective of improve- ment." Henry George, "Our Land and Land Policy," p. 331. 33 It Will Remedy the Tariff Problem. Under the Single Tax there will be no tariff problem to monopolize the attention of legis- lators and annoy the people because there will be no tariff. The customs houses will be gone. Trade will be free. "With the inauguration of this system of [Single] taxation . . . the fallacies of Protection would cease to charm men's ears and disturb their understanding, and true Free Trade, which means freedom to produce ns well as freedom to exchange, would neces- sarily be established as the only equitable policy." Lewis H. Berens, "Toward the Light," p. 208. 34 It Will Remedy the Immigration Problem. During the first two hundred years of American colonization there was no such thing as an immigration problem simply be- cause land was cheap, work plentiful, and wages always high. The Single Tax will per- manently restore these conditions and in doing so will necessarily dispose of the immigration problem. "The problem of immigration is not n problem of people; it is a problem of land. . . . The Single Tax will solve the land problem. And it alone will solve the immi- gration problem." Frederic C. Howe, Ex- Commissioner of Immigration, in "The Sin- gle Tax Year Book," pp. 257, 258. 35_It will Stimulate Enormously the Produc- tion of Wealth. The destruction of land monopoly, the opening up of natural opportunities to capital and labor, together with the abolition of all taxation upon the fruits of human effort, which 47 now bears down, like a brake on a wheel, upon every joint of the industrial mechanism, will alone give a tremendous impetus to the pro- duction of wealth. But this is not all. More important still in enlarging the annual volume of wealth will be the indirect results of the new economic adjustment the elimination of strikes, lockouts, and industrial violence; the virtual disappearance of robberies, incendiar- ism, and other crimes against property now committed by the disinherited and oppressed masses; the addition of hundreds of thousands of industrial parasites to the national working force; the prevention of wholesale sickness and disease; the lengthening of the span of human life; and especially the much greater intelligence, inventiveness, and efficiency of all the working people. These, all combined, will add a wealth-producing power to labor such as the world has never known. "By removing taxes from commodities, from all of the products of labor and capital, a mighty impulse would be given to the pro- duction of wealth." L. F. C. Garvin, Ex-Gov- ernor of Rhode Island, in "The Single Tax Re- view," January-February, 1917. "To abolish the taxation which, acting and reacting, now hampers every wheel of ex- change and presses upon every form of in- dustry, would be like removing an immense weight from a powerful spring. Imbued \vith fresh energy, production would start into new life, and trade would receive a stimulus which would be felt to the remotest arteries." Henry George, "Progress and Poverty," Book IX, Chap. I. "Everywhere [under the Single Tax] Im- provements and production will be encour- aged." Josiah C. Wedgwood, Member Par- liament, England, in "The Westminster Re- view," February, 1908. "The Single Tax would stimulate every branch of industry except the industry of holding vacant land out of use; this would be killed." Judson Grenell, "The Single Tax," p. 3. "The adoption of natural [Single] taxation would remove all shackles from commerce, trade, manufactures, agriculture, and indus- try of every kind, giving them a stimulus nch as they have never known." Thomas G. Shearman, "Natural Taxation," p. 223. "Taxes on the full monopoly value of land must stimulate production, for land not used, and land undor-used, will be forced by the tax into use." Francis Neilson, "The Old Freedom," p. 171. "How can production be increased? That is easy. Free the two sources of production. What are those two sources? L>and and labor. Get the land Into use. Unfenee the heltl-out earth. Release all the natural resources to development. And remove all taxes upon all the forms of Industry necessary to produc- tion There is no other way of la- creasing production In the volume that will be necessary for the future, and only In this way can the worker be assured of getting; the full value of his labor." William Marion Reedy, in "Reedy's Mirror," Aug. 7, 1919. "The removal of taxes from productive business and the imposition of taxes upon the privilege of holding land will cause the best use of the best land, because such pro- cedure will brins the greatest reward. It will pay. It will be sound business. And sound business policy is the only policy that will develop the greatest national strength." Extract from "Unscrambled Industry," a pamphlet issued by the Committee of Manu- facturers and Merchants on Federal Taxa- tion," 1346 Altgeld St., Chicago, 111. PART VI 36 It Will Abolish Involuntary Poverty. Poverty that is to say INVOLUNTARY and UNDESERVED poverty cannot exist when each man is given, not merely every opportu- THE LORD GIVETH AND THE LANDLORD TAKETH AWAY Courtesy of "The United Committee for the Taxation of Land Values," London. nity to secure steady employment at whatever occupation he is best fitted for, but also is awarded the full product of his toil. 49 THE RESULT Courtesy of the Newark Evening News. "The purpose of the Single Tax Is much more than a mere fiscal reform in the method of raising public revenues. When fully ap- plied it will abolish land speculation and in- voluntary poverty." W. S. U'Ren in "The Annals of The American Academy," March, 1915. "Poverty can be abolished by destroying its cause lund monopoly and the Single Tax is the easiest method by which this re- sult can be accomplished." Daniel Kiefer, in "The Single Tax Review," January-February, 1915. "That the appropriation of the rental value of land to public uses in the form of a tax would . . . abolish involuntary poverty, la clear." The Rev. Edward McGlynn, in His Doctrinal Statement Presented to the Au- thorities of The Church of Rome, 1892. "Banishing as It [the Single Tax] would, not only poverty, but the fear of poverty, it must have such further and far-reaching re- sults upon the higher and better develop- ment of the race, that from our present lim- ited outlook appear too idealistic to be pos- sible." Andrew Scott, in "The Westminster Review," October, 1906. "If we would solve the poverty problem we must untax labour and capital and tax land values we must untax trade and industry and tax instead monopoly and privileges." Edward McHugh, in "The Westminster Re- view," May, 1907. "To exterminate involuntary poverty, work- ers of every station and of whatever occupa- tion must secure the values which they create and produce. . . . The only effective 50 method of doing; thin 1* to tax ground rent* Into the public treasury and than relieve the workers of the burdensome tuxes now levied npon them." F. C. Leubuscher, "Proceedings of The National Conference of Charities and Correction," p. 536 (1915). "The Single Tax cause in the cause of Christ and of His disinherited brethren. . . . It is the only remedy for involuntary pov- erty.*' John Bagot, in "The Westminster Review," October, 1909. 37_It Will Solve the Child Labor Problem. "Involuntary poverty underlies child labor just as it underlies all our national ills/' "Children in Bondage" (p. 274), by Edwin Markham, Judge Ben B. Lindsey, and George Creel. "The phenomenon of child labor, is the in- evitable accompaniment of low wages, and low wage result from a condition of land monopoly which the Single Tax will destroy." Joseph Dana Miller, in "The Single Tax Year Book," p. 246. 38 It WU1 Stop the Exploitation of Female Labor. "The entrance of women as wage earners into modern factory, mercantile, and other mechanical establishments and offices," says the United States Public Health Bulletin, No. 76 (p. 28), "is a factor * * * largely, If not entirely due to economic pressure. Accord- ing to the census of 1910, of the 8,000,000 women ordinarily termed 'women in industry,' nearly 37 per cent., or about 3,000,000 are en- gaged in various occupations in stores, mills, and factories. Practically every investigation of the reasons for the entrance of women into industry has shown that their presence in industrial occupations is almost wholly in response to the necessity for earning a living." "Such questions as women competing: with men for employment, shorter hours of labor, equal pay for equal work, are but phases of the grreat land question. . . . Settle this question and labor everywhere will receive Its full reward." Eliza Stowe Twitchell, In "The Arena," October, 1894. "There will disappear [under the Single Tax] child labor, and the labor of married women in factories, while such employment for unmarried women would either be more and more shunned or would be carried on under grreatly improved conditions. Fathers and husbands, in receipt of ample wagres, would as little think of sending; their wives and children into factories as do the mem- bers of the middle class now; and parents would not allow their g;rown-np daughters to work there except for short hours and in the absence of adequate household labor." Max Hirsch, "Democracy Versus Socialism," p. 401. 51 89 It Will Dispose of the Illiteracy Question. There are 5,516,163 illiterates over ten years of age in the United States a number prac- tically as large as the entire population of the six New England states. Furthermore, of the 19,693,007 children from five to eighteen years of age, actually enrolled in the public schools of the nation, a large majority never even get out of the lower grades. What is the reason? There is but one answer POVERTY. Says the Federal Commission on Industrial Relations (Final Report, p. 12) : "Statistics show that only one-third of the children in our public schools complete the grammar school course, and less than 10 per cent, finish high school. Those who leave are almost entirely the children of the workers, who, as soon as they reach working age, are thrown, immature, ill-trained, and with no practical knowledge, into the complexities of industrial life. In each of four industrial towns studied by the Bureau of Labor Statis- tics, more than 75 per cent, of the children quit school before reaching the seventh grade." "Two hundred thousand dollars dedicated to the establishment of the Single Tax would do more for the human race than $20O,OOO,OOO directed to the education of individual mem- bers of the community in whatever way the sum were expended." Hon. L. F. Garvin, Ex- Governor of Rhode Island, in "The Arena," July, 1906. 40 It Will Diminish Crime and Wipe Out Com- mercialized Tice. That numerous types of crime, such as bur- glary, larceny, forgery, arson, murder, suicide, etc., owe their origin primarily to want and the fear of want, and will diminish or dis- appear when these ills are eradicated, has long been recognized. But the same may be said of various kinds of vice particularly prostitu- tion. The Senate Vice Committee of the Illi- nois Legislature, for instance, reports: "First That poverty is the principal cause, direct and indirect, of prostitution. "Second That thousands of girls are driven into prostitution because of the sheer inability to keep body and soul together on the low wages received by them. "Third That thousands of girls are forced into industrial employment by the low wages received by their fathers; that they are sepa- rated from proper home influences at an exces- sively early age; that they are inadequately 52 schooled and are insufficiently protected; and tbat many of them become recruits for the sys- tem of prostitution." The abolition of nil taxation . . . would cut more of the tap-roots of poverty, vice, and social unrest than any other progres- sive step which is a legislative possibility." Charles T. Root, in "The American City," July, 1913. "When the full rental value of land la taken by taxation ... the hideous traffic in women, based in almost every white slave cane upon the pressure of poverty, will cease." Alfred Bishop Mason, in "The Forum," August, 1914. __"The Single Tax will surely put the wom- en to a more independent economic status and so far remedy the white slave evil and reduce all that measure of prostitution which is due to low wages, social depression and smothered instincts among; the -workers of the land." Robert D. Towne, in "The Areo,' November, 1917. "If by taking economic rent for public purposes we release idle land and at the same time encourage industry by the removal of taxes . . . the vice and crime which springs from the slums as naturally as dis- ease will be checked at their source." F. W. Garrison, in "The Atlantic Monthly," Decem- ber, 1913. "We believe land value taxation would usher in industrial conditions in which want and the fear of want, poverty and its at- tendant evils of vice, disease, and crime, would rapidly disappear." "The Taxation of Land Values," p. 17. A Pamphlet Distributed by the Joseph Fels Fund Commission and signed by Lincoln Steffens, Jackson H. Ralston, Frederic C. Howe, George A. Briggs, C. H. Ingersoll, Daniel Kiefer, A. B. DuPont. 41 It Will Promote Sobriety. "The drink habit may be the cnuae of many miseries, but it is, in turn, the effect of other and prior miseries. The temperance advo- cates may preach their hearts out over the evils of drink, but until the evils that cause people to drink are abolished, drink and its evils will remain." Jack London, "The Peo- ple of the Abyss," p. 305. I see in the proposal of Henry George to appropriate the rent of ground by taxation, "an effort to establish a principle which, when established, will do more to lift humanity from the slough of poverty, crime and mis- ery than all else; and in this I recognize as one of the greatest forces working for tem- perance and morality." Miss Frances B. Wil- 68 lard, in a Letter to The Chicago Question Club, September, 1894. Cited by Oliver R. Trowbridge in "Bisocialism." Chap. 45. "When the full rental value of land is taken by taxation . . . drunkenness, which i caused by poverty more often than it causes poverty, will cease to defile our civilization." Alfred Bishop Mason, in "The Forum," August, 1914. "Do we desire purity and truth instead of corruption and perjury to prevail? Then re- peal all taxes on industry, and let the mo- nopolists of land, the source of our living and the rightful inheritance of all, pay taxes in proportion to the value of what they mo- nopolize, then poverty, prostitution, intem- perance, will soon be among the things that were." Edwin Burgess, Forerunner of Henry George, in The Racine Advocate, 1859. 42 It Will Decrease the Desertion of Wives and Infants. "If wage workers," says Judge Henry Neil. originator of the Mothers' Pension System, "bad income sufficient to provide a decent house and other necessities, there would be few desertions. But low wages force the family into little rat-trap habitations. "It is unnatural for men to leave their own offspring, and when a large number of men are committing this unnatural act, we must conclude that there is some strong compulsion. I have found this compulsion, and as long as low wages continue we will have desertions and all the courts and jails in the world will not reform the situation." This putting land out of the reach of speculators by taking their profits for pub- lic expenses and throwing it into use by untaxing all products of toil, goes to the root of all present maladies and restores the true relation of man to the earth." Lona I. Robinson, in "The Arena," October, 1894. 43_It Will Check the Increase of Insanity. "Every one who ponders on the primary causes of disease, of vice, of alcoholism, of feeble-mindedness, every one, who, in other words, brings his scientific imagination as well as his scientific knowledge to bear upon this problem, is finally forced into the con- viction that underneath all obvious and im- mediate causes there lies one great, general and determining social cause Poverty. . . . Until recently, poverty was looked upon as a divine dispensation a natural phenom- enon, as unavoidable as the tides or the pro- cession of the equinoxes. . . . But the world is now slowly turning more and more to the conviction that the persistence of poverty amid abounding wealth is due neither to the insufficiency of nature, nor to the incompe- tence of man, but that it is due to some sub- tle and hitherto little recognized force oper- ating within our social system. . . . What this subtle force is and how it operates to distribute unjustly the great mass of wealth produced, we believe, has been clearly indi- cated in the writings of Henry George." Victor C. Vaughan, M.D., Ph.D., LL.D. Jacques Loeb, M.D., Ph.D. Aristides Agramonte, M.D. William T. Councilman, M.D., LL.D. John Rogers, M.D. Frederick Peterson, M.D., Ph.D. Albert P. Brubaker, M.D. 54 S. Solis Cohen, M.D. S. Adolphus Knopf, M. D. Henry Smith Williams, M.D., L.L.D. Walter Mendelson, M.D. Frederic C. Howe, Ph.D. Thomas Mott Osborne. George Foster Peabody, LL.D. Louis F. Post. John J. Murphy. Charles A. Downer, Ph.D. George H. Parker, S.B. Charles W. Killam, A.I.A. Comfort A. Adams, S.B., E.E. H. E. Clifford, S.B. Arthur T. Safford. Lionel S. Marks, M.M.E. From "Two Papers on Public Sanitation and the Single Tax," Published by the Single Tax Information Bureau, 90 West Street, New York City. 44 It Will Stop OYerwork. "The present working day, from a physi- ological standpoint, is too lone, and keep* the majority of men and women in a con- tinual state of over-fatigue. It starts a vicious circle, leading to the craving of means for deadening fatigue, thus inducing drunk- enness and other excesses." Prof. Irving Fisher, "National Vitality; Its Wastes and Conservation." "When -we learn that the land belong* to all of us, then \ve will be free men no need for labor unions then, no need to legislate to keep men and women from working them- selves to death; no need to legislate against the white slave traffic." Clarence Darrow. Cited by F. C. Leubusher in "Proceedings of the National Conference of Charities and Cor- rection" (1915), p. 537. 45 It Will Improye Sanitation. WIL.L.IAM C. GORGAS ON SANITATION (A letter quoted by Dr. Seward W. Williams of Chicago, in the "Journal of the American Pharmaceutical Association," March, 1916.) WAR DEPARTMENT Office of the Surgeon-General Washington, July 3, 1015. Mr. Seward W. Williams, 5415 Hyde Park Boulevard, Chicago, Illinois. Dear Mr. Williams: Yours of June the twenty-eighth is acknow- ledged. I was very thoroughly impressed in my san- itary work with the evil effects upon the gen- eral health of the community which our jires- cnt system of taxation causes. In both Cuba and Panama, American occupation was at once followed by a large increase of wages. This was at once followed by very much bet- ter living conditions among the poorer class- es, and, therefore, very much improved sani- tary conditions. In considering these in- stances, I was impressed by the fact that low- wages were due to there not being enough Jobs to go around and that, therefore, the wage-earners were forced to bid against each other for these Jobs. I cnn see that a tax on land values would tend to everywhere bring the large body of unused lands into use. This would furnish abundant jobs to the jobless and would prevent them from bidding against each other for employment, and, therefore, have a great tendency to raise wages. I feel confident that the most important sanitary measure that any community could adopt would be a tax on land values. Yours very truly, (Signed) W. C. GORGAS, Surgeon-General U. S. Army. 55 "In the matters f health, hygiene, and (sanitation, we can not make much further progress until we tax land values and untax industry and commerce." Byron W. Holt, in "The Popular Science Monthly," April, 1915. "An ounce of [Single] taxation will do more to clean up a slum than a score of sanitary policemen." Frederic C. Howe, Ex-Commis- sioner of Immigration, in "The World's Work," December, 1910. "We believe with Surgeon-General Gorgas that the best sanitary measure is a Single Tax on land values;' that the shifting of taxes from industry and enterprise to site values would, almost at one stroke, eliminate the disease-infested tenement houses, thus ridding every community of its worst plague spots." David Gibson, Publisher "The Ground Hog," Cleveland, Ohio. "I am a Single Taxer . . . The Single Tax would be the means of bringing about the sanitary conditions I so much desire ... For sanitation is most needed by the class of people who would be most benefited by the Single Tax." William C. Gorgas, Sur- geon-General, U. S. A. (Ret.), in an Addres at Cincinnati, O., September 28, 1914. 46 It Will Reduce to a Minimum Sickness and Disease. "We have continually 3,000,000 people on the sick list and at least one-half of this sickness is preventable." Dr. Harry F. Ward, in "The Social Creed of the Churches." "Under the Single Tax . . . we could hope to induce the public to spend enough of itm own to provide as we have never done yet for really adequate hospitals and dispensaries; for the suppression of dust and other public nuisances; for better water and sewerage systems; for better housing inspec- tion; for better milk and provision inspec- tion, and many other things we have to do so inadequately, because we simply cannot now find the money with which to prevent disease and to preserve health and save life." Prof. L. J. Johnson, in "The American Journal of Public Health," June, 1914. "Tax vacant land equally with adjoining land put to wise use, and remove taxes from the improvements made by the farmer, builder, manufacturer, miner, etc., and you will revolutionize not only industry, but health. Rents will fall, the profits of the farmer, the manufacturer and the merchant, the wages of the workman, will alike in- crease." Dr. Solomon Solis Cohen, Phila- delphia, Pa. Quoted by Dr. Seward W. Wil- liams in the "Journal of the American Pharmaceutical Association," March, 1916. 47_It Will Encourage Marriage and Check the Divorce Evil. Up to the time of the War of 1812 practically every marriageable man in America had a wife, and every marriageable woman had a husband. Today there are more than 11,000,000 mar- 56 riageable men In America without wives, and more than 10,000,000 marriageable women without husbands. In 1870 the number of divorces in this country amounted to 28 per thousand of popu- lation; in 1900, to 73 per thousand. Today the number is higher yet, and is fast rising. To many students of sociology these tenden- cies toward racial degeneration seem very per- plexing. But there is nothing really perplexing ANOTHFR HOLDUP. From The Chicago Daily News. about them. They are the logical fruits of In- creasing economic pressure and of nothing else. The great historian, Henry Thomas Buckle, pointed this out more than fifty years ago. In his "History of Civilization in Eng- land" (Vol. I., Chap. I), he says: "It Is now known that marriages bear a fixed and definite relation to the price of corn; and in England the experience of a century has proved that, instead of having any connec- tion with personal feelings, they are simply regulated by the average earnings of the great mass of the people; so that this immense social and religious institution is not only swayed, but is completely controlled by the price of food and by the rate of wages." When public revenue burdens upon irdustrial activities have been discontinued and monopoly exterminated, so that a man can maintain a wife and family in a manner compatible with the existing standard of life, then the rate of marriage and divorce will return to normal. But not before. "The Single Tax is for man n man, be*- stowing upon every one the highest gift opportunity to live honest, cleanly, self-in- dependent, lives, neither entangled on the one side in a mesh of oppression which the heart abhors, nor on the other crowded by necessity to do what the mind disallows/' Julia A. Kellogg, in "The Arena," October, 1894. . K7 "The Single Tax is not a national philoso- phy of life, but an international and world- wide philosophy of life. Single Taxers are battling for universal and equal freedom freedom to live, to mutually help in a common humanity t to produce, to aspire, and to gain the highest and best of human aspirations." E. Stillman Doubleday in "The Single Tax Review," November-December, 1918. "The Single Tax will restore to every child born upon this planet, not only its God-given birth right in the land, but also will give to It a rightful share in that rich inheritance from the past, of wealth, of knowledge, science, art, virtue, and religion." Eliza Stowe Twitchell, "Economic Principles," p. 35. 48 It Will Lower the Death Rate. "The real reason why there are 300,000 un- necessary deaths every year among our babies Is that the fathers cannot make enough money to keep them alive." "Journal of American Medicine," October, 1915. "A study of the causes of death shows (hat, in general but 4 per cent die from old ayrc, 4 per cent more die from violence, and 92 per cent die from disease. Of this last great group, nearly one-half are due to dlseancs of environment; that is, to diseases which . . . are wholly preventable." Dr. Thos. Darlington, in "Health and Efficiency." "We have 1,500,000 deaths in the United States per annum. Of these 1,500,000 deaths, 42 per cent, or 630,OOO are annually prevent- able or postponable." Prof. Irving Fisher, "National Vitality: Its Wastes and Conserva- tion." "There are no social ills that cannot be traced to our wicked and unjust tax system." James R. Brown, "Proceedings of the Sev- enty-Fifth Annual Meeting of the New York State Agricultural Society." PART VII 49_It Will Solve the Tenement Housing Problem. "Reclaim for the community Its natural in- come, making it expensive either to keep needed land vacant or to withhold it from those ready and willing to improve it to the full extent of its possibilities. Does it re- quire severe intellectual effort to see the re- sult? Better and better homes, apartments, tenements, offices and stores, more employ- ment for labor in all enterprises now held back by the shadow of the tax gatherer, an end of all tax-lying, tax-evasion, and tax- injustice, and withal a public revenue ade- quate to all real public needs." Charles T. Root, in "The American City," July, 1913. "The taxation of land values will cut into the monopoly of land which is now recog- nized as a fundamental obstacle to all hous- ing schemes." John Paul, in "Land Values," (London), December, 1917. 58 "The Single Tax would forever solve the tenement house problem. ... I believe there In positively no other remedy for this evil and blot upon civilization." S. S. Craig, in "The Arena," January, 1899. "Remove the restrictions the. taxes on houses mul other labor products nnd there will be no difficulty as regards the housing; of the working classes." W. Chapman Wright, in "The Westminster Review," March, 1912. "The exemption from taxation of all build- ings and other improvements on land would at once multiply buildings and other Im- provements. . . . The filthy tenements that disgrace our cities would disappear aw If by magic." James P. Kohler, "Hard Times: The Cause and Cure," pp. 80, 81. "Appeals to philanthropy would be unnec- essary (in Single Tax conditions) to se- cure the construction of commodious and san- itary tenement houses in the slums of great cities. All improvements on land being ex- empt from taxation, and landowners being no longer fined by an increase of taxation for Improving land, and sites for such tenements being obtainable on easy terms, self-interest alone would quickly bring about the employ- ment of labor in tearing down unsanitary rookeries, and in the construction of com- fortable dwellings in place of them." Henry F. Ring-, "The Problem of the Un- employed," p. 231. "Take the question of over-crowding. The land question in the towns bears upon that. It is all very well to produce 'Housing of Working Class' bills. They will never be effective until you tackle the taxation of land values." Lloyd George, Prime Minister of England, in an Address at Newcastle, March 4, 1903. "The first thing to do for good homes as well as for permanent good times would seem to be to increase the available supply of land through increased taxes on all sites worth owning, at the same time abolishing taxes on improvements. The premium upon land speculation thus removed, and wages thus permitted to rise and prices to drop to their normal levels, the worker should find the get- ting and keeping of a comfortable home with adequate ground around it a reasonably easy problem." Prof. Lewis J. Johnson, in the "Springfield Daily Republican" of March 30, 1916. "Exemption of housing would go a much longer way than any other proposition of municipal housing to improve the living con- dition of the poorer citizens." J. J. Murphy, Commissioner, Tenement House Department of New York City, in the "Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science," March, 1915. P. 192. to 60 It Will Encourage Municipal Improvement, "The Single Tax," says Byron W. Holt ("Municipal Affairs," June, 1899), "would re- sult in improving the appearance of the city in many ways. By untaxing buildings not only would new buildings be encouraged, but, the the yearly fine being removed, the old and cheap buildings which now disfigure the city, would be replaced by good-looking structures. As no one could afford to pay a tax on idle land which left no room for speculative profits, nearly all very valuable land not used for parks, would contain valuable buildings; and the value of the buildings would be somewhat in proportion to the value of the land under them. The city would therefore lose much of its present ragged appearance. No extra fine being placed on fine appearing buildings, their external architecture would be improved. Under the Single Tax, cities would also be better laid out and provided with parks. "If a city now wishes to improve its appear- ance and to lay out its streets with some evi- dence of design for the accommodation and convenience of the public, it can do so only after paying exorbitant prices for the land condemned. Under the Single Tax the land would have little value and the change could be easily and cheaply made." "The Single Tax Is essential for the com- plete solution of the housing problem, the provision of gardens and open spaces, and all the other things -which town planners have set their hearts on." Joseph Fels, in "The American City," November, 1913. "The untaxing of improvements would give free course to building in all its branches, and to the making of many other improve- ments that are checked by the present sys- tem." J. D. White, Member Parliament, Eng- land, in "The Single Tax Year Book," p. 345. "The taxation of land values only . . . would bring about a revolution in city build- ing that would surpass all the regulatory measures and all of the health and sanitary Inspection that can be devised. ... It would enable parks, boulevards and docks to be acquired and developed; it would per- mit the location of public buildings and the opening up of open spaces and playgrounds." Frederic C. Howe, Ex-Commissioner of Immigration, in "The World's Work," De- cember, 1910. 51 It Will Beduce the Cost of Tax Depart- ments. The total cost of collecting the present taxes in villages, towns, and cities of the country is conservatively estimated at from $25,000,000 to 60 $40,000,000. Since the Single Tax will dispense with a vast army of tax assessors, tax "ferrets/* clerks, accountants, and so forth, the cost of collection will naturally be a great deal lower than it now is. "The substitution of a Single Tax upon land values for all other taxes would represent an Immense waving In our municipal tax depart- ments." Lawson Purdy, Former President of the Department of Taxes and Assessments, New York City. "The Single Tax IH the most economical of all possible taxes." Edward P. E. Troy, Tax- ation Expert, San Francisco, Cal. "In cheapness of collection no tax ap- proaches the land value tax.'' J. J. Pastoriza, Late Tax Commissioner of Houston, Texas. 62 It Will Reduce the Cost of Fire Depart- ments. The fire losses in the United States in 1916, outside of forests, aggregated $200,000,000; in 1917, $230,000,000; and in 1918, $290,000,000. This terrible waste of property springs largely, if not chiefly, from our vicious policy of pen- alizing improvement, of taxing fire-proof build- ings more heavily than we tax those which are not fire-proof. Let a builder use marble instead of wood, let him tear down an old, decayed, and dangerous tenement and replace It by a new and safe one, and lo! he is Instantly rewarded by heavier taxation. The result of this shortsighted policy is obviously to discourage the putting up of sound and safe structures, and to encourage the retention of unsound and unsafe ones. Out of the eleven or twelve million buildings in the country in 1909, less than ten thousand, according to Samuel Hopkins Adams (see Everybody's Mag- azine, June, 1909), were even nominally fire- proof! Abandon this unwise custom of penalizing improvement and the larger part of the danger from fire must disappear. Fire-proof buildings being taxed no more than "fire-traps," builders will be tempted to construct the first rather than the second. Thus not merely will the peo- ple save a vast amount of property now annually destroyed by fire itself, but they will save millions of dollars a year in the cost of maintaining their fire equipment. "Ninety per cent of the cost of such func- tions as flre department and sanitary depart- ment should be charged to antiquated build- ings which are fire traps and pest holes, for modern buildings need very little flre service and no sanitary service." Bolton Hall, "Thrift," p. 210. ftl Will Keduce the Cost of Police Depart- ments. The total number of prisoners sentenced to penal institutions in the United States in 1910, most of which came from the cities, was 479,- 787. To apprehend these offenders and to guard society against the violations of others, cost the residents of the cities alone, in police pro- tection, approximately $140,000,000. Probably less than one-half of this stupendous sum will be needed for this purpose when the land value tax program has been put in force. For the criminals that now prey upon society, are, in the large majority of cases, simply the vic- tims of social injustice. They are the fruits of the community's own sin in allowing publicly created funds the rents of natural opportu- nities to be privately appropriated. When, therefore, the community shall have washed itself of this sin, when justice and civic right- eousness shall have been established, and ample opportunity shall have been given to all men to earn a comfortable living, the law breaking classes will eventually dwindle away. And with them, of course, will pass the need of large armies of paid police. "Everyone able and willing to work will (in Sinv.lt' Tax conditions) always be ca- pable of making a comfortable living;, so that worry, envy, class hatred, theft, robbery, etc., (the results of poverty and the fear thereof) will not exist, and the expenses for the main- tenance of police, asylums, etc., will be re- duced to a minimum." M. W. Norwalk, in the "Yiddische Folk," November 12, 1915. Trans- lated by the author and reprinted in "The Single Tax Review," July-August, 1916. 54 It Will Keduce the Cost of Public Health Departments. The matter of sanitation and conservation of the public health will very likely receive much better attention under the fiscal system herein advocated than under the present one, inas- much as human life will be considered of more value than mere dollars and cents. Neverthe- less, the $60,000,000 or so that municipalities now spend each year for this purpose will doubtless be much in excess of that needed to provide the best of service, for the vast im- provement in personal health and hygiene that the Single Tax will bring about will leave but little for the public itself to look after. "We should save millions weekly [by the land value tax] in cost of local government, In rents, interest, and usury, besides dimin- ishing pauperism, prostitution, disease and crime." Edwin Burgess, Forerunner of Henry George, in the "Racine Advocate," 1859. 62 55 It Will Reduce the Cost of Public Cliarity Departments. Courtesy of Alfred N. Chandler, Newark, N. J. "Some of the greatest burdens upon cities are the care of paupers, criminals and the unemployed. Whatever will lessen these classes will relieve the cost of government In cities. In every way the effect of the Single Tax would be to lighten this burden." Byron W. Holt, in "Municipal Affairs," June, 1899. 56 It Will Diminish the Expense of Public Parks, Playgrounds, Zoological Gardens, Schools, Libraries, Bridges, Courthouses, Postoffices, etc. The outlays for municipal improvements of all kinds in cities of more than 2,500 popula- tion, amounted, in 1912, to $383,649,000. Not less than $150,000,000 of this huge sum was for land alone. Nine-tenths of this will be saved under the full Single Tax. For when all of the economic rent has been taxed out of the land; that is, all but enough to induce the land- owner to retain the title, the land will be free, or practically so. "High taxation of land values would re- duce the annual municipal expenditures for the acquisition of land for municipal pur- poses." Benjamin C. Marsh, "The Taxation of Land Values in American Cities." 57 It Will Diminish the Expense of Laying Pavements, Sidewalks, Conduits, Sewers, Water and Gas Mains, Car Lines, Etc. The way in which the Single Tax will dimin- ish the expense of laying pavements and con- structing other municipal improvements is simply by untaxing the materials used, by breaking land speculation and by allowing va- cant lots between the suburbs and the business districts of cities to be put to service. In other THE ENORMOUS WASTE OF CITIES Because of the vast amount of land held va- cant between improved portions of American towns and cities, literally billions of dollars are wasted each year by the taxpayers, not merely in building and keeping: in condition all public improvements, such as street car lines, sewers, telephone and electric lighting systems, water mains, pavements, sidewalks, etc., but in the wear of shoe leather, the tear of automobile tires, the consumption of gasoline for motor cars, and coal for the manufacture of electrical power, to say nothing of the immense amount of precious time consumed by men, horses, and transportation equipment in constantly passing and repassing these same vacant spaces. Note the illustration below, typical of the average American city: m - Improved land PI - Unimproved land BBDHEDHEQ words, by destroying speculation it will enable all who wish to live or settle in town to locate their residence, shop, or factory upon ground that is "closer in." What an immense saving this will mean in the way of constructing and maintaining all public or semi-public improve- 64 ments under, upon, or above the streets of cities, can be appreciated only when it is remembered that from one-third to four-fifthi of every urban center in America is vacant. Even in the old and congested cities of Man- hattan and Brooklyn, "seven hundred miles of costly streets run past vacant lots!" "By encouraging the vacant lot Industry. this M.v.steni [of "taring- everything"] enor- mously Increases the cost of opening and grading: streets, of sewers and water mains, of sidewalks and pavements, of curbs and boulevards, of gait, electric and street ear service; all of which must be carried aero** these waste spaces at enormous expense." C. J. Buell, in "The Ground Hog," August 26, 1916. "About all our cities, and especially about New York, we find great tracts of vacant land intervening between well-built areas. These intervening tracts are often fully developed with streets and all conveniences greatly in- creasing the cost of city administration for lighting, policing, fire protection, and in other ways." Edward Polak, Register of Deeds, Bronx County, New York, in the "Annals of American Academy of Political and Social Science," March, 1915, p. 186. 58 It Will Lower the Cost of Freight and Passenger Transportation. Naturally, with miles of unimproved lots eliminated, with a vast empire of vacant ter- ritory thrown open to use that is now held for the "unearned increment" that it will yield in the future, with cities and towns made more compact, despite the spreading out of their congested portions, the time required for carry- ing men and goods from one point to another will be largely reduced, and the expense of transportation consequently correspondingly lowered. "Due to the fact that land is not developed naturally, but artificially, billions of dollars are wasted every year in unnecessary trans- portation charges. In Cleveland there are acres of land on which as many as 50O people are crowded. Adjacent to these congested acres there are parcels of 15 and 20 acres of land without a soul on them. On several street car lines, the cars run through a mile or two of vacant land before they emerge into a populated district. Take a train from Cleveland to Columbus and you will run through miles of uncultivated, unfilled land. "As communities we do things which as in- dividuals we would be arrested for doing." "The Ground Hog," August 10, 1917. "Our systems of transportation cost vastly more for original construction and for opera- tion than they should, because they must 65 traverse sparsely settled territory to reach settled areas." Edward Polak, Register of Deeds, Bronx County, New York, in the "An- nals of American Academy of Political and Social Science," March, 1915, p. 186. 59_It Will Lower the Expense of Building Homes. A hundred years ago practically every family in the nation owned its own home. Today, out of the 14,131,945 residences in our towns and cities, only 3,408,854 are owned "free." The remainder are either mortgaged or rented. The chief cause of this appalling increase in urban tenancy is directly traceable to the ris- ing value of land. Whereas, in the days of Thomas Jefferson, he who wanted a desirable site for a home could obtain it for a nominal THIS CONDITION WILL, EXIST Courtesy of "The Great Adventure," Los Angeles, Calif. SO LONG AS THIS CONDITION LASTS "~ "BUSINESS "5 } SUBURBS sum, now he must hand over anywhere from several hundred to several thousand dol- lars the result, in many cases, of years of persevering toil and sacrifice. The taxation of land values, however, will quickly turn the tables. It will greatly re- duce the selling value of the land and thus enable the prospective home builder to secure his lot for a mere trifle. More than this, it will break the monopoly of all other natural resources, and thus make it possible for him to buy his needed materials much cheaper than at present. In this way, the initial cost of building homes for the mass of men, will be reduced at least one-fourth and in numerous instances as much as one-half. "By menus of the taxation of land values, the criiNhiiiK" burden of taxes and duties* today imposed upon industry and the earning;)* of industry could at once be removed. Once again the masses of mankind would hnve room to live; once a^ain they could freely breathe God's air, bask in God's sunshine, share in God's blessings and bounties, main- taining themselves and those dependent upon them by the untaxed fruits of their own free industry." Gustav Buscher, of Zurich, Switzerland, in "The Single Tax Review," July-August, 1914. GO It Will Lower the Expense of Erecting Factories, Mills, Plants, and Office Build- ings. Just as the Single Tax will help those who wish to build homes, so also will it help those who wish to start a business of any kind. The thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of dollars that are now demanded by specula- A 100% AMERICAN BILLBOARD (Fay Lewis, Rockford, Illinois, Prop.) tors for a location close to trade centers or convenient to shipping facilities, will dwindle to an infinitesimal amount. The land will be cheap, and the cost of building materials much lower in price. "The manufacturer looking for a site for a new factory -would no longer be forced to pass by an unimproved block in the heart of the manufacturing district of the city, 67 convenient to railroad and wharf, to school* and comfortable sanitary dwellings for em- ployees, and locate his enterprise in a dis- tant suburb, remote from such advantages." Henry F. Ring, "The Problem of the Un- employed," p. 230. 61 It Will Lower the Expense of Constructing Churches, Hospitals, and Similar Insti- tutions. As with residences and places of business, so with churches, Y. M. C. A.s, fraternity houses, and the like. With the land values destroyed and the injurious power of the trusts broken, the cost of erecting such institutions will be greatly cut down and the expense of maintain- ing them reduced to a minimum. "It has long seemed to me that the land tax system advocated by Henry George would create almost ideal conditions for the ordi- nary church." Prof. Walter Rauschenbusch, "Christianity and the Social Crisis," p. 289. 62 It Will Disintegrate the Slums. Slums, or congested portions of cities, are sometimes said to be due to a lack of ground space. Nothing could be farther from the truth. From one-third to four-fifths of every urban center in America, as we have seen, is unused territory. In New York City, to be exact, there are 193,544 vacant parcels of land about one-half of the area of that metropolis. Yet New York City has one of the worst slum districts in the world. In Chicago, with its fearful pressure of population in certain quar- ters, there are held out of use within the actual limits of the city, 463,243 lots, or more than 100 square miles of territory. Again, just out- side the limits, but within the confines of Cook County, in which the city is situated, there are held unimproved an additional 195,- 681 acres, or 305 square miles. Certainly slums and overcrowding can not be attributed to the lack of land. What is responsible for these conditions is simply our poverty-breeding economic system. Change this system kill speculation, stop penalizing by way of tax- ation those who make improvements, lower the cost of living, make employment plentiful so that all who wish may obtain it, and raise the wages of labor, and slums and overcrowded districts will easily take care of themselves. "With the gradual adoption of the Single Tax system . . . slums as well as the present style of workmen's houses would dis- 68 appear and give way to decent lions. >< and cottages with ample room for all the ameni- ties and convenience* of life." Max Hirach, "Democracy Versus Socialism," p. 401. "Increasing the economic Independence of all worker* in the only way It can lie done, by opening to industry the natural opportu- nities which nature provides at our doors, should gradually drain the slums of their congestion, though It may take some time wholly to wean slum dwellers from the glit- ter and horrors of the life to which so many seem perversely devoted. As the dire neces- sity to endure slum conditions gradually dis- appears, we may fairly hope and believe that the slums, the breeding place of squalor, dis- ease, alcoholism and vice, the baffling menace to health and stability of society, will also disappear." Prof. L. J. Johnson, in "The American Journal of Public Health," June, 1914. 63 it Will Facilitate the "Back to The Land" Movement, "The Single Tax ... by forcing Into use millions of acres of Innd now unproduc- tive . . . will find openings for all those who desire to get back on the land." Arthur H. Weller, in "The Westminster Review," November, 1908. A FEW ACRES AND LIBERTY Courtesy of Alfred N. Chandler, Newark, N. J. "Not only would the exodus of the country population to the cities be stopped but a great return flow from the towns and cities would take place. Town and country life would lose much of their distinctive charac- ter. Towns people living in garden-homes and country-people living far more closely than at present would gain physically, men- tally, and morally, by this change." Max Hirsch, "Democracy Versus Socialism," p. 402. "If we tax land heavily enough people will move from the city onto the land cheap- ened by the taxes which we impose upon it." Frederic C. Howe, Ex-Commissioner of Immigration, in "The Single Tax Year Book," p. 258. 69 64 It Will Increase the Taxes in the Richer Districts of Cities. When public revenues are collected solely from ground rents, the wealthier classes in cities will naturally have to contribute much more to the government than they now do. This holds good not only of their residence property but of their "down-town" property. In both cases the value of the land (with occasional exceptions, of course,) outstrips the WHERE CITY LAND VALUES ARE NEW YORK CITY BOROUGH OF MANHATTAN (Vacant land - $151,425,530 - excluded) Land 13,033,015,975 Irapr ovement e 11,596,084,570 ALL OTHER BOROUGHS (Vacant land - $454,232,680 - excluded) Land $1,004,740,591 Aoprovements $1,288,391,281 - Annual Report of Commissioners of Taxes and Assessments, 1915 CHICAGO CENTRAL BUSINESS SECTION Land $427,704,305 Improvements $106,579,431 OUTLYING RESIDENCE SECTION Average value of a lot Avg. value of a cottage on the above lot - Estimated by Mr. E.J. Batten, Chicago, 111., 1916 value of the improvements upon it. Especially is this true of the business districts. In Chi- cago, for example, the naked ground contained within the half section "bounded by the river 70 on the west and north, and the lake and 12th street on the east and south" is assessed at $427,704,305, while the improvements the ten, fifteen, and twenty story buildings included are assessed at only $106,579,431, or less than one-fourth as much as the land. The same principle holds true of every other city. HOW THE SINGLE TAX (LIMITED TO NEEDS OF GOVERNMENT), WOULD HAVE AFFECTED THE 11 LARGEST TAXPAYERS (EXCEPTING CORPORATIONS), IN BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS, IN 1913i Present Single Name Tax Tax George R. White $ 70,687.00 $133,856.80 Eugene N. Foss 41,007.24 44,076.33 Isabel Anderson 38,720.64 60,706.00 Abraham Shuman . 30,004.06 51,810.15 Fannie E. Morrison 29,771.48 40,621.25 Eben D. Jordan 28,450.52 26,830.72 Lotta M. Crabtree 25,782.80 44.2S2.56 Frederick Ayer 24,645.88 44,627.50 George A. Gardner 23,805.06 13,645.38 George N. Black 21,343.48 37,830.87 Martha C. Codman 18,746.28 37,307.12 Total $363,846.84 $545,614.86 See Article by Charles H. Porter, in "The Public," December 11, 1914. 66 It Will Decrease the Taxes in the Poorer Districts of Cities. Precisely as the richer classes in cities will have to carry a heavier burden under the Single Tax, so will the poorer classes have to carry less. For unlike the value of the land in the "business" and "fine residence" districts, which exceeds, in by far the majority of cases, the value of the improvements upon it, the value of the land in the "poorer quarters," is as a general thing, much less than the value of the improvements. "Had New York City secured the total tnx levy on land and buildings last year [1015] by taxing land -values only, the Asters would have paid $507,625 more taxes than they did, the Goelets, $171,702 more, the Gerrys, $125,- 162 more, the Sloans, $55,231 more, E. H. Van Ingen, $60,O82 more, the Vanderbilts, $100,024 more. The tax rate on their land holdings would have been increased by about 1 per cent on the assessed value, I. e., from about 2 per cent to 3 per cent, and so would have taken only one-fifth of their net ground rent that year, above taxes, calculating this rent at 5 per cent. Untaxing buildings would save most small home owners $40 to $5O a year, and would make nearly every owner of a big mansion pay more taxes. Many of them own vacant land in addition to their resi- dences. Carnegie would have paid $19,625 more." The Joseph Fels Fund Bulletin of April, 1916, quoting: Benjamin C. Marsh be- fore the Senate and Assembly Committees of the New York Legislature. 71 "Taxes on small homes [under the Single Tax] would be reduced from one-third to three-fifths, according to the relative vaJue of the site and building." F. C. Leubuscher. "Proceedings of the National Conference of Charities and Correction," 1915, p. 535. THE SINGLE TAX IN THE CITY Comparison of present taxes and Single Tax (limited to needs of government) in Washing- ton, D. C., in 1912: COMPARISON or PRESENT SHALL HOME AftCA- PftCSCNT TAX U*ORSt,VGLE TA X MtOOLECLASSAREA- PftCSCNTTAX BVILO^S PRESENT TAX SIHGIC MX 1503.000 *l. 130.000 751.000 S40.00O Ft fte RESIDENCE AREA - PRESENT TAX UXCSRStUGLtTAX SveufiBA* AACA- UNCEBSlNGLCTAX C WATCH TAX L/su/oftUcatse PUBLKUnUTY C ft AMD TOTAL 993.000 1. 187.000 5ZI.OOO /, 40 O.OOO Z.3IO.OOO 1.800,000 2,245.000 790,000 790,000 450.000 450,000 430.000 43O.OOO #QJB 7O, OOO *8,8 TO. 000 NOTE ^Sf*Gt. TAX BASED ON LAND 9504,000,000 YAIM WJ.5. W. I. Swanton in "The Single Tax Review," July-August, 1914. PART VIII Will Break Up Big Landed Estates and Speculative Holdings in the Farming 1 Com- munities. All vacant bodies of agricultural land held out of use merely for the "unearned increment" and there are approximately 600,000,000 acres of such land in the whole country will, of course, either be put to service or thrown open to settlement when the land value tax is generally applied. But more than this. The last Census Report shows a total of 167,082,047 acres in "farms of 1,000 acres and over." In the majority of in- stances these "bonanza farms" especially those ranging from 10,000 to 1,000,000 acres- are operated by salaried superintendents em- ployed by absentee corporations and landlords; and hence these farms are, quite naturally, not 72 productively handled, not utilized to their full- est capacity. Since no owner of farm land, however, will care, under the new arrange- ment, to invite excessive taxation by retaining more ground than he can profitably manage WHO OWNS OUR AGRICULTURAL LAND? Unimproved land owned by 733 landholders (98,867,000 acres) From the Federal report on "The Lumber In- dustry," Pt. Ill, p. 181. Government Printing Office, 1914. From the Census Report of 1910. the inevitable result will be that a still larger quantity of available agricultural territory will be opened up to the multitudes who now wish to build homes upon it, and who are willing to put the soil to its best and fullest use. 73 SOME EXAMPLES OF LAND MONOPOLY. (Compiled from the Report on "The Lumber Industry," by the Bureau of Corporations, Washington, D. C., 1914. See Part II, Chap. 6; Part III, Chap. 2) LOUISIANA. No. of Owner. Acres. Tensas Delta Land Co. 391,000 William Buchanan Companies 330,000 Long-Bell Lumber Co 318,000 Frost-Johnson Lumber Co 277,000 Missouri Lumber & Land Exchange interests 276,000 Great Southern Lumber Co. and af- filiated companies 233,000 Calcasieu Pine Co. and Southern Lumber Co. 134.OOO Jay Gould Estate 124,000 Lutcher & Moore interests 121.OOO Central Coal & Coke Co 95,000 260 other holders own ._ 3,016,000 Total acreage (270 holders) 5,315,000 Average number of acres per holder 19,70O Total improved acreage in Louisi- ana (1910 Census) 5,276,016 Total number of farms 120,546 Average number of acres per farm 48 MICHIGAN. (Upper Peninsula Only.) Cleveland Cliffs Iron Co 1,515,000 Keweenaw Association (Ltd.) 373.00O The Michigan Iron & Land Co. (Ltd.) 324,000 I. Stephenson interests 302,000 Chicago & Northwestern Ry 1S6,OOO United States Steel Corporation 171,000 130 other holders own ._ 3,624,000 Total acreage (136 holders) 6,495,000 Average number of acres per holder 47,760 Total improved acreage in Michigan (entire state) 12,832,078 Total number of farms 206,960 Average number of acres per farm 62 FLORIDA. Southern States Land & Timber Co.. 1,402,OOO Empire Land & National Timber Co 941,000 Florida Coast Line Canal & Trans- portation interests 610,000 John Paul & East Coast Lumber Co. GOO.OOO R. J. Bolles 474,000 R. J. & B. F. Camp Lumber Co. and Crystal Lumber Co. 375,000 Model Land Co. _ 355,000 Cummer Lumber Co. 318.0OO Dowling Lumber Co. 305,000 Hlllmnn Sutherland Co. 273.0OO Putnam Lumber Co. 238.0OO Arlpeka Sawmill Co. 232,000 Myaka Land Co. 193,000 Florida Land & Timber Co 189.0OO Stearns & Culver Lumber Co 189,000 St. Joseph Land & Development Co 184.0OO 74 Southern Timber & Naval Store* Co., Florida Land Co. and affiliated companies 182,000 J. P. William* and J. P. William* Land Co. 177,000 B. Beaeham 177.OOO \\ :ison Cypress Company 194,000 Hodden, O'Hnra & RuMMell Interests .1.V..OOO B. Parker et al 146,000 McLeod Timber & Duluth Timber Companies 133,000 28 other holder* own 2,688,000 36 other holder* own 2,175,OOO 47 other holder* own 1,726,OOO 66 other holder* own 1,479,OOO 80 other holder* own__ _ 1,130,OOO Total acreage (290 holder*) 18,049,000 Average number of acre* per holder 65,341 Total improved acreage In Florida, (1910 Census) 1,8O5,4O8 Total number of farm* 50,016 Average number of acre* per farm 36 PACIFIC STATES. Northern Pacific Railway Co 9,950,000 Southern Pacific Railway Co 13,880,000 Atchlson, Topeka & Santa Fe Rail- way Co. _ 9,653,000 Total acreage (3 holders) 33,483,OOO Total improved acreage in the nine states of Idaho, Wyoming, New Mexico, Montana, Utah, Nevada, Washington, Oregon and Cali- fornia 33,300,736 Total number of farm* 318,140 Average number of acre* per farm 104 67 It Will Solve the Farm Tenancy and Farm Mortgage Problems. When the keen French observer, Alexander DeTocqueville, visited the United States more than 65 years ago, he wrote ("Democracy in America," Vol. II, p. 196) : "In America there are, properly speaking, no farming tenants; every man owns the ground he tills. * * * Land is cheap, and any one may easily become a landowner." What is the status of the agricultural popu- lation today? Of the 6,361,502 farmers in Amer- ica, only 2,588,596, or 41%, according to the Census Bureau, own their farms "free of all incumbrance;" 1,312,034, or 21%, have their homes "mortgaged;" while the remaining 2,354,676, or more than 37% are renters strangers in the land of their birth! From what does this startling decline of the rural population primarily arise? It arises 76 primarily from the constantly increasing value of agricultural land. Ground that in the be- ginning had no value, and that in DeTocque- ville's time was "cheap," now costs, if we may believe the Department of Agriculture (see Monthly Crop Report of April, 1916), an aver- age of $45.55 per acre. In other words, a farm THE TOLL, OF LANDLORDISM Courtesy of Alfred N. Chandler, Newark, N. J. of one or two hundred acres which, a few gen- erations back was to be had for the mere tak- ing, today costs the ordinary man more than he is able to accumulate in a lifetime! But the remedy is the same in the open coun- try as it is in the city. Place all taxes on the RESPECTFULLY REFERRED TO THE AMERICAN LEGION */* . . - Courtesy of the "Salt Lake Mirror.' value of land, thus destroying land specu- lation and land monopolization at the root, and the fundamental cause of increasing farm ten- ancy and farm indebtedness will be gone. 76 CONDITION OP THE TENANT FARMER IN AMERICA. "No nation-wide Investigation of the con- dition of tenant farmer** linn ever been made, but in Texas, where the investigations of this Commission were thorough and conclu- sive, it wa found not only that the eco- nomic condition of the tenant was extremely bad, but that he was far from being free, while his future wag regarded as hopeless. Badly housed, 111-nouriMhed, uneducated and hopeless, these tenants continue year after year to eke out a bare living, moving fre- quently from one farm to another in the hope that something will turn up. Without a large family the tenant can not hope to succeed or break even, so in each tenant family numerous children are being reared to a future which under present conditions will be no better than that of their parents, if as good. The wife of a typical tenant farmer, the mother of eleven children, stated in her testimony before the Commission that in addition to the rearing of children, mak- ing their clothes and doing the work of the house, she always helped with the crops, working up to within three or four months before children were born, and that during all the years of her married life she had had no ready-made dresses and only three hats." Final Report of the Commission on Indus- trial Relations," pp. 14, 15. "We possess 445 acres of land almost paid for, the gambling value of which is about 92O,OOO. Would shout for joy if we could change to Single Tax conditions. Every farm- er who has not the cash to pay for land (and few have) sells himself and family as slaves for life to a landlord, when they buy land needed to farm on, because all they can earn more than needed to live on must go In one form or another to pay it. Negro slavery was bad, but this in many ways Is worse." Henry Cramer and Family, Houston, Va. Quoted in "The Joseph Fels Fund Bulle- tin," July, 1915. 68 It Will Enlarge the Farmer's Market and Give Him a Better Price for His Produce. The farmer's market lies practically alto- gether in urban centers. There he sells the bulk of all he produces from fruits and vege- tables, to grain, cotton, wool, poultry, live stock, and dairy products. On the purchasing power of the city population, therefore, he is dependent, in a large measure, for his own welfare. If his customers are able to demand much, he is obviously at a greater advantage than if they are able to demand but little. Now the tendency of our present economic system, as we have seen, is to impoverish the pro- ducing classes of the cities especially the wage-earners. Hundreds of thousands are, 77 even in normal times, periodically out of em- ployment, while the under-bidding of these keeps the wages of the rest constantly below their natural level. Moreover, the constant toll of privilege in the shape of exorbitant rents and interest on land values cuts down the gen- eral purchasing power further yet. The farmer's market consequently is restricted. He is able to supply more than his chief custom- ers can demand. What will be the effect of the land value tax program? It will reverse the order. The great improvement in the material condition of all the people the annihilation of privilege and monopoly, and the abundance of steady em- ployment, coupled with the rise in wages that this program will bring about, will create on the part of the wage-and-salary-earning class- es, a demand for the farmer's goods brisker than he can supply. "The city is the farmer's market. Any- thing the farmer can do by legislative in- fluence to prosper the elty will prosper him by prospering his market. By permitting people in the city to adopt Single Tax, less money will go to the few in the form of Interest on high land values, and the many Trill have more money to buy more from the farmer." David Gibson, in "The Ground Hog," April 10, 1917. "To market is to trade, and a man with SOMETHING to trade can make no exchange with a man who has NOTHING to trade. . . . To remedy this is the object and pur- pose of the Single Tax niovement." S. B. Riggen, in "The Arena," August, 1894. "The Single Tax will lower rents in our great cities and thereby Improve the market for the farmers* products." James R. Brown, "Proceedings of Seventy-Fifth Annual Meet- ing of New York State Agricultural Society." 69 It Will Increase the Agricultural Produc- tion. Farmers who farm their own land have but little less to gain from the adoption of Single Tax than those who do not. Consider, for example, the matter of preventable losses now annually sustained by the "free-owning" farm- ers because of the spread of destructive weeds, the ravages of insect pests, and the inroads of all transmittable diseases of plants and ani- mals. These losses, which, in the case of in- sect pests alone (see Yearbook, U. S. Dep't of Agriculture, 1909), amount annually to more than $970,000,000, and in the case of animal diseases (Yearbook, 1915), to an average of $212,000,000, are chargeable in the great ma- 78 Jority of cases simply to the ignorance and inefficiency of their poverty-stricken neighbors especially their tenant neighbors. Not that such farmers are naturally inferior to any other. They are not. But under the un- just economic system now prevailing, such farmers lack opportunity. They have little or no time to read and study, and to reflect upon the problems of their occupation, or are gen- erally too exhausted and too discouraged for such exercise when they do have the time. They know nothing of the deeper sciences and next to nothing of the simpler. They have small chance to attend Farmers' Institutes, examine agricultural displays, or go to listen to the addresses of experts, for lo! this would take a few hours from the plow and maybe a dollar or two from the pocket! Every hour of their time must be judiciously utilized and every penny of their earnings saved to pay the landlord his rent and the money-lender his exorbitant interest at the appointed hour. Why wonder, therefore, that on the whole, they are ignorant and wasteful? Why wonder that the seeds they grow, and which the inde- pendent farmers frequently buy, are invariably of inferior grade and of low germinating qual- ity; that they seldom know how best to com- bat the spread of troublesome weeds and nox- ious grasses; that their fields are the hatching grounds of pestiferous, yet controllable in- sects, many of which, like the chinch bug and the Hessian fly, annually ravage wide terri- tories, doing incalculable damage; and that In their orchards and granaries and pastures and live stock pens, the transmittable diseases of plants and animals go uninterruptedly on? But take the rent of land for community pur- poses and the causes that make for such igno- rance and wastefulness will vanish. For all tenants will then not merely have absolutely no taxes to pay but their annual rent burden will be much less by reason of the fact that with the raising of the "economic margin" rent will fall, while with the breaking up of large estates and the release of extensive areas of vacant land by speculators, they will soon be able to obtain good ground at a nominal price. Further, with the cheapening of money and the increase in banking facilities resulting from the same principle (see topic 31) they will soon be able to secure loans at far more ad- vantageous rates of interest than at present 79 Think what this means to the tenants. It means opportunity, encouragement, fresh hope. It means the end of their moving about and the acquisition of homes of their own. It means independence, the escape from per- petual debt, freedom from tyranny and oppres- sion, the assertion of their manhood and dig- nity. It means better tools for their work, with less exhausting toil and more time for the ab- sorption of knowledge, for reading, studying, and investigation. It means a chance to visit OUT OF THE MOUTHS OF GOVERNORS "The farmer should not be penalized be- cause he improves the acres he holds." Gov- ernor F. M. Byrne, South Dakota, 1916. "Governor Byrne's contention [that the farmer should not be penalized by taxation because he improves his land], is essentially sound." Governor Arthur Capper, Kansas, 1916. "I favor local option in taxing? land value* at higher rates than those imposed on the products of industry." Governor D. I. Walsh, Massachusetts, 1915. "There should be such proper exemptions am will encourage improvements upon farms and lands." Governor J. H. Morehead, Ne- braska, 1916. "I favor nntaxing labor and the products of labor." Governor William Sulzer, New York. 1914. "An exemption from taxation of all im- provements on land farmed by owners would have a wholesome tendency to reduce land peculation." Governor Henry Allen, Kansas, 1919. "I would like to see the Single Tax plan worked into our tax system." Governor W. N. Ferris, Michigan, 1916. Farmers' Institutes and agricultural exhibits, a chance to watch the demonstrations of County Agents and College Extension Bureaus, a chance to question scientists and experts. It means an opportunity to learn how to conserve the moisture and the fertility of the soil, how to rotate their crops, what crops to grow and what not to grow, how to select seeds and treat them for smut, how to eradicate pesti- ferious weeds, control destructive insects, and check the many communicable diseases of plants and animals in short, how to produce the raw materials for food and clothing with the minimum of time and effort, not only to themselves, but to the whole community in which they live. The gain to the independent farmers from these improved agricultural methods on the part of their down-trodden neighbors will amount to hundreds of millions of dollars a year. "The building- of a sound economic founda- tion for a wholesome rural civilization la be- ing prevented by the Increase In tenantry. . . . The most hopeful solution appears to be the control of tenantry through exercise of the taxing power." Prof. Paul L. Vogt, Department of Rural Economics, Ohio Univer- sity, in an Address Before a Joint Meeting of the American Economic Association and American Sociological Society at Columbus. Ohio, December, 1916. "To exterminate land monopoly Is to re- move the cause of the Incipient degeneracy that has laid hold upon the republic; to ar- rest the process of social decay and put an end to conditions that are growing more dis- tressing to all and which have practically made serfs of a majority of American culti- vators of the soil. "There is but one method remaining by which land monopoly can be reached that has thus far never been applied on any extended scale, or to its full extent. It Is to require that land monopolists, the real owners of the country, pay the expense* of running It." Western Starr, Farmer and Publicist, in "The Single Tax Review," May- June, 1916. "The use of land must be encouraged If we are to feed, not only the nations of the world, but if we are to keep hunger and starvation from our very doors. The taxation of land values is the remedy. It strikes at the root of the evil." Eugene Frey, Lecturer, Illinois State Grange, in "The Ground Hog," September 10, 1917. 70 It Will Improve the Conditions for Rural Co-operation. As in the case of production itself, so in the case of marketing and distribution here, again, the debt-ridden tenant farmers, because of their inefficiency, hold down the incomes of those who farm their own land. The tenant farmers rarely cooperate with their fellows The great majority are nomadic shifting about each year from one place to another, "mining" the soil of its fertility, making few acquaint- ances, and taking little or no interest in the community at large. Because of their limited knowledge and hopeless condition they rarely sort or grade their products; they follow few standards; and they seldom know how, when, and where best to dispose of their goods. The consequence is that the independent farmers who more fully recognize the value of effective 81 teamworK in buying and selling, are compelled to suffer along with the tenants. Not only are they unable to supply a superior product and realize the full value of that product, but they are frequently obliged to sell, in a glutted market, goods whose price is considerably be- low what is reasonable and fair. But give the tenants a fair chance in life, open up the opportunities that nature and civ- ilization affords, and such wastefulness will soon end. The advantage of intelligent team- work in marketing will shortly dawn upon them. They will learn how best to prepare their products for the market, what grades and sizes are the most desirable, what standards to go by, where and when to sell and where and when not to sell in a word, how to work and cooperate effectively with their fellowmen and to increase, not only their own earning power, but the earning power of all their neighbors. "I say to you farmers that this Single Tax, of -which I am proud to be an advo- cate, would be to the over-burdened farmers and workingmen the greatest boon, the great- est blessing, the greatest God-send that any country ever knew." Tom L. Johnson, Mayor of Cleveland, Ohio, Before an Audience of Ohio Farmers, 1909. 71 It Will Reduce the Price of Practically Everything the Farmers Buy. It has been estimated that the various trusts and monopolies in the United States railroad, shipping, waterpower, packing, stockyard, communication, coal, oil, iron, timber, etc., charge the farmers in common with all other consumers, an average of 33% more than is necessary to furnish them with a reasonable rate of profit on their capital actually invested. Whether or not this estimate is literally cor- rect is a matter of small moment. Certain it is that when the teeth of the above trusts and monopolies have been extracted by the Single Tax method, the price of practically everything the farmers purchase "store food," wearing apparel, kitchen utensils, furniture, lumber, brick, tools, machinery, etc., will make a substantial drop. 'There is no possible way except through the adoption of the Single Tax to prevent the robbery of the farmer, which takes even from the most prosperous a large part of his just profits, and which steadily reduces Increasing numbers to the condition of strug- gling, poverty-stricken tenants, or, what is essentially the same thing, mortgage-bur- 82 dened owner* whose equity in their farm* I steadily becoming? a minus quantity." George P. Hampton, Editor of "The Farmers' Open Forum," in "The Single Tax Year Book," p. 265. M If by taxation . . . we make It imporixlble to hold idle land and other natural re- sources, then new farms, new mines, new Industries will be developed everywhere, and free competition thus promoted will result In new jobs, higher wages, increased pro- duction, lower prices, lower rents, and better markets for farm and factory/' George L. Record, Republican Candidate for Senator of New Jersey, 1918. Quoted in "The Public" of April 20, 1918. 72 It Will Lower the Farmers' Federal Taxes. The amount of federal taxes paid by the farmers in 1912 (not taking into consideration the monopoly profits of trusts due to these taxes), was equal to the amount paid by all other consumers about $35 per family. In 1917, the first year of the great war, this sum had risen to approximately $80 per family, and in 1918 it was estimated to be in the vicinity of $110. In 1919 it exceeded $200 per family. Practically all of this unseen, yet severely- felt burden, will be taken off the farmers under the Single Tax. For the Single Tax is not a CITY LAND VALUES VS. FARM LAND VALUES The value of the bare land in New York City in 1913 was greater by 9205,087,474 than the value in 1910 of all the improved and unimproved farm land in the twenty-seven (27) States shown in black: See Annual Report of Commissioners of Taxes and Assessments of the City of New York, 1916. Census Report of 1910. tax upon the products of labor that is to say, upon consumption; it is a tax upon land in proportion to its value. And the bulk of the land values is not to be found in the agricul- 83 tural districts, but In lumbering and mining regions, along railroad lines, rivers and the seashore, and especially in towns and cities. Of the $125,000,000,000 or more of land value in the United States, considerably less than one-third is in the rural communities. But this third, or approximately $38,000,000,000 is not, however, all owned by farmers. Fully $15,000,000,000 of it is owned by speculators men who are letting their ground lie idle. But 37% of the farmers again are tenants, while another 21% are mortgaged. This means that fully $8,000,000,000 more of land is owned by absentee landlords and money-lenders. As a matter of fact actual bona-fide farmers farmers who really own the ground they till have but a ridiculously small proportion of the total land values of the nation. Let there be no mistake. Under the Single Tax all farmers will pay their full share of the federal expenses. But they will not as now pay any more than this. As compared with their present unjust burden the new and just one will be insignificant. "After ten years of close study of the sub- ject of taxation, as the responsible head of the Washington State Grange, I am positively convinced that this plan of taxation [the Sin- gle Tax] is not only the best for the farm- ers, hut the only one that will take the bur- den of taxation off the producers and place it where it really belongs, namely, on the bene- ficiaries of special privilege." C. B. Kegley, Late Master of the Washington State Grange. Quoted in "The Ground Hog," July 15, 1916. 73 It Will Lower the Farmers' State Taxes. The state taxes are not collected wholly from consumption as are the national taxes, but most of them are. This, of course, puts an unfair burden on all consumers, and relieves privilege from contributing its full quota. As farmers have greater interests as consumers and producers than they have as mere land- owners, they will, therefore, when the state taxes on the products of labor are abolished, gain much more than they will lose. "The fanner who improves, irrigates, ma- nures and intensively uses his land will find that the Single Tax is a scheme for taking off his burden of taxes and laying them on the shoulders of the land monopolist." Her- bert Quick, Editor "Farm and Fireside" and member of the Federal Farm Loan Board. "The [farmer's] land is at present assessed at nearly twice its proper unimproved value, while town and city land is often valued at less than one-half of its actual value, thus 84 THE FARMER AND THE SINGLE TAX the Single Tax (limited to need* of gov- ernment) would have affected farmer*, farm land peculator*, and the owners of both im proved and unimproved lots, In the entire State of Oregon in 1900s FARMERS Gen- Prop. Tax $3,730,150 Single Tax 11,941,493 FARM LAND SPECULATORS OWNERS OF UN IMPROVED LOTS Oen. Prop. Tax $1,826,743 Single Tax $3,133,719 Gen. Prop. Tax $2,522,080 Single Tax $2,326,806 Gen. Prop. Tax $1,366,368 Single Tax $2,326,806 From "People's Power and Public Taxation," by W. G. Eggleston, A. D. Cridge and W. S. U'Ren, of Oregon. subjecting him to a more than fourfold dis- advantage." C. B. Fillebrown, "Principles of Natural Taxation," p. 231. "Some of the farmers have an Idea that the Single Tax or land tax will hit them hard and Is for the benefit of the city man. This Isn't so where the Single Tax has been par- tially tried out." Alson Secor, Editor "Suc- cessful Farming 1 ," Des Moines, Iowa, Febru- ary, 1912. "Sinee the Single Tax would fall most heavily on the cities where land values are greatest the poorer agricultural districts could be relieved from the heavy burden of taxation." Profs. Burch and Nearing, "Ele- ments of Economics," p. 340. "It can not be said that if Single Tax he adopted it will fall heavily upon the farmer* of a state. It will not, in fact, fall as heav- ily upon the farmers of the state as It will on owners of land in cities and towns." G. Li. Carlson, in "Carlson's Rural Review," Nor- folk, Neb., September, 1914. 85 74 It Will Lower tlie Farmers' Local Taxes. Farmers who farm their own farms will, as well as tenants, have a smaller local burden to carry under the Single Tax than they have at present. For two reasons: In the first place, there will be no taxes on their improvements or personal property on their houses and household goods, on their barns, bins, fences, tools, machinery, orchards, crops, livestock, etc. In the second place, the owners of unim- proved land will have to pay more than under the present system will have to pay as much as the owners of improved land of equal value. What a relief this will be to actual farmers can be realized only when it is known to what a colossal extent the owners of unimproved lands now escape taxation. THE LAND SPECULATOR AND THE SINGLE TAX How the Single Tax (limited to needs of gov- ernment) would have affected seven large land peculators and 5,407 farmers owning both im- proved and unimproved lands, in Clackamas County, Oregon, in 1910: SEVEN LARGE LAND SPECULATORS Gen. Prop. Tax $41,993.96 Single Tax $60,454.86 5,407 FARMERS (Owning 95,594.51 acres of improved and 213,609.09 acres of unimproved land) Gen. Prop. Tax $196,525,92 Single Tax $159,559.01 From "Clackamas County Assessments and Taxes," by W. G. Eggleston, of Portland, Oregon, and W. S. U'Ren, of Oregon City, Oregon. Take, for example, California. "Throughout the Sacramento Valley," says Edward P. B. Troy, Taxation Expert of San Francisco (Single Tax Year Book, p. 400), "the taxes of the farmer will average from $5 to $10 per acre; in the San Joaquin Valley from $10 to $15. Over the Tehachipi, among the orange groves of Riverside County, I found the small farmer's tax to average $20 per acre, and many of them are paying $30, $40, and even $50 per acre in taxes." What do the owners of the unimproved land the speculators pay? The following table 86 (see Second Annual Report of the Commission of Immigration and Housing in California, p. 327), speaks for itself: Tax per No. of Acre, Owner. County. Acres. Cents. Cent. Pac. Ry Siskiyou _664,830 7 Cent. Pac. Ry Yuba 22,061 6 Cent. Pac. Ry Tehama 69,008 74 Stovall-Wilcoxson Co.Colusa 35,660 22 Agoure interests Ventura __ 16,000 8i So. Pac. Land Co___Tulare 13,732 4} Kern Co. Land Co___Kern 428,000 16 Miller & Lux Kern 147,000 18 So. Pac. Ry Kern 650,000 5 But it may be said, "Granted that the Single Tax, by removing all burdens from improve- ments and personal property, and compelling all holders of idle land to pay more, will, tem- porarily at least, reduce the actual farmer's taxes, will not this burden be raised when the full Single Tax is applied? The answer is in the negative. For just as the Single Tax approaches its limit, will the "margin of cultivation," be raised. In other words, just as the pressure of land taxation is felt, will land monopolists throw their vacant holdings on the market, and just as they throw these holdings on the market, will economic rent fall. How much lower the pure rent of ground will be under the full Single Tax than it is now, no one, to be sure, can say. It may be one-third, one-half, or it may be more. Everything seems to indicate, however, that it will eventually be reduced to the actual cost of government. In any event men who own improved lands in the rural districts will have lower local taxes to pay under the full Single Tax than they have at present. "Had the Single Tax been In operation [in 1900] the farmers of Coos county (Oregon) would have paid but $13,456, a saving of over $51,OOO. In the whole state of Oregon the farmers would have saved nearly $1,800,- 000 on their tax bills and speculators and public service corporations would have paid that much more/' Joseph Fels, in "Success- ful Farming," Des Moines, Iowa, February, 1912. "A recent and trustworthy compilation from the official tax books of Claeknmas County, Oregon, shows that the 5,407 farmers of that county, exclusive of tenant farmer* and those who hold NO improved land that Is to say, the working owners of bona-fldc farms would pay 23.01 per cent less in taxea on their property if only land values were taxed, the total levy remaining as at pres- ent. . . . It is believed that such a system 87 of taxation with a proper distribution of state expenses among: the municipalities, would halve the taxes of Massachusetts farmers." Prof. I.. J. Johnson, in "Harper's Weekly," July, 1913. The following statement by the "Home- stead Loan and Land League" of Missouri, shows how the partial Single Tax measure voted on in that state in 1918, would have affected the farming communities: "Am to where this tax will fall, a little reflection will show. According to govern- ment reports* it is clear that at least 115,000 of the farmers of Missouri have land value exclusive of improvements of less than $3,000 each. They will pay less than at present, when all their improvements, machinery, stock, etc., are exempt. The 85,000 tenant farmers of the state will pay no tax at all. A total of more than 200,000 farmers will pay less tax than now and many none at all. Few farmers will have any increase in taxes whatever. "There are millions of acres of land lying idle in this state, held out of use for specu- lation, and upon this taxes will fall heavily. This land will be opened up thereby for use. Only about 24,000,000 acres out of a total of 43,000,000 in Missouri are even partially im- proved, while less than one per cent of the land in the state is intensively cultivated. Fifteen million acres are absolutely idle. "Seventy per cent of the land within the corporate limits of Kansas City is vacant. Land in the business section of the city, not used for homes, is worth a total of $175,000,- 000. These vast idle and valuable tracts of land will be taxed. Two thousand acres in the heart of Kansas City is worth more than all of the farm land in Audrain, Andrew, Bates, Clariton, Green, Henry, Knox, Missis- sippi, Montgomery and Howard Counties; ten of the best agricultural counties in the state combined, and will, therefore, under this pro- posal, pay as much tax as all the farmers in the ten counties named. "The same is true of St. Louis. There is land there worth $4,000,000 per acre. The mineral land of eastern and southern Mis- souri is highly valuable and this tax will force those who hold it to use it, or permit others to do so on just terms." 75_It Will Reduce the Cost of County Govern- ment. The cost of county government in the United States in 1912, amounted to $385,181,000. At this time it amounts in round numbers to about $400,000,000 annually. Much of this will be eliminated when the Single Tax goes into force. For the land, upon which to build pub- lic improvements from canals to court houses will be vastly lower in price than it is now. 88 There will be practically no poor houses to maintain because there will be no helplessly poor; fewer hospitals and Jails and reforma- tories to support, because there will be less sickness and less crime. The immense cost of highway construction and maintenance will be lowered because there will be no roads to build past vacant stretches of unimproved land the unimproved land will be opened up to whoever wants to use it. There will be fewer tax assessors and tax officials, fewer police and officers of the law, fewer lawyers and judges and jurymen to wrangle over civil suits, or to pass sentence upon the victims of social injustice. Where it now takes four hun- dred million dollars a year to cover the ex- penditures of county government in the United States, two hundred fifty or three hundred mil- lion dollars will easily suffice when we resort to natural taxation. WHAT SOME PROGRESSIVE CANADIAN FARMERS THINK OP THE SINGLE TAX. "Whereas, the adoption of the Single Tax and the removal of the tax on improvement* would be of immense benefit to those engaged In agriculture; be it therefore, "Resolved, That this Institute endeavor to bring before the proper authorities the need for such removal, with an urgent request that such steps may be taken as will bring about the change desired/* Resolution unanimously adopted at the Annual Conven- tion of the Farmers' Institute of British Co- lumbia, held at Victoria, January 23, 1913. See "The Public," February 7, 1913. "Resolved, That this convention of Mani- toba Grain Growers strongly urge the Do- minion Government to frame a fiscal system of national taxation that will bear justly on all classes affording special privileges to none. That Is, by a direct taxation of all land values both rural and urban, including all the natural resources of the nation, forest, mineral, water power and fisheries, so far as these resources are owned or operated by private or corporate interests, with a surtax on that part of all of such resources as are held out of use by private interests for spec- ulative purposes." Resolution Adopted at the Manitoba Grain Growers' Convention at Brandon, January 13-15, 1915. Carried 499 to 1. See "The Public," January 22, 1915. 76 It Will Reduce the Cost of Farm Trans- portation. How will the Single Tax reduce the cost of farm transportation? Simply, as has previ- ously been suggested, by compelling all own- ers of vacant land lying close to markets either to use it or to let go, and thus permit those forced out into the wilderness by our present system to come back and put it to service. "Had our early statesmen understood tfee laws of political economy, they would hove taken for public purposes the annual value conferred upon the land by the community. This -would have produced two direct effects. It would have prevented any man from hold- ing more land than he could use to good pur- pose; and it would have prevented any Idle land in a settled community. Hence, the next man seeking land would find it imme- diately connected with a market. Such a system of settlement would have kept men within reach of the fullest cooperation, would have saved a great part of the present cost of transportation, and would have made the lot of each newcomer, whether by immigrant hip or stork express, easier than those that came before." Stoughton Cooley, in "The Public," September 15, 1916. THE HIGH COST OF LAND SPECULATION Could an estimate be made, not only of the annual cost of constructing and keeping in repair all public improvements, such as roads, highways, bridges, ditches, telephone lines, etc., past the half billion or more acres, that are held out of use between farm houses and cities, but of the value of the colossal amount of time, trouble, and power man, horse, and mechanical involved in constantly hauling merchandise and crops past this huge empire of vacant territory could an estimate be made of all this extra cost, it would amount annually to billions of dollars. 77 It Will Solve the Kural School and Church Problems, The terrible plight of the rural schools of the nation is little realized. Doctor H. B. Smith of Iowa is authority for the statement that "more illiteracy is to be found in rural America than in urban America, despite the fact that a large majority of illiterate immi- grants settle in the cities;" moreover, that "a large majority of the rural children never go farther than the fifth grade." 90 These statements, startling though they are, square with those uttered by Prof. E. T. Fair- child, Superintendent of Public Instruction of the State of Kansas, before the House and Senate Committees on Education, Washington, D. C., on January 16, 1912. Said Prof. Fair- child: "Of the 12,000,000 rural school children less than 25% is completing the work of the grades. The teaching body is immature and lacks proper training. In many states fully one- half of the rural teachers have had no training beyond the eighth grade. Terms are too short School buildings are poor, insanitary and ill- equipped. The school enrollment is constantly decreasing. The supervision is wholly inade- quate. High school privileges are denied to the great majority of these boys and girls. The strong, virile rural school of a generation ago has gone and in its place is a primary school, weak in numbers and lacking in effi- ciency." The decline of the rural church is equally marked. "Wallace's Farmer," of Des Moines, Iowa, in its edition of August 13, 1915, states: "While we do not have definite statistics cov- third of the churches of the open country have died in the last fifteen or twenty years, that another third are dying, that here and there is one decidedly prosperous, and the rest not more than holding their own." Surely it is superfluous to remark that these downward tendencies can not be allowed to continue; that unless the fundamental cause which induces them is removed, America will witness ere long, an intellectual and moral deterioration of her agricultural population that is equalled only by that of the peasantry classes of Europe. As to the cause itself there can be no dis- pute. It lies primarily in our vicious public policy of levying tribute upon things which are distinctly the results of individual effort, and In permitting funds which are plainly social, to flow into private pockets a policy which widens the gulf between the landed and the landless, which condemns millions to an existence of misery and poverty and grinding toil, and deprives them of every opportunity to live in a manner befitting civilized life. When this vicious policy is changed, then, but not till then, will the downward course of the rural school and church cease, and their up- ward course begin. 91 WHAT SOME! THOUGHTFUL FARMERS IN THE UNITED STATES THINK OF THE SINGLE TAX. "Resolved, That this body go on record a favoring the adoption of a system of taxation whereby personal property and all Improve- ments would be exempt from taxation and the bnrden of taxation be borne by land values only." Resolution Adopted by Wash- ington State Grange, Centralia, 1916. See "The Public," May 19, 1916. "Resolved, That the Farmers' Institute of Potter County, Texas, do recommend that all rental values of vacant lands and such others as are not put to their best use, be, as are the soldiers, conscripted into service of the government while in this unprecedented emergency. And that we recommend as to methods for the easiest, cheapest, and fair- est, as has been demonstrated in many lo- calities, the annual taxation of every parcel up to its full rental value, and the exemp- tion from taxation of all improvements and personal property belonging to the user." Resolution Adopted by the Farmers' Insti- tute of Potter County, Texas, May 20, 1917. "Resolved, That we favor the abolition of the general property tax and favor the tax- ation of the value of land Irrespective of Improvements. "Resolved, That we favor the tuxntion of all land held out of use at Its full selling or pecnlative value." Resolution Adopted at the Annual Convention of the Maryland State Grange, Held at Easton on December 8, 1916. See "The Public," of December 29, 1916. 78 It Will Elevate the Agricultural Life. Given conditions in the rural districts such as the Single Tax will bring about conditions where the speculative holding of idle land is destroyed and the soil made cheap; where the power of landlordism and usury is broken, and the debt-ridden tenants liberated from a cruel bondage; where agricultural production and marketing may be carried on under the most favorable circumstances, with a maximum of efficiency and a minimum of wastage; where the farming classes receive more for what they sell and pay less for what they buy; where government federal, state and local has been placed on a most economical basis, taxation equalized, and all the expenses of administra- tion cut down; where the community, has, be- cause of the elimination of vacant spaces, be- come more compact, the roads improved, and the educational and religious institutions set upon a sound and permanent footing given conditions such as these and it unavoidably 92 follows that the social life In the rural com- munities will be elevated to a higher and better plane. "Were all the taxes on the land and the people-' * land free to the landloNii, then none would be driven Into the wilderness to naffer the change* of climate and want of society, bat those who desired coald then settle nearer to their kindred and friend* and en- Joy the blessings of friendship, love, and home with much less cost and Inconvenience." Edwin Burgess, Forerunner of Henry George, in the "Racine Advocate," 1859. "An a farmer for the better part of half a century I want to tell farmers that It Is to their Interest to have most of the cost of the war paid by a tax on land values." C. B. Kegley, Late Master of the Washington State Grange, in the "Farmers' Open Forum." 79 It Will Halt the Movement to the Cities. "The Single Tax would stop the unnntnrnl flow of population from the rural districts to the cities, and make life in both healthier and happier." S. S. Craig, in "The Arena," January, 1899. "The depopulation of the country districts also would cease. For the land Is used to best advantage when It is used in small areas by independent owners. The taxation of rent would force landowners to allow it o to be used and the country could then again, afford ample opportunities for a healthy, profitable, and pleasurable life." Max Hirsch, "Democracy Versus Socialism," p. 402. "Rural and farm life, relieved of its ab- normal and well-nigh crushing tax burdens, should [under the Single Tax] assume It* natural attractiveness to human beings and the abnormal flow to the cities should dimi- nish or cease." Prof. L. J. Johnson, in "The American Journal of Public Health," June, 1914. PART IX 80--It Will Remove the Opposition to Foreign Immigration The First Cause of Interna- tional Irritation. There are four great causes of the enmity, fear, and distrust with which the nations of the Old World view the United States of America, All of these great causes the application of the Single Tax principle will remove. The first cause is our policy of restricting immigration, our shutting out of large numbers of those who apply for admission with the ob- ject of bettering their economic and social circumstances. This policy, which is en- forced chiefly for the purpose of keeping un- 93 employment down and wages in this country as high as possible, will naturally be aban- doned when society has quit the taxation of industry. For the number of jobs will then constantly exceed the number of men. The supply of work will far outrun the supply of workers. Wages as a result will always border on the value of the full product. There will thus be no need or desire on the part of our own laborers to exclude the laborers of other countries in order to protect themselves from want and the fear of want. On the contrary, it will then clearly be seen, what is disbelieved now, that the more immigrants, the easier it becomes for all to make a living. Immigra- tion, therefore, instead of being longer opposed, will be warmly welcomed. "By taking economic rent for public pur- poses . . . -we shall create a demand for labor which will solve the menacing prob- demand for labor will make wages higher . . . and the fear of deadly competition being removed, the Immigration problem will cease to be a problem at all, and workers from other lands will be welcome to aid in the production of wealth the natural limits of which have never been described." F. W. Garrison, in the "Atlantic Monthly," Decem- ber, 1913. 81 It Will Remove the Opposition to Foreign Imports The Second Cause of Interna- tional Irritation. The second cause of the suppressed feeling against the United States on the part of foreign nations, is our maintenance of a protective tariff, our keeping out of the products that the workers of other nations wish to make and sell to us. This obnoxious policy which also owes its existence to the desire to "protect the highly paid American laborer from the pauper laborer of Europe," will, like the immigration policy, inevitably be abandoned when the Single Tax has been inaugurated. For not merely will it then be perceived, that, with opportunities for employment open on every side, and wages therefore, constantly at their highest level, the American workingman as a producer has nothing to lose by abandoning it, but that he has as a consumer a great deal to gain. While sacrificing nothing either in the way of chances for employment or in wages, he will profit immensely in that he will be able to buy numerous excellent commodities from Europe, Asia, and elsewhere, much cheaper than he can buy the same kind of commodities here. 94 Like the menacing restrictions on foreign Im- migration, therefore, the menacing restrictions on foreign Imports, will be crossed off the books. "The application of rent to the public net-v- ice and the relief of every Industry from tax- ation would create a new world both for the producer nnd the consumer. . . . The 1m- pnlftc Riven to commerce and manufactures would be Irresistible. A home market would be created ten tlnien greater than that of all China and the East." Dr. J. H. Stallard, "The True Basis of Economics," p. 98. 82 It Will Remove the General Hunger for Foreign Territory The Third Cause of In- ternational Irritation. The third cause of the suspicion and fear with which the American Republic Is looked upon by other nations, Is the keen desire mani- fested by a large and growing part of our pop- ulation for more territory. It is true that our leaders generally deny this. But the denial, so far as the masses are concerned, is not in good form. Our language shows it. Our news- papers show it. Our magazines and periodicals and books show it. Contrary to the assertion of statesmen vast and increasing numbers of citizens in the United States do want more land for colonization purposes. From whence springs this unholy desire for more land and more territory? It springs fundamentally from the belief that the con- stantly tightening economic pressure in the country is due to "over-population," to a ten- dency of the "labor supply to outrun the work supply," and that the condition of the working masses at home can be improved only by ex- tending our boundaries, by "adding Mexico," "annexing Central America," "taking over Canada," etc., and thus permitting our surplus population to emigrate into the new provinces. The great fallacy of this notion, however, can be quickly shown. It is not "over-population," that is responsible for the poverty of the American workingman, but "under-employ- ment." His wages are not low because there are "more men than jobs," but because there are "less jobs than men." To cure unemploy- ment, raise wages, and abolish poverty, there- fore, it is not necessary to secure "additional territory"; it is only necessary to remove the obstacles that prevent the legitimate use of the territory we already possess. This the Single Tax will do. It will not merely open up for settlement a huge empire 95 of vacant land within our own borders, but by Increasing permanently the purchasing power of all consumers, will create a condition in which the work-supply always remains in ex- cess of the labor supply. Its adoption will thus dispel all desire on the part of our citizens for outside colonies. Our speeches and literature will be forever purged of all suggestions for territorial expansion. No nation, therefore, will longer have the slightest occasion to im- pugn the motives or distrust the actions of this greatest of all Republics. ''The Single Tax will dispel the keen na- tional desire for territorial expansion, by forcing on the markets of every country adopting It, 00 much DOMESTIC land that the need to colonize FOREIGN land will viiu- teh." Ernest Batten, "The Single Tax," p. 14. 88 It Will Remove the General Hunger for Foreign Markets The Fourth Canse of In- ternational Irritation. The fourth cause of the prejudice and hatred nursed in the hearts of our neighbors across the seas emanates from our efforts to se- cure foreign markets. Under our present ab- surd revenue methods we can supply faster than we can demand. Our "home mar- ket" is constantly restricted. We are perpetu- ally suffering from "over-production," or, more accurately, from "under-consumption." Unless therefore, we are able to sell our surplus goods in the unexploited countries of Asia, Africa, Australia, Europe, North and South America, our industries are in danger of stand- ing idle, and our laborers thrown out of em- ployment. Out of this dilemma the taxation of land values only can deliver us. It alone can rid us of the evil of under-consumption, can push the demand for goods ahead of the ability to supply. It alone can create a "home market" so great that our capital and labor will not need to "forcibly invade" the trading grounds of other peoples thereby in- curring the jealousy, wrath, and enmity of for- eign powers. "If, in all countries, those vrho wished to use the resources of the earth paid the rent to the government, which exempted all the products of industry from taxation, there would be such a home market created that the nations would not have 'to fight for the markets of the world,' and custom houses would not stand upon their borders as mon- uments to the enmity of nations/' Dr. Mary D. Hussey, at the Conference of Universal Peace Union, Buck Hill Falls Inn, Penn., September 7, 1912. 96 84 It Will, When Applied Universally, Crush Militarism, and Disband Armies and Navies. Militarism owes Its existence the world over, simply to the fear and distrust, the hatred and enmity, that one nation has for another. Any- thing, therefore, that will overcome this fear and distrust, this hatred and enmity, must necessarily and Inevitably destroy militarism. Now, as has just been suggested, this mutual fear and distrust, this hatred and enmity be- tween nations, springs in Its final analysis, from two powerful sources: (1) From the desire of each nation to pre- vent the laborers and products of every other nation from COMING INTO the country, and, (2) From the hunger of each nation for new colonies and new markets that its own laborers and products may GO OUT. We have already seen how the application of the Single Tax doctrine in the United States will remedy this matter so far as this country Is concerned; how the greatly increased ac- tivity of capital and labor, and the abolition of poverty, will dissipate the eagerness of our citizens for additional territory and outside markets, and cause the removal of all restric- tions upon immigrants and imports; and how this furthermore will demonstrate to all foreign powers, not only our perfect peaceableness, but our sincere friendship, and so transform their present attitude towards us from one of sus- picion and hostility into one of love and trust. But the same results that will follow the adoption of the Single Tax in the United States will follow its adoption everywhere else. In each country where its far-reaching prin- ciples are Introduced, the vacant lands will be opened up to use, industry will be relieved of a burdensome load of taxation, capital and labor will be stimulated into fresh and whole- some activity, and poverty will disappear. And with poverty gone, with the commodity market constantly under-supplied, employment beck- oning from every hand, and wages up to the full value of the service performed, no coun- try will yearn for more territory or new mar- kets to which its native population can emi- grate and its industrial output flow, or feel compelled in self-defense to close its ports to laborers and the products of these laborers from other areas of the globe. No country, therefore, will longer possess the least excuse for challenging the motives of the men of other 97 countries or to watch their language and ac- tions with feelings of the gravest apprehension and distrust. The foundation upon which the institution ol militarism rests, having thus everywhere been undermined, militarism must crumble like a house of cards. "The abolition of tariff* and the recognition of the right to the land of the earth which all its inhabitants possess will at last lay the specter of war, and lead to the abandonment of an armed peace which is only less crush- Ing and brutalizing than war itself." F. W. Garrison, in "The Atlantic Monthly," Decem- ber. 1913. 85 It Will, When Applied Universally, Abolish War. There can be no wars when there are no standing armies and navies; no standing arm- ies and navies when there is no insecurity or danger; no insecurity or danger when there IB no interference with "life, liberty, and the pur- suit of happiness;" no interference with "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," when capital and labor are free and untrammelled, and natural opportunities are within the reach of all. "Single Taxers, pointing to the cause or causes of war, are confident that free access to the use of the earth and the abolition of tariffs would result in making mankind free from the age-long slavery to governments of princes and king and lords or privilege, that the bringing of men closer together in the association of ideas and the greater harmony of Interests would reveal the identity