thought, and even in his written words. His strained efforts to prove that Consols, railway shares and municipal stock are equally eligible as subjects from which public revenue can be raised are rendered futile by the very nature of the things he is discussing. Land differs from the property represented by Consols, railway shares and municipal stock, and there is, therefore, good reason for assuming that the persons who hold land should be treated differently from those who hold property in these forms. A consideration of the case of Consols, between which and land values the distinction is perhaps the least obvious, will serve for all. These are Government stock or funds used for the maintenance of national or imperial services. One form of these services may be taken as typical of all. A naval loan is occasionally raised, and subscribers to this loan are granted shares in Consols in proportion to the amount of their subscriptions. The loan is used to increase or maintain the strength of the Navy. The Navy is a part of our national capital. It exists to render what is regarded as an indispensable national service. The people and their representatives believe that if it were not for the Navy the country might be invaded by foreign enemies, that vast armies might overrun our territory, laying waste our crops, razing or burning our factories, offices and dwelling-houses, destroying our public and private wealth, and depriving us of the opportunity and security which enable and encourage us to continue production, that hostile fleets might attack our ships at sea, and cut off our trade and intercourse with friendly nations. That is, the Navy is considered to play an essential part in the production and exchange of wealth, like any other form of capital. But land differs very widely from the Navy, and a tax on the value of land differs as widely in its nature and in its effects from a tax on Consols or on the dividends paid on Consols. A tax of a hundred per cent. on the dividends drawn from Consols would make national loans a thing of the past. No person would subscribe to a naval loan, if he understood that the Government would confiscate every penny of it in taxation. The national capital would not be replenished, the strength of the Navy would decline, and our shores would be left open to the attack of any country which might care to make it. But a tax of a hundred per cent. on the value of land would have a very different result. The land, unlike the Navy, is not brought into existence by the expenditure of capital and labour, and the value of land is not created by services performed by its recipients. If the value of land were taxed, the land would not disappear, and the services which give land its value would not be withdrawn or those who perform them discouraged. On the contrary, every kind of public and private enterprise would receive a new stimulus, because the appropriation of land value by the State would remove the insurmountable obstacle placed in their way by the withholding of land, and because the value of land would be used to render the first more efficient and to free the second from burdens

which now rest on it. The same argument applies to railway shares and municipal stock. They represent capital which differs essentially from land in every case where men give or receive its use.

This attempt to identify things essentially dissimilar is tediously repeated throughout the article. Mr. Cox argues that the holding up of land is the same in its effects as the holding up of capital and labour. A merchant buys a supply of cotton, and holds it until the market is more favourable for a sale. Is he to be taxed on the stock he holds, to compel him to sell? A body of workmen hold back their muscular strength until they obtain a price which they think adequate. Are they to be taxed, to force them to come to terms more quickly with their employers?' If the difference between land on the one hand, and cotton goods and muscular strength on the other, is not apparent to Mr. Cox in the gradual but steady process of dissolution which affects the latter in ordinary circumstances, cases may be taken where the distinction is suddenly and clearly revealed. There was much muscular strength, and there would doubtless be many cotton goods in Messina, Kingston and San Francisco immediately before the earthquakes which recently visited them, and no doubt the possessors of cotton and of far more enduring forms of wealth, as well as the possessors of muscular strength, expected that they would receive a price for their possessions not for one day but for many days in the future. But when the surface of the earth was moved by some hidden force as an awning is moved by the wind, muscular strength, cotton and substantial buildings went down in ruins or up in flames, never to fetch a price again. With the land it was different. Although its configuration might be slightly altered, it was there to bring for its owners a price as high as or higher than before, just as it was in the times of Verres or Columbus. In spite of Mr. Cox's assertion, the injury done to trade by the largest strikes is not so serious or so widespread as the injury caused by the chronic interference with every trade due to the withholding of land in every part of the country. Strikes themselves, indeed, are caused by land monopoly, and its displacement of labour with the consequent tendency to force down wages.

While it is equally inconsistent with dignity and intelligence to discuss Mr. Cox's comparison of land monopoly with the 'monopoly' he has in his trousers, it is both of importance and interest to point out the implicit and inevitable meaning of this reiterated argument, a meaning which becomes explicit in one passage. Mr. Cox is known as the arch-opponent of Socialism. He is irrepressible in his attacks on Socialist proposals in Parliament, on the platform, and in the Press, but here in cold letters he advocates the vicious principle which has been pressed as a solution of the social problem by the most extravagant section of those reformers who have unfortunately adopted the word Socialism to describe their aims and methods, Mr. Cox's argument is a perfect illustration of this vice :

Where it can be shown (he says) that a particular piece of land is deliberately being kept out of the market, to the injury of the community, power ought to be given to the local authority to compel the landowner to sell. No man is justified in using his property in such a manner as to injure other people. We want some machinery for expropriating the obstructive landlord, paying him, of course, a fair price for his legally acquired property.

Consider the situation as it is described. There is the Government and the individual whose action is shown to be injurious to the community. Mr. Cox, with all that fatal haste which is the chief defect in Socialistic thought, condemns the individual at once. He does not stay to inquire whether the fault is the Government's or the individual's, nor to ask how the situation arises, or how it might be avoided, but calls for compulsion, for machinery, for legislation which is socialistic in the bad sense of the word, to expropriate the obstructive landlord. This disclosure of Mr. Cox's real views is very salutary. It shows that the men who most loudly profess themselves opponents of State interference cannot consistently maintain their principles if they are not prepared to challenge the laws imposed on individuals by past Governments, laws which are interfering, and not merely threatening to interfere, with individual freedom. The land taxers, if they understand the principle underlying their proposal, would deny that the landowner is the real or ultimate cause of the injury inflicted on the community by the withholding of land. They find that cause in the land and rating laws which are the work of Governments or the State. The landowners are not one bit more wicked or more stupid than other people that they deserve to be coerced; they are agents of a system which teaches them inevitably to believe that their interests are best served by the injury of common interests, and this system has been founded and built up by Governments in the past. The evil is not partial, it prevails on every estate, it is as universal as the laws which cause it. Socialism, in the true sense of the word, is not a new growth of yesterday or of last century, it is exactly the same age as the earliest society, and the most urgent call at the present time is not to resist the Socialism that is proposed, but to repeal the Socialism, the legislative work of society, which is in force, and which is crushing industry and limiting freedom on every hand.

The taxation of land values is a proposal to readjust the relations of the community to individuals and to assign to each the functions which naturally and properly belong to them. It would involve no arbitrary or vindictive coercion. The incongruity and perversity of the present arrangement will be best seen in an example sufficiently interesting to justify a rather long quotation. Lord Dudley, who owns an estate in the West Indies, paid a visit there in 1906. Asked his opinion of Jamaica when he was on the point of leaving for home, he said:

It is a wonderfully productive place. There is hardly a thing that will not grow there. As a matter of fact, I have 10,000 acres in Jamaica which came

into our family, in the female line, about the year 1744. Of course these properties gave sugar, but when Emancipation came along there seemed to be an end to all of that, and they have never given anything since. I have always rather laughed at our Jamaica estates, fancying they could not be worth very much as they never gave anything, and, of course, as they never required any money I have never troubled very much about them. I am afraid we have been very much absentee proprietors. When we were coming out on the Port Kingston there was a chap on board named Nathan-the poor fellow was killed in the earthquake-he told me that he knew one of my estates, and advised me on no account to part with it. Since then some of the members of the Conference have visited the estates, and they have reported to me very highly upon them. They are wonderfully rich and productive, and I am advised not to part with a rood of land, and I do not intend to. I should not be going home just yet, only I am chairman of a Royal Commission and am bound to be at home; but I intend to come out again in the autumn, to go and see my estates and put them in proper order. I am very sorry it is not convenient for me to do so now, as I am bound to be at home.

Here is our problem restated in a manner and in circumstances which are least of all calculated to provoke bitterness or charges of a personal nature. So far as we are aware Lord Dudley has never had the reputation of being anything else than public-spirited and disinterested as a citizen, and generous in his private transactions, nor have we ever heard that he was a land taxer, or an ardent land law reformer of any kind, but in this simple statement of facts, with a frankness that is as rare as it is charming, he describes the whole evil, he indicates its cause, and suggests the remedy. He confesses that his West Indian estates are very productive, that they have not produced anything for some seventy years, that if certain things had happened, if some money had been required of him in respect of them, they would have received attention, and would have produced an unknown amount of wealth and employed a large amount of labour. He saw the whole tragic situation, he fully intended to devote himself to the development of the estates, but in spite of all his eagerness and ambition to carry out this project, he is now on the other side of the world with his mind and hands full of important work. His West Indian estates are still undeveloped, and he could still say with truth, ‘I am afraid we have been very much absentee proprietors.' Owing to the fact that Lord Dudley's West Indian acres are idle the total production of the world is less than it might be. There are fewer men and women employed there, and, consequently, fewer customers for our merchants and manufacturers here.

Lord Dudley's relation to his estates is similar to that of all other landowners to their estates. He was unable though anxious to develop his estates; the others are unable and not always anxious. He admitted his failure and expressed his regret ; few of the others do either. This is all the difference between them and him. The universal inability of landowners to develop the land in their possession and under their absolute control is inevitable in the nature

of things. The task is beyond their powers. Its proper performance requires the attention of an authority or agency whose power is universal within the limits of any country. Lord Dudley attributed his neglect to the fact that his estates never required any money. That is the great unperformed task of the community or Government, to ascertain the value of each separate holding, and to exact a part of its value from its possessor sufficient to make him attend to its development, or to make it accessible to capital and labour. Everyone would benefit by this policy. Suppose that a charge of 10007. a year on the value of his West Indian land were made on Lord Dudley by the Government, and that this charge moved him to use it, and to produce something to the value of 10,000l., he himself would be enriched and the trade of the whole world increased and stimulated. This ascertainment and appropriation of land value is a function which belongs peculiarly to the Government, which can only be performed by the Government. Its assumption and performance by the Government would not only give industry and enterprise full scope, but would enable the Government to abandon a thousand impertinent and improper tasks which do not rightly or naturally belong to it. This is the reply to Mr. Cox's reiterated contention that particular cases of obstruction 'do not justify the imposition of a special tax on all land.' The problem is not one of rare and isolated cases, but one of unvarying practice.

In one sentence Mr. Cox denies that there is anything unequal in our system of land tenure, and in the next he admits that there is, but that its evil effects are insignificant. Referring to unemployment, he says: There is no land monopoly in this country. There is, indeed, a monopoly in particular pieces of land, just as I have a monopoly in the particular pair of trousers I am wearing. But there is no general monopoly in land. If one piece is held back, other pieces can be bought.' Against these statements of contradictory and doubtful meaning we may put John Stuart Mill's statement that 'a thing which is limited in quantity, even though its possessors do not act in concert, is still a monopolised article.' For this reason the possession of land is always a monopoly which must be modified in order to prevent injurious effects. If space permitted, a great many instances could be cited in which landowners refused to allow capitalists and labourers to develop building, agricultural, and mineral lands in this country. They can go elsewhere, says Mr. Cox. Where can they go to get the freedom that is denied them here? To South Africa? According to a report of the meeting of the Lydenburg Estates, held on the 9th of February 1909 :

Mr. John Hay advocated a waiting policy with regard to their land holdings. It might be painful to go without dividends, but the policy was undoubtedly in their interests. The land would of course grow no larger, but it would increase in value, and they should hold on to it for all they were worth. They had had offers for some of their farms during the year, but they did not propose to sell unless much better prices were suggested.