, consequently, highly calculated to establish an equal level of
well-being and culture throughout society. The extension and
ramification of the most perfect means of transportation and
communication into the remotest corners of the land is, accordingly, _a
necessity and a matter of general social interest_. On this field there
arise before the new social system tasks that go far beyond any that
modern society can put to itself. Finally, such a perfected system of
transportation and communication, will promote the decentralization of
the mass of humanity that is to-day heaped up in the large cities. It
will distribute the same over the country, and thus--in point of
sanitation as well as of mental and material progress--it will assume a
significance of inestimable value.

* * * * *

Among the means of production in industry and transportation, land holds
a leading place, being the source of all human effort and the foundation
of all human existence, hence, of Society itself. Society resumes at its
advanced stage of civilization, what it originally possessed. Among all
races on earth that reached a certain minimum degree of culture, we find
community in land, and the system continues in force with such people
wherever they are still in existence. Community in land constituted the
foundation of all primitive association: the latter was impossible
without the former. Not until the rise and development of private
property and of the forms of rulership therewith connected, and then
only under a running struggle, that extends deep into our own times, was
the system of common ownership in land ended, and the land usurped as
private property. The robbery of the land and its transformation into
private property furnished, as we have seen, the first source of that
bondage that, extending from chattel slavery to the "freedom" of the
wage-earner of our own century, has run through all imaginable stages,
until finally the enslaved, after a development of thousands of years
re-convert the land into common property.

The importance of land to human existence is such that in all social
struggles the world has ever known--whether in India, China, Egypt,
Greece (Cleomenes), Rome (the Gracchi), Christian Middle Ages (religious
sects, Munzer, the Peasants War), in the empires of the Aztecs and of
the Incas, or in the several upheavals of latter days--the possession of
land is the principal aim of the comba