y. It may be assessed and
collected with a definiteness that partakes of the immovable and
unconcealable character of the land itself. It is the most just and
equal of all taxes, because it falls only on those who receive from
society a peculiar and valuable benefit, and upon them in proportion to
the benefit they receive. The division of land now held on speculation
would much increase the number of landowners. A single tax on the value
of land would so equalise the distribution of wealth as to raise even
the poorest above that abject poverty in which public considerations
have no weight, while it would at the same time cut down those overgrown
fortunes which raise their possessors above concern in government.

_V.--Effects of the Remedy_

The effects of the remedy would be to lift the whole enormous weight of
taxation from productive industry. It would open new opportunities, for
no one would care to hold land unless to use it, and land now withheld
from use would everywhere be thrown open to improvement. The selling
price of not merely agricultural, but all land, would fall. The bonus
that wherever labour is most productive must not be paid before labour
can be exerted would disappear. Competition in the labour market would
no longer be one-sided. Rent, instead of causing inequality, would
promote equality. Labour and capital would receive the whole produce,
minus that portion taken by the state in the taxation of land values,
which, being applied to public purposes, would be equally distributed in
public benefits. The equalisation in the distribution of wealth would
react upon production, everywhere preventing waste, everywhere
increasing power.

Simplicity in the legislative and executive functions of government
would become possible. It would at the same time and in the same degree
become possible for it to realise the dream of socialism, not through
governmental repression, but because government would become the
administration of a great co-operative society, merely the agency by
which the common property was administered for the common benefit. Give
labour a free field and its full earnings, take for the benefit of the
whole community that fund which the growth of the community creates, and
want, and the fear of want, would be gone.

If the conclusions at which we have arrived are correct, they will fall
under a larger generalisation. However man may have originated, man, as
man, no matter how low in the