"to intercept _all_ future
unearned increment" of the land is certainly a tremendous step towards
collectivism, as it would ultimately involve the nationalization of
perhaps a third of the total wealth of society. With railways and
monopolies of all kinds also in government hands, a very large part of
the industrial capital of the country would be owned by the State, and,
though all agricultural capital, and therefore the larger part of the
total, remained in private hands, we are certainly justified in calling
such a state of society _capitalist collectivism_.

But not one of the elements of this collectivism is a novelty. Railroads
are owned by governments in most countries, and monopolies often are.
The partial appropriation of the "unearned increment" is by no means
new, since a similar policy is being adopted in Germany at the present
moment, and is favored not by the radicals alone, but by the most
conservative forces in the country; namely, the party of landed Prussian
nobility. Count Posadovsky, a former minister, has written a pamphlet in
which he urges that the State should buy up the land in and about the
cities, and also that it should fix a definite limit beyond which land
values must not rise. Nearly all the chief cities of Prussia, more than
a hundred, are enforcing such a tax in a moderate form, and the
conservatives in the Reichstag proposed that the national government
should be given a right to tax in the same field. Their bill was
enacted, and, in the second half of 1911, the German government, it was
estimated, would raise over $3,000,000 by this tax, and in 1912 it is
expected to give $5,000,000. This tax, which is collected when land
changes hands by sale or exchanges, rises gradually to 30 per cent when
the increase has been 290 per cent or more. Of course this scale is
likely to be still further raised and to be made more steep as the tax
becomes more and more popular.

Mr. Churchill's defense of the new policy of the British government is
as significant as the new laws it has enacted:--

"You may say that unearned increment of the land," he says, "is on
all-fours with the profit gathered by one of those American
speculators who engineer a corner in corn, or meat, or cotton, or
some other vital commodity, and that _the unearned increment in
land is reaped by the land monopolist in exact proportion, not to
the service but to the disservice done_. It is monopoly w