dlords that weighed on their shoulders as much as
on those of the rest of the people. Not only do industrial capitalists
pay heavy rents to landlords, but the rent paid by the wage worker also
has to be paid indirectly and in part by the industrial capitalist: "The
quantity of wealth that a landlord can appropriate from the capitalist
class becomes larger in proportion as the general demand for land
increases, in proportion as population grows, in proportion as the
capitalist class needs land, _i.e._ in proportion as the capitalist
system of production expands. In proportion with all this, rent rises;
that is to say, the aggregate amount of wealth increases which the
landlord class can slice off--either directly or indirectly--from the
surplus that would otherwise be grabbed by the capitalist class
alone."[90]

The industrial capitalists, then, have very motive to put an end to this
kind of parasitism, and to use the funds secured, through confiscatory
taxation of the unearned increment of land, to lessen their own
taxation, to nationalize those fundamental industries that can only be
made in this way to subserve the interests of the capitalist class as a
whole (instead of some part of it merely), and to undertake through
government those costly enterprises which are needed by all industry,
but which give too slow returns to attract the capitalist investor.

This enormous reform, in land taxation, which alone would put into the
hands of governments ultimately almost a third of the capital of modern
nations, was considered by Marx, in all its early stages, as purely
capitalistic, "_a Socialistically-fringed attempt to save the rule of
capitalism, and to establish it in fact on a still larger foundation at
present_."[91] Indeed, I have shown in a previous chapter that radical
reformers who advocated this single-tax idea, along with the
nationalization and municipalization of monopolies, do so with the
conscious purpose of reviving capitalism and making it more permanent,
precisely as Marx says. The great Socialist wrote the above phrase in
1881 (in a recently published letter to Sorge of New York) after reading
Henry George's "Progress and Poverty," which had just appeared. He calls
attention to the fact that James Mill and other capitalistic economists
had long before recommended that land rent should be paid to the State
so as to serve as a substitute for taxes, and that he, himself, had
advocated it in the Manifesto o