peratively and work it co-operatively."

"How about the land? Oughtn't that to be owned by the people too?"

"Why, of course. The land is a part of the machinery of production. Henry
George separates it but in reality it is simply one of the means by which
we live, nowadays, for no man but an absolute savage can support himself
on the bare land. In the free land days which Henry George quotes, the
free old German days when we were all barbarians and didn't know what a
thief was, not only was the land held in common but the cattle also.
Without its cattle a German tribe would have starved on the richest
pastureland in Europe, and without our machinery we would starve were the
land nationalised to-morrow. At least I think so. George's is a scheme by
which it is proposed to make employers compete so fiercely among one
another that the workman will have it all his own way. It works this way.
You tax the landowner until it doesn't pay him to have unused land. He
must either throw it up or get it used somehow and the demand for labour
thus created is to lift wages and put the actual workers in what George
evidently considers a satisfactory position. That's George's Single Tax
scheme."

"You don't agree with it?" asked Ned.

"I am a Socialist. Between all Socialists and all who favour competition
in industry, as the Single Tax scheme does, there is a great gulf fixed.
Economically, I consider it fallacious, for the very simple reason that
capitalism continues competition, not to selling at cost price but to
monopoly, and I have never met an intelligent Single Taxer, and I have
met many, who could logically deny the possibility of the Single Tax
breaking down in an extension of this very monopoly power. Roughly,
machinery is necessary to work land most profitably, profitably enough
even to get a living off it. Suppose machine holders, that is
capitalists, extend their organisation a little and 'pool' their
interests as land users, that is refuse to compete against one another
for the use of land! Nellie was telling me that at one land sale on the
Darling Downs in Queensland the selectors about arranged matters among
themselves beforehand. The land sold, owing to its situation, was only
valuable to those having other land near and so was all knocked down at
the upset price though worth four times as much. It seems to me that in
just the same way the capitalists, who alone can really use land
remember, for the farmer, the squa