t legal
advantages in the local vacant lands should forthwith cease.

In bringing to an end the local land monopoly, however, justice could be
done the landholders. Unquestionably the fairest measure to them, and at
the same time the most direct method of giving to city producers, if not
free access to land, the next practicable thing to it, would be for the
municipality to convert a part of the local vacant land into public
property, and to open it in suitable plots to such citizens as should
become occupiers. Sufficient land for this purpose might be acquired
through eminent domain. The purchase money could be forthcoming from
several sources--from progressive taxation in the direct forms already
mentioned, from the city's income from franchises, and from the savings
over the wastes of administration under present methods.

From the standpoint of equal rights there need be no difficulty in
meeting the arguments certain to be brought against this proposed
course--such sophistical arguments as that it is not the business of a
government to take property from some citizens to give to others. If the
unemployed, propertyless wage-worker has a right to live, he has the
right to sustain life. To sustain life independently of other men's
permission, access to natural resources is essential. This primary right
being denied the wage-workers as a class, any or all of whom, if
unemployed, might soon be propertyless, they might in justice proceed to
enforce it. To enforce it by means involving so little friction as
those here proposed ought to win, not opposition, but approval.

Equal rights once conceded as just, this reasoning cannot be refuted.
Discussed in economic literature since before the day of Adam Smith, it
has withstood every form of assault. If it has not been acted on in the
Old World, it is because the wage-workers there, ignorant and in general
deprived of the right to vote, have been helpless; and if not in the
New, because, first, until within recent years the free western lands,
attracting the unemployed and helping to maintain wages, in a measure
gave labor access to nature, and, secondly, since the practical
exhaustion of the free public domain the industrial wage-workers have
not perceived how, through politics, to carry out their convictions on
the land question.

Our reasoning is further strengthened by law and custom in state and
nation. In nearly every state, the constitution declares that the
origina