in land, is
morally a worse man than any one else, who gathers his profit where he
finds it, in this hard world under the law and according to common
usage. It is not the individual I attack; it is the system. It is not
the man who is bad; it is the law which is bad. It is not the man who
is blameworthy for doing what the law allows and what other men do; it
is the State which would be blameworthy, were it not to endeavour to
reform the law and correct the practice. We do not want to punish the
landlord. We want to alter the law. Look at our actual proposal.

We do not go back on the past. We accept as our basis the value as it
stands to-day. The tax on the increment of land begins by recognising
and franking all past increment. We look only to the future; and for
the future we say only this: that the community shall be the partner
in any further increment above the present value after all the owner's
improvements have been deducted. We say that the State and the
municipality should jointly levy a toll upon the future unearned
increment of the land. A toll of what? Of the whole? No. Of a half?
No. Of a quarter? No. Of a fifth--that is the proposal of the Budget.
And that is robbery, that is plunder, that is communism and
spoliation, that is the social revolution at last, that is the
overturn of civilised society, that is the end of the world foretold
in the Apocalypse! Such is the increment tax about which so much
chatter and outcry are raised at the present time, and upon which I
will say that no more fair, considerate, or salutary proposal for
taxation has ever been made in the House of Commons.

But there is another proposal concerning land values which is not less
important. I mean the tax on the capital value of undeveloped urban or
suburban land. The income derived from land and its rateable value
under the present law depend upon the use to which the land is put. In
consequence, income and rateable value are not always true or
complete measures of the value of the land. Take the case to which I
have already referred, of the man who keeps a large plot in or near a
growing town idle for years, while it is "ripening"--that is to say,
while it is rising in price through the exertions of the surrounding
community and the need of that community for more room to live. Take
that case. I daresay you have formed your own opinion upon it. Mr.
Balfour, Lord Lansdowne, and the Conservative Party generally, think
that that