also ask, "How did you get it? Did you earn it by yourself, or has it
just been left you by others? Was it gained by processes which are in
themselves beneficial to the community in general, or was it gained by
processes which have done no good to any one, but only harm? Was it
gained by the enterprise and capacity necessary to found a business,
or merely by squeezing and bleeding the owner and founder of the
business? Was it gained by supplying the capital which industry needs,
or by denying, except at an extortionate price, the land which
industry requires? Was it derived from active reproductive processes,
or merely by squatting on some piece of necessary land till enterprise
and labour, and national interests and municipal interests, had to buy
you out at fifty times the agricultural value? Was it gained from
opening new minerals to the service of man, or by drawing a mining
royalty from the toil and adventure of others? Was it gained by the
curious process of using political influence to convert an annual
licence into a practical freehold and thereby pocketing a monopoly
value which properly belongs to the State--how did you get it?" That
is the new question which has been postulated and which is vibrating
in penetrating repetition through the land.[20]

It is a tremendous question, never previously in this country asked so
plainly, a new idea, pregnant, formidable, full of life, that taxation
should not only have regard to the volume of wealth, but, so far as
possible, to the character of the processes of its origin. I do not
wonder it has raised a great stir. I do not wonder that there are
heart-searchings and angry words because that simple question, that
modest proposal, which we see embodied in the new income-tax
provisions, in the land taxes, in the licence duties, and in the tax
on mining royalties--that modest proposal means, and can only mean,
the refusal of the modern State to bow down unquestioningly before the
authority of wealth. This refusal to treat all forms of wealth with
equal deference, no matter what may have been the process by which it
was acquired, is a strenuous assertion in a practical form, that there
ought to be a constant relation between acquired wealth and useful
service previously rendered, and that where no service, but rather
disservice, is proved, then, whenever possible, the State should make
a sensible difference in the taxes it is bound to impose.

It is well that you should k