The antithesis between the rights and duties of property, especially in the case of land, is one which raises many nice and difficult questions. Some theorists, like Henry George, are for solving it by ignoring the rights altogether. According to them, private property in land is the source of all the evils that afflict modern society; poverty, depressions of trade, low profits, and low wages are caused by the constant drift towards high rents, due to the possession by a small section of the community of a monopoly in that which is as much a necessity of existence as air or water. Abolish private property in land, and straightway you will have the millennium. In this extreme form the fallacy of the argument is obvious. You cannot stop at land, but must have the courage of your opinion, and go the full length, with Proudhon, of denouncing all property as robbery. For if the right of individual property is the first condition of civilised society, you can hardly exclude that form of it which, in all ages and all countries, has been practically the most powerful incentive to progress and civilisation. Compare the United States of America under their homestead laws, with Russia under a system of village communes; or the California of to-day with that of fifty years ago under the Jesuit padres; and you will see that the desire to acquire property in land has been what may be called the high-pressure steam supplying the motive power to reclaim continents and multiply population. Nor in principle is there any argument for the confiscation of land which would not equally apply to the confiscation of any other sort of property, when theorists, philanthropic at other people’s expense, thought that the owner had more than was good for him, or had acquired it as an unearned increment, without working for it. Suppose two men, A and B, employed as engine-drivers on an American railway, have each saved a hundred dollars. The railway has been a failure: intended to reach a distant terminus, it has stopped halfway in a desert, for want of funds, and for years has paid no dividend. The hundred-dollar shares are only worth ten, and the land at the distant terminus is only worth ten dollars an acre. But A and B are sharp fellows, and see that if speculation ever revives the line will probably be completed, and both shares and land will become valuable. A buys ten shares with his hundred dollars, and B ten acres of land. The boom comes, the capital is found, the line completed, and the shares rise to par, and the land to a hundred dollars an acre. A and B have each realised nine hundred dollars by what may be described, as you like to put it, either as an unearned increment or as providence and foresight. On what principle can you confiscate B’s nine hundred dollars because it is in land, and leave A’s untouched because it is in shares?