An example of a most uncertain and unjust tax for the taxpayer in our own country is the Income Tax, because it is difficult to prevent unfixed people from hiding their profits or from concealing from the tax collectors amounts which they have earned. Also the honest citizen with an established and known position can be bled to the full, while the rogue and adventurer, the speculator and dealer escapes. But it is a certain tax from the point of view of the Government, because they know on the average what a penny on the Income Tax will produce one year with another, and are not concerned with justice but with a calculable revenue. Before we leave this discussion it is worth while mentioning an odd idea which a few very earnest and active people have got hold of, called the “Single Tax.” It is really much more a part of the theory of Socialism than a system of taxation. Still, as it has come to be called the “Single Tax” we will treat it under that head. The idea of the single tax is this:--Rent, or the surplus value of a site, whether it be due to the extra fertility of farm land or to the extra convenience of town land, is, say the Single Taxers, not the product of the individual who owns the land. If I own a barren piece of heath on which I cannot get any rent for agriculture, and then a railway is built passing through it and a station is built on the heath, many town workers who want to live in the country will take houses which will be built near this station and live in these houses, running up and down from town for their work. In a few years this barren heath which brought me in nothing will be bringing in many thousands a year, for a little town will have sprang up, and I shall be able to charge rent to all the people who live there upon my land. The Single Taxers say that, since I did nothing towards making the extra value, but that extra value has been made by the growth of population and by the activity of the whole community, I have no right to these rents. In the same way they say that I have no right to the rent of a very fertile field compared with a bad field which pays little or no rent, because it was not I that made the soil fertile. So they propose that _all the rents of the country should be levied as a tax_. They say that no other taxes are needed. If I have money from dividends in an industrial concern I can keep all that without paying any taxes on it, and I can be let off taxes on tobacco and drink and everything else of that sort. But anything I get as rent for land I must pay over to the State. I may still be allowed to call myself the owner of the land, but I must be taxed an equivalent to the rent which it produces.