These people have never been able to apply their theory, and the reason is pretty clear. It would work most unjustly, considering that people buy and sell land just as they do any other commodity, and that a man who had put all his money into rents in land would be ruined by this system, while another man with exactly the same amount of money, who had put it into a business, would go scot free. If you were starting a new country it might be possible to begin with the Single Tax system, but even then you would be up against the fact that people like owning land because such ownership gives them independence. But at any rate it is theoretically possible to apply this system in a new country. In an old country it is quite out of the question. THE SOCIAL (OR HISTORICAL) VALUE OF MONEY There is a special point in Economics which has been very little dealt with, or rather not properly dealt with at all, and which you will find interesting as a new piece of study, because it will help you to understand history as nothing else will: and that point is the _Social (or Historical) Value of Money_. You read how, in the past, the King of England, wishing to wage a great war, managed to raise, say, a hundred thousand pounds; and how that was thought a most enormous sum: whereas to-day, for the same sized army, we should need thirty times as much. You read how Henry VIII. suppressed the Monastery at Westminster which had an income of four thousand pounds a year, and how this income was then regarded as something very large indeed--much as we to-day regard a half million a year or more--the income of some great shipping company. You read how the National Debt later on actually reached _one_ million, and people trembled lest the State could not bear the burden. Yet here we are to-day, raising hundreds of millions yearly in taxation, spending thousands of millions in our wars. What is the explanation of this apparently totally different meaning of money in different times? It puzzles nearly everybody who reads history intelligently, and it wants explanation. Most attempts to explain it have failed, or have been very insufficient; some of them quite vague, as: “The value of money was very different in those days from what it is now.” Or: “Money was then at least ten times as valuable as now” (whereas it is clear from the chronicle that it was _enormously_ more valuable!) Sentences like that leave the unfortunate reader as much in the dark as he was before. We need a more precise explanation, and that I think can be given. There are three things which, between them, decide the social value of money at any period, and unless we consider _all_ three we shall go wrong. The reason why most people have gone wrong in trying to solve the problem--or have abandoned it--is that they only consider the first of the three. These three things are as follows:--