All claims for damages arising out of the building of railways had to be presented to the District Court, and the law provided that the District Court could grant such compensation as was just, but in no case could it exceed the assessed value of the land per acre that the owner had sworn to previously as the full value of his land, to be paid out of the funds of the district. There were only two forms of taxation in Eurasia, a land tax and a graduated income tax. There was no tax on improvements of any kind, either on city or country property, but on the land only; by this wise system of taxation encouraging the people to improve their property and beautify and discouraging land speculation; and when the Government wanted land owned by private parties who were citizens of the Republic (for no foreigner was permitted by law to own land directly or indirectly, so that the curse of Absentee Landlordism which was the ruin of Ireland, should never blight the happiness of the people of Eurasia), they added up the assessments for the previous five years and divided them by five and added twenty per cent. to it in payment for the land, together with fair compensation for any buildings there might be on it; so that if the owner swore to a low valuation on his land he was the loser; but the District Court, sitting as a Board of Equalization every year, could fix the value of the land at what they considered proper. CHAPTER XI. THE INCOME TAX. The income tax was a graduated income tax beginning with persons having on income one thousand dollars a year and above what they laid out in improving their property. All persons whose income was less than one thousand dollars paid no income tax. The tax was one per cent. on one thousand dollars, the rate increasing with the amount of income up to fifty thousand dollars a year, when it was fifty per cent., leaving the owner twenty-five thousand dollars, and for all incomes over fifty thousand dollars a year the surplus over twenty-five thousand dollars went to the Government and as a result of this wise policy there were no Jay Goulds or J. D. Rockefellers in Eurasia. All money received from land and income taxes went into the District Fund for the expenses of the district and schools, and building and maintaining of good, macadamized roads, for every district had a rock crusher from which the roads were supplied with broken stone at a trifling expense to the district. CHAPTER XII. DEPARTMENT OF MANUFACTURES.