In 1888 a Government avowedly reactionary passed a Local Government Bill which effected a distinct advance towards the democratic municipality.[83] It was furthermore a Bill with no single aspect of finality anywhere about it. Local Self-Government remains prominent within the sphere of practical politics. When it is achieved, the democratic State will have the machinery for Socialism. And now, how is the raw material of Socialism--otherwise the Proletarian man--to be brought to the Democratic State machinery? Here again the path is easily found. Politicians who have no suspicion that they are Socialists, are advocating further instalments of Socialism with a recklessness of indirect results which scandalizes the conscious Social Democrat. The phenomenon of economic rent has assumed prodigious proportions in our great cities. The injustice of its private appropriation is glaring, flagrant, almost ridiculous. In the long suburban roads about London, where rows of exactly similar houses stretch for miles countrywards, the rent changes at every few thousand yards by exactly the amount saved or incurred annually in travelling to and from the householder’s place of business. The seeker after lodgings, hesitating between Bloomsbury and Tottenham, finds every advantage of situation skimmed off by the landlord with scientific precision. As lease after lease falls in, houses, shops, goodwills of businesses which are the fruits of the labor of lifetimes, fall into the maw of the ground landlord. Confiscation of capital, spoliation of households, annihilation of incentive, everything that the most ignorant and credulous fundholder ever charged against the Socialist, rages openly in London, which begins to ask itself whether it exists and toils only for the typical duke and his celebrated jockey and his famous racehorse. Lord Hobhouse and his unimpeachably respectable committee for the taxation of ground values are already in the field claiming the value of the site of London for London collectively; and their agitation receives additional momentum from every lease that falls in. Their case is unassailable; and the evil they attack is one that presses on the ratepaying and leaseholding classes as well as upon humbler sufferers. This economic pressure is reinforced formidably by political opinion in the workmen’s associations. Here the moderate members are content to demand a progressive Income Tax, which is virtually Lord Hobhouse’s proposal; and the extremists are all for Land Nationalisation, which is again Lord Hobhouse’s principle. The cry for such taxation cannot permanently be resisted. And it is very worthy of remark that there is a new note in the cry. Formerly taxes were proposed with a specific object--as to pay for a war, for education, or the like. Now the proposal is to tax the landlords in order to get some of _our_ money back from them--take it from them first and find a use for it afterwards. Ever since Mr. Henry George’s book reached