But even if the taxation of land values were as perfect a method of raising revenue for public purposes as its advocates assert, it would still be necessary to insist that no alteration in the incidence of taxation will ever solve the problem of poverty. Suppose that you have got every penny of unearned increment into the public treasury, the question then arises--What are you going to do with it? If you keep it locked up in a box, the last state of the people will be worse than the first. If it is to be of benefit to anybody this revenue must be used by the State as industrial capital. That is to say the socialisation of industry must go hand in hand with the reform of taxation. Now what the Labour party really wants just now is two or three genuine installments of Socialism on which to concentrate its energies. A party without a programme is always an absurdity; a labour party without a programme is an absurdity passing the just limits of farce. It is futile to think that you can keep a party together much less build up a new one, with no common basis save the desire to amend trade union law, which appears to be the only demand on which the L.R.C. is united at present. And the programme of the Labour party must, for reasons already cited, be a Socialist and not a Liberal programme. I do not mean that the whole party should call itself Socialist or should be committed to Socialism as that term is understood by the S.D.F. We have been surfeited in the past with abstract resolutions in favour of “the socialisation of all the means of production, distribution and exchange.” But I do maintain that the programme must be collectivist in tendency and must have the organisation of industry by the state and the abolition of industrial parasitism as its ultimate goal. Also it must as far as possible appeal directly to the interests of the people for with all his great qualities the British workman is constitutionary defective in the capacity for seeing far before his nose, and will not readily grow enthusiastic about the soundest economic measure which does not obviously improve the position of his class. At the same time the labour party would do well to avoid too much narrowness of outlook, since there are, as we shall see, some measures which do not appear at first sight to benefit the worker directly, but which are indispensable conditions of his ultimate emancipation. Such measures should therefore be put along side of the more patently beneficial one and their connection with these as far as possible made plain to the electorate.