It cannot continue because there is a fast-growing conviction of the falsity of the philosophy of economic Machiavellism--an ever-growing recognition of the truth that the relationships of men in business, like all other human relationships, are conditioned by the moral law of human brotherhood. There are profound changes taking place in the moral feelings and judgments of men respecting many of the customs, principles, and institutions of the modern industrial order. There is a growing recognition of the fact that though these conventions and arrangements may in past periods of history have been promotive of human welfare and therefore moral, they are, as applied to the more complex social and economic relations of modern society, the very embodiment of unreason and injustice. Among the economic institutions respecting which there is taking place such a change in moral judgment is that of absolute private property in land. Although this is an institution unknown to primitive peoples, in all the great civilizations of the past we find society based upon it. That the system, since it inevitably results in private monopoly, has contributed largely to the creation of that gross inequality in wealth which has characterized every advanced civilization known to history, and which has helped to prepare its downfall, does not admit of reasonable doubt. The monopolization of land by a class has been one source, and probably a main source, of the phenomenon in modern society of deepening poverty in the midst of growing wealth, of dehumanizing want for the many along with demoralizing luxury for the few. That in countries of large and thickening population a private monopoly in the arable land is the embodiment of a colossal and cruel wrong is incontrovertible. That a single class should be allowed to become the absolute owners of the soil and thereby acquire the legal right to exclude all others from it save on the condition that practically all that can be got from it by the hardest toil, save just enough for the bare subsistence of the laborer, shall be given over as rent to the holder of the land, is as great a moral wrong as to take directly from the worker the product of his toil by reducing him to bodily slavery. It is this gross inequity which has made the history of many countries, like much of the history of Ireland, a harrowing tragedy. The wrong, if not greater, is at least more obvious when the land thus monopolized is the site of a great city where the enormous ground values have been created not by any labor or expenditure on the part of the owners, but by the growth and enterprise of the community as a whole.