The plan of equalizing the burden of taxation and the opportunities of land tenure by a general confiscation and redistribution of real estate might recommend itself as a last resort, though hardly in preference to the project of Fedor Bakunin, the “Russian Mirabeau,” who proposed to found new communities under a charter, reserving the tenth part of all building lots for communal purposes, and lease the tenant-right to the highest bidder. The value of those reserve lots would increase with the growth of the town, and by renewing their lease from ten to ten years, the rent could be made to cover the budget of all direct municipal expenses, and leave a fair surplus for charitable and educational purposes. In comparison with the confiscation plan, that project could claim all the advantages which make prevention preferable to a drastic cure. As a check to the evils of land monopoly the least objectionable plan would seem to be Professor De Graaf’s proposition of a graded system of real estate taxation, increasing the rate of tallage with each multiple of a fair homestead lot, and thus taxing a land-shark for the privilege of acquisition, as well as for the actual possession, of an immoderate estate. The art of making home-life pleasant will yet prove the most effective specific in the list of temperance remedies, and will aid the apostles of Secularism in that work of redemption which the gospel of renunciation has failed to achieve. CHAPTER XIX. LEGISLATIVE REFORM. A.—LESSONS OF INSTINCT. Progress is a general law of Nature, and the comparative study of Evolution proves that the tendency to improvement increases with the advance to higher planes of development. Among the lowest organisms the rate of progress is hardly appreciable. The sea shells of the Devonian period can scarcely be distinguished from the shells of our present seas. The balls of amber found on the shores of the Baltic often contain the mummies of insects closely resembling certain species of latter-day flies and beetles, while the horse, the zebra, and other modern varieties of the equine genus, have developed from a creature not much larger than a fox. The Neanderthal skull proves that the heads of our early ancestors were almost ape-like in their protruding jaws and flatness of cranium. The lower animals adhere to inherited habits with a persistency that has often proved their ruin by diminishing their ability of adapting themselves to change of circumstances, as in the case of that sea-lizard of the South sea islands, where its ancestors had for ages managed to escape their only enemies by leaving the water and crawling up the beach, and where their modern descendants persist in crawling landward in the hope of escaping from dogs and hunters.