When big towns and great industries arise, the value of the land goes up to enormous heights: in London bits of land with frontages on the important streets sell at the rate of a million pounds an acre; and men of business will pay the huge rents that make the land worth such a figure, although there is land forty miles away to be had for next to nothing. The land that was first let gets sublet, and yet again and again sublet until there may be half a dozen leaseholders and subleaseholders drawing more rent from it than the original ground landlord; and the tenant who is in working occupation of it has to make the money for all of them. Within the last hundred and fifty years villages in Europe and pioneer encampments in the other continents have grown into towns and cities making money by hundreds of millions; yet most of the inhabitants whose work makes all this wealth are no better off, and many of them decidedly worse off, than the villagers or pioneer campers-out who occupied the place when it was not worth a pound an acre. Meanwhile the landlords have become fabulously rich, some of them taking every day, for doing nothing, more than many a woman for sixty years drudgery. And all this could have been avoided if we had only had the sense and foresight to insist that the land should remain national property in fact as well as in legal theory, and that all rents should be paid into a common stock and used for public purposes. If that had been done there need have been no slums, no ugly mean streets and buildings, nor indeed any rates or taxes: everybody would benefit by the rent; everybody would have to contribute to it by work; and no idler would be able to live on the labor of others. The prosperity of our great towns would be a real prosperity, shared by everyone, and not what it is now, the enslavement and impoverishment of nine persons out of every ten in order that the tenth should be idle and rich and extravagant and useless. This evil is so glaring, so inexcusable by any sophistry that the cleverest landlord can devise, that, long before Socialism was heard of, a demand arose for the abolition of all taxation except the taxation of landowners; and we still have among us people called Single Taxers, who preach the same doctrine. 33 CAPITAL