it was expected would fall upon the industrial classes especially and directly, but would be shared by all. Manufacturing industries relieved of the repression of taxation, would bound forward like a spring suddenly released. Nothing would any longer artificially limit the production of wealth and the great stimulation it would receive would result in making even articles of luxury so common as to place them within the reach of everyone. “The land speculating class, while admitting that the rest of the people would be benefitted by the single tax, claimed that it would be done at their expense and unjustly. They had bought the land and paid for it and the state had got the money. With this money, and the interest on it, the state had built the university, the state capitol, the penitentiary, the charitable institutions and innumerable school houses. In other words, they had given the state the interest on their money and taken in lieu of it the anticipated increase in the value of the land. Moreover, they had paid taxes on the land as they would have done on the money, if they had retained it. And so they maintained that the increment in the value of the land was not unearned. It was simply the interest on their money which would have brought a like profit if it had been invested in mining manufacturing, banking or steamboating. They admitted that in some cases this profit had been greater than that derived from other sorts of investments, but in many cases it was far less. They said the single tax meant a confiscation of the land and the resumption of it by the state that had once sold it; because it would very soon, if not from the first, take the entire amount of the rent which would make the fee of the land worthless to the owner. It would no longer be possible to mortgage it or to sell it and the owner would lose his investment and be reduced to a mere tenant, who could hold it only as long as he paid the rent to the state the same as any other tenant, and if it were unimproved, the owner would have no inducement to pay the rent and would simply abandon it. In view of that, they said, that the state should at least pay back the purchase money it had received with interest at the rates prevalent during the time that she had possessed it, or failing that, she should postpone so radical a change or make it gradual by annually increasing the assessment upon land and diminishing it upon other property, and thus consume at least thirty years in making the transfer complete. “The impatience of the tax reformers would not allow any such postponement as this. They said they did not propose to wait a whole generation to have this wrong made right.