Almost every influence now at work in the progress of your society tends to throw money into the hands of your land holders, not fairly earned by themselves. While the products of labor are cheapening from day to day, partly due to increased skill, and the appliance of machinery in their manufacture, and partly, also, by the competition of labor, owing to increase of population, yet even by these very operations the value of landed property goes up. You already estimate rent as a considerable element of cost in the production of your food materials, and you are gradually approaching a period, when by the growth of population the cost of food will be very much increased by rent charges. You have all along submitted to this monopoly of land from causes plainly apparent. In the early days of your history all private ownership of land was acquired and held by force, and it may be safely asserted that no title at present exists in any of your older countries that is not founded on violent conquest, and that has not been maintained by an organized and armed authority, whose existence depends upon retaining the system of ownership in vogue. It is plain to see that when the demand of justice to all shall be the basis of political action, and especially when the cost of your food supply shall become greatly increased by the charges of rent, your present system will not be quietly endured. In your own more favored region of the Earth may be found temporary conditions which tend not only to tolerate your present land ownership system, but to render it popular. Your large area of unoccupied agricultural surface, from which any of your citizens are permitted at small cost to select a portion with a title in perpetuity, destroys for the time being the monopolizing character of private ownership; and while these governmental acts of land distribution are the most remarkable concessions to labor in human history, we fail to discover anything in the practice but a temporary compromise between the interests of capital and labor. As your society progresses you must arrive at the time when your landless class will be as effectually excluded from the privilege of ownership as they are at present in the older countries of the world.