Your inhabitants are called upon also to provide for the necessities of government, and an additional tax is levied therefore, which takes from the profits of labor and capital an amount equal to the tenth part of all their savings. Because the privilege of becoming a land owner is equal to all, and is the hope of most of you, you have permitted the transformation of this gift of nature into a monopoly, the most arbitrary and consuming that can be conceived. This gift of nature, however, is not the only one diverted from its equitable distribution, and permitted to become the material of unrighteous exaction. The process of the water, heat, and light supply, so manifestly among the duties of your government to institute and superintend, is given, like your land, to the management and control of private individuals; thus converting these indispensable elements of life and comfort into money getters for wealth, and subtracting to an unnecessary degree from the profits of industry and the savings of labor. We shall now suppose that your city has arrived at the termination of its fourth decade. Its population has increased two-fold, and its land value has quadrupled; but it is noticeable that your products of industry have not kept pace in their value with this enormous appreciation, and your ground rents alone now consume every ten years the whole cost of all buildings and their contents. In other words, every vestige of the accumulated labor of your city goes into the pockets of its landlords every ten years. Change now becomes apparent in social life. Competition has now reduced the wages of labor, and it has very nearly lost its ability to share in some of the minor operations of capital. The struggles of increasing numbers, precisely the same influence which has depressed wages, have advanced land. Labor has lost much of its old buoyancy and hopefulness. While raiment and food, the products of its own industry, have fallen in price, with a tendency to make up for its reduced income, every other one of its living expenses is greatly increased. Allowing it its proper place with matrimonial ambitions and hopes, the remarkable proportion of one fourth of its hard-earned wages is demanded of it in land rent alone, for a dwelling spot in the midst of a region which nothing else but its own energies have produced from a wilderness. Every single one of the bounties of nature, except the air and sunshine, are inaccessible without the charges of an intercepting medium. The heat, and light-giving materials of the earth, together with water, the most useful and abundant of all, are served out to it burdened with all the costs and profits levied by an organized and irresponsible few.