Another and significant change now becomes apparent in your social state. During the first stages of your city’s existence, there had been no money invested except as capital. Every dollar laid out in that way had been shared by labor. Any increase in the volume of capital brings a corresponding prosperity to those who toil; but the accumulations from the profits of capital have not generally been added to it, and in many cases the capital itself has been led away into the many profitable monopoly enterprises which abound. These now flourish as they never did before. Increase of population and trade has stimulated the various industries to increased supplies, but the prices of all commodities instead of being raised are lowered. The free and open competition within the precincts of capital and labor has effected this; not greatly to the detriment of either, because the producer in one department of industry is a consumer in many of the others, and capital has increased its volume of business to make up for smaller profits. But you have within the borders of your city those money-making contrivances peculiar to your planet, wherein the natural effect of competition is entirely reversed, and where the universal law of supply and demand is completely abrogated. The worst and most disastrous of these is your system of land ownership. Into this, and the other of your monopolies, capital pours its surplus, and finally retires to them with its accumulations, deserting its partnership with labor, and appearing on the scene in the new form of wealth. From a few instances, so rare as to be conspicuous, your holders of large money accumulations become now a numerous and influential class. While your society at one end has been sinking into poverty, it blooms at the other with signs of unusual thrift. With an increase of luxury on one hand, and of want on the other, your city is now approaching the normal state. A few decades more it will have established within itself those relations between wealth, capital, and labor which are as inevitably the outcome of your land ownership system, as drouth and famine are the outcome of a lack of moisture in the soil.