We shall say now that your city contains a half million of inhabitants. Its surface is not extended in proportion with its increase in population, the cost of space inducing a greater crowding of houses and people. Your labor products, and the land upon which they rest, have been so constantly receding from each other in values, that now, with all the forced economy of space, your piles of goods, merchandise, and houses, if sold at their market value, would not furnish more than a quarter enough of money to purchase the ground beneath them. This enormous increase in the value of your city land is mostly the result of the opportunities its owners enjoy to prey upon the industries, and at this stage the following very remarkable conditions may be observed: While the city’s capital, properly so called, is about three hundred millions of dollars, and the number of its workers in industrial pursuits about one hundred thousand, the aggregate earnings of both labor and capital combined have one quarter of the whole swept away by the demands of your landlords, estimating ground rent alone. And this enormous exaction, remember, is imposed without rendering any service in return. None of your economists will deny that this large drain does not come directly from the industries of your people, and its exhausting effects are daily seen in the gradually hardening lines in the lives of those who toil. In an early period, twenty persons in every hundred of your workers owned a portion of your city’s surface. Now only four per cent are land owners, and within a few decades not more than five in a thousand will dwell or pursue their avocations without the virtual consent of some superintending ground owner, upon whose mercy in abstaining from ejectment or extortion they will remain in constant uncertainty. The ownership of your city lots will now have gone almost exclusively into the hands of your leisure class; and the vast sums of money drawn monthly for rent, instead of being, as formerly, partly returned as capital, to assist labor in the various industrial enterprises is now either dissipated in luxury, expended in new possessions, or invested in some of the many monopoly undertakings of the day. The effects of this unjust burden are daily apparent. It reduces the possible savings of labor and the accumulations of industry to such a minimum that success in these is the exception rather than the rule. It is mostly because of this monopoly of land that life among your masses is a continuous and uninterrupted struggle; and to this more than all else is due that unequal distribution of wealth which affords only the few that cultivation and knowledge which elevates them, and that dooms the many to an unceasing wear of nerve and muscle to sustain themselves.