You say that “the power to fix taxes is the power to confiscate.” The very opposite is true. The power to confiscate is the power to tax. Give that power to one class and what more does it want? Let that class confiscate land values, which you agree are naturally common property, and you give it the power to rob its victim, not merely to the “limit of their capacity to pay,” but to literal starvation, if they choose to carry the principle of private ownership of land to its logical conclusion. For certainly to recognize the right to private property in land is to recognize the owner’s right to do with _his land_ what he pleases. To recognize this is to recognize the land-owner’s right to deny to the landless either the use of _his land_, or any of its products, on any terms whatsoever. Thus, in carrying the principle of private ownership of land to its logical conclusion, and recognizing it as a just principle, is to sanction literal murder. Can a system that has this for its ultimate, be other than a vicious system, even though it may never be carried to that extent? It is by means of this vicious system that human sufferings are augmented by a thousand fold and the sum of human happiness is correspondingly diminished. Do not the foregoing facts prove to you that your statement that “_usury_ is the vulture that has gorged itself upon the vitals of nations since the dawn of time,” is economically untrue? Is it not clear that usury is only an effect of a deeper-seated cause inherent in land monopoly? As proof that the universal condition of inequality is _not_ inherent in land monopoly, you say that the Rothschilds and other “kings of high finance” do not “buy up vast domains that they may be served by a lot of tenants.” But when touching upon this phase of the question, you should always bear in mind that all land is not farm land. The power of the coal barons to exploit does not arise so much from the fact that they own large tracts of land, as from the fact that it bears large deposits of coal. Nor does their power to exploit affect merely the miners of coal. Coal is a public necessity, and the ownership by these barons of a comparatively small area of land places them in a position to place—by reason of unreasonable prices—a tax upon every user of coal. What is the basis of the railroad’s power for unrestrained exploitation? Unquestionably it arises from its exclusive franchises, inherent in its rights of way.