There are, no doubt, great businesses which, as I have said, are so big, and have such huge powers as the result of monopoly and vested interest, that they need not resort to these means for accumulating wealth. They succeed, however, by the most merciless use of the powers which monopoly gives. This may, for instance, be a land monopoly, which is the oldest and most anti-social monopoly of all; in fact, every other monopoly has grown out of this power of controlling land; without such power it is very doubtful if monopoly of other things could come into being at all. It is land monopoly which has caused the workers to be housed on swamps and marshes around our great cities. I am told that in the offices of the Local Government Board there are huge maps of all the capital cities of Europe and America, and that these all show how the working classes are housed on the low-lying damp lands or in the least healthy parts of these great cities, where the rent of land is _cheap_. The reason is that those whose business in life is to draw huge sums by the exercise of their power to extract ground rent drive the poor to crowd themselves together on the cheapest land, and this results in over-crowding and so-called over-population. In my own life-time, and within ten minutes’ walk of where I live, I have seen huge tracts of marshland (previously filled up with the sweepings and other refuse gathered from the streets of London) converted into rows of streets, now populated by the working classes. Neither the landowner, nor the builder, nor the present owners of these houses, would for one moment dream of living either in one of these houses or even in a special house built on this land. They know only too well what an unhealthy district it is. Yet some of the land-owners and house-owners are good, decent men and women. They build chapels and churches, and on Sundays believe that all men are brothers and that God is the Father of us all. But they do not mind growing rich at the cost of the health and even the life of their poorer brothers and sisters. The sacred right to make money covers many more sins than does the virtue of charity. It is the passive acquiescence of us all in this sacred right of money-making which makes good men and women content to draw incomes from such sources.