COLLECTIVISM AND LAND NATIONALIZATION. 259 
improvements and from all progress finds its way at last into 
the pockets of the landowners. The labourer gains no advan 
tage therefrom, and as living becomes more difficult as the price 
of food rises, there results privation for the working classes and 
destitution for those least well off. When in California, to 
recall Mr. George’s illustration, there was land for any one who 
wished to take it, rent did not exist, and the labourer enjoyed 
the entire product of his labour. To-day, in order to obtain 
access to the natural agents and raw materials upon which to 
work, he must abandon to rent everything beyond the bare 
necessaries. 
To prevent poverty from increasing side by side with wealth, 
Mr. George sees only one remedy, namely, to make over the 
ownership of the land to the State. To accomplish this reform, 
he says, it is not necessary to have recourse to expropriation ; 
It will be enough to raise the land-tax so as to absorb rent, as 
IS done in certain provinces in India where the State is, in con 
sequence, looked upon as the proprietor of the land. All other 
taxes might then be abolished, and trade, freed from all 
shackles, would receive such an impetus that general well-being 
would result. This idea of a rent-tax is at bottom the same as 
that of the Physiocrats, a single tax on land. 
Towards the close of his life, J. S. Mill proposed that the 
State should take the whole increase of rent which was due to 
the collective progress of society and not to the individual 
efforts of the proprietor. A French landowner, M. Edgard 
Baron, in his “ Protest against the Abusive Extension of the 
Right of Property,” has uttered ideas similar to those of Mr. 
George. 
I believe that it is a mistake to see in rent the principal cause 
of inequality. In so far as it levies the exceptional produce of 
the more fertile land, it establishes, on the contrary, equality 
among the cultivators of lands which differ in productivity. 
Were it not for rent, the cultivator of fertile soil would obtain 
for the same effort a much greater remuneration than the man 
who worked refractory land. It is capital, ever growing, which 
engrosses a larger and larger share of the total product 
Formerly the principal factor was labour. Now, in proportion