88 
THE A B C OF TAXATION 
Boston rate of |i6 per thousand, from taxation upon 
the land of any one of the above named ten cities 
or one county of the state for the year 1907. 
Under the single tax such conditions could not 
prevail. Prevailing, as they do, nothing but the 
private appropriation of a public ground rent can 
perpetuate them. Nothing but the taxation of ground 
rent can correct them. 
The St. Paul’s illustration seems extreme on account 
of the total exemption of church property, but what 
has been said of it is from two-thirds to nine-tenths true 
of all vacant land, or of land slightly improved, as is the 
case with a large part of the business section of 
Boston. 
Granting all that St. Paul’s may claim for religion 
and sentiment, we yet maintain—and its forty-one 
proprietors will doubtless admit—that an impartial 
distribution of the cost of religion and sentiment to 
the one hundred and twenty thousand families of 
Boston at this rate of more than $2,000 each, amounting 
to a total of more than $240,000,000 a year, would be 
an undreamed of union of Church and State. 
The object of this illustration is not to cast any 
invidious reflection upon St. Paul’s Church, but rather 
to impress upon your minds the enormous dimensions 
of the reservoir from which the single tax proposes to 
draw all public revenue. 
The proprietors of St. Paul’s are a body of Christian 
gentlemen of discernment and philanthropy; none are 
more likely than they to see the inconsistency of their 
situation; none more likely to welcome its cor 
recting; none more likely to see that they will get a full 
share of betterment from a new and improved order of