90 THE A B C OF TAXATION because, unless the owner can get a rent sufficient to pay interest on the cost of the house, over and above taxes, no more houses will be built, until they become so scarce as to force rent to a point that will cover the cost of maintenance. How can taxation be confiscation? Etymologically the words have nothing, and colloquially almost nothing, in common. To confiscate is, according to the Century Dictionary, “to adjudge to be forfeited to the public treasury by way of penalty” —the meaning is inseparable from the idea of forfeiture. To tax, on the contrary, is “to levy money or other contributions, as from subjects or citizens, to meet the expense of government.” Is it just to allow the landowners’ investment, now exempt, to remain exempt? Does either legal equity or ethics require that the land should be exempt from an increased tax, or that its owner should have even partial, much less total, immunity from the burden of taxation? Because a new tax upon land would reduce proportionately the selling price, should owners of land for that reason continue to go scot free? The advance in Boston’s tax rate per thousand for 1907 ($15.90) is $3 over that of 1897 ($13.00.) The capitalised value of this increase, $650,000,000 multi plied by $3 per thousand, multiplied by twenty years (the number years purchase), is $39,000,000. Do we hear that Boston has confiscated $39,000,000 worth of her citizen’s land in the last ten years? Boston has to-day some $560,000,000 of new land value, which it did not have fifty years ago. Mean time the tax rate doubled from $8 in 1856 to $16 in 1906. The capitalised value of this $8 increase in