PRIVATE PROPERTY IN LAND 
99 
there is no recognition of the right of the private 
appropriation of ground rent, no compromise with 
any wrong attendant upon ownership that does not 
attend alike upon possession. 
It is not individual proprietorship of land, but the 
private appropriation of ground rent, which is charged 
with maintaining industrial slavery. True it is that 
under present conditions “when land value is made 
private property the law of equal freedom is denied”; 
but under the Single Tax this would not be true. 
Any degree of justice or injustice, with the single tax 
or without, would be exactly the same whether the 
tenure be called property, ownership, or possession. 
What practical difference, then, does it make, whether 
the tenure be called by one name or the other? The 
private property in land of which Herbert Spencer 
and Tolstoy* and Henry George treated was the 
untaxed ownership of our day and generation with 
its corresponding private appropriation of ground 
rent. It may be confidently asserted that when 
Henry George said, “Private property in land is 
unjust,” he meant — as the whole principle and 
spirit of his teaching require us to believe, and as the 
context of controverted passages shows — that private 
property in land values is wrong.f 
* See Appendix B. 
t “The words ‘private property in land’ have two meanings. One meaning 
,s > the legal power privately to appropriate rent. The other meaning is, the 
legal power exclusively to possess land in perpetuit} r . 
* The first power is the essence of landlordism. It was attacked by all the 
force Henry George possessed. The second power is land ownership, and this 
Henry George did not attack, but on the contrary said, if his plan were adopted, 
would ‘continue just as now.’ 
The value of land has nothing to do with the validity of its title. If a man 
oolds title to a parcel of land of no value, he is nevertheless a land owner.”— 
John Z. White, in the Single Tax Review.