*  Doubleday,  Page  &  Co.,  New  York,  1906,  p.  242.

PRIVATE  PROPERTY  IN  LAND  ioi

Poverty,”  Book  VIII.,  Chapter  II.,  “I  do  not  propose
.  .  .  to  confiscate  private  property  in  land”  but
“to  appropriate  rent  by  taxation.”  “It  is  not  necessary,” ­
  he  says,  “to  confiscate  land;  it  is  only
necessary  to  confiscate  rent.”  And  again,  “People
are  led  into  confusion  by  assuming  that  we  propose  to
take  land  from  its  owners.”  Yet  again,  in  1892,  in  his
chapter  on  Compensatitm  in  “A  Perplexed  Philosopher,”* ­
  Mr.  George  says:  “The  primary  error  of  the
advocates  of  land  nationalisation  is  in  their  confusion
of  equal  rights  with  joint  rights.  .  .  In  truth  the
right  to  the  use  of  land  is  not  a  joint  or  common  right,
hut  an  equal  right;  the  joint  or  common  right  is  to  rent.”
The  appalling  distress  and  havoc  consequent  upon
tenant  eviction  in  Scotland,  Ireland,  and  even  in  New
York  City,  would  be  abolished  if  the  evictors  had  to
pay  as  much  for  land  to  be  held  idle  as  the  evicted  are
willing  to  pay  for  it  to  use,  and  Mr.  George’s  prediction
that  the  users  of  the  land  would  eventually  become  the
owners  would  be  realised.  An  unjust  ownership  would
give  place  to  a  just  ownership.  The  wrong  is  not  in  a
just  ownership,  but  in  an  unjust,  because  untaxed  and
hence  monopoly,  ownership.  What  Mr.  George  plainly
aimed  at  was  to  destroy  the  latter  while  conserving  the
former.
Mr.  George  perhaps  never  had  an  abler  or  fairer
opponent,  or  one  more  analytical  in  his  treatment  of
the  issue,  than  Mr.  Edward  Atkinson.  Mr.  Atkinson,
early  in  his  argument  at  Saratoga  in  1890,  in  order
to  limit  their  discussion  to  their  differences,  proceeded
to  eliminate  their  agreements,  chief  of  which,  to  his
mind,  was  that  land  should  remain  private  property.