* 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 nec 
essary,” 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 Philoso 
pher,”* 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.