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THE  A  B  C  OF  TAXATION

injustice  to  one  man  there  would  be  a  far  greater  justice
wrought  to  hundreds  and  to  thousands;  that  the
vacant  lot  which  is  his  only  all,  is  not  the  poor  man’s
universe;  that  his  individual  loss  or  benefit  will  be
measured,  not  by  his  relation  to  that  vacant,  unproductive ­
  lot,  but  by  his  relation  to  the  social  fabric  into
which  he  is  woven  and  to  the  universe  of  which  he  is  a
part;  and  that  for  every  alleged  confiscation  there  would
be  a  score  of  compensations.
If  the  moral  theory  of  the  “compensationists”
were  sound,  it  would  apply  —  and  many  of  its  advocates ­
  claim  that  it  does  apply  —  as  well  to  slavery  as  to
landlordism,  so  that  slaves  could  not  be  justly  set  free
unless  the  masters  were  compensated.  The  most
outrageous  act,  then,  of  what  the  “compensationists”
call  confiscation,  was  committed  by  God  himself,  when
he  led  the  Israelites  out  of  Egypt.  Instead  of  compensating ­
  the  Egyptians,  who  thereby  lost  valuable
“private  property”  which  had  had  the  sanction  of  four
hundred  years’  acquiescence,  He  engulfed  in  the  Red
Sea  those  whose  sensitiveness  to  the  injustice  of
“confiscation”  stirred  them  to  follow  and  reclaim
their  confiscated  property.
If  the  cinder  is  not  removed  from  your  eye  at  once,
and  inflammation  follows,  what  then  do  you  do?  Do
you  bathe  the  head,  apply  a  plaster  to  the  back,  hot
water  bottles  to  the  feet,  and  some  specific  to  the
stomach?  Or  do  you  forthwith  remove  the  speck  from
the  eye  whatever  the  pain  it  costs  you?  The  smaller
the  offending  cinder,  the  more  intense  oftentimes  the
inflammation,  and  the  more  difficult  of  removal.  The
longer  the  operation  is  delayed  the  more  painful  the
conditions.  While  guarding  well  “the  apple  of  the