3° 
THE A B C OF TAXATION 
ground.”-—Bullock, “ Introduction to the Study of Economics,” 
p. 116. 
“The growth of the city occasions unusual expenditures; the 
growth of the city also creates unusual values. Why should 
not the values which the city creates go to bear the expenses 
which the city occasions ? 
“ The volume of traffic on a street railway increases with the 
increase in municipal population, and the receipts of the 
company on this account grow more rapidly than do the operat 
ing expenditures which the increased traffic occasions. . . . 
Now it is this income to which a franchise tax should address 
itself. . . . One might, then, say that by means of the 
franchise tax the State taxes its social earnings from the capital 
which it has created, but which for reasons of public policy it 
assigns to private parties for administration.”—Adams, 
“Science of Finance,” pp. 504 and 380. 
XIV.—Conclusion 
Throughout this chapter the impelling aim has 
been to invite and promote the understanding of 
ground rent, an agency clear to few, very obscure to 
many, but as subtle and powerful in the social orga 
nism as is the life-blood in the human organism. 
Legislatures and Congresses are prevented by incon 
venient distance from revising and improving the 
planetary laws, but they busy themselves with the 
enactment of statute after statute designed to keep 
men and women in their natural orbits. Discerning, 
as we surely do, a natural law in the material world, 
established by a Law-giver greater than any state or 
nation, we urge simply a repeal one by one of all 
artificial tax laws, putting upon the statute book 
instead a single one — an enacting clause to this 
natural law — under which every American city may 
begin at once to administer the single tax remedy.