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  operating ­
  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  organism ­
  as  is  the  life-blood  in  the  human  organism.
Legislatures  and  Congresses  are  prevented  by  inconvenient ­
  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.