THE A B C OF TAXATION 
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not a tax at all, but a divinely natural provision, 
restoring to every man his inalienable share in the 
value of the land. 
Just in Its Apportionment 
Full single tax would mean all national taxes 
apportioned to cities and towns in proportion to their 
respective land values; all local taxes, including 
national, assessed upon land values alone. In 
“Natural Taxation,” page 147, Mr. Shearman makes a 
plausible claim that for the year 1890 “all national 
and local taxes, if collected exclusively from the ground 
rents of the United States would have absorbed only 
44J per cent of those ground rents, leaving 55J per 
cent to the owners of the bare land as a clear annual 
income, besides the absolutely untaxed income from 
all buildings and improvements upon their land.” 
Repeated calculation of the ground rent of the state 
of Massachusetts and of the City of Boston, as well as of 
many other cities and towns, has fully justified Mr. 
Shearman’s position that gross ground rent is approxi 
mately double the amount of taxes in each case. 
The constitutions of the several states and the moral 
sense of all the people maintain that government should 
not take private property for public use without full 
compensation. Single taxers maintain not only that 
there is no right, but that there is no need to do this, 
even under forms of taxation. 
We would exempt personal property because by 
the same system under which you collect a tax upon 
the poor man’s “visibles,” you are putting upon the 
rich man’s “invisibles” a tax which you cannot collect. 
Equalisation is possible only by abolishing the tax