THE ABCOF TAXATION 
1*4 
With the right to possess, “to buy and sell, bequeath 
and devise it,” provided only that equal rights shall 
be asserted and secured by taking in the form of 
taxation enough of the ground rent to meet all public 
expenses. Because taxes are spent upon the land, we 
would take them from the land. 
The tendency to-day of this regulation by taxation, 
of trusts, monopolies, franchises and special privileges 
in all its forms would, we claim, be strongly toward 
a rectification of the admittedly unjust distribution, 
not of present wealth, but of wealth hereafter to be 
produced. 
When all special privileges, including the special 
privilege of private appropriation of ground rent, are 
abolished by exacting payment for the same at their 
market value, then taxation, which now so grievously 
aggravates an unjust distribution, will be unnecessary, 
and you will have one channel only, and that the one 
proper channel, for the distribution of wealth, viz., 
wages proportioned to skill and industry. 
In all primitive societies the soil has been held as 
common property with equal rights of the many to 
natural opportunities. To-day the land tenure pendu 
lum has swung clear to the other side, and in highly 
civilised society land has come to be held by the few 
in private ownership with its special privilege of the 
private appropriation of ground rent. The single 
tax aim is to bring the pendulum back into a position of 
reconciled equilibrium, modern individual ownership 
by the few brought into harmony with primitive com 
mon ownership by the many. One reason why so 
many men are averse to conceding to the individual 
the right of ownership in land is that the right has