COLLECTIVISM  AND  LAND  NATIONALIZATION.  259

improvements  and  from  all  progress  finds  its  way  at  last  into
the  pockets  of  the  landowners.  The  labourer  gains  no  advantage ­
  therefrom,  and  as  living  becomes  more  difficult  as  the  price
of  food  rises,  there  results  privation  for  the  working  classes  and
destitution  for  those  least  well  off.  When  in  California,  to
recall  Mr.  George’s  illustration,  there  was  land  for  any  one  who
wished  to  take  it,  rent  did  not  exist,  and  the  labourer  enjoyed
the  entire  product  of  his  labour.  To-day,  in  order  to  obtain
access  to  the  natural  agents  and  raw  materials  upon  which  to
work,  he  must  abandon  to  rent  everything  beyond  the  bare
necessaries.

To  prevent  poverty  from  increasing  side  by  side  with  wealth,
Mr.  George  sees  only  one  remedy,  namely,  to  make  over  the
ownership  of  the  land  to  the  State.  To  accomplish  this  reform,
he  says,  it  is  not  necessary  to  have  recourse  to  expropriation  ;
It  will  be  enough  to  raise  the  land-tax  so  as  to  absorb  rent,  as
IS  done  in  certain  provinces  in  India  where  the  State  is,  in  consequence, ­
  looked  upon  as  the  proprietor  of  the  land.  All  other
taxes  might  then  be  abolished,  and  trade,  freed  from  all
shackles,  would  receive  such  an  impetus  that  general  well-being
would  result.  This  idea  of  a  rent-tax  is  at  bottom  the  same  as
that  of  the  Physiocrats,  a  single  tax  on  land.
Towards  the  close  of  his  life,  J.  S.  Mill  proposed  that  the
State  should  take  the  whole  increase  of  rent  which  was  due  to
the  collective  progress  of  society  and  not  to  the  individual
efforts  of  the  proprietor.  A  French  landowner,  M.  Edgard
Baron,  in  his  “  Protest  against  the  Abusive  Extension  of  the
Right  of  Property,”  has  uttered  ideas  similar  to  those  of  Mr.
George.
I  believe  that  it  is  a  mistake  to  see  in  rent  the  principal  cause
of  inequality.  In  so  far  as  it  levies  the  exceptional  produce  of
the  more  fertile  land,  it  establishes,  on  the  contrary,  equality
among  the  cultivators  of  lands  which  differ  in  productivity.
Were  it  not  for  rent,  the  cultivator  of  fertile  soil  would  obtain
for  the  same  effort  a  much  greater  remuneration  than  the  man
who  worked  refractory  land.  It  is  capital,  ever  growing,  which
engrosses  a  larger  and  larger  share  of  the  total  product
Formerly  the  principal  factor  was  labour.  Now,  in  proportion