Page:A Jewish State 1917.djvu/31

 and will allow them to mortgage these for the building of their habitations, deducting the amount due from their salaries, or putting it down to their account as increased emolument. This will, in addition to the honors they expect, form a kind of recompense for their services.

All the immense profits of this speculation in land will go to the Company, which is bound to receive this indefinite premium in return for having borne the risk of the undertaking. When the undertaking involves any risk, the profits must be freely accorded to those who have borne it. But under no other circumstances will profits be permitted. In the co-relation of risk and profit is comprehended financial justice.

BUILDINGS.

The Company will thus barter houses and estates. It must be plain to any one who has observed the rise in the value of land through its cultivation, that the Company will gain enormously on its landed property. This can best be seen in enclosed pieces of land in town and country. Areas not built over increase in value through surrounding cultivation. The men who carried out the extension of Paris made a successful speculation in land which was ingenious in its simplicity; instead of erecting new buildings in the immediate vicinity of the last houses of the town, they bought up adjacent strips of land and began to build on the outskirts of these. This inverse order of construction raised the value of building sites with extraordinary rapidity. After having completed the outer ring, they built in the middle of the town on these highly valuable sites, instead of continually erecting houses at the extremity.

Will the Company do its own building, or commission independent architects? It can, and will, do both. It has, as will be shown shortly, an immense reserve of working power, which will not be sweated by the Company, but, transported into brighter and happier conditions of life, will work at a cheap rate. Our geologists will have looked to the provision of building materials when they selected the sites of the towns.

What is to be the principle of construction?

WORKMEN'S DWELLINGS.

The workmen's dwellings (which include the dwellings of all operatives) will be erected at the Company's own risk and expense. They will resemble neither those melancholy workmen's barracks of European towns, nor those miserable rows of cabins which surround factories; they will certainly present a uniform appearance, because the Company must build cheaply where it provides the building materials to a great extent; but the detached houses in little gardens will be united into attractive groups in each locality. The natural conformation of the land will rouse the ingenuity of our young architects, whose ideas have not yet been cramped by routine; and even if the people do not grasp the whole import of the plan, they will at any rate feel at ease in their loose clusters. The Temple will be visible from long distances, for our faith it was that united us in the old days. There will be light, attractive, healthy schools for children, conducted on the most approved modern systems. There will be continuation-schools for workmen, which will educate them up to greater technical knowledge and enable them to become intimate with the working of machinery. There will be places of amusement, for the proper conduct of which the Society of Jews will be responsible.