Page:Adolph Douai - Better Times (1877).djvu/22

 1790 down to the last of 1870, the population was doubled in every 28 years, the value of real estate in every 16 years.) This law applies with equal force to the several portions of the country, so that in a neighborhood with one hundred people on one square mile, the price of an acre will, on an average, be nearly the four-fold of what it is in a neighborhood of but fifty people on one square mile. The exceptions to this rule are few, and can be accounted for without disproving the law. It is, therefore, the demand for land which raises the price, because the supply cannot be increased, and raises it proportionally more than the population increases, because that demand comes from new comers that are all landless, and must at once be domiciled and fed, the means for which demand are brought with them. A strong and steady current of immigration brings along with it two things or values which it costs the country nothing to produce—laborers that need not first be raised to the grown age, and money that need not first be earned within the country. The latter seeks at once security and growth by acquiring real estate, the former soon follow the example' by diligence and economy. In old countries the same law obtains, but the growth in the price is far slower, for the reason that those are countries from which emigrants come.

Every new-born infant helps to raise the price of real estate, and when grown to be a man or woman, must pay by surplus work that increase to the then owners of land and capital, just as he must help to pay the interest and to extinguish the capital of all public debts, which were, perhaps, contracted before he or she was born. That is law in the present Capitalistic world. Instead of placing every new generation on a better footing for a start in life, it diminishes the chances for a prosperous career to every new generation of laborers, in spite of the rapid increase of the wealth of the nation, because that is constantly accumulating in fewer and fewer hands, and with it go power and freedom.

Oh, that every worker might again and again ponder on this ultimate cause of all the bad times, present and future! Unless this cause be removed, no good times can return. This last or first cause is—the private property in land, on which capitalism in every shape is based. If you are a holder of real estate or a small farmer—you need not here throw this pamphlet aside—there is hope and security for your property, but only under the one condition that you study well and take to heart all the contents of this pamphlet.

No amount of specious sophistry can refute the truth that land cannot, should not, must not be made private property. Can water, air, sunheat, and daylight be made