Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/34

 20 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

The rise of land values acts as an automatic brake on church extension, and the worst of it is that the pressure of the brake grows strongest precisely when the free expansion of church work is most needed, namely, when population is congested. In no great city, so far as I know, do the churches keep pace with the growth of the population. Is this altogether due to the leth- of the churches, or ought some of the blame to go to the nimbleness of land values ?

Of course in so far as land values are regulated by a just and inevitable natural law we can have no quarrel with them. We cannot complain if the best sites are dearer than the worst. But in so far as land values are artificially enhanced by land specula- tion and by a vicious system of taxation, the churches have a right to cry out against the silken bands that are strangling religious enterprise in common with every other form of enter- prise. Anyone who for purposes of speculation holds land in or about a city idle or partly idle contributes thereby to raise the price of every inch of soil in that town and hampers every church that wants to use land. And if our system of taxation taxes idle land more gently than improved land, and encourages speculation in land by allowing land owners to appropriate the increase in value created by the community, that system of tax- ation is as hostile to church work as to any other form of indus- try and progress. The church has a' stake in the land question.

I wish some competent single taxer would tell us how churches would fare under the single tax. If the present exemption of church property from taxation continued under that system, it would practically cut in two the cost of securing a place of wor- ship, and would enable the churches to devote their resources entirely to the erection of a suitable building. If total exemp- tion were refused, partial exemption on some sliding scale might be permitted. And even if all government favors were withdrawn, and the church property were taxed evenly with other property, I doubt if they would be worse off than they are now. They would be situated then as if they were located on leased ground now, with the privilege of unlimited renewals. Moreover the