Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/516

 496 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

A glance at the foregoing exhibit discloses this fact : the average selling price per acre of improved lands in this group of counties increased from the first subgroup up to that for amounts over S 1 0,000. The average assessed value also increased, but not to the same extent. As a result, the percentages of assessment for improved acres decreased without a break from the sales for the smallest amounts to those for the largest.

The unimproved acres in this group of counties had a low average selling price for the tracts sold in amounts less than S500. That average increased until sales are reachedwith amounts for from 82,000 to 83,000. Afterward that average decreases. The percentages of relative assessment move in lines the very converse of the averages for the selling price of the land. The sales of improved and unimproved acre property agree in these particulars : they record the highest percentage of assessment for the lands worth the least per acre; that percentage decreases until the highest average selling price per acre is reached; the percentages of relative assessment make a series more or less regular and proportional to the changes in the average values per acre. The discrimination here shown is one primarily between the owners of land with a high value per acre and that with a low value, and not between the rich and the poor; but this discrimination works to the detriment of the poor and to the advantage of the rich as classes.

The beginnings of this system of unjust assessment are found in the condition of affairs that once existed in all parts of the state, and of the Northwest, but which has now been superseded in most of the older counties. In the first settlement of any agricultural county of the western prairie states the land taken up was all of nearly, if not quite, the same value per acre. It had about the same natural resources and no artificial ones. It was all without improvements, or additions made by man. Under these circumstances an honest and equitable assessment would be one that appraised all acre property at substantially the same rate per acre. This was the first assessment in all the counties of Minnesota and of the western states. But with the fuller settlement and more complete development of any section