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 forcible confiscation or redivision of the land—he knows that, even if it could by any possibility be done, the same causes which have produced accumulation once would produce it again. What he does ask is that the laws shall cease to promote and perpetuate a tendency to accumulation strong enough to need no artificial help. He asks that the other law shall be given a chance—the law which tends to break up accumulations, sometimes by the advent of a spendthrift, sometimes merely by a large family of co-heirs—whom our present system forbids to be co-heirs. Let land be no longer hedged about with entail and with a costly and complicated system of conveyance. Let it take its chance, as money does. If we could conceive of money being hedged about as land is, in a little while we should have 2250 persons in possession of half the money in the country. We all see that this could never be allowed for a day. But people can subsist without money, and cannot exist except upon land—even the slums are land. To promote the accumulation of land is to hinder the growth of citizenship.



T is two hundred years since King William's Assessment, and one hundred years since Pitt's Act. During these two hundred years the value of land in England has increased nearly five -hundred fold. For as the Land Tax was to be, at its highest, 4s. in the £, and realised at this highest £2,037,627, the whole value of the whole land of England in 1792 must have been £10,188,135 (4 being the fifth of 20). Mr Fawcett estimated the capitalised value, in the last third of the nineteenth century, at £4,500,000,000. The freeholder receives and the leaseholder pays enormously more than in 1792, but the ground landlord is still supposed (if he has not redeemed his tax) to possess property no more valuable than in the days of William III. And even so, the rate is very unequal. As the proportions fixed by Pitt's Commissioners were made