Page:Landholding in England.djvu/183

 proposals for the equalisation of rates. Throughout, the occupiers pay more than the ground landlords.

All our public improvements are paid for by the public. It is really singular how little the great landowners of London do for London. In most other countries, a noble, man with the enormous rental of the Duke of Bedford, would have presented to London Co vent Garden Market—the state of which at present is a disgrace to the greatest city in the world.

The Thames Embankment was made at a cost to the public of nearly two and a half millions—paid partly out of the now abolished London Coal Duties, and partly out of the inhabited house duty—a duty paid, not by the ground landlord, but by the occupier. In this case, too, the ground landlords received the full price of the land, compensation for "severance," 10 per cent, for "compulsion," and found the value of the unsold half of the land enormously increased by the substitution of a magnificent frontage on the river, for the former unwholesome mudbanks.

The Tower Bridge, which cost the Corporation over three quarters of a million, was also partly paid out of the Coal Dues.

London ground landlords are paid heavily for permitting improvements to be made, and they benefit enormously by those improvements after they are made. But not content with this, they denounce as "robbery" and "confiscation" any proposal to tax them in any sort of proportion to their gains. The ground landlord is the only man whose property increases in value without effort or expenditure on his part, and he is the only man who is protected from bearing his share of the public burdens. As this continual rise in value is solely due to the public, the public and not the ground landlord ought in common justice to reap the chief part of the benefit. The expenditure caused by growth of population ought to be borne by the growing land values. But as it is, "The people of London pay, directly or indirectly, £11,000,000 a year to make and keep the land valuable; and then pay £16,000,000 a year to the landlords because it is valuable."

The story of the making of Charing Cross Road, besides being an excellent example of the way in which ground