Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/501

Rh have their counterparts as land-owners in all our lesser cities, does not answer the question, because the Vanderbilts, the Havemeyers, the Drexels, the Rockefellers, the Carnegies, the Armours, and the Pullmans are also very rich, and they do not own land to any large extent. Can anybody point to a similar group of rich men whose income is derived from agricultural land?

Any man of fair intelligence can answer the question for himself. The opportunity has been open to me, for example, to get rich by land-owning ever since I arrived at man's estate. It has been open to me to acquire land at all prices, from nothing per acre upward. I was once domiciled for a short time at a place where land was obtainable at the former price—good arable land, underlaid by a workable vein of coal. I filed an entry on one hundred and sixty acres of it at the United States Land-Office at Lecompton, Kansas; but, happening to receive an offer of twenty-five dollars per week to work on a newspaper shortly afterward, I abandoned my claim, and I am sure that I made no mistake in the point of view of dollars and cents. I took up my abode in the city of Chicago when there were only sixty thousand inhabitants there. The growth of that place has been, since that time, one of the remarkable phenomena in the world's history, and a great part of this growth took place under my eye; yet I have never seen the time when I thought I could make better use of my small capital by becoming a land-owner than by following other pursuits. But I have had some experience as a land-owner. The land that I have at one time and another owned, whether urban, suburban, or agricultural, or taken altogether, has not served me as well on the whole as other investments.

I make this personal reference because I know that my experience tallies with that of many others. Mr. Henry George, for example, has fairly earned all that he possesses of this world's goods. I venture to ask whether the same amount of labor, diligence, and foresight that he has bestowed upon his own vocation of book-writer, journalist, and publisher, if applied to the acquisition and use of land, would have netted him as much. Undoubtedly both he and I, by the use of hind-sight, can see where we might have made larger gains by becoming land-owners than we have ever made. But so, too, by the use of hind-sight we can see how we might have made as much or more in still other ways. We might have invented a telephone, for example.

Before proceeding it should be noted that Mr. Clarke expressly repudiates the idea that the single-tax argument rests upon the idea of an “unearned increment.” The rise in land values due to the growth of population has nothing to do with it, or at most only serves to set it in a more glaring light.

“The argument for the land-value tax” (he says) “is very apt