Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/515

Rh The land-owners have so many stakes in the country, and these are driven so firmly, and woven together so tightly, that no revolution can gain head which has for its aim to dispossess them of their homes and acres, or to unduly tax them.

No evidence exists showing or tending to show that agricultural land in the United States is capable of yielding any considerable amount of public revenue above what it now yields under the tax laws of the several States. Evidence corroborating that cited from the Connecticut Bureau of Labor Statistics has been supplied lately in a rapidly swelling stream, especially in the official publications of the Commissioners of Vermont and New Hampshire, where there are literally tens of thousands of acres of abandoned lands, which were once the homes of thrifty farmers, and which can now be had for no greater price than the present value of the improvements thereon. A remarkable letter from Judge Nott, of the United States Court of Claims, in the “Nation” of November 21, 1889, presents facts and reasoning thereon, which, whatever else may be said, show conclusively that in the fairest parts of agricultural New England there is nothing left for the single tax to sweep into the public treasury. In the presence of such facts, how idle is it for disputants to cull figures out of the census reports, as Mr. Shearman does in the “Forum” article previously cited, to show what was the value of farms in 1880, and what annual percentage they ought to yield—like measuring a man for clothes, at the distance of a mile, with a theodolite!

There is no subject more bedeviled with dogmatism than taxation. There is none in which dogmatism is less helpful. The more study one bestows upon it the less will he be inclined to lay down inflexible rules. While justice should be ever in the mind's eye, yet our conclusions must always be mainly experimental. Of all the dogmas on taxation the single tax on land is the most dogmatic, and the one least favored by experiment, so far as experiment has been made. In India the single tax has been in force from the earliest times, supplemented by other taxes only after economic rent had been exhausted. During the last half-century British India has been well governed, so that whatever blessings the single tax has in hiding ought there to have been disclosed. That it has not abolished poverty, or exhibited any tendency to do so, may be confidently affirmed.

There are some hundreds of professors of political economy in the colleges and universities of the civilized world. They are of various schools, including that of state socialism. Some are conservatives, others progressives, still others may be called radicals. They are men who have somehow got themselves recognized as fit to instruct others in the principles of the science which deals with the production and distribution of wealth, with land, labor,