Page:The Complete Works of Henry George Volume 3.djvu/175

 THE "REDUCTION TO INIQUITY." 57'

years, the user is often hampered with restrictions that prevent improvement and interfere with use, and at the expiration of the lease he is not merely deprived of his improvements, but is frequently subjected to a blackmail calculated upon the inconvenience and loss which removal would cost him. Wherever I have been in Great Britain, from Land's End to John O'Groat's, and from Liverpool to Hull, I have heard of improvements prevented and production curtailed from this cause in instances which run from the prevention of the building of an outhouse, the painting of a dwelling, the enlargement of a chapel, the widening of a street, or the excavation of a dock, to the shutting up of a mine, the demolition of a village, the tearing up of a railway track, or the turning of land from the support of men to the breeding of wild beasts. I could cite case after case, each typical of a class, but it is unnecessary. How largely use and improvement are restricted and prevented by private ownership of land may be appreciated only by a few, but specific cases are known to all. How insecurity of improvement and pos- session prevents the proper maintenance of dwellings in the cities, how it hampers the farmer, how it fills the shopkeeper with dread as the expiration of his lease draws nigh, have been, to some extent at least, brought out by recent discussions, and in all these directions propositions are being made for State interference more or less violent, arbitrary, and destructive of the sound principle that men should be left free to manage their own property as they deem best.

Does not all this interference and demand for interfer- ence show that private property in land does not produce good results, that it does not give the necessary perma- nence of possession and security of improvements? Is not an institution that needs such tinkering fundamentally wrong ? That property in land must have different treat-

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