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Now here is something which Henry George did not say, and if he knew was too diplomatic to mention: The reason the people have not had possession of the land is because they did not want it. The ownership of the land you need to use comes in answer to prayer–and prayer is the soul’s desire, uttered or unexpressed. The will of the people is supreme. If fraud and rascality exist in high places, it is because we elect rascals to office.

The will of the people is supreme. When we cease toadying to brainless nabobs, and quit imitating them as soon as we get the money, we will be on the road to reformation. As it is, most poor people are just itching to live as the rich do. The average servant-girl who gets married quits work then and there, and is quite content to live the rest of her life as a slave, asking her husband for a quarter at a time and cajoling the money out of him by hook or crook, or else explorating his trousers for free coinage when opportunity offers. Fresh air is free, but the average individual does not know it; and neither would this same person use land if it were given him. Freedom is a condition of mind.

Yet apart from the “submerged tenth” is a very large class of people to whom land and a home would be a positive paradise, and who are simply forced into flats and tenements on account of present economic conditions: the land is monopolized, and held by men who neither improve it themselves nor will they allow others to. Then hold it awaiting a rise in value.

This increase in value is not on account of anything the owner may do –in fact, he is usually an absentee and does nothing. The increase comes from the enterprise and thrift of people for whom the owner has no interest, beyond contempt.

If these enterprising people who do the work of the world–making the things the world needs–want more land for their business or for homes, they have to pay the absentee for the increased value which they themselves have brought about. When you beautify and enrich the value of your own lot by improving it, you are making it impossible to buy the vacant lot next to you without bankruptcy.

Moreover, you are taxed by the State for any improvement you make on your land, and this taxation on improvements must of necessity tend toward discouragement of improvement. It is really a surer way to make money, to hang on to land and do nothing, than to improve it.

The remedy proposed by Henry George is simply the Single Tax, and this tax to be on land values and not on improvements.

That is to say, with the Single Tax, the man who owns the vacant lot covered with briars and brambles would pay the same tax that you pay on your lot next door upon which you have built a house, barn and conservatory and planted trees and flowers.

The immediate tendency of this policy would be to cause the gentleman who owned the vacant lot devoted to cockleburs to put up on it a sign, “For Sale Cheap.”

Even the opponents of the Single Tax agree that its inauguration would at once throw on the market a vast acreage of unimproved land, and that is just the one reason why they oppose it. All those thousands of acres held by estates, trustees and idle heirs, in the vicinity of Boston, Philadelphia and up the Hudson, would be for sale.

The single tax would give the land back to the people, or at least make it possible for people who want it to get what they could use. Those who have the desire to improve land, and improve themselves by improving it, would no longer be blocked.

The fresh blood of the country which makes the enterprise of cities possible comes from the boys and the girls who warmed their feet on October mornings where the cows lay down; who have been brought up to work on land, to plant and hoe and harvest and look after livestock. This is all education, and very necessary education. “A sand-pile and dirt in which to dig is the divine right of every child,” says Judge Lindsey.