In Support of Taxing Land Values

Charles. R. Eckert

[Excerpts from a speech delivered 2 July, 1935 on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives]

In 1857 Lord Macaulay wrote a letter to H. S. Randall, autobiographer of Jefferson -- a letter which President Garfield said startled him "like an alarm bell at night" -- which reads in part as follows:

"I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must sooner or later destroy liberty or civilization, or both. You may think that your country enjoys an exemption from these evils. I will frankly own to you that I am of a very different opinion. Your fate I believe to be settled, though it is deferred by a physical cause. As long as you have a boundless extent of fertile and unoccupied land your laboring population will be far more at ease than the laboring population of the Old World, and while that is the case the Jefferson politics, may continue to exist without any fatal calamity. But the time will come … when wages will be as low and will fluctuate as much with you as with us. You will have your Manchesters and Birminghams, and in these Manchesters and Birminghams hundreds of thousands of artisans will assuredly some time be out of work. Then your institutions will be brought to the test. …

"I have seen England pass three or four times through such critical seasons and I have described; through such seasons the United States will have to pass in the course of the next century, if not of this. How will you pass through them? I heartily wish you a good deliverance. But my reason and my wishes are at war, and I cannot help foreboding the worst. …

"I seriously apprehend that you will, in some such season of adversity as I have described, do things that will prevent prosperity from returning. There will be, I fear, spoliation. The spoliation will increase and distress. The distress will produce fresh spoliation. There is nothing to stop you. Your constitution is all sail and no anchor.

__ _ "As I said before, when a society has entered on this downward progress, either civilization or liberty must perish. Either some Caesar or Napoleon will seize the reins of government with a strong hand, or your Republic will be as fearfully plundered and laid waste by the barbarians in the twentieth century as the Roman Empire was in the fifth, with the difference that the Huns and Vandals who ravaged the Roman Empire came from without, and that your Huns and Vandals will have been engendered within your own country by your own institutions."