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The opinion is general that we must take over our public utilities, transportation transmisison of intelligence, but when we are considering the public retention and assumption of natural resources it is strange that most of us forget the most important of all these resources, and that is the land itself.

The most serious phase of this situation of high prices is that it tends to make the rich: A richer and the poor poorer and still more accentuates the difference between the House of Have and the House of Want. "Laissez faire" has completely broken down and the sacred natural law of supply and demand has been repealed. While we are speaking of added prices as following this so-called law, we are compelled to wonder whether these added prices are productive in nature, or whether they merely tend to deprive the less fortunate of things they need and to bestow them on those with bank accounts. It is easy enough to talk about taking a long view of such situations and to show that high prices will in a series of years tend to increase production and thereby lower prices. But while we are waiting for such readjustment the valuable may starve and the parasitic grow fat. Against this remedy there also stand out the possibilities of men refusing to compete if it is to their advantage to form combinations, and always and ever there is the increment added to the land by prosperity in any given line.

The question of rising prices due to increased land values reminds one of a building raised on jack screws, temporarily braced with timbers and then having put under it permanent construction. We shall never have 40 cent corn on $200 land. We can regulate the railroads and other public utilities on the basis of investment or inherent value regardless of capitalizations. Can we not see the absurdity of considering inflated land prices as legitimate capitalization calculated to bring interest returns forever?

It would appear that much as we dislike it, and much as we object to state interference, we shall have to practice a great real more of it before we can practise less. In this we are but interfering with prior private interference. In a small way and an immediate way it is the same old struggle between anarchism and socialism - anarchism representing the millenium and socialism a conveyance toward that destination.

If our contest prove long and severe the Federal Constitution will not recognize itself in a looking glass, or else the United States Government will be crippled and hampered beyond measure by the constriction of the baling wires that bind us, placed there by men, who, however good or wise, lived a hundred and fifty years ago, and were neither prophets nor sons of prophets.

There is no danger but that the American system of land tenure will come in for plenty of analysis and criticism at the hands of Singletaxers. There are certain things concerning which I disagree with some of my friends of that enthusiastic and thoughtful school. I do not believe that if Henry George had lived he would have confined his revenue system to the taxation of land, either as abstractly perfect or concretely feasible, and I think he would have recognized the fact that after taxing all the rental value out of land and forcing the owner of the land to the trouble of cashing his crops, and turning in taxes, no benefit of holding title would appear. Just as millions of acres of chopped over timber land have been permitted to revert to the state rather than to irritate the owner with taxation charges, in the same way this taxing of the unearned increment would eventually throw the land back to the taxing community. The taxation plan would be self destructive and a leasing system would take its place, an evolution to be devoutly sought, and one only to be reached thru taxation or revolution.