advance in land values cuts down the
earnings of labour and capital, and checks production, leads
irresistibly to the conclusion that this is the main cause of those
periodical industrial depressions to which every civilised country seems
increasingly liable.

Robbed of all the benefits of the increase of productive power, labour
is exposed to certain effects of advancing civilisation which, without
the advantages that naturally accompany them, are positive evils, and of
themselves tend to reduce the free labourer to the helpless and degraded
condition of the slave. As land is necessary to the exertion of labour
in the production of wealth, to command the land is to command all the
fruits of labour save enough to enable labour to exist. But there is
also an active, energetic power--a power that in every country, be its
political form what it may, writes laws and moulds thought--the power of
a vast and dominant pecuniary interest. The great cause in the
inequality of the distribution of wealth is the inequality in the
ownership of land. The ownership of land is the great fundamental fact
which ultimately determines the social and political, and consequently,
the intellectual and moral condition of a people. The tendencies and
measures at present relied on or advocated as calculated to relieve
poverty and distress among the masses are insufficient. The true remedy
is to substitute for individual the common ownership of land.

As man belongs to himself, so his labour when put in concrete form
belongs to him. As nature gives only to labour, the exertion of labour
in production is the only title to exclusive possession. When
non-producers can claim as rent a portion of the wealth created by
producers, the right of the producers to the fruits of their labour is
to that extent denied.

The equal right of all men to the use of land is as clear as their equal
right to breathe the air--it is a right proclaimed by the fact of their
existence. The right of individual proprietorship of land is the denial
of the natural rights of other individuals--it is a wrong which must
show itself in the inequitable division of wealth. Again, the ownership
of land will always give the ownership of men, to a degree measured by
the necessity, real or artificial, for the use of land. And when that
necessity is absolute, when starvation is the alternative to the use of
land, then does the ownership of men involved in the ownership of land
become