g over excavations already made,
and paying out to members of the building trade large sums in
unemployment benefit, while the demand for the houses on which they
might be employed is left wholly unsatisfied.

LAND FOR PUBLIC PURPOSES

The Acquisition and Valuation of Land for the purpose of public
improvements is a branch of the question to which a great deal of
attention was drawn during and immediately after the war. The Government
appointed a Committee, of which the present Solicitor-General was
chairman, and which, in spite of a marked scarcity of advanced land
reformers amongst its members, produced a series of remarkably unanimous
and far-reaching recommendations. These recommendations dealt with four
main topics:--

(_a_) Improvements in the machinery by which powers may be obtained by
public and private bodies for the acquisition of land for improvements
of a public character;

(_b_) Valuation of land which it is proposed to acquire;

(_c_) Fair adjustment as between these bodies and the owners of other
land, both of claims by owners for damage done by the undertaking to
other lands, and of claims by the promoting bodies for increased value
given by their undertaking to other lands; and

(_d_) The application of these principles to the special subject of
mining.

The Government in the Acquisition of Land Act, 1919, has adopted a great
part of the Committee's recommendations under the second head, and this
Act has undoubtedly effected an enormous improvement in the prices paid
by public bodies for land which they require, although, most
unfortunately, the same immunity from the extortion of the land-owner
and the land speculator has not been extended to private bodies such as
railway companies who need land for the improvement of public services.
Moreover, it has not attempted to bring the purchase price of land into
any relation with its taxing valuation.

The whole of the rest of the Committee's recommendations dealing with
the other three points which I have mentioned, the Government has wholly
ignored. Powers for public development can still only be obtained by the
slow, costly and antiquated processes in vogue before the war; private
owners of lands adjoining works of a public character are still in a
position to put into their own pockets large increases in value due to
public improvements to which they have contributed nothing, and which
they may even have impeded; the development of minerals