ng the decade, 1900-1910, when the political overturn gave
Australia to the Labour Party, should be more advanced than France,
Germany, Great Britain, or the United States, where the latest great
overturn in the democratic direction occurred in each instance a
generation or more ago.

So also Australia and New Zealand which, on the one hand, are still
suffering from the disadvantage of having lived until recently under a
system of large landed estates, on the other hand have the advantage of
dealing with the land question in a period when the governments of these
new countries are becoming rich enough, through their own enterprises,
to exist independently of land sales, and when farmers are more willing
to increase the power of their governments, both in order to protect
themselves from the encroachments of capital and of labor, and directly
to advance the interests of agriculture. The campaign to break up the
large estates has kept the farmers engrossed in politics, and this has
occurred in a period when industrial organization has made possible a
whole program of "Constructive State Socialism." By taking up this
program the farmers and those who wished to become farmers have at once
looked to their own interests and secured the political support of other
small capitalists and even of a large part of the workingmen.

But working against the nationalization of the unearned increment,
against the policy of leasing instead of selling the public land,
central features of every advanced "State Socialist" policy, is the fact
that the small farmers, daily becoming more numerous, hope that they
might themselves reap this increment through private ownership. In no
national legislation is it proposed to tax away this increment in
_agricultural_ land, which preponderates both in New Zealand and
Australia. But, while in other countries the agricultural population is
decreasing relatively to the whole, in New Zealand the settlement of the
country by the small farmers has hitherto led it to increase, and the
new legislation in Australia must soon have the same result. So, in
spite of the favorable auspices, it seems that the climax of the "State
Socialism," the transformation of the small farmer into a tenant of the
State is not yet to be undertaken, either in the shape of land
nationalization or in the taxing away of unearned increment. And while
the Australian Labour Party as an organization favors nationalization, a
large part o