t to offer an
effective remedy.

Under these conditions few things could be more desirable than that
the matter should be advanced to the third of its natural stages by
being submitted to the critical test of experience. Nothing short of
this will ever satisfy the mass of mankind of the feasibility of the
system proposed, or of its adequacy to meet the evils complained of;
nothing less will set free the minds of many thousands of intelligent
persons to inquire into other methods of reform than the fair trial of
the single-tax system, and its failure to cure the evils which its
author expected it to cure. The difficulty, which indeed is by no
means a slight one, is to find a favorable arena in which the
experiment can be tried, and a community prepared to make the
experiment.

It must be remembered that, if the evils aimed at by the proposed
remedy of the single tax are great and far-reaching, its complete
application could hardly, in most communities, amount to less than a
practical revolution. Striking as it does at the whole received theory
of land tenure, as sanctioned throughout the civilized world by the
practice of many centuries, it arrays against itself the prejudices of
the most influential classes in every long-established community, and
its introduction is necessarily surrounded by difficulties and at
least apparent injustices which must indefinitely delay any attempt to
bring it to the test of experiment there. The only reasonable hope,
indeed, of reducing the theory of the single tax to the plane of
experience is to find a country not yet fully committed to any other
system, and occupied by a self-governing people sufficiently
intelligent to perceive the evils of other existing systems of land
tenure, and sufficiently enterprising to be willing to experiment in
this direction.

It may perhaps prove of no little benefit to other communities that
one self-governing country has been found which has been both able and
willing to make trial of the principle which has been so strongly
contended for by the author of "Progress and Poverty," and by those
who have seen in his proposals a way of escape from many of the most
serious difficulties that beset civilized communities at the present
day. There is probably no other country which is to-day in so good a
position to enter upon experimental legislation in this and other
directions as the British colony of New Zealand. An island community
separated by more tha