tution of which both they and their neighbors are
the victims. Judged by this standard, certain kinds of property are
obviously anti-social. The rights in virtue of which the owner of the
surface is entitled to levy a tax, called a royalty, on every ton of
coal which the miner brings to the surface, to levy another tax, called
a way-leave, on every ton of coal transported under the surface of his
land though its amenity and value may be quite unaffected, to distort,
if he pleases, the development of a whole district by refusing access
to the minerals except upon his own terms, and to cause some 3,500 to
4,000 million tons to be wasted in barriers between different
properties, while he in the meantime contributes to a chorus of
lamentation over the wickedness of the miners in not producing more
tons of coal for the public and incidentally more private taxes for
himself--all this adds an agreeable touch of humor to the drab quality
of our industrial civilization for which mineral owners deserve perhaps
some recognition, though not the $400,000 odd a year which is paid to
each of the four leading players, or the $24,000,000 a year which is
distributed among the crowd.

The alchemy by which a gentleman who has never seen a coal mine
distills the contents of that place of gloom into elegant chambers in
London and a place in the country is not the monopoly of royalty
owners. A similar feat of prestidigitation is performed by the {89}
owner of urban ground-rents. In rural districts some landlords,
perhaps many landlords, are partners in the hazardous and difficult
business of agriculture, and, though they may often exercise a power
which is socially excessive, the position which they hold and the
income which they receive are, in part at last, a return for the
functions which they perform. The ownership of urban land has been
refined till of that crude ore only the pure gold is left. It is the
perfect sinecure, for the only function it involves is that of
collecting its profits, and in an age when the struggle of Liberalism
against sinecures was still sufficiently recent to stir some chords of
memory, the last and greatest of liberal thinkers drew the obvious
deduction. "The reasons which form the justification ... of property
in land," wrote Mill in 1848, "are valid only in so far as the
proprietor of land is its improver.... In no sound theory of private
property was it ever contemplated that the proprietor of land s