hould be
merely a sinecurist quartered on it." Urban ground-rents and royalties
are, in fact, as the Prime Minister in his unregenerate days suggested,
a tax which some persons are permitted by the law to levy upon the
industry of others. They differ from public taxation only in that
their amount increases in proportion not to the nation's need of
revenue but to its need of the coal and space on which they are levied,
that their growth inures to private gain not to public benefit, and
that if the proceeds are wasted on frivolous expenditure no one has any
right to complain, because the arrangement by which Lord Smith spends
wealth produced by Mr. Brown on objects which do no good to either is
part {90} of the system which, under the name of private property, Mr.
Brown as well as Lord Smith have learned to regard as essential to the
higher welfare of mankind.

But if we accept the principle of function we shall ask what is the
_purpose_ of this arrangement, and for what end the inhabitants of, for
example, London pay $64,000,000 a year to their ground landlords. And
if we find that it is for no purpose and no end, but that these things
are like the horseshoes and nails which the City of London presents to
the Crown on account of land in the Parish of St. Clement Danes, then
we shall not deal harshly with a quaint historical survival, but
neither shall we allow it to distract us from the business of the
present, as though there had been history but there were not history
any longer. We shall close these channels through which wealth leaks
away by resuming the ownership of minerals and of urban land, as some
communities in the British Dominions and on the Continent of Europe
have resumed it already. We shall secure that such large accumulations
as remain change hands at least once in every generation, by increasing
our taxes on inheritance till what passes to the heir is little more
than personal possessions, not the right to a tribute from industry
which, though qualified by death-duties, is what the son of a rich man
inherits to-day. We shall treat mineral owners and land-owners, in
short, as Plato would have treated the poets, whom in their ability to
make something out of nothing and to bewitch mankind with words they a
little resemble, and crown them with flowers and usher them politely
out of the State.

{91}

VII

INDUSTRY AS A PROFESSION

Rights without functions are like the shades in Homer whic