ers in that district are endowed with unearned increment in
consequence of the building of the railway. But if after a while their
business aptitude and industry creates a large carrying trade, then
the railway, he contends, gets its unearned increment in its turn. But
the right hon. gentleman cannot call the increment unearned which the
railway acquires through the regular service of carrying goods,
rendering a service on each occasion in proportion to the tonnage of
goods it carries, making a profit by an active extension of the scale
of its useful business--he cannot surely compare that process with
the process of getting rich merely by sitting still. It is clear that
the analogy is not true.

We are further told that the Budget proposals proceed on the
assumption that there is a corner in land, and that communities are
denied the opportunity of getting the land required, whereas, it is
asserted, there is in fact nothing approaching a corner in land. I do
not think the Leader of the Opposition could have chosen a more
unfortunate example than Glasgow. He said that the demand of that
great community for land was for not more than forty acres a year. Is
that the only demand of the people of Glasgow for land? Does that
really represent the complete economic and natural demand for the
amount of land a population of that size requires to live on? I will
admit that at present prices it may be all that they can afford to
purchase in the course of a year. But there are one hundred and twenty
thousand persons in Glasgow who are living in one-room tenements; and
we are told that the utmost land those people can absorb economically
and naturally is forty acres a year. What is the explanation? Because
the population is congested in the city the price of land is high upon
the suburbs, and because the price of land is high upon the suburbs
the population must remain congested within the city. That is the
position which we are complacently assured is in accordance with the
principles which have hitherto dominated civilised society.

But when we seek to rectify this system, to break down this unnatural
and vicious circle, to interrupt this sequence of unsatisfactory
reactions, what happens? We are not confronted with any great argument
on behalf of the owner. Something else is put forward, and it is
always put forward in these cases to shield the actual landowner or
the actual capitalist from the logic of the argument or from the f