y enhanced.

He renders no service to the community, he contributes nothing to the
general welfare, he contributes nothing even to the process from which
his own enrichment is derived. If the land were occupied by shops or
by dwellings, the municipality at least would secure the rates upon
them in aid of the general fund; but the land may be unoccupied,
undeveloped, it may be what is called "ripening"--ripening at the
expense of the whole city, of the whole country--for the unearned
increment of its owner. Roads perhaps have to be diverted to avoid
this forbidden area. The merchant going to his office, the artisan
going to his work, have to make a detour or pay a tram fare to avoid
it. The citizens are losing their chance of developing the land, the
city is losing its rates, the State is losing its taxes which would
have accrued, if the natural development had taken place--and that
share has to be replaced at the expense of the other ratepayers and
taxpayers; and the nation as a whole is losing in the competition of
the world--the hard and growing competition in the world--both in time
and money. And all the while the land monopolist has only to sit still
and watch complacently his property multiplying in value, sometimes
manifold, without either effort or contribution on his part. And that
is justice!

But let us follow the process a little farther. The population of the
city grows and grows still larger year by year, the congestion in the
poorer quarters becomes acute, rents and rates rise hand in hand, and
thousands of families are crowded into one-roomed tenements. There are
120,000 persons living in one-roomed tenements in Glasgow alone at the
present time. At last the land becomes ripe for sale--that means that
the price is too tempting to be resisted any longer--and then, and not
till then, it is sold by the yard or by the inch at ten times, or
twenty times, or even fifty times, its agricultural value, on which
alone hitherto it has been rated for the public service.

The greater the population around the land, the greater the injury
which they have sustained by its protracted denial, the more
inconvenience which has been caused to everybody, the more serious the
loss in economic strength and activity, the larger will be the profit
of the landlord when the sale is finally accomplished. In fact you may
say that the unearned increment on the land is on all-fours with the
profit gathered by one of those American