the fiscal policy of a country should not prevent a real
Democrat from siding with the party which opposed monopoly, especially
in land. He saw in "LATIFUNDIA"--huge estates--the ruin of the Roman
Empire, and its prevalence in the United Kingdom was the greatest
danger ahead of it. In these young countries the tendency to build up
large holdings was naturally fostered by what was the earliest of our
industries. Sheepfarming is not greatly pursued in the United States or
Canada, because of the rigorous winter--but Australia is the favourite
home of the merino sheep. Originally there was no need to buy land, or
even to pay rent to the Government for it; the land had no value till
settlement gave it. The squatter leased it on easy terms, and bought it
only when it had sufficient value to be desired by agriculturists or by
selectors who posed as agriculturists. When he bought it he generally
complained of the price these selectors compelled him to pay, but it
was then secure; and, with the growth of population and the railroads
and other improvements, these enforced purchasers, even in 1877, had
built up vast estates in single hands in every State in Australia. In
The Melbourne Review for April, 1877, Professor Pearson sketched a plan
of land taxation, which was afterwards carried out, in which the area
of land held was the test for graduated taxation. Henry George had not
then declared his gospel; and, although I felt that there was something
very faulty in the scheme, I did not declare in my article on the
subject that an acre in Collins street might be of more value than
50,000 acres of pastoral land 500 miles from the seaboard, and was
therefore more fitly liable to taxation for the advantage of the whole
community, who had given to that acre this exceptional value. I did not
declare it because I did not believe it. But I thought that the end
aimed at--the breaking up of large estates--could be better and more
safely effected, though not so quickly, by a change in the incidence of
succession duties.

Some time after I saw a single copy of Henry George's "Progress and
Poverty" on Robertson's shelves, and bought it, and it was I who after
reading this book opened in the three most important Australian
colonies the question of the taxation of land values. An article I
wrote went into The Register, and Mr. Liston, of Kapunda, read it, and
spoke of it at a farmers' meeting. I had then a commission from The
Sydney Morning Her