[721] S. Alexander, Moral Order and Progress (1889), p. 391.
[722] History of Rationalism in Europe (1890), vol. ii, p. 220.
[723] History of European Morals, 3d ed., vol. i, p. 126.
[724] The Approach to the Social Question (1909), p. 84.
[725] Muirhead, The Elements of Ethics (1909), p. 232.
[726] An Essay on Crimes and Punishments, tr. Voltaire (1793), p. 157.
[727] See Sisson, “The State absorbing the Functions of the Church,” International Journal of Ethics for April, 1907, p. 341.
[728] “It won’t do any longer to lay the blame for poverty wholly upon its victims. These cruel theories cannot face a growing suspicion that poverty is somehow involved in the ethics of distribution.”—Louis F. Post, in address; see The Public for June 21, 1912, p. 593.
[729] Lloyd, Man the Social Creator (1906), p. 135.
[730] The most practicable proposal for the undoing of this ancient and ever-augmenting wrong of private monopoly in land is that presented with singular force and clarity by Henry George in his epochal work, Progress and Poverty. His proposal is to exempt from taxation industry and all forms of property save land, and to lay upon land values, or, in other words, upon actual or potential ground rents, a tax that would reclaim practically the whole of these for society, and secure to the public all future increments in land values created by communal growth and enterprise. Since this tax is to take the place of all other forms of taxation it has become known as “the single tax.” Such a change in the tax system would inevitably create a hardship in a few cases, but a hardship almost infinitesimal as compared with that now inflicted upon the many by the preëmption of the earth by a class. The reform would undoubtedly, as claimed by its advocates, destroy private monopoly in land, the root which nourishes most other monopolies, and secure to all equal right of access to the earth and its resources.