What Great Men Have Said.

Hastings Standard, Issue 372, 14 July 1897, Page 4

What Great Men Have Said.

The earth is the general property of all mankind from the immediate gift of the Creator.—Sir William Blackstone. While another man has no land my iitle to mine, your title to yours, is at once vitiated.—Ralph Waldo Emerson. All men are created free and equal, to live, to labor upon the earth, and to enjoy the fruits of their own industry. —Hamlin Garland. No Englishman who has the courage to forecast the destinies of his country can doubt that its greatest danger lies in the present alienation of the people from the soil, and in the future exodus of a discontented peasantry—Professor Rogers. No one can doubt that we are to-day degrading and paganizing men, women and children faster than we are Christianizing them. But we should not forget that a Christian republic can never be built upon the quicksands of an industrial serfdom—Rena Atchison. The great social problem is to discover such a system as shall secure to every man his exact share of the natural advantages which the Creator has provided for the race, while at the same time he has full opportunity, without let or hindrance, to exercise his skill, industry, and perseverance for his own advantage. —Patrick Edward Dove. Those people who possess large portions of the earth's space are not altogether in the same position as the possessors of mere personality. Personality does not impose limitation on the action and industry of man and on the well-being of the community, as possession of land does, and therefore I freely own that compulsory expropriation is admissable and even sound in principle.—-William E. Gladstone. The success of the single tax depends solely upon the soundness of its principles and their practical application. If these are visionary or impracticable, it will soon pass into the realm of Utopia, adding another specimen of human credulity to that museum of unworkable models. If its principles are elemental, based upon the underlying rock of truth, having the forces of nature on its side, no opposition can avail.—William Lloyd Garrison. The government as well as the ruling classes know in their secret hearts that the land question contains all social questions ; that with its solution all special privileges would disappear and that the question is the leading subject of the day. Yet, while they pretend to care for the well-being of the masses, and while they raise for them benelit societies, factory inspection, income taxes, aye, and eight-hour working days, they carefully ignore the land question.—Count Leo Tolstoi. A tax on rent falls wholly ou the landlord. There are no means by which he can shift the burden upon anyone else. It does not affect the value or price of agricultural produce, for this is determined by the cost of production in the most unfavorable circumstances, and in those circumstances, as we have so often demonstrated no rent is paid. A tax on rent, therefore, had no effect, other than its obvious one. It merely takes so much from the landlord and transfers it to the state.—John Stuart Mill. It is the universal fact that where the value of land is highest, civilisation exhibits the greatest luxury side by side with the most piteous destitution. To see human beings in the most abject, the most helpless and hopeless condition, you must go, not to the unfenced prairies and the log cabins of new clearings in the backwoods, where man single-handed is commencing the struggle with nature, and land is yet worth nothing, but to the greatest cities, where the ownership of a little patch of ground is a fortune. —Henry George.