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New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXI, Issue 24, 31 March 1893, Page 27

and upon the products of industry may and should be abolished. While the tax on land valnes promotes industry, and therefore increases private wealth, taxes upon industry act like a fine or a punishment inflicted upon industry ; they impede and restrain and finally strangle it. In the desired condition of things, land would be left in the private poessssion of individuals, with full liberty on their part to give, sell, or bequeath it, while the State would levy on it for publio usea a tax that should equal the annual value of the land itself, irrespective of the nse made of it or the improvements on it, The only utility of private ownership and dominion of land, as distinguished from possession, is the evil utility of giviog to the owners the power to reap where they have not sown, to take the products of the labour of others without giving them an equivalent — the power to impoverish and practically to reduce to a species of slavery the masses of men wbo are compelled to pay private owners the greater part of what they produce for permission to live and to labour in this world, when they would work upon the natural bounties of their own account, and the power, when men work for wages, to compel them to compete against ont another, to compel them to consent to labour for thejowest poslible wages— wages that are by no means the equivalent of the new value created by tbe work of the labourer, but are barely sufficient to maintain the labourer in a miserable existence, and even the power to deny to the labourer the opportunity to labour at all. This ii an injustice against the equal right of all men to life and to the pursuit of happiness — a right based upon tbe brotherhood of men, which ie derived from the fatherhood of God. This is the injustice that we would abolish in order to abolish involuntary poverty. That the appropriation of the rental value of land to public uses in the form of a tax would abolith the injustice which has just been described", and thus abolish tbe involuntary poverty, is clear, since in inch case no one would hold lands except for use, and the masses of men, having free access to unoccupied land, would be able to exert their labour directly upon Datural bounties and to enjoy the full fruits of their labours, beginning to pay a portion of tbe fruits of their indußtry to the public treasury only when, with the growth of the community and the extension to them of tbe benefits of civilisation, there would come to their hands a rental value distinct from the value of ibe product of their industry, which value they would willingly pay as the exact tquivalent of the new value created by their labour. Since men surely would not be consent to work for utjust wages when they could obtain perfectly just wages by working for themselves, and, final y, since what belongs to the community shall have been given to the community, the only valuable things that men shall own as private property will be those thiegs that have been produced by private industry. The boundless desires and cap - cities of civilised human nature for good things, namely, the products of labour — a demand always greater than tbe supply — and, therefore, for the labour that produces these good things there will always be a demand greater than the supply, and the labourer will be able to command perfectly just wages, which are a perfect equivalent in the product of some otber person's labour for the new value which bis own labour produces."