have charged it upon the pocket of the tax-payer.  The most striking instance is that of the tube railway from Charing Cross to Golders Green, now being extended under Government guarantee to Edgware.  Those who provided the original capital have never received any return upon their money, yet millions have been put into the pockets of the owners of what was undeveloped land now served by the line, and now that the extension is being carried out with the tax-payers’ guarantee, the land-owners will again reap the benefit untaxed.

The development of the natural resources of our country was one of the promises held out by Mr. Lloyd George to the electors in 1918.  Schemes were ready, and are still in the official pigeon-holes, for the production of electricity on a very large scale both from water power and from coal, which would not only provide employment, but cheapen the cost of production in all our industries.  France, Italy, and other countries are at this moment carrying out similar schemes whereby they will relieve themselves to a large extent from dependence on British coal.  But here, four years of Coalition Government have left us practically where we were.  In France, although in many respects her social system seems to me less enlightened than our own, the power of the land-owner to obstruct enterprise and development is by no means so great.  Land Reform in this country is a necessary preliminary to the fulfilment of Mr. Lloyd George’s promises.  Development at the public expense without such reforms will result chiefly in further burdens upon the tax-payer and further enrichment of the landowner.

RATING RELIEF FOR IMPROVEMENTS

This brings me to the last, and in my opinion the most important branch of the Land Question, that relating to the reform of our system of rating and taxation.  I am myself an ardent supporter of the policy which I think has been rather unfortunately named the Taxation of Land Values.  The vital point about this policy is not so much that we should tax land values, as that we should leave off taxing buildings and other improvements of land.  The policy would be better described as the Relief of Improvements from Taxation.  Its economic merits seem to me so obvious as hardly to require examination.  It is only because the present system has been in force for over 300 years that it can find any supporters.  If any one were to propose as a useful means of encouraging the steel trade or the boot trade, or as a desirable method of taxation, that a tax of, say, 50 per cent. should be imposed upon the value of every ton of steel or every pair of boots turned out in our factories, he would be rightly and universally denounced as a lunatic.  Yet this is the system which ever since the days of Queen Elizabeth has been in force with regard to the building trade and all other industries which result in the production of improvements upon land.