We are further told that the Budget proposals proceed on the assumption that there is a corner in land, and that communities are denied the opportunity of getting the land required, whereas, it is asserted, there is in fact nothing approaching a corner in land.  I do not think the Leader of the Opposition could have chosen a more unfortunate example than Glasgow.  He said that the demand of that great community for land was for not more than forty acres a year.  Is that the only demand of the people of Glasgow for land?  Does that really represent the complete economic and natural demand for the amount of land a population of that size requires to live on?  I will admit that at present prices it may be all that they can afford to purchase in the course of a year.  But there are one hundred and twenty thousand persons in Glasgow who are living in one-room tenements; and we are told that the utmost land those people can absorb economically and naturally is forty acres a year.  What is the explanation?  Because the population is congested in the city the price of land is high upon the suburbs, and because the price of land is high upon the suburbs the population must remain congested within the city.  That is the position which we are complacently assured is in accordance with the principles which have hitherto dominated civilised society.

But when we seek to rectify this system, to break down this unnatural and vicious circle, to interrupt this sequence of unsatisfactory reactions, what happens?  We are not confronted with any great argument on behalf of the owner.  Something else is put forward, and it is always put forward in these cases to shield the actual landowner or the actual capitalist from the logic of the argument or from the force of a Parliamentary movement.  Sometimes it is the widow.  But that personality has been used to exhaustion.  It would be sweating in the cruellest sense of the word, overtime of the grossest description, to bring the widow out again so soon.  She must have a rest for a bit; so instead of the widow we have the market-gardener—­the market-gardener liable to be disturbed on the outskirts of great cities, if the population of those cities expands, if the area which they require for their health and daily life should become larger than it is at present.

I should like to point out to the Committee that the right hon. gentleman, in using this argument about the market-gardener, recognises very clearly—­and I think beyond the possibility of a withdrawal—­the possibility of these cities expanding and taking up a larger area of ground in consequence of the kind of taxation which my right hon. friend in his land taxes seeks to impose.  But let that pass.  What is the position disclosed by the argument?  On the one hand we have one hundred and twenty thousand persons in Glasgow occupying one-room tenements; on the other, the land of Scotland.  Between the two stands the market-gardener, and we are solemnly invited, for the sake of the market-gardener, to keep that great population congested within limits that are unnatural and restricted to an annual supply of land which can bear no relation whatever to their physical, social, and economic needs—­and all for the sake of the market-gardener, who can perfectly well move farther out as the city spreads, and who would not really be in the least injured.