Some years ago in London there was a toll-bar on a bridge across the Thames, and all the working people who lived on the south side of the river, had to pay a daily toll of one penny for going and returning from their work.  The spectacle of these poor people thus mulcted of so large a proportion of their earnings appealed to the public conscience:  an agitation was set on foot, municipal authorities were roused, and at the cost of the ratepayers the bridge was freed and the toll removed.  All those people who used the bridge were saved 6d. a week.  Within a very short period from that time the rents on the south side of the river were found to have advanced by about 6d. a week, or the amount of the toll which had been remitted.  And a friend of mine was telling me the other day that in the parish of Southwark about L350 a year, roughly speaking, was given away in doles of bread by charitable people in connection with one of the churches, and as a consequence of this the competition for small houses, but more particularly for single-roomed tenements is, we are told, so great that rents are considerably higher than in the neighbouring district.

All goes back to the land, and the landowner, who in many cases, in most cases, is a worthy person utterly unconscious of the character of the methods by which he is enriched, is enabled with resistless strength to absorb to himself a share of almost every public and every private benefit, however important or however pitiful those benefits may be.

I hope you will understand that when I speak of the land monopolist, I am dealing more with the process than with the individual landowner.  I have no wish to hold any class up to public disapprobation.  I do not think that the man who makes money by unearned increment in land, is morally a worse man than any one else, who gathers his profit where he finds it, in this hard world under the law and according to common usage.  It is not the individual I attack; it is the system.  It is not the man who is bad; it is the law which is bad.  It is not the man who is blameworthy for doing what the law allows and what other men do; it is the State which would be blameworthy, were it not to endeavour to reform the law and correct the practice.  We do not want to punish the landlord.  We want to alter the law.  Look at our actual proposal.

We do not go back on the past.  We accept as our basis the value as it stands to-day.  The tax on the increment of land begins by recognising and franking all past increment.  We look only to the future; and for the future we say only this:  that the community shall be the partner in any further increment above the present value after all the owner’s improvements have been deducted.  We say that the State and the municipality should jointly levy a toll upon the future unearned increment of the land.  A toll of what?  Of the whole?  No.  Of a half?  No.  Of a quarter?  No.  Of a fifth—­that is the proposal of the Budget.