28 THE LAND QUESTION.
necessarily become their absolute master. And just as this point is neared that is to say, just as competition increases the demand for land just in that degree does the power of taking a larger and larger share of the earn- ings of labor increase. It is this power that gives land its value ; this is the power that enables the owner of valu- able land to reap where he has not sown to appropriate to himself wealth which he has had no share in producing. Rent is always the devourer of wages. The owner of city land takes, in the rents he receives for his land, the earn- ings of labor just as clearly as does the owner of farming land. And whether he be working in a garret ten stories above the street, or in a mining drift thousands of feet below the earth's surface, it is the competition for the use of land that ultimately determines what proportion of the produce of his labor the laborer will get for himself. This is the reason why modern progress does not tend to extir- pate poverty ; this is the reason why, with all the inventions and improvements and economies which so enormously increase productive power, wages everywhere tend to the minimum of a bare living. The cause that in Ireland produces poverty and distress the ownership by some of the people of the land on which and from which the whole people must live everywhere else produces the same results. It is this that produces the hideous squalor of London and Glasgow slums ; it is this that makes want jostle luxury in the streets of rich New York, that forces little children to monotonous and stunting toil in Massa- chusetts mills, and that fills the highways of our newest States with tramps.
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