82 THE LAND QUESTION.
I doubt not that whichever way a man may turn to inquire of Nature, he will come upon adjustments which will arouse not merely his wonder, but his gratitude. Yet what has most impressed me with the feeling that the laws of Nature are the laws of beneficent intelligence is what I see of the social possibilities involved in the law of rent. Rent * springs from natural causes. \lt arises, as society develops, from the differences in natural oppor- tunities and the differences in the distribution of popula- tion. It increases with the division of labor, with the advance of the arts, with the progress of invention. And thus, by virtue of a law impressed upon the very nature of things, has the Creator provided that the natural advance of mankind shall be an advance toward equality, an advance toward cooperation, an advance toward a social state in which not even the weakest need be crowded to the wall, in which even for the unfortunate and the cripple there may be ample provision^ For this revenue, which arises from the common property, which represents not the creation of value by the individual, but the crea- tion by the community as a whole, which increases just as society develops, affords a common fund, which, properly used, tends constantly to equalize conditions, to open the largest opportunities for all, and utterly to banish want or the fear of want.
The squalid poverty that festers in the heart of our civilization, the vice and crime and degradation and ravening greed that flow from it, are the results of a treatment of land that ignores the simple law of justice, a law so clear and plain that it is universally recognized by the veriest savages, ^Vljat is by nature the common birthright of all, we have made the exclusive property of
- I, of course, use the word "rent" in its economic, not in its
common sense, meaning by it what is commonly called ground-rent.
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