ment. Many a time has some small proprietor, troubled with qualms of conscience and anxious to justify the source of his income, exclaimed, on learning that I believe in payment for wear and tear: "Oh! well, you believe in rent, after all; it's only a question of how much rent;" after which he would settle back, satisfied. I have always found that the only way to give such a man's conscience a chance to get a hold upon his thought and conduct was to insist on the narrower use of the word rent. It calls the attention much more vividly to the distinction between justice and injustice. If in this I am guilty of neology, I am no more so than in my use of the word Anarchy, which Edgeworth adopts with great enthusiasm and employs with great effect. If the "squint" is what he objects to, why does it annoy him in one case and please him in the other?
I must add that, after what I said in my previous answer in opposition to legislative interference for the control of rents, etc., it seems hardly within the limits of fair discussion to hint that I am in favor of "procrustean measures of law." Certainly, Edgeworth does not directly say so, but in an article avowedly written, in answer to me I cannot see how the remark is otherwise pertinent.
RENT : PARTING WORDS.
[Liberty, December 12, 1885.]
The terminology employed by me in the preceding numbers of Liberty needs no defence, as I have used common words in their usual sense without regard to the technicalities of schoolmen.
My admission that payments by a tenant beyond restoration of all values removed by crops, and during the years of.culture, should justly be reckoned as purchase money, has nothing to do with terminology; it employs no words in an unusual sense. Therein consists, however, my radical accord with Proudhon and other modern socialists, and it cuts to the root of the tribune paid to idle landlords. The rent on real estate in cities has a compound basis; for, in addition to the equivalent for repairs and taxes common between it and agricultural rent, it includes an increment that may or may not have been earned by the owner and which is generally due to the concurrence of many individuals actuated by commercial and other social interests. A vortex, the site of which is determined by some local advantage, sucks in the population and resources of a large area.
The ethical title to the unearned increment of market values in real estate reverts to the municipal autonomy (1), but its legal title is now vested
with individuals, and is the unjust basis of fortunes, like that of the Asters in New York City. Such titles carry with them at least hygienic;