people, we should now take it away again from their representatives, most of whom have paid for it with money earned by services rendered. But it most certainly is our business and duty to see that we do not now put riches into the hands of those who pander to our ignorance and vice. Are we putting much successful energy into this duty?
There is perhaps some difference in the power which investors in land have to charge others for the use of it as compared with that of other forms of property from which interest and profit are earned. Competition is less free and multiplication is less possible, though as the rural landowners of England found to their cost in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the development of transport, by bringing far-away wildernesses within reach for farming purposes, has extended the competing area enormously and will do so in future to an extent, perhaps, that we cannot yet imagine. Even urban land is not quite a monopoly. Owners of sites in Mayfair may seem to be able to dictate their own terms, but there is a point at which the community will refuse to pay their price and go to other abodes. Mr. Ramsay Macdonald, in the book already quoted (page 58), says that the owner of land is
