Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2250

1939

Printed pamphlet, one of a triplet of pamphlets on real estate that Heath carried with him, often stapled together. The first was this one, titled, Private Property in Land Explained: Some new Light on the Social Order and Its Mode of Operation. The second and third were both titled, Real Estate — How to Raise and Restore its Income and Value, but differently subtitled, the first being subtitled, Questions for the Consideration of Land Owners (Item 2039), and the second, The Administration of Property as Community Services (Item ­­­2032). All were revised for use in Citadel, Market and Altar (Items 2225-2236).  

    Private Property in Land Explained

    Some New Light

           on the

 Social Order

        and

   Its Mode of Operation

SPENCER HEATH

  Roadsend  Gardens,   Elkridge,  Maryland

                                       Copyright, 1939, by Spencer Heath.

                          Permission to reprint will be granted upon application.

Land owners, in their capacity as publicly auth­orized officers renting sites and locations to land users, afford the only market there is in which publicly created benefits can be distributed justly for value received and at rates socially and not arbitrarily set and determined.

All public benefits allocated otherwise, and not in accordance with value received, are beneficial to some only by being detrimental to others. No social values can thus arise.

The only social values resulting from govern­ment are those that manifest themselves in the value of the sites and locations within the terri­tory served by it. The value of land, as expressed in net rent actually received, is the only net value that arises out of public or governmental opera­tions.

Changes in the amount, scope or form of govern­mental activity can be socially beneficial only when they lift some of the limitations on the use of and demand for land and thus raise rental values.

Land administration, landlord-ism, by mer­chandising publicly created benefits, transforms them from special and private privileges, pre­cariously held, into social and public values justly apportioned and securely enjoyed.

PRIVATE PROPERTY IN LAND EXPLAINED

In the nineteenth century probably no great so­cial and public question was either more fully or less conclusively mooted than that of private property in land. The great rise is private capital through wide developments of transportation and exchange and the steady advance of political domination and restrictions upon its ownership and administration has tended, in the twentieth century, to draw interest away from the more basic and therefore the broader question of prop­erty in land. But in the preceding century this great and practically universal institution came under a considerable scrutiny that was due, in part at least, to the weight and authority of the minds that arrayed themselves against it and proposed its abolition, or at least its profound modification.

In other controversies both attack and defense have rested on premises disputed or denied by the other side. But the attacks on property in land were based on assumptions not specifically denied by its apologists and the defense has rested rather upon the existence of the institution as a fact than upon any logical justification or any thorough refutation of the arguments with which it has been assailed. Thus a kind of stalemate ensued with little ground being given or taken by either side. In fact, such conspicuous assailants as Herbert Spencer, J. S. Mill and Henry George came either to withdraw their more drastic con­demnations and insist that existing values and titles be not disturbed or at least that the struc­ture and framework, “the shell”, of the institution be preserved in the interest of practical conveni­ence and social order. And so, while the closing

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of the nineteenth and opening of the twentieth century has witnessed both theoretical and prac­tical attack on almost every other form of prop­erty, no other social institution has been so quietly taken for granted as necessary and essen­tially sound.

And yet the ownership of land, property in land, has undoubtedly entered upon a decline. With the multiplying political assaults on other prop­erty and the progressive penalization of the processes requisite to its creation and use, the income to land and locations not only ceases to advance but has so far gone down that even urban locations are no sound security for loans and country land has little or no sales value, if indeed any value as land, apart from such improvements or other property as the owner may possess. In fact, the ownership of land has so widely become a liability and a burden that through wide and populous regions it is being forced out of the amenities of private ownership and administration by voluntary engagements and into the arbitrary administration of public authority with the neces­sary implications as to political favor and dis­crimination.

Thus land ownership, in its practical aspects, is on the defensive and even in retreat. Without any theory to justify its existence, with no recog­nition of its own essential function in the social order and therefore without any constructive pro­gram or policy, the institution of property in land is slowly crumbling away. To explain its under­lying principle and operation as a prerequisite essential to the formation or continuance of or­ganized society is the present purpose.

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A traditional institution must remain empiri­cal and blind until it becomes rational and en­lightened. Its preservation and advance hang on the displacement of narrow and empiric thoughts and actions by broader, more general and en­lightened ones. The narrow and traditional idea of land ownership and, in fact, of ail property is as a privilege or personal enjoyment or indul­gence from which all but the owner are excluded. It is as though all wealth were personal goods owned only to be consumed or destroyed in self-gratification or in the execution of sinister design, oblivious of the fact that the great community of wealth is nearly all capital goods in the course of flow by exchange towards their consummation as satisfactions in consumers’ hands where they rapidly dissolve. These flowing goods, together with the fixed and moving facilities that trans­form them and accelerate their flow, this capital wealth, is the only substantial wealth there is, and none of it can be owned as a gratification or indulgence but only administratively for the bringing of fully finished goods and services to the condition, place and possession where they can be consumed. This is the only dominion that an owner can exercise over his wealth and its value not disappear.*

So it is with land. Primitive ownership consists in getting satisfactions directly from it, as the ox gets the grass. But in an exchange society, with its highly specialized services, land comes to be owned more and more for the benefit and satisfaction of others. Except when it is the owner’s place of residence or private recreation,

* A lender of wealth is still its owner. He and the borrower become, in effect, co-administrators on shares, the lender’s share being fixed usually in advance.

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it is only as a social agency, as a means of giv­ing secure possession and of supplying commu­nity services and satisfactions to users, and in no other way, that an owner can practice any actual dominion over his land. Except as noted, land ownership is not an indulgence but a social re­sponsibility, an opportunity of giving service by exchange and therefore an opportunity for re­compense in ground rent,—so far as that respon­sibility is met and that service performed.

Land, then, may be and generally is owned by one and occupied and used by others, either as places of residence or for the production of prod­ucts or services destined for others by means of exchange. For excellent reasons a high exchange economy tends always to dissociate the ownership from the use and occupancy of land. An owner cannot be also the occupant or user of his own land except he act in two capacities:—once as the owner whose concern it is that the occupant shall be in receipt of valuable services through his lo­cation and, again, as his own tenant receiving these services, which he of course takes directly instead of receiving their equivalent in ground rent. Here we find very unlike functions devolv­ing on the same person. As owner he is respon­sible, in common with the other owners, for those public and general benefits that give the land its desirability to the tenant and hence its location value. But as a tenant he is responsible only for the particular and specific services that he per­forms for the patrons of his particular enter­prise; and this is true even if his enterprise or employment be elsewhere and though he may use the public and general services available at his site only for their residential advantages or

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similar self-satisfactions to him. In his former role he is a provider and merchandiser of public services; in the latter he is the purchaser and user or consumer of these services.

This combination in one of both owner and user is not found in early societies. It does not char­acterize ancient society in the rich river valleys of the south where the owners of the soil are sharply defined from the users whom, in that climate, they can and do enslave by compulsive tribute or taxation. Nor is it found in the early social integrations of the rugged north in which un-taxed free-men rendered rents to their land­lords by consent of custom or measure of the market in exchange for possession and protection and other common and necessary public services that the lords supplied. In the south the pro­prietor owns both land and man; in the north, until taxation arrives, he owns only the land; but in both cases the original public authority is in the proprietary hands. The ambiguous combi­nation of owner and user makes its appearance in the later tax-based and slave-supported democ­racies and republics in which the proprietors have yielded their public authority into irresponsible hands.

When the proprietary interest in northern lands or of northern origins becomes so corrupted bythe slavery and taxation of the south that it defaults upon its obligation to protect its free-men and assumes coercive power over them, then its members war on each other, forfeit authority, and eventually concede all rights and powers to kings by divine right or to what is called popular or elective sovereignty. Then the situation of the land-lords under their community servants is but

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little better than that of the users of the land. They, too, come under indefinitely increasing de­predations at the hands of the accepted or elected authority. Discoveries and conquests in new lands will delay the fall, but, as the burden of taxation and debt continues to grow, enterprise becomes unprofitable and unsafe, employment shrinks, pro­duction falls, and the income and value of land necessarily declines.

This failure of owners to function as such, pub­licly and separately from the use of land, has given rise to the fallacious ideas that taxation in­stead of rent is the normal and honest revenue of a community, that private use instead of pub­lic administration over land is the true function of its ownership and that tenancy, but not taxa­tion, somehow beguiles free men into servility. It is forgotten that, in the absence of slavery or taxation, as in Saxon England, land-lord and free-man were correlative and reciprocal terms and serfdom was a consequence of Roman taxa­tion under Norman rule.

In modern as in ancient times, just as all pri­vate enterprises require owner-administration, so do all the public enterprises by which the private ones are served. In both cases, whether they function little or much, the owners are sharply marked off from all subordinates or employes. Accordingly, where there is the highest speciali­zation of functions and the most complete and complex division and exchange of labor here the greatest production of wealth and, correspond­ingly, of land values takes place. In these most highly organized communities, the metropolitan centers, we find the ownership and administration of land almost entirely in other hands than of

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those who use and occupy it. Here, likewise, the permanent buildings and improvements are them­selves owned and administered and their services maintained by a special class of owners who hold as tenants of the owners of the lands but who, in turn, are themselves the land-lords of those who occupy the buildings as tenants under them. These last tenants, of course, own and adminis­ter such kinds of properties as are requisite for serving patrons of the enterprises in which these tenants of the buildings are engaged.

Looking at the owner of the land exclusively in his capacity as such, it is clear that his function in the exchange system has to do with the com­mon services of the community, for these are what he purveys to his tenants to the value and amount measured by the ground rent that he re­ceives in exchange.

Although the ownership of land, apart from the ownership of capital improvements, does not in­volve the administration of any property or en­terprise directly on the site itself, it does, never­theless, place the owner in an administrative re­lationship to the community capital and services. If he is merely a speculator he does not of course administer property of any kind; but his owner­ship in the functional sense of bringing income to himself by serving others, has to do only with the public capital and enterprises the services and products of which he sells to his tenants,—so far as these public services are profitable to them and therefore in actual demand. The land owner performs a sales service with regard to all the net balance of community benefits that come to the particular locations occupied by his tenants. Likewise, the land owners collectively in any

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community, however small or large, perform this important sales function with regard to all the pub­lic services (less disservices) for which there is any actual demand, this demand depending on and being proportional to the amount of business that can be done and wealth produced under the existing burdens of taxation and the restrictions on business and employment that taxes on busi­ness are spent to enforce.

All wealth that is used to prepare and provide any products or services for others is capital wealth. So also are all the materials and commodities that in the course of exchange are being prepared for and moved forward into consumers’ hands. All properties so used or being so prepared and distributed are socialized properties or capital. Capital, then, is wealth that is owned and used for the benefit of others, and all capital, from the very nature of its administrative owner­ship and use, is, of necessity, socialized wealth. Such wealth must not be confounded with those negligible properties that never come into the ex­change system, nor with the relatively few goods that have passed out of that system into individual use and are in process of being consumed or otherwise destroyed. Any useful thing that does not come into the exchange system but remains in the hand of its producer or appropriator is not socialized and therefore not capital, for it does not become the instrument of any associative relationship through exchange of services. The same is true of goods that have passed by trade through all the measured relationships of exchange and into consumers’ hands. These are no longer capital or socialized goods, for their owner is under no social or administrative responsibility

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with regard to them. He does not own them as capital is owned. So only that they reach their final possessors without force or fraud and through the legitimate processes of voluntary ex­change and that they are then not used for any injury to others, they are not of any public or general concern. Before they enter or after they pass out of the exchange system they move under no law of social demand, they accumulate no so­cial utility or value, and their lapse back into the substance of the earth whence they came is, in the absence of criminal or political coercion, only a matter of individual, and not social, control or concern.

It is the same with land. So far as its owner­ship and its enjoyment or use are by the same person or interest it is not socialized, for either it has not entered into or it has passed out of the exchange system. An owner-user is his own land­lord and his own tenant, standing in two different relationships to two different kinds of property. As owner, he is interested in the public capital and services that give desirability to his location; as user, he is interested in those private properties and improvements that are requisite to his enjoy­ment or use of the services his location affords. He is like the lawyer who is his own client, the doctor who is his own patient; he is the merchant who is his own customer; he does not, as a land­owner, give any specialized services to others and so he foregoes all the advantages of division of labor by exchange.

Land ownership therefore, as a social function, is a special division of labor, and it must be con­sidered with reference  to the  public  properties

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upon which its values depend. This implies a special administration of these community prop­erties by the community owners separate and apart from the private administration that the user of the land gives to his private properties and improvements. This field of public adminis­tration, belonging historically and in all essential propriety to the land owners collectively, is very wide; but, as the institution of property in land is now carried on, this administrative field is far from being fully occupied by them. Nevertheless, one part of this public administration, and that its most essential and most important part, they do faithfully perform, however insensible they may be to its wide and deep social implications and enormous value to all. This is the merchan­dising and sales function wherein all administra­tion of capital, be it public or private, culminates and fulfils its end.

Merchandising—making sales—is the only mode by which goods or services can be transferred for value received. It follows, then, that it is the only equitable mode of distribution, the only true ex­change. Moreover, it is an administrative process that none but owners themselves can perform, for they alone can convey the ownership of a thing or service sold. Others may arrange sales but only the acts of owners can give them force and effect. Transfers without owner consent, such as by taxation or by crimes, cannot be sales for they can be accomplished only by force or deceit. Social stability and peace requires, therefore, not merely that goods and .services come into being but also that they be administered and sold by their owners and thus distributed equitably on the basis of value received.  This is the final and

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wholly indispensable feature of owner adminis­tration over any property or services. It applies no less to the distribution of public services than to any other and this is where the merchandising of these services by the community owners plays its supremely important role.

Most properties, including those that are of a community character such as hotels, are delibera­tely administered by their owners so that salable goods or services are brought forth. The owners, so far as they are not forcibly divested of their ownership, then consummate all other and prior administrative functions in merchandising and sales. But in the public enterprises of political communities the merchandising function is just about the only administrative activity that the owners worthily perform. The community serv­ices, other than sales, come into being under hap­hazard political arrangements in which all the community property is the result of seizures, more or less systematized, on the part of public servants and employes who, being non-owners, can give no responsible administration to this pub­lic capital nor make any sales or exchanges of the public products or services. Indeed, the ter­ritorial owners of the political communities so far neglect all supervision and responsibility for their community services (other than the sale of them to their tenants) that the servants of the larger community, unlike those in a hotel, are not provided with any funds for the conduct of their services. For their recompense and expenses, therefore, they both pledge and seize in advance the monies, credits and properties of the popu­lation and disburse these largely for purposes tending to  insure their re-election  or otherwise

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secure them in their arbitrary political power. The historic tendency of all such non-owning and therefore quite irresponsible community servants has been to expand beyond measure their preda­tory processes, using their takings more and more to subsidize the poverty that they cause and thus induce tolerance and even popular demand for still further extensions of their coercive and compulsive powers.

But the exchange relation itself can be main­tained against the inroads of anti-social ten­dencies such as robbery and theft only by that same public authority whose expanding depreda­tions also destroy it. So it comes about that the blessings and benefits of community operations must be weighed off against the destructive and arbitrary manner in which they are performed. This weighing off takes place in the open market wherein are set, by consent of all and coercion of none, the price equivalents of all the public serv­ices that have any exchange or salable value at the locations to which they are supplied. These rents are the market expression of the net community values that emerge in virtue of the difference between all the benefits conferred by public authority and all the depredations and dis­tresses suffered under and sanctioned by it.

It is here that the indispensable function of the ownership of land appears. So long and so far as this institution is accepted and sustained by public policy, just so long and so far will the actual net benefits and values of public services remain within the scheme of social relationships, for these values will have owners and these (land) owners will distribute  them  equitably   by  the

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pro-social process of sale and exchange. These social benefits and services being owned they can be purchased and securely enjoyed by the tenants to whom they are sold.

The first and foremost of these benefits will be security of possession. Because the occupant obtains this security by an exchange process that is politically respected only as property in land is upheld he has this security and protection not only at a justly measured rate and price but it comes to him from no other source and by no other means than the functioning of ownership under the institution of private property in land. While this institution stands, a civilized society with secure and definite places of work and abode and exchange is possible; when it is destroyed there can be no security either of ownership or possession, no respecting of property or freedom in any form, for then no occupancy or possession can rest on any sanction but the arbitrary will and power of elected or of self-constituted author­ity. The respecting of the prerogatives of owner­ship, and thereby of the exchange relationship between owners and tenants, is all that stands between the peaceable possession and use of land, between the amenities of civilized relationships, and the dearth and darkness of a nomadic bar­barism. This alternative to the private ownership of and security in the possession of land brings into view the absolute indispensability of that institution to a social order.

Beyond seeing its indispensability, it remains to ascertain and measure the social value of the services rendered to society by means of property in land. Rather, it remains to be observed how, in the functioning of the social  organism, this

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value is measured and its equivalent rendered in exchange. If it be suggested that the labor of land owners is very light it must be remembered that not the onerousness but the need of a service is the gage of its value. Land owners may not even be conscious that their acts of ownership which confer security and services upon their tenants are an indispensable service to the society; nevertheless, they do cause whatever there is of net public services to be distributed without favor and for value received. Ground rents, then, taken in the aggregate, are the exchange equivalent that a community renders to the institution of property in land for the security of possession and access to public benefits that its members enjoy. This is the social value and justification of the institution as it now stands. So far as it is permitted to operate, so far as the owners are not taxed out of their values and thus out of their ownership, it is the means and instrument whereby security of possession to land users is guaranteed and the net benefits of public services, such as they may be, are correctly and equitably apportioned among those most capable of their productive use.

It being accepted that property in land is the social device and instrument that confers security and makes other exchange relationships possible, it still remains to discern why the recompense that it yields to its members should be precisely what it is, namely, the entire ground rent paid by the tenants. Here a striking automatism of adjust­ment appears. When, as is now usual, land owners perform no administrative services beyond arrang­ing that security of possession which is implicit in their orderly merchandising of the rights of

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occupancy, then the rent that springs up by the open and unforced operations of the market is a recompense that is socially determined and auto­matically awarded to them for this limited service.

Any public benefit that is not merchandised to the recipient for its full value in exchange must be a favor or a privilege and therefore, a social detriment and no social value, no exchange value, can arise from it; the benefit to one becomes a detriment to others and no social purpose is served. But the merchandising function converts public benefits into public values and services. It distributes them equitably, makes them legitimate, and also provides their recipient with the security necessary to enjoy them or to use them for the benefit of others in the course of business and trade. There is no way in which public benefits can become services, and not exploitations, except by their being treated as the land owners’ proper­ties and measured out by them in exchange for rent. Because this merchandising process lifts public benefits, from what must otherwise be privileges and exploitations, into their character as services, this process may be said to create them as and into services. The rent received for them is then seen as no more than the due recom­pense for creating them.

With no other authority but location owners can this exchange relationship arise. The consequence is that when political activities are so carried on that there is any residue of benefits between the good and the evil of all public operations, then this positive residue of public advantage can be rightly obtained by no other means than by pur­chasing possession and use of the territory and locations to which these benefits and advantages

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are served. The value, then, of security of posses­sion is in reality the value of the services by which that security is obtained and assured. This secur­ity and its equitable distribution the ownership of land alone creates and guarantees. The rents paid are the social values voluntarily and automatically rendered in return for this great and necessary social service.

It may be objected that some part or all of rent should be passed on to the public servants (govern­ment) the net benefits of whose operations are the foundation—the raw material, as it were—of the services that land owners perform. The answer is that without the function of land owner­ship being performed in sales services any public benefit or advantage to one would rest on even greater detriments to others and because of this there would not be any net benefits. It is by this sales service alone that any public advantage can enter a market and thereby come into legitimate existence as a service or value given in exchange.

Moreover, all community servants other than land owners are already self-recompensed for all that they do. They receive no income and exer­cise no powers, have no instruments of work or weapons of war, but what they derive from the forcible appropriation of property and services. Thus they recompense themselves in advance for all that they do. They advance no public costs, make no public investments, and create no public values. Because they are appropriators from others and not owners of what they seize and possess they can give it no productive adminis­tration and it yields them no income. The appro­priated wealth, for want of authentic ownership, ceases to function as productive capital and melts

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away to be replenished only by further seizures which, in turn, are consumed and destroyed.

The only pro-social and constructive public ad­ministration is that performed by land owners. By their services and by them alone can any public operations be consummated into values by being merchandised and sold, and to them alone comes any public income by way of exchange and not appropriated by force. Without them politi­cal functions never have nor ever can yield any social or public values. Without such values there can be no security of ownership, no mutual­ity of service and cooperation by exchange, no community of interest and therefore no community of life or any organized society at all.

The indispensability of property in land should be sufficiently clear, but its social potentialities have hardly been touched. Should land owners extend their administration beyond mere sales of possession and access to public benefits and into the conduct of their community affairs as true and worthy lords of their lands their first service would be to procure at least a reduction in some of the unnecessary and more destructive forms of tax taking and tax spending that are degrading into tax-enslaved bond-men the men of business who strive to make productive use of the sites and resources of the land. Such tax abolition, especially when seen as a progressive policy, would so release the frozen energies and facilities of production and exchange and so re­plenish wages and profits out of the expanding production that the demand for land and, there­with its value and income would enormously rise. And it would rise at a rate far beyond the rate

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at which the tax burdens on its use would  be removed.

The institution of property in land would then emerge from its present decadence and come into its own as the largest, most productive and most profitable business in the world. The merely negative services of relief, of even partial res­toration of the freedom inviolably to own and manage property, would bring the whole exchange economy into such enormous productivity as to raise rents and land values permanently to heights undreamed. This would give the land­owning interest—the land-lords—a new, sound, and abundant basis for the maintenance and operation of all existing community capital and services and for the financing of every new pub­lic enterprise that could justify itself by raising either the productivity or the cultural attractive­ness of the community and so returning, to the land-owning business, profits and dividends by way of further enhancement of rents. In this proprietary administration of the community ser­vices and properties by the organized owners themselves the slightest neglect of the public interest or lapse in the direction of corruption and oppression would itself penalize them by a decline in rents and values, while enterprise and effi­ciency would have not only the allurements of profit but the high satisfactions of honor and pride as well. From region to region the pro­prietors, looking beyond all their material gains, would rival each other in the health and beauty of their communities and their people’s joy. Government by seizures and repressions and penalizations would merge into the civilized tech­nique of mutual service by voluntary exchange. Its administration would become at last a high

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emprise and could attain even to the sheer beauty of a creative artistry.

Pending such cooperative and enlightened policy on the part of land owners acting publicly as an organized class, it is only possible to regard with sorrow how they are allowing their institution to decline through the impoverishment of land users by mounting tax-confiscations, restrictions and prohibitions, permitting all productive pro­cesses to be more and more inhibited and the value of their lands thus to be destroyed under their very eyes.

In conclusion, it may be said that no attempt has been made to refute the great arguments against the justice and equity of property in land. The ponderous syllogisms of Herbert Spencer and those who followed him, doubtless, as formal arguments, are sound,—but they are not relevant to any description or interpretation of social or community phenomena. They seem to be premised on subjective concepts of the “rights” or desires of an isolated individual and how he is supposed to feel about them or, rather, about their infringe­ment. A social institution can not be appraised in the light of how an individual feels and fears about his injuries or privations. Arguments based on so pathological a foundation can have no revealing pertinency in a picture of those interactions among its units by which a society is sustained. This discussion therefore has avoided refutation or argument in a somewhat detached description of how human services, public as well as private, are incorporated in property and distributed by exchange.

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With no axes to grind or wrongs to avenge it is quite possible to observe objectively and de­scribe correctly the structures in any accessible field of phenomena and the manner in which the diverse parts act with reference to each other to promote the growth of the structure and main­tain the total functioning and integrity of the whole.

Society is an organization of living units. It is therefore organic and alive. Its members, singly and in specialized groups, perform unlike functions or services in the satisfaction of each other’s needs and desires. This exchange process goes on only in places where services necessary to the exchange relationship are performed by pub­lic servants upon the common and public parts of the territory and through these public parts are conveyed to and conferred upon the private parts held in exclusive possession. These parts are under ownership of proprietary officers and, so far as occupied, they are in the possession chiefly of tenants in an exchange or purchase relation to them. The public servants are observed to do not only needful and necessary things but also an increasing* quantity and variety of things that are so harmful to the society that the bal­ance between the good and evil of the public services finally tends towards zero. Exchange and production are inhibited and the diminished pro­ductivity causes at once a diminished use, need and demand for land with a diminished ability to pay for the diminished benefits of possessing it. But the net benefits of public operations, whether high or low, come to have an exchange value and to be distributed, otherwise than as special privi­leges, only through the merchandising of them by the owners of the lands.  The proprietors are

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recompensed in rents for the beneficial acts they perform in being the active instruments by which security of possession, including all other public services, is obtained. The value of this exchange service by the proprietors is attested by its being paid to them in open market with free competition on both sides and by the further consideration that without this service by land-lords possession or dispossession of any occupant would rest on force or in the will of politically elected or appointed persons and all safety and security would disappear.

When the real nature and necessary services of property in land become better known and under­stood land-owners will organize themselves into agencies of much wider administrative service, authority and responsibility than they now assume. They will then be able to confer upon their res­pective communities almost unimaginable relief and advantages, and the production and exchange of their populations, so freed and so served, can then lift them into the plenty and peace they now so sadly lack and so deeply crave. And these true lords of the land, protectors of its free-men and public servants of all, will find themselves recom­pensed in such abundance of rent and capital values as were never known and in such finer satisfactions to themselves as only dreamers can conceive. With this wider service the institution of private property in land will be in splendor redeemed and its blessings enjoyed; without this it will continue to be destroyed.

                     Copyright,  1939, by Spencer Heath.

    Permission to reprint will be granted upon application.