Nearly all the chief cities of Prussia, more than a hundred, are enforcing such a tax in a moderate form, and the conservatives in the Reichstag proposed that the national government should be given a right to tax in the same field.

Their bill was enacted, and, in the second half of 1911, the German government, it was estimated, would raise over $3,000,000 by this tax, and in 1912 it is expected to give $5,000,000.

This tax, which is collected when land changes hands by sale or exchanges, rises gradually to 30 per cent when the increase has been 290 per cent or more.

Of course this scale is likely to be still further raised and to be made more steep as the tax becomes more and more popular.
Mr.Churchill's defense of the new policy of the British government is as significant as the new laws it has enacted:-- "You may say that unearned increment of the land," he says, "is on all-fours with the profit gathered by one of those American speculators who engineer a corner in corn, or meat, or cotton, or some other vital commodity, and that _the unearned increment in land is reaped by the land monopolist in exact proportion, not to the service but to the disservice done_.

It is monopoly which is the keynote; and where monopoly prevails, the greater the injury to society the greater the reward of the monopolist will be....
"Every form of enterprise, every step in material progress, is only undertaken after the land monopolist has skimmed the cream off for himself, and every where to-day the man, or the public body, who wishes to put land to its highest use is forced to pay a preliminary fine in land values to the man who is putting it to an inferior use, and in some cases to no use at all....