scandals and libels, or the various other forms of blackmail. The average political speaker for hire, the lobbyist, the pimp, and the procurer belong by the same right in the same classification. Each earns his wage according to his kind, in the sole and ultimate sense that he gets it. It does not matter for the purpose whether the wage is received for good practice or for malpractice, for making cloth or for making shoddy, for adulteration or for honest goods, for canned nutriment or for canned poison. That, socially viewed, certain gain-acquiring activities may be denounced as parasitic or as something worse, is not to the point. Parasitism is not a competitive category.

Acceptance of the fact that neither labor nor capital need eventuate either in a material result or in a good result, but only in a price-bearing result, must greatly modify the capital concept and greatly extend the capital category. Slaves rank as capital where slavery exists. To reduce to slavery half of a population might in itself amount to a doubling of the aggregate of wealth. Nothing follows as to the result upon aggregate welfare. Weal and wealth have no necessary interdependence.

The growth of capital by growth of liens against men is widely illustrated in actual business. An increase in public war debts or an increase in private indebtedness as mere claims in personam is a growth of capital. A property right is merely a right of individual enjoyment and, therefore, a right of exclusion of others. It results that patent rights and franchises and monopolies are all capital, since they represent the right to collect revenue from others. Nor, again, is it to the purpose to inquire whether the right is or is not predation. Whatever wealth serves the acquisitive end is capital. Police permits to rob passers-by after midnight are capital. Legislative authority to rob importers both early and late is capital. Royal patents for tax-farming the peasantry are capital.

I would avoid any over-call upon your time in presenting these doctrinal axioms: I have elsewhere too much sinned in this regard. I desire at present merely to point out the application of this doctrine to our actual American society. A great part of the 110 billions of American wealth is made up of one form or another of capitalized privilege or of capitalized predation. If, indeed, our computations include all forms and manifestations of private claim and of private property in that to which no indi

vidual can make good his private right of enjoyment, it is probably not going too far to assert that two thirds of the durable property bases of income in the country are nothing else than this capitalization of privilege or capitalization of predation. The market value of these non-social forms of capital is merely the present worth of the right to exact tribute from one's fellows or to plunder one's fellows. I put this fraction at two thirds admittedly as mere estimate. I claim no adequate basis in statistics and no authority as statistician-God forfend. Nor should I have great confidence in any statistical pronouncement on the question. But I think I can make the statement reasonably credible.

Note the facts as reported by the 1904 census: Out of the 107 billions of material wealth, 1812 billions are reported as current products-clothing, personal ornaments, furniture, carriages. Of the remaining 89 billions, 2 billions are coin and bullion. Of the remaining 87 billions, 62 billions are land and improvements and 16 billions are accounted for as public utility corporations; 8 billions remain for live stock and industrial equipment. Our problem has, then, mostly to do with these 87 billions of social equipment—income-earning wealth in the ordinary sense. We find this total to divide into:

8 billions of non-transportation equipment

16 billions of public utility wealth

62 billions of land and improvements

How much, then, of this 87 billions of wealth is the capitalized bounty of nature or the capitalized expectation of unearned dividends?

Recalling that mines and water powers are included within the land category, that the ground values in cities like New York and Chicago are twice the improvement values, that four fifths of the farm values are land values, that seven twelfths of the real estate values for a group of states not including New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, and Pennsylvania are ground values, that the last tax report for Illinois gives the town and city lots as assessed at twenty-four times the farm values-it is probably conservative to say that over two thirds of the real estate wealth of the country is in ground values: here are 41 billions of unearned increment.

Estimating, also, the value of rights of way and user, and of terminals for the railroads and tramways, express companies,

telephone, electric light, and telegraph companies, it is probably not wide of the truth to say that one half of the 18 billion value of public service corporations represents merely social values. If there is overstatement here, it surely does not offset the liberality in the division of real estate values.

Here, then, are approximately 50 billions of unearned values out of a total of 87 billions. Five ninths of the durable wealth reported by the census is made up of privately appropriated social wealth.

The difficulty is, however, that the census returns have been constructed upon the basis of a viciously bad concept of capital. In the main, the totals represent a valuation of material tangible items of goods or of equipment. But as a question not of social wealth, but of the aggregate of private competitive wealth, the interrelations of human beings must be considered. If half the population of America became slaves, note again that 50 billions of wealth would forthwith be added to the wealth aggregate. In the mere item of public debts we have approximately 3 billions to be computed as private wealth against which no debit can be charged in the aggregate appraisal. These debts are merely the present worth of the private rights of some men to collect future taxes out of other men. Patents and franchises and privileges are all fundamentally of this same sort. In a general way, the common stocks of the later corporations are nothing more or less than the present worth of putative future dividends resting upon no basis of original investment. The Steel Corporation with its billion dollars of market value rests upon original properties of from 200 to 300 millions. The average earnings of 120 millions would support a valuation of 3 billions if only it were certain that this robbery can have no end. The dividend-earning capacity of the Booth Company supports a capitalization double that of its material assets. Sears, Roebuck and Company incorporated approximately 9 millions of tangible assets into the 9 millions of preferred stock and 30 millions of common stock: and this common stock is now selling at 180-sixty-three millions of private wealth against 10 millions of social wealth. Immunity from competition through protective tariffs, through combination, through franchises, and through patented processes, explains a vast total of private wealth of which the census takes practically no account. Even

the item of good will—a property claim not necessarily predatory in its basis-means commonly nothing more than the special ability of some particular corporation, for example, Sears, Roebuck and Company, to avoid the wastes of our prevailing system of retail merchandising. I conjecture—or guess-the aggregate private wealth of the country to be 150 billions of dollars, and I hazard the estimate that the 20 billions of real estate improvements, 10 billions of public utilities property, 20 billions of tangible personal property and of goods for consumption-a total of 50 billions-more than represent the earned wealth of the country as against a total private wealth three times as great.

The purpose here is not primarily to show how tragically inadequate is the single tax program interpreted as applying solely to unearned increments of land. So far at least as the singletaxers go, they emphasize a real evil. Nor is it a valid objection to their proposed remedy that there are other iniquities even more seriously demanding attention. Nor have I time at present to point out how unworkable is the single tax program, so far as it intends an appropriation of unearned increment through the machinery of the ad valorem tax. Nor shall I stop to prove that the application of the single tax principle to fertility rents is big with social danger. It is not even possible here to demonstrate the diminishing significance of these agricultural rents as over against the stupendously increasing importance of urban rents. I must content myself with noting that if improving transportation and improving agricultural appliances and improving methods and improving varieties of products all tend to the reduction of agricultural rents, they at the same time make enormously for the growth of urban rents. The land rent problem is not a problem of diminishing importance, but of enormously increasing importance-all on the urban side. The assessed value of the real estate on Manhattan Island exceeds the assessed value of all property in the United States, real and personal, urban and rural, west of the Mississippi River, inclusive of Minnesota and Louisiana.

Nor am I trying to indite any sort of socialistic screed, but simply to point out the significance of the unearned increment in its bearing upon the present distribution of wealth. Were society later to make as great a botch of socialism as it has thus far

made of competition, socialism would present the nightmare of all the ages. I want, for example, to point out, so far as I may, why the wage-earning classes of our cities are finding it increasingly difficult to get meat to eat and why, with the more unskilled of these, the Italians, for example, it is no longer possible for the wife and the wage-earning girls and the children to have any meat at all. And about all that I shall be able to do for the problem anyway is to get it stated and to get its terms into the proper theoretical relation to a really modern and workable concept of capital.

For we are to remember that, side by side with the want of the poor, our average standard of living is rising. We are to remember, also, that we are the richest nation of the world-not merely as measured by the colossal wealth of our very rich; not merely by the flamboyant expenditure and the crass ostentation of our great spenders; not merely, also, by the sheer common-placeness of great personal incomes and great property incomes—but also by the test of an extraordinarily high per capita productivity of consumable wealth.

The truth is that no nation of the world out of all the past and no other nation of the present can rank with present America either in opportunities or in accomplishment in wealth production. The average per capita product depends in part upon the quality of the human being and in part upon the quality of his environment. As speed in running is partly a matter of the runner and partly of the track, so the productive output is explained partly by the quality of the farmer and partly by the quality of his farm.

All this is merely one application of the great law of correspondence, the interplay between organism and environment. There are only these two ultimate forces in economic history, man and nature. If the Chinese have less per capita to consume than the French, it is because the Chinese produce less per capita. And the explanation for this must be found in the lower skill or vigor or energy or intelligence or scientific attainments of the Chinese, or in the crowded or otherwise unfavorable character of the habitat. If Americans live better than Europeans, it must be that the Americans are better producers-more active, more inventive, more enterprising or that the soil and climate and other natural resources of America offer more favorable opportunities.