period increased by 172,000. Here too, land values are at the rate of $1,000 per capita. In almost every city where land values are accurately valued they aggregate from $800 to $1,000 per capita. Every babe that is born, even the ignorant immigrant coming to the city, adds this value to the land and to the land alone. He produces wealth by his coming, and then is charged an annual rent for that which he himself has produced. This is one of the paradoxes of society. The wealth the worker creates is given to another who in turn levies tribute in the form of land rent from him who produces it.

Is it not clear that the city is a wealth producer on a colossal scale; is it not obvious that here is a source of revenue far in excess of the needs of any city? Is it not equally obvious that the city levies tribute on its people and passes it on to a few who have done nothing to create it? City ground rent increases the cost of city living. It is the heaviest burden on city life. In New York City, ground rent amounts to an average of $250 per family. The ground rent alone of a miserable two-room tenement on Grand Street amounts to $90 per year, almost as much as the rent of a comfortable cottage in a small town. This is a social burden imposed on people by the failure of the city to control its economic foundations in the interest of the people. It is one of the principal causes of poverty.

The private monopolies which supply transportation, light, heat, and power are another cause of poverty. They collect such tribute as a corrupt alliance with the city sanctions. The city of Cleveland reduced the burden of car riders by $2,000,000 a year when it cut the rate of fare from five cents to three cents. It saved its people this substantial sum. But this is the least of the costs which the private ownership of the public utility corporation involves. They are operated for monopoly profits. They should be operated as a public service, for the relief of housing, for the promotion of decent living conditions, for the health, for cheap rent, for cleanliness and comfort. Our failure to recognize the plumbing of the city as a public rather than a private function is another of our costliest errors.

Poverty could be reduced to the vanishing point if the city

thought in public rather than in private; in social rather than in personal terms. If the city took in land taxes, what the city itself creates, it could abandon all other taxes; it could supply many services at no cost whatever, that are now privately exploited. With this abundant revenue the city could acquire public utilities, could widen education, could build slaughter houses, markets, and cold storage plants; it could furnish many kinds of recreation and amusement, now denied to people.

But more important by far than the fiscal gain, the taxation of these increasing land values would relieve the housing problem, it would reduce rents and distribute people far out in the country. For the taxation of vacant land compels owners to use it, to build upon it, to cultivate it, and that is the great gain from this reform. With a heavier tax on land values, opportunity would call men to work, to build, to cultivate. Then speculators would be punished for their idleness rather than rewarded for it. Then too, new wealth would be created, prices would come to a competitive basis and those monopolies identified with the land would be destroyed. For the taxation of land values would open up nature to use by man, it would offer him a place in which to live, and to labor. It would create new opportunities. It would relieve poverty by the creation of more jobs. It would lead to a more equitable distribution of wealth.

Finally, I think the psychology of our city politics, the neglect and indifference of the voter which Mr. Bryce ascribes to ethical causes, are traceable to the relation of the city to its physical environments. I am inclined to question if the American voter is any more indolent, any more partisan, any more absorbed in his daily occupations than is the voter in England or Germany. I do not believe our political conditions are due to personal or ethical causes. Rather I should say, the qualities referred to are a result rather than a cause; a result of an antecedent economic relationship. The psychology of politics, like the social costs enumerated above, is physical; it springs from the relation of the city to the citizen. Even the corruption of our cities is not personal; it too is economic or institutional. American business men are probably no more dishonest than German and English business men. We ourselves are

largely responsible for their offenses. Our laws have encouraged corruption. We invite it and then wonder at its existence. We give away franchise grants of colossal value; we invite men to struggle for them and then complain when they adopt the only weapons available for this struggle. The franchises alone of the street railways, gas, electric lights and many other public utility corporations of almost any city exceed in amount the total city debt. In the larger cities they run into millions, even in hundreds of millions of dollars. Franchise values in Boston are assessed for taxation at more than $100,000,000. In New York they are worth more than five times this colossal sum. Owners of these law-made privileges are able to keep what they have acquired, are able to be free from competition, or municipal ownership, only by controlling the politics of the city. This they do by controlling the party. Privilege selects the nominees for mayor, council, and other offices. In order to be sure of the city these interests have to control the state as well. They oppose charter changes, direct primaries, the initiative and referendum, or municipal home rule. In almost every city the cause of corruption in city and state can be traced from the city hall to the boss; from the boss to the man behind the boss in the franchise corporations, from whom it runs to the boss of the state and the legislative chambers in the state capital.

Corruption is not personal. It is largely institutional. It is due to the false relations of the city to its physical foundations. And these false economic relations, like the legalized institutions of slavery, divide the city into two classes, on the one hand, the privileged, containing the talent, wealth, and intelligence of the community, which owns the press and aligns it against the city; and on the other, the unorganized, misled, undisciplined mass of the unprivileged. It is this that keeps our best men out of city politics. They cannot and dare not enter. For the franchise corporations are identified with the banks and trust companies, with business men and chambers of commerce. This conflict of interest, this class war growing out of our attitude to the public utility corporation can be reproduced in any one of a dozen cities that have tried to touch the franchise question. We have made

municipal honesty almost impossible by our laws; by inviting civil war and by exiling the talent of the city from interest or participation in the life of the community. One has only to read the accounts of the struggles in San Francisco, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Chicago, where privilege has been challenged by the people, to find an explanation of the corruption of our cities.

The indifference and indolence of the voter are also explained by the economic relation of the city. In America there is no economic nexus between the voter and the city as there is in England and Germany. With us municipal taxes are levied on property. More than two-thirds of our city dwellers are tenants. They are not conscious of the taxes they pay. In the English city taxes are paid by the tenant directly. They are not levied on the owner. The English citizen votes as a rate payer. He thinks as a rate payer. When he goes to the polls he goes with strong economical interest. The same is true in Germany. One-half the municipal revenues in that country come from the income tax. They are felt directly by the voter. This arouses his interest. It keeps it alive. It promotes watchfulness and interest over the council.

A still more potent influence for interest in the European city is the extent of the city's activities. The city is the biggest corporation in the community. It serves the citizen in countless ways. Municipally owned street railways touch the voter daily. His interest is quickened by his common ownership of many things. In the British cities people talk tramways, gas, water, and electriclighting undertakings, they talk rates and taxes to the exclusion of everything else. It is a common bond of conversation. The same is true in the German city. The utility corporations, slaughter houses, markets, baths, savings-banks, pawnshops, restaurants, orchestras, operas, theaters, all owned by the city and operated by the city for the people, awaken an interest on the part of the people that is reflected in their attitude toward the city.

The American city has none of these stimuli to interest. Our cities only serve the people in routine, non-industrial ways. Our municipal services are negative rather than positive. There is little to awaken the enthusiasm, the affection of the voter. This, I

think, rather than any ethical, personal, or partisan reason, explains the failure of our people in things municipal. We lack a city sense because we have little to create a city sense. There is nothing to awaken love, affection, interest. The attitude of people to the state is a reciprocal state of mind born of the attitude of the state to the citizen. The city has neglected the people and the people in turn have neglected the city.

And we cannot have a real city until we reverse our point of view. That will only come when the city enjoys a kind of sovereignty, a sense of its dignity, a local pride and power like that of the free cities of the world. When we are endowed with that kind of freedom and when we exercise that power for the building of cities, for their conscious intelligent planning, for the promotion of beauty, of comfort, of convenience, when we begin to think in terms of the whole city, as we did a few years ago about the World's Fair at Chicago, then the personal, ethical, and political conditions that we treat as causes will disappear. For then the interest of the whole community will be on the side of the city. There will be none of that cleavage of classes that we have today. Then the economic viewpoint of community ownership and city service will create a new citizenship before which the personal derelictions will disappear. For then we will have corrected the cause of our disease rather than the results, causes we have vainly tried to cure by a treatment of symptoms.