Excerpt from The Unearned Increment: Or Reaping Without Sowing
Of making of books on agrarian questions there is no end. As yet, however, it cannot be said that the phase of land-law reform treated of in these pages has received the attention it deserves. "Unearned increment" is an expression which has long figured more or less prominently in the works of Liberal and Socialistic economists, both English and Continental, but it has not yet become a commonplace of polemic. If the present inquiry into the meaning and bearings of this still dignified phrase should take away something of its obscurity for the popular mind, a good purpose will certainly have been served.
It was the complaint of the elder Pliny that great estates were ruining Italy. We have in the United Kingdom a multitude of plethoric domains, and the belief is rapidly growing that their existence is not an unmixed blessing. Yet while we may run no risk, or little, of being ruined by the magnitude of individual estates, very great danger may be apprehended from the magnitude of land-values in this country, so long as, to use the words of John Stuart Mill, "an accession of wealth created by circumstances" is allowed to "become an unearned appendage to the riches of a particular class."
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. Это и многое другое вы найдете в книге The Unearned Increment (William Harbutt Dawson)