Your Holiness will see from the explanation I have
given that the reform we propose, like all true
reforms, has both an ethical and an economic side. By
ignoring the ethical side, and pushing our proposal
merely as a reform of taxation, we could avoid the
objections that arise from confounding ownership with
possession and attributing to private property in land
that security of use and improvement that can be had even
better without it. All that we seek practically
is the legal abolition, as fast as possible, of taxes on
the products and processes of labor, and the consequent
concentration of taxation on land values irrespective of
improvements. To put our proposals in this way would be
to urge them merely as a matter of wise public
expediency.
There are indeed many single-tax men who do put our
proposals in this way; who seeing the beauty of our plan
from a fiscal standpoint do not concern themselves
further. But to those who think as I do, the
ethical is the more important side. Not only do
we not wish to evade the question of private property in
land, but to us it seems that the beneficent and
far-reaching revolution we aim at is too great a thing to
be accomplished by “intelligent
self-interest,” and can be carried by nothing less
than the religious conscience.
Hence we earnestly seek the judgment of religion. This
is the tribunal of which your Holiness as the head of the
largest body of Christians is the most august
representative. ... read the whole
letter