this day, while an English urban landlord can cramp
or distort the development of a whole city by with-
holding land except at fancy prices, English munici-
palities are without adequate powers of compulsory
purchase, and must either pay through the nose or
see thousands of their members overcrowded. The
whole body of procedure by which they may acquire
land, or indeed new powers of any kind, has been
carefully designed by lawyers to protect owners of
property against the possibility that their private
rights may be subordinated to the public interest,
because their rights are thought to be primary
and absolute and public interests secondary and
contingent.

No one needs to be reminded, again, of the influence
of the same doctrine in the sphere of taxation. Thus
the income tax was excused as a temporary measure,
because the normal society was conceived to be one
in which the individual spent his whole income for
himself and owed no obligations to society on account
of it. The death duties were denounced as robbery,
because they implied that the right to benefit by in-
heritance was conditional upon a social sanction. The
Budget of 1909 created a storm, not because the taxa-
tion of land was heavy -- in amount the land-taxes were
trifling -- but because it was felt to involve the doc-
trine that property is not an absolute right, but that
it may properly be accompanied by special obligations,
a doctrine which, if carried to its logical conclusion,
would destroy its sanctity by making ownership no
longer absolute but conditional.

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