I beg to second the Motion.

The right hon. Gentleman the Member for Chelmsford (Mr. Pretyman) the other day in this House, when speaking on the land question, said that a pennyworth of practice was worth a pound of theory, and, as I have had the luck, in a somewhat chequered career, to travel in a good many English Colonies, I have looked up a few of those pennyworths of practice, in order, if I can, to point the argument which my hon. Friend has just put forward. Some years ago I was driving in Toronto with a friend, and he showed me the new University buildings. He said, "If I had bought the plot on which those buildings stand what a rich man I should be to-day." I said, "Why did not you?" and he said, "It was not so much the cost of the land as the taxes. I should have had to pay taxes, and I could not see my way to doing so." I said, "In England, if we buy land and do not use it, waiting for it to grow worth more, we do not pay tax." I had the greatest difficulty to convince that wealthy Conservative friend of mine, who was a large business man in Canada, that we in England were such fools. He argued the point. He said, "This land on which the Toronto University is built was growing in value every year. Why should I not pay city taxes? It is the people of the city who are making that land more valuable, and why should I not pay?" I said, "In England directly you use the land and create employment you pay tax on the land and the improvements, but if you were in England so long as you did nothing with this land and the people of Toronto made it more valuable you would not pay at all." That was the practice in Toronto, in Australia, and in New Zealand. It is because of that practice that we are paying millions and millions of pounds to get rid of our men and to send them to these countries where they can make a living. Because of that practice we see the Socialist party 140 strong on those benches. It is one of the reasons, because if this thing for which we have been fighting for so many years had been put into practice the causes which have made Socialists would not have been there. The greatest of those causes is the housing question, and even the Socialists have the glimmerings of light to see that on the land question depends the housing question.

I will give one or two instances of the injustice of this thing. A friend of mine in Lincolnshire had land on the fen. There was a drainage authority, and we took several hours the other night discussing whether the West Riding County Council should be allowed to levy a drainage rate. My friend was a very good farmer, and had one of the best cultivated farms in Lincolnshire. Across the way of this drain is one of the worst farms in Lincolnshire, and because my friend was a good farmer he was paying four times as much per acre for drainage as his neighbour who was a bad farmer. Surely, if there is any equity at all in this country, the Drainage Tax should have been levied equally on those two farms. They got an equal benefit, but the man who was deprived of a portion of his earnings was the man who was the useful citizen. That, we say, is unjust. You will notice in the underground railways a little bit of elementary economic teaching. Sir Albert Stanley, as he then was, is the great controller of the underground railways, and he sat in the Coalition Government. The underground tell you that they are making the value of London suburbs. They also tell you that the value does not go to the London people. The value that the underground are making, and which incidentally is made by the people who live in those suburbs, is all going to the owners of the land in those suburbs.

I have just time to tell a little parable of my own town. About 60 or 70 years ago there came a humble foreigner of Jewish extraction from Germany. He was a political refugee. He lived and worked in my city and he built up a very large export trade. He used considerable premises to do it. He paid rates, which were growing year by year, particularly in my own town, which has had a good deal of socialistic administration. He paid Income Tax on his earnings. He paid very heavy Excise and Customs duties on his luxuries, and we know that the Jews when they make money like to spend it. He was taxed on his industry at every hand and turn and corner. He started at nothing and finished with a lot. All that time he was paying tax. Just about the same time that he came to Bradford the principal landowner of Bradford succeeded to the estate. His land at that time was not worth a twentieth of what it is now. He hardly ever came near the town. He did no work for the town. Year by year he sold a little piece at 5s., is., 10s. a square yard for building, and of course only the land that was becoming what they call ripe. I got an acre of land six miles out of the town for £40 an acre, but the poor people in the town had to spend £300 or £400 an acre because they could not afford to go out. Their children must be educated close at home. The difference was this. The useful citizen was taxed, taxed, taxed. The man who did nothing and grew rich while he slept—when the end of his life came Bradford had made for him, without his working at all, far more than the other man had made by a long life of clever toil and financial genius. It is not equity, and because it is not equity all the great municipalities—Glasgow, Manchester, I believe even Liverpool, that home of Toryism—have passed Resolutions in favour of this great reform. Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman said, long ago, that our present system of taxation and rating is a hostile tariff against building. I was one of the few men in the House who voted against the Housing Bill on the principle that we should not tax the poor to give a subsidy to any trade. If you would untax the buildings, if you would take the rates off improvements and put them upon land values, upon that form of wealth which is created solely by the community, you would want no subsidy. We should have no tinkering or interference by the Minister of Health, or any other Minister, on the housing question, because houses would be built by the people for the people at a price people could pay.