In its recent report, the Commission upon Country Life calls impressively to the attention of Congress "the widespread continuing depletion of soils," and finds in this fact one of the leading conditions bearing adversely upon rural living. It is most fortunate that this fact of progressive deterioration has finally achieved authoritative recognition. Economistssome of them-have, on purely theoretical grounds, insisted that such deterioration must be taking place, but it has been beyond their reach to support the doctrinal analysis by appeal to a firsthand investigation of the concrete facts. Even were there, then, in the report of the commission nothing further than the announcement of this one fact, the commission would have well justified its existence. But it is unfortunate that the commission has done little toward explaining the momentous fact which it reports. Bad farming may, it is true, serve-so far as it goes-as an explanation for the case; but why is there this bad farming? Native ignorance or faulty education might, of course, stand as ultimate cause, if only it were true that other rural populations rank above our own in intelligence. But is there not a more satisfactory explanation? May it not indeed be true that present conditions are such as to stimulate a more and more rapid deterioration of the. farms in proportion as the owners are more and more intelligent? Is ignorant husbandry the cause for which we are in search? For decades the evils of the general property tax have been the occasion of denunciation on the part of all thoughtful students of tax problems. Broadly speaking, the. general property tax is the central and almost exclusive feature-or in any event the characteristic and prevailing feature-of our American system of taxation. And on the face of it the system does not appear to be an unfair one: Let each man pay according to his property. To the native and naive common-sense of men this