Significant
Paragraphs from Progress and Poverty
by Henry George
with An Appreciation by John
Dewey
Harry
Gunnison Brown's Preface
Contents
An Appreciation of Henry George: John
Dewey
Selections from Progress and Poverty:
1.
The Problem
2. Poverty
Not Due to Over-Population
3. Land
Rent Grows as Community Develops
4. Land Speculation Causes Reduced Wages
5. The Basic Cause of Poverty
6. The Remedy
7. Simplicity of Method of Introducing Remedy
8. Why a Land-Value Tax is bettter than an Equal Tax on All
Property
9. Alleged Difficulty of Distinguishing Land from Improvements
10. Effect of Remedy upon Wealth Production
11. Effect of Remedy upon the Sharing of Wealth
12. Effect of Remedy upon Various Economic Classes
13. Effect of Remedy upon Social Ideals
14. Liberty, and Equality of Opportunity
15. The Cross of a New Crusade
Appendix: Opinions of Some Leading American Economists
"Significant Paragraphs" is an
abridgement, intended for use in college survey courses. This version
cross-references the material omitted from SP, via links that are right-justified.
Occasionally, paragraphs are abridged; links below will take you to the
unabridged version. After you've read Significant Paragraphs, you may
want to explore the omitted material; much of it is very inspiring,
and must have been difficult for Brown to omit!
If you are going to print it out, you might prefer the PDF version,
which does not use bullet points! |
Harry Gunnison Brown's Preface
to Brown's abridgement ("Significant Paragraphs")
of Henry George's book, Progress and Poverty
Probably no other writer has ever made the study of economics so interesting
to so many readers as has Henry George. And now, when more and more economists
of national and international reputation are coming to endorse the main idea
for which Henry George stood, it is almost preposterous, as well as unfair
to students of economics, that they should be assigned no reading on this idea
other than the inadequate account of it and the superficial' adverse criticism
which are all that some of the most widely used current texts in economics
— and even in public finance — contain.
But there has been a real difficulty even for instructors most anxious that
their students should have the case for bare-land-value taxation fairly presented
to them. The complete Progress and Poverty from which these selections are
made would take more time than most teachers might wish to devote to a single
topic in economics, whatever its importance.
The paragraphs here printed have been selected so as to present in brief compass
the essentials of Henry George's argument in his own eloquent and inimitable
style. Only such slight textual changes have been made as seemed necessary
to preserve continuity. In almost any course in economics can be found space
for the few assignments necessary to cover these selected paragraphs, and any
class can be asked to meet the trifling incident expense. Thus might be given
a new zest and renewed enthusiasm to the students whose sometimes waning interest
in the categories and laws of economics is a recurrent discouragement to their
instructors.
It is hoped, too, that many who are not in school or college, but who should
know and really desire to know something of the economic philosophy of Henry
George, will spare for that purpose the very few hours necessary to read this
little book.
Harry Gunnison Brown,
University of Missouri,
Columbia, Mo
1. The Problem |
source: Introductory: The Problem, pages 3-9 |
Could a Franklin or a Priestley have seen,
in a vision of the future, the steamship taking the place of the sailing
vessel, the railroad train of the wagon, the reaping machine of the
scythe, the threshing machine of the flail;
- could he have heard the throb of the engines that in obedience
to human will, and for the satisfaction of human desire, exert a
power greater than that of all the men and all the beasts of burden
of the earth combined;
- could he have seen the forest tree transformed into finished lumber — into
doors, sashes, blinds, boxes or barrels, with hardly the touch of
a human hand; the great workshops where boots and shoes are turned
out by the case with less labor than the old-fashioned cobbler could
have put on a sole; the factories where, under the eye of a girl,
cotton becomes cloth faster than hundreds of stalwart weavers could
have turned it out with their hand-looms;
- could he have seen steam hammers shaping mammoth shafts and mighty
anchors, and delicate machinery making tiny watches; the diamond
drill cutting through the heart of the rocks, and coal oil sparing
the whale;
- could he have realized the enormous saving of labor resulting from
improved facilities of exchange and communication — sheep killed
in Australia eaten fresh in England and the order given by the London
banker in the afternoon executed in San Francisco in the morning
of the same day;
- could he have conceived of the hundred thousand improvements
which these only suggest, what would he have inferred as to the
social condition of mankind?
It would not have seemed like an inference; further than
the vision went it would have seemed as though he saw; and his heart
would have leaped and his nerves would have thrilled, as one who from
a height beholds just ahead of the thirst-stricken caravan the living
gleam of rustling woods and the glint of laughing waters. Plainly, in
the sight of the imagination,
- he would have beheld these new forces elevating
society from its very foundations, lifting the very poorest above the
possibility of want, exempting the very lowest from anxiety for the
material needs of life;
- he would have seen these slaves of the lamp of
knowledge
taking on themselves the traditional curse, these muscles of iron
and sinews of steel making the poorest laborer's life a holiday, in
which
every high quality and noble impulse could have scope to grow.
And out of these bounteous material conditions he would
have seen arising, as necessary sequences, moral conditions realizing
the golden age of which mankind always dreamed.
- Youth no longer stunted and starved;
- age no longer harried by avarice;
- the child at play with the tiger;
- the man with the muck-rake drinking in the glory of the stars!
- Foul things fled, fierce things tame;
- discord turned to harmony!
For how could there be greed where all had enough? How
could the vice, the crime, the ignorance, the brutality, that spring
from poverty and the fear of poverty, exist where poverty had vanished?
Who should crouch where all were freemen; who oppress where all were
peers?
More or less vague or clear, these have been the hopes,
these the dreams born of the improvements which give this wonderful century
its preeminence. They have sunk so deeply into the popular mind as to
radically change the currents of thought, to recast creeds and displace
the most fundamental conceptions. The haunting visions of higher possibilities
have not merely gathered splendor and vividness, but their direction
has changed — instead of seeing behind the faint tinges of an expiring
sunset, all the glory of the daybreak has decked the skies before.
It is true that disappointment has followed disappointment,
and that discovery upon discovery, and invention after invention, have
neither lessened the toil of those who most need respite, nor brought
plenty to the poor. But there have been so many things to which it seemed
this failure could be laid, that up to our time the new faith has hardly
weakened. We have better appreciated the difficulties to be overcome;
but not the less trusted that the tendency of the times was to overcome
them.
Now, however, we are coming into collision with facts which
there can be no mistaking. From all parts of the civilized world come
complaints
- of industrial depression;
- of labor condemned to involuntary idleness;
- of capital massed and wasting;
- of pecuniary distress among business men;
- of want and suffering and anxiety among the working classes.
All the dull, deadening pain, all the keen, maddening anguish,
that to great masses of men are involved in the words "hard times," have
afflicted the world. This state of things, common to communities
differing so widely in situation, in political institutions, in fiscal
and financial systems, in density of population and in social organization
can hardly be accounted for by local causes.
- There is distress where large standing armies are maintained, but
there is also distress where the standing armies are nominal;
- there is distress where protective tariffs stupidly and wastefully
hamper trade, but there is also distress where trade is nearly free;
- there is distress where autocratic government yet prevails, but
there is also distress where political power is wholly in the hands
of the people;
- in countries where paper is money, and
- in countries where gold and silver are the only currency.
Evidently, beneath all such things as these, we must infer
a common cause.
That there is a common cause, and that it is either
what we call material progress or something closely connected with
material progress, becomes more than an inference when it is noted
that the phenomena we class together and speak of as industrial depression
are but intensifications of phenomena which always accompany material
progress, and which show themselves more clearly and strongly as material
progress goes on.
It has always been to the newer countries — that
is, to the countries where material progress is yet in its earlier stages — that
laborers have emigrated in search of higher wages, and capital has flowed
in search of higher interest. It is in the older countries — that
is to say, the countries where material progress has reached later stages — that
widespread destitution is found in the midst of the greatest abundance.
Go into a new community where Anglo-Saxon vigor is just beginning the
race of progress;
- where the machinery of production and exchange is yet rude and
inefficient;
- where the increment of wealth is not yet great enough to enable
any class to live in ease and luxury;
- where the best house is but a cabin of logs or a cloth and paper
shanty, and the richest man is forced to daily work —
and though you will find an absence of wealth and all its
concomitants, you will find no beggars. There is no luxury, but there
is no destitution. No one makes an easy living, nor a very good living;
but every one can make a living, and
no one able and willing to work is oppressed by the fear of want.
But just as such a community realizes the conditions
which all civilized communities are striving for, and advances in the
scale of material progress — just as closer settlement and a
more intimate connection with the rest of the world, and greater utilization
of labor-saving machinery, make possible greater economies in production
and exchange, and wealth in consequence increases, not merely in the
aggregate, but in proportion to population — so does poverty
take a darker aspect. Some get an infinitely better and easier
living, but others find it hard to get a living at all. The "tramp" comes
with the locomotive, and almshouses and prisons are as surely the marks
of "material progress" as are costly dwellings, rich warehouses, and
magnificent churches. Upon streets lighted with gas and patrolled by
uniformed policemen, beggars wait for the passer-by, and in the shadow
of college, and library, and museum, are gathering the more hideous
Huns and fiercer Vandals of whom Macaulay prophesied.
This fact — the great fact that poverty and all
its concomitants show themselves in communities just as they develop
into the conditions towards which material progress tends — proves
that the social difficulties existing wherever a certain stage of progress
has been reached, do not arise from local circumstances, but are, in
some way or another, engendered by progress itself.
And, unpleasant as it may be to admit it, it is at last
becoming evident that the enormous increase in productive power which
has marked the present century and is still going on with accelerating
ratio, has no tendency to extirpate poverty or to lighten the burdens
of those compelled to toil. It simply widens the gulf between Dives
and Lazarus, and makes the struggle for existence more intense. The
march of invention has clothed mankind with powers of which a century
ago the boldest imagination could not have dreamed. But
- in factories where labor-saving machinery has reached its most
wonderful development, little children are at work;
- wherever the new forces are anything like fully utilized, large
classes are maintained by charity or live on the verge of recourse
to it;
- amid the greatest accumulations of wealth, men die of starvation,
and puny infants suckle dry breasts;
- while everywhere the greed of gain, the worship of wealth, shows
the force of the fear of want.
The promised land flies before us like the mirage. The
fruits of the tree of knowledge turn as we grasp them to apples of Sodom
that crumble at the touch.
It is true that wealth has been greatly increased, and
that the average of comfort, leisure, and refinement has been raised;
but these gains are not general. In
them the lowest class do not share. I do not mean that the condition
of the lowest class has nowhere nor in anything been improved; but that
there is nowhere any improvement which can be credited to increased productive
power. I mean that the tendency of what we call material progress
is in no wise to improve the condition of the lowest class in the essentials
of healthy, happy human life. Nay, more, that it is to still further
depress the condition of the lowest class. The new forces, elevating
in their nature though they be, do not act upon the social fabric from
underneath, as was for a long time hoped and believed, but strike it
at a point intermediate between top and bottom. It is as though an
immense wedge were being forced, not underneath society, but through
society. Those who are above the point of separation are elevated, but
those who are below are crushed down.
This depressing effect is not generally realized, for it
is not apparent where there has long existed a class just able to live.
Where the lowest class barely lives, as has been the case for a long
time in many parts of Europe, it is impossible for it to get any lower,
for the next lowest step is out of existence, and no tendency to further
depression can readily show itself. But in the progress of new settlements
to the conditions of older communities it may clearly be seen that material
progress does not merely fail to relieve poverty — it actually
produces it. |
[omitted material, p 9-10]
|
source: The
Problem, p. 10 |
This
association of poverty with progress is the great enigma of our times.
- It is the central fact from which spring industrial, social, and
political difficulties that perplex the world, and with which statesmanship
and philanthropy and education grapple in vain.
- From it come the clouds that overhang the future of the most progressive
and self-reliant nations.
- It is the riddle which the Sphinx of Fate puts to our civilization,
and which not to answer is to be destroyed.
So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress
brings goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury and
make sharper the contrast between the House of Have and the House of
Want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent. The reaction
must come. The tower leans from its foundations, and every new story
but hastens the final catastrophe. To educate men who must be condemned
to poverty, is but to make them restive; to base on a state of most
glaring social inequality political institutions under which men are
theoretically equal, is to stand a pyramid on its apex.
All-important as this question is, pressing itself from
every quarter painfully upon attention, it has not yet received a solution
which accounts for all the facts and points to any clear and simple remedy. |
[omitted material, p10-11]
|
source: p. 11-12 |
It must be within the province of political economy
to solve it. For political economy is not a set of dogmas. It is
the explanation of a certain set of facts. It is the science which,
in the sequence of certain phenomena, seeks to trace mutual relations
and to identify cause and effect, just as the physical sciences seek
to do in other sets of phenomena. It lays its foundations upon firm
ground. The premises from which it makes its deductions are truths
which have the highest sanction; axioms which we all recognize; upon
which we safely base the reasoning and actions of every-day life, and
which may be reduced to the metaphysical expression of the physical
law that motion seeks the line of least resistance — viz., that
men seek to gratify their desires with the least exertion. |
[omitted material, p.12]
|
page 12 [*] |
I propose in the following pages to attempt to solve by the methods of
political economy the great problem I have outlined. I propose to seek
the law which associates poverty with progress, and increases want with
advancing wealth. Properly commenced and carefully pursued, such
an investigation must yield a conclusion that will stand every test, and
as truth, will correlate with all other truth. For in the sequence of phenomena
there is no accident. Every effect has a cause, and every fact implies
a preceding fact. |
[*omitted material p.12-13]
|
source: page 13 |
I propose in this inquiry to take nothing for granted. I propose
to beg no question, to shrink from no conclusion, but to follow truth wherever
it may lead. |
[*p. 13] |
[*Book I:
Wages
and Capital,
pages 3-88]
Chapter 1: The current doctrine of wages—its insufficiency
Chapter 2: The meaning of the terms
Chapter 3: Wages not drawn from capital, but produced by the labor
Chapter 4: The maintenance of laborers not drawn from capital
Chapter 5: The real functions of capital] |
2. Poverty Not Due to Over-Population |
[*Book II: Population and
Subsistence:
Chapter 1:
The Malthusian theory,
its genesis and support
(pages 81-102)
Chapter 2:
Inferences from facts
(pages 103-129)
Book II, Chapter
3:
Inferences from Analogy,
pages 129-134]
|
Book II, Chapter
3: Inferences from Analogy, pages 134-137 |
That vegetable and animal life tends to press against the limits of space
does
not prove the same tendency in human life. Granted that man is only a more
highly developed animal; that the ring-tailed monkey is a distant relative who
has gradually developed acrobatic tendencies, and the humpbacked whale a far-off
connection who in early life took to the sea — granted that back of these
he is kin to the vegetable, and is still subject to the same laws as plants,
fishes,
birds, and beasts. Yet there is still this difference between man and all
other animals — he is the only animal whose desires increase as they are
fed;
the only animal that is never
satisfied. The wants of every other living thing are uniform and fixed. The
ox of today aspires to no more than did the ox when man first yoked him. The
sea gull of the English Channel, who poises himself above the swift steamer,
wants no better food or lodging than the gulls who circled round as the keels
of Caesar's galleys first grated on a British beach. Of all that nature offers
them, be it ever so abundant, all living things save man can take, and care for,
only enough to supply wants which are definite and fixed. The only use they can
make of additional supplies or additional opportunities is
to multiply.
But not so with man. No sooner are his animal wants satisfied than new
wants arise. Food he wants first, as does the beast; shelter next, as
does the beast; and these given, his reproductive instincts assert their
sway, as do those of the beast. But here man and beast part company. The
beast never goes further; the man has but set his feet on the first step
of an infinite progression — a progression upon which the beast never
enters; a progression away from and above the beast.
The demand for quantity once satisfied, he seeks quality. The very desires
that he has in common with the beast become
extended, refined, exalted.
- It is not merely hunger, but taste, that seeks gratification in food;
- in clothes, he seeks not merely comfort, but adornment;
- the rude shelter becomes a house;
- the undiscriminating sexual attraction begins to transmute itself into
subtle influences, and
- the hard and common stock of animal life to blossom and to bloom into shapes
of delicate beauty.
As power to gratify his wants increases, so does aspiration grow.
- Held down to lower levels of desire, Lucullus will sup with Lucullus; twelve
boars turn on spits that Antony's mouthful of meat may be done to a turn;
every kingdom of Nature be ransacked to add to Cleopatra's charms, and marble
colonnades and hanging gardens and pyramids that rival the hills arise.
- Passing into higher forms of desire, that which slumbered in the plant
and fitfully stirred in the beast, awakes in the man. The eyes of the mind
are opened, and he longs to know. He braves the scorching heat of the desert
and the icy blasts of the polar sea, but not for food; he watches all night,
but it is to trace the circling of the eternal stars. He adds toil to toil,
to gratify a hunger no animal has felt; to assuage a thirst no beast can
know.
Out upon nature, in upon himself, back through the mists that shroud the past,
forward into the darkness that overhangs the future, turns the restless desire
that arises when the animal wants slumber in satisfaction. Beneath things,
he seeks the law; he would know how the globe was forged and the stars were
hung, and trace to their origins the springs of life. And, then, as the man
develops his nobler nature, there arises the desire higher yet — the
passion of passions, the hope of hopes — the desire that he, even he,
may somehow
aid in making life better and brighter, in destroying want and sin, sorrow
and shame. He masters and curbs the animal; he turns his back upon the feast
and renounces the place of power; he leaves it to others to accumulate wealth,
to gratify pleasant tastes, to bask themselves in the warm sunshine of the
brief day. He works for those he never saw and never can see; for a fame, or
maybe but for a scant Justice, that can only come long after the clods have
rattled upon his coffin lid. He toils in the advance, where it is cold, and
there is little cheer from men, and the stones are sharp and the brambles thick.
Amid the scoffs of the present and the sneers that stab like knives, he builds
for the future; he cuts the trail that progressive humanity may hereafter broaden
into a highroad. Into higher, grander spheres desire mounts and beckons, and
a star that rises in the east leads him on. Lo! the pulses of the man throb
with the yearnings of the god — he would aid in the process of the suns!
Is not the gulf too wide for the analogy to span? Give more food, open
fuller conditions of life, and the vegetable or animal can but multiply;
the man will develop. In the one the expansive force can but extend existence
in new numbers; in the other, it will inevitably tend to extend existence
in higher forms and wider powers.* Man is an animal; but he is an animal
plus something else. He is the mythic earth-tree, whose roots are in the
ground, but whose topmost branches may blossom in the heavens!
|
* Many contemporary economists while agreeing
that population does not necessarily tend to become too dense for the
greatest per capita prosperity,
would nevertheless argue that it may do so, and in certain times and countries
has done so. Population, they would say, does not automatically and
without human prevision adjust itself to available space and available
natural resources; but it may be made so to adjust itself, for the very
reason that human beings differ from non-humans in such ways as Henry George
here indicates. H. G. B.
|
[*Book II, Chapter
3:
Inferences from Analogy, pages 137-139]
Book II, Chapter 4: Disproof of the Malthusian
Theory, pages 140-150
|
source: Book II, Chapter 4: Disproof of the Malthusian
Theory, p. 150. |
Look simply at the facts. Can anything
be clearer than that the cause of the poverty which festers in the
centers of civilization is not in
the weakness of the productive forces? In countries where poverty is
deepest, the forces of production are evidently strong enough, if fully
employed, to provide for the lowest not merely comfort but luxury.
It is this very fact -- that want appears where productive power is
greatest and the production of wealth is largest -- that constitutes
the enigma which perplexes the civilized world, and which we are trying
to unravel. Evidently the Malthusian theory, which attributes want to
the decrease of productive power, will not explain it. That theory is
utterly inconsistent with all the facts. It is really a gratuitous attribution to the laws
of God of results which, even from this examination, we may infer really
spring from the mal-adjustments of
men. |
[*Book II, Chapter 4:
Disproof of the Malthusian Theory,
p. 150] |
|
3. Land Rent Grows as Community Develops |
Book III: The Laws of Distribution:
Chapter 1: The Inquiry Narrowed
to the laws of distribution— the
necessary relation of these laws,
pages 153-162
|
Book III: The Laws of Distribution:
Chapter 1: The Inquiry Narrowed to the laws of distribution, p. 162 |
Land, Labor, and Capital are the factors of production, The term Land
includes all natural opportunities or forces; the term Labor, all human
exertion; and the term Capital, all wealth used to produce more wealth.
In returns to these three factors is the whole produce distributed. That
part which goes to land owners as payment for the use of natural opportunities
is called Rent;that part which constitutes the reward of human exertion
is called Wages; andthat part which constitutes the return for the use
of capital is called Interest. These terms mutually exclude each other.The
income of any individual may be made up from any one, two, or all three
of these sources; but in the effort to discover the laws of distribution
we must keep them separate. |
|
p. 163 |
There must be land before labor can be exerted, and
labor must be exerted before capital can be produced. Capital is a
result of labor, and is used by labor to assist it in further production.
Labor is the active and initial force, and labor is therefore the employer
of capital. Labor can be exerted only upon land, and it is from land
that the matter which it transmutes into wealth must be drawn. Land
therefore is the condition precedent, the field and material of labor.
The natural order is land, labor, capital.
|
[*p.164]
Book III: The
Laws of Distribution:
Chapter 2: Rent and the law of rent p. 165-172
Chapter 3: Of Interest and the Cause of Interest p. 173-188
Chapter 4: Of spurious capital and of profits often mistaken for interest
p. 189-194
Chapter 5: The Law of interest p. 195-203
Chapter 6: Wages and the law of wages p. 204-217
Chapter 7: Correlation and co-ordination of these laws p. 218-220
Chapter 8: The statics of the problem thus explained
p. 221-224
Book IV: Effect of Material Progress upon the Distribution
of Wealth
Chapter 1: The dynamics of the problem yet to seek
p.227-229
Chapter 2: Effect of increase of population upon the distribution of
wealth p.230-243
Chapter 2: Effect of increase of population
upon the distribution of wealth p. 234-235
|
Increasing population increases rent* without reference to the natural
qualities of land, for the increased powers of co-operation and exchange
which come with increased population are equivalent to — nay, I think
we can say without metaphor, that they give — an increased capacity
to land.
*Elsewhere, Henry George
explains, "I, of course, use 'rent' in its economic, not in its common
sense, meaning by it what is commonly called ground-rent."
I do not mean to say merely that, like an improvement in the methods or tools
of production, the increased power which comes with increased population gives
to the same labor an increased result, which is equivalent to an increase in
the natural powers of land; but that it brings out a superior power in labor,
which is localized on land; and which thus inheres in the land as much as any
qualities of soil, climate, mineral deposit, or natural situation, and passes,
as they do, with the possession of the land. |
|
Chapter 2: Effect of increase of population upon the
distribution of wealth p. 235-235 |
Here, let us imagine, is an unbounded savannah, stretching off in
unbroken sameness of grass and flower, tree and rill, till the traveler
tires of the monotony. Along comes the wagon of the first immigrant. Where
to settle he cannot tell — every acre seems as good as every other
acre. As to wood, as to water, as to fertility, as to situation, there
is absolutely no choice, and he is perplexed by the embarrassment of richness.
Tired out with the search for one place that is better than another, he
stops — somewhere, anywhere — and starts to make himself a
home. The soil is virgin and rich, game is abundant, the streams flash
with the finest trout. Nature is at her very best. He has what, were he
in a populous district, would make him rich; but he is very poor. To say
nothing of the mental craving, which would lead him to welcome the sorriest
stranger, he labors under all the material disadvantages of solitude. He
can get no temporary assistance for any work that requires a greater union
of strength than that afforded by his own family, or by such help as he
can permanently keep. Though he has cattle, he cannot often have fresh
meat, for to get a beefsteak he must kill a bullock. He must be his own
blacksmith, wagonmaker, carpenter, and cobbler — in short, a "jack
of all trades and master of none." He cannot have his children schooled,
for, to do so, he must himself pay and maintain a teacher. Such things
as he cannot produce himself, he must buy in quantities and keep on hand,
or else go without, for he cannot be constantly leaving his work and making
a long journey to the verge of civilization; and when forced to do so,
the getting of a vial of medicine or the replacement of a broken auger
may cost him the labor of himself and horses for days. Under such circumstances,
though nature is prolific, the man is poor. It is an easy matter for him
to get enough to eat; but beyond this, his labor will suffice to satisfy
only the simplest wants in the rudest way.
Soon there comes another immigrant. Although every quarter section*
of the boundless plain is as good as every other quarter section, he
is not beset by any embarrassment as to where to settle. Though the land
is the same, there is one place that is clearly better for him than any
other place, and that is where there is already a settler and he may
have a neighbor. He settles by the side of the first comer, whose condition
is at once greatly improved, and to whom many things are now possible
that were before impossible, for two men may help each other to do things
that one man could never do.
*The public prairie lands
of the United States were surveyed into sections of one mile square,
and a quarter section (160 acres) was the usual government allotment
to a settler under the Homestead Act.
Another immigrant comes, and, guided by the same attraction, settles where
there are already two. Another, and another, until around our first comer
there are a score of neighbors. Labor has now an effectiveness which, in
the solitary state, it could not approach. If heavy work is to be done,
the settlers have a logrolling, and together accomplish in a day what singly
would require years. When one kills a bullock, the others take part of
it, returning when they kill, and thus they have fresh meat all the time.
Together they hire a schoolmaster, and the children of each are taught
for a fractional part of what similar teaching would have cost the first
settler. It becomes a comparatively easy matter to send to the nearest
town, for some one is always going. But there is less need for such journeys.
A blacksmith and a wheelwright soon set up shops, and our settler can have
his tools repaired for a small part of the labor it formerly cost him.
A store is opened and he can get what he wants as he wants it; a postoffice,
soon added, gives him regular communication with the rest of the world.
Then come a cobbler, a carpenter, a harness maker, a doctor; and a little
church soon arises. Satisfactions become possible that in the solitary
state were impossible. There are gratifications for the social and the
intellectual nature — for that part of the man that rises above the
animal. The power of sympathy, the sense of companionship, the emulation
of comparison and contrast, open a wider, and fuller, and more varied life.
In rejoicing, there are others to rejoice; in sorrow, the mourners do not
mourn alone. There are husking bees, and apple parings, and quilting parties.
Though the ballroom be unplastered and the orchestra but a fiddle, the
notes of the magician are yet in the strain, and Cupid dances with the
dancers. At the wedding, there are others to admire and enjoy; in the house
of death, there are watchers; by the open grave, stands human sympathy
to sustain the mourners. Occasionally, comes a straggling lecturer to open
up glimpses of the world of science, of literature, or of art; in election
times, come stump speakers, and the citizen rises to a sense of dignity
and power, as the cause of empires is tried before him in the struggle
of John Doe and Richard Roe for his support and vote. And, by and by, comes
the circus, talked of months before, and opening to children whose horizon
has been the prairie, all the realms of the imagination — princes
and princesses of fairy tale, mailclad crusaders and turbaned Moors, Cinderella's
fairy coach, and the giants of nursery lore; lions such as crouched before
Daniel, or in circling Roman amphitheater tore the saints of God; ostriches
who recall the sandy deserts; camels such as stood around when the wicked
brethren raised Joseph from the well and sold him into bondage; elephants
such as crossed the Alps with Hannibal, or felt the sword of the Maccabees;
and glorious music that thrills and builds in the chambers of the mind
as rose the sunny dome of Kubla Khan.
Go to our settler now, and say to him: "You have so many fruit trees
which you planted; so much fencing, such a well, a barn, a house — in
short, you have by your labor added so much value to this farm. Your
land itself is not quite so good. You have been cropping it, and by and
by it will need manure. I will give you the full value of all your improvements
if you will give it to me, and go again with your family beyond the verge
of settlement." He would laugh at you. His land yields no more wheat
or potatoes than before, but it does yield far more of all the necessaries
and comforts of life. His labor upon it will bring no heavier crops,
and, we will suppose, no more valuable crops, but it will bring far more
of all the other things for which men work. The presence of other settlers — the
increase of population — has added to the productiveness, in these
things, of labor bestowed upon it, and this added productiveness gives
it a superiority over land of equal natural quality where there are as
yet no settlers. If no land remains to be taken up, except such as is
as far removed from population as was our settler's land when he first
went upon it, the value or rent of this land will be measured by the
whole of this added capability. If, however, as we have supposed, there
is a continuous stretch of equal land, over which population is now spreading,
it will not be necessary for the new settler to go into the wilderness,
as did the first. He will settle just beyond the other settlers, and
will get the advantage of proximity to them. The value or rent of our
settler's land will thus depend on the advantage which it has, from being
at the center of population, over that on the verge. In the one case,
the margin of production will remain as before; in the other, the margin
of production will be raised.
Population still continues to increase, and as it increases so do the
economies which its increase permits, and which in effect add to the
productiveness of the land. Our first settler's land, being the center
of population, the store, the blacksmith's forge, the wheelwright's shop,
are set up on it, or on its margin, where soon arises a village, which
rapidly grows into a town, the center of exchanges for the people of
the whole district. With no greater agricultural productiveness than
it had at first, this land now begins to develop a productiveness of
a higher kind. To labor expended in raising corn, or wheat, or potatoes,
it will yield no more of those things than at first; but to labor expended
in the subdivided branches of production which require proximity to other
producers, and, especially, to labor expended in that final part of production,
which consists in distribution, it will yield much larger returns. The
wheatgrower may go further on, and find land on which his labor will
produce as much wheat, and nearly as much wealth; but the artisan, the
manufacturer, the storekeeper, the professional man, find that their
labor expended here, at the center of exchanges, will yield them much
more than if expended even at a little distance away from it; and this
excess of productiveness for such purposes the landowner can claim just
as he could an excess in its wheat-producing power. And so our settler
is able to sell in building lots a few of his acres for prices which
it would not bring for wheatgrowing if its fertility had been multiplied
many times. With the proceeds, he builds himself a fine house, and furnishes
it handsomely. That is to say, to reduce the transaction to its lowest
terms, the people who wish to use the land build and furnish the house
for him, on condition that he will let them avail themselves of the superior
productiveness which the increase of population has given the land.
Population still keeps on increasing, giving greater and greater utility
to the land, and more and more wealth to its owner. The town has grown
into a city — a St. Louis, a Chicago or a San Francisco — and
still it grows. Production is here carried on upon a great scale, with
the best machinery and the most favorable facilities; the division of
labor becomes extremely minute, wonderfully multiplying efficiency; exchanges
are of such volume and rapidity that they are made with the minimum of
friction and loss. Here is the heart, the brain, of the vast social organism
that has grown up from the germ of the first settlement; here has developed
one of the great ganglia of the human world. Hither run all roads, hither
set all currents, through all the vast regions round about. Here, if
you have anything to sell, is the market; here, if you have anything
to buy, is the largest and the choicest stock. Here intellectual activity
is gathered into a focus, and here springs that stimulus which is born
of the collision of mind with mind. Here are the great libraries, the
storehouses and granaries of knowledge, the learned professors, the famous
specialists. Here are museums and art galleries, collections of philosophical
apparatus, and all things rare, and valuable, and best of their kind.
Here come great actors, and orators, and singers, from all over the world.
Here, in short, is a center of human life, in all its varied manifestations.
So enormous are the advantages which this land now offers for the application
of labor, that instead of one man — with a span of horses scratching
over acres, you may count in places thousands of workers to the acre, working
tier on tier, on floors raised one above the other, five, six, seven and
eight stories from the ground, while underneath the surface of the earth
engines are throbbing with pulsations that exert the force of thousands
of horses.
All these advantages attach to the land; it is on this land and no
other that they can be utilized, for here is the center of population — the
focus of exchanges, the market place and workshop of the highest forms
of industry. The productive powers which density of population
has attached to this land are equivalent to the multiplication of its
original fertility by the hundredfold and the thousandfold. And rent,
which measures the difference between this added productiveness and
that of the least productive land in use, has increased accordingly.
Our settler, or whoever has succeeded to his right to the land, is
now a millionaire. Like another Rip Van
Winkle, he may have lain down and slept; still he is rich — not
from anything he has done, but from the increase of population. There
are lots from which for every foot of frontage the owner may draw more
than an average mechanic can earn; there are lots that will sell for
more than would suffice to pave them with gold coin. In the principal
streets are towering buildings, of granite, marble, iron, and plate
glass, finished in the most expensive style, replete with every convenience.
Yet they are not worth as much as the land upon which they rest — the
same land, in nothing changed, which when our first settler came upon
it had no value at all.
That this is the way in which the increase of population powerfully
acts in increasing rent, whoever, in a progressive country, will look
around him, may see for himself. The process is going on under his eyes.
The increasing difference in the productiveness of the land in use, which
causes an increasing rise in rent, results not so much from the necessities
of increased population compelling the resort to inferior land, as from
the increased productiveness which increased population gives to the
lands already in use. The most valuable lands on the globe, the lands
which yield the highest rent, are not lands of surpassing natural fertility,
but lands to which a surpassing utility has been given by the increase
of population.
And where value seems to arise from superior natural qualities, such
as deep water and good anchorage, rich deposits of coal and iron, or
heavy timber, observation also shows that these superior qualities
are brought out, rendered tangible, by population. The coal and
iron fields of Pennsylvania, that today [1879] are worth enormous sums,
were fifty years ago valueless. What is the efficient cause of the
difference? Simply the difference in population. The coal and iron
beds of Wyoming and Montana, which today are valueless, will, in fifty
years from now, be worth millions on millions, simply because, in the
meantime, population will have greatly increased.
It is a well-provisioned ship, this on which we sail through space.
If the bread and beef above decks seem to grow scarce, we but open a
hatch and there is a new supply, of which before we never dreamed. And
very great command over the services of others comes to those who as
the hatches are opened are permitted to say, "This is mine!" |
p. 243
Book IV: Chapter 3: Effect of improvements in the arts
upon the distribution of wealth p. 244-254
Chapter 4: Effect of the expectation raised by material
progress p.255-262
|
4. Land Speculation Causes Reduced Wages |
Book __ Chapter 4, Effect of the Expectation Raised by Material Progress,
p. 255 |
p 255-256 |
There is a cause, not yet adverted to, which must be taken into consideration
fully to explain the influence of material progress upon the distribution
of wealth.
That cause is the confident expectation of the future enhancement of
land values, which arises in all progressive countries from the steady
increase of rent, and which leads to speculation, or the holding of land
for a higher price than it would then otherwise bring.
We have hitherto assumed, as is generally assumed in elucidations of
the theory of rent, that the actual margin of cultivation always coincides
with what may be termed the necessary margin of cultivation — that
is to say, we have assumed that cultivation extends to less productive
points only as it becomes necessary from the fact that natural opportunities
are at the more productive points fully utilized.
This, probably, is the case in stationary or very slowly progressing
communities, but in rapidly progressing communities, where the swift
and steady increase of rent gives confidence to calculations of further
increase, it is not the case. In such communities, the confident expectation
of increased prices produces, to a greater or less extent, the effects
of a combination among landholders, and tends to the withholding of land
from use, in expectation of higher prices, thus forcing the margin of
cultivation farther than required by the necessities of production. |
p. 256 |
p. 256-7 |
In communities like the United States, where the user of land generally
prefers, if he can, to own it, and where there is a great extent of land
to overrun, this cause operated with enormous power.
The immense area over which the population of the United States is
scattered shows this. The man who sets out from the Eastern Seaboard
in search of the margin of cultivation, where he may obtain land without
paying rent, must, like the man who swam the river to get a drink, pass
for long distances through half-tilled farms, and traverse vast areas
of virgin soil, before he reaches the point where land can be had free
of rent i.e., by homestead entry or pre-emption. He (and, with him, the
margin of cultivation) is forced so much farther than he otherwise need
have gone, by the speculation which is holding these unused lands in
expectation of increased value in the future. And when he settles, he
will, in his turn, take up, if he can, more land than he can use, in
the belief that it will soon become valuable; and so those who follow
him are again forced farther on than the necessities of production require,
carrying the margin of cultivation to still less productive, because
still more remote points. |
p. 257 |
p. 257 |
If the land of superior quality as to location were always fully used
before land of inferior quality were resorted to, no vacant lots would
be left as a city extended, nor would we find miserable shanties in the
midst of costly buildings. These lots, some of them extremely valuable,
are withheld from use, or from the full use to which they might be put,
because their owners, not being able or not wishing to improve them,
prefer, in expectation of the advance of land values, to hold them for
a higher rate than could now be obtained from those willing to improve
them. And, in consequence of this land being withheld from use, or from
the full use of which it is capable, the margin of the city is pushed
away so much farther from the center.
But when we reach the limits of the growing city — the actual
margin of building, which corresponds to the margin of cultivation in
agriculture — we shall not find the land purchasable at its value
for agricultural purposes, as it would be were rent determined simply
by present requirements; but we shall find that for a long distance beyond
the city, land bears a speculative value, based upon the belief that
it will be required in the future for urban purposes, and that to reach
the point at which land can be purchased at a price not based upon urban
rent, we must go very far beyond the actual margin of urban use. |
257-8 timberland in Marin County |
p. 258 |
That mineral land, when reduced to private ownership, is frequently withheld
from use while poorer deposits are worked, is well known, and in new states
it is common to find individuals who are called "land poor" --
that is, who remain poor, sometimes almost to deprivation, because they
insist on holding land, which they themselves cannot use, at prices at
which no one else can profitably use it. |
p. 258-9 |
p. 259 |
Whether we formulate it as an extension of the margin of production,
or as a carrying of the rent line beyond the margin of production, the
influence of speculation in land in increasing rent is a great fact which
cannot be ignored in any complete theory of the distribution of wealth
in progressive countries. It is the force, evolved by material progress,
which tends constantly to increase rent in a greater ratio than progress
increases production, and thus constantly tends, as material progress goes
on and productive power increases, to reduce wages, not merely relatively,
but absolutely. |
p. 259-60 |
p. 260: |
The cause which limits speculation in commodities, the tendency of increasing
price to draw forth additional supplies, cannot limit the speculative advance
in land values, as land is a fixed quantity, which human agency can neither
increase nor diminish; but there is nevertheless a limit to the price of
land, in the minimum required by labor and capital as the condition of
engaging in production. If it were possible continuously to reduce wages
until zero were reached, it would be possible continuously to increase
rent until it swallowed up the whole produce. But as wages cannot be permanently
reduced below the point at which laborers will consent to work and reproduce,
nor interest below the point at which capital will be devoted to production,
there is a limit which restrains the speculative advance of rent. Hence
speculation cannot have the same scope to advance rent in countries where
wages and interest are already near the minimum, as in countries where
they are considerably above it. |
|
5. The Basic Cause of Poverty |
Book V: The Problem Solved
Chapter 1: The primary cause of recurring paroxysms of
industrial depression p.263-282 |
Chapter 2: the persistence of poverty amid advancing wealth p. 282 |
The great problem, of which these recurring seasons of industrial depression
are but peculiar manifestations, is now, I think, fully solved, and the
social phenomena which all over the civilized world appall the philanthropist
and perplex the statesman, which hang with clouds the future of the most
advanced races, and suggest doubts of the reality and ultimate goal of
what we have fondly called progress, are now explained.
The reason why, in spite of the increase of productive
power, wages constantly tend to a minimum which will give but a bare
living, is that, with increase in productive power, rent tends to even
greater increase, thus producing a constant tendency to the forcing down
of wages. |
p. 282-3 |
p. 283: |
Land being necessary to labor, and being reduced to private
ownership, every increase in the productive power of labor but increases
rent -- the price that labor must pay for the opportunity to utilize
its powers; and thus all the advantages gained by the march of progress
go to the owners of land, and wages do not increase.*
*Whatever be the fact as to wages, the reader
will, of course, recognize that higher money wages which merely balance
higher living costs, are not to be reckoned as real wage increases.
H.G.B
|
p. 283-287 |
p. 287-8 abbreviated |
The simple theory which I have outlined (if indeed it can be called
a theory which is but the recognition of the most obvious relations)
explains this conjunction of poverty with wealth, of low wages with high
productive power, of degradation amid enlightenment, of virtual slavery
in political liberty.
- It harmonizes, as results flowing from a general and inexorable
law, facts otherwise most perplexing, and exhibits the sequence and
relation between phenomena that without reference to it are diverse
and contradictory.
- It explains why improvements which increase the productive power
of labor and capital increase the reward of neither.
- It explains what is commonly called the conflict between labor
and capital, while proving the real harmony of interest between them.
- It cuts the last inch of ground from under the fallacies of protection,
while showing why free trade fails to benefit permanently the working
classes.
- It explains why want increases with abundance, and wealth tends
to greater and greater aggregations.
- It explains the vice and misery which show themselves amid dense
population, without attributing to the laws of the All-Wise and All-Beneficent
defects which belong only to the shortsighted and selfish enactments
of men.
|
p. 288-293 |
p.293-296 |
The truth is self-evident. Put to any one capable of
consecutive thought this question:
"Suppose there should arise from the English Channel
or the German Ocean a no man's land on which common labor to an unlimited
amount should be able to make thirty shillings a day and which should
remain unappropriated and of free access, like the commons which once
comprised so large a part of English soil. What would be the effect upon
wages in England?"
He would at once tell you that common wages throughout
England must soon increase to thirty shillings a day.
And in response to another question, "What would be
the effect on rents?" he would at a moment's reflection say that
rents must necessarily fall; and if he thought out the next step he would
tell you that all this would happen without any very large part of English
labor being diverted to the new natural opportunities, or the forms and
direction of industry being much changed; only that kind of production
being abandoned which now yields to labor and to landlord together less
than labor could secure on the new opportunities. The great rise in wages
would be at the expense of rent.
Take now the same man or another -- some hardheaded business
man, who has no theories, but knows how to make money. Say to him: "Here
is a little village; in ten years it will be a great city -- in ten years
the railroad will have taken the place of the stage coach, the electric
light of the candle; it will abound with all the machinery and improvements
that so enormously multiply the effective power of labor. Will, in ten
years, interest be any higher?"
He will tell you, "No!"
"Will the wages of common labor be any higher; will
it be easier for a man who has nothing but his labor to make an independent
living?"
He will tell you, "No; the wages of common labor will
not be any higher; on the contrary, all the chances are that they will
be lower; it will not be easier for the mere laborer to make an independent
living; the chances are that it will be harder."
"What, then, will be higher?"
"Rent; the value of land. Go, get yourself a piece
of ground, and hold possession."
And if, under such circumstances, you take his advice,
you need do nothing more. You may sit down and smoke your pipe; you may
lie around like the lazzaroni of Naples or the leperos of Mexico; you
may go up in a balloon, or down a hole in the ground; and without doing
one stroke of work, without adding one iota to the wealth of the community,
in ten years you will be rich! In the new city you may have a luxurious
mansion; but among its public buildings will be an almshouse.
In all our long investigation we have been advancing to
this simple truth: That as land is necessary to the exertion of labor
in the production of wealth, to command the land which is necessary to
labor, is to command all the fruits of labor save enough to enable labor
to exist. We have been advancing as through an enemy's country, in which
every step must be secured, every position fortified, and every bypath
explored; for this simple truth, in its application to social and political
problems, is hid from the great masses of men partly by its very simplicity,
and in greater part by widespread fallacies and erroneous habits of thought
which lead them to look in every direction but the right one for an explanation
of the evils which oppress and threaten the civilized world. And back
of these elaborate fallacies and misleading theories is an active, energetic
power, a power that in every country, be its political forms what they
may, writes laws and molds thought -- the power of a vast and dominant
pecuniary interest.
But so simple and so clear is this truth, that to see it
fully once is always to recognize it. There are pictures which, though
looked at again and again, present only a confused labyrinth of lines
or scroll work -- a landscape, trees, or something of the kind -- until
once the attention is called to the fact that these things make up a
face or a figure. This relation, once recognized, is always afterward
clear.*
*Hence the expression, current among adherents
of Henry George's proposal: "Do you see the cat?"
It is so in this case. In the light of this truth all social facts group
themselves in an orderly relation, and the most diverse phenomena are
seen to spring from one great principle. It is not in the relations of
capital and labor; it is not in the pressure of population against subsistence,
that an explanation of the unequal development of our civilization is
to be found. The great cause of inequality in the distribution of wealth
is inequality in the ownership of land. The ownership of land is the
great fundamental fact which ultimately determines the social, the political,
and consequently the intellectual and moral condition of a people. And
it must be so. For land is the habitation of man, the storehouse upon
which he must draw for all his needs, the material to which his labor
must be applied for the supply of all his desires; for even the products
of the sea cannot be taken, the light of the sun enjoyed, or any of the
forces of nature utilized, without the use of land or its products. On
the land we are born, from it we live, to it we return again -- children
of the soil as truly as is the blade of grass or the flower of the field.
Take away from man all that belongs to land, and he is but a disembodied
spirit. Material progress cannot rid us of our dependence upon land;
it can but add to the power of producing wealth from land; and hence,
when land is monopolized, it might go on to infinity without increasing
wages or improving the condition of those who have but their labor. It
can but add to the value of land and the power which its possession gives.
Everywhere, in all times, among all peoples, the possession of land is
the base of aristocracy, the foundation of great fortunes, the source
of power. As said the Brahmins, ages ago—
"To whomsoever the soil at any time belongs, to
him belong the fruits of it. White parasols and elephants mad with
pride are the flowers of a grant of land."
|
|
6. The Remedy |
Book 6 The Remedy: Chapter 1: Insufficiency of Remedies
Currently Advocated p.299-327
Chapter 2: The True Remedy p. 328 |
source: Book
VI: The Remedy — Chapter 2: The True Remedy page 328 |
Poverty deepens as wealth increases, and wages are forced down while
productive power grows, because land, which is the source of all wealth
and the field of all labor, is monopolized. To extirpate poverty, to
make wages what justice commands they should be, the full earnings of
the laborer, we must therefore substitute for the individual ownership
of land a common ownership.*
*By the phrase "common ownership" of land,
Henry George did not mean that land should be held in common or by
the State, nor did he propose to interfere with the existing system
of land tenures. (See Sections 7 and 12, post.) As in this condensation
much of George's argument necessarily has been omitted, the following
extracts from his later work "Protection or Free Trade," chapter
XXVI, are appended to make his position clear to the present reader.
"No one would sow a crop, or build
a house, or open a mine, or plant an orchard, or cut a drain, so
long as any one else could come in and turn him out of the land in
which or on which such improvement must be fixed. Thus is it absolutely
necessary to the proper use and improvement of land that society
should secure to the user and improver safe possession. ... We can
leave land now being used in the secure possession of those using
it. ... on condition that those who hold land shall pay to the community
a ... rent based on the value of the privilege the individual receives
from the community in being accorded the exclusive use of this much
of the common property, and which should have no reference to any
improvement he has made in or on it, or to any profit due to the
use of his labor and capital. In this way all would be placed on
an equality in regard to the use and enjoyment of those natural elements
which are clearly the common heritage."
|
p.328-330
Book VII Justice of the Remedy
Chapter 1: Injustice of private property in land p.333-6 |
p.336 (paragraph abridged) |
This right of ownership that springs from labor excludes the possibility
of any other right of ownership. If a man be rightfully entitled to the
produce of his labor, then no one can be rightfully entitled to the ownership
of anything which is not the produce of his labor, or the labor of some
one else from whom the right has passed to him. For the right to the produce
of labor cannot be enjoyed without the right to the free use of the opportunities
offered by nature, and to admit the right of property in these is to deny
the right of property in the produce of labor. When nonproducers can claim
as rent a portion of the wealth created by producers, the right of the
producers to the fruits of their labor is to that extent denied. |
p.336-7 |
p337-8 |
A house and the lot on which it stands are alike property, as being
the subject of ownership, and are alike classed by the lawyers as real
estate. Yet in nature and relations they differ widely.
- The one is produced by human labor, and belongs to the class in
political economy styled wealth.
- The other is a part of nature, and belongs to the class in political
economy styled land.
The essential character of the one class of things is that they embody
labor, are brought into being by human exertion, their existence or nonexistence,
their increase or diminution, depending on man. The essential character
of the other class of things is that they do not embody labor, and exist
irrespective of human exertion and irrespective of man; they are the
field or environment in which man finds himself; the storehouse from
which his needs must be supplied, the raw material upon which and the
forces with which alone his labor can act.
The moment this distinction is realized, that moment is it seen that
the sanction which natural justice gives to one species of property is
denied to the other. |
p.338-41 |
p.341-2 |
For as labor cannot produce without the use of land, the denial of the
equal right to the use of land is necessarily the denial of the right of
labor to its own produce. If one man can command the land upon which others
must labor, he can appropriate the produce of their labor as the price
of his permission to labor. The fundamental law of nature, that her enjoyment
by man shall be consequent upon his exertion, is thus violated. The one
receives without producing; the others produce without receiving. The one
is unjustly enriched; the others are robbed. |
342-347
p.347 Chapter 2: The enslavement of laborers the ultimate
result of private property in land |
p.347-8 |
Place one hundred men on an island from which there is no escape,
and whether you make one of these men the absolute owner of the other
ninety-nine, or the absolute owner of the soil of the island, will make
no difference either to him or to them. In the one case, as the other,
the one will be the absolute master of the ninety-nine — his power
extending even to life and death, for simply to refuse them permission
to live upon the island would be to force them into the sea.
Upon a larger scale, and through more complex relations, the same cause
must operate in the same way and to the same end — the ultimate
result, the enslavement of laborers, becoming apparent just as the pressure
increases which compels them to live on and from land which is treated
as the exclusive property of others. |
p. xxx-343 |
source: Book 7: Justice of the Remedy, Chapter 1: The injustice of private
property in land p.343-4 |
Yet, it will be said: As every man has a right to the use and enjoyment
of nature, the man who is using land must be permitted the exclusive
right to its use in order that he may get the full benefit of his labor.
But there is no difficulty in determining where the individual right
ends and the common right begins. A delicate and exact test is supplied
by value, and with its aid there is no difficulty, no matter how dense
population may become, in determining and securing the exact rights of
each, the equal rights of all.
The value of land, as we have seen, is the price of monopoly. It is
not the absolute, but the relative, capability of land that determines
its value. No matter what may be its intrinsic qualities land that is
no better than other land which may be had for the using can have no
value. And the value of land always measures the difference between it
and the best land that may be had for the using. Thus, the value of land
expresses in exact and tangible form the right of the community in land
held by an individual; and rent expresses the exact amount which the
individual should pay to the community to satisfy the equal rights of
all other members of the community.
Thus, if we concede to priority of possession the undisturbed use of
land, taxing rent into the public treasury for the benefit of the community,
we reconcile the fixity of tenure which is necessary for improvement
with a full and complete recognition of the equal rights of all to the
use of land. |
344-365
Chapter 3: Claim of landowners to compensation |
p. 365-6 |
Consider what rent is. It does not arise spontaneously from land;
it is due to nothing that the land owners have done. It represents a
value created by the whole community.
Let the land holders have, if you please, all that the possession of
the land would give them in the absence of the rest of the community.
But rent, the creation of the whole community, necessarily belongs to
the whole community.*
* To the view of the extreme conservative that due
consideration for the claims of rent receivers negatives the adoption
of such a policy, it may be replied that society as such is under
no obligation to maintain an unchanged policy through out all future
time. Public policies are constantly changing in such ways as to
disappoint the expectations of persons who have invested on the supposition
that policies would not change and to affect the value of their property.
Tarriffs are raised, and lowered. The brewing of spirituous liquors
is at one time permitted and at another time outlawed. Prices of
monopolized services are first left to be fixed by the monopolist
and are then regulated. Taxes are increased on some goods and decreased
on others. In some communities taxes have already been made higher
on land values than on improvements. Purchasers of land have no right
to insist that society may not, even by gradual steps, discriminate
in taxation against land rent, which is an income socially produced.
(Henry George himself elsewhere said -- Century Magazine, July, 1890
-- that "we cannot get to the Single Tax at one leap, but only
by gradual steps.") We must presume that land owners, like other
persons, buy their property with no guarantee that public policy
will never change. The conservative insistence that society, which
makes frequent changes of policy in other matters, is under a binding
implied pledge and obligation never to move, even by successive steps,
towards the eventual taking of the economic rent of land by taxation,
seems preposterous. H. G. B.
|
p.365 |
Source: Book 3: Claim of Landowners to Compensation |
|
7. Simplicity of Method of Introducing Remedy |
Application of the Remedy: How Equal Rights May be
Asserted
p. 404-5 |
It is an axiom of statesmanship, which the successful founders of
tyranny have understood and acted upon that great changes can best
be brought about under old forms. We, who would free men, should heed
the same truth. It is the natural method. When nature would make a
higher type, she takes a lower one and develops it. This, also, is
the law of social growth. Let us work by it. With the current we may
glide fast and far. Against it, it is hard pulling and slow progress. |
p. 405 |
p. 405 |
By making use of this existing machinery, we may, without jar
or shock, assert the common right to land by appropriating rent by
taxation. We already take some rent in taxation. We have only to
make some changes in our modes of taxation to take it all.*
*Rent in the economic sense is not, as those unfamiliar
with economic terminology may assume, the whole amount paid for
the use of real estate. It is only that part of such amount which
is paid for the use of the bare land or site employed, exclusive
of the payment for the use of any buildings or other improvements
on it. H. G. B.
|
p. 405-6 |
p. 406-7 |
In form, the ownership of land would remain just as now. No owner
of land need be dispossessed, and no restriction need be placed upon
the amount of land any one could hold. For, rent being taken by the
State in taxes, land, no matter in whose name it stood, or in what
parcels it was held, would be really common property, and every member
of the community would participate in the advantages of its ownership.
Now, insomuch as the taxation of rent, or land values, must necessarily
be increased just as we abolish other taxes, we may put the proposition
into practical form by proposing --
to abolish all taxation save that upon
land values.
As we have seen, the value of land is at the beginning of society
nothing, but as society develops by the increase of population and
the advance of the arts, it becomes greater and greater. In every
civilized country, even the newest, the value of the land taken as
a whole is sufficient to bear the entire expenses of government.
In the better developed countries it is much more than sufficient.
Hence it will not be enough merely to place all taxes upon the value
of land. It will be necessary, where rent exceeds the present governmental
revenues, commensurately to increase the amount demanded in taxation,
and to continue this increase as society progresses and rent advances.
But this is so natural and easy a matter, that it may be considered
as involved, or at least understood, in the proposition to put all
taxes on the value of land. That is the first step upon which the
practical struggle must be made. When the hare is once caught and
killed, cooking him will follow as a matter of course. When the common
right to land is so far appreciated that all taxes are abolished
save those which fall upon rent, there is no danger of much more
than is necessary to induce them to collect the public revenues being
left to individual landholders. |
407 |
407 |
Wherever the idea of concentrating all taxation upon land values
finds lodgment sufficient to induce consideration, it invariably
makes way, but there are few of the classes most to be benefited
by it, who at first, or even for a long time afterward, see its full
significance and power.
- It is difficult for workingmen to get over the idea that there
is a real antagonism between capital and labor.
- It is difficult for small farmers and homestead owners to get
over the idea that to put all taxes on the value of land would
be unduly to tax them.
- It is difficult for both classes to get over the idea that to
exempt capital from taxation would be to make the rich richer,
and the poor poorer.
These ideas spring from confused thought. But behind ignorance and
prejudice there is a powerful interest, which has hitherto dominated
literature, education, and opinion. A great wrong always dies hard,
and the great wrong which in every civilized country condemns the
masses of men to poverty and want, will not die without a bitter
struggle. |
407 |
8. Why a Land-Value Tax is Better than an Equal Tax on All
Property |
408-420 |
Book
VIII: Application of the Remedy —
Chapter 3: The proposition tried by the canons of taxation p.420-1 |
The ground upon which the equal taxation of all species of property
is commonly insisted upon is that it is equally protected by the
state. The basis of this idea is evidently that the enjoyment of
property is made possible by the state -- that there is a value created
and maintained by the community, which is justly called upon to meet
community expenses. Now, of what values is this true? Only of the
value of land. This is a value that does not arise until a community
is formed, and that, unlike other values, grows with the growth of
the community. It exists only as the community exists. Scatter again
the largest community, and land, now so valuable, would have no value
at all. With every increase of population the value of land rises;
with every decrease it falls. This is true of nothing else save of
things which, like the ownership of land, are in their nature monopolies.
The tax upon land values is, therefore, the most just and equal
of all taxes.
- It falls only upon those who receive from society a peculiar
and valuable benefit, and upon them in proportion to the benefit
they receive.
- It is the taking by the community, for the use of the community,
of that value which is the creation of the community.
- It is the application of the common property to common uses.
When all rent is taken by taxation for the needs of the community,
then will the equality ordained by Nature be attained. No citizen
will have an advantage over any other citizen save as is given by
his industry, skill, and intelligence; and each will obtain what
he fairly earns. Then, but not till then, will labor get its full
reward, and capital its natural return. |
p.421 |
9 Alleged Difficulty of Distinguishing Land From Improvements |
Chapter 4, p 422-424 |
Book VIII: Application of the Remedy — Chapter 4: Indorsements
and Objections p. 424-425 |
The only objection to the tax on rent or land values which is
to be met with in standard politico-economic works is one which concedes
its advantages — for it is, that from the difficulty of separation,
we might, in taxing the rent of land, tax something else. McCulloch,
for instance, declares taxes on the rent of land to be impolitic
and unjust because the return received for the natural and inherent
powers of the soil cannot be clearly distinguished from the return
received from improvements and meliorations, which might thus be
discouraged. Macaulay somewhere says that if the admission of the
attraction of gravitation were inimical to any considerable pecuniary
interest, there would not be wanting arguments against gravitation — a
truth of which this objection is an illustration. For admitting that
it is impossible invariably to separate the value of land from the
value of improvements, is this necessity of continuing to tax some
improvements any reason why we should continue to tax all improvements?
If it discourage production to tax values which labor and capital
have intimately combined with that of land, how much greater discouragement
is involved in taxing not only these, but all the clearly distinguishable
values which labor and capital create?
But, as a matter of fact, the value of land can always be readily
distinguished from the value of improvements.
- In countries like the United States there is much valuable land
that has never been improved; and in many of the States the value
of the land and the value of improvements are habitually estimated
separately by the assessors, though afterward reunited under the
term real estate.
- Nor where ground has been occupied from immemorial times, is
there any difficulty in getting at the value of the bare land,
for frequently the land is owned by one person and the buildings
by another, and when a fire occurs and improvements are destroyed,
a clear and definite value remains in the land.
- In the oldest country in the world no difficulty whatever can
attend the separation, if all that be attempted is to separate
the value of the clearly distinguishable improvements, made within
a moderate period, from the value of the land, should they be destroyed.
This, manifestly, is all that justice or policy requires. Absolute
accuracy is impossible in any system, and to attempt to separate
all that the human race has done from what nature originally provided
would be as absurd as impracticable. A swamp drained or a hill terraced
by the Romans constitutes now as much a part of the natural advantages
of the British Isles as though the work had been done by earthquake
or glacier. The fact that after a certain lapse of time the value
of such permanent improvements would be considered as having lapsed
into that of the land, and would be taxed accordingly, could have
no deterrent effect on such improvements, for such works are frequently
undertaken upon leases for years. The fact is, that each generation
builds and improves for itself, and not for the remote future. And
the further fact is, that each generation is heir, not only to the
natural powers of the earth, but to all that remains of the work
of past generations. |
p.425-429 |
source: Part
VIII: Application of the Remedy, Chapter 4: Indorsements and Objections |
|
10 Effect of Remedy Upon Wealth Production |
|
The elder Mirabeau, we are told, ranked the proposition of Quesnay,
to substitute one single tax on rent (the impôt unique)
for all other taxes, as a discovery equal in utility to the invention
of writing or the substitution of the use of money for barter.
To whosoever will think over the matter, this saying will appear
an evidence of penetration rather than of extravagance. The advantages
which would be gained by substituting for the numerous taxes by which
the public revenues are now raised, a single tax levied upon the
value of land, will appear more and more important the more they
are considered.
- This is the secret which would transform the little village
into the great city.*
- With all the burdens removed which now oppress industry and
hamper exchange, the production of wealth would go on with a rapidity
now undreamed of.
- This, in its turn, would lead to an increase in the value of
land -- a new surplus which society might take for general purposes.
- And released from the difficulties which attend the collection
of revenue in a way that begets corruption and renders legislation
the tool of special interests, society could assume functions which
the increasing complexity of life makes it desirable to assume,
but which the prospect of political demoralization under the present
system now leads thoughtful men to shrink from.
*At the beginning of Book
IX of the complete Progress & Poverty, Henry George
quotes from Themistocles: "I cannot play upon any stringed
instrument, but I can tell you how of a little village to make
a great and glorious city."
Consider the effect upon the production of wealth.
To abolish the taxation which, acting and reacting, now hampers
every wheel of exchange and presses upon every form of industry,
would be like removing an immense weight from a powerful spring.
Imbued with fresh energy, production would start into new life, and
trade would receive a stimulus which would be felt to the remotest
arteries. The present method of taxation operates upon exchange like
artificial deserts and mountains;
- it costs more to get goods through a custom house than it does
to carry them around the world.
- It operates upon energy, and industry, and skill, and thrift,
like a fine upon those qualities.
- If I have worked harder and built myself a good house while
you have been contented to live in a hovel, the taxgatherer now
comes annually to make me pay a penalty for my energy and industry,
by taxing me more than you.
- If I have saved while you wasted, I am mulct, while you are
exempt.
- If a man build a ship we make him pay for his temerity, as though
he had done an injury to the state;
- if a railroad be opened, down comes the tax collector upon it,
as though it were a public nuisance;
- if a manufactory be erected we levy upon it an annual sum which
would go far toward making a handsome profit.
- We say we want capital, but if any one accumulate it, or bring
it among us, we charge him for it as though we were giving him
a privilege.
- We punish with a tax the man who covers barren fields with ripening
grain,
- we fine him who puts up machinery, and him who drains a swamp.
How heavily these taxes burden production only those realize who
have attempted to follow our system of taxation through its ramifications,
for, as I have before said, the heaviest part of taxation is that
which falls in increased prices. |
|
To abolish these taxes would be to lift the whole enormous weight
of taxation from productive industry. The needle of the seamstress
and the great manufactory; the cart horse and the locomotive; the
fishing boat and the steamship; the farmer's plow and the merchant's
stock, would be alike untaxed. All would be free to make or to save,
to buy or to sell, unfined by taxes, unannoyed by the taxgatherer.
Instead of saying to the producer, as it does now, "The more
you add to the general wealth the more shall you be taxed!" the
state would say to the producer, "Be as industrious, as thrifty,
as enterprising as you choose, you shall have your full reward! You
shall not be fined for making two blades of grass grow where one
grew before; you shall not be taxed for adding to the aggregate wealth."
And will not the community gain by thus refusing to kill the goose
that lays the golden eggs; by thus refraining from muzzling the ox
that treadeth out the corn; by thus leaving to industry, and thrift,
and skill, their natural reward, full and unimpaired? For there is
to the community also a natural reward. The law of society is, each
for all, as well as all for each. No one can keep to himself the
good he may do, any more than he can keep the bad. Every productive
enterprise, besides its return to those who undertake it, yields
collateral advantages to others. If a man plant a fruit tree, his
gain is that he gathers the fruit in its time and season. But in
addition to his gain, there is a gain to the whole community. Others
than the owner are benefited by the increased supply of fruit; the
birds which it shelters fly far and wide; the rain which it helps
to attract falls not alone on his field; and, even to the eye which
rests upon it from a distance, it brings a sense of beauty. And so
with everything else. The building of a house, a factory, a ship,
or a railroad, benefits others besides those who get the direct profits. |
|
Well may the community leave to the individual producer all that
prompts him to exertion; well may it let the laborer have the full
reward of his labor, and the capitalist the full return of his capital.
For the more that labor and capital produce, the greater grows the
common wealth in which all may share. And in the value or rent of
land is this general gain expressed in a definite and concrete form.
Here is a fund which the state may take while leaving to labor and
capital their full reward. With increased activity of production
this would commensurately increase.
And to shift the burden of taxation from production and exchange
to the value or rent of land would not merely be to give new stimulus
to the production of wealth; it would be to open new opportunities.
For under this system no one would care to hold land unless to use
it, and land now withheld from use would everywhere be thrown open
to improvement.
The selling price of land would fall; land speculation would receive
its death blow; land monopolization would no longer pay.* Millions
and millions of acres from which settlers are now shut out by high
prices would be abandoned by their present owners or sold to settlers
upon nominal terms. And this not merely on the frontiers, but within
what are now considered well settled districts.
* The fact that a tax on the rental value of land
cannot be shifted by landowners to tenants, though recognized
by all competent economists, is sometimes a stumbling block to
persons untrained in economics. The reason such a tax cannot
be shifted is that it cannot limit the supply of land. Landowners
are presumably, before the tax is laid, charging all the rent
they can get. There is nothing in a tax on the rental value of
land to make tenants willing to pay more or to make land more
difficult to hire. On the contrary, more land will be on the
market, because of such a tax, rather than less, since the tax
puts a heavy penalty on holding land out of use and unimproved
for mere speculation. The competition of former vacant land speculators
to get their land used will make land cheaper to rent rather
than more expensive. And since only the net rent remaining after
the tax is subtracted is capitalized into salable value, land
will be very much cheaper to buy. H.G.B.
|
|
And it must be remembered that this would apply, not merely to
agricultural land, but to all land. Mineral land would be thrown
open to use, just as agricultural land; and in the heart of a city
no one could afford to keep land from its most profitable use, or
on the outskirts to demand more for it than the use to which it could
at the time be put would warrant. Everywhere that land had attained
a value, taxation, instead of operating, as now, as a fine upon improvement,
would operate to force improvement. Whoever planted an orchard, or
sowed a field, or built a house, or erected a manufactory, no matter
how costly, would have no more to pay in taxes than if he kept so
much land idle.
- The monopolist of agricultural land would be taxed as much as
though his land were covered with houses and barns, with crops
and with stock.
- The owner of a vacant city lot would have to pay as much for
the privilege of keeping other people off of it until he wanted
to use it, as his neighbor who has a fine house upon his lot.
- It would cost as much to keep a row of tumble-down shanties
upon valuable land as though it were covered with a grand hotel
or a pile of great warehouses filled with costly goods.
Thus, the bonus that wherever labor is most productive must now
be paid before labor can be exerted would disappear.
- The farmer would not have to pay out half his means, or mortgage
his labor for years, in order to obtain land to cultivate;
- the builder of a city homestead would not have to lay out as
much for a small lot as for the house he puts upon it*;
- the company that proposed to erect a manufactory would not have
to expend a great part of its capital for a site.
- And what would be paid from year to year to the state would
be in lieu of all the taxes now levied upon improvements, machinery,
and stock.
*Many persons, and among them some professional
economists, have never succeeded in getting a thorough comprehension
of this point. Thus, the editor has heard the objection advanced
that the greater cheapness of land is no advantage to the
poor man who is trying to save enough from his earnings to
buy a piece of land; for, it is said, the higher taxes on
the land after it is acquired, offset the lower purchase
price. What such objectors do not see is that even if the
lower price of land does no more than balance the higher
tax on it, (and this overlooks, for one thing, the discouragement
to speculation in land), the reduction or removal of other
taxes is all clear gain. It is easier to save in proportion
as earnings and commodities are relieved of taxation. It
is easier to buy land, because its selling price is lower,
if the land is taxed. And although the land, after its purchase,
continues to be taxed, not only can this tax be fully paid
out of the annual interest on the saving in the purchase
price, but also there is to be reckoned the saving in taxes
on buildings and other improvements and in whatever other
taxes are thus rendered unnecessary. H.G.B.
Consider the effect of such a change upon the labor market. Competition
would no longer be one-sided, as now. Instead of laborers competing
with each other for employment, and in their competition cutting
down wages to the point of bare subsistence, employers would everywhere
be competing for laborers, and wages would rise to the fair earnings
of labor. For into the labor market would have entered the greatest
of all competitors for the employment of labor, a competitor whose
demand cannot be satisfied until want is satisfied -- the demand
of labor itself. The employers of labor would not have merely to
bid against other employers, all feeling the stimulus of greater
trade and increased profits, but against the ability of laborers
to become their own employers upon the natural opportunities freely
opened to them by the tax which prevented monopolization.
With natural opportunities thus free to labor;
- with capital and improvements exempt from tax, and exchange
released from restrictions, the spectacle of willing men unable
to turn their labor into the things they are suffering for would
become impossible;
- the recurring paroxysms which paralyze industry would cease;
- every wheel of production would be set in motion;
- demand would keep pace with supply, and supply with demand;
- trade would increase in every direction, and wealth augment
on every hand.
|
source: Part
IX: Effects of the Remedy— Chapter 1: Of the Effect Upon the
Production of Wealth |
|
11. Effect of Remedy Upon the Sharing of Wealth |
But great as they thus appear, the advantages of a transference
of all public burdens to a tax upon the value of land cannot be fully
appreciated until we consider the effect upon the distribution of
wealth.
Tracing out the cause of the unequal distribution of wealth which
appears in all civilized countries, with a constant tendency to greater
and greater inequality as material progress goes on, we have found
it in the fact that, as civilization advances, the ownership of land,
now in private hands, gives a greater and greater power of appropriating
the wealth produced by labor and capital.
Thus, to relieve labor and capital from all taxation, direct and
indirect, and to throw the burden upon rent, would be, as far as
it went, to counteract this tendency to inequality, and, if it went
so far as to take in taxation the whole of rent, the cause of inequality
would be totally destroyed. Rent, instead of causing inequality,
as now, would then promote equality. Labor and capital would then
receive the whole produce, minus that portion taken by the state
in the taxation of land values, which, being applied to public purposes,
would be equally distributed in public benefits.
That is to say, the wealth produced in every community would be
divided into two portions.
- One part would be distributed in wages and interest between
individual producers, according to the part each had taken in the
work of production;
- the other part would go to the community as a whole, to be distributed
in public benefits to all its members.
In this all would share equally -- the weak with the strong, young
children and decrepit old men, the maimed, the halt, and the blind,
as well as the vigorous. And justly so -- for while one part represents
the result of individual effort in production, the other represents
the increased power with which the community as a whole aids the
individual.
Thus, as material progress tends to increase rent, were rent taken
by the community for common purposes the very cause which now tends
to produce inequality as material progress goes on would then tend
to produce greater and greater equality. |
|
Who can say to what infinite powers the wealth-producing capacity
of labor may not be raised by social adjustments which will give to
the producers of wealth their fair proportion of its advantages and
enjoyments! With present processes the gain would be simply incalculable,
but just as wages are high, so do the invention and utilization of
improved processes and machinery go on with greater rapidity and ease. |
|
But I shall not deny, and do not wish to lose sight of the fact, that while thus
preventing waste and thus adding to the efficiency of labor, the equalization
in the distribution of wealth that would result from the simple plan of taxation
that I propose, must lessen the intensity with which wealth is pursued. It
seems to me that in a condition of society in which no one need fear poverty,
no one would desire great wealth -- at least, no one would take the trouble
to strive and to strain for it as men do now. For, certainly, the spectacle
of men who have only a few years to live, slaving away their time for the sake
of dying rich, is in itself so unnatural and absurd, that in a state of society
where the abolition of the fear of want had dissipated the envious admiration
with which the masses of men now regard the possession of great riches, whoever
would toil to acquire more than he cared to use would be looked upon as we
would now look on a man who would thatch his head with half a dozen hats. |
|
And though this incentive to production be withdrawn, can we not
spare it? Whatever may have been its office in an earlier stage of
development, it is not needed now. The dangers that menace our civilization
do not come from the weakness of the springs of production. What
it suffers from, and what, if a remedy be not applied, it must die
from, is unequal distribution!
Nor would the removal of this incentive, regarded only from the
standpoint of production, be an unmixed loss. For, that the aggregate
of production is greatly reduced by the greed with which riches are
pursued, is one of the most obtrusive facts of modern society. While,
were this insane desire to get rich at any cost lessened, mental
activities now devoted to scraping together riches would be translated
into far higher spheres of usefulness. |
source: Part
IX — Effects of the Remedy: Chapter 2 — Of the Effect
Upon Distribution and Thence Upon Production |
|
12. Effect of Remedy Upon Various Economic Classes |
When it is first proposed to put all taxes upon the value of land,
all landholders are likely to take the alarm, and there will not be
wanting appeals to the fears of small farm and homestead owners, who
will be told that this is a proposition to rob them of their hard-earned
property. But a moment's reflection will show that this proposition
should commend itself to all whose interests as landholders do not
largely exceed their interests as laborers or capitalists, or both.
And further consideration will show that though the large landholders
may lose relatively, yet even in their case there will be an absolute
gain. For, the increase in production will be so great that labor and
capital will gain very much more than will be lost to private landownership,
while in these gains, and in the greater ones involved in a more healthy
social condition, the whole community, including the landowners themselves,
will share. |
|
-
It is manifest, of course, that the change I propose will
greatly benefit all those who live by wages, whether of hand
or of head -- laborers, operatives, mechanics, clerks, professional
men of all sorts.
-
It is manifest, also, that it will benefit all those who
live partly by wages and partly by the earnings of their
capital -- storekeepers, merchants, manufacturers, employing
or undertaking producers and exchangers of all sorts from
the peddler or drayman to the railroad or steamship owner
-- and
-
it is likewise manifest that it will increase
the incomes of those whose incomes are drawn from the earnings
of capital.
Take, now, the case of the homestead owner — the mechanic,
storekeeper, or professional man who has secured himself a house
and lot, where he lives, and which he contemplates with satisfaction
as a place from which his family cannot be ejected in case of
his death. He will not be injured; on the contrary, he will be
the gainer. The selling value of his lot will diminish — theoretically
it will entirely disappear. But its usefulness to him will not
disappear. It will serve his purpose as well as ever. While,
as the value of all other lots will diminish or disappear in
the same ratio, he retains the same security of always having
a lot that he had before. That is to say, he is a loser only
as the man who has bought himself a pair of boots may be said
to be a loser by a subsequent fall in the price of boots. His
boots will be just as useful to him, and the next pair of boots
he can get cheaper. So, to the homestead owner, his lot will
be as useful, and should he look forward to getting a larger
lot, or having his children, as they grow up, get homesteads
of their own, he will, even in the matter of lots, be the gainer.
And in the present, other things considered, he will be much
the gainer. For though he will have more taxes to pay upon his
land, he will be released from taxes upon his house and improvements,
upon his furniture and personal property, upon all that he and
his family eat, drink and wear, while his earnings will be largely
increased by the rise of wages, the constant employment, and
the increased briskness of trade. His only loss will be, if he
wants to sell his lot without getting another, and this will
be a small loss compared with the great gain.
And so with the farmer. I speak not now of the farmers who never
touch the handles of a plow, but of the working farmers who constitute
such a large class in the United States — men who own small
farms, which they cultivate with the aid of their boys, and perhaps
some hired help, and who in Europe would be called peasant proprietors.
Paradoxical as it may appear to these men until they understand
the full bearings of the proposition, of all classes above that
of the mere laborer they have most to gain by placing all taxes
upon the value of land. That they do not now get as good a living
as their hard work ought to give them, they generally feel, though
they may not be able to trace the cause. The fact is that taxation,
as now levied, falls on them with peculiar severity. They are
taxed on all their improvements — houses, barns, fences,
crops, stock. The personal property which they have cannot be
as readily concealed or undervalued as can the more valuable
kinds which are concentrated in the cities. They are not only
taxed on personal property and improvements, which the owners
of unused land escape, but their land is generally taxed at a
higher rate than land held on speculation, simply because it
is improved. But further than this, all taxes imposed on commodities,
and especially the taxes which, like our protective duties, are
imposed with a view of raising the prices of commodities, fall
on the farmer without mitigation.
|
|
The farmer would be a great gainer by the substitution of a single
tax upon the value of land for all these taxes, for the taxation
of land values would fall with greatest weight, not upon the agricultural
districts, where land values are comparatively small, but upon
the towns and cities where land values are high; whereas taxes
upon personal property and improvements fall as heavily in the
country as in the city. And in sparsely settled districts there
would be hardly any taxes at all for the farmer to pay. For taxes,
being levied upon the value of the bare land, would fall as heavily
upon unimproved as upon improved land. Acre for acre, the improved
and cultivated farm, with its buildings, fences, orchard, crops,
and stock, could be taxed no more than unused land of equal quality.
The result would be that speculative values would be kept down,
and that cultivated and improved farms would have no taxes to pay
until the country around them had been well settled. In fact, paradoxical
as it may at first seem to them, the effect of putting all taxation
upon the value of land would be to relieve the harder working farmers
of all taxation.*
*Let us remember that fertility
elements put into the soil -- or maintained through constant
renewal -- are in the economic sense, capital rather than land,
and under Henry George's plan would not be taxed. The farmer
who builds up, or maintains, the fertility of his land, would
not have to pay any higher tax than if he kept it in run-down
condition and with no buildings, orchards or other improvements
on it. H.G.B
But the great gain of the working farmer can be seen only
when the effect upon the distribution of population is considered.
The destruction of speculative land values would tend to
diffuse population where it is too dense and to concentrate
it where it is too sparse; to substitute for the tenement
house, homes surrounded by gardens, and fully to settle agricultural
districts before people were driven far from neighbors to
look for land. The people of the cities would thus get more
of the pure air and sunshine of the country, the people of
the country more of the economies and social life of the
city. If, as is doubtless the case, the application of machinery
tends to large fields, agricultural population will assume
the primitive form and cluster in villages. The life of the
average farmer is now unnecessarily dreary. He is not only
compelled to work early and late, but he is cut off by the
sparseness of population from the conveniences, and amusements,
the educational facilities, and the social and intellectual
opportunities that come with the closer contact of man with
man. He would be far better off in all these respects, and
his labor would be far more productive, if he and those around
him held no more land than they wanted to use. While his
children, as they grew up, would neither be so impelled to
seek the excitement of a city nor would they be driven so
far away to seek farms of their own. Their means of living
would be in their own hands, and at home.
In short, the working farmer is both a laborer and a capitalist,
as well as a landowner, and it is by his labor and capital
that his living is made. His loss would be nominal; his gain
would be real and great. In varying degrees is this true
of all landholders. Many landholders are laborers of one
sort or another. This measure would make no one poorer but
such as could be made a great deal poorer without being really
hurt. It would cut down great fortunes, but it would impoverish
no one.
Wealth would not only be enormously increased; it would
be equally distributed. I do not mean that each individual
would get the same amount of wealth. That would not be equal
distribution, so long as different individuals have different
powers and different desires. But I mean that wealth would
be distributed in accordance with the degree in which the
industry, skill, knowledge, or prudence of each contributed
to the common stock. The great cause which concentrates wealth
in the hands of those who do not produce, and takes it from
the hands of those who do, would be gone. The inequalities
that continued to exist would be those of nature, not the
artificial inequalities produced by the denial of natural
law. The nonproducer would no longer roll in luxury while
the producer got but the barest necessities of animal existence.
|
Source: Chapter 3: Of the Effect Upon Individuals and Classes |
|
13 Effect of Remedy Upon Social Ideals |
|
From whence springs this lust for gain, to gratify which men tread
everything pure and noble under their feet; to which they sacrifice
all the higher possibilities of life; which converts civility into
a hollow pretense, patriotism into a sham, and religion into hypocrisy;
which makes so much of civilized existence an Ishmaelitish warfare,
of which the weapons are cunning and fraud?
Does it not spring from the existence of want? Carlyle somewhere
says that poverty is the hell of which the modern Englishman is most
afraid. And he is right. Poverty is the openmouthed, relentless hell
which yawns beneath civilized society. And it is hell enough. The
Vedas declare no truer thing than when the wise crow Bushanda tells
the eagle-bearer of Vishnu that the keenest pain is in poverty. For
poverty is not merely deprivation; it means shame, degradation; the
searing of the most sensitive parts of our moral and mental nature
as with hot irons; the denial of the strongest impulses and the sweetest
affections; the wrenching of the most vital nerves. You love your
wife, you love your children; but would it not be easier to see them
die than to see them reduced to the pinch of want in which large
classes in every highly civilized community live? The strongest of
animal passions is that with which we cling to life, but it is an
everyday occurrence in civilized societies for men to put poison
to their mouths or pistols to their heads from fear of poverty, and
for one who does this there are probably a hundred who have the desire,
but are restrained by instinctive shrinking, by religious considerations,
or by family ties.
From this hell of poverty, it is but natural that men should make
every effort to escape. With the impulse to self-preservation and
self-gratification combine nobler feelings, and love as well as fear
urges in the struggle. Many a man does a mean thing, a dishonest
thing, a greedy and grasping and unjust thing, in the effort to place
above want, or the fear of want, mother or wife or children.
And out of this condition of things arises a public opinion which
enlists, as an impelling power in the struggle to grasp and to keep,
one of the strongest perhaps with many men the very strongest springs
of human action. The desire for approbation, the feeling that urges
us to win the respect, admiration, or sympathy of our fellows, is
instinctive and universal. Distorted sometimes into the most abnormal
manifestations, it may yet be everywhere perceived. It is potent
with the veriest savage, as with the most highly cultivated member
of the most polished society; it shows itself with the first gleam
of intelligence, and persists to the last breath. It triumphs over
the love of ease, over the sense of pain, over the dread of death.
It dictates the most trivial and the most important actions. |
|
Now, men admire what they desire. How sweet to the storm-stricken
seems the safe harbor; food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty,
warmth to the shivering, rest to the weary, power to the weak, knowledge
to him in whom the intellectual yearnings of the soul have been aroused.
And thus the sting of want and the fear of want make men admire above
all things the possession of riches, and to become wealthy is to
become respected, and admired, and influential. Get money -- honestly,
if you can, but at any rate get money! This is the lesson that society
is daily and hourly dinning in the ears of its members. Men instinctively
admire virtue and truth, but the sting of want and the fear of want
make them even more strongly admire the rich and sympathize with
the fortunate. It is well to be honest and just, and men will commend
it; but he who by fraud and injustice gets him a million dollars
will have more respect, and admiration, and influence, more eye service
and lip service, if not heart service, than he who refuses it. The
one may have his reward in the future; he may know that his name
is writ in the Book of Life, and that for him is the white robe and
the palm branch of the victor against temptation; but the other has
his reward in the present.
* His name is writ in the list of "our substantial citizens";
* he has the courtship of men and the flattery of women;
* the best pew in the church and the personal regard of the eloquent clergyman
who in the name of Christ preaches the Gospel of Dives, and tones down into
a meaningless flower of Eastern speech the stern metaphor of the camel and
the needle's eye.
* He may be a patron of arts, a Mæcenas to men of letters;
* may profit by the converse of the intelligent, and
* be polished by the attrition of the refined.
* His alms may feed the poor, and help the struggling, and bring sunshine into
desolate places;
* and noble public institutions commemorate, after he is gone, his name and
his fame.
* It is not in the guise of a hideous monster, with horns and tail, that Satan
tempts the children of men, but as an angel of light. His promises are not
alone of the kingdoms of the world, but of mental and moral principalities
and powers. He appeals not only to the animal appetites, but to the cravings
that stir in man because he is more than an animal. |
|
Give labor a free field and its full earnings; take for the benefit
of the whole community that fund which the growth of the community
creates, and want and the fear of want would be gone. The springs
of production would be set free, and the enormous increase of wealth
would give the poorest ample comfort. Men would no more worry about
finding employment than they worry about finding air to breathe;
they need have no more care about physical necessities than do the
lilies of the field. The progress of science, the march of invention,
the diffusion of knowledge, would bring their benefits to all.
With this abolition of want and the fear of want, the admiration
of riches would decay, and men would seek the respect and approbation
of their fellows in other modes than by the acquisition and display
of wealth. In this way there would be brought to the management of
public affairs, and the administration of common funds, the skill,
the attention, the fidelity, and integrity that can now be secured
only for private interests. |
|
Shortsighted is the philosophy which counts on selfishness as
the master motive of human action. It is blind to facts of which
the world is full. It sees not the present, and reads not the
past aright. If you would move men to action, to what shall you
appeal? Not to their pockets, but to their patriotism; not to
selfishness, but to sympathy. Self-interest is, as it were, a
mechanical force -- potent, it is true; capable of large and
wide results. But there is in human nature what may be likened
to a chemical force; which melts and fuses and overwhelms; to
which nothing seems impossible. "All that a man hath will
he give for his life" -- that is self-interest. But in loyalty
to higher impulses men will give even life.
* It is not selfishness that enriches the annals of every people
with heroes and saints.
* It is not selfishness that on every page of the world's history bursts
out in sudden splendor of noble deeds or sheds the soft radiance of benignant
lives.
* It was not selfishness that turned Gautama's back to his royal home or
bade the Maid of Orleans lift the sword from the altar; that held the Three
Hundred in the Pass of Thermopylæ or gathered into Winkelried's bosom
the sheaf of spears; that chained Vincent de Paul to the bench of the galley,
or brought little starving children, during the Indian famine, tottering
to the relief stations with yet weaker starvelings in their arms.
Call it religion, patriotism, sympathy, the enthusiasm for humanity,
or the love of God -- give it what name you will; there is yet
a force which overcomes and drives out selfishness; a force which
is the electricity of the moral universe; a force beside which
all others are weak. Everywhere that men have lived it has shown
its power, and today, as ever, the world is full of it. To be
pitied is the man who has never seen and never felt it. Look
around! among common men and women, amid the care and the struggle
of daily life, in the jar of the noisy street and amid the squalor
where want hides -- every here and there is the darkness lighted
with the tremulous play of its lambent flames. He who has not
seen it has walked with shut eyes. He who looks may see, as says
Plutarch, that "the soul has a principle of kindness in
itself, and is born to love, as well as to perceive, think, or
remember."
|
|
The will within us is the ultimate fact of consciousness. Yet
how little have the best of us, in acquirements, in position, even
in character, that may be credited entirely to ourselves; how much
to the influences that have molded us.
Who is there, wise, learned, discreet, or strong, who might not,
were he to trace the inner history of his life, turn, like the Stoic
Emperor, to give thanks to the gods, that by this one and that one,
and here and there, good examples have been set him, noble thoughts
have reached him, and happy opportunities opened before him. |
|
To remove want and the fear of want, to give to all classes leisure,
and comfort, and independence, the decencies and refinements of life,
the opportunities of mental and moral development, would be like
turning water into a desert. The sterile waste would clothe itself
with verdure, and the barren places where life seemed banned would
ere long be dappled with the shade of trees and musical with the
song of birds. Talents now hidden, virtues unsuspected, would come
forth to make human life richer, fuller, happier, nobler. For
* in these round men who are stuck into three-cornered holes, and
three-cornered men who are jammed into round holes;
* in these men who are wasting their energies in the scramble to be rich;
* in these who in factories are turned into machines, or are chained by necessity
to bench or plow;
* in these children who are growing up in squalor, and vice, and ignorance,
are powers of the highest order, talents the most splendid.
They need but the opportunity to bring them forth.
Consider the possibilities of a state of society that gave that
opportunity to all. Let imagination fill out the picture; its
colors grow too bright for words to paint.
-
Consider the moral elevation, the intellectual activity,
the social life.
-
Consider how by a thousand actions and interactions
the members of every community are linked together, and how
in the present condition of things even the fortunate few who
stand upon the apex of the social pyramid must suffer, though
they know it not, from the want, ignorance, and degradation
that are underneath.
-
Consider these things and then say whether
the change I propose would not be for the benefit of every
one — even the greatest landholder?
|
source: Chapter 4: Of the Changes that Would ... |
|
14 Liberty, and Equality of Opportunity |
p.544 |
p.544
|
The truth to which we were led in the politico-economic branch
of our inquiry is as clearly apparent in the rise and fall of nations
and the growth and decay of civilizations, and it accords with those
deep-seated recognitions of relation and sequence that we denominate
moral perceptions. Thus are given to our conclusions the greatest
certitude and highest sanction.
This truth involves both a menace and a promise. It shows that the
evils arising from the unjust and unequal distribution of wealth,
which are becoming more and more apparent as modern civilization
goes on, are not incidents of progress, but tendencies which must
bring progress to a halt; that they will not cure themselves, but,
on the contrary, must, unless their cause is removed, grow greater
and greater, until they sweep us back into barbarism by the road
every previous civilization has trod. But it also shows that these
evils are not imposed by natural laws; that they spring solely from
social maladjustments which ignore natural laws, and that in removing
their cause we shall be giving an enormous impetus to progress.
The poverty which in the midst of abundance pinches and embrutes
men, and all the manifold evils which flow from it, spring from a
denial of justice. In permitting the monopolization of the opportunities
which nature freely offers to all, we have ignored the fundamental
law of justice — for, so far as we can see, when we view things
upon a large scale, justice seems to be the supreme law of the universe.
But by sweeping away this injustice and asserting the rights of all
men to natural opportunities, we shall conform ourselves to the law — we
shall remove the great cause of unnatural inequality in the distribution
of wealth and power; we shall abolish poverty; tame the ruthless
passions of greed; dry up the springs of vice and misery; light in
dark places the lamp of knowledge; give new vigor to invention and
a fresh impulse to discovery; substitute political strength for political
weakness; and make tyranny and anarchy impossible.
The reform I have proposed accords with all that is politically,
socially, or morally desirable. It has the qualities of a true reform,
for it will make all other reforms easier. What is it but the carrying
out in letter and spirit of the truth enunciated in the Declaration
of Independence — the "self-evident" truth that is
the heart and soul of the Declaration —"That all men are
created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit
of happiness!"
These rights are denied when the equal right to land — on
which and by which men alone can live — is denied. Equality
of political rights will not compensate for the denial of the equal
right to the bounty of nature. Political liberty, when the equal
right to land is denied, becomes, as population increases and invention
goes on, merely the liberty to compete for employment at starvation
wages. This is the truth that we have ignored. And so
- there come beggars in our streets and tramps on our roads; and
- poverty enslaves men who we boast are political sovereigns;
and
- want breeds ignorance that our schools cannot enlighten; and
- citizens vote as their masters dictate; and
- the demagogue usurps the part of the statesman; and
- gold weighs in the scales of justice; and
- in high places sit those who do not pay to civic virtue even
the compliment of hypocrisy; and
- the pillars of the republic that we thought so strong already
bend under an increasing strain.
We honor Liberty in name and in form. We set up her statues and
sound her praises. But we have not fully trusted her. And with our
growth so grow her demands. She will have no half service!
Liberty! it is a word to conjure with, not to vex the ear in empty
boastings. For Liberty means Justice, and Justice is the natural
law — the law of health and symmetry and strength, of fraternity
and co-operation.
They who look upon Liberty as having accomplished her mission when
she has abolished hereditary privileges and given men the ballot,
who think of her as having no further relations to the everyday affairs
of life, have not seen her real grandeur — to them the poets
who have sung of her must seem rhapsodists, and her martyrs fools!
As the sun is the lord of life, as well as of light; as his beams
not merely pierce the clouds, but support all growth, supply all
motion, and call forth from what would otherwise be a cold and inert
mass all the infinite diversities of being and beauty, so is liberty
to mankind. It is not for an abstraction that men have toiled and
died; that in every age the witnesses of Liberty have stood forth,
and the martyrs of Liberty have suffered.
We speak of Liberty as one thing, and of virtue, wealth, knowledge,
invention, national strength, and national independence as other
things. But, of all these, Liberty is the source, the mother, the
necessary condition. She is to virtue what light is to color; to
wealth what sunshine is to grain; to knowledge what eyes are to sight.
She is the genius of invention, the brawn of national strength, the
spirit of national independence. Where Liberty rises, there virtue
grows, wealth increases, knowledge expands, invention multiplies
human powers, and in strength and spirit the freer nation rises among
her neighbors as Saul amid his brethren — taller and fairer.
Where Liberty sinks, there virtue fades, wealth diminishes, knowledge
is forgotten, invention ceases, and empires once mighty in arms and
arts become a helpless prey to freer barbarians!
Only in broken gleams and partial light has the sun of Liberty yet
beamed among men, but all progress hath she called forth.
- Liberty came to a race of slaves crouching under Egyptian whips,
and led them forth from the House of Bondage. She hardened them
in the desert and made of them a race of conquerors. The free spirit
of the Mosaic law took their thinkers up to heights where they
beheld the unity of God, and inspired their poets with strains
that yet phrase the highest exaltations of thought.
- Liberty dawned on the Phoenician coast, and ships passed the
Pillars of Hercules to plow the unknown sea.
- She shed a partial light on Greece, and marble grew to shapes
of ideal beauty, words became the instruments of subtlest thought,
and against the scanty militia of free cities the countless hosts
of the Great King broke like surges against a rock.
- She cast her beams on the four-acre farms of Italian husbandmen,
and born of her strength a power came forth that conquered the
world. They glinted from shields of German warriors, and Augustus
wept his legions.
- Out of the night that followed her eclipse, her slanting rays
fell again on free cities, and a lost learning revived, modern
civilization began, a new world was unveiled; and as Liberty grew,
so grew art, wealth, power, knowledge, and refinement. In the history
of every nation we may read the same truth.
- It was the strength born of Magna Charta that won Crecy and
Agincourt.
- It was the revival of Liberty from the despotism of the Tudors
that glorified the Elizabethan age. It was the spirit that brought
a crowned tyrant to the block that planted here the seed of a mighty
tree.
- It was the energy of ancient freedom that, the moment it had
gained unity, made Spain the mightiest power of the world, only
to fall to the lowest depth of weakness when tyranny succeeded
liberty.
- See, in France, all intellectual vigor dying under the tyranny
of the Seventeenth Century to revive in splendor as Liberty awoke
in the Eighteenth, and on the enfranchisement of French peasants
in the Great Revolution, basing the wonderful strength that has
in our time defied defeat.
Shall we not trust her?
In our time, as in times before, creep on the insidious forces that,
producing inequality, destroy Liberty. On the horizon the clouds
begin to lower. Liberty calls to us again. We must follow her further;
we must trust her fully. Either we must wholly accept her or she
will not stay. It is not enough that men should vote; it is not enough
that they should be theoretically equal before the law. They must
have liberty to avail themselves of the opportunities and means of
life; they must stand on equal terms with reference to the bounty
of nature. Either this, or Liberty withdraws her light! Either this,
or darkness comes on, and the very forces that progress has evolved
turn to powers that work destruction. This is the universal law.
This is the lesson of the centuries. Unless its foundations be laid
in justice the social structure cannot stand.
Our primary social adjustment is a denial of justice. In allowing
one man to own the land on which and from which other men must live,
we have made them his bondsmen in a degree which increases as material
progress goes on. This is the subtile alchemy that in ways they do
not realize is extracting from the masses in every civilized country
the fruits of their weary toil; that is instituting a harder and
more hopeless slavery in place of that which has been destroyed;
that is bringing political despotism out of political freedom, and
must soon transmute democratic institutions into anarchy.
It is this that turns the blessings of material progress into a
curse. It is this that crowds human beings into noisome cellars and
squalid tenement houses; that fills prisons and brothels; that goads
men with want and consumes them with greed; that robs women of the
grace and beauty of perfect womanhood; that takes from little children
the joy and innocence of life's morning.
Civilization so based cannot continue. The eternal laws of the universe
forbid it. Ruins of dead empires testify, and the witness that is
in every soul answers, that it cannot be. It is something grander
than Benevolence, something more august than Charity — it is
Justice herself that demands of us to right this wrong. Justice that
will not be denied; that cannot be put off — Justice that with
the scales carries the sword. Shall we ward the stroke with liturgies
and prayers? Shall we avert the decrees of immutable law by raising
churches when hungry infants moan and weary mothers weep?
Though it may take the language of prayer, it is blasphemy that
attributes to the inscrutable decrees of Providence the suffering
and brutishness that come of poverty; that turns with folded hands
to the All-Father and lays on Him the responsibility for the want
and crime of our great cities. We degrade the Everlasting. We slander
the Just One. A merciful man would have better ordered the world;
a just man would crush with his foot such an ulcerous ant-hill! It
is not the Almighty, but we who are responsible for the vice and
misery that fester amid our civilization. The Creator showers upon
us his gifts — more than enough for all. But like swine scrambling
for food, we tread them in the mire — tread them in the mire,
while we tear and rend each other!
In the very centers of our civilization
today are want and suffering enough to make sick at heart whoever
does not close his eyes and steel his nerves.
Dare we turn to the Creator and ask Him to relieve it? Supposing the
prayer were heard, and at the behest with which the universe sprang
into being
there should glow in the sun a greater power; new virtue fill the air;
fresh vigor the soil; that for every blade of grass that now grows two
should spring up, and the seed that now increases fiftyfold should increase
a hundredfold! Would poverty be abated or want relieved? Manifestly no!
Whatever benefit would accrue would be but temporary. The new powers
streaming through the material universe could be utilized only through
land. |
p.550 |
p.550 |
This is not merely a deduction of political economy; it is a fact
of experience. We know it because we have seen it. Within our own times,
under our very eyes, that Power which is above all, and in all, and
through all; that Power of which the whole universe is but the manifestation;
that Power which maketh all things, and without which is not anything
made that is made, has increased the bounty which men may enjoy, as
truly as though the fertility of nature had been increased. Into the
mind of one came the thought that harnessed steam for the service of
mankind. To the inner ear of another was whispered the secret that
compels the lightning to bear a message round the globe. In every direction
have the laws of matter been revealed; in every department of industry
have arisen arms of iron and fingers of steel, whose effect upon the
production of wealth has been precisely the same as an increase in
the fertility of nature. What has been the result? Simply that landowners
get all the gain. |
p.551 |
Can it be that the gifts of the Creator may be thus misappropriated
with impunity? Is it a light thing that labor should be robbed of
its earnings while greed rolls in wealth — that the many should
want while the few are surfeited? Turn to history, and on every page
may be read the lesson that such wrong never goes unpunished; that
the Nemesis that follows injustice never falters nor sleeps! Look
around today. Can this state of things continue? May we even say, "After
us the deluge!" Nay; the pillars of the State are trembling
even now, and the very foundations of society begin to quiver with
pent-up forces that glow underneath. The struggle that must either
revivify, or convulse in ruin, is near at hand, if it be not already
begun.
The fiat has gone forth! With steam and electricity, and the new
powers born of progress, forces have entered the world that will
either compel us to a higher plane or overwhelm us, as nation after
nation, as civilization after civilization, have been overwhelmed
before. It is the delusion which precedes destruction that sees in
the popular unrest with which the civilized world is feverishly pulsing
only the passing effect of ephemeral causes. Between democratic ideas
and the aristocratic adjustments of society there is an irreconcilable
conflict. Here in the United States, as there in Europe, it may be
seen arising.
- We cannot go on permitting men to vote and forcing them to tramp.
- We cannot go on educating boys and girls in our public schools
and then refusing them the right to earn an honest living.
- We cannot go on prating of the inalienable rights of man and
then denying the inalienable right to the bounty of the Creator.
Even now, in old bottles the new wine begins to ferment, and elemental
forces gather for the strife!
But if, while there is yet time, we turn to Justice and obey her,
if we trust Liberty and follow her, the dangers that now threaten
must disappear, the forces that now menace will turn to agencies
of elevation. Think of the powers now wasted; of the infinite fields
of knowledge yet to be explored; of the possibilities of which the
wondrous inventions of this century give us but a hint.
- With want destroyed;
- with greed changed to noble passions;
- with the fraternity that is born of equality taking the place
of the jealousy and fear that now array men against each other;
- with mental power loosed by conditions that give to the humblest
comfort and leisure; and
- who shall measure the heights to which our civilization may
soar?
Words fail the thought! It is the Golden Age of which poets have
sung and high-raised seers have told in metaphor! It is the glorious
vision which has always haunted man with gleams of fitful splendor.
It is what he saw whose eyes at Patmos were closed in a trance. It
is the culmination of Christianity — the City of God on earth,
with its walls of jasper and its gates of pearl! It is the reign
of the Prince of Peace!
|
source: Part
X: The Law of Human Progress — Chapter 5: The Central Truth |
|
15 The Cross of a New Crusade |
My task is done.
Yet the thought still mounts. The problems we have been considering
lead into a problem higher and deeper still. Behind the problems
of social life lies the problem of individual life. I have found
it impossible to think of the one without thinking of the other,
and so, I imagine, will it be with those who, reading this book,
go with me in thought; for, whatever be its fate, it will be read
by some who in their heart of hearts have taken the cross of a new
crusade. This thought will come to them without my suggestion; but
we are surer that we see a star when we know that others also see
it. |
p. 555 |
p.555 |
The truth that I have tried to make clear will not find easy acceptance.
If that could be, it would have been accepted long ago. If that could
be, it would never have been obscured. But it will find friends — those
who will toil for it; suffer for it; if need be, die for it. This
is the power of Truth.
Will it at length prevail? Ultimately, yes. But in our own times,
or in times of which any memory of us remains, who shall say?
For the man who, seeing the want and misery, the ignorance and
brutishness caused by unjust social institutions, sets himself,
in so far as he has strength, to right them, there is disappointment
and bitterness. So it has been of old time. So is it even now.
But the bitterest thought — and it sometimes comes to the
best and bravest — is that of the hopelessness of the effort,
the futility of the sacrifice. To how few of those who sow the
seed is it given to see it grow, or even with certainty to know
that it will grow.
Let us not disguise it. Over and over again has the standard of
Truth and Justice been raised in this world. Over and over again
has it been trampled down — oftentimes in blood. If they
are weak forces that are opposed to Truth, how should Error so
long prevail? If Justice has but to raise her head to have Injustice
flee before her, how should the wail of the oppressed so long go
up?
But for those who see Truth and would follow her; for those who
recognize Justice and would stand for her, success is not the only
thing. Success! Why, Falsehood has often that to give; and Injustice
often has that to give. Must not Truth and Justice have something
to give that is their own by proper right — theirs in essence,
and not by accident?
That they have, and that here and now, every one who has felt
their exaltation knows. But sometimes the clouds sweep down. It
is sad, sad reading, the lives of the men who would have done something
for their fellows. To Socrates they gave the hemlock; Gracchus
they killed with sticks and stones; and One, greatest and purest
of all, they crucified. And in penury and want, in neglect and
contempt, destitute even of the sympathy that would have been so
sweet, how many in every country have closed their eyes? This we
see.
But do we see it all?
|
p.557 |
I have in this inquiry followed the course of my own thought. When,
in mind, I set out on it I had no theory to support, no conclusions
to prove. Only, when I first realized the squalid misery of a great
city, it appalled and tormented me, and would not let me rest, for
thinking of what caused it and how it could be cured. |
p.557-559 |
Political Economy has been called the dismal science, and as currently
taught, is hopeless and despairing. But this, as we have seen, is
solely because she has been degraded and shackled; her truths dislocated;
her harmonies ignored; the word she would utter gagged in her mouth,
and her protest against wrong turned into an indorsement of injustice.
Freed, as I have tried to free her — in her own proper symmetry,
Political Economy is radiant with hope.
For properly understood, the laws which govern the production and
distribution of wealth show that the want and injustice of the present
social state are not necessary; but that, on the contrary, a social
state is possible in which poverty would be unknown, and all the
better qualities and higher powers of human nature would have opportunity
for full development.
And, further than this,
- when we see that social development is governed neither by a
Special Providence nor by a merciless fate, but by law, at once
unchangeable and beneficent; when we see that human will is the
great factor, and that taking men in the aggregate, their condition
is as they make it;
- when we see that economic law and moral law are essentially
one, and that the truth which the intellect grasps after toilsome
effort is but that which the moral sense reaches by a quick intuition,
a flood of light breaks in upon the problem of individual life.
These countless millions like ourselves, who on this earth of ours
have passed and still are passing, with their joys and sorrows, their
toil and their striving, their aspirations and their fears, their
strong perceptions of things deeper than sense, their common feelings
which form the basis even of the most divergent creeds — their
little lives do not seem so much like meaningless waste. |
p.560-563 |
The scriptures of the men who have been and gone — the Bibles,
the Zend Avestas, the Vedas, the Dhammapadas, and the Korans; the
esoteric doctrines of old philosophies, the inner meaning of grotesque
religions, the dogmatic constitutions of Ecumenical Councils, the
preachings of Foxes, and Wesleys, and Savonarolas, the traditions
of red Indians, and beliefs of black savages, have a heart and core
in which they agree — a something which seems like the variously
distorted apprehensions of a primary truth. And out of the chain
of thought we have been following there seems vaguely to rise a glimpse
of what they vaguely saw — a shadowy gleam of ultimate relations,
the endeavor to express which inevitably falls into type and allegory.
- A garden in which are set the trees of good and evil.
- A vineyard in which there is the Master's work to do.
- A passage — from life behind to life beyond.
- A trial and a struggle, of which we cannot see the end.
Look around today.
Lo! here, now, in our civilized society, the old allegories yet
have a meaning, the old myths are still true. Into the Valley of
the Shadow of Death yet often leads the path of duty, through the
streets of Vanity Fair walk Christian and Faithful, and on Greatheart's
armor ring the clanging blows. Ormuzd still fights with Ahriman — the
Prince of Light with the Powers of Darkness. He who will hear, to
him the clarions of the battle call.
How they call, and call, and call, till the heart swells that hears
them! Strong soul and high endeavor, the world needs them now. Beauty
still lies imprisoned, and iron wheels go over the good and true
and beautiful that might spring from human lives. |
p. 564-5 |
source: CONCLUSION:
THE PROBLEM OF INDIVIDUAL LIFE |
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