George
Bernard Shaw
Robert
V. Andelson The Earth is the Lord's
George Bernard Shaw, in a letter
written in 1905 to Hamlin
Garland, describes how, more than twenty years earlier, he had
attended Henry George's first platform appearance in London. He knew
at once, he said, that the speaker must be an American, for four
reasons:
- "Because he pronounced 'necessarily' . . . with the accent
on the
third syllable instead of the first;
- because he was deliberately and intentionally oratorical,
which
is not customary among shy people like the English;
- because he spoke of Liberty, Justice, Truth, Natural Law,
and
other strange eighteenth-century superstitions; and
- because he explained with great simplicity and sincerity
the
views of the Creator, who had gone completely out of fashion in London
in the previous decade and had not been heard of there
since." Read the whole article
George Bernard Shaw, from a letter read at a dinner commemorating the 25th
anniversary of the publication of Progress and Poverty, and quoted
in
the
New
York
Times (January 25, 1905):
"When I was thus swept into the great Socialist revival of 1883 I
found that five-sixths of those who were swept in with me had been converted
by Henry George. This fact would have been far more widely acknowledged had
it not been
that it was not possible for us to stop where Henry George stopped.
"What George did not teach you you are being taught now by your great trusts
and combines, as to which I need only say that if you would take them over
as National property as cheerfully as you took the copyrights of all my early
books you would find them excellent institutions, quite in the path of progressive
evolution, and by no means to be discouraged or left unregulated as if they
were nobody's business but their own.
"It is a great pity that you all take America for granted because you
were born in it. I, who have never crossed the Atlantic, and have taken
nothing American for granted, find I know ten times as much about your country
as you
do yourselves: and my ambition is to repay my debt to Henry George by coming
over some day and trying to do for your young men what Henry George did
nearly a quarter of a century ago for me."
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