Progress and Poverty
Henry George
[Introduction (4th ed., New York: D. Appleton and
Co., 1882, pp. 1-12)]
INTRODUCTORY.
The present century has been marked by a prodigious increase in
wealth-producing power. The utilization of steam and electricity, the
introduction of improved processes and labor-saving machinery, the
greater subdivision and grander scale of production, the wonderful
facilitation of exchanges, have multiplied enormously the
effectiveness of labor.
At the beginning of this marvelous era it was natural to expect, and
it was expected, that labor-saving inventions would lighten the toil
and improve the condition of the laborer; that the enormous increase
in the power of producing wealth would make real poverty a thing of
the past. Could a man of the last century--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 have 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," afflict the world today. 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. Where the conditions to which material
progress everywhere tends are most fully realized--that is to say,
where population is densest, wealth greatest, and the machinery of
production and exchange most highly developed-we find the deepest
poverty, the sharpest struggle for existence, and the most enforced
idleness.
It is to the newer countries--that is, to the countries where
material progress is yet in its earlier stages--that laborers emigrate
in search of higher wages, and capital flows 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
one of the new communities 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. The "tramp" comes
with the locomotive, and alms houses and prisons areas surely the
marks of "material progress" as are costly dwellings, rich
warehouses, and magnificent churches. Upon streets lighted with gas
and controlled 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 infant 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 fruit 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.* [* It
is true that the poorest may now in certain ways enjoy what the
richest a century ago could not have commanded, but this does not show
improvement of condition so long as the ability to obtain the
necessaries of life is not increased. The beggar in a great city may
enjoy many things from which the backwoods farmer is debarred, but
that does not prove the condition of the city beggar better than that
of the independent farmer.] 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. In the United States it is clear
that squalor and misery, and the vices and crimes that spring from
them, everywhere increase as the village grows to the city, and the
march of development brings the advantages of the improved methods of
production and exchange. It is in the older and richer sections of the
Union that pauperism and distress among the working classes are
becoming most painfully apparent. If there is less deep poverty in San
Francisco than in New York, is it not because San Francisco is yet
behind New York in all that both cities are striving for? When San
Francisco reaches the point where New York now is, who can doubt that
there will also be ragged and barefooted children on her streets?
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 not fully 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.
This is shown by the widely varying attempts to account for the
prevailing depression, They exhibit not merely a divergence between
vulgar notions and scientific theories, but also show that the
concurrence which should exist between those who avow the same general
theories breaks up upon practical questions into an anarchy of
opinion. Upon high economic authority we have been told that the
prevailing depression is due to over-consumption; upon equally high
authority, that it is due to over-production; while the wastes of war,
the extension of railroads, the attempts of workmen to keep up wages,
the demonetization of silver, the issues of paper money, the increase
of labor-saving machinery, the opening of shorter avenues to trade,
etc., etc., are separately pointed out as the cause, by writers of
reputation.
And while professors thus disagree, the ideas that there is a
necessary conflict between capital and labor, that machinery is an
evil, that competition must be restrained and interest abolished, that
wealth may be created by the issue of money, that it is the duty of
government to furnish capital or to furnish work, are rapidly making
way among the great body of the people, who keenly feel a hurt and are
sharply conscious of a wrong. Such ideas, which bring great masses of
men, the repositories of ultimate political power, under the
leadership of charlatans and demagogues, are fraught with danger; but
they cannot be successfully combated until political economy shall
give some answer to the great question which shall be consistent with
all her teachings, and which shall commend itself to the perceptions
of the great masses of men.
It must be within the province of political economy to give such an
answer. 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. Proceeding from a basis thus
assured, its processes, which consist simply in identification and
separation, have the same certainty. In this sense it is as exact a
science as geometry, which, from similar truths relative to space,
obtains its conclusions b~y similar means, and its conclusions when
valid should be as self-apparent. And although in the domain of
political economy we cannot test our theories by artificially produced
combinations or conditions, as may be done in some of the other
sciences, yet we can apply tests no less conclusive, by comparing
societies in which different conditions exist, or by, in imagination,
separating, combining, adding or eliminating forces or factors of
known direction.
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; and I believe that in the explanation of
this paradox we shall find the explanation of those recurring seasons
of industrial and commercial paralysis which, viewed independent of
their relations to more general phenomena, seem so inexplicable.
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.
That political economy, as at present taught, does not explain the
persistence of poverty amid advancing wealth in a manner which accords
with the deep-seated perceptions of men; that the unquestionable
truths which it does teach are unrelated and disjointed ; that it has
failed to make the progress in popular thought that truth, even when
unpleasant, must make; that, on the contrary, after a century of
cultivation, during which it has engrossed the attention some of the
most subtle and powerful intellects, it should be spurned by the
statesman, scouted by the masses, relegated in the opinion of many
educated and thinking men to the rank of a pseudo-science in which
nothing fixed or can be fixed--must, it seems to me, be due not to any
inability of the science when properly pursued, but some false step in
its premises, or overlooked factor in its estimates. And as such
mistakes are generally concealed the respect paid to authority, I
propose in this inquiry take nothing for granted, but to bring even
accepted theories to the test of first principles, and should they not
stand the test, to freshly interrogate facts in the endeavor to
discover their law.
I propose to beg no question, to shrink from no conclusion, but to
follow truth wherever it may lead. Upon us the responsibility of
seeking the law, for in the very heart of our civilization to-day
women faint and little children moan. But what that law may prove to
be is not our affair. If the conclusions that we reach run counter to
our prejudices, let us not flinch; if they challenge institutions that
have long been deemed wise and natural, let us not turn back.
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