The Gospel of Plenty

A.C. Campbell

[Reprinted from Land and Freedom, March-April 1938]


You put it strongly and, I believe, most truly: "Poverty is the foe of all social advance, of spiritual and intellectual as well as material progress." I suppose you include not only poverty itself but the fear of poverty and the myriad superstitions that are born of fear.

Your hope, you say, is in the young. You are a younger product of my own era I am eighty years old. I think both you and I have the right to hope that the new spirit that manifests itself is a spirit of peace and makes converts and apostles of us all.

I agree with you most enthusiastically: "In the philosophy of freedom is the germ of a new renaiscence."

Our civilization has brought into play greater freedom than ever was known in the world before. This freedom has led to the plenty which Henry George was the first to declare and prove, and which has forced itself upon attention of observers and thinkers everywhere.

Evidently referring to the followers of Henry George, you say: "Ours is a tremendous responsibility." Once more, I very heartily agree. But I think we do not discharge that responsibility by any of the methods we have adopted. I approve of all methods that are in line with the Henry George philosophy, but I think we have made a big mistake in not beginning where George began. When he announced in the very first words of "Progress and Poverty," that the age of plenty had begun, he flatly contradicted the thought of his time. But today the belief in plenty is universal. But the world's self-appointed spokesman dare not follow the plain road that George marked out leading to the abolition of poverty.

Plenty is our heritage from our great prophet and leader. If we declare it confidently and exultantly we can justify both our declaration and our confidence by showing how the social mechanism that he devised the recovery of rent will distribute plenty on a plenty scale and so will abolish poverty and establish economic equity for practical purposes, economic equality: "Who should crouch where all were freemen? Who oppress where all were peers?"