Henry George, Original Thinker

John W. Davis

[A statement on the donation of Henry George's death mask to Princeton University. Reprinted from Land and Freedom, November-December 1937]

In the front rank of American writers on political economy place must always be reserved for him. He was a profound, original thinker with an unsurpassed capacity for clear and convincing exposition. One may agree or disagree with his conclusions, one may doubt or accept his remedies, but no one can deny to him utter sincerity and the courage to attack such abuses as he saw, no matter how securely entrenched. The whole aim and purpose of his life was to leave human society better than he found it.

He was one of those men who can send an idea out into the world with such burning force that it lives on long after its author has gone. When he hurled his work on Progress and Poverty into the complacent atmosphere of the Nineteenth Century, it shook the political thought of the world. No man could no man can read it with indifference to the evils which he pictured. While it is possible to believe that he underestimated the difficulties in applying his remedy of a Single Tax and exaggerated the benefits that would result, his fundamental theses of the inherent injustice of monopolistic control of land and land value has never, I think, been successfully answered.

It would be a mistake, however, for his disciples to hold him up to the world merely as the advocate of the Single Tax. His political thought went far beyond it. He was a liberal in the true sense of the word. Indeed, I know of no more inspiring passages of English prose than those which are contained in the closing chapters of Progress and Poverty.