Personal Reminiscences of Henry George

Anonymous

["The following was addressed by a Catholic priest in Ireland to his devoted friend, Henry George's daughter. For some personal reasons this old land leaguer would not sign his name, yet he does not conceal that he felt highly honored, though greatly surprised, when in the Life of Henry George, he found himself named as the recipient of a memorable letter." Reprinted from Land and Freedom, November-December 1930]

Henry George was always glad to find in earlier authors the confirmation of his own views on the essential injustice of the landlord system. He quoted such older authors with pleasure, if only for the purpose of recommending their teachings to English, or Irish, or other European politicians. These were naturally distrustful of the teachings of a newly arrived American, whom the Duke of Argyll, joking with some difficulty, called the Prophet of San Francisco. In or around the year 1880, i.e., in the days of the Irish Land League, when Henry George was living in Dublin, and was correspondent of the New York Irish World, he heard of the Irish Fintan Lalor, and the Scottish Thomas Spence, and he eagerly put their words anew into print. He always maintained that, since what he taught in Progress and Poverty was the truth, others must have perceived it before himself.

Mr. George may not have known of a remarkable passage in the works of the English philosopher, Paley (1743-1805) ; and indeed the passage may not have appeared in all editions of Elements of Moral and Political Philosophy, first published in 1785. Paley wrote, in his considerations concerning " Property":

"If you should see a flock of pigeons in a field of corn, and if instead of each picking where and what it liked, taking just as much as it wanted, and no more you should see ninety-nine of them gathering all they got into a heap, reserving nothing for themselves but the chaff and the refuse, keeping this heap for one, and that the weakest, perhaps worst pigeon of the flock; sitting round, and looking on all the winter, whilst this one was devouring, throwing about and wasting it; and if a pigeon, more hardy or hungry than the rest, touched a grain of the hoard, all the others instantly flying upon it, and tearing it to pieces: if you should see this, you would see nothing more than what is every day established and practised among men. Among men you see the ninety-and-nine toiling and scraping together a heap of superfluities for one, and this one too, oftentimes, the feeblest and worst of the whole set a child, a woman, a madman, or a fool getting nothing for themselves all the while but a little of the coarsest of the provision which their own industry produces; looking quietly on while they see the fruits of all their labor spent or spoiled; and if one of the number take or touch a particle of the hoard, the others joining against him, and hanging him for the theft."

Paley got some good " livings " in his day. But in spite of his exceptional talents, he never reached the "Bench of Bishops." It was reported that when his name was mentioned favorably to George III, the King exclaimed, "Paley! What? Pigeon Paley?" Nevertheless, after the Pigeon paragraph quoted above, i.e., after showing that the landlord system is manifestly and essentially contra bonum publicum, Paley continued as follows in apparent seriousness :

"There must be some very important advantages to account for an institution which, in the view of it above given, is so paradoxical and unnatural."

Paley's mention of the pigeon more hardy or hungry than the rest reminds me of a conversation with Henry George, on an occasion when we met in Leeds. Judging by my own whereabouts in 1884, and by a reference in George's Life, p. 434, I feel sure it was in that year that our meeting in Leeds took place. He was accompanied by a very zealous and intelligent follower, Mr. McGee (or McHugh). I rallied Mr. George about a rather strong statement which he had lately made to the effect that it was "hard to repress a feeling of contempt" for the afflicted Irish "tenants," who, after enduring such and such, had only "occasionally murdered a landlord." He said, quite gravely, "Well, if you had been in Donegal with me, and had seen etc., etc., I think you would not have found fault with that statement." Of course I was really well enough acquainted with what, "by a heartless euphemism," says Cardinal Manning, we call the Land Question. My own grandfather had been evicted from his farm. I explained to my American friend that it was not courage which was wanting to the Irish. It was a case of Di me terrent: they considered it sinful to take the law into their own hands. Whether every individual victim of oppression took that conscientious view is another matter.

It was in Leeds, after his Scottish campaign, that Henry George told me he had seen the meaning of the "Reformation," in Scotland: the Lords wanted the Church properties!

I have been quoting Paley. Henry George himself, as I have said, gladly made use of the words of Thomas Spence, published in 1775, maintaining the public right to the rental value of land. The author of Progress and Poverty had already in his book quoted Herbert Spencer (Social Statics, ch. ix), declaring that Equity does not permit property in land.

The words of Fintan Lalor in the young Ireland days (1847), were the same as those of John Stuart Mill in later times : "The land of Ireland belongs to the people of Ireland." These same sentiments were also expressed very well by Mill's step-daughter, that spirited and intellectual lady, Miss Helen Taylor. Ruskin, unable to be present at George's lecture in London, wrote him a public letter wishing him "an understanding audience." Ruskin himself had already explained that the Social Problem meant simply how to get potatoes and meat enough on the table twice a day.

Others to whom Henry George made appeal for confirmation of his own (more fully developed) views were Turgot and other "illustrious Frenchmen," who in the darkness of the night "foresaw the glories of the coming day." To their memory he dedicated his book, Protection or Free Trade: "a great work, a masterly work," says Mr. Snowden, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer: "a work which gets down to the fundamentals of the controversy." Turgot (1727-81), theologian, lawyer, minister of State, and "philosopher," perceived that it could not be right or reasonable that the workingman should be taillable et corveable a merer, and unto starvation; nor that the weavers of purple and fine linen should be free from taxation. Instead of a confused medley of aids and tithes, and corvees and octrois, he desired that there should be one good impot, payable by those who were allowed to hold any portion of the national soil as their own. He had the root of the matter in him. He had got to what Mr. Snowden calls "the fundamentals" of Free Trade, freedom to buy and to sell, and to produce something for sale. Turgot was not like the simple-minded Frenchman of 1848, who wished to provide national workshops, and expensive overseers. In France above all countries there is a bountiful and pleasant national workshop provided for all by God Almighty; but Turgot's great proposal was too great, too new, too simple, and too just. It "displeased the privileged classes," says M. Georges Goyau.

The human mind is very conservative, and often very honestly so. Gladstone maintained that it was not true that he was too fond of change: he desired to "preserve not only whatever was good, but whatever was tolerable." Yet it is the usual fate of those who propose changes for the better, to frighten those people who are sufficiently content with things as they now are. And sometimes indeed the Rerum Novarum heralds, the preachers of much- needed improvements, use language to provoke the anger, or the ridicule, of every one. Proudhon (1809-65) for instance, proclaimed as a grand truth, such as may hardly be discovered and proclaimed "en deux mille ans," that Property is Theft! Seemingly he meant only that Landed Property, the Landlord system, is contra bonum publicum, and therefore unlawful, just as other private property is lawful, desirable, and necessary, precisely because it is pro bono publico. But naturally it has taken us a long time to see any sense in the bold and ludicrous statement, "La propriete c' est le vol."

Henry George cannot be said to have left himself open to misunderstanding of his meaning when denying the right of private property in earth and air and God's direct gifts. He explained over and over again that what he proposed was simply a just system of taxation. "We would take for the community what belongs to the community, leaving sacred to the individual all that belongs to the individual." Instead of taxing a man because he is industrious, or is doing something useful, or needs to eat and drink, we would take (he said) for the public needs the fair annual value of every town site, or other such landed property. Still I said to him one day quite truly that some men did not understand his doctrine. He said somewhat warmly, " They do not wish to understand," and I am afraid that was and is the truth in many cases.

Cardinal Manning understood Henry George from the very beginning. Thoughts about the Land Question, or The Condition of Labor, were not new to him. In 1874, in the Leeds Mechanics' Institute, I heard him deliver his Lecture on the Dignity and Rights of Labor. It was a delight to hear that silvery voice, and to follow those words "falling like snow flakes," so fresh and fair, every syllable so clear, and every sentence sending home its meaning to the mind so plainly as if the thought could not in any other way have been expressed. The great Archbishop, the distinguished Archdeacon of Chichester, was already at home, and was making the Catholic Church at home, among his own people, although Gladstone looked upon his going away from the Establishment as a death. The lecturer expressed the desire he had "to promote, if it be in my power, not only the good, but even the recreation, of my neighbor." Besides his historical survey, he went on to make such statements as that Labor is the origin of all our greatness, and that there is no limit as yet ascertained to the fertility of the earth. Talking of the Rights of Labor, he spoke of conditions which "turn men into creatures of burden I will not use any other word" and declared that we dare not go on in this path. …No Commonwealth can rest on such foundations."

The Archbishop was very calm, very sympathetic, very plain and clear in what he did say, but he showed us no definite way to remedy a state of things which was too bad to last. I contrasted his lecture with his sermons, already heard or read. In these he was peremptory and decisive. The ecclesiastical Paganini, as some one called him, never failed to make charming music with the one string, the Authority of the Church, the one authorized Teacher of Religion.

In 1874 I was not acquainted with his Letter to Earl Grey in 1868 (on Ireland). In that weighty appeal, he had gone plainly enough to the root of a matter which concerned others than the Irish people. He asserted that private rights must not damage the public weal; "that there is a natural and divine law, anterior and superior to all human and civil law, by which every people has a right to live of the fruits of the soil on which they are born, and in which they are buried." And he went on in a characteristic masterly summary:

"The Land Question, as we call it by a somewhat heartless euphemism, means hunger, thirst, nakedness, notice to quit, labor spent in vain, the toil of years seized upon, the breaking up of homes, the miseries, sicknesses, deaths, of parents, children, wives; the despair and wildness which spring up in the hearts of the poor when legal force, like a sharp harrow, goes over the most sensitive and vital rights of mankind. All this is contained in the Land Question."

It was no wonder that the writer of such lines understood and approved Henry George, when the time came. But not in the Sixties or the Seventies, even when Gladstone had begun to lessen the tyrannical power of Irish landlords, would either the Cardinal or Mr. Gladstone have thought of such a comparison as was set before us in the Eighties by Henry George. He told us to take notice that there had been no need to bring negro slaves into England or Ireland. When rough work was to be done, the natives were glad to be allowed to do it for their masters, in the worst possible conditions, because they had no chance of working for themselves: they had not a foot of ground of their own, on which to labor, or to lie down to rest.

In 1884, Mr. Wilfrid Meynell brought the author of Progress and Poverty to the Cardinal at Westminster. He afterwards described the interview in touching words, which Henry George, Jr., quoted in the Life of his father, p. 438. The Cardinal had no need to wait for the Royal Commission on the "Housing of the Working Classes," on which he served, his name coming next after that of the Prince of Wales (Edward VII), 1884-5.

We have now in the Life of Dr. Walsh, Archbishop of Dublin, published only at the end of the year 1928, a private letter in which the Cardinal tells plainly enough his agreement with George. He tells the Archbishop (p. 227), "I know what Henry George means . . . but I am not sure of your meaning, unless it be that the Irish people shall reenter into the possession of their own soil. The garrison must give way to the nation." This letter is dated August 17, 1886. In the Eighties, Dr. Walsh was defending the afflicted Irish tenants on the ground that they too (and not only the landlords) had rights in the land, rights given by Gladstonian legislation. At the same time, his private correspondence with Cardinal Manning showed that he was going more deeply into the subject. He wrote to the Cardinal in 1886-7: Progress and Poverty is a singularly interesting as well as ably written book. Ever since I read it, several years ago, I have felt convinced that the nationalization of the land will infallibly be a point of practical politics before very long. The sooner it is carried out, the less revolutionary the measure will be. What Dr. Corrigan [Archbishop of New York] writes is very sad. The extracts quoted by himself are quite sufficient to show . . . that George is a writer of singular definiteness and clearness. I do not think it possible that anyone who had read Progress and Poverty could have made such a mistake, or could have failed to see the irrelevancy of the arguments on which the Archbishop relies." (Life of Archbishop Walsh, pp. 227, 230.)

Dr. Corrigan had condemned a book either not read, or not understood, and he had "censured " the Rev. Dr. McGlynn "for publicly approving the views of Henry George. Reparation came to Dr. McGlynn" later, but too late.

I have not found any expression of Archbishop Walsh's opinion about the Letter which he did not like to call a Pastoral Letter issued in 1883 by Dr. Nulty, Bishop of Meath. Dr. Walsh himself was a great and good Irish Bishop, who most industriously used his exceptional talents in promoting the temporal and spiritual good of his people. He is sure to have read Bishop Nulty 's pronouncement and proof of that "The land of every country is the property of the people of that country." But it is easy to understand the general silence on the subject. Many interests in England and Ireland were alarmed by such an episcopal approbation of Michael Davitt's slogan, "The Land for the People. " In the Life of Henry George, p. 363 ., we may read of events in which almost all the actors have passed away.

WWhen George returned from seeing the Bishop of Meath at Mullingar, he said to me with a very slight American accent on the word very "Dr. Nulty would be a very good Radical man, if he were not a Bishop. "The simple fact was that, long before the famine of 1879-80, Dr. Nulty had been acquainted with the miseries inflicted upon the Irish people by bad laws and bad men. After the famine of 1847, he had seen the evictions; he had seen a rich country depopulated. "An eviction is a sentence of death," said Gladstone during one of his attempts to make bad laws less intolerable. His one short sentence was like a summary of the words of Archbishop Manning, already quoted. When the principal members of the Land League were on trial the Traversers they were called in legal language in the Four Courts, Bishop Nulty was present and prominent, and it was made public that he wished to give evidence to account for the existence and the operations of the Land League. But to the Judges such evidence seemed irrelevant. They did not wish to hear of explanations or excuses, or anything of past history, but only to inquire into certain alleged speeches or actions of the Traversers. Bishop Nulty was not invited into the witness-box.

I have mentioned Michael Davitt, a man of singular nobility of character, which was manifested not only in his touching last testament to the Irish People, but in the very fact of his coming out of the prison-house not a ruined and embittered man, but a still greater man than he was before his prolonged sufferings and humiliations began. Davitt was almost the only Irishman in politics who understood and approved Henry George's doctrine. In 1905, at Dalkey, not a year before his death, I asked him if he had learned his views from Henry George. He said that a lady journalist had asked him that question in a railway carriage in America. But no! It was in his own lonely reflections in his convict cell during many years that he perceived the real cause of the poverty of the people, and that it was not a mere Irish grievance. It was certainly remarkable how almost at the same, time but without communication three men came forward to preach "The Land for the People." Davitt and Dr. Nulty had been moved to think and to act by their acquaintance with the injustice practised on their own people, Henry George by his experience in "progress" and "boom" in California.

ManMany patriotic and intelligent Irishmen had it in mind that due reform in the land laws meant simply freeing the farmers from the risk of eviction and from rackrents. To them it was a very new doctrine that any one's right over land (of only prairie or site value) was quite different from ownership of producible and perishable goods. The new talk about nationalization only made them scoff. "I would not waste my time reading such nonsense," was said by Frank Hugh O'Donnell, M. P., and to myself by a more important man, still surviving, the idea was too novel for them to look at it at all. They had a notion that it meant putting a committee, or a county, or the State, in the place of the individual landlord. Where would the difference be? William O'Brien asked me in or about 1881. You see the difference, said George to me, when I repeated the words. I could not say that I did, at that early moment, before perceiving that a just tax makes it every body's interest to bring all land into use, so that there can be no need for starving people to outbid each other for a hold upon some small portion of what the landlord system chooses to throw open.

Nationalization was not a word used by Henry George. The national soil cannot be more national that it is. What can be done is to make a good use of it for the benefit of the nation. When George came back from his campaign in Australia, in reply to my question, he told me with a laugh that he had addressed very good meetings. They had a system there called totalization; they saw mention in the papers of nationalization; they thought it must be something of the same kind, and they gathered in crowds to hear him. I believe totalization is some sort of a plan for betting on horses.

Nationalization in the sense of a bureaucratic or state management was something with which George had no sympathy. I asked him one day how it was that a certain London daily paper, ably conducted, quite radical, quite literary, seemed to be against him. "Oh! they are Socialists: that is the reason. "This was in the days when even in The Times a friendly reviewer quoted one of his best passages, but made all quite smooth for the reader by some such declaration as that stuff of that sort was not likely to be swallowed by free-born Englishmen. The word socialism is often used without any very precise meaning. An Englishman, a convert, told me many years ago that Abbot Gasgnet was "by way of being a Socialist." Still there are real Socialists in England. And no wonder! Socialism would be better than the present system. But it would not last long. Socialists (says George) would try to rule the vital functions and internal relations of the human frame by conscious will. The public weal, which forbids private property in land (in the true sense of property or ownership), commands other private property, and the private management of one's own affairs.

A very active man in the Land League, along with Davitt was young Thomas Brennan. He was explaining one day to Henry George the high patriotic spirit of the Fenian Society, to which, I presume, he belonged. The Land League movement, he said, was "rather sordid." "All men are sordid," said Henry George. Of course he only meant, Primum est vivere. We must live, even though Talleyrand, who lived so very well, did not "see the necessity" for other people. Bobbie Burns admitted the plea even for the thieving mouse turned up by his plough!

Our Irish ideas have been pretty correct, yet rather vague, about the ownership of the soil. Thomas Brennan, a fine and brave young man, if somewhat too contemptuous and cocksure, prospered, I am glad to know, in Omaha. I hope it was not by any dealings in "real estate" that so militant a Land Leaguer made his way. But we have been accustomed in a vague way to remember ancient confiscations and modern evictions, and to nourish hopes that somehow justice would yet be done. The dear old Bishop of Clonfert, Dr. Duggan, about whom William O'Brien tells us so much in his Reminiscences, got Henry George to explain his views about the Land Question. Then he said: "Goon preaching that doctrine; that is what I used to hear around the turf fires in Connaught. "Still it was the usual Irish notion that payment of money for leave to work was like payment to a shopkeeper. I had youthful wonder about the plan of transferring land by means of a twig or a sod. And when I saw a landlord building a new house for himself in certain fields, I was in childish confusion of mind as to the ownership of the earth. For the landlord was a good man, and resident. He was raising a new home, where his father, an absentee, had allowed an old house to tumble to the ground.

In spite of all old struggles for "tenant-right," and then for making every man his own landlord, there was not among public men in Ireland sufficient sympathy for the views of the American who had come "to spread the light" on his own behalf, and on that of Patrick Ford's Irish World, and of Michael Davitt. When these views were new to me, in the early eighties, I consulted the Rev. Dr. Carr, a learned professor in Maynooth, afterwards Archbishop of Melbourne. In a kind letter, he wrote that the burden of proof lay upon the preachers of the new doctrine: that the Church had been approving of private property in land ever since the Donation of Constatine.

I think now that the word property is commonly used in two senses, but that Henry George correctly used it in only one and the same sense. Also, that the old landlordism was the cause in the Church of nepotism, pluralism, absenteeism, commendarism, and so forth. Moreover, the Church properties were really cases of public property in land, not private. The rents were intended for religious and charitable purposes. When the Rev. Dr. Browne (Bishop of Cloyne since 1894) was editor at Maynooth of the Irish Ecclesiastical Record, I begged him to have "Progress and Poverty" reviewed, perhaps refuted. He said that it was not possible to have the book considered at all in a publication bearing the Imprimatur of the Archbishop of Dublin (Dr. McCabe).

Indeed many worthy ecclesiastics did not, and do not, like to meddle with "what by a "heartless euphemism" we call the Land Question." In a theological conference at Spanish Place Church, in London, the. late Mgr. Moyes, a very learned, experienced, pious and zealous priest, said that it was for laymen to remedy the injustice done by bad laws. Nevertheless, Pope Leo, a few years earlier, had solemnly declared that" all the Ministers of Holy Religion must throw into the conflict (over the Social Problem) all the energies of their mind and all the strength of their endurance. " In the making of Encyclical Rerum Novarum, the Pope (report said) was influenced by Cardinals Manning and Gibbons. Certainly His Holiness enforced the "Dignity and Rights of Labor," that is of human nature, whilst insisting, even more plainly than Henry George, that individuals or families cannot lawfully be turned into employees of some public board, but must have their own roof-tree, and their own plot of ground, or demesne, of such size as may be pleasing to themselves.

Mr. George visited Cardinal Manning on at least one other occasion besides that already mentioned. In August 1890 he went to him in Carlisle Place, Westminster, along with his friend (who became my friend), "Father" Huntington, an intellectual and pious Ritualist clergyman from New York. George afterwards asked me to come with him to find Father Huntington, who had gone to pay a visit also to Father Lockhart, of the Institute of Charity, at St. Etheldreda's, Ely Place. As we went along Holborn in a hansom, he told me that, when leaving the Cardinal, Father Huntington had knelt down to ask his blessing. He would willingly have done the same, he said, but he did not wish to be misunderstood. That was characteristic of Henry George. He was the soul of honor: a most religious mind.

I spoke to him with a laugh about the severe words he had lately used against Herbert Spencer's backsliding. He said with warmth, "And what else was it but a cowardly apostasy?" Of course I only enjoyed the phrase, because those very free thinkers are always saying that we Christians are the cowardly poor folk. Spencer had forgotten his former ideas about rent, and his question regarding the rate per annum at which injustice turns into justice. In 1892 George published his book, A Perplexed Philosopher. It is not surprising that neither the Duke of Argyl nor Herbert Specner even attempted any reply to Henry George.

We read at least once a year, viz. on the 14th Sunday after Pentecost (or perhaps the 15th after Trinity) the words (St. Matt. ch. VI) in which Our Divine Lord declares that if we were ruled by God's laws , if justice prevailed among men, we should have all that we need. The birds of the air have abundance: the sweet nurslings of the vernal skies (as Keble calls them) do not need to toil.

Many men who have often read that passage act and speak as if Our Lord's words were not true. Perhaps they do not wish to understand. Since we are not leading an ordinary, natural, i. e. divinely appointed, life, we are driven to make a living by all sorts of laborious dodges, producing nothing, adding nothing to our common stock, merely passing things (perhaps not dishonestly) from one pocket to another. We live by huxtering, i. e. picking up such difference as we can between what we pay for goods, and what is paid to us. And so there are ten shops in every small street, "cutting each others throats," where one shop would be enough. Or we live by gambling, of one sort or another. "Don't call them promoters," said a friendly solicitor to me in London, referring to some members of a religious co-fraternity; "in London a promoter is a man who is robbing the public."

And those who cannot be promoters in that sense are driven to gather up used postage stamps, tin-foil, tissue paper, or other cast-off trifles. I know a man practising this sort of industry who calls himself le chiffonier du bon Dieu. A rag-gatherer for religious and charitable purposes in God's own world, full of God's rich gifts! And we pay tens of thousands of men for standing idle at the street corners, or in public institutions, instead of paying them for producing cheap food in the tens of thousands of now idle acres. And we pay able-bodied men who might be doing useful work to stand at the receipt of custom for the annoyance of travellers, in the childish attempt to "tax the foreigner," as if he were an enemy to be punished for offering us cheap goods. And we tout for the tourist foreigner, as if we had not the ability and honesty to pay our own expenses in our own country. And some of us charitably spend money and pains in sending families away from their native land, to be exiles in the snow or the slum, and still "in dreams to see the Hebrides," or to weep for the "winding banks of Erne," the woodlands and meadows of that southern "Avondhu, which of the Englishman is called Blackwater."

I have said that we in Ireland are rather vague in our notions about popular rights, though we may cherish an innate sympathy with such a cry as "The Land for the People," or the cry of Roderick Dhu, "These fertile plains, that softened vale, Were once the birthright of the Gael."

But it would be worth our while to consider well how much truth there may be in the fuller doctrine which Walter Scott, elsewhere, makes a Highlander teach to young Edward Waverley: "To take a tree from the forest, a salmon from the river, a deer from the hill, or a cow from lowland strath, is what no Highlander need ever think shame upon. " [Waverley, ch. 18.]

The political economy of Henry George is what gives clear ideas on these points. He himself had great confidence in the power of truth. But he realized the power of vested interests, and the selfishness and inhumanity of man. His confidence simply was that somehow, somewhere, sometime, the Laws of Heaven would prevail, the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of man be recognized.