The Influence of Henry George's
Principles in Denmark

Jakob E. Lange

[An address delivered at the Henry George Congress, 12 September 1927, New York, New York
Reprinted from Land and Freedom, September-October 1927]

I know that in selecting this subject for my lecture, Henry George and Denmark, I unite something grand with something very small. Still I do it because I want to tell you what influence our great leader has had upon the life of Denmark, and because our experience may tell you something in what ways and by what means the philosophy of Henry George may be carried all over the world.

When you compare the two great minds within social economics for the last seventy years (the only two ones that can be compared), Karl Marx and Henry George, you will see a remarkable difference, and you will find the reason for it not so much in the personality of the men as in the conditions of the times. Most of you know that when Karl Marx was quite a young man he wrote (in 1848) the famous Communist Manifesto. The first thing in this Manifesto that he says to the proletariat of all countries is "You must nationalize rent, take over land values. This is the cornerstone of the New World." But then Karl Marx went to England and never came back to his own country. He lived in England and what did he see there? He saw a great country whose millions had lost their land, and had lost at the same time any initiative. When Karl Marx wrote Das Kapital he, therefore, instead of beginning with man and nature, always sees the beginning of everything in the capitalist, the employer. "A capitalist, who owns 20,000 pounds, builds a factory, installs machinery and hires some men." That is how he sees things and from that standpoint, from that experience, he built up his whole philosophy and ended by creating a universal state capitalism which is now called Socialism. When Henry George, twenty or thirty years later, looked out on the world, he looked out on Young America. He did not see the capitalist building houses, putting in machinery and hiring men. That great spectacle, that wonderful event in the history of the world, the conquering of America, was not done either by capitalists or by government officials; it was done by John Smith and Jim Jones and many others from many countries. It was done with a plow, a sack of wheat and a team, but everywhere, wherever it was done, on the prairies or in the woods, it was a man who worked with or without capital chiefly without but with the land, and who succeeded roughly in creating out of the wilderness, if not a rose garden, at least a cornfield.

When Henry George built up his social economics on this foundation, he had to begin was forced to begin with land and labor. He did not look out upon proletarians; he looked out upon men who had not lost initiative, and he saw that if we could recreate this easy access to nature in America, the World, following this example, would not only be a cornfield but a rose garden.

Whenever and wherever you find a 'country where some of the same spirit of independence exists in the common man, as it did in America at the time of Henry George, you have the right field for sowing the seed. And because in my country some of this spirit to some extent existed among my countrymen, even the lowliest, the seed would take root there and germinate, although occasionally it would fall among thorns and stones.

Denmark is different from most of the other countries of Europe in that the people never lost the land. Especially when compared with England you see this great difference, that by laws dating back several hundred years it was absolutely forbidden to unite two or more family farms in order to create big manorial properties, and we never experienced the great enclosures by which the peasantry and yeomanry of England were annihilated. While England preserved pheasants, we took care of our peasants. And when the first dawn appeared on the European horizon, when those French philosophers (the Physiocrats) who invented the term "Single Tax" about 1760 when their ideas overran Europe in a remarkable way, the only place where their ideas struck root to germinate and produce practical results was in Denmark where by the influence of these ideas the peasants were liberated and were given such conditions on the land that they were enabled to build for the future; they had the opportunity of work ing out their own salvation. And they rapidly began to do that. So you can go more than one hundred years back and see that the ideas of the Single Tax were actually arising in Denmark.

And so with Free Trade not in that clear and absolute form in which our great leader presented it to the world, but in the limited form advocated by Cobden and Bright. It opened up to us the best market in the world. And the Danish peasant-farmer, just started on his uphill course, here found his future the possibility for doing his best. And very soon after, having realized this, he went in for that purpose and attained if not actually to the leader ship in farming, at least to a place in the front.

Other conditions which I shall not here at this late hour speak of in detail, stirred up new problems and were introduced among the farmers. Europe was placed in a position of dire need under which other countries than Denmark almost lost their commercial and financial balance. You know how in the seventies, America, especially the broad Middle West, began to send over by cheap transportation, cheap corn, cheap wheat, and the European farmers did not know what to do. Now our cousins, they said, send us wheat and other things from these broad acres at prices which will not suffice for what we can raise on our limited strips of land. What are we to do? In Germany Bismarck by a masterstroke of what you may call "policy," united the great landowners' interests and the new capitalistic manufacturers' interests, "yunkers and smokestack-barons." The small landowners followed the lead of the big ones and consequently Germany was given over to that policy misnamed protection.

In England they did not dare to do that, and the farmers let their hands sink down. They do not know what they are going to do even now except sell the land for golf links to rich Americans.

But in Denmark we did otherwise. Not because we had keener minds, but because we were Democrats, and did not want to follow the lead of the big landowner and capitalist. As soon as our big landowners said protection, we said free trade. But we had to say something more. So we said: Why shouldn't we use this cheap corn, cheap wheat and cheap grain for feeding hogs, for producing milk and butter for the use of our other cousins beyond the North Sea? Plain thinking for the common man. Not philosophy just plain thinking. And when we began to put into operation this plan we did it on straight democratic lines. Those engaged in a political war with the great landowners and capitalists became democratic cooperators, and that is why Danish cooperation was a success, built on the theory that we must all do our best. Cooperation and this new form of agriculture worked well together, but this created a new phase of the land problem.

We had kept by wise policies the land in the hands of the peasantry and the farmers. We had through the nineteenth century made them proprietors, and consequently to these farmers the land problem did not exist in an acute phase for them. But now there had come into being a new strata: the landless or quasi-landless farmer, the owner of three, four, five or ten acres. Here was the new land question in Denmark. The keenest minds saw that problem. The way some people thought it would be solved (especially from the aristocratic stand point) was by advising them to immigrate to America. "There is plenty of land over there," they said. But of course this is not the true solution and even if it were then it is not today, when America is practically closed to the common man. And naturally this forced to the front the claim for a new and better solution: That of settling them on the land of Denmark to create the "New America" at home.

At the same time it became practically possible to solve it to a certain extent because under intensive cultivation even some few acres might be of value and the man who had only five or six acres began to think of becoming a farmer, not only a farm laborer. He knew that even if he had only one horse and two cows he was just as well a member of the corporation as the man with one hundred cows. Naturally there also the question arose: How can the landless get land and how can the quasi-landless get land? This happened almost at the same time that Progress and Poverty was translated into Danish, not only the book but the ideas. And I must say that those followers of Henry George who managed to introduce this philosophy among the small holders of Denmark (I refer especially to Mr. Berthelsen), by a masterstroke introduced at the right moment the right ideas within the right group of men. The small holders of Denmark became the stout supporters of land value taxation and free trade, and this is the strength of the Danish Georgism. This is what prevented the movement among the small holders from degenerating into a class movement, but broadened it to universal importance so that it even stamped to a very large extent Danish politics and legislation.

Here lies the chief difference between Denmark and other countries in Europe where the ideas of Henry George are known. With us they are firmly rooted in the broadest strata. We have not gone very far, but we have a good valuation system. We have got perhaps the best valuation. We do not hear any more the words "it is impossible to value the land." Anyone who knows anything knows that it is easier to value land correctly than to value improvements. In attaining to this it was a great help to us that we have had a kind of land valuation in Denmark for 200 years, so that in Denmark you can ask in any registration office, "What is the taxable appreciation of this bit of land since 1688," and the officer can tell you on a map that "that square is three acres and a half, and is valued at so much."

We also have more free trade and more free traders than in any other country in Europe, and we have absolutely stopped any deal between capital and organized industrial labor in introducing during these difficult times more protection. A policy in the direction of more protection cannot be carried because Progress and Poverty was translated thirty years ago!

We have adopted a certain amount of land value taxation, but besides this we also introduced the right principle in another way. When we cut up some of the overgrown family estates, we transformed them into a kind of practical Henry George settlement, by not selling the land, nor leasing it, but giving it to the men as proprietors (they become proprietary farmers like the rest of us), but we tell them "the land value you cannot touch." "You will have to pay interest forever 4J^,% on the value of the bare land." We have divided the proprietary rights in two the land belongs to the worker, the land value belongs to the community. It was not the leaders of the movement of Henry George who realized this; it was the small holders and their own leaders, but you see the influence of the ideas of Henry George. The instinct of the Danish peasant was for "property." He looked back upon the tenancy of the eighteenth century as a kind of slavery, and he wanted to be a proprietor. But he accepted the fundamental idea of Henry George; he saw the common rights as well, and tried to make provision for this.

This is the little we have done. Not much, certainly, but I wanted to tell you of it, chiefly because I wanted to make you feel that it is not the individual agitator or preacher who does this or that, but chiefly the conditions of the times. Seeds of economic justice can only germinate where people have the will to work out their own salvation, to become their own masters. That is why the industrial multitudes in very few cases are alive to these problems. The industrial multitudes have organized a war against employers. I look forward to the time when they will organize to do without employers. This will be the time when they too will see.

In conclusion. People speak very much about the debt of Europe to America whether it should be can celled or not. There is one debt which can never be can celled and that is a debt which Europe owes to America as the country of Henry George. But I want to tell you as countrymen of Henry George and, so to speak, his heirs, that you also owe to Europe a debt. Senator Hennessy mentioned how Europe is split up by innumerable tariff barriers. Now America, the United States, the strongest economic power of the world, owes it to Europe to demolish their own protective tariff. Now is the time for you to do this, to set the example to the old world.