Henry George

Alexander MacKendrick

[A Memorial Address delivered to the Scottish League for the Taxation of Land Values, by the President, Alexander Mackendrick. Reprinted from the Single Tax Review, January-February 1910]

A I have no hesitation in ranking Henry George as among the greatest men of the Nineteenth Century, and what follows will be an attempt to substantiate this placing of him.

The much debated question whether the times produce the great men or the great men the times, like the conundrum of the hen and the egg, it would be futile to waste time discussing. The point to note with satisfaction is that the great man always seems to come when he is wanted. Interpret it how we may it is the fact that when the fullness of time has come, when men's minds are prepared, it may be by much pain and suffering, to receive a new truth, a great teacher appears and nothing is ever again the same in the old world as it was before. A new force has been introduced into the complex scheme of life, and the vibrations which are set up, go on extending in concentric circles outward toward Infinity.

It may be useful to review shortly the speculative position as it seems to have stood for average men, up to the time of the coming of Henry George. For a few generations previous to thirty years ago, the social outlook for thoughtful lovers of the human race must have been of the most gloomy and hopeless kind. The so-called science of political economy which professes to teach the laws governing the production and distribution of wealth had amply earned for itself the name by which Carlyle had christened it, that of "the dismal science." For it had failed to provide any light to governors and legislators that was better than darkness. In its efforts to make its conclusions square with facts, it set up theories only to recant them again. Under its guidance or no guidance, there had arisen that strangest of spectacles, an unprecedented increase in the wealth of the country, accompanied by Manchester Insurrections, Chartist rebellions, Bread riots, and wide-spread pauperism. Its favorite and loudly proclaimed doctrine of liberty or laissez faire, had turned out in practice to mean for the mass of men the liberty to die of starvation. These facts ought to and probably would have served to raise doubts as to the soundness of the orthodox economy had not the teachings of Malthus buttressed and supported it by the theory, that there is a constant tendency for population to outrun the means of subsistence; thus laying the poverty and suffering of mankind upon the broad back of natural causes which could not by any possibility be evaded.

Thus the conclusion was forced upon the minds of our fathers that poverty and starvation were natural and inevitable; that that was just how the laws of the universe worked out and there was no use in grumbling at it. In addition to this, remember that we had for many generations been living under the shadow of the dismal doctrines of Calvinism, which taught us the total depravity of human nature. We were all hopelessly corrupt and doomed to Eternal damnation for sins we could not help committing, except, of course, an elect few who couldn't go astray if they wanted to. It was thundered and pounded into our consciousness that human nature was deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. And just as we were beginning to move and make the first effort to waken ourselves out of this dreadful nightmare, there came Thos. Carlyle, who told us that the British Empire contained so many million people "mostly fools," and that the only chance for society was to lay hold of the few exceptional wise men granted to each generation, to put its affairs in the wise man's hands, and go its way rejoicing and thanking God. This was the only Morrison's pill that the greatest moral teacher of the 19th Century could prescribe for the healing of the nations.

Consider then, the predicament in which we were placed. Not only were we, according to Calvin and Carlyle, rogues and fools by nature, bound by natural law to suffer all the consequences of our roguery and folly, but we found ourselves also, according to Malthus and the Economists, caught in a kind of patent rat-trap from which there was no escape, which condemned about two-thirds of our number to perpetual grinding poverty; a predicament for which we could not blame either our lack of righteousness or our lack of wisdom. Is it possible to conceive a gloomier Golgotha than that of the human outlook to men who really believed the teachings of Theology and Political Economy? I suppose that with sound digestion and stupidity one might subscribe to any creed, however horrible, and it seems as though our ancestors must have been fairly well protected by these two conditions. In any case, that men and women continued to live and love and laugh and beget children proves, I think, that the doctrines of Theology and Political Philosophy were not really believed in at all. Men only thought they believed them, or believed they believed. It can only have been an unconscious undercurrent of scepticism, or, call it, if you will, an unconscious faith in God which saved the race from death by despair or a universal suicide of some kind. Men must have felt somewhere in the subconscious regions of their minds, that somehow and at some time justice would be discovered at the heart of things, and that the laws of nature would ultimately be found to work out toward moral ends.

Meantime, the revolt of the minds of men under intellectual concepts which could not be honestly or sincerely believed in, had some curious reactionary effects. On the purely intellectual side it became necessary that the God who was supposed to preside over this welter of rogues and fools struggling as in the Egyptian jar of tamed vipers, each to get his head above the others; it became necessary, I say, that the God who presided over this chaos should be deposed and ruled out of the cosmos altogether. There arose in consequence the rationalistic materialism of the middle of the century, which, building upon the rapidly accumulating scientific discoveries of Darwin and Wallace and other nature searchers, constructed what is now known as the mechanical theory of the universe, a theory which interpreted all life in terms of the redistribution of matter and motion, with mind as an incidental or accidental by-product. The solar system was figured as some huge cathedral clock which had been set in motion by some mysterious agency of a mainspring, the power of which was slowly working itself out through the millions of wheels and pinions and ratchets on toward its escapement in human life with the tick-tick of its feeble efforts at thinking and doing. The obvious functions of a clock were to tick and run itself down and that, it was held, is just what the Universe is doing; and the emotions and passions of humanity were to be regarded simply as the undertones in the ticking of that huge cosmic clockwork.

On the emotional and moral side again, the revolt from the old Theological and Political dogmas produced the various theories of political collectivism which found perhaps their highest expression in the scientific socialism of Karl Marx. It would take too long even to mention the many society reconstructors and Fabian waiters-upon-providence who have during the last century built up the substantial body of opinion which we now know as socialism, and still more impossible is it to trace the stages and phases in the evolution of the idea with the contributions made by each thinker. But one thing seems pretty clear, that however much the various socialist writers have differed in method and detail, they have all been agreed in accepting the conclusions of the orthodox Economists, supported by the science of the period, that the laws of nature are immoral, or, at all events, non-moral; that there is a tendency for things in human society to go askew; that injustice and suffering are the natural outcome of the forces at the back of things. It became then obvious that in obedience to the moral sense which, it was argued, is only to be found in the human mind it was absolutely necessary to suspend the laws of nature and to set up instead a system of artificial laws which would work out results more in conformity with the human standard of ethics than natural law seemed capable of producing. Logical consistency seemed also to compel the socialist philosophy to abandon all conception of a god as ruler of the Universe. If the laws of nature when left to themselves worked out toward injustice and cruelty, it was of course impossible to postulate a beneficent force at the back of things; and a god who was not beneficent was of course no god at all.

So matters seem to have stood in the world of speculation for a considerable number of weary, dreary years, and, as I have said, the outlook for any really thoughtful and humane soul must have been such as to make life a burden. One can figure the collective human race saying in bitterness of soul to itself in the words of Hamlet, "The world is out of joint, Oh, cursed spite, That ever we were born to set it right." The thing seemed wellnigh hopeless unless men collectively should evolve sufficient wisdom to take firm hold of the great economic forces and compel them along lines of justice and equity. And if we grant the original postulate that natural law contains no element of justice and that the relationship between men has a natural tendency to get into a [unreadable], that is the only thing left for us to do; that is what we have been trying for years to do by Poor-law acts, by Factory acts, Old-age pensions, and such legal enactments. But the darkest hour often precedes the dawn. The stygian darkness in the speculative horizon had gone down to its deepest shade of blackness. A few stray scintillations of diffused luminosity perhaps still remained to remind observant star-gazers that there once had been a sun above the horizon, but otherwise all was dark and gloomy. We lived in a fatherless world. The great companion was dead, and we poor orphans must band ourselves together to combat the merciless natural laws which threatened to crush us!

Well, ladies and gentlemen, I hope you will not think I am deliberately straining my metaphors or striving after merely theatrical effect when I figure this night of starless gloom as being suddenly penetrated by a ray of light, at first a feeble and flickering ray struggling with difficulty to overcome the circumambient darkness, but a ray destined ultimately to broaden out to the light of day, bringing hope and gladness in its train.

That ray of light was the message of Henry George, and I know that to many here present, myself included, it came as a message of hope and good cheer, altering the entire aspect of the world for ever after.

And what then was the message of Henry George? It was nothing less than a complete vindication both of the laws of God and of human nature. It proved beyond dispute that poverty and destitution are not the result of natural law, but are entirely caused by artificial or human laws which permit certain men to call the earth their own. It proved with irrefragable logic, that poverty is only the inevitable corollary to special privilege; that struggle and destitution are just the other side of monopoly. It showed clearly that in the absence of monopoly in the sources of labor, men's natural desire to satisfy their own wants would be a quite sufficient force to dispel poverty and ensure plenty to all.

Moreover, the message of Henry George showed us exactly where the dismal science of the orthodox economists had gone wrong. They professed to explain the natural laws according to which wealth was produced and distributed, and they had omitted to notice that they had begun their observations at a point where natural law had already been interfered with and violated. That is to say, they took a state of things where certain men had taken hold of nature's storehouses and were in a position to dictate to others whether they should starve or work under conditions dictated by them, and assumed that to be natural. They then, upon that false assumption, built up the superstructure of deductions which led inevitably and logically to the melancholy conclusions which caused Ruskin to say bad words of Stuart Mill and roused Carlyle's righteous soul to a white heat of indignation against the whole tribe of logic-choppers and theorygrinders. And yet the logic-chopping economists were perfectly right in their logic; it was only their primary or fundamental assumption that was wrong, and the wrongness of which vitiated all the conclusions built upon it. They did not see the blunder with which they started, so difficult is it for men to think themselves out of the toils of a conventional traditional idea if only it be of sufficient antiquity, and consecrated by approval of the dominant religion.

Even Carlyle and Ruskin, those thundering denunciators, did not see the false assumption which underlays that long chain of deductions which ended in this quagmire of hopeless pessimism. The clear seeing of that initial blunder was reserved for him whose life and work have inspired this society. Henry George was the first to give us a clear sight of the knot that was threatening to strangle us and show us how it might be untied. He was the first to vindicate the laws of God or the laws of nature as one may choose to call them, and to prove that destitution and poverty are due to artificial laws which men had made, and which men can unmake. of Henry George. To those who understood it, it was like the sight of a sail to shipwrecked sailors. It was like news of water springs to parched and thirsty travelers. It was like the first coming of Spring to dwellers in a frost bound country. It not only showed the cause of the dead-lock in human affairs which had issued in the primary economic evils of poverty and the innumerable secondary and derivative evils of deteriorated character, moral and physical, but it showed the way out of the cul-de-sac or blind alley in which humanity had been rolling and tumbling in so wicked and wasteful a manner. Henry George showed us that poverty is not to be removed either by extending markets or protecting industries or abolishing kings, but only by removing those unjust privileges which permit certain men to fence in the earth and deny to others the right to live.

Again the message of Henry George like the bold plea of Abraham when he argued with the Almighty for the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, was a chivalrous defence of poor maligned human nature. Men and women he said are not corrupt, and neither are they fools, despite all the Calvins and Carlyles that ever vilified the race. George's strong and simple faith was at bottom a faith in humanity. To him faith in God whom we have not seen is impossible without faith in man whom we have seen. To him Christianity revealed an undeveloped saint inside of every sinner, as democracy postulated a wise man inside of every fool. He rediscovered the fact which has been forgotten and trampled out of sight for centuries, that the spirit of man tendeth ever upward; that original sin has more than its counterpoise in original goodness; that love and sympathy are among the original cosmic forces and are facts as solid and substantial as selfishness and egotism. His faith in human nature was infinite.

It may be difficult for young men to understand the feelings of middle-aged ones whose memories go back to the times of which I have spoken. I occasionally yet recall with horror the pains and sickness of heart on discovering that the beautiful world I had been born in was honeycombed and worm-eaten with misery, and on receiving no explanation of it all from my seniors and teachers and preachers, but the old story of its being the will of God. It is hardly possible to exaggerate the horror of the outlook at that time to any young person who was keenly alive emotionally and intellectually. The heart was torn, and the cup of pleasure poisoned by the miseries one saw around him, and the reason was affronted by the utterly inadequate explanations offered by clergy and political philosophers, who had been stationed at the outposts of thought for the express purpose of telling us the time of day.

I may have dwelt on this point unduly, but it seems to me necessary to realize the utter blackness of the speculative outlook at this particular time, before one can understand the good cheer contained in the message.

That George's political economy is the true one, the world is gradually though slowly coming to realize, but one wonders much that the process should have been a slow one at all. If truth has the compelling power that we like to think is its chief attribute, why should its teachers be constantly treated with contumely and the truth itself scoffed at and rejected? Why should the economic truth expounded by George that there is but one cause of poverty and one cure, have met with slow acceptance? The knowledge of this truth promised to make men free in no mere metaphorical or mystic sense, but in the very tangible sense of emancipating men from the slavery of circumstances, poverty, and struggle. It was surely just the Gospel we were all waiting for and should have grasped with avidity. Why then should it have required 25 years of arduous toil on the part of the few who first saw and realized the meaning of it, to bring this truth into the arena of public life? There are probably many reasons, and it may be useful to examine a few of them.

First of all it ran full tilt against vested interests and tended to that upsetting of settled opinions which men have an instinctive tendency to resist. Like the Copernican theory of Astronomy which was resisted to persecution by the church because it contradicted the churches teaching as to the constitution of the Universe and tended to undermine the church's authority, so the Political philosophy of George was either resisted or ignored by the church because it cut the foundations from below the old doctrine of original sin upon which the superstructure of dogma had been built. It also ran counter to the selfish interests of law makers who were for the most part landowners. It is not so easy, however, to understand the indifference and opposition of the oppressed middle and lower classes to whom it should have come as a gospel of hope.

One can only explain it by the supposition that in the mysterious chemistry of the human mind there are psychological moments when, and when only, a new truth can combine with the old stock of ideas already in possession and produce that electric spark we call intuition - insight or vision. This is the only hypothesis by which I can explain to myself the utter failure of mere argument or logical demonstration to convince reasonable and thoughtful men, most of whom are not lacking in the sentiment of justice which ought to predispose them to see the truth. For, after all, it is by vision or insight we live and understand things and not by logic or ratiocination and the weighing of reasons; and the balancing of considerations are but the unconscious effort of the mind to focus the mental vision to that delicate point where the lines of life fall into their proper perspective. Reason and argument are of course the means by which intuition or vision comes, and the unthinking mind remains for ever without them. But reason and argument are valuable only in so far as they increase the chances of these psychical combinations of ideas which produce the flashes of intuition which carry us one step further in our knowledge of the Eternal verities. The explanation I here offer of this strange inability on the part of reasonable men to assimilate the teaching of Henry George has bred in me a forbearing patience that was not mine earlier in life, but it has also produced a confidence that now the collective mind is really astir, now that the human intelligence is more and more being directed to social problems, the chances of vision are infinitely greater than when men's reasoning faculties lay paralysed under the hypnotising tyranny of Theological and Politico-Economic theories.

Again Henry George's central doctrine has suffered heavily from its extreme simplicity. The genus homo has a curious aversion to simple explanations of its difficulties, or simple remedies for its social ills. Like Naaman the leper, when commanded by the prophet to wash in the river Jordan and be cleansed of his leprosy, they are offended by the obviousness and by the absurd simplicity of the cure offered. It seemed to rob the disease of the mysterious distinction with which it had been invested. It is a curious fact that in religion, in philosophy, in science, art, and politics, the very last things to be learned are the great simplicities.

The chief obstacle however to the acceptance and understanding of Henry George's Politico-Economic doctrines has arisen through a cause which I should like to explain at some length. It is my opinion that we have never yet realized how completely our conception of human life has been dominated, or, I might say, magnetized by the mechanical theory of things to which I referred a little while ago. We have been thinking of human life both individual and collective as a balancing of forces, an interaction of causes with effects which can be measured and stated in quantitative terms, arithmetical or mathematical-so many foot pounds of energy exerted here, reappearing in the same definite measurable results there, minus the amount also measurable, which has escaped in friction. Unconsciously to ourselves, we have been applying mechanical principles to our interpretation of the relation between cause and effect in society. We have unthinkingly been expecting to find quantitative relations between causes and effects, and, not finding these, we fail to understand a true diagnosis when it is offered. All the catch-phrases of science and philosophy have tended to confirm us in this mistaken application of mechanical principles to life. We are told that "every result must have adequate cause" - that "nothing can act but where it is." We hear of the conservation of energy - the convertibility of heat into motion - the equivalence of forces - and so on - and we thus fail to observe that this mechanical equivalence of forces does not apply when our field of enquiry is among the mysterious phenomena of life.

The moment we rise out of the physicochemical world where forces can be measured and checked with their results into the biological and sociological strata, then the relation between causes and effects eludes all our methods of measurement. And this is the fact we are so apt to forget just because of the dominating influence which unconsciously to ourselves the mechanical theory has had upon our minds. When men are told that all the distressful facts of pauperism, destitution, and unemployment, are due to the pressure of land monopoly, they look round and say, "why the pressure is very slight, land can be got in Canada for nothing, land can be got at home for very little, landlords everywhere are eager to sell, to lease, or feu." They admit perhaps here and there a little hurtful pressure is to be found, but, on the whole, it seems so utterly inadequate to account for the enormous multiplex results that the hypothesis is discarded as quite incredible, and the causes of social distress are looked for in various other directions, original sin being usually the final scapegoat.

The difficulty in understanding the relation of cause and effect between landlordism and pauperism is due, I believe, to our having carried the "equivalence of forces" idea out of the physico-chemical field into the biological and sociological where it does not hold good. If any gentleman present could get his thumb under my skull and exert a little pressure upon my brain (assuming that he was so fortunate as to find some gray matter there) the effect would be prodigious. It would convert me either into a raving lunatic or a brilliant genius. In either case the effect would be out of all thinkable relation to the cause; it would neither be predictable in quality nor measurable in quantity. Here as elsewhere we must believe there is a law in the relationship between the apparently trivial cause and the enormous effect, but it is a law which we do not understand, and which we have no mental machinery for comprehending.

Spencer says somewhere "matter in its last analysis is inscrutable, but we understand its laws. Mind is inscrutable, and we understand a very little of its laws, but the relation between mind and matter is altogether inscrutable." Pardon me if I seem to dwell on this point, but I wish to emphasize my belief that in all things connected with life there is no merely mechanical relation between cause and effect - that apparently small causes may produce great results, and vice versa. I once spent a whole day in a pair of boots one size too small for me and I need not tell any one who has had a similar experience that the pains I suffered were not confined to my feet. My head ached and my back ached, every muscle in my body seemed to join in protest against a slight pressure with which, theoretically, they had nothing to do. The whole corporate body suffered in sympathy with a slight restriction upon the liberty of those two humble members. When in the evening I got myself into another pair of boots, it seemed incredible that a quarter of an inch difference in girth of two pieces of leather could make all the difference between Heaven and Hell. The reason of all this is obvious. My body is not a machine, it is not a congerie of unrelated parts put together by a skillful artificer and wound up to go. It is an organism that has grown and evolved. It is a great community of living cells, each one dependent for its well being upon the well being of every other one. It is interrelated in all its parts. The thinking cells and the working cells all live a common life and none can say to the other, I have no need of you. An injury done to one cell, a restriction of the liberty and health of one part, sets up sympathetic vibrations in every other part, and so effects are multiplied and magnified in a ratio which, as I have said, eludes all our means of computation.

Now we ought to have known by this time that society is not a machine, but an organism which has grown and evolved after the same manner and according to the same laws as those by which animal life has evolved from lower to higher forms, for Herbert Spencer has familiarized us with the idea. But somehow this fact has never yet deeply permeated into our consciousness. We still continue to think of social relations in terms of the mechanical equivalent of forces. For example, I have found many intellectual men who will admit at once the anomalies and injustices of land monopoly, but their method of reasoning is this: they sum up the total amount pocketed annually by receivers of land rent, divide it by the number of noses, and discover that it means £3. or £4. annually to each when equally distributed. Then they naturally exclaim, what a beggarly reform! Is this the panacea that is to bring about the economic Millennium? They cannot see that it is not the miserable £3. per annum we are after, it is life, health, liberty, free and full circulation of the communal life blood.

Now it may seem a small thing that I am insisting upon, this realizing of the difference between the mechanical theory of society and the organic one, but I am convinced it makes all the difference between our chances of correctly grasping Henry George's central idea or missing it altogether. We think in images. We must visualize in some way an intellectual concept and hold it up to our imagination in some definite form before we can understand it, and I am convinced that the image that rises to most men's imagination when they think of society, is that of an intricate machine put together by human ingenuity and regulated by mechanical laws. Not long ago I had a conversation with a gentleman who has distinguished himself as a professor of Economics. After an interesting discussion, he closed it by maintaining that, after all, a kind of rough justice prevails even at present in the distribution of income, and that unemployment was but the inevitable friction which can never be abolished, and can only be reduced or modified by employment-bureaus and other means of mobilizing labor. Here again, I thought, is that paralyzing mechanical theory. Society is a machine and its joints must be oiled and its bearings kept in order, and its valves and escapements and regulators must be seen to, but, in spite of all, friction and heat can never be entirely got rid of.

Such conclusions to the thoughtful and humane man would be depressing to the last degree but for the conviction which is borne in upon one by a broad induction from observation and experience; a conviction that frequently delivers one from the despair engendered by the terrible problems which beset society; a conviction which will serve to lay the foundations of what will perhaps be proved to be a more satisfying religion than any we have heretofore leaned upon. This conviction which lies inarticulate in the sub-consciousness of every healthy mind, may be expressed in the following words: "Depressing and melancholy theories as to the ultimate laws of things are always untrue." This is a generalization or hypothesis which I believe may be trusted as we trust the law of gravitation, and may be confidently applied as the best answer to all theories that reflect discredit upon the laws of nature. All the same, I warn you that this mechanical theory with its idea of the balancing of forces according to arithmetical and mathematical laws, is a very insidious one, and forms a trap which careful thinkers should beware of.

Some years ago at a meeting of the Ruskin Society in course of a discussion on some question of social reform, I made the unfortunate remark that the aim of all social regulations should be to make justice automatic; to make rewards and penalties self-adjusting. Of course, I brought down upon my unfortunate head the ridicule of a humorist who raised a picture of a slot for pennies and a piece of machinery that will not always work as it was intended to do, and which sometimes robs you both of your penny and the thing you desired to possess. Then I saw my blunder. The word I should have used was not automatic, but organic. What I really meant was, that, as in the healthy human body right action of the liver or lungs becomes organic and proceeds spontaneously without help or artificial stimulus, thus producing a sense of well-being, so in the social body the aim should be to produce those conditions of health under which all useful activities would become organic or spontaneous and require no artificial stimuli. The right understanding of Henry George's teaching requires, I believe, a thorough grasp of this truth, that society is an organism and requires for its health and well-being the same conditions of health as are required for an individual life, i.e., perfect freedom for exercise of all its functions.

And now let me begin to close with a few words of consolation and, if I may venture upon it, of exhortation. The progress our movement has made and is making, is slow, but we know it is sure and steady. Not an inch of the foothold we have ever made has ever been lost. Year by year the principle of shifting the burden of the public income on to publicly created values and so freeing personal effort and industry, is being recognized as a just principle, even by men who have not yet caught sight of all the bearings of the question, or realized that the whole distressing problem of poverty is bound up in it.

Another ground of gratification is the consideration of the kind of men who are one by one coming over to us. For many years we resigned ourselves to the fact that we and the other followers of Henry George, were for the most part an obscure body, but we can feel that no longer when we think of the late Sir H. Campbell Bannerman, Mr. Asquith, the two chief law officers of the Crown, and a host of influential noblemen and commoners both in and out of Parliament.

Our principles are being recognized as not only the first law of theoretic justice, but as the first law of practical liberalism. It is rapidly being acknowledged as the basic of fundamental reform, the reform without which it were vain to give our goods to feed the poor or our bodies to be burned, without which all our talk of love for humanity is but sounding brass and tinkling cymbals.

Of all men who take life and its problems seriously we have least reason to despair, for we know the root-cause of the poverty which distresses us and we know the cure; and we observe that in proportion as the intelligence of men is beginning to play seriously around the problem, the truth as we know it is being acknowledged.

In pressing forward to our goal there are one or two considerations which I think we ought carefully to keep in mind. The central truth in the message of Henry George is that there is but one cause of involuntary poverty and of the strenuosity of life from which even the well-to-do suffer, and that cause is monopoly of natural resources. The practical lesson flowing from this truth is, that the removal of this cause must precede, in order of importance, all other reforms whatever. That, it seems to me, is the beginning and end of the Gospel we are called upon to preach. Whether the final form of a perfected society made out of free men and women will be individualistic or socialistic, or a compound of both, is a question on which we are not in a position to judge. All we do know for certain is, that if men are not free at the base, all social relationships must suffer distortion. If an injustice prevails at the foundation of society and men are denied equal right to the use of the earth, that injustice (like a restriction in the blood circulation of a man) will manifest itself all though the social organism, in effects which multiply and magnify themselves in a ratio which no mechanical or mathematical theory can follow.

Our function then is to show the world the beauty of justice and to prove that all the economic evils we suffer are due to our having violated her first principle, that of equal right to the earth which God has given to the children of men. By concentrating on this thought we shall avoid much futile controversy with those whose methods of realizing the ideal would be different from ours, and we shall at the same time escape doing damage to the beauty and simplicity of our central principle. Edward Caird says: "Whenever a truth is used as a weapon of controversy, it loses its universality, and is on the way to become a half truth." I have frequently felt the force of this. Whenever I have used a truth to bang heads with, it has seemed to go all out of shape in my hands and to become quite unrecognizable as the thing of beauty which had straightened out my other thoughts and conceptions and given unity and coherence to the cosmic scheme of things.

We must realize that at present we see through a glass, darkly; we know in part and we see in part, and we can only prophesy in part as to what may be when old things are passed away; when the dead hand of landlordism and monopoly relaxes its cold grip upon the life of humanity. It is not for us to argue as to what may follow the abolition of monopoly in land and natural things. It matters not to us whether it is followed by a restriction or an extension of municipal or governmental or collective co-operative activity; because we know that whichever way it is there will be an increase in life, in the joy of life, in the freedom from poverty and anxiety. There will be a chance for greed and avarice to become in reality the stupid things they ought to be. What we need to cultivate therefore is the broad open-mindedness of Henry George himself. In one of his later writings he says: "Let me not be misunderstood. I do not say that in recognizing the equal right of each human being to the use of the earth, lies the solution of all social problems. I recognize the fact that after we do this, much will remain to be done. We might recognize equal right to land and yet tyranny and spoliation be continued. But whatever else we do, so long as we fail to recognize equal right to the earth, nothing will avail to remedy that unnatural inequality in the distribution of wealth which is the parent of so much evil. Until we make this fundamental reform all material progress will but tend to differentiate our people into the monstrously rich and frightfully poor."

Some of us have almost reached the age at which George passed away. Those of us who are conscious that we have not yet stopped growing and that our horizon is still widening, must feel an unwillingness to assume that his opinions were closed and final and might not, had he lived, have undergone some modification or alteration. In any case, our only safe course is to hold tenaciously to that fundamental truth which it is his glory to have established, i.e., that there is one cause sufficient to account for all the poverty we see, and that that cause is removable.

This is the truth the teaching of which evoked from that most unfortunate and most illustrious of his accusers, the late Duke of Argyle, that contemptuous and derisive epithet which we now accept in all seriousness as his rightful title, "the Prophet of San Francisco."