Henry George:
Prophet of Human Rights
Charles A. Madison
[Reprinted from the book Critics & Crusaders,
published
by Henry Holt and Company, 1948. pp. 257-284]
OUR PROFESSIONAL ECONOMISTS, anxious to lift their studies to the
high objective plane of the natural sciences, have disregarded Henry
George as an unerudite tamperer with matters which are their special
concern. As a consequence most Americans who have heard of him
associate his name only with a confiscatory and unworkable single-tax
panacea. This has obscured the fact that his books once excited the
imagination of millions and that his energetic crusading gave them a
new vision and fresh hope. A familiarity with his work shows indeed
that he had the greatness of soul to sublimate his early experience
with grinding indigence into a passionate drive to obliterate want
from the face of the earth. Without the advantages of a formal
education, he evolved a philosophy of society, at once prophetic and
melioristic, which has placed him among the pre-eminent social
thinkers of our time.
George was born in Philadelphia on September 2,1839, the second of
ten children. His father was at one time a publisher of religious
books and later a clerk in the customs house, but he was never quite
able to provide for his large family. Young George went to work before
he was fourteen. Ambitious and restless, interested in ships like his
grandfather before him, he sailed in 1855 as foremast boy on a voyage
that took him to Australia and as far as India and back. When he
returned to Philadelphia about a year later he obtained work in a
printing shop, but his weekly earnings of two dollars were wholly
inadequate for the alert youth who had seen the world and knew of the
high wages paid in California. The lure of the West gave him no peace,
and before long he again went to sea, on a government ship bound for
San Francisco. But conditions in that city had greatly deteriorated
since the early years of the Gold Rush. There was no pot of gold at
the end of the rainbow for the newcomer, but he was too young and too
ambitious to feel discouraged. Unable to find work, he joined some
miners on their way to Fraser River in search of the precious metal.
Again he met with disappointment, and after several months of futile
effort he returned to San Francisco. Penniless and in debt, he was
ready to take the first job that came his way, but there was no work
of any kind available in the city which a few years before had paid
the highest wages in the world.
Determined to improve himself, he read considerably and joined a
leading circle. On July 21,1859, he wrote to his sister Jennie: "
I try to pick up everything I can, both by reading and observation,
and flatter myself that I learn at least something every day." He
was also beginning to dream of heaven on earth, and in a letter to his
sister two years later he expressed his longing for the time
when each one will be free to follow his best and
noblest impulses, unfettered by the restrictions and necessities which
our present state of society imposes on him; when the poorest and
meanest will have a chance to use all his God-given faculties and not
be forced to drudge away the best part of his time in order to supply
wants but little above those of the animal.
All this time he was living haphazardly on odd jobs as a printer's
substitute, and he was never free of debt. His situation became more
precarious when he fell in love with a young orphan from Australia,
Annie Corsina Fox, and married her on December 4, 1861. Shortly
afterwards he found work in Sacramento and soon became the father of a
son. Early in 1864 he lost his job and returned to San Francisco,
Nothing seemed to come his way no matter how hard he tried. " I
came near starving," he recalled years later, "and at one
time I was so close to it that I think I should have done so bat for
the job of printing a few cards which enabled us to buy a little corn
meal. In this darkest time in my life my second child was born."
So frantic was he on that particular day that he was ready to kill a
man for five dollars if the latter had not given him the money
voluntarily. A month later, greatly in debt and still without regular
employment, he confided to his diary, " Am in desperate plight.
Courage."
Although George was able to improve his condition somewhat after
1865, and at times even lived in relative comfort, he never forgot the
dreadful months of utter despair. He had long given up the dream of
riches, but the memory of dire poverty kept him " in perpetual
disquiet" and turned his mind to social problems. Groping in the
darkness of ignorance and inexperience, yearning to make the world a
better place for his children to live in, keenly conscious of the fire
in his heart and the power of his pen, he began to read voraciously
and to practise writing at every opportunity. Lincoln's assassination
moved him to express his admiration of the martyred President in two
stirring editorials which were printed in Alta California, the
newspaper for which he was then, a typesetter. The completion of the
first transcontinental railway gave him the occasion to write down the
thoughts about land and wealth which had long been simmering in his
mind. "What the Railroad Will Bring," which appeared in Overland
Monthly in 1868, stressed the idea that material progress was not
necessarily beneficial to the people as a whole and that increased
wealth tended to accentuate want.
High wages and high interest were indications that the natural wealth
of the country was not yet monopolized, that great opportunities were
open to all.
Those who have land, mines, established business,
special abilities of certain kinds, will become richer for it and find
increased opportunities; those who have only their own labor will
become poorer, and find it harder to get ahead -- first because it
will take more capital to buy land or get into business; and second,
as competition reduces the wages of labor, this capital will be the
harder for them to obtain.
Here, in bare outline, George expressed the basic idea which he was a
decade later to incorporate in Progress and Poverty.
George was by this time an established journalist. His zeal for
justice and his sharp pen made him at once known and notorious
throughout California and prevented him from remaining long on one
newspaper. He became preoccupied with civic affairs, and his
editorials were charged with the indignation and zest of the
aggressive reformer. Yet his deepest thought was reserved for the
problem which in his view affected the very foundations of modern
society: the simultaneous increase of wealth and want in a
civilization capable of providing the comforts of life to all mankind.
In possession of a creative intelligence that perceived relationships
where the ordinary mind saw only isolated events, he began to gather
the evidence for those principles upon which a better society might be
built. He recalled that, years before, a lot in San Francisco had
doubled in price upon the arrival of a ship carrying supplies. He
remembered what the old miner had told him about wages going down with
the growth of population. In 1869, while in New York trying in vain to
establish a news service in opposition to the Associated Press and
Western Union, he felt the full impact of the kind of society he was
determined to abolish: " I saw and recognized for the first time
the shocking contrast between monstrous wealth and debasing want."
Shortly after his return to California, while riding on horseback in
the neighborhood of Oakland, he noticed that the completion of the
railway had caused a land boom far outside of the urban limits. Land,
previously of little worth, had been sub-divided into acre lots, and
these were being offered at a thousand dollars apiece. " Like a
flash it came upon me that there was the reason of advancing poverty
with advancing wealth."
His mind seethed with the discovery, but he was not yet prepared to
formulate it. At this time Governor Haight, too honest a man to
condone the land-grabbing of the railroads, decided to put an end to
the corrupting machinations of the Central Pacific Railroad. He
engaged George to edit the Sacramento-Reporter and campaigned for
re-election on an anti-railroad platform. Central Pacific was more
than a match for these two doughty warriors. It bought the Reporter,
depriving George of his job, and paid for enough votes to swamp the
recalcitrant governor.
The experience gave George the proper impetus to express his views on
land monopoly and its consequences. He was then wholly unfamiliar with
the literature on the subject and did not know that the French
Physiocrats and several individual thinkers in other lands had
preceded him in the exposition of similar conclusions. Our Land
and Land Policy, National and State, which he wrote and published
in 1871, was a 48-page pamphlet presenting his solution of the land
problem. In sketchy outline the booklet explained the pertinent issues
and proposals which he was later to discuss in persuasive detail in
Progress and Poverty: the exhaustion of the nation's public
lands, the dependence of the laborer on land, the viciousness of land
monopoly, and the need to socialize land by taxing its unearned
increment to its full value. George sent copies to various men of
prominence and was gratified by the response.
In December 1871 he became Editor and part owner of the newly
established Daily Evening Post, the first newspaper in
California to be sold for a penny -- a coin not then in free
circulation on the Pacific Coast. Its editorial page gave George
opportunity to excoriate the abuses of privilege and to expound his
economic ideas on the causes of poverty and land values. Although the
daily was to be "the organ of no faction, clique or party"
it came out for Greeley in the election of 1872, championed the cause
of labor, and forced the prosecutions of political grafters and
wealthy criminals.
Late in 1875 the Post was sold and George was once again
without a job. He did not, however, seek work on another newspaper.
The urge to propound his economic views and social ideals gave him no
peace. Since he had worked for Governor Irwin's election he applied to
him for a sinecure that would provide his family with bread and afford
him the leisure to write. Early in January 1876 he was appointed state
inspector of gas meters, a post that paid him a fee for each
inspection and that therefore became less lucrative as fewer meters
were installed during the years of depression. This position he kept
until he was deprived of it by the next governor -- long enough to
have enabled him to complete his great work.
George now had his own well-stocked collection of books as well as
access to several public and private libraries. To his mother he wrote
on November 13, 1876: "I propose to read and study; to write some
things which will extend my reputation, and perhaps to deliver some
lectures with the same view. If I live I will make myself known, even
in Philadelphia. I aim high." For all his eagerness to
concentrate on his main task, he could not abstain from speaking his
mind on the affairs of the day. No longer having access to an
editorial page, he began to voice his views from the public platform.
During the Hayes-Tilden campaign he became known as one of the best
political speakers in California. While not a prepossessing figure on
the rostrum -- he was a rather short, bald, untidy man with a reddish
heard -- he more than made up for this deficiency in the logic of his
thought and the fervor of his delivery.
The following March he was invited by the University of California to
deliver a lecture on political economy. His friends on the faculty
were hoping that he would be appointed to the first professorship in
this subject. But George was not the man who aimed to please. He spoke
his mind with a frankness and an iconoclasm which precluded his
consideration for the chair. Addressing himself to the students, he
insisted that the study of political economy required not so much
teachers and textbooks as the ability to think straight and to the
root of things.
All this array of professors, all this paraphernalia
of learning cannot educate a man. They can help him to educate
himself. Here you may obtain the tools, but they will be useful only
to him who can use them. A monkey with a microscope, a mule packing a
library, are fit emblems of the men -- and, unfortunately, they are
plenty -- who pass through the whole educational machinery and come
oat learned fools, crammed with knowledge which they cannot use -- all
the more pitiable, all the more contemptible, all the more in the way
of real progress, because they pass, with themselves and others, as
educated men.
Several months later he was the chief orator at San Francisco's
celebration of Independence Day. Here was his opportunity to speak on
the meaning of liberty -- the subject dearest to his heart -- and he
had prepared for it with exceeding care. His address was polished,
pointed, passionate. His apotheosis of liberty, rising to metaphysical
loftiness, was no doubt beyond the grasp of his sweltering audience,
and belongs more fittingly to the pages of Progress and Poverty
where he later inserted it. But the people did not fail to appreciate
his deep sincerity and his glowing praise of the principles upon which
our republic had been founded. And not a few understood and applauded
when he said:
Wealth in itself is a good, not an evil; but wealth
concentrated in the hands of a few, corrupts on the one side, and
degrades on the other. No chain is stronger than its weakest link, and
the ultimate condition of any people must be the condition of its
lowest class.
In the long run, no nation can be freer than its
most oppressed, richer than its poorest, wiser than its most ignorant.
In 1878, even while deeply engrossed in writing his masterpiece, he
took the time not only to deliver two important lectures but also to
campaign for political office. So overflowing was he with the theme of
poverty and its abolition by means of taxing land values that it crept
into everything he did. Even in his address on Moses -- a fervent and
highly finished piece of writing -- he could not help reverting to it
again and again:
For all this wonderful increase in' knowledge, for
all this enormous gain in productive power, where is the country in
the civilized world in which today there is no want and suffering --
where the masses are not condemned to toil that gives no leisure, and
all classes are not pursued by a greed of gain that makes life an
ignoble struggle to get and to keep?
The grievous depression of 1877 with its widespread suffering and
sporadic labor strikes impelled George to begin the writing of Progress
and Poverty. He was then in debt again, his income from inspecting
meters was dwindling, and he had to pawn his watch for some ready
cash; but the theme of his book had taken complete possession of him.
For eighteen months he devoted most of his waking hours to the great
task, and when the last page was finished he wept like a child at the
thought of having accomplished his life's major work. He knew he had
written a capital book and said so to his father and friends. To John
Swinton, the New York reformer, he stated that it was " the most
important contribution to the science of political economy yet made."
In any evaluation of Progress and Poverty it is important to
remember that the book was completed in 1879, when the Ricardian
principles of political economy were still widely accepted, and that
George was right in regarding Mill as the outstanding exponent of
these principles. Nor should it be forgotten that George was wholly
self-taught, that there were obvious lacunae in his knowledge of
economic literature, and that he arrived at his doctrine deductively
and philosophically. His aim was to demolish those principles which he
believed false and detrimental to the welfare of mankind and to
replace them with others which would explain the causes of poverty and
the means of abolishing it.
George began with the problem which had long tormented him.
Where the conditions to which material progress
everywhere tends are most fully realized -- that is to say, where
population .is densest, wealth greatest, and the machinery of
production and exchange most highly developed -- we find the deepest
poverty, the sharpest struggle for existence, and the most enforced
idleness.
Before he could come to grips with this basic problem, however, he
felt compelled to clear away the theoretical obstacles which the
economists before him had erected as valid reasons for the perpetual
existence of poverty. Of these, the chief were the so-called iron law
of wages and the Malthusian doctrine that population tends to increase
faster than the means of subsistence. Familiar with some of the
attacks made upon these theories by later economists, he proceeded to
disprove them anew with such irrefutable logic and slashing statement
that nothing remained of them except the prejudices at their source.
In opposition to these pessimistic doctrines, which condemned the
mass of mankind to a subsistence level and political economy to a
state of hopelessness, George argued persuasively that man was an
intelligent and ingenious creature and therefore able to meet any
situation he might come up against. If laborers lived in want, it was
not because their great number made tie share of each in the available
wages fund a mere pittance. This wages-fund theory, he pointed out,
was a mere figment, since "wages, instead of being drawn from
capital, are in reality drawn from the product of the labor for which
they are paid." Nor had the Malthusian doctrine any basis in fact
since, as he proved by a forceful analysis of the theory of
population, "the law of population accords with and is
subordinate to the law of intellectual development, and any danger
that human beings may be brought into the world where they cannot be
provided for arises not from the ordinances of nature, but from social
maladjustments that in the midst of wealth condemn men to want."
He asserted, moreover, that "in a state of equality the natural
increase of population would constantly tend to make every individual
richer instead of poorer."
Having removed the negative obstacles which in his view explained
nothing and merely obscured the basic causes of poverty, George
proceeded to examine the laws which govern the distribution of wealth.
Here he followed Ricardian economics fairly closely. Land included "all
natural opportunities or forces"; labor embraced "all human
exertion," being "the active and initial force ... the raw
material of wealth"; capital consisted of "wealth used to
produce more wealth" and therefore "not a necessary factor
in production," since it must first be produced by labor before
it became available. Rent from land was the price of monopoly and was
"determined by the excess of its produce over that which the same
application can secure from the least productive land in use."
Consequently rent tended to increase as production increased and thus
served to keep down wages and interest -- a crucial factor in the
distribution of wealth.
His inquiry into the causes of the increase of rent disclosed that
the growth of population was not a basic cause, since rent advanced
even where population remained stationary. The true cause inhered in
die private monopoly of land. For any increase in the production of
wealth inevitably stimulated the demand for land -- with a consequent
rise in rent. The landlord thus tended to receive the greater share of
this increased wealth, which in turn resulted in a maladjustment of
wealth and recurrent economic depressions. As George summarized his
finding:
The great cause of the inequality in the distribution
of wealth is inequality in the ownership of land. The ownership of
land is the great fundamental fact which ultimately determines the
social, the political, and consequently the intellectual and moral
conditions of a people.
The remedy was to abolish the private ownership of land. Despite its
radical implications, George found "that nothing short of making
land common property can permanently relieve poverty and check the
tendency of wages to the starvation point." To justify such
drastic action against the present owners of land, he investigated the
nature of property and concluded that "there is a fundamental and
irreconcilable difference between property in things which are the
product of labor and property in land." While one was obtained by
honest human effort and therefore had the sanction of justice and
equity, the other was originally seized by force and fraud and was
indefensible. Moreover, the recognition of individual ownership of
land " always has, and always must, as development proceeds, lead
to the enslavement of the laboring class." Justice therefore
demanded that landowners be curbed and that the land be restored to
the people as a whole. "When a title rests but on force, no
complaint can be made when force annuls it. Whenever the people,
having the power, choose to annul these titles, no objection can be
made in the name of justice."
He next met the expected objection that the socialization of land was
detrimental to its best use. He pointed out that the private ownership
of land frequently blocked its improvement and use -- the vacant lots
in crowded urban centers and large estates in the country being
obvious examples -- while land held in common was generally improved
and used for the good of all. Having demonstrated the greater utility
of land belonging to society over that owned by private individuals,
he next discussed the most desirable method of abolishing the monopoly
on land. To his mind neither nationalization nor confiscation was
advisable. In order to disturb the status quo as little as possible,
he was willing for the owners to retain the shell -- provided they
were deprived of the kernel. To this end he suggested a tax on the
full value of the land, explaining that such a tax would not only help
remove iniquity from society but would also suffice for all public
needs and thus make all other taxes superfluous.
What I propose, therefore, is the simple yet
sovereign remedy, which will raise wages, increase the earnings of
capital, extirpate pauperism, abolish poverty, give remunerative
employment to whoever wishes it, afford free scope to human powers,
lessen crime, elevate morals, and taste, and intelligence, purify
government and carry civilization to yet nobler heights, is -- to
appropriate rent by taxation.
Such a tax, bearing lightly on production, collected easily and
cheaply, unshiftable, certain, and equitable, was in his belief not
only the most just of all taxes but the only one bound "to
stimulate industry, to open new opportunities to capital, and to
increase the production of wealth."
George devoted the final section of Progress and Poverty to
the law of human progress. He argued persuasively that economic
disparities in civilization were due, not to differences in
individuals, but to differences in social organization; that progress,
stimulated by association, tended to be checked by the emergence of
inequality. "Association in equality" was therefore the law
of progress, and our own civilization, already showing signs of decay
caused by inequality, must eliminate its social maladjustments if it
was not to suffer the fate of earlier civilizations. Since the basic
source of inequality lay in land monopoly, the taxation of land values
would sot only assure justice and equality to all men bat would also
provide fresh impetus toward greater progress.
The foregoing summary of the contents of Progress and Poverty
gives but an indication of the book's scope and purpose. Even now,
nearly seventy years later, one cannot read it without being moved by
its clear style, the cogency of its logical exposition, the prophetic
vision of its social message. The work has its obvious limitations,
and its proposed remedy may be impugned as unfair and inadequate, but
the reader cannot fail to be impressed by its high purpose and
passionate sincerity. For the problem of poverty has continued to
plague our civilization, and no other reformer has attacked it so
fundamentally and so eloquently. Having felt its grievous effects to
the despair of starvation, George perceived it as "the
open-mouthed, relentless hell which yawns beneath civilized society.
For
poverty is not merely deprivation; it means shame, degradation; the
searing of the most sensitive parts of our moral and mental nature as
with hot irons; the denial of the strongest impulses and sweetest
affections; the wrenching of the most vital nerves." It was to
remove this social cancer from the body of mankind that he wrote the
book; and it was this high aim, expressed with compelling
forcefulness, that inspired many of its multitude of readers to join
him in the great effort. What appealed to them most was the simplicity
of the remedy: no bloody revolution, no radical overthrow of
government, no disruption of industrial enterprise -- only a change in
taxation which would right a long-standing wrong.
In an obvious sense Progress and Poverty was, as Parrington
has indicated, George's reaction to "the policy of pre-emption,
exploitation, and progress of the Gilded Age." In his own state
of California he witnessed grants of land to the railroad companies
amounting to 16,387,000,000 acres, or sixteen percent of the total
area. Also, within eighteen years of the first pre-emption act in
1863, the state disposed of all its vast public lands. This
misappropriation of common property, with its consequent social
maladjustments, struck fire in George's heart and gave him no rest
until he had exposed the wrong and pointed out the remedy. An even
deeper purpose of the book was, in the words of Parrington, "to
humanize and democratize political economy, that it might serve social
ends rather than class exploitation." For in George's day
economists regarded poverty as "the result of an inevitable law,"
and thus sanctioned the grievous exploitation of the laborer as well
as the ruthlessness of laissez-faire enterprise. As a genuine democrat
he refused to accept such a "law" and expounded to his
fellow men a glorious future: the identification of "the law of
social life with the great moral law of justice: a vision of progress:
without poverty, material enrichment based on equality, man rising to
new spiritual heights."
Eastern publishers did not share George's opinion of the book and
none would at first undertake to bring it out. It was only after a
friendly printer in San Francisco had agreed to make a set of plates
and run off an author's edition of five hundred copies that D.
Appleton and Company were persuaded to use the plates for a trade
edition. George sent a number of copies to leaders of public opinion
in this country and abroad, and most of these responded promptly and
appreciatively. The book sold very sluggishly, and the English
publisher was able to dispose of only twenty copies during the first
few months.
Meantime George, considerably in debt and desperately in need of
work, borrowed the fare to New York in the hope of finding employment
on one of the city's newspapers. Failing in this effort, he undertook
whatever odd jobs he came upon. His strong concern with the land
problem caused him to interest himself in the current agitation
against landlordism in Ireland. The Irish in New York welcomed him and
engaged him to lecture on the land question. Ever ready with his pen,
he decided to review the situation in Ireland in the light of the
universal land problem; and the resulting brochure, The lrish Land
Question (subsequently retitled The Land Question because
of its general implications and conclusions), made him something of a
hero among the Irish and led them to give the booklet wide
circulation. This publicity reacted favorably on the sale of Progress
and Poverty and induced many newspapers and magazines in this
country and in Great Britain to review the book seriously and at
length. A five-column leader in the London Times helped the
volume to spectacular popularity. Labor leaders, with Powderley of the
Knights of Labor at their head, recommended the work enthusiastically
to their followers. Cheap editions soon outsold the most popular
fiction. Before long everyone seemed to be reading and discussing Progress
and Poverty, and George found himself famous. In Ireland and
England, where he went as a correspondent for the New York Irish
World in October 1881, he was widely acclaimed.
This extraordinary enthusiasm for a book dealing radically with a
fundamental social problem -- around three million copies have been
disposed of to date, a runaway record for a book in economics --
greatly perturbed the academic guardians of the science of economics.
In the Judgment of these scholars, who were just then making a great
effort to replace the theories of the Smith-Ricardo-Mill school with
views consonant with the latest scientific principles, George's
indebtedness to that school stamped him as a lay meddler. His
deliberate, almost evangelical fusion of economics with ethics struck
them as rank heresy -- being contrary to their painfull attempts to
divorce the two disciplines. His proposed remedy of taxing land values
to the exclusion of all other taxes appeared to them unscientific,
highly unjust, and, in view of its great popular appeal, dangerously
demagogic. Alfred Marshall, soon to become their chief spokesman, and
the dying Arnold Toynbee each tried to demolish the book in three
analytical lectures; Herbert Spencer, Lord Bramwell, the Duke of
Argyll, and practically all American economists scorned him as an
ignorant intruder into their special field of knowledge.
The socialists, in the 1889's struggling for public attention, were
likewise critical of George's proposed remedy for the social
maladjustment which they regarded as their special concern. The;
approved, of course, of his castigation of the existing order and
sympathized with his desire to abolish poverty, but they insisted that
a tax on land values would affect only a fraction of the surplus value
created by labor and could not therefore accomplish all that George
claimed for it. They moreover disparaged what they considered his
misunderstanding of the nature of capital and his rejection of the
doctrine of the class struggle. His remedy, they contended, might
suffice for the primitive agricultural society, in which land was the
"primary, all-inclusive element," but was wholly inadequate
in our era of monopolistic industrialism. When Karl Marx was given a
copy of Progress and Poverty, he looked it through and
remarked that it was " the capitalists' last ditch."
Ironically enough, George was largely responsible for the rise of
socialism in England, which he had visited at an opportune time. Most
of the liberal and labor intellectuals of the discontented i88o's, who
later gravitated towards socialism, crowded first to his standard. "
Henry George," wrote John A. Hobson, " may be considered to
have exercised a more directly formative and educative influence over
English radicalism of the last fifteen years [1882-1897] than any
other man."
George, in turn, was quite contemptuous of socialism, and regarded
Karl Marx as "a most superficial thinker, and entangled in an
inexact and vicious terminology." The American reformer was
indeed a genuine individualist, a product of the eighteenth-century
equalitarianism. Thomas Jefferson was his patron saint, and the
Declaration of Independence his revered Decalogue. In an address in
Baltimore on "The Democratic Principle" he stated: "Our
belief is that of Thomas Jefferson; our aim is his aim and our hope
his hope." He regarded the doctrines of natural law and natural
rights as sacrosanct and argued that even if these rights had no
actual historical basis, they were so obviously the higher goal of
human striving that one should work for their realization as a matter
of simple justice. He assumed that a true understanding of natural
laws would lead to the establishment of equality and justice and bring
society to a state of blessedness. His theory of reform, as expounded
in Progress and Poverty, was based upon these moral principles
and was thus "but the carrying out in letter and spirit of the
truth enunciated in the Declaration of Independence - the
'self-evident' truth that is the heart and soul of the Declaration --
'That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their
Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these rights are
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness!'"
His great book having initiated a social movement, George became
acutely conscious of his responsibilities as the prophet of social
reform. The popularity of The Irish Land Question made it
possible for him to visit Great Britain, and he took advantage of the
opportunity to preach his philosophy in that country. The enthusiasm
of the growing host of British admirers was balm to his soul, and he
was glad in the course of the next few years to make several
missionary excursions to England.
When George returned to New York after his first trip, he had already
acquired an international reputation. The bounty of one of his
admirers and his success as a lecturer and writer at last freed him
from the drag of poverty. A whole-hearted believer in education, he
took every opportunity to apply his philosophy to problems of current
interest. Again and again he lectured before labor and other groups on
the cause and cure of social maladjustments. Since politicians were
then advocating tariffs as a means of raising wages, he exposed their
pretenses and indicated the true source of higher wages.
He interrupted this work, however, when Frank Leslie's
Illustrated Newspaper, eager for a feature to counterbalance
Professor W. G. Sumner's articles in Harper's Weekly, asked
him to write a series of thirteen essays on "Problems of the
Times." These discussions he revised and expanded into a book
which he published in 1883 under the title of Social Problems.
In essence a popular application of his land doctrine to current
questions, its central thesis was that "at the root of every
social problem lies a social wrong." Most essential in righting
these wrongs was a just distribution of wealth, which he defined as
follows:
To secure to each the free use of his own power,
limited only by the equal freedom of all others; to secure to each the
hill enjoyment of his own earnings, limited only by such contributions
as he may be fairly called upon to make for purposes of common
benefit.
Since men now lacked such economic justice, he argued, they behaved
like hungry hogs before a pail of swill; with wealth justly
distributed, men would behave everywhere with the ease and grace of
those seated at a banquet table. Moreover, without economic justice,
political democracy remained a myth.
Democratic government in more than name can exist only where wealth
is distributed with something like equality -- when the great mass of
citizens are personally free and independent, neither fettered by
their poverty, nor made subject by their wealth.
This equality, he insisted, could be attained only by the land reform
-- truly "the greatest of social revolutions." He declared
that our great material development necessitated a higher moral
standard.
Civilization, as it progresses, requires a
higher conscience, a keener sense of justice, a warmer brotherhood, a
wider, loftier, truer public spirit. Failing these, civilization must
pass into destruction.
For civilization knits men more and more
closely together, and constantly tends to subordinate the individual
to the whole, and to make more and more important social conditions.
While in the British Isles in 1883, addressing large audiences under
the auspices of the Land Reform Union, he was attacked by the Duke of
Argyll in an article, "The Prophet of San Francisco,"
published in Nineteenth Century. This titled critic termed
George a "Preacher of Unrighteousness" because of his
uncompromising attitude towards landowners. On his return to New York
the "Prophet of San Francisco" composed a reply, published
in the same periodical, which slashed to shreds the Duke's argument
that landlords have a right to the monopolistic use of their land
regardless of the manner in which it was originally acquired or of the
nature of property in land.
George next devoted himself to writing his book on the tariff
problem. So popular had he become by this time that he was able to
obtain $3000 for several of the finished chapters of Protection or
Free Trade, and this money enabled him to publish the volume
during the summer of 1886. The work had a tremendous circulation,
owing largely to the efforts of Tom L. Johnson, who had become
converted to George's views. In 1890 Johnson, then in Congress,
succeeded, with the aid of several fellow Congressmen, in placing the
entire contents of the book in the Congressional Record.
Hundreds of thousands of copies were sent to constituents of these and
other members of Congress, and the total distribution, including
various cheap editions, exceeded two million copies.
Protection or Free Trade contains some of George's most lucid
writing and is undoubtedly one of the clearest and most cogent
discussions of free trade ever published. In it he argued from general
principles to the logical conclusion that not only was protection
based on a fallacy but that genuine free trade involved the abolition
of all tariffs and taxes and led to the confiscation of land values.
He attacked the prevailing tariffs as a hidden tax on labor, "the
producer of all wealth"; as conducive to "corruption,
evasion and false swearing"; as antagonistic to "improvements
in transportation and labor-saving devices." In brief, "the
restrictions which protection urges us to impose upon ourselves are
about as well calculated to promote national prosperity as ligatures,
that would impede the circulation of the blood, would be to promote
bodily health and comfort." Protection, moreover, could not be of
more than temporary benefit to any class of producers except
monopolists because of the fact that competition within a country
tended to keep profits to a common level.
George asserted that the principle of free trade derived from the
right of each man to the full produce of his labor. Consequently, to
insure this right, free trade required "the sweeping away of all
tariffs
the abolition of all indirect taxes of whatever kind
as well [as] all direct taxes on things that are the produce of labor."
There remained only the taxes on ostentation and land values. To
justify the land tax George reiterated the ethical argument for the
common ownership of land.
Property
in land is as indefensible as property in man. It is so absurdly
impolitic, so outrageously unjust, so flagrantly subversive of the
true right of property, that it can only be instituted by force and
maintained by confounding m the popular mind the distinction between
property in land and property in things that ate the result of labor.
George was opposed, however, to the nationalization of land. He
believed that " all men have equal rights to the use and
enjoyment of the elements provided by Nature," and that any form
of communism must interfere with these rights. He criticized the
socialists for not thinking the matter through -- asserting that their
views were "a high-purposed but incoherent mixture of truth and
fallacy." To him any dependence on government for the insurance
of justice and equality was shortsighted so long as mankind was
dominated by greed and force.
All schemes for securing equality in the conditions
of men by placing the distribution of wealth in the hands of
government have the fatal defect of beginning at the wrong end. They
presuppose pure government; but it is not government that makes
society; it is society that makes government; and until there
is something like substantial equality in the distribution of wealth,
we cannot expect pure government.
In 1886 George was invited by the united labor unions of New York to
become their candidate for mayor. He had not thought of entering
politics, and had made definite plans for a lecture tour and for the
publication of a weekly journal of opinion; but when the labor
leaders, who hoped to capitalize on his popularity, met his
stipulation by obtaining thirty thousand bona fide signatures, he
decided to enter the campaign. To a friend he wrote: "If I do go
into the fight, the campaign will bring the land question into
practical politics and do more to popularize its discussion than years
of writing would do."
It was the first election in New York to be fought on social issues.
George gave no quarter and attacked his rivals with all his forensic
power, speaking as often as twelve and fourteen times daily. His
opponents, Abram S. Hewitt and young Theodore Roosevelt, took full
advantage of the fact that he was backed by radical groups and
asserted that the horrors of the French Terror would seem mild in
comparison with the hell that would be let loose by George's election.
The Catholic hierarchy likewise opposed his candidacy and brought
about the excommunication of the Rev. Edward McGlynn when he insisted
on speaking in George's favor. When the votes were counted, Tammany
emerged victorious -- but only because its henchmen had thrown many
George ballots into the East River. George himself was gratified by
his large vote and believed that the land question had become a
political issue. His position in the campaign was well stated by his
eldest son:
Rather than a seeker for office, he was a man with a
mission, preaching the way to cast out involuntary poverty from
civilization. Rather than a politician ready to pare away and
compromise, he pressed straight for equality and freedom, and in a
breath-taking way struck at the ignorant prejudices of his own
followers as sharply as at those of his fiercest antagonists.
Several days after the election he spoke encouragingly to a large
gathering of his followers. "It is not the end of the campaign,"
he assured them, "but the beginning. We have fought the first
skirmish." The following year he ran as candidate for Secretary
of State and campaigned across the state with unabated zeal. But his
unwillingness to compromise alienated the socialists and brought about
the disruption of the tenuously united labor party. The final vote for
George was disappointingly small, and both the candidate and his labor
backers decided they had had enough of politics.
Immediately after the mayoralty election George began to organize the
staff for his long-projected weekly newspaper, The Standard,
and employed such experienced journalists as William T. Croasdale and
Louis F. Post. The first issue appeared on January 8, 1887, and
because it was devoted to the flagrant case of Father McGlynn it
achieved a circulation of 75,000 copies; subsequently it maintained a
level of about 25,000 copies. During its five years of existence The
Standard was very actively concerned with the reforms of the day.
George's pungent editorials put him in the forefront of political
journalism. The weekly also sponsored and devoted much space to the
Anti-Poverty Society, which was headed by Father McGlynn and which
aimed to spread the doctrine that "God has made ample provision
for the need of all" and that poverty is caused by man-made laws:
In 1890, however, shortly after his return from a triumphant but
exhausting tour of Australia by way of Europe, George suffered a mild
stroke. Thereafter the periodical declined, and in August 1892 it
ceased publication.
A sojourn in Bermuda helped George to recover at least the appearance
of health. He at Once began to work on a book that would round out his
principles of political economy and establish his doctrine on a
philosophical foundation firm enough to withstand all the assaults of
his academic opponents. The following remark in a letter written on
April 28, 1891 suggests that, despite his insistence to the contrary,
he was very sensitive to their criticism: "How persistent is the
manner in which the professors and those who esteem themselves the
learned class ignore and slur me; but I am not conscious of any other
feeling about it than that of a certain curiosity."
As was the case with his two other major works, he interrupted his
efforts on his new book in order to attend to controversial matters of
more immediate importance. Pope Leo XIII's encyclical letter on "The
Condition of Labor," while criticizing all radical means of
improving the lot of labor, appeared to George to aim its shafts
particularly at the theories of land reform. His reply, extending to
about 25,000 words, politely and modestly analyzed the Pope's
fallacious reasoning and reaffirmed the sound Christian basis of his
own doctrine. He submitted that, because the essence of religion was
equality before God, "the social question is at bottom a
religious question." Consequently his economic remedy was offered
"not as a cunning device of human ingenuity, but as a conforming
of human regulation to the will of God." He also elaborated upon
the justness and advantages of the tax on land values. And, while he
joined tie Pope in condemning the "forcible communism" of
the socialists, he asserted that in his view "voluntary communism
might be the highest possible state of which man can conceive."
George's vehement attack on Herbert Spencer was occasioned by the
latter's presumed apostasy from the views on the land question which
he had expressed in Social Statics. This book, published in
1850, was one of the seminal studies of the nature of property in
land. George had come upon it at the time when he was first struggling
with the problem, and its forceful logic had helped him to formulate
his conclusions. George sent Spencer a copy of Progress and
Poverty, but received no acknowledgment. Two years later, when
they met in London, Spencer's defense of the Irish landlords irritated
the American. Then came the controversy between Spencer and his
critics in which the author of Social Statics virtually
repudiated his own book and merely confused the issue by his effort to
differentiate between absolute and relative ethics. This was followed
by a new edition of the book, with the disputed chapter on land
entirely omitted and the sections on property revised to accord with
the author's later views. Since this recantation was not accompanied
by an offer of new evidence but rested upon a re-interpretation of the
original premise, George concluded that his one-time mentor had
committed intellectual treason.
A Perplexed Philosopher, published in 1892, while bitter and
almost scurrilous in the sections dealing with Spencer's apostasy,
presents an incisive review of the latter's treatment of the land
problem and a critical analysis of synthetic philosophy. By way of
illustration George reiterated his own belief in Jeffersonian
democracy.
The sphere of government begins where the freedom of
competition ends, since in no other way can equal liberty be assured.
But within this line I have always opposed governmental interference.
I have been an active, consistent and absolute free trader, and an
opponent of all schemes that would limit the freedom of the
individual. I have been a stauncher denier of the assumption of the
right of society to the possessions of each member, and a clearer and
more resolute upholder of the rights of property than has Mr. Spencer.
I have opposed every proposition to help the poor at the expense of
the rich.
However, while he held "the rights of property to be absolute,"
he insisted that land values lacked the rights inherent in the produce
of labor. As a concrete example of this distinction he pointed out
that "if the population and business of London could be
transported to a newly risen island in the Antipodes, land there would
become as valuable as land in London now; and that, though all
improvements were to be left behind, the value of land in London would
disappear." Since land values were created by society and not by
individual labor, the inequity arising from the individual ownership
of land might be removed without doing violence to the rights of
legitimate property.
So far from the destruction of those spurious and
injurious rights of property which have wound around the useful rights
of property, like choking weeds around a fruitful vine, being
calculated to injure that respect for property on which wealth and
prosperity and civilization depend, the reverse is the case.
These interruptions over, George returned to his work on The
Science vf Political Economy, which he did not live to complete
and which his eldest son edited and published in 1898. His primary aim
was to "put the ideas embodied in Progress and Poverty in
the setting of a complete economic treatise, and without controversy."
He wanted to relate the science of political economy to all human
activity, to make dear the principles deriving from nature and
affecting the life of man. He began with the familiar axiom that "men
seek to gratify their desires with the least exertion," and
broadened it into a fundamental law:
This disposition of men to seek the satisfaction of
their desires with the minimum of exertion is so universal and
unfailing that it constitutes one of those invariable sequences that
we denominate laws of nature, and from which we may safely reason. It
is this law of nature that is the fundamental law of political
economy.
From this central principle he developed the scientific structure of
our modern economic society into which he fitted every aspect of
economic life. He restated and amplified his views on the nature of
land and labor, wealth and capital, production and distribution. He
stressed "the distinction between the productive power derived
wholly from nature, for which its term is land, and the productive
power derived from human exertion, for which its term is labor."
Value was determined by labor but measured by effective demand; "thus
it is not exchangeability that gives value, but value that gives
exchangeability." Wealth he defined as "the embodiment or
storage in material form of action aiming at the satisfaction of
desire, so that this action obtains a certain permanence."
Capital "is but a part of wealth, differing from other wealth
only in its use, which is not to satisfy desire, but indirectly to
satisfy desire, by associating in the production of other wealth."
Consequently wages were paid not out of capital but out of the product
of labor, arid interest became the wages of capital. Production was
obtained by means of adapting, growing, and exchanging -- their
importance being in the order given. "Production and distribution
are in fact not separate things, but two mentally distinguishable
parts of one thing -- the exertion of human labor in the satisfaction
of human desire." Money he defined as the common medium of
exchange used in any time and place.
From the point of view of the rising generation of economists, who
stressed data and facts rather than standards and values, the book was
out of date before it was published. They therefore ignored it in
their teaching and thus prevented it from exerting any influence on
the subsequent development of economic theory. Despite this neglect,
however, the work remains a milestone in American economic thought. It
was the most ambitious undertaking attempted by an American up to that
time and it towers as a contribution1 to the understanding of how men
make their living. For George did not limit himself to the mechanics
of economic activity, but sought to discover the causes of social
maladjustments as well as their remedy -- the establishment of
equality and justice as the guiding principles of society. It was
indeed this prophetic vision plus his remarkable ability as a writer
of lucid prose that, all his limitations notwithstanding, give his
major books the stamp of greatness.
In 1897, while devoting to his writing all the time that his
precarious health would permit, he again received a call to become
candidate for mayor of New York City, this time from the "Party
of Thomas Jefferson." The appeal of duty was irresistible. He
knew that the liberal groups had no other man around whom they could
unite, and he could not fail them. Nor was he unaware of the stimulus
his election would give to the cause to which he had devoted his life.
When the doctors warned him that the rigors of the campaign would
probably prove fatal, he answered: "How could I do better than
die serving humanity? Besides, so dying will do more for the cause
than anything I am likely to be able to do in the rest of my life."
For a while the excitement of the campaign seemed to invigorate him,
but after three weeks of strenuous exertion he began to show signs of
collapse. On October 28, five days before the election, he found
himself unable to go on after his fourth speech. Fatigued and
overworked, he died that night of a stroke of apoplexy.
New York was genuinely shocked by the tragedy. For the moment the
election was forgotten. The loss of one of its greatest citizens
completely overshadowed the normal activities of the metropolis. More
than a hundred thousand mourners filed past George's bier, and an
equal number, unable to enter the building, crowded the streets near
by. A vast funeral procession followed the body to the City Hall and
across Brooklyn Bridge to the cemetery. No other private citizen had
ever received greater tribute from his fellow New Yorkers.
There are a number of things about Henry George's land doctrine with
which one might disagree. Essentially, any social remedy that depends
upon a single factor is almost certain to fail. While the tax on land
values might have been of paramount importance in an agrarian economy,
in a more complex society it can be considered only in association
with other factors. One may doubt whether the common ownership of land
can by itself give man the full produce of his labor in a monopolistic
industrial society. For it is hardly true that the landlord now
victimizes both the laborer and the capitalist; the latter himself is
frequently a landlord and is, in any event, too powerful for anyone's
exploitation. Thus a Henry Ford or a Du Pont is neither subject to the
landlord's exaction nor at the mercy of a tax on land values. In this
respect Karl Marx was more realistic in regarding ground rent as
merely "a portion of the surplus value produced by industrial
capital."
In considering the practicality of the single tax one must take into
account tie nature of the opposition. While George justified his
remedy on moral grounds -- at least to the satisfaction of his
admirers -- he disregarded the powerful opposition of the wealthy
landlords and made little effort to mollify the small farmer who could
not help fearing a confiscatory tax on the means of his livelihood.
This shortcoming becomes all the more glaring when it is remembered
that, although the farmers a half-century ago were a far more potent
element of our population than the urban laborers, George concentrated
his attention upon the grievous lot of the latter group.
It is not at all strange to find the professional economists
disdaining George's land doctrine as the teaching of an untrained and
confused layman. Even the more liberal insisted that economics was,
like all sciences, descriptive and correlative and not normative and
evaluative. In their view his reliance on the old, classical theory
invalidated his writings. Certain aspects of his economic thought are
no doubt open to criticism and have been dealt with by some of his
discerning disciples. Yet his work taken as a whole places him in the
very forefront of American economic thinkers. His system of political
economy is, for all its flaws and "unscientific" emphasis,
an original and positive formulation of a body of principles which has
been condemned as a whole or in part by a number of the keenest
academic minds but invalidated by none. And while the remedy of the
single tax has failed to make its impress upon society, the philosophy
underlying it has withstood the attacks of the acutest critics.
George's greatness, however, lies not in his originality as a
political economist but in the combination of broad social vision with
a passionate concern for the welfare of mankind. The love of liberty
and equality spurred him to probe deeply into the causes of poverty
and to discover the means for its alleviation. He had the opportunity
to see, in the words of George Bernard Shaw, "in a single
lifetime the growth of the whole tragedy of civilization from the
primitive first clearing," and the creative intelligence to make
use of this experience in arriving at a true understanding of the
nature of society. He perceived that "the poverty which in the
midst of abundance pinches and imbrutes men, and the manifold evils
which flow from it, spring from a denial of justice"; that the
source of poverty lies in the private monopoly of land; that economic
equality was the essential criterion of true progress. He therefore
preached that men
must have liberty to avail themselves of the
opportunities and means of life; they must stand on equal terms with
reference to the bounty of nature. Either this, or Liberty withdraws
her light! Either this, or darkness conies on, and the very forces
that progress has evolved turn to powers that work destruction. This
is the universal law. This is the lesson of the centuries. Unless its
foundations be laid in justice, the social structure cannot stand.
These are the words of a prophet. And his voice in behalf of
righteousness rang out around the world, and many men blessed him
while others scorned him. He became the protagonist of the rights of
man -- his one lapse in connection with the Haymarket anarchists was
caused by misunderstanding -- and he fought for them with all his mind
and all his heart. John Dewey no doubt had in mind this combination of
prophetic vision and passionate crusading when he stated: "It is
the thorough fusion of insight into actual facts and forces, with
recognition of their bearing upon what makes human life worth living,
that constitutes Henry George one of the world's great social
philosophers."
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