Lectures on the Single Tax

Anna George de Mille

[Reprinted from Land and Freedom, March-April, 1931]

You have asked me to tell you of my recent lecturing experiences in the colleges. They are not only encouraging but inspiring.

I went into the thing with fear and trembling quite scared, in fact, of the scholastic atmosphere; but it proved so pleasant that I am happy in it.

I have only been at work a few weeks. I had become almost desperate over the unemployment situation. It seemed to me that we Single Taxers should be shouting from the housetops, and yet we are apparently doing little to make the great masses of groping, fumbling humans see the way out of this evil economic muddle. I felt as though I'd have to climb on an apple box and shriek to the multitude our solution of this problem. Instead, I offered my services to the Schalkenbach Foundation, and accordingly Mr. Walter Fairchild and Miss Antoinette Kaufmann arranged with Prof. Broadus Mitchell, of Johns Hopkins; Professors S. C. Mitchell and H. H. Seay, of the University of Richmond, and Prof. A. G. Taylor, of the College of William and Mary, for me to talk to their classes in economics.

The following week at Columbia University I spoke to the classes of Dr. George S. Mitchell and Dr. A. F. Cutler.

Later I went back to Baltimore, where, under the auspices of the Dean, Dr. Elinor Pancoast, I talked to her groups; following next day at Rutgers, where I was sponsored by Dr. Thos. W. Holland. I am booked by Prof. Raymond C. Moley to speak on March 31st, at Barnard, to some ninety-five students.

I lecture for at least fifty minutes and sometimes as long as an hour and a quarter. I give straight, unadulterated Single Tax. If they ask it, I give a brief biographical sketch of Henry George, but always I give his message first, for that is as he would have it.

Everywhere I have been the professors have been more than courteous; they have been graciously hospitable, usually doing the honors of their campus. Their interest in my subject is intensely gratifying to me. And the students, too, seem interested. Out of the nearly six hundred I have talked to as far as I could perceive (and having been a mother for some years I possess a roving and far-seeing eye) only one youth consistently drew pictures in his note book and only one smirked and squirmed, and only two went to sleep. Rather a fine record when one considers how weary the poor children must get, being, as the old lady said, "teached and torched" all day long!

The most complimentary audience of all was the one at the University of Richmond. My lecture was held at the noon hour and the attendance was not compulsory, yet so many students crowded into the big room that seats gave out, boys perched on window sills and stood along the sides of the long walls, and some twenty in the corridor, where no supervising, professorial glance could reach them, stood through my hour's talk. They could so easily have cut and run. I do not know whether to attribute this attention on their part to Southern chivalry or to a real interest in our cause. I prefer to think the latter.

Certainly it is gratifying to know that the young idea is "getting on the job," and I am more than ever enthused over the prize essay contest scheme. It costs $200 to hold a contest in a college, and it means that from twenty to perhaps more than a hundred students, as the case may be, are actively striving to understand this philosophy and economic reform of ours striving to understand it well enough to write about it. I wish I knew some way of enthusing Single Taxers to donate funds to the Annie C. George Prize Essay Fund to help in this great work. Certainly doubters would see the far-reaching effect of it if they had but a little of my recent experience with the college student.

Certainly they would feel, as I now do, more optimistic concerning the future of these our United States.