The Vision

Joseph Dana Miller

[An address at the Henry George Congress, 10 September, 1928;
Reprinted from Land and Freedom, September-October, 1928]

In the great imaginative literature of the ancient Hebrews which we call the Holy Scriptures it is said: "Where there is no vision the people perish." Is the American nation so lacking? Are we so busy running after the things we call wealth, are we so engrossed in the pursuit of self- indulgences that we have left the vision behind us? It would seem so. Our age is the apotheosis of material achievement. In the chorus of ephemeral overtones the still small voice of the spirit is unheard. There does not seem in all the volume of sound from press and pulpit and politics a single authentic voice. No wonder Chesterton is provoked into saying that it is unfortunate that the invention of the radio enabling us to talk to millions with enormously increased facility comes at a time when nobody has anything to say!

I think this audience would be puzzled to name a single writer of popular eminence, a single man in public life, a single group movement outside our own, that glimpses any real vision even in broken lights. We are to remember that even in our own life time it was not always so. The vision was with us in fitful gleams. The Populist movement, the Non-Partisan League, the Committee of 48, we all remember. But every vestige of these movements embodying some vague aspiration has departed. Most people seem content to drift along with the two old time- serving parties, Republican and Democratic, both now wedded to the economic Bedlamite policy of protection. It is a time when the self-respecting citizen may serve best the cause of the Republic by staying away from the polls, or voting the Socialist ticket, a refuge always open to us. There never was a time when in politics the citizen's vote was less important.

A few years ago I sat in a great hall in this city as a delegate to the convention of the Committee of 48. It was an inspiring spectacle, those 1500 delegates from nearly every state in the Union, with banners flying and a great hush of expectancy over all. Here was not a gathering of office seekers not a man or woman among them but was animated by a hope of something better for the nation. It was good to be here for a few hours at least one could feel the exaltation and share the hopes that throbbed in the breasts of so many. But how soon it was to melt away.

Perhaps it needed no political prophet to foretell its failure. In the absence of a harmony of purpose this great convention broke up into confused and bewildered groups and drifted apart. Only for a few minutes when our friend Oscar Geiger held the Convention in the spell of his eloquent appeal and never had he spoken so well did it seem that this great Convention might declare for the Georgean principle, find something that would hold it together and start a real movement for its accomplishment. But it was not to be.

A part of the Convention melted away and marched to another hall where the Labor Party was formed. The band played as they marched along and this led the late Mr. William Wallace to remark that it was the only instance on record of a funeral procession where the corpse provided its own music.

Such vision as this convention had failed because it lacked the necessary apprehension of how to attain it. And it was but a partial vision after all. Henry George gave us a practical vision, for he linked it with the natural processes; he showed us how it could be attained; he accommodated it to methods approved by custom, in ways grown familiar to civilization and communities. He seized upon the machinery of taxation to effect this great change in the social order.

It is easy perhaps because of this to make two great mistakes. We may magnify these fiscal changes we propose as something important in themselves. We have indeed talked of natural or scientific taxation; there is no such thing. This is to concern ourselves with the body rather than with the soul of our movement.

One of the greatest misfortunes that can happen to a Henry George man is for him to become a student of taxation; the next is for him to become a tax expert. He is then in danger of becoming atrophied, impervious to principle. He may even become like our good friend, Prof. Seligman, and there are worse than Seligman, I can tell you. I do not need to tell you; you know.

Sometime in 1975 another Isaac Disraeli will write a new chapter for his "Curiosities of Literature" in which he will make an examination of books and treatises dealing with the subject of taxation. He will find here doctrines confirmatory of the theory that the infallible way to make a country rich is to keep things out of it; that if you lend money to a neighbor in straits across a body of water you must clamor like a Shylock that he pay to the last penny, principal and interest, and then proceed to adopt measures that will make it difficult if not impossible for him to pay at all; on the subject of local taxation he will find taught in these books the strange theory that you can get more out of a hogshead by tapping it a number of times, which is analogous to the story of the man who built a dog house and made one hole for the big dog to get in and another smaller hole for the little puppies!

The other mistake we make and with which we are sometimes charged, is to talk too much of the realization while ignoring the method, so enamoured of the vision, so drunken with its beauty, that we are blinded by the sheer apprehension of a world of men and women made really free, a vision too dazzling for eyes yet unaccustomed to the light.

I do not know how you define the term a "religious man," though I know how I define it for myself. Henry George was in the sense I understand it a deeply religious man. It has always seemed to me that the men who have wrought the profoundest influence on the human race were the men who were possessed of the vision Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, and perhaps in no less degree but differently Savonarola, Mazzini, yes, and Tom Paine, and the man we honor this day.

We may differ as we will on the meaning of the word "inspiration," but certainly George was genuinely inspired. He was a visionary, but a very practical visionary. He saw the vision, and all his life he made it his, from the time it broke upon him as it did to Saul of Tarsus, as it did to the Hebrew Lawgiver in the thunders of the Mount; it never left him; he lived for it in a very real sense he died for it. And that vision he put into Progress and Poverty, and there it is, ineradicable for generation after generation as the tablets of Moses!

INDIRECT taxes, while deceptive, are really the most costly of all and, both for the deceptiveness and the costliness, should be avoided in legislation for the frankness and economy of direct taxation. Hardly anybody appears to agree with us, though, and if the gasoline tax is ultimately wiped out all over the country what may be called an almost popular method of raising public money will go by the boards and our legislators will begin to hunt frantically for some new patch to add to our taxation crazy quilt. Ohio State Journal, Columbus.