Remembering Henry George

Unsigned Comment by the Editors

[Reprinted from Yale Review, November, 1897]

THE dramatic death of Henry George, in the very climax of the New York municipal elections, is in some respects a most fitting close to the life of a man who moved his fellow-men profoundly, yet failed to accomplish much of the work which he had planned for himself and for them. Progress and Poverty was a great book. No other American work on economic subjects has had so wide an audience; no scientific work on these subjects -- for it is hardly necessary to say that books like those of Bellamy belong to a totally different class -- has even momentarily approached it in popular interest.

It is so long since most of us have read Progress and Poverty that it may be worth while to recall a little in detail the character of its contents. It consisted of the parts: 1. An attack on certain of the received doctrines of orthodox political economy, notably the wage-fund theory and the Malthusian theory. 2. A treatment of the subject of distribution, which George believed to be at once more coherent and more fruitful than that which had been given in previous books. 3. An indictment of private land tenure, which charged this system with nearly all the economic evils under which we now suffer, followed by the promise of an economic millennium if we had the resolution to tax private land values out of existence.

The first, or purely critical, part of the book was, on the whole, scientific and sound. Many of George's comments on the wage-fund theory are such as most modern economists would endorse - indeed they do not greatly differ from those of Longe or Walker, except that they are presented in such language as to appeal to a wider circle of readers. George's criticism of Malthus would not be so universally accepted; but it may fairly be said that against the Malthusian theory, as it had usually been stated, his points were well taken, and that his book was one of the things which paved the way for a re-statement of the principles of population which should be more in accordance with the results of modern science.

The second part is not so good. While George is right to say that the distribution theories of his predecessors are rather chaotic, his own theory will not bear criticism so well as theirs. His axiom, that whatever increases the efficiency of labor increases the demand for land, turns out, on examination, to be by no means an axiom, and often to be the reverse of the truth. Still less satisfactory is his third part, where he seeks to prove by historical and legal analysis the evils of the present system and the good to be obtained by a change. His knowledge of history and law were unequal to the task. The magnificent investigations of Wagner were quite unknown to him; and the reader who was in possession of Wagner's facts could detect the fallacies at a glance.

Yet it was this weakest part of the work which gave it most of its popularity. Few of its readers had more knowledge of history and law than George; most of them had not nearly as much. Progress and Poverty promised the millennium in specious reasoning and in really excellent English; that was enough to secure its success. But what kind of success? Did it weaken the institution of private land tenure? Apparently not in the least. Did it promote tax reforms which should make the public burdens bear heavier on ground values and lighter on improvements? There is no evidence that it did; in fact, there is some reason to believe that it hindered rational reforms of this kind by holding out the prospect of irrational ones. Not a few of the more zealous advocates of land nationalization regard the evils of the present system with a kind of complacency, as likely the sooner to drive the world to the adoption of a drastic remedy; and they have correspondingly little use for palliative measures, which, by lightening present evils, may postpone the day of radical cure.

The great effect of Progress and Poverty was a moral one. It gave the sentiment of the laborers some common thoughts and some rallying cries. It served the "new unionism" as a sort of prophetic book - half poem and half prediction. This influence is far from being confined to America. Critics like the Webbs give the clearest testimony to its effect on the other side of the Atlantic. Marx's Kapital had been called the "bible of the socialists"; but it was totally unfitted for effective use in propaganda. Abstruse in its reasonings and extreme in its conclusions, it could not win the love of any large body of supporters. With George it was different. His style was delightful; his meaning speciously plain, and yet adorned by poetic fancy; his sympathies catholic; his proposals, in appearance at least, essentially constructive. No wonder that Progress and Poverty had a power which placed it beyond the assaults of logical critics, however acute; and that the book as a whole has an importance in the world's economic history which is not to be measured by examining the correctness of its specific conclusions or the extent to which they have been carried out in practice.