In the United States also [Collectivism] has made some progress, though it would be scarcely possible to conceive a nation where the spirit of individualism is more strongly developed and the spirit of competition more intense. America had long been the refuge of an immense proportion of the banished Anarchies of Europe, and it presents the curious spectacle of a country where the working-class, at least in its lower levels, consists mainly of foreigners or children of foreigners. At the same time, the most prominent type of American Socialism does not appear to have been created by direct foreign propagandism, though its leading doctrine had long since been anticipated on the Continent. The great popularity and influence of the writings of Mr. [Henry] George, on both sides of the Atlantic, have been a remarkable fact. It is largely due to the eminent literary skill with which he has propounded his views, and described and exaggerated the darkest sides of modern industrial life, and partly also, I think, to the general ignorance of continental Socialist literature, which has given his doctrines something of the fascination of novelty. His fundamental proposition is that, the soil not having been made by man, and having in the beginning of human society been a common property (as it still is in most savage nations), should be taken by the community, without compensation, from its present owners, although it has been recognised as private property for countless generations;[1] although it has been bought, sold, inherited, and mortgaged on the faith of the most undisputed titles; although the earnings and savings and labour of innumerable industrious lives have been sunk in its improvement, and have given it its chief present value; although its existing rent represents, in innumerable cases, nothing more than the lowest, or almost the lowest, rate of interest on the sum actually expended upon it within the memory of living men.[2] It is but a slight circumstance of aggravation that large tracts of the land which Mr. George desires the American Government to take without compensation, had not long since been sold by that very Government to its present owners.[3]

This scheme of plunder, as we have seen, is by no means original. It had long been a leading article in the Socialist programmes of Germany and France, and the continental Socialists, long before Mr. George, had clearly seen that it could be carried out by the simple process of imposing a special tax on land, equivalent to its full rent value. The doctrine that wages are not paid from capital, but from earnings, on which Mr. George lays so much stress, is merely the doctrine of Marx; nor is there any originality in Mr. George's proposal that nations should still further improve their condition by defrauding their creditors and repudiating their debts. It is 'a preposterous assumption,' he assures us, 'that one generation should be bound by the debts of its predecessors.'[4] That all the profits of production of every kind must ultimately centre in the possessors of land (who must, in consequence, be reaping the most enormous wealth) is a doctrine which belongs more distinctively to Mr. George; but his statements that wages are steadily tending to the minimum of subsistence, the condition of the working-classes steadily deteriorating, and society rapidly dividing into the enormously rich and the abjectly poor, have been abundantly made in Europe, and will, no doubt, long continue to be repeated, in spite of the clearest demonstrations of their falsehood.[5]

It is a somewhat singular fact that the most popular work in favour of the plunder of landed property should come from a country where there is neither primogeniture, nor entail, nor any other form of feudal privilege or restriction; where land is far more abundant than in the Old World, and where the immense majority of the enormous fortunes that have been so rapidly, and often so scandalously, amassed have been acquired in ways quite different from those of the landowner. In no country, in modern times, have abuses of property been greater than in America, and in no country have these abuses been more rarely and more slightly connected with the ownership of land.[6]

In another respect the American authorship of these books may excite some surprise. Whatever may have been the nature of the first division and appropriation of the soil when societies passed from their nomadic to their agricultural stage, it is at least incontestably true that the early histories of all nations are full of scenes of savage violence. Exterminating invasions have nearly everywhere been again and again, repeated, and again and again followed by vast dispossessions of land. In European countries, it is usually impossible to say whether any particular man is wholly or in part descended from the aboriginal inhabitants, or from one of the many successive races of plundering invaders. All that can be confidently alleged is, that the latter descent is by far the more probable, when we consider the vast period that has elapsed since the aboriginal inhabitants were displaced, and the exterminating character of savage warfare. But in America we may go a step further. It is at least quite certain that the original owners of the soil, whoever they may have been, were not the members of the Anglo-Saxon race. If there is no such thing as prescription in property; if violent dispossession in a remote and even a prehistoric past invalidates all succeeding contracts, the white man has no kind of title, either to an individual or to a joint possession of American soil. The sooner he disappears, the better. Against him, at least, the claim of the Red Indian is invincible.[7]

But, in truth, the .principle of Mr. George may be carried still further. If the land of the world is the inalienable possession of the whole human race, no nation has any right to claim one portion of it to the exclusion of the rest. The English people have no more right than Frenchmen to the English soil. The French have no more right to the soil of France than the Germans. Inequalities of fortune are scarcely less among nations than among individuals, and they must be equally unjust. Compare the lot of the Esquimaux in the frozen North, or of the negro in the torrid sands of Africa, with that of the nations inhabiting the fertile soils and the temperate regions of the globe. And what possible right, on the principle of Mr. George, have the younger nations to claim for themselves the exclusive possession of vast tracts of fertile and almost uninhabited land, as against the teeming millions and the overcrowded centres of the Old World? Mr. George is a Californian writer. The population of California is about a fifth of that of Belgium. The area of California is nearly fourteen times as large as that of Belgium.

In some respects the writings of Mr. George differ widely from those of European Socialists. They contain no aggressive atheism, and no attacks on marriage. The American writer knows his public, and there are few books on economical subjects which are so percolated with religious phraseology and so profusely adorned with Scriptural quotations. We pass at once into a region of piety to which continental Socialism has not accustomed us. Nor are these writings characterised by that desire to aggrandise the functions of government which is so general in continental Socialism. Mr. George does not wish to suppress competition, or individual initiative, or individual savings, and he desires rather to diminish than to extend the powers of Government. In these respects, indeed, he cannot properly be called a Socialist. All he asks from the Government is, that it should rob two great classes, appropriating the whole rent-value of land by a single tax, which should supersede all others, and repudiating its national and municipal debts.

The results to be expected from the confiscation of private property in land he describes in rapturous terms. 'It is the golden age of which poets have sung and high-raised seers have told in metaphor! It is the glorious vision which has always haunted man with gleams of fitful splendour. It is what he saw whose eyes at Patmos were closed in a trance. It is the culmination of Christianity, the City of God on earth, with its walls of jasper and its gates of pearl! It is the reign of the Prince of Peace!'[8] In another and more terrestrial passage he describes the promised millennium in the words of an English democrat. It would be 'no taxes at all, and a pension to everybody.'[9] Mr. George is quite as ready as the German Socialists to plunder the capitalist. He maintains that the first act Of the Federal Government, at the beginning of the War of Secession, ought to have been to provide for its expense by confiscating the property of all the richest members in the community who remained loyal to the Union;[10] and no continental writer ever advocated dishonesty to national creditors with a more unblushing cynicism. At the same time, capital, as distinguished from landowning, does not occupy in his system the same position as in the treatise of Marx. In the demonology of Marx the capitalist is the central figure. He is the vampire who sucks the blood of the poor, and absorbs all the wealth which more perfect machinery and more productive labour create. According to Mr. George, he can ultimately absorb none of this wealth, (unless he happens to be a landowner. The interest and profits of the capitalist, as well as the wages of the labourer, can never, in the long run, increase while land remains private property.[11] Some of my readers will probably doubt whether such a doctrine could have been seriously propounded, but the language of Mr. George is perfectly clear. 'The ultimate effect of labour-saving machinery or improvements is to increase rents without increasing wages or interest.' 'Every increase in the productive power of labour but increases rent. . . . All the advantages gained by the march of progress go to the owners of land, and wages do not increase. Wages cannot increase.' 'The necessary result of material progress -- land being private property -- is, no matter what the increase in population, to force labourers to wages which give but a bare living.' 'Whatever be the increase of productive power, rent steadily tends to swallow up the gains, and more than the gains.' It is a general law, according to Mr. George, that wherever land is cheap wages will be high, and wherever land is dear wages will be low.[12] It is obvious that, according to this law, wages must be far lower in London, in the great provincial towns, and in the country that surrounds them, than in Dorsetshire or Connemara; far lower in England and France than in Hungary, or Poland, or Spain! Mr. George assures us that the whole benefit of the increase of wealth which has taken place in England within the last twenty or thirty years has gone to a single class -- the English landowners. It has not alleviated pauperism, but only increased rent.[13]

I can imagine a speculative writer who belonged to one of the more severe monastic Orders, or who wrote, like Campanella, in the profound isolation of a prison-cell, arriving at such conclusions. That sophistry of this kind should deceive anyone who saw, or might have seen, Manchester, or Birmingham, or Leeds; who observed the countless prosperous villas, built out of successful industry, that are growing up around every great manufacturing centre; who had paid the smallest attention to the history of wages in different times and different places, or to the comparative increase of. the revenues drawn from personal property and from land, in any of the great countries of the world, is truly amazing. One touch of the reality of things is sufficient to prick the bladder.

Mr. George devotes a special chapter to repudiating all idea of compensation to the 'expropriated' landowner. In this he is perfectly consistent. I have already examined this point in a former chapter, and need here only repeat that Mr. Fawcett, and several other writers, have shown to absolute demonstration that any attempt to purchase the soil at its market value, by means of a loan raised at the current rate of interest, could only end in a ruinous loss to the nation, while the lot of those who are actually cultivating the soil would become incomparably worse than at present. To pay the interest of the purchase money it would be necessary to raise their rents to the rack-rent level, and to exact them with a stringency which is now only shown by the harshest landlords. The scheme of an honest purchase is, in fact, I believe, now universally abandoned; but some of the English disciples of Mr. George have proposed that, although the land should be taken by the State, an annuity of two lives, equal to its net revenue, should be granted in the form of a pension to the dispossessed owner and to his living heir. It is charitable to assume that this proposal is a serious one; but a man must have a strange conception of human nature if he imagines that a nation which had gone so far in adopting the principles and policy of Mr. George, I would consent for a long period of years to burden itself with this enormous tax.[14]

Few things are more difficult than to estimate the real force of dishonest and subversive theories in a great, free nation, where every novelty and every extravagance find an unshackled utterance. In the chaos of vast redundant energies, of crude opinions, of half-assimilated nationalities, of fiercely struggling competitions, paradox and violence rise easily to the surface, for they strike the imagination, and give men the notoriety which, in such a society, is feverishly sought. Notoriety, however, is no measure of power, and the controlling force of the good sense and the sound moral sentiment of the community has, in America as in England, usually proved invincible. The writings of Mr. George are said to have made much more impression in England than in his own country, and few things are more improbable than that his doctrines should triumph. Whatever form land legislation may take in the future, it will never take the form of wholesale spoliation in a country where land is as divided as in America; and a people who so honestly accepted and so courageously reduced their national debt at a time when its burden seemed overwhelming, are certainly not likely to seek their millennium in fraudulent bankruptcy. Nor is the American Constitution one in which the firm fabric of property and contract can be overthrown by any transient ebullition of popular sentiment.

It is, however, impossible to deny that there are signs of grave labour troubles in America, and elements out of which very dangerous opinions might easily grow. In America, no doubt, as in all other civilised countries, most wealth is made by honest industry, and, more than in most countries, it has been expended for public uses. At the same time, there is no country where the struggle for it is fiercer or more unscrupulous, or where vast sums have been more frequently or more rapidly accumulated by evil means. The colossal fortunes built up by the railway-wrecker, by the railway-monopoliser, by the fraudulent manipulator of municipal taxation, by unjust favours extorted from bribed legislators, by great commercial frauds and commercial monopolies under the names of trusts and syndicates, must one day bring a terrible nemesis. These are the things that do most to sap the respect for property in a nation, and they are especially dangerous where no aristocratic or established territorial influence exists to restrict the empire and overshadow the ostentation of ill-got wealth. The vast development of the protective system, and of the system of subsidising great multitudes from the pension list, can scarcely fail to weaken the spirit of self-reliance, and to teach the American people to look more and more to Government to create for them artificial conditions of wellbeing. On the other hand, pauperism has appeared and spread widely through the American cities, where so many turbulent and explosive foreign elements already exist. The unoccupied land, which was once the great safety-valve of dangerous energies, is fast contracting; wages during the last terrible years of depression, probably for the first time in American history, have generally fallen, and, in a country where the cost of living is extremely high, the number of the unemployed has enormously increased.

COMMENTARY

[1] Lecky materially misrepresents the program called for by Henry George, who advocated not land redistribution but the societal collection of the rental value of land for use as a fund for development of public goods and provision of public services.

[2] The author provides no data to support this contention, and almost any history of the period describes the enormous profits associated with speculation in land. To the extent the return to capital approached the return to investments in land, one needs to look at the preponderance of trusts, cartels and other organizational monopolies.

[3] Here again, the objective analysis of the history of the sale of public lands reveals a high level of corruption and entrenched privilege associated with the enabling legislation and its enforcement.

[4] The source Lecky provides for this assertion is Henry George's book, Social Problems, pp. 218-21. The pages referred to by Lecky are the first few pages of Chapter XX, "The American Farmer." They do not address this subject at all. However, in Chapter XVI, "Public Debts and Indirect Taxation," George writes: "… by the institution of indirect taxes and public debts the great landholders were enabled to throw off on the people at large the burdens which constituted the condition on which they held their lands, and to throw them off in such a way that those on whom they rested, though they might feel the pressure, could not tell from whence it came. …The institution of public debts, like the institution of private property in land, rests upon the preposterous assumption that one generation may bind another generation." [pp. 161-162]

[5] George forecasts the future as something of a race between the increasing productivity of labor and capital against the tendency of such increases in productivity to be capitalized into higher and higher rental values for land. Other externalities - social as well as political - influence the extent to which this tendency is realized.

[6] Lecky's contemporary, Frederick Jackson Turner, documented quite clearly the extent to which land speculation and political corruption combined to effect huge fortunes for a politically-connected few at the public expense.

[7] What Henry George argued is that no group of people has any greater claim to any region of the globe than any other, regardless of the duration of occupancy or territorial control.

[8] From: Progress and Poverty, Book X. chap. 5. Lecky adds: "Compare the boast of a prominent English Socialist: ' he Churches are turning timidly towards the rising sun, and the eager reception by Evangelical Christian reformers of Mr. Henry George as a notable champion of the faith is significant of the change of tone. . . . English Protestantism ... is coming more and more forward as an active political influence towards the creation of [the Kingdom of God on Earth' (Webb's Socialism in England, p. 72)." What Lecky could have learned from others who knew Henry George was his deep and sincere spirituality. George actually came to believe that God had called upon him to reveal the truths he came to and wrote of in Progress and Poverty.

[9] From: Protection and Free Trade, p. 334. This book ends with page 332. By definition, the public collection of rent is not taxation, for rent is not legitimately private property and therefore not subject to confiscation via taxation. George forecasted that should the full rent fund be publicly collected, not only would there be no necessity to confiscate private property or earned income via taxation, but there would be sufficient public revenue remaining after providing all necessary and desired public goods and services to issue a form of citizens dividend to all individuals. Or, at minimum, provide a pension to those no longer able to work.

[10] From: Social Problems, p. 216. Again, this page reference is erroneous. George treats the subject of public debt and war in pages 164 thru 166. What George actually wrote was that "if, when we called upon men to die for their country, we had not shrunk from taking, if necessary, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand dollars from every millionaire, we need not have created any debt. But instead of that, what taxation we did impose was so levied as to fall on thepoor more heavily than on the rich, and incidentally to establish monopolies by which the rich could profit at the expense of the poor." [p.164]

[11] George agreed that individuals must have exclusive, if conditional, control over land in order to enjoy secure use of whatever improvements are made to the land. Thus, he accepted the appropriateness of issuing deeds or leases. Deeded land would be subject to an annual tax equal to the full rental value of the location. Leased land would be offered to individuals at whatever annual amount was determined by market forces.

[12] From: Progress and Poverty, Book iv. chap. 3. 'Wherever you find land relatively low, will you not find wages relatively high? And wherever land is high, will you not find wages low? As land increases in value, poverty deepens and pauperism appears' (Book v. chap. 2). Lecky states: "It is obvious that Mr. George merely thought of the high wages in some new countries. It is equally obvious that the explanation of those high wages is, simply, that the labourers are few, and that, if they do not wish to labour for an employer, they have other and easy ways of acquiring a comfortable subsistence." Yes, and this comfortable subsistence was possible because potentially productive land was freely or very inexpensively available to those willing to apply their labor, even with a minimum of financial reserves or capital goods to assist them.

[13] Ibid. Book vi. chap. 1.

[14] Lecky here fails to address George's ethical argument against compensating those who control land for requiring them to pay far more of the realized or imputed rental value of that land than was the case up to that point. He simply misrepresents George as calling for the public confiscation and redistribution of land. Moreover, George never endorsed measures called for by others to repurchase land outright from a nation's landowners.