Henry George's Life and Work
George Collins
[Reprinted from Land & Liberty, May-June
1989. Originally printed with the title "Call that Stirred the
World"]
HENRY GEORGE emerged on the American scene with the publication of
his first book, Progress & Poverty in 1879. His stirring
call for liberty through economic equity quickly captured worldwide
attention and placed him among the front rank of economic and social
philosophers.
His central idea was that poverty grew with advancing wealth because
land monopoly and speculation absorbed all the increase brought on by
progress. The thesis first appeared in a series of editorials, then as
a pamphlet, in 1871. George had been a journalist. Still in his teens
and trained as a printer, he had left his native Philadelphia in the
1850s for San Francisco. There, after failed adventures in search of
gold, he practised his trade, working for several newspapers, rising
from printer to reporter to editor. He became publisher of his own
newspaper and a leading citizen of San Francisco by the time Progress
& Poverty was published.
In his youth, he was exposed to the anti-slavery sentiment alive at
home in abolitionist Philadelphia. During periods of hard times and
depressions in California, he personally suffered the pang of hunger,
unemployment and uncertainty. This background helped to make him an
ardent student of the science, which in his estimation, should explain
the cause and supply the cure for the problem of the persistence of
poverty with the increase of wealth.
Reading the economic writers of his time -- Prof Henry Carey, Henry
Fawcett, James Rogers, etc. -- he found a jumble of confusion and
contradiction in their definitions, analyses and conclusions. Even
masters of classical economics such as John Stuart Mill and David
Ricardo, who, like himself, took their lead from the great Adam Smith,
author of The Wealth of Nations, fell into errors of thought
that to George's mind befogged the subject.
Progress & Poverty was not an attempt to redesign blems of
poverty, unemployment and depressions. But to find those answers,
George discovered that he had to bring precision to the terms,
consistency to their use and observation to the estimates, which his
forerunners had not done.
In 565 pages George's eloquence, logic, passion and optimism was said
to have fired the imagination of princes and paupers. Men of letters
and the unschooled found his call a clarion, sounding the start of a
better day.
Count Leo Tolstoy sang his praise. "People do not argue with the
teaching of George," he wrote, "they simply do not know it.
He who becomes acquainted with it cannot but agree." George
Bernard Shaw credited Progress & Poverty and George's
eloquence for his involvement with political economy and social
problems.
REDUCING the effort required to transform natural materials into
desirable objects has been the persistent aim of mankind since the
dawn of civilization. We not only yearn to breathe free but strive to
extend our lives, increase our comfort, gain more leisure and expand
our scope while expending the least possible effort. This precept,
posited as the motive force of economic behaviour, underlies Henry
George's economic analysis.
The social analogue of the physical law that motion seeks the line of
least resistance is, he explained, "that men seek to gratify
their desires with the least exertion." The never ending desire
of human beings for material goods propels the march of industry. Its
stride, lengthened by invention after invention, reduces the toil
required to produce each item and to satisfy every want. The resulting
abundance fosters trade with ever more distant peoples, bringing with
the exchange of goods different fashions, customs methods and ideas.
Perhaps being conscious of his physical frailty, of how quickly his
energy gives way to fatigue, and driven by an unquenchable desire for
more and better things, mankind stumbled on to the idea of using the
results of his own actions upon nature not only for consumption but as
instruments to lighten his toil and increase his rewards. Seeds are
planted and through natural germination yield new crops. Iron ore is
smelted, milled, fabricated and fitted together in machines that are
used to make other desirable things. Labour stored up in all the ways
that multiply productive efficiency and output, is a third factor of
production. Capital, "wealth used to produce more wealth;"
tools in the hands of labor, acting upon natural resources, had made
production a thing of almost magical ease.
In his introduction to Progress & Poverty George wrote: "Could
a man of the last century -- a [Benjamin] Franklin or a [Joseph]
Priestley -- have seen, in a vision of the future, the steamship
taking the place of the sailing vessel, the railroad train of the
wagon, the reaping machine of the scythe, the threshing machine of the
flail; could he have heard the throb of the engines that in obedience
to human will, and for the satisfaction of human desire, exert a power
greater than that of all the men and all the beasts of burden of the
earth combined.
"Could he have seen the forest tree transformed into finished
lumber -- into doors, sashes, blinds, boxes or barrels, with hardly
the touch of a human hand; the great workshops where boots and shoes
are turned put by the case with less labor than the old-fashioned
cobbler could have put on a sole; the factories where, under the eye
of a girl, cotton becomes cloth faster than hundreds of stalwart
weavers could have turned it out with their hand looms; could he have
seen steam hammers shaping mammoth shafts and mighty anchors, and
delicate machinery making tiny watches; the diamond drill cutting
through the heart of the rocks, and coal oil sparing the whale.
"Could he have realized the enormous saving of labor resulting
from improved facilities of exchange and communication -- sheep killed
in Australia eaten fresh in England, and the order given by the London
banker in the afternoon executed in San Francisco in the morning of
the same day; could he have conceived of the hundred thousand
improvements which these only suggest, what would he have inferred as
to the social condition of mankind? ..... Plainly in the sight of the
imagination, he would have beheld" these forces elevating society
from its very foundations, lifting the very poorest above the
possibility of want, exempting the very lowest from anxiety for the
material needs of life."
ALAS such was not the case. Poverty and want and all the social and
political evils that grow upon it were everywhere increasing. Wages
failed to keep pace with the growth of wealth because monopoly and
speculation kept land out of the reach of working men, leaving the
great majority no alternative but to work at subsistence wages or not
at all.
George's remedy, to establish equal rights to land by collecting its
annual value in lieu of taxes, was an appeal to justice, for "unless
its foundations be laid in justice the social structure cannot stand."
Justice dictates what belongs to whom. And the rightful possession of
property, the ability to say that something belongs exclusively to
someone, without reservation and without injury to any other person
due to that possession, is the unalterable standard of justice. George
made the case that labor was the sole basis for such claims.
"What constitutes the rightful basis of property? What is it
that enables a man justly to say of a thing, It is mine! From what
springs the sentiment which acknowledges his exclusive right as
against all the world? It is not, primarily, the right of a man to
himself, to the use of his own powers, to the enjoyment of the fruits
of his own exertions? Is it not this individual right, which springs
from and is testified to by the natural facts of individual
organization -- the fact that each particular pair of hands obey a
particular brain and are related to a particular stomach; the fact
that each man is a definite, coherent, independent whole - which alone
justifies individual ownership? As a man belongs to himself, so his
labor when put in concrete form belongs to him."
By that standard no one could claim rightful, exclusive ownership of
land for no labor produced it. Nor could the rent, or value of land be
individually claimed for it is the entire community of people and
their actions who make it what it is. The reform was based on sound
economic reasoning and ethical principles.
HIS monumental work in the hands of a New York publisher, George
moved to that city in 1880. Success for the book was not immediate but
by 1881 it had been published in England, was translated into German
and French and had begun to attract considerable attention.
George, and the leaders of the Irish Land League, who were battling
English landlordism in the struggle for a free Ireland, found common
cause. His second work, The Irish Land Question, made its
appearance in 1881. The same year, he set sail for the British Isles
as a correspondent for the New York newspaper, the Irish World. He
found great acceptance of his ideas in Britain and his popularity
flourished there.
In the ensuing years, his lectures and articles, both at home and
abroad, placed him at the center of philosophical debate, social
ferment and agitation for economic reform. George was convinced when
Progress & Poverty was completed, that he had unveiled a
timeless truth which, if heeded, would right the basic social wrong
and bring abundance to all who labored and would justly reward all who
prudently used their capital. And all his enterprises thereafter were
undertaken with the aim of promoting the adoption of his land tax
reform.
In the concluding chapter of Progress & Poverty he wrote:
"The truth that I have tried to make clear will not find easy
acceptance. If "that could be, it would have been accepted long
ago. If that could be, it would never have been obscured. But it will
find friends -- those who will toil for it; suffer for it; if need be,
die for it. This is the power of Truth."
In Social Problems (1883) George addressed the critical
issues one by one. Arguments from every side of the question --
concentration of industry, unemployment, machinery and inventions,
public debts, farm problems -- were examined with the precision and
perceptiveness he had displayed from the beginning of his career. The
solution to the problems was everyone's charter: "Let no man
imagine he has no influence. Whoever he may be, and wherever he may be
placed, the man who thinks becomes a light and a power."
The Scottish philosopher, Duke of Argyll, wrote a stinging
denunciation of George's ideas, labeling them communistic. It was
issued under the title, "The Prophet of San Francisco," an
obvious attempt at ridicule. George's followers turned the slur into a
mantle which George wore with pride. His reply to the duke's attack
titled, "The Reduction to Iniquity," was published in 1884,
together with "The Prophet of San Francisco," in a book with
the title Property in Land.
In the spring of 1886 George finally published his brilliant defence
of free trade, Protection or Free Trade. He had been working on it off
and on for three years, had even lost the first manuscript and had to
rewrite it. The book was read into the Congressional Record by his
fervent advocate and patron, Tom L. Johnson of Ohio, and five other
congressmen.
AS 1887 began, George founded The Standard, a weekly
newspaper of thought and opinion. The paper waded into the controversy
in the Roman Catholic Church which arose out of the political advocacy
and active campaign for George's candidacy by a priest, Father Edward
McGlynn. George's ideas were ruled contrary to church teaching and
McGlynn was ordered to cease and desist. He refused and was
excommunicated, but ultimately, reinstated.
The controversy in the church reached the highest level. In 1891 Pope
Leo XIII issued an encylical, "Rerum Novarum." It was seen
as a repudiation of George's philosophy based on a perception of it as
socialistic and anarchistic. George immediately replied with The
Condition of Labor -- An Open Letter to Pope Leo XIII. He very
carefully and respectfully set out the tenets of his doctrine in five
chapters with this succinct summation.
"Here is the answer, the only true answer: If men lack bread it
is not that God has not done his part in providing it. If men willing
to labor are cursed with poverty, it is not that the storehouse that
God owes men has failed; that the daily supply he has promised for the
daily wants of his children is not here in abundance.
It is, that impiously violating the benevolent intentions of their
Creator, men have made land private property, and thus given into the
exclusive ownership of the few the provision that a bountiful Father
has made for all. Any other answer than that, no matter how it may be
shrouded in the mere forms of religion, is practically an atheistical
answer."
In the remaining years of the century respect for George and his
reform philosophy grew. All around the world land value taxation was
debated and adopted in many places. His thoughts about the money
question, a subject he intended to elaborate in the book which was to
have been his magnum opus, The Science of Political Economy,
was beginning to crystalize. His recommendation that a failing
Johnstown, Pennsylvania company pay its workers with certificates
backed by the bonds of its debtor, saved the company during the
financial crisis of 1893.
Henry George had been distracted from his work on The Science of
Political Economy, begun in 1891, by the many demands for
lectures, speeches, travels and other books, over the years. But the
final interruption came in October, 1897 when he was once again
persuaded to run for Mayor of New York. His public support was thought
to be as great as before, if not greater, but he was in failing health
and the strenuous effort claimed his life five days before the
election. The Science of Political Economy was left
unfinished.
HENRY GEORGE fills a prominent place in the history of economic
thought. He was an active reformer but he developed an economic and
social philosophy which in the minds of many noted scholars rank him
among the great minds of the ages.
Will Lissner, until recently the editor of The American Journal
of Economics and Sociology, wrote in a centennial tribute to Progress
& Poverty: "It is a work in the Utopian tradition of
Plato's Republic, one of the works that, like the various sacred
scriptures and other timeless creations of the human mind, have
spurred the human species on to greater heights of cultural
achievement."
In a similar vein Prof. John Dewey has said: "Henry George is
one of the great names among the world's social philosophers. It would
require less than the fingers of the two hands to enumerate those who,
from Plato down, rank with him. ...No man, no graduate of a higher
educational institution has a right to regard himself as an educated
man in social thought unless he has some firsthand acquaintance with
the theoretical contribution of this great American thinker."
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