Conditions Necessary for the True Republic
Henry George
[A speech delivered at The Financial Reform Meeting,
Liverpool, England. Reprinted from The Standard, 10 August,
1889. Henry George shared the platform in Liverpool with William Lloyd
Garrison, Jr., son of the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison (1805 -
1879)]
. . . Mr. Henry George, on rising, was greeted with prolonged
cheering, again and again renewed. When silence was at last obtained
he said:
It is a deep pleasure for me to be here tonight, the guest of the
Liverpool Financial Reform Association, and to speak at my last
meeting in England with my honored countrymen, [including] William
Lloyd Garrison of Massachusetts. (Cheers)
You are right, Mr. Garrison. The true republic, the American Republic
that we hope for and pray is not yet here. (Hear, hear) A poor thing
is a republic where the tramp jostles the millionaire, where liberty
is mocked by a paternal system of interference with human rights,
where, under the pretext of protecting labor, labor is robbed!
(Cheers) And here, in the motherland, in the United States, in
Australia and New Zealand, we of the English tongue find the same
difficulties confronting us. Liberty is not yet here; but, thank God,
she is coming. (Cheers) Not merely the American Republic, not merely
the Republic of the Southern Cross, not merely the Republic of Great
Britain and Ireland is it that we see in the future, but that great
republic that some day is to confederate the English speaking people
everywhere (loud cheers) that is to bring a grander "Roman peace"
to the world. (A voice: More than that.) Aye, more than that - that is
to bring civilization as much higher, as much better than what we call
a Christian civilization, as this is higher and better than barbarism.
And already, in meetings such as this, it seems to me that I feel an
earnest [presentiment] of the coming time when we of one blood and one
speech are also to be one. (Cheers) For the same principles, for the
same great cause that we stand in the United States we stand here. And
in a little over a week from now I will be standing on an American
platform speaking to men whose hearts are beating in the same cause in
which we are engaged here. (Cheers)
Our little local politics may differ; our greater politics are one
and the same. We have the same evils to redress, the same truth to
propagate, the same end to seek.
And that end, what is it but liberty? (Hear, hear) He who listens to
the voice of Freedom, she will lead and lead him on. Before I was
born, before our friend there was born, there was in a southern city
of the United States a young printer bearing the name William Lloyd
Garrison. (Cheers) He saw around him the iniquity of negro slavery.
(Hear, hear) The voice of the oppressed cried to him and would not let
him rest, and he took up the cross. He became the great apostle of
human liberty, and today in American cities that once hooted and
stoned him there are now statues raised to William Lloyd Garrison.
He began as a protectionist. As he moved on he saw that liberty meant
something more than simply the abolition of chattel slavery. He saw
that liberty also meant, not merely the right to freely labor for
oneself, but the right to freely exchange one's production, and, from
a protectionist, William Lloyd Garrison became a free trader. (Cheers)
And now, when the first is gone, the second comes forward, to take
one further step to realize that for perfect freedom there must also
be freedom in the use of natural opportunities. (Hear, hear, and
cheers)
We have come . . . to the same point by converging lines. Why is
freedom of trade good? Simply that trade - exchange - is but a mode of
production. Therefore, to secure full free trade we must also secure
freedom to the natural opportunities of production. (Hear, hear) Our
production - what is it? We produce from what? From land. All human
production consists but in working up the raw materials that we find
in nature - consists simply in changing in place, or in form, that
matter which we call land. To free production there must be no
monopoly of the natural element. Even in our methods we agree
primarily on this essential point - that everyone ought to be free to
exert his labor, to retain or to exchange its fruits, unhampered by
restrictions, unvexed by the tax gatherer. (Hear, hear) . . .
Chattel slavery, thank God, is abolished at last. Nowhere, where the
American flag flies, can one man be bought, or sold, or held by
another. (Cheers) But a great struggle still lies before us now.
Chattel slavery is gone; industrial slavery remains. The effort, the
aim of the abolitionists of this time is to abolish industrial
slavery. (Cheers)
The free trade movement in England was a necessary step in this
direction. The men who took part in it did more than they knew.
Striking at restrictions in the form of protection, aiming at
emancipating trade by reducing tariffs to a minimum for revenue only,
they aroused a spirit that yet goes further. There sits, in the person
of my friend, Mr. Briggs [Thomas Briggs], one of the men of that time,
one of the men who, not stopping, has always aimed at a larger
freedom, one of the men who today hails what we in the United States
call the single tax movement, as the natural outcome and successor of
the movement which Richard Cobden led.39 (A voice: "Three cheers
for Mr. Briggs," and cheers)
And here, in your Financial Reform Association, you have the society
that has best preserved the best spirit of that time, that has never
cried "Hold!" [and] that has always striven to move forward
to a fuller and a brighter day. (Hear, hear)
In the United States, carried away by the heat of the great struggle,
we allowed protection to build itself up. We have to now make the
fight that you have partially won over here; but, in making that
fight, we make the fight for full and absolute free trade. I don't
believe that protection can ever be abolished in the United States
until a majority of the people have been brought to see the absurdity
and the wickedness of all tariffs, whether protective or for revenue
only (hear, hear); have been brought to realize the deep truth of the
fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man; have been led to see
what Mr. Garrison has so eloquently said, that the interests of
mankind are harmonious, not antagonistic, that one nation cannot
profit at the expense of another, but that every people is benefited
by the advance of other peoples - (cheers) - until we shall aim at a
free trade that will enable the citizen of England to enter the ports
of the United States as freely as today, the citizen of Massachusetts
crosses into New York. (Cheers)
The English Speaking People
Have you ever thought of the position that this English-speaking race
of ours is going to hold in the next century? Here, the motherland -
this little island. Put it alongside the United States, Canada,
Australia, or South Africa; how small it is. Our outposts are now so
planted, every sea knows so well our commerce, our millions are so
many, that in the next century this English-speaking people will be to
the world of that time a mightier power than Rome was to the civilized
world of the past. (Cheers)
What is the cause of this, what is the reason of it? Why is it that
English is spoken on the North American continent by so many millions
of people, and not French or Spanish? Why is it that it is English
that is being taught in the public schools of South Africa, of
Australia, of New Zealand? (A voice: "They are the public robbers
of the world," and laughter) Robbers they have been, but it is
not by virtue of their robbery. Spain was even a more unconscionable
robber: No! I will tell you why. It is simply because there has been
more freedom; it is simply because the English people have had less of
a paternal government than the people of the continent. (Cheers) It is
not because her colonies were fostered - it is because they were
neglected, that they grew up. (Laughter) That is today our strength,
and that will give us strength in the future. What we want today to
bring us all together is, not union under one government that shall
assume to govern, but that absolute freedom of intercourse that shall
entwine all interests, that absolute freedom of intercourse that shall
establish a daily ferry from this side of the Atlantic to the other
side of the Atlantic, that shall make everyone belonging to any of
these nations, wherever he may be on the territory of another, feel as
though he were at home: (Cheers)
That is what we strive for - for the freedom of all, for
self-government to all (hear, hear) - and for as little government as
possible: (Laughter and cheers) We don't believe that tyranny is a
thing alone of kings and monarchs; we know well that majorities can be
as tyrannous as aristocracies (hear, hear); we know that mobs can
persecute as well as crowned heads. (Hear, hear) What we ask for is
freedom - that in each locality, large or small, the people of that
locality shall be free to manage the affairs that pertain only to that
locality (hear, hear, and cheers); that each individual shall be free
to manage the affairs that relate to him; that government shall not
presume to say of whom he shall buy or to whom he shall sell, shall
not attempt to dictate to him in any way, but shall confine itself to
its proper function of preserving the public peace, of preventing the
strong from oppressing the weak, of utilizing for the public good all
the revenues that belong of right to the public, and of managing those
affairs that are best managed by the whole. (Cheers) Our doctrine is
the doctrine of freedom, our gospel is the gospel of liberty, and we
have faith in it, why should we not? (Cheers)
The Old Argument
The People who say that such terrible things would follow the
institution of the single tax are simply like the people who had
predicted terrible things to follow the building of railroads and the
abolition of chattel slavery. Why I remember, and Mr. Garrison well
remembers, the day when in the United States all the arguments that
are used in this country against the single tax were used against the
abolition of chattel slavery, even down to the "poor widow
argument."
We used to be told - I was only a boy then - we used to be told, when
William Lloyd Garrison, father of this man, was the best denounced man
on two continents, that it might be well if we could find the people
who originally brought these slaves from Africa, to make them give
them up. "But," it was urged, "these negroes are owned
by people who paid their money for them. (Laughter) Would you take
away from a man without any compensation the property that he bought?"
(Laughter) Then we used to be told, as you are told now, about that
hard working mechanic. "Here is a hard working laboring man. He
has toiled early and late, and he has bought a slave to help him. Are
you going to take a man's slave without compensation and rob him of
the products of his labor?" (Laughter) So they say today of the
English mechanic, or English laborer, who has bought himself a little
bit of land. And then we used to be told: "Here is a man who
worked hard and saved his money, and he invested in half-a-dozen
slaves. He died, and those slaves are the only means of subsistence
the widow has to support his orphan children. Would you emancipate
those slaves, and let that poor widow and those little orphans starve
to death?" (Laughter)
Slavery and Slavery
It is the old, old story! And no wonder, for property in land is just
as absurd! just as monstrous as property in human beings. (Hear, hear,
and cheers) What difference does it make whether you enslave a man by
making his flesh and blood the property of another, or whether you
enslave him by making the property of another that element on which
and from which he must live if he is to live at all? (A voice: "None
whatever!" and cheers)
Why, in those old days slave ships used to set out from this town of
Liverpool for the coast of Africa to buy slaves. They did not bring
them to Liverpool; they took them over to America. Why? Because you
people were so good, and the Englishmen who had got to the other side
of the Atlantic, and had settled there, were so bad? Not at all. I
will tell you why the Liverpool ships carried slaves to America and
did not bring them back to England. Because in America population was
sparse and land was plentiful. Therefore to rob a man of his labor -
and that is what the slaveowner wanted the slave for - you had got to
catch and hold the man. That is the reason the slaves went to America.
The reason they did not come here, the reason they were not carried
over to Ireland was that here population was relatively dense, land
was relatively scarce and could easily be monopolized, and to get out
of the laborer all that his labor could furnish, save only wages
enough to keep him alive even the slaveowner had to give this - it was
only necessary to own land.
What is the difference, economically speaking, between the slaves of
South Carolina, Missouri, Mississippi, and Georgia and the free
peasantry of Ireland or the agricultural laborer of England? (Cheers)
Go to one of those slave states in the slave days, and there you would
find a planter, the owner of five hundred slaves, living in elegant
luxury, without doing a stroke of work, having a fine mansion, horses,
[and a] carriage - all the things that work produces, but doing none
of it himself. The people who did the work were living in negro huts,
on coarse food; they were clothed in coarse raiment. If they ran away,
he had the privilege of chasing them back, tying them up and whipping
them and making them work.
Come to this side of the Atlantic, in a place where you saw the same
state of development. There you found also five hundred people living
in little cabins, eating coarse food, clothed in coarse raiment,
working hard, yet getting only enough of the things that work produces
to keep them in good times, when bad times came having to appeal to
the world for charity. But you found among those little cabins, too,
the lordly mansion of the man who did no work. (Hear, hear, and
groans)
You found the mansion; you did not often find the man. (Laughter and
cheers) As a general rule he was off in London, or in Paris, enjoying
himself on the fruits of their labor. (Hear, hear) He had no legal
right to make them work for him. Oh! no. If they ran away he could not
put bloodhounds on their track and bring them back and whip them; but
he had, in hunger, in starvation, a ban dog40 more swift, more keen,
more sure than the bloodhound of the south. (Cheers)
The slaveowner of the south - the owner of men - had to make those
men work for him. He went to all that trouble. The landlord of Ireland
did not have to make men work for him. He owned the land, and without
land men cannot work; and so men would come to him - equal children of
the Creator, equal citizens of Great Britain - would come to him, with
their hats in their hands, and beg to be allowed to live on his land,
to be allowed to work and to give to him all the produce of their
work, except enough to merely keep them alive, and thank him for the
privilege. . . .
|