The Inconsistencies of Hugh Pentecost
on the Taxation of Land

Henry George

[Reprinted from The Standard, 7 September, 1889]

In this issue of THE STANDARD we reprint from the Twentieth Century, following copy with regard to italics and small caps, an address entitled "An Infamous Conspiracy," delivered by Hugh O. Pentecost on Sunday, August 25.

This formal statement of Mr. Pentecost's present position will surprise readers of THE STANDARD who, not being at the same time readers of the Twentieth Century, have not kept track of his changing and jostling opinions. It was not more than three or four weeks ago that Mr. Pentecost was charging THE STANDARD with turning a moral and religious appeal into a mere fiscal reform, and degrading the movement for securing equal rights to land from "the plane of high, uncompromising principle on which it once rested" by permitting the presentation through its columns of views which did not involve the taking from land owners of the last penny of economic rent. But now, in the address which we print this week, Mr. Pentecost declares that he is not in favor of the taking by the community of any economic rent at all. He proposes to leave land owners, not five per cent, not ten per cent, not even the thirty-five per cent which he so indignantly charged Mr. Shearman with being willing to leave them, but all the rent they are at present receiving.

And in striking contrast with his chosen formula of some few weeks since, he now formally and definitely declares that he is not in favor of abolishing private ownership of land, but is only in favor of abolishing the ownership of vacant land.

This seems like an [antipodeal] reversal of position in the course of a few weeks. Yet it would be hardly fair to call it that. So various and contradictory have been Mr. Pentecost's declarations of opinion for some time past that it has not only been impossible for any one else to fairly state his position, but it has been evident that he did not know it himself. Having swung from his moorings and nailed down the card of his compass so that whichever way he headed for the moment seemed to him the true course, he has been drifting about with every whiff of opinion, all the while declaring that others were changing their position because he was swinging around himself.

Mr. Pentecost's new position, as explained in the address, is that the ownership of land is all right, and the only trouble lies in the ownership (either public or private) of vacant land; that the owners of vacant land are the enemies of the human race to-day - legal thieves and murderers, engaged in an infamous conspiracy against the rest of mankind; that the world is waiting now for some pregnant sentence that can be understood without explanation or argument. Mr. Pentecost thinks that he is the man who can produce this mighty sentence, and here it is:

WE DEMAND THE IMMEDIATE AND UNCONDITIONAL ABOLITION OF THE OWNERSHIP OF VACANT LAND.

This pregnant sentence, to which Mr. Pentecost seems to attribute the same magical power that in the "Arabian Nights" attaches to such sentences as "Open sesame!" or "Fish! fish! do your duty!" he styles the "white banner of anti-poverty," and wants people never to abate one jot or tittle of its demands, and to swear that they will "never be tempted to carry it into battle or into politics!"

Seeing that the most obvious ways of carrying a popular demand into effect are by force or by voting, some people might ask how this abolition is to be accomplished. Mr. Pentecost explains: If you own vacant land you must either use it yourself or give it up. And then when you have given up your vacant land (or if, like the great majority of us you do not happen to have any vacant land), you must begin to teach everybody the "horrible iniquity" of owning vacant land. This is not a mere rhetorical slip, for it is evident not only from this address but from other utterances of Mr. Pentecost, that he would rely upon the moral suasion for everything and utterly discard force or law. Naughty children are not to be spanked, murderers are not to be executed; if a burglar breaks into your house the proper course is to go down and reason with him, and if he still insists on carrying off your things, to bid him take them in peace.

Nor is there to be any public ownership or control of vacant land - any regulation as to who shall take it or in what quantities. If two men want the same piece of vacant land they are to settle the matter between them as best they may-probably in the same manner the burglar and burglarized are to settle such differences as may arise when one visits the other. This leaving of the appropriation of vacant land without regulation or control has, wherever it has been tried, resulted in the settlement of disputes by the shot gun or revolver, or whatever else may have been the arms of the period.

But passing this difficulty and supposing that by dint of constant teaching that owning of vacant land is a horrible iniquity and that the owners of vacant land are thieves and murderers, public opinion should become so far educated that no two men would want the same piece, what would the abolition of ownership in vacant land result in? Manifestly, since Mr, Pentecost would give the full ownership of land in use without any stipulation as to any degree of use, since he would not even impose any tax or rent upon it, whenever the people became so fully alive to the horrid iniquity of owning vacant land as to give to public opinion the force of law they would find no vacant land except it were also valueless, If without waiting so long, all our states could within a year's time pass laws prohibiting the holding of vacant land, they could not go into effect before we should find that all valuable vacant land had been put to some pretense of use - coal land would have become goat pastures, cattle would have been turned upon agricultural land and hogs into timber land, while on city lots would be some sort of a shanty.

Granted that there would even then be some improvement, how little would it go toward the removal of the injustice under which society is suffering, toward securing to all now here, or hereafter to come, their equal right to land? For the doctrine of the equal rights of men to the use of natural opportunities - the truth of which Mr. Pentecost says can he seen as soon as stated - is not satisfied by giving every one an equal chance to scramble for a piece of vacant land somewhere on the outskirts, so long as any vacant land remains to be scrambled for. It can only be satisfied when all are placed on the same plane with regard to natural opportunities, when every one who holds a piece of valuable land pays into a common fund, to be used for the benefit of all, a sum equivalent to the special privilege he enjoys - that is to say, a sum equivalent to the value of his land.

This Mr. Pentecost would not require. He only wants to abolish the ownership of vacant land, and would accord to the owners of used land even a fuller ownership than they have now, since he would not tax them at all. It is evident by his assurance, not only to farmers, but to factory owners, shipbuilders, miners, and house builders, that the land they are using belongs to them, as it is even more clearly evident from articles that have appeared in the Twentieth Century since he has been drifting in his present direction, that Mr. Pentecost has not adopted the crazy notion that no one should be permitted to have land save as he used it with his own hands, and that the use of land which is to give full ownership because, forsooth, the owners know it is theirs, includes the use by tenants or employes. Thus the abolition of the ownership of vacant land, as he proposes, would leave landlordism in full swing wherever it exists, and free to extend itself, as it is extending itself to-day over the used land of the United States, where it does not yet exist. It would leave all the enormous incomes which are now drawn from land to their present owners, and leave them to grow. It would not diminish them by a penny, for vacant land yields no revenue. It would, on the contrary, increase them, as Mr. Pentecost contemplates no tax on land.

This is a queer scheme for the ending of poverty and the release of the laborer from "the hellish thralldom" of the capitalist. Those who do not know Mr. Pentecost might think that in abandoning the single tax for such a scheme as this, at once preposterous and inconsequential, he was endeavoring to "draw a red herring across the trail" of the land movement, and so far as his influence went, divert it in a direction in which it would cease to he menacing to those who have grown rich by obtaining possession of valuable land. Or they might think at least that reverting to the timid thought and futile measures of the early American land reformers of a generation ago, ho was seeking to get up a land movement to which even the most ignorant farmer who thinks the single tax designed to take his farm from him might find no objection. But this is not so.

Nor yet, is his present position so utterly incongruous as it might seem. The truth is, as may he seen not only from this address, but from other utterances in the Twentieth Century, Mr. Pentecost has now, in company with the associate editor of his paper, Mr. M'Cready, reached something like a coherent position, But this is not a new and unappropriated one which he has for the first time discovered, as from the grandiloquent phrase of the address Mr. Pentecost seems to think. It is simply that occupied by the moral force or philosophical anarchists, so called in distinction from the mere physical force regenerators of society, who are also called anarchists.

Mr. Pentecost has for the present - it is to be hoped not for long - ceased to be a single tax man and has become (in the better meaning of the term) an anarchist. He would have no taxes on land, and no governmental control of land, because he would have no government.

There are some things, however, in Mr. Pentecost's statement of his present position, which are worth a word of comment for reasons which go beyond any relations of his to the single tax movement. His primary postulate is that truth is so simple, so self-evident that when you discover it, you need not seek to prove it. You have but to declare it and everybody will accept it and understand it! And, by the same notion, the discoverer of truth need make no examination to find it, need apply no tests to make sure that he has got it. All he has to do is to feel that he has got it. This is the essential principle of crankism; the root of the self-complacent assumption that leads men who will not take the trouble to equip themselves for mental work to seize on some ill-digested notion, and without further test or examination to hug it and proclaim it as a great discovery. But nothing could be further from the teachings of experience. Moral truth appeals to the deepest and truest faculties of our nature, yet how often has moral truth been overlaid and distorted! While as for the truth that must be apprehended by the intellect, does not experience show that what is not true often appears at first far more plausible than what is true - that truth indeed lies, as the old adage has it, at the bottom of a well, and that he who would find it must dig for it.

Mr. Pentecost's illustrations are curiously unfortunate. Newton did not discover gravitation. The first man to discover the sun discovered that. And that two apples on opposite sides of the earth will fall toward a common center was apparent as soon as the Copernican theory, after general incredulity and long opposition, was at length accepted. What Newton discovered was not. gravitation, but the law of gravitation - the law, namely, that all bodies attract each other with an energy directly as to their mass and inversely as the square of their distance, This discovery not merely required great analytic powers, great mathematical acquirements and great labor, but so far from being evident to everybody as soon as announced, it is doubtful if there were a hundred men in England - perhaps not many more in all Europe - who were competent to pass upon it. Nor is the proportion much larger to-day. Mr. Pentecost and I. and the mass of other people who accept Newton' s law of gravitation, do not do so because we see its truth, but because mathematicians and astronomers tell us that it is true. If we were to trust to our own ability to recognize truth of that kind without previous study we should be holding with Brother Jasper that the sun goes around the earth. That everyone can see just as soon as it is stated that, "all men should be equal as to rights and opportunities," is not merely negatived by centuries of history, but by the present condition of the world. Thomas Jefferson stated that in most striking form and prominent place, but though they hear it every Fourth of July, his countrymen do not see if yet.. As for everybody seeing that slavery was wrong just as soon as it was clearly stated, it would be quite as correct to say that the confederates all laid down their arms as soon as President Lincoln issued his proclamation, and that there never was any war. Such a statement shows such as grotesque an innocence of historical facts as that the English monarchy was rent in twain and the United States formed because a hundred years ago some one said, "No taxation without representation." It would be more reasonable to attribute that result to Dr. Johnson's "Taxation, no Tyranny." But that was a book, not a phrase.

The abolitionists testified against slavery in their day and generation, but the abolition of slavery in the United States was not the direct result of their denunciations of slavery. Though they made converts, the vast mass of the people continued to support slavery, or at least to decline to move for its abolition. It was the movement on far more moderate lines, the movement which at first had no more radical aim than to restrict the extension of slavery, that finally brought the masses of the north into opposition to it. It is well to proclaim the whole truth, but it is not well to despise the efforts of those who are advancing towards the truth, or condemn practical measures, however small, which are in the right direction.

As for Mr. Pentecost' s parallel between land owners preaching the single tax, and slave catchers, slave owners and slave traders preaching abolition, that is of the same logical texture with the rest of his address. Chattel slavery involves a direct relation between one particular man and another particular man. But though the private ownership of land may result in the same robbery of labor as does chattel slavery, the relation between the parties is not a particular and personal one; it is a general and social relation. If I own slaves and am profiting by the appropriation of the proceeds of their labor, I know precisely from whom I am taking and how the injustice can be ended. But if I own a piece of land and am profiting by its rent or by its increase in value, from what particular man or men am I taking? From the tenant? From the man who may want to purchase? Why, they have no more right to the rent of the land or to the increase in its value than I have! To leave it to them or to abandon the land to whoever is lucky enough to get there first and take it, would be equivalent to the slaveowner giving away the slave or leaving him for the first kidnapper to claim, not to emancipating him.

I do not know the man who Mr, Pentecost refers to who was willing to im0overish himself rather than take part in the iniquity of owning vacant land by taking it in payment of a debt. If I did, I would like to ask him whether his objections extended also to occupied land, and if not, why not? But I certainly think that, on Mr. Pentecost' s statement, he has more sentiment than sense. And I do not know the holder of vacant land who told Mr. Pentecost that he was giving time and money to the cause of the single tax while making all he could out of the present system. But I certainly think that he is doing far more for the cause of justice than if he were to impoverish himself by abandoning his land to someone else.

Since he has been evidently bent on finding some position more impracticable than the single tax, it is better that Mr. Pentecost should have drifted into anarchism than into socialism. For, while both are equally impracticable, and each ignores an opposite side of human nature and social needs, anarchism, which would dispense with all government , is on the whole nearer to the direction in which reform should at present move than state socialism, which would subordinate everything to government. And there is another thing that disposes me more to anarchism than to socialism. Socialism seems more consort with atheism; an- archism with theism. For socialism, which seeks to build up, as it were, a huge machine in which every man shall be put into his place, does not trust to natural harmony. But anarchism, which would do away with all government, involves at bottom the belief that there is a natural harmony in individual impulses, a natural order in social affairs, which if given free play would enable society to dispense with all human legislation. The one therefore seems to consort rather with materialism; the other with the recognition of a supreme first cause behind all the effects that our senses recognize as matter and energy. This Mr. Pentecost has probably not considered, yet it is pleasanter to find him moving in the one direction rather than in the other.

Philosophical anarchism, born of the simple life and fervent faith of the Russian peasant, who hardly knows of railroad, or telegraph, or labor saving machine, and who is so used to the operations of his mir or village community that he does not think of it as a form of government, but as a natural thing, like father or mother, which all men have, and would continue to have if government, that means to him only military conscription and taxation for which there is no return, were abolished, seems indeed with its simple trustfulness in human nature a pleasanter thing than state socialism, which ha s its birth in factory life, bureaucratic regulation and military despotism. And though philosophical anarchism is as utterly impracticable as stat e socialism, it is probably better that Mr. Pentecost should for awhile find anchorage here than that he should continue drifting around. It is certainly better that since he has ceased to be a single tax man he should frankly proclaim it.