On Strikes: The Fight in the Dark

Henry George

[Reprinted from The Standard, 31 August, 1892]

Let those who deprecate strikes consider the real cause of strikes. It is time. When a great city can in midwinter be brought within measurable distance of being cut off from a prime necessity of life, and when armies of private mercenaries guard factories and patrol wharves, it needs no prophet to foresee that the gravest social catastrophes are impending. The most dangerous classes in the world today are "the men of light and learning", the editors, professors, preachers, teachers and influential citizens, who are constantly proclaiming that our social adjustments are all that need to be desired, and that every effort to induce the masses to think of possible social improvement is a menace to property, an invitation to anarchy. It is as true in the nineteenth century as it always was, that a society based on the denial of a fundamental human right cannot stand.

I have neglected no opportunity of telling workingmen that what they had to fight, in order to accomplish anything real and lasting, was not their immediate employers, but the false and wrongful system, which, by depriving the masses of men of the natural opportunities for the employment of their labor, compelled them to struggle with one another for the chance to work. I have constantly endeavored in every way I could to throw light into the darkness; to induce men to revert to first principles, and think of these questions in a large way; to convince them that the evils which they feel are not due to the greed or wickedness of individuals, but are the result of social maladjustments, for which the whole community is responsible, and which can only be righted by general action.

What is the cause of this wide-spread discontent, and what is its cure?

To both these questions there must be specific answers. I assert that the cause is the shutting out of labor from those natural materials and opportunities without which labor is helpless, and that the remedy is in the restoration to labor of access to these materials and opportunities, by breaking up the monopolization of land and securing to all equal rights in the bounty of their Creator.

Many of us -- and our numbers are rapidly increasing--see clearly that the monopoly of land is the true cause of the evils which are acknowledged to exist, and that in the concentration of taxes on land values lies the adequate and peaceful remedy.

The work that The Standard was intended to do has been done. ...I did not start The Standard for the purpose of establishing a paper, but for the purpose of advancing a cause. Needed while it is the only means of presenting that idea to the public and keeping its friends in touch, that need ceases as the idea finds wider expression and journals of general circulation are open to it.

The Standard closes its existence with a clear and honorable record. Its files ... record an advance of the great cause to which it was devoted unprecedented in the history of such movements. Where in the beginning it stood alone, there are now scattered over the United States hundreds of local journals devoted to the same cause, while the columns of general newspapers of the largest circulation are freely opened to the advocacy of our views. They are, indeed, making their way through all avenues of thought -- the pulpit, the stage and the novel, in legislatures, in Congress and on the political stump.

The ignorance and prejudice which the earlier files of The Standard showed that we then had to meet, have, in their cruder forms at least, almost disappeared, and among our most active friends are thousands of men who then believed our successes would be the destruction of society.

Let us say good-bye to it; not as those who mourn, but as those who rejoice. Times change, men pass, but that which is built on truth endures.