Review of the Book:
Prosperity by
Henry Ware Allen
Dean Gordon
[Reprinted from Land and Freedom, May-June
1936]
A new and timely book by Henry Ware Allen, Wichita's celebrated
contributor to country-wide newspapers, zealous advocate of the
philosophies of Henry George, especially George's panacea, the "Single
Tax," is just from the press of the Christopher Publishing Co.,
Boston. I have donated my copy of the book to the Wichita City
Library, a practice I have long followed with the books I like best so
that others may enjoy them, instead of hoarding them at home.
Mr. Allen gives a vivid, understandable picture of permanent
prosperity as an accomplished fact in the year 2000 A.D.; draws the
curtain and unfolds the story of its achievement, step by step, movie
picture-like, under the Henry George Single Tax system. The story is
told through the medium of a grandfather, Justin Waterson, aged
eighty-five, a retired Chicago merchant, in conversations with his
interested and inquiring grandson, Charles Waterson, aged seventeen.
The book is a sort of an Edward Bellamy "Looking Backward"
way of treating the contrast between the depression and aftermaths of
the present days with the orderly and happy situation under the
established Single Tax system in full sway in the year 2000. The book
of Bellamy (1850-1898) contrasted the boom days debacle of 1887-1889
with his idea of a socialistic state in the year 2000. It was
published in 1889 in the days of the rise of Populism, and met with a
big sale. This book was seized upon by the Socialists and Populists as
the gospel of their new credo, and was widely influential in the big
vote polled by the radicals of the time. I remember reading it and
remember hearing Bellamy speak in Wichita then. "Coin"
Harvey's "Coin's Financial School," illustrated by pictures
of a young man teacher, a sort of defied youth, with blackboard
figures, teaching the wise and learned and convincing them of the
errors in the existing monetary system, was another chimerical evangel
in the craze of those Populistic, Bryanistic days.
In Allen's book, grandfather Waterson was a young student of public
affairs in 1929-1935 and was able to tell his grandson from personal
experience of the greatest of depressions, intensified and prolonged
by the legerdemain which Mr. Hoover called the leaping white rabbits;
by the bootstrap-lifting, wasteful and ineffectual efforts of the
national administration to dam the eternal flowing stream of natural
forces. The grandson expresses the greatest amazement, hardly able to
believe that there could have been such times in contrast with the
happy situation of affairs in Chicago sixty-five years later, all
brought about by the political economy philosophies and Single Tax
system of Henry George.
Allen's book is the antithesis of the Utopias of Plato's Republic,
Plutarch's Utopian Sparta under the days of Lycurgus, Sir Thomas
More's "Utopia," published in 1516, Bacon's "Atlantis,"
and other noted Utopias. More's " Utopia," was an imaginary
island under an idealized, impossible social regime, and like all
others, totally disregards the realities of human nature in the
equation. More (1478-1535) was a member of the British House of
Commons, afterwards Chancellor and while in that office he was
beheaded as a traitor because he refused to take the oath required by
Henry VIII to "renounce all foreign potentates," meaning of
course the Pope.
More put the word Utopia in the dictionary, coined it from Gr. ou,
not, plus topos, a place, meanirig no place, no where. The name was
not appropriate to the More Utopia. It negated the possible reality of
his dream. It might as well have been "Never never land." As
an antonym Allen's " Prosperity," might have been well named
"Antiutopia," also from Gr. anti, oppose, topos, a place an
actuality, a possible some place, somewhere, a State such as he
pictures in his book based upon the eternal truths of reality and
natural forces, the forces, which, when scientifically met, faced and
utilized may be turned into blessings and happiness along the lines of
least resistance. The More-Bellamy idea in the face of realities is to
buck the young calf idea, the more the rope hurts the more the calf
pulls back, and the more it pulls the tighter the noose and the more
it hurts, ad infinitum.
In addition to the main purpose of Allen's book, the furthering of an
interest in and understanding of Henry George's Single Tax, another
fine and timely feature of his book is the prominence he gives to the
philosophies of the historically classic writers on political economy,
especially of Adam Smith (1723-1790), who published his "Wealth
of Nations" in 1776, and to Henry Thomas Buckle (1821-1862),
historian, whose "History of Civilization" appeared in 1857.
The Buckle history covered eleven centuries of the progress of
civilization. Buckle said that the "Wealth of Nations" was
the most important book to civilization ever written.
Buckle sought to make of history an exact science, maintaining that
the progress of civilization was influenced by climate, soil, food and
the character of a people formed by the mutabilities of nature. He
maintained that skepticism was the true source of intellectual
progress; that the retarding force was credulity; and that the
excessive protection and regulatory projects of governments, the
nobility, the Church, and other agencies over the people, had dwarfed
and retarded the spirit of freedom and civilization. To him, evidences
of these processes instead of a mere recital of the glamour of
royalty, rulers, politicians, and of wars, were data for an exact
science of history.
Adam Smith was a delusion debunker. One of his debunking instances
was, his denial of the classic claim that the way to enrich a nation
was at the expense of other nations by means of the "favorable
balance of trade," the belief in which originated early in the
16th century. The "favorable balance" was the excess in cash
received for exports above the cash paid for imports. The process was
encouraged on exports by bounties, and discouraged on imports by
protective tariffs. Smith said the process worked just the opposite
way from that intended; that it was the excess in value of imports
above the value of exports which was the true criterion of the gain.
And that centuries-old belief seems still to persist to the present
day.
Allen's style is in the class of clarity, simplicity and charm of a
Henry David Thoreau, a Ralph Waldo Emerson, a Herbert Spencer, an Adam
Smith, a Buckle and a Henry George, who each had a natural aptitude
for comprehension of universal truths, and a natural genius for
picturing them, irresistibly to the imaginations of others; and each
in a class of realists whose passion for truth knew no delusionary
limitations, either in conception of truths or in clarity of
expression.
Allen's book is an index to the Smith, Buckle, George line of
classical thought on political economy, uninfluenced by political
expediency, and his book should prove a stimulant to the revival of
the reading of this class of important literature. It has inspired me
to a re-reading of George's "Progress and Poverty," his "Protection
or Free Trade," and his crowning achievement, the Single Tax. And
since reading Allen's book I have read Buckle, and am now reading Adam
Smith. Never read either before. I have always been a believer in the
merits of Henry George's idea of free trade and in his Single Tax
system.
And so I regard Henry Ware Allen's "Prosperity" as a timely
book in these days of political atavism and reversion to the insanity
of historical millstones in the orderly progress of American
civilization.
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