Thomas G. Shearman and the Single Tax

Hugh O. Pentecost

[Reprinted from The Standard, 20 July, 1889]

Mr. Thomas G. Shearman has a long article in last week's STANDARD concerning my recent declarations that the single tax movement is losing its moral and religious character and becoming a mere fiscal reform, conducted by the ordinary political methods. By the courtesy of the editor of THE STANDARD I am permitted to explain in these columns my position, also. I commend the article spoken of to every reader of this paper as a model of gentlemanly courtesy, logical consistency, and fairness in argument. I have read nothing for a long time that pleased me more.

Mr. Shearman frankly states that he does not agree with Henry George in his idea that private property in land should be abolished -- that land should be made common property. He announces his belief in landlords and landlordism. He defines his idea of taxation to be that the landlords should feed upon the people as aphides feed upon leaves, and then that the government should milk the landlords as the ant milks the aphis -- that is to say, about sixty-five per cent of what the landlords take from the people should be taken from the landlords, leaving them thirty-five percent of rent to encourage them in the business of land holding.

Mr. Shearman is not a philanthropist and makes no pretension to being one. He is a statistician and tax reformer. He is a free trader -- in everything but land. Concerning the business of land holding he is a protectionist. But what is so admirable about him is that he is straightforward, and always dignified and gentlemanly. He differs with Mr. George, and says so. He doesn't pretend to believe in Mr. George's doctrine and then tell Mr. George's disciples that it is not expedient to bring that doctrine into prominence just now, while we have on our dress suits and are hobnobbing so charmingly with the four hundred. He says:

"Mr. Pentecost is mistaken in his entire conception of the motives, methods and efforts of those who have deemed it wise to advocate the single tax as a cure for unjust taxation. [Not as a cure for poverty, nor as a means for abolishing land monopoly, you ob serve. -- H. O. P.] His instinct is correct on one point. We can never work in harmony with socialists or anarchists; not because we do not recognize the honesty and good intentions of many such men, but because we consider the single tax as the surest guarantee that neither socialism nor anarchy will ever become the law of human society, and because this is one of its great merits in our eyes. We are quite able to perceive and admit that socialists, like William Morris, and anarchists, like some Russian philosophers, have excellent intentions and agree with us upon many points, just as all good men agree in desiring the welfare of the human race. But we do not even desire to see all competition abolished, as the typical socialist does, nor all government abolished, as the philosophic anarchist does."

But he indulges in no ridicule, misrepresentation nor abuse of socialists or anarchists.

The fact is Mr. Shearman is an eminent lawyer, a wealthy man, a Christian gentleman, an orthodox conservative, who is very well satisfied with things as they are, except in the single matter of taxation. And as such he has my profoundest respect. I recognize him as a most valuable ally in the great cause of industrial emancipation, and I hope he will permit me to work with him to obtain his sixty-five per cent single tax on land values. But all readers of THE STANDARD will henceforth understand, if they did not before, that Mr. Shearman is what is called a single taxer, "limited." And believers in the abolition of the business of land holding will see at once the absurdity of following Mr. Shearman as a "leader" in the new crusade that was set afoot by the publication of Progress and Poverty.

I highly approve of Mr. Shearman as an able helper of Mr. George, but I protest, in the name of every man and woman who understands Mr. George's writings, and who looks upon his paper as the representative of a great philosophy, against THE STANDARD, in Mr. George's absence, going over, body and soul, to Shearmanism by declaring, as it has declared editorially, that the abolition of private property in land is not even the ultimate object of the single tax, and that only those who are working for Shearmanism via the democratic party, are in the straight and narrow way.

I make this protest also in the name of Henry George himself, who gave us his opinion of Shearmanism in THE STANDARD of July 28, 1888. Here it is. Let THE STANDARD readers ponder it well, compare it with Mr. Shearman's article of last week, and ask themselves whether THE STANDARD has been in tune with these words since Mr. George has been in Europe:

"Every once in a while some one, thinking only of the opposition, writes me that be deems it a mistake that in Progress and Poverty I should have said anything at all about the right of individual ownership of land; and that it would have proved far more effective if I had contented myself with pointing out the economic benefits of concentrating taxation on land values. I know that this is not so. I know that the feeling that induced me to write that book is the feeling to which I have appealed. The success it has had and the forces it has set in motion, are to me proofs of the truth of what I wrote in it when I said:

'If you would move men to action, to what shall you appeal? Not to their pockets, but to their patriotism; not to selfishness, but to sympathy. Self-interest is, as it were, a mechanical force-potent, it is true; capable of large and wide results. But there is in human nature what may be likened to a chemical force; which melts and fuses and overwhelms; to which nothing seems impossible. 'All that a man hath will he give for his life'-that is self-interest. But in loyalty to higher impulses men will give even life.'

"In the long list of men whom I know as having since then given money, time, influence, toil, to the spreading of the doctrines that book sets forth, I know of no single case in which the moving motive was any individual benefit, or even the idea of great and beneficial fiscal reform. In every case of which I know, the moving motive was the idea of overthrowing a monstrous wrong, the idea of making life better, brighter and fuller for those worse off than themselves, and for those yet to be born. I have known many who have recognized the fiscal side of the reform alone; but I have never known any efficient aid from them. The men who have worked, the men who will work, the men who can be counted on everywhere and every time till death closes their eyes, are those to whom this reform appeals from the moral, the religious side; those who see in it not a mere improvement in taxation, but a conforming of our most important social adjustment to the law of justice, to the will of God; a restoration to the disinherited of the bounteous provision which the Intelligence that laid the foundations of the world and brought them upon it has provided for them." -- Standard, July 23, 1888.

And I also declare that glad as I ever will be to work with Mr. Shearman, as far as he wishes to go in our direction -- that is, for free trade in everything but land -- I am more in sympathy with the rational enthusiasm for humanity that I find among the socialists and anarchists, than I am with Mr. Shearman's ambition to make capitalism stronger than it now is, or than I am with the democratic party, which juggles with the name of the great theoretical anarchist, Thomas Jefferson, but desires anything like real freedom as little as the republican party, and has absolutely no sympathy with the George movement.

I do not object to our "leaders," Mr. Croasdale and Mr. Post, using THE STANDARD in Mr. George's absence to "boom" Shearmanism. For as you see, I am disposed to boom it myself, for all that it is worth. I do not object to our "leaders" declaring that we should work with the democratic party. What I object to is their defaming other honest and earnest social regenerators and attempting to prevent them from working with us for the common object of abolishing the land monopoly by Mr. George's plan of confiscating economic rent. I am willing to work with free traders and single taxers as far as they go in our direction, and I would also welcome socialists and anarchists to work with us as far as we go in their direction.

An effort seems to be making to have it appear that I advocate working with socialists for the establishment of socialism. But that is absurd. I have not advocated organic union with the socialists for any purpose. I have only declared for sympathetic relations with our radical brethren, and a willingness and desire to have them join with us in our effort to destroy the private ownership of rent. The socialists and nationalists almost to a man, and very many anarchists, would be working with Mr. George to-day for the abolition of land monopoly by the confiscation of rent, if Mr. George and his "leaders" would lead the "movement" back to the plane of high, uncompromising principle upon which it once rested, and forego the soul destroying political tactics which our "leaders" say constitute the "adopted policy" of the "movement."

I know that our "leaders" think it wise to have the "respectable" American think that we bear no relation to socialists and anarchists. But it is never wise to deny the truth. Even Mr. Shearman's sixty-five per cent land value tax would lead inevitably to socialism or anarchism. It wouldn't "stay put," as Mr. McCready explains in this week's Twentieth Century. And as for the complete confiscation of economic rent -- the result would either be the extension of the functions of government, as Henry George describes in the seventeenth chapter of Social Problems, or the disappearance of economic rent entirely, by the freedom of the land.

For my part I think there is a thousand times more hope of success in uniting all the moral enthusiasts whose reason assents to the cry: "The land must be free!" upon the rent confiscation method, than there ever will be by inching along toward the commencement of a beginning which there is a shadow of a possibility that the democratic professional politicians may at sometime or other contemplate making.

Now let us clearly understand the case. Mr. Shearman's ultimate is a tax of sixty-five per cent on land values. Mr. George's ultimate is the abolition of poverty by destroying landlordism, as a first step toward that end. Shall we raise Mr. George's banner and call upon Mr. Shearman and all others to march under it? Or shall we lower Mr. George's colors and follow Mr. Shearman as our leader?

The whole discussion is simply a revival of the old controversy between the out-and-out abolitionists and the gradual emancipationists. In the old days there were men -- just such admirable men as Mr. Shearman -- who believed in a two-thirds reduction of slavery. But they are forgotten today, because specious as were their arguments they were powerless to generate the moral and religious enthusiasm necessary to bring about a great social revolution. Those who prepared the public mind and conscience for the downfall of slavery were such noble "impracticables" as Garrison, Phillips, Pillsbury, and James and Lucretia Mott -- great souls who clamored for absolute, immediate and unconditional emancipation. Events made the occasion and Lincoln found the way to abolish slavery.

It seems to me that what we should do is to clamor with equal reason and zeal for the confiscation of rent for the purpose of destroying the business of land-holding. Let events determine how it shall be done. The thing to be done is our business. The how it can be done is the business of the statesmen and platform-makers. It is for us to create a public conscience on the subject, to make people abhor land monopoly as they came to abhor slavery. When that conscience is created the statesmen will find a way to accomplish its demands.