PROGRES.S AND POVERTY. 723 



neous forces which progress tends to overcome. In support of this 

 be points out certain facts which, though frequently noted, have re- 

 ceived a different interpretation. "When the conditions," he says, 

 " to which material progress everywhere tends are most fully realized 

 — that is to say, where population is densest, wealth greatest, and the 

 machinery of production and exchange most highly developed — we 

 find the deepest poverty, the sharpest struggle for existence, and the 

 most enforced idleness. It is to the newer countries — that is, to the 

 countries where material progress is yet in its earlier stages — that 

 laborers emigrate in search of higher wages, and capital flows in 

 search of higher interest," It is here that, "though you will find an 

 absence of wealth and all its concomitants, you will find no beggars. 

 There is no luxury, but there is no destitution. No one makes an easy 

 living, nor a very good living ; but every one can make a living, and 

 no one able and willing to work is oppressed by the fear of want." 

 Such facts, Mr. George thinks, justify the belief that somewhere in 

 the industrial fabric there must be a fundamental wrong — a social 

 maladjustment that with increasing force, as progress proceeds, tends 

 to continue and deepen poverty. 



His inquiry, in which he has taken nothing for granted, but has 

 examined anew all the doctrines of our current political economy, has 

 led him to the conclusion that the primary cause of the low returns to 

 labor and capital is to be found in the private ownership of the land 

 of the earth, which is by right the common heritage of all. He rejects 

 the common notion that there is an antagonism between labor and 

 capital, and holds, on the contrary, that they are both robbed of their 

 full earnings by the landholder. Labor can only produce wealth by 

 having access to the materials it is to fashion, all of which are drawn 

 from the earth, and by having such opportunities to occupy the land 

 as its needs require. Whoever, then, can claim a right to the land 

 can name the conditions upon which these materials can be obtained 

 and this occupation allowed. Whoever commands the land commands 

 the fruits of labor spent upon the land. Before labor can exert itself 

 it must ask permission, and the price of this permission is the tax that, 

 acting with accelerating power as civilization goes on, denies to labor 

 and capital their rightful share in the wealth they have produced. 



In claiming that private property in land is a wrong, Mr. George 

 is not alone. He has with him the best thought of all times. Nearly 

 every economist and social thinker of eminence who has made an in- 

 vestigation into the basis of property has found no warrant for the 

 private ownership of land. They have all seen that a natural agent, 

 which is necessary to human existence, and which can neither be in- 

 creased nor decreased by human exertion, can by no process whatever 

 become the rightful property of one man or any number of men, save 

 all men. And most have seen that to finally settle on an equitable 

 basis this question of the ownership of land will be, as Mr. Spencer 



