1890-91.] . SECOND MEETING. 9 



owner of a piece of land in the enterprising, historical, and whilom 

 ambitious city or town of Dundas. Twenty years ago the land was 

 "encumbered," should he say, with a house ; the house was burned, and 

 the land had been held as a vacant lot for many years. Now, according 

 to Mr. Douglass' theory, he ought to have been a millionaire. Surely by 

 this time, according to Mr. Douglass' calculation, the land ought to have 

 doubled in value, and quadrupled that; but alas! for the fruit of a vanished 

 hope ! and alas ! for the trust in the " Two Values " test ! when he had pro- 

 po.sed to a friend in the locality to give him cats, dogs, anything, and take 

 the blessed lot, that friend had smiled (as Mr. Douglass did) a pleasing 

 smile, and remarked on his (Mr. Harvey's) plaintive way of putting it. 

 Let him now take Mr. Douglass' arguments in hand on the port tack, 

 after raking them on the starboard, and ask in which of his two cate- 

 gories, commodity or land, he would put a painting of Raffaelle or 

 Annibale Caracci. In quantity limited, area fixed, produced with toil, 

 preserved only by thought and care, enduring, and cherished by many 

 generations, ever increasing in money value, and priceless in these other 

 values which men of Mr. Douglass's school scarcely seem to admit — 

 humanizing, refining, elevating influences, — such works or things surely 

 traverse in lightning-like zigzags, and altogether confuse and confound 

 the straight-laced lines of Mr. Douglass' parallel columns of fallacious 

 ■attributes. The truth was that all commodities possessed different 

 economic attributes. Food, buildings, money, metals, land, all differed ; 

 but to treat land otherwise than as a marketable commodity surely 

 misled the deluded followers of this new school of unpractical dilettanti, 

 per ajnbages, into a morass. He would have proceeded to ask how Mr. 

 Douglass' theory worked with land in Arabia, or (if he said he meant 

 good land and not sandy wastes) how it applied to the land of Babylonia, 

 with its rich and varied yield and its many paradises, which he had 

 ■doubtless read about in his Xenophon, but now seemed to have forgotten. 

 Dissatisfied theorists reasoned on premises which might seem correct when 

 they were tested by instances occurring in happy, peaceful and growing 

 districts of country ; but when they were applied to towns which were 

 retrograding, or countries scourged by wars or bad government, they were 

 plainly .seen to be hideously false — the clay underpinning of their hollow, 

 brazen simulacrum gave way. It had lately happened to him (Mr. Harvey) 

 to cross the ocean on the " Servia " with Mr. Henry George for a fellow- 

 passenger. On leaving the dinner table one day, during a swell time, 

 Mr. George, coming between the rows of chairs, mostly empty, careened 

 against one, rebounded from another, and came violently to moorings 

 beside the speaker. " Mr. George," he had remarked, " you get on well 

 in smooth weather, but this gale upsets your theories." So it was with 



