Books: Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9
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Elbert Hubbard >> Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9
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In Sacramento now lives a successful merchant, a Jew by birth, and a
man of great grace of spirit, who has this superior, spiritual quality
which makes his services sought after, and in response to demand he
goes all over the State saying the last words over the dust of those
who in their lives had lost faith in the established order, or had too
much faith in God.
After his thirty-sixth year Henry George slipped by natural process
into this semi-religious order--a priest after the order of
Melchizedek. He was spokesman for those who had no social standing, a
voice for the voiceless, a friend to the friendless, even those who
were not friends to themselves.
But at thirty-seven he was up on the mountain-side where he saw to a
distance that very few men could. He felt his own dignity and knew his
worth. The president of the University of California, recognizing his
ability as a thinker and speaker, asked him to give a course of
lectures on economics.
He gave one--this was all they could digest.
California colleges have had a lot of trouble with economics--it has
been a theme more fraught for them with danger than theology. How
Californians make their money and how they spend it is a topic which
in handling requires great subtlety of intellect, a fine delicacy of
expression and much diplomacy, otherwise twenty-three petards!
Here is a passage from Henry George's lecture before the University of
California:
For the study of political economy you need no special knowledge, no
extensive library, no costly laboratory. You do not even need
textbooks or teachers if you will but think for yourselves. All that
you need is care in reducing complex phenomena to their elements, in
distinguishing the essential from the accidental, and in applying the
simple laws of human action with which you are familiar. Take
nobody's opinion for granted; "try all things; hold fast to that
which is good." In this way, the opinions of others will help you
by their suggestions, elucidations and corrections; otherwise they
will be to you as words to a parrot.
All this array of professors, all this paraphernalia of learning, can
not educate a man. They can but help him educate himself. Here you may
obtain the tools; but they will be useful to him only who can use
them. A monkey with a microscope, a mule packing a library, are fit
emblems of the men--and unfortunately, they are plenty--who pass
through the whole educational machinery, and come out but learned
fools, crammed with knowledge which they can not use--all the more
pitiable, all the more contemptible, all the more in the way of real
progress, because they pass, with themselves and others, as educated
men.
California is a land of extremes--everything grows big and fast,
especially ideas. No country ever saw such wealth and such poverty
side by side. The mansions on Nob Hill were so grand that their
magnificence discouraged the owners and abashed visitors; at
receptions, a keg of beer on a sawbuck in the kitchen and champagne in
a washtub, with ham sandwiches in a bushel basket, were all that could
be assimilated. And yet past the high iron gates of these palaces
prowled want--gaunt, hungry and menacing.
Land was never so cheap nor so dear as it has been in California. We
gave a railroad-company twenty-five thousand acres of land for every
mile of track it built, and for years a dollar an acre was the ruling
price at which you could buy to your limit. And yet there were at the
same time little half-acres for which men pushed a hundred thousand
dollars in gold-dust over the counter and then crowed about their
bargain.
Henry George studied economics at first hand. The dignified frappe
which he received in way of honorarium for his university lecture had
its advantages. People in San Francisco wanted to hear what the editor
had to say as well as to read his utterances. He was invited to give
the Fourth of July oration at the Grand Opera House--a very great
compliment.
Henry George was a reformer, and reformers have but one theme, and
that theme is Liberty. We grow by expression. There is no doubt that
the university lecture and the Fourth of July oration added cubits to
the stature of Henry George. In these two addresses we find the kernel
of his philosophy--a kernel that was to germinate into a mighty tree
which would extend its welcoming shade to travelers for many a decade
yet to come.
* * * * *
Like every other great book (or great man), "Progress and Poverty" was
an accident--a providential accident. The book was ten years in the
incubation. It began with a newspaper editorial in Eighteen Hundred
Sixty-nine, and found form in a volume of five hundred pages in
Eighteen Hundred Seventy-nine.
The editorial merely called attention to the fact that California, in
spite of her vast wealth, was peopled, for the most part, with people
desperately poor; and that ground in the vicinity of any city, town or
place of enterprise was held at so exorbitant a figure that the poor
were actually enslaved by the men who owned the land. That is to say,
the men who owned the land controlled the people who had to live on
it, for man is a land animal, and can not live apart from land, any
more than fishes can live at a distance from water. And moreover we
tax for the improvements on land, thus really placing a penalty on
enterprise.
The article attracted attention, and opened the eyes of one man at
least--and that was the man who wrote it. He had written better than
he knew; and any writer who does not occasionally surprise himself
does not write well.
Henry George had surprised himself, and he wrote another editorial to
explain the first. These editorials extended themselves into a series,
and hand-polished and sandpapered, were reprinted in pamphlet form in
Eighteen Hundred Seventy-one, under the title of "Our Land Policy."
The temerity which prompted the printing of this pamphlet was evolved
through a letter from John Stuart Mill. Henry George knew he was right
in his conclusions, but he felt that he needed the corroboration of a
great mind that had grappled with abstruse problems; so he sent one of
his editorials to Mill, the greatest living intellect of his time.
Mill showed his interest by replying in a long letter, wherein he
addressed George as a man with a mind equal to his own, not as a
sophomore trying his wings.
The letter from Mill was to him a white milepost. The corroboration
gave him courage, confidence, poise.
The thousand copies of the pamphlet cost Henry George seventy-five
dollars. The retail price was twenty-five cents each. Twenty-one
copies were sold. The rest were given away to good people who promised
to read them. Pamphlets are for the pamphleteer, but let the fact here
be recorded that new ideas have always been issued at the author's
expense--and also risk. Martin Luther, Dean Swift, John Milton, Paine,
Voltaire, Sam Adams were all pamphleteers. The early Colonial
"broadsides" were pamphlets issued by men with thoughts plus, and all
of the men just named fired inky volleys which proved to be shots
heard 'round the world.
As the years passed, Henry George was gathering gear; he was getting
an education. Providence was preparing him for his work. All he
expressed by tongue or pen had land, labor, production and
distribution in mind. He was getting acquainted with every phase of
the subject--anticipating the objections, meeting the objectors,
opening up side-paths.
And so, in Eighteen Hundred Seventy-eight, when he sat down to write a
magazine article on "Our Government Land Policy," the air was full of
reasons. Soon the article stretched itself beyond magazine length, and
in order to cover the theme he set down headings:
1 Wages
2 Capital
3 Division of Labor
4 Population
5 Subsistence
6 Rent
7 Interest
8 The Remedy for Unequal Distribution
He wrote all one night--wrote in a fever. The next day his pulse got
back to normal, and on talking the matter over with his wife he
decided to begin it all over and work his philosophy up into a book,
writing as he could, only one or two hours a day.
He was absolutely without capital, dependent on his income from space-
writing in the daily newspapers, but he began and the work grew.
It was all done on "stolen time," to use the phrase of Macaulay, and
therefore vital, for things done because you have to do them--done to
get rid of them--contain the red corpuscle.
On March Twenty-second, Eighteen Hundred Seventy-nine, the precious
bundle of manuscript was shipped to D. Appleton and Company, New York,
with instructions that if the work was not accepted, to hold subject
to the author's order.
In six weeks came a letter from the Appletons, gracious,
complimentary, "but"--in fact, no work on political economy had ever
sold sufficiently either to make money for the author or to pay the
bare cost of the book to the publisher.
Here was a dampener, and if Henry George had been a trifle more astute
in the laws of literary supply and demand, he could and would have
anticipated the result, even in spite of the natural prejudice which
an author always feels for the offspring of his brain.
A letter was now sent Thomas George, the author's brother, in
Philadelphia, requesting him to go over to New York and find a market
for the wares.
Thomas had the work passed on by the Harpers, by Scribner, and all
"much regretted."
The next thing was to interest Professor Swinton and several New York
friends, and have them go in a body and storm the castle of Barabbas.
The committee called on D. Appleton and Company, and again laid the
case before them.
Finally the publishers agreed that if the author would advance money
for the electrotype-plates, they would undertake the publication.
But alas, the author was in the proverbial author's condition. On the
offer being laid before Henry George by mail, he replied that he could
make the electrotype-plates himself. He was a typesetter and he had
friends who would give him the use of their printing-outfits. The
offer was satisfactory to the Appletons, provided Professor Swinton
would agree to take on his own account a hundred copies of the work on
suspicion.
The Professor agreed. And the manuscript was sent back to San
Francisco, a trifle dog-eared and the worse for five months' wear.
The author began his typesetting with the same diligence that he had
brought to bear in the writing. This was stolen time, too. He worked
an hour in the morning and two hours at night. Other printers offered
to help, and a genial, bum electrotyper, damnably cheerful, offered to
come in and lend a hand, provided Henry George would agree to give a
funeral oration over the derelict one's grave at the proper time.
Henry George gleefully agreed.
So the work of making the electrotype-plates moved on apace. In the
meantime some of Henry George's political friends had interviewed the
Governor and Henry George was made inspector of gas-meters, at fifteen
hundred dollars a year.
It was four months' work to make the plates, but early in the year
Eighteen Hundred Eighty they were shipped to New York, a few proofs of
the book being taken, stitched up and sent out for review.
So far as we know, there was no one in California able to read the
book and intelligently review it. Leastwise they never did.
The Appletons, however, gradually awoke to the fact that they had a
prize, and they made efforts to get the work into right reviewing
hands. Better still, they began to inquire about what manner of man
Henry George was.
Next they wrote to the author suggesting that, if he would come to New
York and personally present his views, it would help in the sale of
the books.
Fortunately Henry George was not hampered by the ownership of real
estate, nor an excess of personal property, so he hastily packed up,
transportation having been secured by John Russell Young, a capitalist
who had faith in his genius from the first.
Henry George arrived in New York penniless, but Professor Swinton, E.
L. Youmans (that excellent blind man of great insight), John Russell
Young and the Appletons gave him a rich reception.
The tide had turned.
* * * * *
Henry George received all the recognition that any thinker and writer
could desire, from August, Eighteen Hundred Eighty, to the day of his
death, October Twenty-eighth, Eighteen Hundred Ninety-seven. Men might
not agree with him in his conclusions, but few indeed dare meet him in
a duel of argument, either by pen or upon the public platform.
He spoke in churches, halls and private parlors. His newspaper and
magazine articles commanded a price. He met the greatest minds of
America and of Europe on an equal footing.
In England his book was having a sale far beyond what it had met with
at home.
And when he spoke in London and the chief cities of Great Britain, the
halls were packed to suffocation. He appealed to the Messianic
instinct of English workingmen, and they hailed him as the coming man
--their deliverer. They stripped doors from their hinges and carried
him aloft upon the improvised platform. They unhitched the horses from
his carriage and drew him through the streets in triumphal state. This
all meant little--it was only campaign exuberance--the glare and flare
of smoky kerosene-torches, and the blare of brass.
Henry George was right in the same class with Spencer, Huxley, Tyndall
and John Stuart Mills, none of whom, happily, was a college man, and
therefore all were free from the handicap of dead learning and
ossified opinion, and saw things as if they were new. Ignorance is a
very necessary equipment in doing a great and sublime work that is to
eclipse anything heretofore performed.
The mind of Henry George was a flower of slow growth. At thirty-seven
he was just reaching mental manhood. According to all reasonable
tables of expectancy, he should have rivaled Humboldt and been in his
prime at eighty. His brain was the brain of Ricardo; but instead of
sticking to his boos, he got caught in the swirl of politics, and was
matched up with the cheap, the selfish, the grasping. The people who
snatched Henry George out of his proper sphere as a thinker, writer
and lecturer, and flung him into the turmoil of practical politics,
were of exactly the class who would, if they could, have a little
later ridden him on a rail.
It was all a little like that speech of a man in Indianapolis who
nominated James Whitcomb Riley for the Presidency of the United
States. The mob diluted the thought of Henry George and trod his proud
and honest heart into the mire.
Had he been elected mayor of New York, he could have done little or
nothing for reform, for a mayor has only the power delegated to him by
the ward boss and the genus heeler. Beyond this he can merely apply
the emergency-brake by the use of the veto.
Henry George was a racehorse hitched by spoilsmen to an overloaded
jaunting-car with a drunken driver, bound for Donnybrook Fair.
And soon men said he was dead.
* * * * *
The logic of Henry George's book and its literary style are so
insistent that it has been studied closely by economists of note in
every country on the globe. Its argument has never been answered, and
those who have sought to combat it have rested their case on the
assertion that Henry George was a theorist and a dreamer, and so far
as practical affairs were concerned was a failure. With equal logic we
might brand the Christian religion as a failure because its founder
was not a personal success, either in his social status or as a
political leader.
Gradually the thinking men of the world, the statesmen and the doers,
are beholding the fact that mankind is an organism, and that a country
is only as rich as its poorest citizen; that an athlete with Bright's
disease is not worth as much to humanity as a small, lively and
healthy boy of ten with cheek of tan and freckles to spare. Health
comes from right living, and living without useful effort is only
existence.
People living on the pavement or in sky-scrapers soon degenerate.
Man can not thrive apart from land. Abject poverty is found only in
great cities, where population is huddled like worms in a knot.
The highest average of intelligence, happiness and prosperity is found
in villages, where each family owns its home, and the renter is the
rare exception.
The word "renter" we used Out West as a term of contempt. The
ownership of an acre of land gives a sense of security which religion
can not bestow. God's acre, with vegetables, fruits, flowers, a cow
and poultry, places a family beyond the reach of famine, even if not
of avarice. Moreover, this single acre means sound sleep, good
digestion and resultant good thoughts, all from digging in the dirt
and mixing with the elements. "All wealth comes from the soil," says
Adam Smith, and he might have added, man himself comes from the soil
and is brother to the trees and the flowers. Men can no more live
apart from land than can the grass. The ownership of a very small plot
of ground steadies life, lends ballast to existence, and is a bond
given to society for good behavior.
"I am no longer an anarchist--I have bought a lot and am building a
house," a Russian refugee advised his restless colleagues at home,
when they wrote, asking him for quotations on dynamite.
It is obvious and easy to say that the people who make city slums
possible do not want to own houses and would not live upon land and
improve it, if they could.
The worst about this statement is that it is true. They are so sunken
in fear, superstition and indifference that they lack the squirrel's
thrift in providing a home and laying in a stock of provisions; they
are even without the ground-hog's ambition to burrow. They are too
sodden to know what they are missing, and are lacking in the
imagination which pictures a better condition.
They are like those pigmy bondsmen who work in the cotton-mills of the
South--yellow, gaunt, too dead to weep, too hopeless to laugh, too
pained to feel.
From these creatures and creators of slums it is absurd to talk of
gratitude for the offer of betterment. People who expect gratitude do
not deserve it. Neither can the slumsters by force be placed on land
and be expected to till it. A generation, at least, will be required
to work a change, and this change will come through educating the
children--through the kindergarten and the kindergarten methods--and
most of all through school-gardens. The so-called "back districts" are
fast being annihilated, for quick transportation is bringing city and
country close together. The time is coming, and shortly, too, when a
fare of one cent a mile will be the universal rule, and a mile a
minute will not be regarded as an unusual speed.
Now here is something which Henry George did not say, and if he knew
was too diplomatic to mention: The reason the people have not had
possession of the land is because they did not want it. The ownership
of the land you need to use comes in answer to prayer--and prayer is
the soul's desire, uttered or unexpressed. The will of the people is
supreme. If fraud and rascality exist in high places, it is because we
elect rascals to office.
The will of the people is supreme. When we cease toadying to brainless
nabobs, and quit imitating them as soon as we get the money, we will
be on the road to reformation. As it is, most poor people are just
itching to live as the rich do. The average servant-girl who gets
married quits work then and there, and is quite content to live the
rest of her life as a slave, asking her husband for a quarter at a
time and cajoling the money out of him by hook or crook, or else
explorating his trousers for free coinage when opportunity offers.
Fresh air is free, but the average individual does not know it; and
neither would this same person use land if it were given him. Freedom
is a condition of mind.
Yet apart from the "submerged tenth" is a very large class of people
to whom land and a home would be a positive paradise, and who are
simply forced into flats and tenements on account of present economic
conditions: the land is monopolized, and held by men who neither
improve it themselves nor will they allow others to. Then hold it
awaiting a rise in value.
This increase in value is not on account of anything the owner may do
--in fact, he is usually an absentee and does nothing. The increase
comes from the enterprise and thrift of people for whom the owner has
no interest, beyond contempt.
If these enterprising people who do the work of the world--making the
things the world needs--want more land for their business or for
homes, they have to pay the absentee for the increased value which
they themselves have brought about. When you beautify and enrich the
value of your own lot by improving it, you are making it impossible to
buy the vacant lot next to you without bankruptcy.
Moreover, you are taxed by the State for any improvement you make on
your land, and this taxation on improvements must of necessity tend
toward discouragement of improvement. It is really a surer way to make
money, to hang on to land and do nothing, than to improve it.
The remedy proposed by Henry George is simply the Single Tax, and this
tax to be on land values and not on improvements.
That is to say, with the Single Tax, the man who owns the vacant lot
covered with briars and brambles would pay the same tax that you pay
on your lot next door upon which you have built a house, barn and
conservatory and planted trees and flowers.
The immediate tendency of this policy would be to cause the gentleman
who owned the vacant lot devoted to cockleburs to put up on it a sign,
"For Sale Cheap."
Even the opponents of the Single Tax agree that its inauguration would
at once throw on the market a vast acreage of unimproved land, and
that is just the one reason why they oppose it. All those thousands of
acres held by estates, trustees and idle heirs, in the vicinity of
Boston, Philadelphia and up the Hudson, would be for sale.
The single tax would give the land back to the people, or at least
make it possible for people who want it to get what they could use.
Those who have the desire to improve land, and improve themselves by
improving it, would no longer be blocked.
The fresh blood of the country which makes the enterprise of cities
possible comes from the boys and the girls who warmed their feet on
October mornings where the cows lay down; who have been brought up to
work on land, to plant and hoe and harvest and look after livestock.
This is all education, and very necessary education. "A sand-pile and
dirt in which to dig is the divine right of every child," says Judge
Lindsey.
And if it is the divine right of a child to dig in the dirt, why isn't
it the divine right of the grown-up? It is, and would be so recognized
were it not for the fact that we have been obsessed by a fallacy
called "the divine right of property." This idea has come down to us
from the Reign of the Barons, when a dozen men owned all of England,
and plain and unlettered people could not legally own a foot of land.
All paid tribute to the Barons, who were actually and literally
robbers.
We will grant of course that what a man produces and creates is his,
but the land to which he may be legal heir and which probably he has
never seen, and which certainly he does not use or improve, is his
only through a legal fiction. When the matter of legal fiction was
explained to Colonel Bumble and he was told that legally a husband
knew the whereabouts of his wife, because the law regarded a man and
wife as one, Colonel Bumble replied with acerbity, "The law is a
hass."
Comparatively few people have the courage of Colonel Bumble, so they
do not express themselves; but the commonsense of the world is now
coming to believe that the law was made for man, and not man for the
law.
The only people who oppose the single tax are the holders of land who
are hanging on to it expecting to grow rich through inertia.
The problem of civilization is to eliminate the parasite. The idle
person is no better than a dead one and takes up more room. The man
who lives on the labor of others is a menace to himself and to
society.
The taxes necessary to support the government should be paid by those
who have the funds wherewith to be idle; no longer should the chief
burden fall on the home-maker.
Tax the land, and the man who owns it will have to make it productive
by labor, or else get out and allow some one else to have a chance.
Do not drive the landlords out--tax them out.
Let the land gravitate to the people who have the disposition and the
ability to improve it--and that is just what the Single Tax will do.
So this, then, is the philosophy of Henry George.
GARIBALDI
Priests look backward, not forward. They think that there were once
men better and wiser than those who now live, therefore priests
distrust the living and insist that we shall be governed by the dead.
I believe this is an error, and hence I set myself against the Church
and insist that men shall have the right to work out their lives in
their own way, always allowing to others the right to work out their
lives in their own way, too.
--_Garibaldi_
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