THAT, as declared by the French Assembly, public 
misfortunes and corruptions of government spring 
from ignorance, neglect or contempt of human rights, 
may be seen from whatever point we look. 

Consider this matter of " over-production " of which we 
hear so much -to which is so commonly attributed dullness 
of trade and the difficulty of finding employment. 
What, when we come to think of it, can be more preposterous 
that to speak in any general sense of over -production ? 
Over-production of wealth when there is everywhere 
a passionate struggle for more wealth; when so many 
must stint and strain and contrive, to get a living; when 
there is poverty and actual want among large classes ! 
Manifestly there cannot be over-production, in any general 
and absolute sense, until desires for wealth are all 
satisfied ; until no one wants more wealth. 

Relative over-production, of course, there may be. The 
production of certain commodities may be so far in excess 
of the proper proportion to the production of other 
commodities that the whole quantity produced cannot be 
exchanged for enough of those other commodities to give 
the usual returns to the labor and capital engaged in 
bringing them to market. But this relative over-production 
is merely disproportionate production. It may proceed 
from increased production of things of one kind, or from 
decreased production of things of other kinds. 

Thus, what we would call an over -production of watches 
-meaning not that more watches had been produced 
than were wanted, but that more had been produced than 
could be sold at a remunerative price-would be purely 
relative. It might arise from an increase in the production 
of watches, outrunning the ability to purchase 
watches; or from a decrease in the production of other 
things, lessening the ability to purchase watches. No 
matter how much the production of watches were to 
increase, within the limits of the desire for watches, it 
would not be over-production, if at the same time the
production of other things increased sufficiently to allow 
a proportionally increased quantity of other things to be 
given for the increased quantity of watches. And no 
matter how much the production of watches might be 
decreased, there would be relative over-production, if at 
the same time the production of other things were 
decreased in such proportion as to diminish in greater
degree the ability to give other things for watches. 

In short, desire continuing, the over-production of 
particular commodities can be only relative to the production 
of other commodities, and may result from unduly in- 
creased production in some branches of industry , or from 
the' checking of production in other branches. But while 
the phenomena of over-production may thus arise from 
causes directly operating to increase production, or from 
causes directly operating to check production, just as the 
equipoise of a pair of scales may be disturbed by the 
addition or the removal of a weight, there are certain symptoms 
by which we may determine from which of these two 
kinds of causes any disturbance', proceeds. For while to 
a limited extent, and in a limited field, these diverse causes 
may produce similar effects, their general effects will be 
widely different. The increase of production in any branch 
of industry tends to the general increase of production ; 
the checking of production in any branch of industry 
tends to the general checking of production. 

This may be seen from the different general effects 
which follow increase or diminution of production in the 
same branch of industry. Let us suppose that from the 
discovery of new mines, the improvement of machinery, 
the breaking up of combinations that control it, or any 
other cause, there is a great and rapid increase in the 
production of coal, out of proportion to the increase of 
other production. In a free market the price of coal 
therefore falls. The effect is to enable all consumers of 
coal somewhat to increase their consumption of coal, and 
somewhat to increase their consumption of other things, 
and to stimulate production, by reducing cost, in all those 
branches of industry into which the use of coal directly or 
indirectly enters. Thus the general effect is to increase 
production, and to beget a tendency to reestablish the 
equilibrium between the production of coal and the 
production of other things, by raising the aggregate production. 

But let the coal operators and syndicates, as they 
frequently do, determine to stop or reduce the production or 
coal in order to raise prices. At once a large body of men 
engaged in producing coal find their power of purchasing 
cut off or decreased. Their demand for commodities they 
habitually use thus falls off ; demand and production in 
other branches of industry are lessened, and other 
consumers, in turn, are obliged to decrease their demands. 
At the same time the enhancement in the price of coal 
tends to increase the cost of production in all branches of 
industry in which coal is used, and to diminish the amount 
both of coal and of other things which the users of coal 
can call for. Thus the check to production is perpetuated 
through all branches of industry, and when the reestablish- 
ment of equilibrium between the production of coal and 
the production of other things is effected, it is on a 
diminished scale of aggregate production. 

All trade, it is to be remembered, is the exchange of 
commodities for commodities -money being merely the 
measure of values and the instrument for conveniently 
and economically effecting exchanges. Demand (which is 
a different thing from desire, as it involves purchasing 
power) is the asking for things in exchange for an equivalent 
value of other things. Supply is the offering of things 
in exchange for an equivalent value of other things. These 
terms are therefore relative j demand involves supply, and 
supply involves demand. Whatever increases the quantity 
of things offered in exchange for other things at once 
increases supply and augments demand. And, reversely, 
whatever checks the bringing of things to market at once 
reduces supply and decreases demand. 

Thus, while the same primary effect upon the relative 
supply of and demand for any particular commodity or 
group of commodities may be caused either by augmentation 
of the supply of such commodities, or by reduction 
in the supply of other commodities-in the one case, the 
general effect will be to stimulate trade, by calling out 
greater supplies of other commodities, and increasing 
aggregate demand j and in the other case, to depress trade, 
by lessening aggregate demand and diminishing supply. 
The equation of supply and demand between agricultural 
productions and manufactured goods might thus be altered 
in the same direction and to the same extent by such 
prosperous seasons or improvements in agriculture as 
would reduce the price of agricultural productions as 
compared with manufactured goods, or by such restrictions 
upon the production or exchange of manufactured goods 
as would raise their price as compared with agricultural 
productions. But in the one case, the aggregate produce 
of the community would be increased. There would be 
not only an increase of agricultural products, but the 
increased demand thus caused would stimulate the 
production of manufactured goods; while this prosperity in 
manufacturing industries, by enabling those engaged in 
them to increase their demand for agricultural productions, 
would react upon agriculture. In the other case, the 
aggregate produce would be decreased. The increase in 
the price of manufactured goods would compel farmers to 
reduce their demands, and this would in turn reduce the 
ability of those engaged in manufacturing to demand farm 
products. Thus trade would slacken, and production be 
checked in all directions. That this is so, we may see from 
the different general effects which result from good crops 
and poor crops, though to an individual farmer high prices 
may compensate for a poor yield. 

To recapitulate: Relative over-production may proceed 
from causes which increase, or from causes which diminish, 
production. But increased production in any branch of 
industry tends to increase production in all ; to stimulate 
trade and augment the general prosperity; and any 
disturbance of equilibrium thus caused must be speedily 
readjusted. Diminished production in any branch of 
industry, on the other hand, tends to decrease production 
in all ; to depress trade and lessen the general prosperity; 
and depression thus produced tends to perpetuate itself 
through larger circles, as in one branch of industry after 
another the check to production reduces the power to 
demand the products of other branches of industry. 

Whoever will consider the wide-spread phenomena 
which are currently attributed to over-production can have 
no doubt from which of these two classes of causes they' 
spring. He will see that they are symptoms, not of the 
excess of production, but of the restriction and 
strangulation of production. 

There are with us many restrictions of production, direct 
and indirect ; for production, it must be remembered, 
involves the transportation and exchange as well as the 
making of things. And restrictions imposed upon 
commerce or any of its instruments may operate to discourage 
prodl1ction as fully as restrictions imposed upon agriculture 
or manufactures. The tariff which we maintain for 
the express purpose of hampering our foreign commerce, 
and restricting the free exchange of our own productions 
for the productions of other nations, is in effect a 
restriction upon production. The monopolies which we have 
created or permitted to grow up, and which levy their toll 
upon internal commerce, or by conspiracy and combination 
diminish supply and artificially enhance prices, restrict 
production in the same way ; while the taxes levied upon 
certain manufactures by our internal revenue system 
directly restrict production.* 

*Whether taxes upon liquor and tobacco can be defended upon 
other grounds is not here in question. What Adam Smith says upon 
this point may, however, be worth quoting :

"If we consult experience, the cheapness of wine seems to be a 
cause, not of drunkenness, but of sobriety. The inhabitants of the 
wine countries are in general the soberest people in Europe ; witness 
the Spaniards, the Italians, and the inhabitants of the southern provinces 
of France. People are seldom guilty of excess in what is their 
daily fare. Nobody affects the character of liberality and good 
fellowship, by being profuse of a liquor which is as cheap as small beer 
On the contrary, in the countries which, either from excessive heat 
or cold, produce no grapes, and where wine consequently is dear, and 
a rarity, drunkenness is a common vice, as among the northern 
nations, and all those who live between the tropics -the negroes, for 
example, on the coast of Guinea. When a French regiment comes 
from some of the northern provinces of France, where wine is somewhat 
dear, to be quartered in the southern, where it is very cheap, 
the soldiers, I have frequently heard it observed, are at first 
debauched by the cheapness and novelty of good wine ; but after a few
months' residence, the greater part of them become as sober as the 
rest of the inhabitants. Were the duties upon foreign wines, and 
the excises upon malt, beer, and ale, to be taken away all at once, 
it might, in the same manner. occasion in Great Britain a pretty 
general and temporary drunkenness among the middling and inferior 
ranks of people, which would probably be soon followed by a permanent 
and almost universal sobriety. At present, drunkenness is by 
no means the vice of people of fashion, or of those who can easily 
afford the most expensive liquors. A gentleman drunk with ale has 
scarce ever been seen among us. The restraints upon the wine trade 
in Great Britain, besides, do not so much seem calculated to hinder 
the people from going, if I may say so, to the ale -house, as from 
going where they can buy the best and cheapest liquor."- Wealth of 
Nations, Book IV., Chapter III.

So, too, is production dcouraged by the direct taxes
levied by our States, counties and municipalities, which in 
the aggregate exceed the taxation of the Federal government. 
These taxes are generally levied upon all property, 
real and personal, at the same rate, and fall partly on land, 
which is not the result of production, and partly on things 
which are the result of production; but insomuch as buildings 
and improvements are not only thus taxed, but the 
land so built upon and improved is universally rated at a 
much higher assessment, and generally at a very much 
higher assessment, than unused land of the same quality,*
* This arises from the widely spread but utterly false notion that 
property should pay taxes only in proportion to the income it yields. 
In Great Britain, this is carried to such a pitch of absurdity that 
unused land pays no taxes. no matter how valuable it may be.
even the taxation that falls upon land values largely 
operates as a deterrent to production. 

To produce, to improve, is thus fraught with a penalty. 
We, in fact, treat the man who produces wealth, or accumulates 
wealth, as though he had done something which 
public policy calls upon us to discourage. If a house is 
erected, or a steamship or a factory is built, down comes 
the tax-gatherer to fine the men who have done such things. 
If a farmer go upon vacant land, which is adding nothing 
to the wealth of the community, reclaim it, cultivate it, 
cover it with crops, or stock it with cattle, we not only 
make him pay for having thus increased wealth, but, as 
an additional discouragement to the doing of such things, 
we tax him very much more on the value of his land than 
we do the man who holds an equal piece idle. So, too, if 
a man saves, our taxes operate to punish him for his thrift. 
Thus is production checked in every direction. 

But this is not all. 
There is with us a yet greater check to production. 

If there be in this universe superior intelligences 
engaged, with higher powers, in the study of its infinite 
marvels, who sometimes examine the speck we tenant with 
such studious curiosity as our microscopists watch the 
denizens of a drop of water, the manner in which, in such 
a country as this, population is distributed, must greatly 
puzzle them. In our cities they find people packed 
together so closely that they live over one another in 
tiers j in the country they see people separated so widely 
that they lose all the advantages of neighborhood. They 
see buildings going up in the outskirts of our towns, while 
much more available lots remain vacant. They see men 
going great distances to cultivate land while there is yet 
plenty of land to cultivate in the localities from which they 
come and through which they pass. And as these higher 
intelligences watch this process of settlement through 
whatever sort of microscopes they may require to observe 
such creatures as we, they must notice that, for the most 
part, these settlers, instead of being attracted by each 
other, leave between each other large patches of unused 
land. If there be in the universe any societies which have 
the same relation to us as our learned societies have to 
ants and animalculae, these phenomena must lead to no 
end of curious theories. 

Take in imagination such a bird's-eye view of the city 
of New York as might be had from a balloon. The houses 
are climbing heavenward -ten, twelve, even fifteen stories, 
tier on tier of people, living, one family above another, 
without sufficient water, without sufficient light or air, 
without playground or breathing-space. So close is the 
building that the streets look like narrow rifts in the brick 
and mortar, and from street to street the solid blocks 
stretch until they almost meet; in the newer districts only 
a space of twenty feet, a mere crack in the masonry 
through which at high noon a sunbeam can scarcely 
struggle down, being left to separate the backs of the 
tenements fronting on one street from the backs of those 
fronting on another street. Yet, around this city, and 
within easy access of its center, there is plenty of vacant 
land; within the city limits, in fact, not one-half the land is 
built upon; and many blocks of tall tenement-houses are 
surrounded by vacant lots. If the improvement of our 
telescopes were to show us on another planet, lakes where 
the water, instead of presenting a level surface, ruffled 
only by the action of the wind, stood up here and there in 
huge columns, it could hardly perplex ns more than these 
phenomena must perplex such extramundane intelligences 
as I have supposed. How is it, they may well speculate, 
that the pressure of population which piles families, tier 
on tier, above each other, and raises such towering 
warehouses and workshops, does not cover this vacant land 
with buildings and with homes ? Some restraining cause 
there must be; but what, it might well puzzle them to tell. 

A South Sea Islander, however-one of the old heathen 
sort, whom, in civilizing, we have well-nigh exterminated, 
might make a guess. If one of their High Chiefs tabooed 
a place or object, no one of the common sort of these 
superstitious savages dare use or touch it. He must go 
around for miles rather than set his feet on a tabooed 
path ; must parch or die with thirst rather than drink of 
a tabooed spring; must go hungry though the fruit of a 
tabooed grove rotted on the ground before his eyes. A 
South Sea Islander would say that this vacant land must 
be " taboo." And he would be not far from the truth. 
This land is vacant, simply because it is cursed by that 
form of the taboo which we superstitiously venerate under 
the names of " private property " and " vested rights." 

The invisible barrier but for which buildings would rise 
and the city would spread, is the high price of land, a 
price that increases the more certainly it is seen that a 
growing population needs the land. Thus the stronger 
the incentive to the use of land, the higher the barrier 
that arises against its use. Tenement-houses are built 
among vacant lots because the price that must be paid for 
land is so great that people who have not large means must 
economize their use of land by living one family above 
another. 

While in all of our cities the value of land, which 
increases nut merely with their growth, but with the 
expectation of growth, thus operates to check building 
and improvement, its effect is manifested through the 
country in a somewhat different way. Instead of unduly 
crowding people together it unduly separates them. The 
expectation of profit from the rise in the value of land 
leads those who take up new land, not to content them- 
selves with what they may most profitably use, but to get 
all the land they can, even though they must let a great 
part of it lie idle; and large tracts are seized upon by 
those who make no pretense of using any part of it, but 
merely calculate to make a profit out of others who in 
time will be driven to use it. Thus population is scattered, 
not only to loss of all the comforts, refinements, pleasures 
and stimulations that come from neighborhood, but to the 
great loss of productive power. The extra cost of 
constructing and maintaining roads and railways, the greater 
distances over which produce and goods must be transported, 
the difficulties which separation interposes to that 
commerce between men which is necessary even to the 
ruder forms of modern production, all retard and lessen 
production. While just as the high value of land in and 
about a great city makes more difficult the erection of 
buildings, so does increase in the value of agricultural 
land make improvement difficult. The higher the value 
of land the more capital does the farmer require if he buys 
outright; or, if he buys on instalments, or rents, the more 
of his earnings must he give up every year. Men who 
would eagerly improve and cultivate land could it be had 
for the using are thus turned away-to wander long 
distances and waste their means in looking for better 
opportunities; to swell the ranks of those seeking for 
employment as wage-workers; to go back to the cities or 
manufacturing villages in the endeavor to make a living ; 
or to remain idle, frequently for long periods, and some- 
times until they become utterly demoralized and worse 
than useless tramps. 

Thus is production checked in those vocations which 
form the foundation for all others. This check to the 
production of some forms of wealth lessens demand for 
other forms of wealth, and so the effect is propagated 
from one branch of industry to another, begetting the 
phenomena that are spoken of as over-production, but 
which are primarily due to restricted production. 

And as land values tend to rise, not merely with the 
growth of population and wealth, but with the expectation 
of that growth, thus enlisting in pushing on the upward 
movement, the powerful and illusive sentiment of hope, 
there is a constant tendency, especially strong in rapidly 
growing countries, to carry up the price of land beyond 
the point at which labor and capital can profitably engage 
in production, and the only check to this is the refusal of 
labor and capita] so to engage. This tendency becomes 
peculiarly strong in recurring periods, when the fever of 
speculation runs high, and leads at length to a 
correspondingly general and sudden check to production, 
which propagating itself (by checking demand) through all 
branches of industry, is the main cause of those paroxysms 
known as commercial or industrial depressions, and which 
are marked by wasting capital, idle labor, stocks of goods 
that cannot be sold without loss, and wide-spread want 
and suffering. It is true that other restrictions upon the 
free play of productive forces operate to promote, intensify 
and continue these dislocations of the industrial system, 
but that here is the main and primary cause I think there 
can be no doubt. 

And this, perhaps, is even more clear: That from whatever 
cause disturbance of industrial and commercial relations 
may originally come, these periodical depressions 
in which demand and supply seem unable to meet and 
satisfy each other could not become wide-spread and 
persistent did productive forces have free access to land. 
Nothing like general and protracted congestion of capital 
and labor could take place were this natural vent open. 
The moment symptoms of relative over-production manifested 
themselves in any derivative branch of industry, 
the turning of capital and labor toward those occupations 
which extract wealth from the soil would give relief. 

Thus may we see that those public misfortunes which 
we speak of as " business stagnation " and " hard times," 
those public misfortunes that in periods of intensity cause 
more loss and suffering than great wars, spring truly from 
our ignorance and contempt of human rights; 
from out disregard of the equal and 
unalienable right of all men freely to apply 
to nature for the satisfaction of their needs, 
and to retain for their own uses 
the full fruits of their labor.

Chapter 12 Social Problems 1883 by Henry George
OVER-PRODUCTION

Chapter 13 Social Problems 1883 by Henry George
UNEMPLOYED LABOR. 

HOW contempt of human rights is the essential 
element in building up the great fortunes whose growth 
is such a marked feature of our development, we have 
already seen. And just as clearly may we see that from 
the same cause spring poverty and pauperism. 
The tramp is the complement of the millionaire. 

Consider this terrible phenomenon, the tramp - an 
appearance more menacing to the Republic than that of 
hostile armies and fleets bent on destruction. What is 
the tramp ?  In the beginning, he is a man able to work, 
and willing to work, for the satisfaction of his needs; but 
who, not finding opportunity to work where he is, starts 
out in quest of it; who, failing in this search, is, in a later 
stage, driven by those imperative needs to beg or to steal, 
and so, losing self-respect, loses all that animates and 
elevates and stimulates a man to struggle and to labor ; 
becomes a vagabond and an outcast-a poisonous pariah, 
avenging on society the wrong that he keenly, but vaguely, 
feels has been done him by society. 

Yet the tramp, known as he is now from the Atlantic 
to the Pacific, is only a part of the phenomenon. Behind 
him, though not obtrusive, save in what we call " hard 
times," there is, even in what we now consider normal 
times, a great mass of unemployed labor which is unable, 
unwilling, or not yet forced to tramp, but which bears to 
the tramp the same relation that the submerged part of 
an iceberg does to that much smaller part which shows 
above the surface. 

The difficulty which so many men who would gladly 
work to satisfy their needs find in obtaining opportunity 
of doing so, is so common as to occasion no surprise, nor, 
save when it becomes particularly intensified, to arouse 
any inquiry. We are so used to it, that although we all 
know that work is in itself distasteful, and that there never 
yet was a human being who wanted work for the sake of 
work, we have got into the habit of thinking and talking 
as though work were in itself a boon. So deeply is this 
idea implanted in the common mind that we maintain a 
policy based on the notion that the more work we do for 
foreign nations and the less we allow them to do for us, 
the better off we shall be; and in public and in private 
we hear men lauded and enterprises advocated because 
they " furnish employment; " while there are many who. 
with more or less definiteness, hold the idea that labor. 
saving inventions have operated injuriously by lessening 
the amount of work to be done. 

Manifestly, work is not an end, but a means; manifestly, 
there can be no real scarcity of work, which is but the 
means of .satisfying material wants, until .human wants 
are all satisfied. How, then, shall we explain the obvious 
facts which lead men to think and speak as though work 
were in itself desirable ? 

When we consider that labor is the producer of all 
wealth, the creator of all values, is it not strange that 
labor should experience difficulty in finding employment ? 
The exchange for commodities of that which gives value 
to all commodities, ought to be the most certain and easy 
of exchanges. One wishing to exchange labor for food or 
clothing, or any of the manifold things which labor produces, 
is like one wishing to exchange gold-dust for coin, 
cotton for cloth, or wheat for flour. Nay, this is hardly 
a parallel; for, as the terms upon which the exchange of 
labor for commodities takes place are usually that the labor 
is first rendered, the man who offers labor in exchange 
generally proposes to produce and render value before 
value is returned to him. 

This being the case, why is not the competition of 
employers to obtain workmen as great as the competition 
of workmen to find employment ? Why is it that we 
do not consider the man who does work as the obliging 
party, rather than the man who, as we say, furnishes 
work ? 

So it necessarily would be, if in saying that labor is the 
producer of wealth, we stated the whole case. But labor 
is only the producer of wealth in the sense of being the 
active factor of production. For the production of wealth. 
labor must have access to preexisting substance and natural 
forces. Man has no power to bring something out of 
nothing. He cannot create an atom of matter or initiate 
the slightest motion. Vast as are his powers of modifying 
matter and utilizing force, they are merely powers of 
adapting, changing, recombining, what previously exists. 
The substance of the hand with which I write these lines, 
as of the paper on which I write, has previously formed 
the substance of other men and other animals, of plants, 
soils, rocks, atmospheres, probably of other worlds and 
other systems. And so of the force which impels my pen. 
All we know of it is that it has acted and reacted through 
what seem to us eternal circlings, and appears to reach 
this planet from the sun. The destruction of matter and 
motion, as the creation of matter and motion, are to us 
unthinkable. 

In the human being, in some mysterious way which 
neither the researches of physiologists nor the speculations 
of philosophers enable us to comprehend, conscious, 
planning intelligence comes into control, for a limited 
time and to a limited extent, of the matter and motion 
contained in the human frame. The power of contracting 
and expanding human muscles is the initial force with 
which the human mind acts upon the material world. 
By the use of this power other powers are utilized, and 
the forms and relations of matter are changed in accordance 
with human desire. But how great soever be the 
power of affecting and using external nature which human 
intelligence thus obtains, - and how great this may be we 
are only beginning now to realize, - it is still only the 
power of affecting and using what previously exists. 
Without access to external nature, without the power of 
availing himself of her substance and forces, man is not 
merely powerless to produce anything, he ceases to exist 
in the material world. He himself, in physical body at 
least, is but a changing form of matter, a passing mode 
of motion, that must be continually drawn from the 
reservoirs of external nature. 

Without either of the three elements, land, air and 
water, man could not exist; but he is peculiarly a land 
animal, living on its surface, and drawing from it his 
supplies. Though he is able to navigate the ocean, and 
may some day be able to navigate the air, he can only do 
so by availing himself of materials drawn from land. 
Land is to him the great storehouse of materials and 
reservoir of forces upon which he must draw for his 
needs. And as wealth consists of materials and products 
of nature which have been secured, or modified by human 
exertion so as to fit them for the satisfaction of human 
desires,* 

* However great be its utility, nothing can be counted as wealth 
unless it requires labor for its production; nor however much labor 
has been required for its production, can anything retain the 
character of wealth longer than it can gratify desire.

labor is the active factor in the production of 
wealth, but land is the passive factor, without 
which labor can neither produce nor exist. 

All this is so obvious that it may seem like wasting space 
to state it. Yet, in this obvious fact lies the explanation 
of that enigma that to so many seems a hopeless puzzle - 
the labor question. What is inexplicable, if we lose sight 
of man's absolute and constant dependence upon land, is 
clear when we recognize it. 

Let us suppose, as well as we can, human society in a 
world as near as possible like our own, with one essential 
difference. Let us suppose this imaginary world and it.. 
inhabitants so constructed that men could support them. 
selves in air, and could from the material of the air pro- 
duce by their labor what they needed for nourishment 
and use. I do not mean to suppose a state of things in 
which men might float around like birds in the air or 
fishes in the ocean, supplying the prime necessities of 
animal life from what they could pick up. I am merely 
trying to suppose a state of things in which men as they 
are, were relieved of absolute dependence upon land for a 
standing-place and reservoir of material and forces. We 
will suppose labor to be as necessary as with us, human 
desires to be as boundless as with us, the cumulative power 
of labor to give to capital as much advantage as with us, 
and the division of labor to have gone as far as with us 
-the only difference being (the idea of claiming the air 
as private property not having been thought of) that no 
human creature would be compelled to make terms with 
another in order to get a resting-place, and to obtain 
access to the material and forces without which labor 
cannot produce. In such a state of things, no matter how 
mlinute had become the division of labor, no matter how 
great had become the accumulation of capital, or how far 
labor-saving inventions had been carried, -there could 
never be anything that seemed like an excess of the 
supply of labor over the demand for labor; there could 
never be any difficulty in finding employment; and the 
spectacle of willing men, having in their own brains and 
muscles the power of supplying the needs of themselves 
and their families, yet compelled to beg for work or for 
alms, could never be witnessed. It being in the power of 
every one able to labor to apply his labor directly to the 
satisfaction of his needs without asking leave of anyone 
else, that cutthroat competition, in which men who must 
find employment or starve are forced to bid against each 
other, could never arise. 

Variations there might be in the demand for particular 
commodities or services, which would produce variations 
in the demand for labor in different occupations, and cause 
wages in those occupations somewhat to rise above or fall 
below the general level, but the ability of labor to employ 
itself, the freedom of indefinite expansion in the primary 
employments, would allow labor to accommodate itself to 
these variations, not merely without loss or suffering, but 
so easily that they would be scarcely noticed. For 
occupations shade into one another by imperceptible degrees, 
no matter how minute the division of labor-or, rather, 
the more minute the division of labor the more insensible 
the gradation -so that there are in each occupation enough 
who could easily pass to other occupations, readily to allow 
of such contractions and expansions as might in a state of 
freedom occur. The possibility of indefinite expansion in 
the primary occupations, the ability of every one to make 
a living by resort to them, would produce elasticity 
throughout the whole industrial system. 

Under such conditions capital could not oppress labor. 
At present, in any dispute between capital and labor, 
capital enjoys the enormous advantage of being better 
able to wait. Capital wastes when not employed; but 
labor starves. Where, however, labor could always 
employ itself, the disadvantage in any conflict would be 
an the side of capital, while that surplus of unemployed 
labor which enables capital to make such advantageous 
bargains with labor would not exist. The man who 
wanted to get others to work for him would not find men 
crowding for employment, but, finding all labor already 
employed, would have to offer higher wages, in order to 
tempt them into his employment, than the men he wanted 
could make for themselves. The competition would be 
that of employers to obtain workmen, rather than that 
of workmen to get employment, and thus the advantages 
which the accumulation of capital gives in the 
production of wealth would (save enough to secure the 
accumulation and employment of capital) go ultimately 
to labor. In such a state of things, instead of thinking 
that the man who employed another was doing him 8 
favor, we would rather look upon the man who went to 
work for another as the obliging party. 

To suppose that under such conditions there could b~ 
such inequality in the distribution of wealth as we now 
see, would require a more violent presumption than we 
have made in supposing air, instead of land, to be the 
element from which wealth is chiefly derived. But sup. 
posing existing inequalities to be translated into such a 
state, it is evident that large fortunes could avail little, 
and continue but a short time. Where there is always 
labor seeking employment on any terms; where the masses 
earn only a bare living, and dismissal from employment 
means anxiety and privation, and even beggary or starvation, 
these large fortunes have monstrous power. But in 
a condition of things where there was no unemployed 
labor, where every one could make a living for himself and 
family without fear or favor, what could a hundred or 
five hundred millions avail in the way of enabling its 
possessor to extort or tyrannize ? 

The upper millstone alone cannot grind. That it may 
do so, the nether millstone as well is needed. No amount 
of force will break an egg-shell if exerted on one side 
alone. So capital could not squeeze labor as long as labor 
was free to natural opportunities, and in a world where 
these natural materials and opportunities were as free to 
all as is the air to us, there could be no difficulty in finding 
employment, no willing hands conjoined with hungry 
stomachs, no tendency of wages toward the minimum on 
which the worker could barely live. In such a world we 
would no more think of thanking anybody for furnishing 
us employment than we here think of thanking anybody 
for furnishing us with appetites. 

That the Creator might have put us in the kind of world 
I have sought to imagine, as readily as in this kind of a 
world, I have no doubt. Why he has not done so may, 
however, I think, be seen. That kind of a world would 
be best for fools. This is the best for men who will use 
the intelligence with which they have been gifted. Of 
this, however, I shall speak hereafter. What I am now 
trying to do by asking my readers to endeavor to imagine 
a world in which natural opportunities were " as free as 
air," is to show that the barrier which prevents labor from 
freely using land is the nether millstone against which 
labor is ground, the true cause of the difficulties which are 
apparent through the whole industrial organization. 

But it may be said, as I have often beard it said, " We 
do not all want land! We cannot all become farmers ! " 

To this I reply that we do all want land, though it may 
be in different ways and in varying degrees. Without 
land no human being can live ; without land no human 
occupation can be carried on. Agriculture is not the only 
use of land. It is only one of many. And just as the 
uppermost story of the tallest building rests upon land as 
truly as the lowest, so is the operative as truly a user of 
land as is the farmer. As an wealth is in the last analysis 
the resultant of land and labor, so is all production in the 
last analysis the expenditure of labor upon land. 

Nor is it true that we could not all become farmers. 
That is the one thing that we might all become. If all 
men were merchants, or tailors, or mechanics, all men 
would soon starve. But there have been, and still exist, 
societies in which all get their living directly from nature. 
The occupations that resort directly to nature are the 
primitive occupations, from which, as society progresses, 
all others are differentiated. No matter how complex the 
industrial organization, these must always remain the 
fundamental occupations, upon which all other occupations 
rest, just as the upper stories of a building rest upon the 
foundation. Now, as ever, the farmer feedeth all." And 
necessarily, the condition of labor in these first and widest 
of occupations, determines the general condition of labor, 
just as the level of the ocean determines the level of all its 
arms and bays and seas. Where there is a great demand 
for labor in agriculture, and wages are high, there must 
soon be a great demand for labor, and high wages, in all 
occupations. Where it is difficult to get employment in 
agriculture, and wages are low, there must soon be a 
difficulty of obtaining employment, and low wages, in all 
occupations. Now , what determines the demand for labor 
and the rate of wages in agriculture is manifestly the 
ability of labor to employ itself -that is to say, the ease 
with which land can be obtained. This is the reason that 
in new countries, where land is easily had, wages, not 
merely in agriculture, but in all occupations, are higher 
than in older countries, where land is hard to get. And 
thus it is that, as the value of land increases, wages fall, 
and the difficulty in finding employment arises. 

This whoever will may see by merely looking around 
him. Clearly the difficulty of finding employment, the 
fact that in all vocations, as a rule, the supply of labor 
seems to exceed the demand for labor, springs from 
difficulties that prevent labor finding employment for 
itself-from the barriers that fence labor off from land. 
That there is a surplus of labor in anyone occupation 
arises from the difficulty of finding employment in other 
occupations, but for which the surplus would be immediately 
drained off. When there was a great demand for 
clerks no bookkeeper could suffer for want of employment. 
And so on, down to the fundamental employments which 
directly extract wealth from land, the opening in which of 
opportunities for labor to employ itself would soon drain 
off any surplus in derivative occupations. Not that every 
unemployed mechanic, or operative, or clerk, could or 
would get himself a farm; but that from all the various 
occupations enough would betake themselves to the land 
to relieve any pressure for employment.

Chapter 13 Social Problems 1883 by Henry George
UNEMPLOYED LABOR

Chapter 14 Social Problems 1883 by Henry George
THE EFFECTS OF MACHINERY. 

HOW ignorance, neglect or contempt of human rights 
may turn public benefits into public misfortunes 
we may clearly see if we trace the effect of 
labor - saving inventions. 

It is not altogether from a blind dislike of innovation 
that even the more thoughtful and intelligent Chinese set 
their faces against the introduction into their dense 
population of the labor-saving machinery of Western 
civilization. They recognize the superiority which in many 
things invention has given us, but to their view this 
superiority must ultimately be paid for with too high a 
price. The Eastern mind, in fact, regards the greater 
powers grasped by Western civilization somewhat as the 
medieval European mind regarded the powers which it 
believed might be gained by the Black Art, but for which 
the user must finally pay in destruction of body and 
damnation of soul. And there is much in the present 
aspects and tendencies of our civilization to confirm the 
Chinese in this view. 

It is clear that the inventions and discoveries which 
during this century have so enormously increased the 
power of producing wealth have not proved an unmixed 
good. Their benefits are not merely unequally distributed, 
but they are bringing about absolutely injurious effects. 
They are concentrating capital. and increasing the power 
of these concentrations to monopolize and oppress; are 
rendering the workman more dependent; depriving him 
of the advantages of skill and of opportunities to acquire 
it; lessening his control over his own condition and his 
hope of improving it; cramping his mind, and in many 
cases distorting and enervating his body. 

It seems to me impossible to consider the present 
tendencies of our industrial development without feeling 
that if there be no escape from them, the Chinese philosophers 
are right, and that the powers we have called into 
our service must ultimately destroy us. We are reducing 
the cost of production; but in doing so, are stunting children, 
and unfitting women for the duties of maternity. 
and degrading men into the position of mere feeders of 
machines. We are not lessening the fierceness of the 
struggle for existence. Though we work with an intensity 
and application that with the great majority of us leaves 
time and power for little else, we have increased, not 
decreased, the anxieties of life. Insanity is increasing, 
suicide is increasing, the disposition to shun marriage is 
increasing. We are developing, on the one side, enormous 
fortunes, but on the other side, utter pariahs. These are 
symptoms of disease for which no gains can compensate. 

Yet it is manifestly wrong to attribute either necessary 
good or necessary evil to the improvements and inventions 
which are so changing industrial and social relations. 
They simply increase power-and power may work either 
good or evil as intelligence controls or fails to control it. 

Let us consider the effects of the introduction of labor. 
saving machinery-or rather, of all discoveries, inventions 
and improvements, that increase the produce a given 
amount of labor can obtain. 

In that primitive state in which the labor of each family 
supplies its wants, any invention or discovery which in- 
creases the power of supplying one of these wants will 
increase the power of supplying all, since the labor saved 
in one direction may be expended in other directions. 

When division of labor has taken place, and different 
parts in production are taken by different individuals, the 
gain obtained by any labor saving improvement in one 
branch of production will, in like manner, be averaged 
with all. If, for instance, improvements be made in the 
weaving of cloth and the working of iron, the effect will 
be that a bushel of grain will exchange for more cloth and 
more iron, and thus the farmer will be enabled to obtain 
the same quantity of all the things he wants with less 
labor, or a somewhat greater quantity with the same labor. 
and so with all other producers. 

Even when the improvement is kept a secret, or the 
inventor is protected for a time by a patent, it is only in 
part that the benefit can be retained. It is the general 
characteristic of labor - saving improvements, after at least 
a certain stage in the arts is reached, that the production 
of larger quantities is necessary to secure the economy. 
And those who have the monopoly are impelled by 
their desire for the largest profit to produce more at a 
lower price, rather than to produce the same quantity at 
the previous price, thus enabling the producers of other 
things to obtain for less labor the particular things in the 
production of which the saving has been effected, and thus 
diffusing part of the benefit, and generally the largest part, 
over the whole field of industry. 

In this way all labor-saving inventions tend to increase 
the productive power of all labor, and, except in so far as 
they are monopolized, their whole benefit is thus diffused. 
For, if in one occupation labor become more profitable 
than in others, labor is drawn to it until the net average 
in different occupations is restored. And so, where not 
artificially prevented, does the same tendency bring to a 
common level the earnings of capital. The direct effect 
of improvements and inventions which add to productive 
power is, it is to be remarked, always to increase the earnings 
of labor, never to increase the earnings of capital. 
The advantage, even in such improvements as may seem 
primarily to be rather capital-saving than labor -saving 
- as, for instance, an invention which lessens the time 
required for the tanning of hides - becomes a property 
and advantage of labor. The reason is, not to go into a 
more elaborate explanation, that labor is the active factor 
in production. Capital is merely its tool and instrument. 
The great gains made by particular capitalists in the 
utilization of improvements, are not the gains of capital, 
but generally the gains of monopoly, though sometimes 
they may be gains of adventure or of management. The 
rate of interest, which is the measure of the earnings of 
capital, has not increased with all the enormous labor. 
saving improvements of our century; on the contrary, its 
tendency has been to diminish. But the requirement of. 
larger amounts of capital, which is generally characteristic 
of labor-saving improvements, may increase the facility 
with which those who have large capitals can establish 
monopolies that enable them to intercept what would 
naturally go to labor. This, however, is an effect, rather 
than a cause, of the failure of labor to get ~he benefit of 
improvements in production. 

For the cause we must go further. While labor-saving 
improvements increase the power of labor, no improvement 
or invention can release labor from its dependence 
upon land. Labor -saving improvements only increase the 
power of producing wealth from land. And land being 
monopolized as the private property of certain persons" 
who can thus prevent others from using it, all these gains, 
which accrue primarily to labor, can be demanded from 
labor by the owners of land, in higher rents and higher 
prices. Thus, as we see it, the march of improvement and 
invention has increased neither interest nor wages, but its 
general effect has everywhere been to increase the value 
of land. Where increase of wages has been won, it has 
been by combination, or the concurrence of special causes ; 
but what of the increased productiveness which primarily 
attaches to labor has been thus secured by labor is 
comparatively trivial. Some part of it has gone to various 
other monopolies, but the great bulk has gone to the 
monopoly of the soil, has increased ground-rents and 
raised the value of land. 

The railroad, for instance, is a great labor-saving 
invention. It does not increase the quantity of grain 
which the farmer can raise, nor the quantity of goods 
which the manufacturer can turn out; but by reducing 
the cost of transportation it increases the quantity of all 
the various things which can be obtained in exchange for 
produce of either kind; which practically amounts to the 
same thing. 

These gains primarily accrue to labor; that is to say, 
the advantage given by the railroad in the district which 
it affects, is to save labor; to enable the same labor to 
procure more wealth. But as we see where railroads are 
built, it is not labor that secures the gain. The railroad 
being a monopoly -and in the United States, a practically 
unrestricted monopoly -as large a portion as possible of 
these gains, over and above the fair returns on the capital 
invested, is intercepted by the managers, who by fictitious 
costs, watered stock, and in various other ways, thinly 
disguise their levies, and who generally rob the stock. 
holders while they fleece the public. The rest of the gain 
- the advantage which, after these deductions, accrues to 
labor - is intercepted by the monopolists of land. As the 
productiveness of labor is increased, or even as there is a 
promise of its increase, so does the value of land increase, 
and labor, having to pay proportionately more for land, 
is shorn of all the benefit. Taught by experience, when a 
railroad opens a new district we do not expect wages to 
increase; what we expect to increase is the value of land. 

The elevated railroads of New York are great labor - 
saving machines, which have greatly reduced the time and 
labor necessary to take people from one end of the city to 
the other. They have made accessible to the overcrowded 
population of the lower part of the island, the vacant 
spaces at the upper. But they have not added to the 
earnings of labor, nor made it easier for the mere laborer 
to live. Some portion of the gain has been intercepted 
by Mr. Cyrus Field, Mr. Samuel J. Tilden, Mr. Jay Gould, 
and other managers and manipulators. Over and above 
this, the advantage has gone to the owners of land. The 
reduction in the time and cost of transportation has made 
much vacant land accessible to an overcrowded population, 
but as this land has been made accessible, so has its value 
risen, and the tenement-house population is as crowded as 
ever. The managers of the roads have gained some mil- 
lions; the owners of the land affected, some hundreds of 
millions; but the working-classes of New York are no 
better off. What they gain in improved transportation 
they must pay in increased rent. 

And so would it be with any improvement or material 
benefaction. Supposing the very rich men of New York 
were to become suddenly imbued with that public spirit 
which shows itself in the Astor Library and the Cooper 
Institute, and that it should become among them a passion, 
leading them even to beggar themselves in the emulation 
to benefit their fellow -citizens. Supposing such a man as 
Mr. Gould were to make the elevated roads free, were to 
assume the cost of the Fire Department, and give every 
house a free telephone connection; and Mr. Vanderbilt, 
not to be outdone, were to assume the cost of putting 
down good pavements, and cleaning the streets, and run 
ning the horse-cars for nothing; while the Astors were to 
build libraries in every ward. Supposing the fifty, twenty, 
ten, and still smaller millionaires, seized by the same passion, 
were singly or together, at their own cost, to bring 
in plentiful supplies of water; to furnish heat, light and 
power free of charge; to improve and maintain the 
schools; to open theaters and concerts to the public; to 
establish public gardens and baths and markets j to open 
stores where everything could be bought at retail for the 
lowest wholesale price ;-in short, were to do everything 
that could be done to make New York a cheap and pleasant 
place to live in ? The result would be that New York being 
so much more desirable a place to live in, more people 
would desire to live in it, and the landowners could charge 
so much the more for the privilege. All these benefactions 
would increase rent. 

And so, whatever be the character of the improvement, 
its benefit, land being monopolized, must ultimately go to 
the owners of land. Were labor-saving invention carried 
so far that the necessity of labor in the production of 
wealth were done away with, the result would be that the 
owners of land could command all the wealth that could 
be produced, and need not share with labor even what is 
necessary for its maintenance. Were the powers and 
capacities of land increased, the gain would be that of 
landowners. Or were the improvement to take place in 
the powers and capacities of labor, it would still be the 
owners of land, not laborers, who would reap the 
advantage. 

For land being indispensable to labor, those who monopolize 
land are able to make their own terms with labor ; or 
rather, the competition with each other of those who cannot 
employ themselves, yet must find employment or starve, 
will force wages down to the lowest point at which the 
habits of the laboring-class permit them to live and reproduce. 
At this point, in all countries where land is fully 
monopolized, the wages of common labor must rest, and 
toward it all other wages tend, being kept up above it 
only by the special conditions, artificial or otherwise, which 
give labor in some occupations higher wages than in 
others. And so no improvement even in the power of 
labor itself-whether it come from education, from the 
actual increase of muscular force, or from the ability to 
do with less sleep and work longer hours-could raise the 
reward of labor above this point. This we see in countries 
and in occupations where the labor of women and children 
is called in to aid the natural breadwinner in the support 
of the family. While as for any increase in economy and 
thrift, as soon as it became general it could only lessen, 
not increase, the reward of labor. 

This is the " iron law of wages," as it is styled by the 
Germans -the law which determines wages to the minimum 
on which laborers will consent to live and reproduce. 
It is recognized by all economists, though by most of them 
attributed to other causes than the true one. It is manifestly 
an inevitable result of making the land from which 
all must live the exclusive property of some. The lord of 
the soil is necessarily lord of the men who live upon it. 
They are as truly and as fully his slaves as though his 
ownership in their flesh and blood were acknowledged. 
Their competition with each other to obtain from him the 
means of livelihood must compel them to give up to him 
all their earnings save the necessary wages of slavery-to 
wit, enough to keep them in working condition and maintain 
their numbers. And as no possible increase in the 
power of his labor, or reduction in his expenses of living, 
can benefit the slave, neither can it, where land is monopolized, 
benefit those who have nothing but their labor. It 
can only increase the value of land-the proportion of the 
produce that goes to the landowner. And this being the 
case, the greater employment of machinery, the greater 
division of labor, the greater contrasts in the distribution 
of wealth, become to the working-masses positive evils 
- making their lot harder and more hopeless as material 
progress goes on. Even education adds but to the capacity 
for suffering. If the slave must continue to be a slave, it 
is cruelty to educate him. 

All this we may not yet fully realize, because the 
industrial revolution which began with the introduction 
of steam, is as yet in its first stages, while up to this time 
the overrunning of a new continent has reduced social 
pressure, not merely here, but even in Europe. But the 
new continent is rapidly being fenced in, and the 
industrial revolution goes on faster and faster.

The more carefully he examines, the more fully will he see 
that at the root of every social problem lies a social wrong, 
that " ignorance, neglect or contempt of human rights are 
the causes of public misfortunes and corruptions of government. 
Yet, in truth, no elaborate examination is necessary. 
To understand why material progress does not benefit 
the masses requires but a recognition of the self - evident 
truth that man cannot live without land; that it 
is only on land and from land that human labor can produce. 

Robinson Crusoe, as we all know, took Friday as his 
slave. Suppose, however, that instead of taking Friday 
as his slave, Robinson Crusoe had welcomed him as a man 
and a brother; had read him a Declaration of Independence, 
an Emancipation Proclamation and a Fifteenth 
Amendment, and informed him that he was a free and 
independent citizen, entitled to vote and hold office ; but 
had at the same time also informed him that that particular 
island was his (Robinson Crusoe's) private and exclusive 
property. What would have been the difference ? Since 
Friday could not fly up into the air nor swim off through 
the sea, since if he lived at all he must live on the island, 
he would have been in one case as much a slave as in the 
other. Crusoe's ownership of the island would be 
equivalent to his ownership of Friday. 

Chattel slavery is, in fact, merely the rude and primitive 
mode of property in man. It only grows up where population 
is sparse; it never, save by virtue of special circumstances, 
continues where the pressure of population gives 
land a high value, for in that case the ownership of land 
gives an the power that comes from the ownership of men, 
in more convenient form. When in the course of history 
we see the conquerors making chattel slaves of the 
conquered, it is always where population is sparse and land 
of little value, or where they want to carry off their human 
spoil. In other cases, the conquerors merely appropriate 
the lands of the conquered, by which means they just as 
effectually, and much more conveniently, compel the 
conquered to work for them. It was not until the great estates 
of the rich patricians began to depopulate Italy that the 
importation of slaves began. In Turkey and Egypt, where 
chattel slavery is yet legal, it is confined to the inmates 
and attendants of harems. English ships carried negro 
slaves to America, and not to England or Ireland, because 
in America land was cheap and labor was valuable, while 
in western Europe land was valuable and labor was cheap. 
As soon as the possibility of expansion over new land 
ceased, chattel slavery would have died out in our Southern 
States. As it is, Southern planters do not regret the abolition 
of slavery. They get out of the freedmen as tenants 
as much as they got out of them as slaves. While as for 
predial slavery -the attachment of serfs to the soil -the 
form of chattel slavery which existed longest in Europe 
it is only of use to the proprietor where there is little 
competition for land. Neither predial slavery nor absolute 
chattel slavery could have added to the Irish landlord's 
virtual ownership of men -to his power to make them 
work for him without return. Their own competition for 
the means of livelihood insured him all they possibly could 
give. To the English proprietor the ownership of slaves 
would be only a burden and a loss, when he can get 
laborers for less than it would cost to maintain them as 
slaves, and when they are become ill or infirm can turn 
them on the parish. Or what would the New England 
manufacturer gain by the enslavement of his operatives , 
The competition with each other of so-called freemen, who 
are denied all right to the soil of what is called their 
country, brings him labor cheaper and more conveniently 
than would chattel slavery . 

That a people can be enslaved just as effectually by 
making property of their lands as by making property of 
their bodies, is a truth that conquerors in all ages have 
recognized, and that, as society developed, the strong and 
unscrupulous who desired to live off the labor of others, 
have been prompt to see. The coarser form of slavery, in 
which each particular slave is the property of a particular 
owner, is fitted only for a rude state of society, and with 
social development entails more and more care, trouble 
and expense upon the owner. But by making property 
of the land instead of the person, much care, supervision 
and expense are saved the proprietors; and though no 
particular slave is owned by a particular master, yet the 
one class still appropriates the labor of the other class as 
before. 

That each particular slave should be owned by a particular 
master would in fact become, as social development 
went on, and industrial organization grew complex, a 
manifest disadvantage to the masters. They would be , 
at the trouble of whipping, or otherwise compelling the 
slaves to work; at the cost of watching them, and of 
keeping them when ill or unproductive; at the trouble of 
finding work for them to do, or of hiring them out, as at 
different seasons or at different times, the number of 
slaves which different owners or different contractors 
could advantageously employ would vary. As social 
development went on, these inconveniences might, were 
there no other way of obviating them, have led slave. 
owners to adopt some such device for the joint ownership 
and management of slaves, as the mutual convenience 01 
capitalists has led to in the management of capital. In a 
rude state of society, the man who wants to have money 
ready for use must hoard it, or, if he travels, carry it with 
him. The man who has capital must use it himself or 
lend it. But mutual convenience has, as society developed, 
suggested methods of saving this trouble. The man who 
wishes to have his money accessible turns it over to a 
bank, which does not agree to keep or hand him back that 
particular money, but money to that amount. And 
so by turning over his capital to savings -banks or trust 
companies, or by buying the stock or bonds of corporations 
he gets rid of all trouble of handling and employing it 
Had chattel slavery continued, some similar device for the 
ownership and management of slaves would in time have 
been adopted. But by changing the form of slavery - by 
freeing men and appropriating land-all the advantages 
of chattel slavery can be secured without any of the 
disadvantages which in a complex society attend the 
owning of a particular man by a particular master.

Unable to employ themselves, the nominally free la- 
borers are forced by their competition with each other to 
pay as rent all their earnings above a bare living, or to 
sell their labor for wages which give but a bare living j and 
as landowners the ex-slaveholders are enabled as before, 
to appropriate to themselves the labor or the produce of 
the labor of their former chattels, having in the value 
which this power of appropriating the proceeds of labor 
gives to the ownership of land, a capitalized value equivalent, 
or more than equivalent, to the value of their slaves. 
They no longer have to drive their slaves to work ; want 
and the fear of want do that more effectually than the 
lash. They no longer have the trouble of looking out for 
their employment or hiring out their labor, or the expense 
of keeping them when they cannot work. That is thrown 
upon the slaves. The tribute that they still wring from 
labor seems like voluntary payment. In fact, they take it 
as their honest share of the rewards of production -since 
they furnish the land! And they find so-called political 
economists, to say nothing of so-called preachers of 
Christianity, to tell them it is so. 

We of the United States take credit for having abolished 
slavery .Passing the question of how much credit the 
majority of us are entitled to for the abolition of negro 
slavery, it remains true that we have abolished only one 
form of slavery-and that a primitive form which had 
been abolished in the greater portion of the country by 
social development, and that, notwithstanding its race 
character gave it peculiar tenacity, would in time have 
been abolished in the same way in other parts of the 
country. We have not really abolished slavery ; we have 
retained it in its most insidious and wide-spread form -in 
a form which applies to whites as to blacks. So far from 
having abolished slavery, it is extending and intensifying, 
and we make no scruple of selling into it our own children 
- the citizens of the Republic yet to be. For what else are 
we doing in selling the land on which future citizens must 
live, if they are to live at all ? 

The essence of slavery is the robbery of labor. It consists 
in compelling men to work, yet taking from them all 
the produce of their labor except what suffices for a bare 
living. Of how many of our free and equal American 
citizens " is that already the lot ? And of how many more 
is it coming to be the lot ? 

In all our cities there are, even in good times, thousands 
and thousands of men who would gladly go to work for 
wages that would give them merely board and clothes 
- that is to say, who would gladly accept the wages of 
slaves. As I have previously stated, the Massachusetts 
Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Illinois Bureau of 
Labor Statistics both declare that in the majority of 
cases the earnings of wage-workers will not maintain 
their families, and must be pieced out by the earnings of 
women and children. In our richest States are to be 
found men reduced to a virtual peonage-living in their 
employers' houses, trading at their stores, and for the most 
part unable to get out of their debt from one year's end 
to the other. In New York, shirts are made for thirty-five 
cents a dozen, and women working from fourteen to sixteen 
hours a day average three dollars or four dollars a 
week. There are cities where the prices of such work are 
lower still. As a matter of dollars and cents, no master 
could afford to work slaves so hard and keep them so cheaply. 

But it may be said that the analogy between our industrial 
system and chattel slavery is only supported by the 
consideration of extremes. Between those who get but 
a bare living and those who can live luxuriously on the 
earnings of others, are many gradations, and here lies the 
great middle class. Between all classes, moreover, a constant 
movement of individuals is going on. The millionaire's 
grandchildren may be tramps, while even the poor 
man who has lost hope for himself may cherish it for his 
son. Moreover, it is not true that all the difference 
between what labor fairly earns and what labor really gets 
goes to the owners of land. And with us, in the United 
States, a great many of the owners of land are small 
owners -men who own the homesteads in which they live 
or the soil which they till, and who combine the characters 
of laborer and landowner. 

These objections will be best met by endeavoring to 
imagine a well-developed society, like our own, in which 
chattel slavery exists without distinction of race. To do 
this requires some imagination, for we know of no such 
case. Chattel slavery had died out in Europe before 
modern civilization began, and in the New World has 
existed only as race slavery, and in communities of low 
industrial development. 

But if we do imagine slavery without race distinction in 
a progressive community, we shall see that society, even 
if starting from a point where the greater part of the 
people were made the chattel slaves of the rest, could not 
tong consist of but the two classes, masters and slaves. 
The indolence, interest and necessity of the masters 
would soon develop a class of intermediaries between the 
completely enslaved and themselves. To supervise the 
labor of the slaves, and to keep them in subjection, it 
would be necessary to take, from the ranks of the slaves, 
overseers, policemen, etc.. and to reward them by more of 
the produce of slave labor than goes to the ordinary slave. 
So, too, would it be necessary to draw out special skill 
and talent. And in the course of social development a 
class of traders would necessarily arise, who, exchanging 
the products of slave labor, would retain a considerable 
portion; and a class of contractors, who, hiring slave labor 
from the masters, would also retain a portion of its produce. 
Thus, between the slaves forced to work for a bare 
living and the masters who lived without work, intermediaries 
of various grades would be developed, some of 
whom would doubtless acquire large wealth. 

And in the mutations of fortune, some slaveholders 
would be constantly falling into the class of intermediaries, 
and finally into the class of slaves, while individual slaves 
would be rising. The conscience, benevolence or gratitude 
of masters would lead them occasionally to manumit 
slaves; their interest would lead them to reward the diligence, 
inventiveness, fidelity to themselves, or treachery 
to their fellows, of particular slaves. Thus, as has often 
occurred in slave countries, we would find slaves who were 
free to make what they could on condition of paying so 
much to their masters every month or every quarter ; 
slaves who had partially bought their freedom, for a day 
or two days or three days in the week, or for certain 
months in the year, and those who had completely bought 
themselves, or had been presented with their freedom. 
And, as has always happened where slavery had not race 
character, some of these ex-slaves or their children would, 
in the constant movement, be always working their way 
to the highest places, so that in such a state of society the 
apologists of things as they are would triumphantly point 
to these examples, saying, " See how beautiful a thing is 
slavery ! Any slave can become a slaveholder himself if 
he is only faithful, industrious and prudent! It is only 
their own ignorance and dissipation and laziness that 
prevent all slaves from becoming masters! " And then 
they would indulge in a moan for human nature. " Alas! " 
they would say, " the fault is not in slavery ; it is in human 
nature" -meaning, of course, other human nature than 
their own. And if anyone hinted at the abolition of 
slavery, they would charge him with assailing the sacred 
rights of property, and of endeavoring to rob poor blind 
widow women of the slaves that were their sole dependence ; 
call him a crank and a communist; an enemy of man and 
a defier of God ! 

Consider, furthermore, the operation of taxation in an 
advanced society based on chattel slavery ; the effect of 
the establishment of monopolies of manufacture, trade and 
transportation; of the creation of public debts, etc., and 
you will see that in reality the social phenomena would be 
essentially the same if men were made property as they 
are under the system that makes land property. 

It must be remembered, however, that the slavery that 
results from the appropriation of land does not come 
suddenly, but insidiously and progressively. Where 
population is sparse and land of little value, the institution 
of private property in land may exist without its 
effects being much felt. As it becomes more and more 
difficult to get land, so will the virtual enslavement of the 
laboring -classes go on. As the value of land rises, more 
and more of the earnings of labor will be demanded for 
the use of land, until finally nothing is left to laborers 
but the wages of slavery -a bare living. 

But the degree as well as the manner in which individuals 
are affected by this movement must vary very much. 
Where the ownership of land has been much diffused, 
there will remain, for some time after the mere laborer 
has been reduced to the wages of slavery, a greater body 
of smaller landowners occupying an intermediate position, 
and who, according to the land they hold, and the relation 
which it bears to their labor, may, to make a comparison 
with chattel slavery, be compared, in their gradations, to 
the owners of a few slaves; to those who own no slaves 
but are themselves free; or to partial slaves, compelled to 
render service for one, two, three, four or five days in 
the week, but for the rest of the time their own masters. 
As land becomes more and more valuable this class will 
gradually pass into the ranks of the completely enslaved. 
The independent American farmer working with his own 
hands on his own land is doomed as certainly as two thou. 
sand years ago his prototype of Italy was doomed. He must 
disappear, with the development of the private ownership 
of land, as the English yeoman has already disappeared. 

We have abolished negro slavery in the United States. 
But how small is the real benefit to the slave. George M. 
Jackson writes me from St. Louis, under date of August 
15, 1883 : 

During the war I served in a Kentucky regiment in the Federal 
army. When the war broke out, my father owned sixty slaves. I 
had not been back to my oId Kentucky home for years until a short 
time ago, when I was met by one of my father's old negroes, who 
said tome :  Mas George, you say you sot us free; but 'fore God, 
I'm wus off than when I belonged to your father." The planters, on 
the other hand, are contented with the change. They say:  How 
foolish it was in us to go to war for slavery. We get labor cheaper 
now than when we owned the slaves." How do they get it cheaper ? 
Why, in the shape of rents they take more of the labor of the negro 
than they could under slavery, for then they were compelled to return 
him sufficient food, clothing and medical attendance to keep him 
well, and were compelled by conscience and public opinion, as well 
as by law, to keep him when he could no longer work. Now their 
interest and responsibility cease when they have got all the work out 
of him they can.

In one of his novels, Capt. Marryat tells of a school. 
master who announced that he had abandoned the use of 
the rod. When tender mothers, tempted by this announcement, 
brought their boys to his institution, he was eloquent 
in his denunciations of the barbarism of the rod; but no 
sooner had the doors closed upon them than the luckless 
pupils found that the master had only abandoned the use 
of the rod for the use of the cane! Very much like this 
is our abolition of negro slavery. 

The only one of our prominent men who had any glimmering 
of what was really necessary to the abolition of 
slavery was Thaddeus Stevens, but it was only a glimmering. 
 Forty acres and a mule " would have been a 
measure of scant justice to the freedmen, and it would for 
a while have given them something of that personal 
independence which is necessary to freedom. Yet only for a 
while. In the course of time, and as the pressure of population 
increased, the forty acres would, with the majority 
of them, have been mortgaged and the mule sold, and they 
would soon have been, as now, competitors for a foothold 
upon the earth and for the means of making a living from 
it. Such a measure would have given the freedmen a 
fairer start, and for many of them would have postponed 
the evil day; but that is all. Land being private property, 
that evil day must come. 

I do not deny that the blacks of the South have in some 
things gained by the abolition of chattel slavery. I will 
not even insist that, on the whole, their material condition 
has not been improved. But it must be remembered that 
the South is yet but sparsely settled, and is behindhand 
in industrial development. The continued existence of 
slavery there was partly the effect and partly the cause of 
this. As population increases, as industry is developed, 
the condition of the freedmen must become harder and 
harder. As yet, land is comparatively cheap in the South, 
and there is much not only unused but unclaimed. The 
consequence is, that the freedmen are not yet driven into 
that fierce competition which must come with denser 
population; there is no seeming surplus of labor seeking 
employment on any terms, as in the North. The freedmen 
merely get a living, as in the days of slavery, and in many 
cases not so good a living; but still there is little or no 
difficulty in getting that. To compare fairly the new estate 
of the freedmen with the old, we must wait until in population 
and industrial development the South begins to 
approach the condition of the North. 

But not even in the North (nor, for that matter, even in 
Europe) has that form of slavery which necessarily results 
from the disinheritance of labor by the monopolization of 
land, yet reached its culmination. For the vast area of 
unoccupied land on this continent has prevented the full 
effects of modern development from being felt. As it 
becomes more and more difficult to obtain land, so will the 
virtual -enslavement of the laboring-classes go on. As the 
value of land rises, more and more of the earnings of 
labor will be demanded for the use of land -that is to say, 
laborers must give a greater and greater portion of their 
time up to the service of the landlord, until, finally, no 
matter how hard they work, nothing is left them but a 
bare living. 

Of the two systems of slavery, I think there can be no 
doubt that upon the same moral level, that which makes 
property of persons is more humane than that which 
results from making private property of land. The cruelties 
which are perpetrated under the system of chattel 
slavery are more striking and arouse more indignation 
because they are the conscious acts of individuals. But 
for the suffering of the poor under the more refined system 
no one in particular seems responsible. That one human 
being should be deliberately burned by other human beings 
excites our imagination and arouses our indignation much 
more than the great fire or railroad accident in which a 
hundred people are roasted alive. But this very fact 
permits cruelties that would not be tolerated under the 
one system to pass almost unnoticed under the other. 
Human beings are overworked, are starved, are robbed 
of all the light and sweetness of life, are condemned to 
ignorance and brutishness, and to the infection of physical 
and moral disease; are driven to crime and suicide, not by 
other individuals, but by iron necessities for which it seems 
that no one in particular is responsible. 

To match from the annals of chattel slavery the horrors 
that day after day transpire unnoticed in the heart of 
Christian civilization it would be necessary to go back to 
ancient slavery, to the chronicles of Spanish conquest in 
the New World, or to stories of the Middle Passage. 

That chattel slavery is not the worst form of slavery we 
know from the fact that in countries where it has prevailed 
irrespective of race distinctions, the ranks of chattel slaves 
have been recruited from the ranks of the free poor, who, 
driven by distress, have sold themselves or their children. 
And I think no one who reads our daily papers can doubt 
that even already, in the United States, there are many 
who, did chattel slavery, without race distinction, exist 
among us, would gladly sell themselves or their children, 
and who would really make a good exchange for their 
nominal freedom in doing so. 

We have not abolished slavery. We never can abolish 
slavery, until we honestly accept the fundamental truth 
asserted by the Declaration of Independence and secure 
to all the equal and unalienable rights with which they are 
endowed by their Creator. If we cannot or will not do 
that, then, as a matter of humanity and social stability, it 
might be well, would it avail, to consider whether it were 
not wise to amend our constitution and permit poor whites 
and blacks alike to sell themselves and their children to 
good masters. If we must have slavery, it were better in 
the form in which the slave knows his owner, and the heart 
and conscience and pride of that owner can be appealed 
to. Better breed children for the slaves of good, Christian, 
civilized people, than breed them for the brothel or the 
penitentiary. But alas! that recourse is denied. Supposing 
we did legalize chattel slavery again, who would 
buy men when men can be hired so cheaply ?

Chapter 15  Social Problems 1883  by Henry George
SLAVERY AND  SLAVERY

Chapter 16  Social Problems 1883  by Henry George
PUBLIC DEBTS  AND  INDIRECT TAXATION

THE more we examine, the more clearly may we see 
that public misfortunes and corruptions of government 
do spring from neglect or contempt of the natural 
rights of man. 

That, in spite of the progress of civilization, Europe is 
to-day a vast camp, and the energies of the most advanced 
portion of mankind are everywhere taxed so heavily to pay 
for preparations for war or the costs of war, is due to two 
great inventions, that of indirect taxation and that of 
public debt. 

Both of these devices by which tyrannies are maintained, 
governments are corrupted, and the common people plundered, 
spring historically from the monopolization of land, 
and both directly ignore the natural rights of man. Under 
the feudal system the greater part of public expenses was 
defrayed from the rent of land, and the landholders had 
to do the fighting or bear its cost. Had this system been 
continued, England, for instance, would to-day have had 
no public debt. And it is safe to say that her people and 
the world would have been saved those unnecessary 
and cruel wars in which in modern times English blood 
and treasure have been wasted. But by the institution of 
indirect taxes and public debts the great landholders were 
enabled to throw off on the people at large the burdens 
which constituted the condition on which they held their 
lands, and to throw them off in such a way that those on 
whom they rested, though they might feel the pressure, 
could not tell from whence it came. Thus it was that the 
holding of land was insidiously changed from a trust into 
an individual possession, and the masses stripped of the 
first and most important of the rights of man. 

The institution of public debts, like the institution of 
private property in land, rests upon the preposterous 
assumption that one generation may bind another generation. 
If a man were to come to me and say, " Here is a 
promissory note which your great-grandfather gave to my 
great-grandfather, and which you will oblige me by paying," 
I would laugh at him, and tell him that if he wanted 
to collect his note he had better hunt up the man who 
made it; that I had nothing to do with my great-grand -
father's promises. And if he were to insist upon payment 
and to call my attention to the terms of the bond in which 
my great-grandfather expressly stipulated with his great. 
grandfather that I should pay him, I would only laugh the 
more, and be the more certain that he was a lunatic. To 
such a demand anyone of us would reply in effect, " My 
great-grandfather was evidently a knave or a joker, and 
your great-grandfather was certainly a fool, which quality 
you surely have inherited if you expect me to pay you 
money because my great-grandfather promised that I 
should do so. He might as well have given your great. 
grandfather a draft upon Adam or a check upon the First 
National Bank of the Moon." 

Yet upon this assumption that ascendants may bind 
descendants, that one generation may legislate for another 
generation, rests the assumed validity of our land titles 
and public debts. 

If it were possible for the present to borrow of the 
future, for those now living to draw upon wealth to be 
created by those who are yet to come, there could be no 
more dangerous power, none more certain to be abused ; 
and none that would involve in its exercise a more flagrant 
contempt for the natural and unalienable rights of man. 
But we have no such power, and there is no possible 
invention by which we can obtain it. When we talk 
about calling upon future generations to bear their part 
in the costs and burdens of the present, about imposing 
upon them a share in expenditures we take the liberty of 
assuming they will consider to have been made for their 
benefit as well as for ours, we are carrying metaphor into 
absurdity. Public debts are not a device for borrowing 
from the future,. for compelling those yet to be to bear a 
share in expenses which a present generation may choose 
to incur. That is, of course, a physical impossibility. 
They are merely a device for obtaining control of wealth in 
the present by promising that a certain distribution of 
wealth in the future shall be made-a device by which the 
owners of existing wealth are induced to give it up under 
promise, not merely that other people shall be taxed to 
pay them, but that other people's children shall be taxed 
for the benefit of their children or the children of their 
assigns. Those who get control of governments are thus 
enabled to get sums which they could not get by immediate 
taxation without arousing the indignation and resistance 
of those who could make the most effective resistance. 
Thus tyrants are enabled to maintain themselves, and 
extravagance and corruption are fostered. If any cases 
can be pointed to in which the power to incur public debts 
has been in any way a benefit, they are as nothing 
compared with the cases in which the effects have 
been purely injurious. 

The public debts for which most can be said are those 
contracted for the purpose of making public improvements, 
yet what extravagance and corruption the power of contracting 
such debts has engendered in the United States is 
too well known to require illustration, and has led, in a 
number of the States, to constitutional restrictions. Even 
the quasi-public debts of railroad and other such corporations 
have similarly led to extravagance and corruption 
that have far outweighed any good results accomplished 
through them. While as for the great national debts of 
the world, incurred as they have been for purposes of 
tyranny and war, it is impossible to see in them anything 
but evil. Of all these great national debts that of the 
United States will best bear examination; but it is no 
exception. 

As I have before said, the wealth expended in carrying 
on the war did not come from abroad or from the future, 
but from the existing wealth in the States under the 
national flag, and if, when we called on men to die for 
their country, we had not shrunk from taking, if necessary, 
nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand dollars froth 
every millionaire, we need not have created any debt. But 
instead of that, what taxation we did impose was so levied 
as to fall on the poor more heavily than on the rich, and 
incidentally to establish monopolies by which the rich 
could profit at the expense of the poor. And then, when 
more wealth still was needed, instead of taking it from 
those who had it, we told the rich that if they would 
voluntarily let the nation use some of their wealth we 
would make it profitable to them by guaranteeing the use 
of the taxing power to pay them back, principal and 
interest. And we did make it profitable with a vengeance. 

Not only did we, by the institution of the national banking
system, give them back nine-tenths of much of the money 
thus borrowed while coutinuing to pay interest on the 
whole amount, but even where it was required neither by 
the letter of the bond nor the equity of the circumstances 
we made debt incurred in depreciated greenbacks payable 
on its face in gold. The consequence of this method of 
carrying on the war was to make the rich richer instead 
of poorer. The era of monstrous fortunes in the United 
States dates from the war. 

But if this can be said of the debt of the United States, 
what shall be said of other national debts ! 

In paying interest upon their enormous national debt, 
what is it that the people of England are paying ? They 
are paying interest upon sums thrown or given away by 
profligate tyrants and corrupt oligarchies in generations 
past-upon grants made to courtezans, and panders, and 
sycophants, and traitors to the liberties of their country ; 
upon sums borrowed to corrupt their own legislatures and 
wage wars against both their own liberties and the liberties 
of other peoples. For the Hessians hired and the Indians 
armed and the fleets and armies sent to crush the American 
colonies into submission, with the effect of splitting into 
two what might but for that have perhaps yet been one 
great confederated nation; for the cost of treading down 
the Irish people and inflicting wounds that yet rankle; for 
the enormous sums spent in the endeavor to maintain on 
the continent of Europe the blasphemy of divine right ; 
for expenditures made to carry rapine among unoffending 
peoples in the four quarters of the globe, Englishmen of 
to-day are taxed. It is not the case of asking a man to 
pay a debt contracted by his great-grandfather ; it is asking 
him to pay for the rope with which his great-grandfather 
was hanged, or the fagots with which he was burned. 

The so-called Egyptian debt which the power of England 
has recently been used to enforce is a still more flagrant 
instance of spoliation. The late Khedive was no more 
than an Arab robber, living at free quarters in the country 
and plundering its people. All he could get by stripping 
them to starvation and nakedness not satisfying his insensate 
and barbarian profligacy, European money-lenders, 
relying upon the assumed sanctity of national debts, 
offered him money on the most usurious terms. The 
money was spent with the wildest recklessness, upon
harems, palaces, yachts, diamonds, presents and entertainments; 
yet to extort interest upon it from poverty-stricken 
fellahs, Christian England sends fleets and armies to 
murder and burn, and with her power maintains the 
tyranny and luxury of a khedival puppet at the expense 
of the Egyptian people. 

Thus the device of public debts enables tyrants to 
intrench themselves, and adventurers who seize upon 
government to defy the people. It permits the making of 
great and wasteful expenditures, by silencing, and even 
converting into support, the opposition of those who would 
otherwise resist these expenditures with most energy and 
force. But for the ability of rulers to contract public 
debts, nine-tenths of the wars of Christendom for the past 
two centuries could never have been waged. The destruction 
of wealth and the shedding of blood, the agony of 
wives and mothers and children thus caused, cannot be 
computed, but to these items must be added the waste and 
loss and demoralization caused by constant preparation 
for war. 

Nor do the public misfortunes and corruptions of government 
which arise from the ignorance and contempt of 
human rights involved in the recognition of public debts, 
end with the costs of war and warlike preparation, and 
the corruptions which such vast public expenditures foster. 
The passions aroused by war, the national hatreds, the 
worship of military glory, the thirst for victory or revenge, 
dull public conscience; pervert the best social instincts into 
that low, unreasoning extension of selfishness miscalled 
patriotism; deaden the love of liberty; lead men to submit 
to tyranny and usurpation from the savage thirst for 
cutting the throats of other people, or the fear of having 
their own throats cut. They so pervert religious perceptions 
that professed followers of Christ bless in his name 
the standards of murder and rapine, and thanks are given 
to the Prince of Peace for victories that pile the earth 
with mangled corpses and make hearthstones desolate ! 

Nor yet does the evil end here. William H. Vanderbilt, 
with his forty millions of registered bonds, declares that 
the national debt ought not to be paid off ; that, on the 
contrary, it ought to be increased, because it gives stability 
to the government, " every man who gets a bond becoming 
a loyal and loving citizen." 

* Interview in New York Times 

Mr. Vanderbilt expresses the universal feeling of his kind. 
It was not loyal and loving citizens 
with bonds in their pockets who rushed to 
the front in our civil war, or who rush to the front in any 
war ; but the possession of a bond does tend to make a 
man loyal and loving to whoever may grasp the machinery 
of government, and will continue to cash coupons. A 
great public debt creates a great moneyed interest that 
wants " strong government " and fears change, and thus 
forms a powerful element on which corrupt and tyrannous 
government can always rely as against the people. We 
may see already in the United States the demoralization of 
this influence; while in Europe, where it has had more 
striking manifestations, it is the mainstay of tyranny, and 
the strongest obstacle to political reform. 

Thomas Jefferson was right when, as a deduction from 
" the self-evident truth that the land belongs in usufruct 
to the living," he declared that one generation should not 
hold itself bound by the laws or the debts of its predecessors, 
and as this widest-minded of American patriots 
and greatest of American statesmen said, measures which 
would give practical effect to this principle will appear 
the more salutary the more they are considered. 
Indirect taxation, the other device by which the people 
are bled without feeling it, and those who could make the 
most effective resistance to extravagance and corruption 
are bribed into acquiescence, is an invention whereby taxes 
are so levied that those who directly pay are enabled to 
collect them again from others, and generally to collect 
them with a profit, in higher prices. Those who directly 
pay the taxes and, still more important, those who desire 
high prices, are thus interested in the imposition and 
maintenance of taxation, while those on whom the burden 
t1ltimately falls do not realize it. 

The corrupting effects of indirect taxation are obvious 
wherever it has been resorted to, but nowhere more obvious 
than in the United States. Ever since the war the great 
effort of our National Government has not been to reduce 
taxation, but to find excuses for maintaining war taxation. 
The most corrupting extravagance in every department of 
administration has thus been fostered, and every endeavor 
used to increase expense. We have deliberately substituted 
a costly currency for a cheap currency; we have deliberately 
added to the cost of paying off the public debt; we 
maintain a costly navy for which we have no sort of use, 
and which, in case o~ war, would be of no sort of use to 
us; and an army twelve times as large and fifteen times 
as expensive as we need. We are digging silver out of 
certain holes in the ground in Nevada and Colorado and 
poking it down other holes in the ground in Washington, 
New York and San Francisco. We are spending great 
sums in useless " public improvements," and are paying 
pensions under a law which seems framed but to put a 
premium upon fraud and get away with public money. 

And yet the great question before Congress is what to do 
with the surplus. Any proposition to reduce taxation 
arouses the most bitter opposition from those who profit 
or who imagine they profit from the imposition of this 
taxation, and a clamorous lobby surrounds Congress, 
begging, bullying, bribing, log-rolling against the reduction 
of taxation, each interest protesting and insisting that 
whatever tax is reduced, its own pet tax must be left intact. 
This clamor of special interests for the continuance of 
indirect taxation may give us some idea of how much 
greater are the sums these taxes take from the people than 
those they put in the treasury. But it is only a faint idea, 
for besides what goes to the government and what is intercepted 
by private interests, there are the loss and waste 
caused by the artificial restrictions and difficulties which 
this system of indirect taxation places in the way of 
production and exchange, and which unquestionably 
amount to far more than the other two items. 

The cost of this system that can be measured in money 
is, however, of little moment as compared with its effect 
in corrupting government, in debasing public morals and 
befogging the thought of the people. The first thing every 
man is called upon to do when he reaches this " land of 
liberty " is to take a false oath; the next thing he is called 
upon to do is to bribe a Custom-House officer. And so 
on, through every artery of the body politic and every 
fiber of the public mind, runs the poisonous virus. Law 
is brought into contempt by the making of actions that 
are not crimes in morals crimes in law; the unscrupulous 
are given an advantage over the scrupulous; voters are 
bought, officials are corrupted, the press is debauched ; 
and the persistent advocacy of these selfish interests has 
so far beclouded popular thought that a very large number 
- I am inclined to think a very large majority - of the 
American people actually believe that they are benefited 
by being thus taxed ! 

To recount in detail the public misfortunes and corruptions 
of government which arise from this vicious 
system of taxation would take more space than I can here 
devote to the subject. But what I wish specially to point 
out is, that, like the evils arising from public debts, they 
are in the last analysis due to  ignorance, neglect or con 
tempt of: human rights." While every citizen may properly 
be called upon to bear his fair share in all proper expenses 
of government, it is manifestly an infringement of natural 
rights to use the taxing power so as to give one citizen 
an advantage over another, to take from some the proceeds 
of their labor in order to swell the profit of others, and to 
punish as crimes actions which in themselves are not injurious.

Chapter 16  Social Problems 1883  by Henry George
PUBLIC DEBTS  AND  INDIRECT TAXATION

Chapter 17  Social Problems 1883  by Henry George
THE FUNCTIONS OF GOVERNMENT

To prevent government from becoming corrupt and 
tyrannous, its organization and methods should be 
as simple as possible, its functions be restricted to those 
necessary to the common welfare, and in all its parts it 
should be kept as close to the people and as directly within 
their control as may be. 

We have ignored these principles in many ways, and 
the result has been corruption and demoralization, the 
loss of control by the people, and the wresting of government 
to the advantage of the few and the spoliation of the 
many. The line of reform, on one side at least, lies in 
simplification. 

The first and main purpose of government is admirably 
stated in that grand document which we Americans so 
honor and so ignore -the Declaration of Independence. 
It is to secure to men those equal and unalienable rights 
with which the Creator has endowed them. I shall hereafter 
show how the adoption of the only means by which, 
in civilized and progressive society, the first of these 
unalienable rights-the equal right to land-can be 
secured, will at the same time greatly simplify government 
and do away with corrupting influences. And 
beyond this, much simplification is possible, and should 
be sought wherever it can be attained. As political 
corruption makes it easier to resist the demand for reform, 
whatever may be done to purify politics and bring government 
within the intelligent supervision and control of the 
people is in itself not merely an end to be sought, but a 
means to larger ends. 

The American Republic has no more need for its burlesque 
of a navy than a peaceable giant would have for a 
stuffed club or a tin sword. It is maintained only for the 
sake of the officers and the naval rings. In peace it is 
a source of expense and corruption; in war it would be 
useless. We are too strong for any foreign power wantonly 
to attack, we ought to be too great wantonly to 
attack others. If war should ever be forced upon us, 
we could safely rely upon science and invention, which 
are already superseding navies faster than they can be 
built. 

So with our army. All we need, if we even now need 
that, is a small force of frontier police, such as is maintained 
in Australia and Canada. Standing navies and 
standing armies are inimical to the genius of democracy, 
and it ought to be our pride, as it is our duty, to show the 
world that a great republic can dispense with both. And 
in organization, as in principle, both our navy and our , 
army are repugnant to the democratic idea. In both we 
maintain that distinction between commissioned officers 
and common soldiers and sailors which arose in Europe 
when the nobility who furnished the one were considered 
a superior race to the serfs and peasants who supplied the 
other. The whole system is an insult to democracy, and 
ought to be swept away. 

Our diplomatic system, too, is servilely copied from the 
usages of kings who plotted with each other against the 
liberties of the people, before the ocean steamship and 
the telegraph were invented. It serves no purpose save to 
reward unscrupulous politicians and corruptionists, and 
occasionally to demoralize a poet. To abolish it would 
save expense, corruption and national dignity. 
In legal administration there is a large field for radical 
reform. Here, too, we have servilely copied English 
precedents, and have allowed lawyers to make law in the 
interests of their class until justice is a costly gamble for 
which a poor man cannot afford to sue. The best use that 
could be made of our great law libraries, to which the 
reports of thirty-eight States, of the Federal courts, and 
of the English, Scotch and Irish courts are each year being 
added, would be to send them to the paper-mills, and to 
adopt such principles and methods of procedure as would 
reduce our great army of lawyers at least to the French 
standard. At the same time our statute-books are full of 
enactments which could, with advantage, be swept away. 
It is not the business of government to make men virtuous 
or religious, or to preserve the fool from the consequences 
of his own folly. Government should be repressive no 
further than is necessary to secure liberty by protecting 
the equal rights of each from aggression on the part of 
others, and the moment governmental prohibitions extend 
beyond this line they are in danger of defeating the very 
ends they are intended to serve. For while the tendency 
of laws which prohibit or command what the moral sense 
does not, is to bring law into contempt and produce 
hypocrisy and evasion, so the attempt to bring law to 
the aid of morals as to those acts and relations which 
do not plainly involve violation of the liberty of others, is 
to weaken rather than to strengthen moral influences; to 
make the standard of wrong and right a legal one, and to 
enable him who can dexterously escape the punishment of 
the law to escape all punishment. Thus, for instance, 
there can be no doubt that the standard of commercial 
honesty would be much higher in the absence of laws for 
the collection of debts. As to all such matters, the cunning 
rogue keeps within the law or evades the law, while 
the existence of a legal standard lowers the moral standard 
and weakens the sanction of public opinion. 

Restrictions, prohibitions, interferences with the liberty 
of action in itself harmless, are evil in their nature, and, 
though they may sometimes be necessary, may for the 
most part be likened to medicines which suppress or 
modify some symptom without lessening the disease; and, 
generally, where restrictive or prohibitive laws are called 
for, the evils they are designed to meet may be traced 
to previous restriction -to some curtailment of natural 
rights. 

All the tendencies of the time are to the absorption of 
smaller communities, to the enlargement of the area within 
which uniformity of law and administration is necessary 
or desirable. But for this very reason we ought with the 
more tenacity to hold, wherever possible, to the principle 
of local self-government-the principle that, in things 
which concern only themselves, the people of each political 
sub-division -township, ward, city or State, as may be - 
shall act for themselves. We have neglected this principle 
within our States even more than in the relations between 
the State and National Governments, and in attempting 
to govern great cities by State commissions, and in making 
what properly belongs to County Supervisors and Township 
Trustees the business of legislatures, we have divided 
responsibility and promoted corruption. 

Much, too, may be done to restrict the abuse of party 
machinery, and make the ballot the true expression of the 
will of the voter, by simplifying our elective methods. 
And a principle should always be kept in mind which 
we have largely ignored, that the people cannot manage 
details, nor intelligently choose more than a few officials. 
To call upon the average citizen to vote at each election 
for a long string of candidates, as to the majority of whom 
he can know nothing unless he makes a business of 
politics, is to relegate choice to nominating conventions 
and political rings. And to divide power is often to 
destroy responsibility, and to provoke, not to prevent, 
usurpation. 

I can but briefly allude to these matters, though in 
themselves they deserve much attention. It is the more 
necessary to simplify government as much as possible and 
to improve, as much as may be, what may be called the 
mechanics of government, because, with the progress of 
society, the functions which government must assume 
steadily increase. It is only in the infancy of society that 
the functions of government can be properly confined to 
providing for the common defense and protecting the 
weak against the physical power of the strong. As society 
develops in obedience to that law of integration and 
increasing complexity of which I spoke in the first of 
these chapters, it becomes necessary in order to secure 
equality that other regulations should be made and 
enforced; and upon the primary and restrictive functions 
of government are superimposed what may be called 
cooperative functions, the refusal to assume which leads 
in many cases, to the disregard of individual rights as 
surely as does the assumption of directive and restrictive 
functions not properly belonging to government. 

In the division of labor and the specialization of vocation 
that begin in an early stage of social development, and 
increase with it, the assumption by individuals of certain 
parts in the business of society necessarily operates to the 
exclusion of other individuals. Thus when one opens a 
store or an inn, or establishes a regular carriage of passengers 
or goods, or devotes himself to a special trade or 
profession of which all may have need, his doing of these 
things operates to prevent others from doing them, and 
leads to the establishment of habits and customs which 
make resort to him a necessity to others, and which would 
put those who were denied this resort at a great 
disadvantage as compared with other individuals. 

Thus to secure 
quality it becomes necessary so to limit liberty of action 
as to oblige those who thus take upon themselves quasi- 
public functions to serve without discrimination those 
who may apply to them upon customary conditions. This 
principle is recognized by all nations that have made any 
progress in civilization, in their laws relating to common 
carriers, innkeepers, etc. 

As civilization progresses and industrial development 
goes on, the concentration which results from the utilization 
of larger powers and improved processes operates 
more and more to the restriction and exclusion of com- 
petition, and to the establishment of complete monopolies. 
This we may see very clearly in the railroad. It is but 
a sheer waste of capital and labor to build one railroad 
alongside of another; and even where this is done, an 
irresistible tendency leads either to consolidation or to 
combination; and even at what are called competing 
points, competition is only transitional. The consolidation 
of companies, which in a few years bids fair to concentrate 
the whole railway business of the United States in 
the hands of half a dozen managements, the pooling of 
receipts, and agreements as to business and charges, which 
even at competing points prevent competition, are due to 
a tendency inherent in the development of the railroad 
system, and of which it is idle to complain. 

The primary purpose and end of government being to 
secure the natural rights and equal liberty of each, all 
businesses that involve monopoly are within the necessary 
province of governmental regulation, and businesses 
that are in their nature complete monopolies become 
properly functions of the state. As society develops, the 
state must assume these functions, in their nature cooperative, 
in order to secure the equal rights and liberty of 
all. That is to say, as, in the process of integration, the 
individual becomes more and more dependent upon and 
subordinate to the all, it becomes necessary for government, 
which is properly that social organ by which alone 
the whole body of individuals can act, to take upon itself, 
in the interest of all, certain functions which cannot 
safely be left to individuals. Thus out of the principle 
that it is the proper end and purpose of government to 
secure the natural rights and equal liberty of the individual, 
grows the principle that it is the business of government 
to do for the mass of individuals those things which cannot
be done, or cannot be so well done, by individual action. 
As in the development of species, the power of conscious, 
coordinated action of the whole being must assume greater 
and greater relative importance to the automatic action of 
parts, so is it in the development of society. This is the 
truth in socialism, which, although it is being forced upon 
us by industrial progress and social development, we are 
so slow to recognize. 

In the physical organism, weakness and disease result 
alike from the overstraining of functions and from the 
non-use of functions. In like manner governments may 
be corrupted and public misfortunes induced by the failure 
to assume, as governmental, functions that properly belong 
to government as the controlling organ in the management 
of common interests, as well as from interferences by 
government in the proper sphere of individual action. 
This we may see in our own case. In what we attempt 
to do by government and what we leave undone we are 
like a man who should leave the provision of his dinner 
to the promptings of his stomach while attempting to 
govern his digestion by the action of his will ; or like one 
who, in walking through a crowded street or over a bad 
road, should concentrate all his conscious faculties upon 
the movement of his legs without paying any attention to 
where he was going. 

To illustrate: It is not the business of government to 
interfere with the views which anyone may hold of the 
Creator or with the worship he may choose to pay him, so 
long as the exercise of these individual rights does not 
conflict with the equal liberty of others; and the result 
of governmental interference in this domain has been 
hypocrisy, corruption, persecution and religious war. It 
is not the business of government to direct the employment 
of labor and capital, and to foster certain industries 
at the expense of other industries; and the attempt to do 
so leads to all the waste, loss and corruption due to 
protective tariffs. 

On the other hand, it is the business of government to 
issue money. This is perceived as soon as the great labor- 
saving invention of money supplants barter. To leave it 
to everyone who chose to do so to issue money would be 
to entail general inconvenience and loss, to offer many 
temptations to roguery, and to put the poorer classes of 
society at a great disadvantage. These obvious considerations 
have everywhere, as society became well organized, 
led to the recognition of the coinage of money as an 
exclusive function of government. When, in the progress 
of society, a further labor-saving improvement becomes 
possible by the substitution of paper for the precious metals 
as the material for money, the reasons why the issuance 
of this money should be made a government function 
become still stronger. The evils entailed by wildcat 
banking in the United States are to well remembered to 
need reference. The loss and inconvenience, the swindling 
and corruption that flowed from the assumption by each 
State of the Union of the power to license banks of issue 
ended with the war, and no one would now go back to 
them. Yet instead of doing what every public consideration 
impels us to, and assuming wholly and fully as the 
exclusive function of the General Government the power 
to issue paper money, the private interests of bankers 
have, up to thief, compelled us to the use of a hybrid currency, 
of which a large part, though guaranteed by the 
General Government, is issued and made profitable to 
corporations. The legitimate business of banking - the safe- 
keeping and loaning of money, and the making and exchange 
of credits, is properly left to individuals and associations ; 
but by leaving to them, even in part and under restrictions 
and guaranties, the issuance of money, the people of the 
United States suffer an annual loss of millions of dollars, 
and sensibly increase the influences which exert a 
corrupting effect upon their government. 

The principle evident here may be seen in even stronger 
light in another department of social life. 

The great " railroad question," with its dangers and perplexities,
is a most striking instance of the evil consequences which result from the 
failure of the state to assume functions that properly belong to it. 

In rude stages of social development, and where government, 
neglectful of its proper functions, has been occupied 
in making needless wars and imposing harmful 
restrictions, the making and improvement of highways 
have been left to individuals, who, to recompense them- 
selves, have been permitted to exact tolls. It has, however, 
from the first, been recognized that these tolls are properly 
subject to governmental control and regulation. But the 
great inconveniences of this system, and the heavy taxes 
which, in spite of attempted regulation, are under it levied 
upon production, have led, as social advance went on, to 
the assumption of the making and maintenance of highroads 
as a governmental duty. In the course of social 
development came the invention of the railroad, which 
merged the business of making and maintaining roads 
with the business of carrying freight and passengers upon 
them. It is probably due to this that it was not at first 
recognized that the same reasons which render it necessary 
for the state to make and maintain common roads apply 
with even greater force to the building and operating of 
railroads. In Great Britain and the United States, and, 
with partial exceptions, in other countries, railroads have 
been left to private enterprise to build and private greed 
to manage. In the United States, where railroads are of 
more importance than in any other country in the world, 
our only recognition of their public character has been in 
the donation of lands and the granting of subsidies, which 
have been the cause of much corruption, and in some 
feeble attempts to regulate fares and freights. 

But the fact that the railroad system as far as yet developed 
(and perhaps necessarily) combines transportation 
with the maintenance of roadways, renders competition 
all the more impossible, and brings it still more clearly 
within the province of the state. That it makes the 
assumption of the railroad business by the state a most 
serious matter is not to be denied. Even if it were possible, 
which may well be doubted, as has been sometimes proposed, 
to have the roadway maintained by the state, 
leaving the furnishing of trains to private enterprise, it 
would be still a most serious matter. But look at it which 
way we may, it is so serious a matter that it must be faced. 
As the individual grows from childhood to maturity, he 
must meet difficulties and accept responsibilities from 
which he well might shrink. So is it with society. New 
powers bring new duties and new responsibilities. Imprudence 
in going forward involves danger, but it is fatal to 
stand still. And however great be the difficulties involved 
in the assumption of the railroad business by the state, 
much greater difficulties are involved in the refusal to 
assume it. 

It is not necessary to go into any elaborate argument 
to show that the ownership and management of railroads 
are functions of the state. That is proved beyond dispute 
by the logic of events and of existing facts. Nothing is 
more obvious 

- at least in the United States, where the 
tendencies of modern development may be seen much 
more clearly than in Europe -than that a union of railroading 
with the other functions of government is inevitable. 
We may not like it, but we cannot avoid it. Either 
government must manage the railroads, or the railroads 
must manage the government. There is no escape. To 
refuse one horn of the dilemma is to be impaled on the 
other. 

As for any satisfactory state regulation of railroads, 
the experience of our States shows it to be impossible. 
A strong-willed despot, clothed with arbitrary power. 
might curb such leviathans; but popular governments 
cannot. The power of the whole people is, of course, 
greater than the power of the railroads, but it cannot be 
exerted steadily and in details. Even a small special 
interest is, by reason of its intelligence, compactness and 
flexibility, more than a match for large and vague general 
interests; it has the advantage which belongs to a well. 
armed and disciplined force in dealing with a mob. But 
in the number of its employees, the amount of its revenues, 
and the extent of the interests which it controls, the rail- 
road power is gigantic. And, growing faster than the 
growth of the country, it is tending still faster to 
concentration. It may be that the man is already born who 
will control the whole railroad system of the United States, 
as Vanderbilt, Gould and Huntington now control great 
sections of it. 

Practical politicians all over the United States recognize 
the utter hopelessness of contending with the railroad 
power. In many if not in most of the States, no prudent 
man will run for office if he believes the railroad power is 
against him. Yet in the direct appeal to the people a 
power of this kind is weakest, and railroad kings rule 
States where, on any issues that came fairly before the 
people, they would be voted down. It is by throwing their 
weight into primaries, and managing conventions, by 
controlling the press, manipulating legislatures, and filling 
the bench with their creatures, that the railroads best 
exert political power. The people of California, for 
instance, have voted against the railroad time and again, 
or rather imagined they did, and even adopted a very bad 
new constitution because they supposed the railroad was 
against it. The result is, that the great railroad company, 
of whose domain California, with an area greater than 
twice that of Great Britain, is but one of the provinces, 
absolutely dominates the State. The men who really fought
it are taken into its service or crushed, and powers 
are exerted in the interests of the corporation managers 
which no government would dare attempt. This company, 
heavily subsidized, in the first place, as a great public 
convenience, levies on commerce, not tolls, but tariffs. 
If a man goes into business requiring transportation he must 
exhibit his profits and take it into partnership for the lion's 
share. Importers are bound by an " iron-clad agreement " 
to give its agents access to their books, and if they do 
anything the company deems against its interests they 
are fined or ruined by being placed at a disadvantage to 
their rivals in business. Three continental railroads 
heavily subsidized by the nation under the impression that 
the competition would keep down rates, have now reached 
the Pacific. Instead of competing they have pooled their 
receipts. The line of steamers from San Francisco to New 
York via the Isthmus receives $100,000 a month to keep 
up fares and freights to a level with those exacted by the 
railroad, and if you would send goods from New York to 
San Francisco by way of the Isthmus, the cheapest way is 
first to ship them to England. Shippers to interior points 
are charged as much as though their goods were carried 
to the end of the road and then shipped back again; and 
even, by means of the agreements mentioned, an embargo 
is laid upon ocean commerce by sailing-vessels, wherever 
It might interfere with the monopoly. 

I speak of California only as an instance. The power 
of the railroads is apparent in State after State, as it is 
in the National Government. Nothing can be clearer than 
that, if present conditions must continue, the American 
people might as well content themselves to surrender 
political power to these great corporations and their afliliated 
interests, There is no escape from this. The railroad 
managers cannot keep out of politics, even if they 
wished to, The difficulties of the railroad question do 
not arise from the fact that peculiarly bad men have got 
control of the railroads; they arise from the nature of 
the railroad business and its intimate relations to other 
interests and industries. 

But it will be said: " If the railroads are even now a 
corrupting element in our politics, what would they be ii 
the government were to own and to attempt to run them , 
Is not governmental management notoriously corrupt and 
inefficient' Would not the effect of adding such a vast 
army to the already great number of government 
employees, of increasing so enormously the revenues and 
expenditures of government, be to enable those who got 
control of government to defy opposition and perpetuate 
their power indefinitely j and would it not be, finally, to 
sink the whole political organization in a hopeless slough 
of corruption ?" 

My reply is, that great as these dangers may be, they 
must be faced, lest worse befall us, When a gale sets him 
on a lee shore, the seaman must make sail, even at the risk 
of having his canvas fly from the bolt-ropes and his masts 
go by the board. The dangers of wind and sea urge him 
to make everything snug as may be, alow and aloft; to 
get rid of anything that might diminish the weatherly 
qualities of his ship, and to send his best helmsman to the 
wheel, -not supinely to accept the certain destruction of 
the rocks. 

Instead of belittling the dangers of adding to the functions 
of government as it is at present, what I am endeavoring 
to point out is the urgent necessity of simplifying 
and improving government, that it may safely assume the 
additional functions that social development forces upon 
it. It is not merely necessary to prevent government from 
getting more corrupt and more inefficient, though we can 
no more do that by a negative policy than the seaman can 
lay to in a gale without drifting; it is necessary to make 
government much more efficient and much less corrupt. 

The dangers that menace us are not accidental. They 
spring from a universal law which we cannot escape. That 
law is the one I pointed out in the first chapter of this book 
-that every advance brings new dangers and requires 
higher and more alert intelligence. As the more highly 
organized animal cannot live unless it have a more fully 
developed brain than those of lower animal organizations, 
so the more highly organized society must perish unless it 
bring to the management of social affairs greater 
intelligence and higher moral sense. The great material 
advances which modern invention has enabled us to make, 
necessitate corresponding social and political advances. 
Nature knows no "Baby Act." We must live up to her 
conditions or not live at all. 

My purpose here is to show how important it is that we 
simplify government, purify politics and improve social 
conditions, as a preliminary to showing how much in all 
these directions may be accomplished by one single great 
reform. But although I shall be obliged to do so briefly, 
it may be worth while, even if briefly, to call attention to 
some principles that should not be forgotten in thinking 
of the assumption by the state of such functions as the 
running of railroads. 

In the first place, I think it may be accepted as a principle 
proved by experience, that any considerable interest 
having necessary relations with government is more 
corruptive of government when acting upon government from 
without than when assumed by government. Let a ship 
in mid-ocean drop her anchor and payout her cable, and 
though she would be relieved of some weight, since part 
of the weight of anchor and cable would be supported by 
the water, not only would her progress be retarded, but 
she would refuse to answer her helm, and become utterly 
unmanageable. Yet, assumed as part of the ship, and 
properly stowed on board, anchor and cable no longer 
perceptibly interfere with her movements. 

A standing army is a corrupting influence, and a danger 
to popular liberties; but who would maintain that on this 
ground it were wiser, if a standing army must be kept, 
that it should be enlisted and paid by private parties, and 
hired of them by the state ? Such an army would be far 
more corrupting and far more dangerous than one 
maintained directly by the state, and would soon 
make its leaders masters of the state. 

I do not think the postal department of the government, 
with its extensive ramifications and its numerous employees, 
begins to be as important a factor in our politics, or 
exerts so corrupting an influence, as would a private 
corporation carrying on this business, and which would be 
constantly tempted or forced into politics to procure 
favorable or prevent unfavorable legislation. Where 
individual States and the General Government have 
substituted public printing-offices for Public Printers, who
themselves furnished material and hired labor, I think the 
result has been to lessen, not to increase, corruptive 
influences ; and speaking generally, I think experience shows 
that in all departments of government the system of 
contracting for work and supplies has, on the whole, led to 
more corruption than the system of direct employment 
The reason I take to be, that there is in one case a much 
greater concentration of corruptive interests and power 
than in the other. 

The inefficiency, extravagance and corruption which we 
commonly attribute to governmental management are 
mostly in those departments which do not come under 
the public eye, and little concern, if they concern at all, 
public convenience. Whether the six new steel cruisers. 
which the persistent lobbying of contractors has induced 
Congress to order, are well or ill built the American people 
will never know, except as they learn through the newspapers, 
and the fact will no more affect their comfort and 
convenience than does the fitting of the Sultan's new 
breeches, or the latest changes in officers' uniforms which 
it has pleased the Secretary of the Navy to order. But 
let the mails go astray or the postman fail in his rounds, 
and there is at once an outcry. The post-office department 
is managed with greater efficiency than any other department 
of the National Government, because it comes close 
to the people. To say the very least, it is managed as 
efficiently as any private company could manage such a vast 
business, and I think, on the whole, as economically. And 
the scandals and abuses that have arisen in it have been, 
for the most part, as to out-of-the-way places, and things 
of which there was little or no public consciousness. So in 
England, the telegraph and parcel-carrying and savings- 
bank businesses are managed by government more efficiently 
and economically than before by private corporations. 

Like these businesses-perhaps even more so -the railroad 
business comes directly under the notice of the people. 
It so immediately concerns the interests, the convenience 
and the safety of the great body, that under public management 
it would compel that close and quick attention that 
secures efficiency. 

It seems to me that in regard to public affairs we too 
easily accept the dictum that faithful and efficient work 
can be secured only by the hopes of pecuniary profit, or 
the fear of pecuniary loss. We get faithful and efficient 
work in our colleges and similar institutions without this, 
not to speak of the army and navy, or of the postal and 
educational departments of government; and be this as 
it may, our railroads are really run by men who, from 
switch-tender to general superintendent, have no pecniary 
interest in the business other than to get their pay 
-in most cases paltry and insufficient-and hold their 
positions, Under governmental ownership they would 
have, at the very least, all the incentives to faithfulness 
and efficiency that they have now, for that government.a1 
management of railroads must involve the principles of
civil service reform goes without the saying. The most 
determined supporter of the spoils system would not care 
to resign the safety of limb and life to engineers and 
brakemen appointed for political services. 

Look, moreover, at the railroad system as it exists now. 
That it is not managed in the interests of the public is 
clear ; but is it managed in the interests of its owners ? 
Is it managed with that economy, efficiency and intelligence 
that are presumed to be the results of private 
ownership and control? On the contrary, while the 
public interests are utterly disregarded, the interests of 
the stockholders are in most cases little better considered. 
Our railroads are really managed in the interests of 
unscrupulous adventurers, whose purpose is to bull and 
bear the stock-market; by men who make the interests of 
the property they manage subservient to their personal 
interests in other railroads or in other businesses ; who 
speculate in lands and town sites, who give themselves or 
their friends contracts for supplies and special rates for 
transportation, and who often deliberately wreck the cor 
poration they control and rob stockholders to the last 
cent. From one end to the other, the management of our 
railroad system, as it now exists, reeks with jobbery and 
fraud. 

That ordinary roads, bridges, etc., should not be maintained 
for profit, either public or private, is an accepted 
principle, and the State of New York has recently gone so 
far as to abolish all tolls on the Erie Canal. Our postal 
service we merely aim to make self-sustaining, and no one 
would now think of proposing that the rates of postage 
should be increased in order to furnish public revenues ; 
still less would anyone think of proposing to abandon 
the government postal service, and turn the business over 
to individuals or corporations. In the beginning the postal 
service was carried on by individuals with a view to profits. 
Had that system been continued to the present day, it is 
certain that we should not begin to have such extensive 
and regular postal facilities as we have now, nor such 
cheap rates; and all the objections that are now urged 
against the government assumption of the railroad business 
would be urged against government carriage of letters. 
We never can enjoy the full benefits of the invention of 
the railroad until we make the railroads public property, 
managed by public servants in the public interests. And 
thus will a great cause of the corruption of government, 
and a great cause of monstrous fortunes, be destroyed. 

All I have said of the railroad applies, of course, to the 
telegraph, the telephone, the supplying of cities with gas, 
water, heat and electricity, -in short to all businesses 
which are in their nature monopolies. I speak of the 
railroad only because the magnitude of the business makes 
its assumption by the state the most formidable of such 
undertakings. 

Businesses that are in their nature monopolies are properly 
functions of the state. The state must control or 
assume them, in self-defense, and for the protection of the 
equal rights of citizens. But beyond this, the field in 
which the state may operate beneficially as the executive 
of the great cooperative association, into which it is the 
tendency of true civilization to blend society, will widen 
with the improvement of government and the growth of 
public spirit. 

We have already made an important step in this direction 
in our public-school system. Our public schools are 
not maintained for the poor, as are the English board 
schools -where, moreover, payment is required from all 
who can pay; nor yet is their main motive the protection 
of the state against ignorance. These are subsidiary 
motives. But the main motive for the maintenance of 
our public schools is, that by far the greater part of our 
people find them the best and most economical means of 
educating their children. American society is, in fact, 
organized by the operation of government into cooperative 
educational associations, and with such happy results that 
in no State where the public-school system has obtained 
would any proposition to abolish it get respectful 
consideration. In spite of the corruption of our politics, our 
public school& are, on the whole, much better than private 
schools; while by their association of the children of rich 
and poor, of Jew and Gentile, of Protestant and Catholic, 
of Republican and Democrat, they are of inestimable value 
in breaking down prejudice and checking the growth of 
class feeling. It is likewise to be remarked as to our 
public-school system, that corruptive influences seem to 
spring rather from our not having gone far enough than 
from our having gone too far in the direction of state 
action. In some of our States the books used by the 
children are supplied at public expense, being considered 
school property, which the pupil receives on entering the 
school or class, and returns when leaving. In most of 
them, however, the pupils, unless their parents cannot 
afford the outlay, are required to furnish their own books. 
Experience has shown the former system to be much the- 
better, not only because, when books are furnished to all,. 
there is no temptation of those who can afford to purchase 
books falsely to plead indigence, and no humiliation on 
the part of those who cannot; but because the number of 
books required is much less, and they can be purchased 
at cheaper rates. This not only effects a large economy 
in the aggregate expenditure, but lessens an important 
corruptive influence. For the strife of the great schoolbook 
publishers to get their books adopted in the public 
schools, in which most of them make no scruple of resorting 
to bribery wherever they can, has done much to degrade 
the character of school boards. This corruptive influence 
can only be fully done away with by manufacturing school. 
books at public expense, as has been in a number of the 
States proposed. 

The public-library system, which, beginning in the 
public-spirited city of Boston, is steadily making its way 
over the country, and under which both reading and lending 
libraries are maintained at public expense for the free 
use of the public, is another instance of the successful 
extension of the cooperative functions of government. So 
are the public parks and recreation grounds which we are 
beginning to establish. 

Not only is it possible to go much further in the direction 
of thus providing, at public expense, for the public 
health, education and recreation, and for public encouragement 
of science and invention, but if we can simplify and 
purify government it will become possible for society in 
its various sub-divisions to obtain in many other ways, 
but in much larger degree, those advantages for its 
members that voluntary cooperative societies seek to 
obtain. Not only could the most enormous economies 
thus be obtained, but the growing tendency to adulteration 
and dishonesty, as fatal to morals as to health, would be 
checked,* 
*There are many manufactured articles for which the producer now 
receives only a third of the price paid by the consumer, while adulteration 
has gone far beyond detection by the individual purchaser. Not 
to speak of the compounding of liquors, of oleomargarine and glucose, 
a single instance will show how far adulteration is carried. The 
adulterations in ground coffee have driven many people to purchase 
their coffee in the bean and grind it themselves. To meet this, at 
least one firm of large coffee-roasters, and I presume most of them, 
have adopted an invention by means of which imitation coffee-beans, 
exactly resembling in app6arance the genuine article, are stamped 
out of a paste. These they mix in large quantities with real coffee.

and at least such an organization of industry 
be reached as would very greatly reduce the appropriative 
power of aggregated capital, and prevent those strifes 
that may be likened to wars. The natural progress of 
social development is unmistakably toward cooperation, 
or, if the word be preferred, toward socialism, though 1 
dislike to use a word to which such various and vague 
meanings are attached. Civilization is the art of living 
together in closer relations. That mankind should dwell 
together in unity is the evident intent of the Divine mind, 
- of that Will expressed in the immutable laws of the 
physical and moral universe which reward obedience and 
punish disobedience. The dangers which menace modern 
society are but the reverse of blessings which modern 
society may grasp. The concentration that is going on in 
all branches of industry is a necessary tendency of our 
advance in the material arts. It is not in itself an evil. 
If in anything its results are evil, it is simply because of 
our bad social adjustments. The construction of this 
world in which we find ourselves is such that a thousand 
men working together can produce many times more than
the same thousand men working singly. But this does 
not make it necessary that the nine hundred and ninety- 
nine must be the virtual slaves of the one. 

Let me repeat it, though again and again, for it is, it 
seems to me, the great lesson which existing social facts 
impress upon him who studies them, and that it is all 
important that we should heed: The natural laws which 
permit of social advance, require that advance to be 
intellectual and moral as well as material. The natural 
laws which give us the steamship, the locomotive, the 
telegraph, the printing-press, and all the thousand inventions 
by which our mastery over matter and material 
conditions is increased, require greater social intelligence 
and a higher standard of social morals. Especially do 
they make more and more imperative that justice between 
man and man which demands the recognition of the 
equality of natural rights. 

" Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness 
[ right or just doing] and all these things shall be added 
unto you."  The first step toward a natural and healthy 
organization of society is to secure to all men their natural, 
equal and unalienable rights in the material universe. 
To do this is not to do everything that may be necessary; 
but it is to make all else easier. And unless we do this 
nothing else will avail. 

I have in this chapter touched briefly upon subjects 
that for thorough treatment would require much more 
space. My purpose has been to show that the simplification 
and purification of government are rendered the more 
necessary, on account of functions which industrial development 
is forcing upon government, and the further functions 
which it is becoming more and more evident that it 
would be advantageous for government to assume. In 
succeeding chapters I propose to show how, by recognizing 
in practicable method the equal and unalienable rights 
of men to the soil of their country, government may be 
greatly simplified, and corrupting influences destroyed. 
For it is indeed true, as the French Assembly declared, 
that public misfortunes and corruptions of government 
spring from ignorance, neglect or contempt of human rights. 

Of course in this chapter and elsewhere in speaking of 
government, the state, the community, etc., I use these 
terms in a general sense, without reference to existing 
political divisions. What should properly belong to the 
township or ward, what to the county or State, what to 
the nation, and what to such federations of nations as it 
is in the manifest line of civilization to evolve, is a matter 
into which I have not entered. As to the proper organization 
of government, and the distribution of powers, 
there is much need for thought.

Chapter 17 Social Problems 1883 by Henry George
THE FUNCTIONS OF GOVERNMENT

Chapter 18 Social Problems 1883 by Henry George
WHAT WE MUST DO 

AT the risk of repetition let me recapitulate : 

The main source of the difficulties that menace us 
is the growing inequality in the distribution of wealth. 
To this all modern inventions seem to contribute, and the 
movement is hastened by political corruption, and by 
special monopolies established by abuse of legjslative 
power. But the primary cause lies evidently in fundamental 
social adjustments -in the relations which we have 
established between labor and the natural material and 
means of labor - between man and the planet which is his 
dwelling-place, workshop and storehouse. As the earth 
must be the foundation of every material structure, so 
institutions which regulate the use of land constitute the 
foundation of every social organization, and must affect 
the whole character and development of that organization. 
In a society where the equality of natural rights is recognized, 
it is manifest that there can be no great disparity 
in fortunes. None except the physically incapacitated will 
be dependent on others; none will be forced to sell their 
labor to others. There will be differences in wealth, for 
there are differences among men as to energy, skill, 
prudence, foresight and industry ; but there can be no very 
rich class, and no very poor class; and, as each generation 
becomes possessed of equal natural opportunities, whatever 
differences in fortune grow up in one generation will not 
tend to perpetuate themselves. In such a community, 
whatever may be its form, the political organization must 
be essentially democratic. 

But, in a community where the soil is treated as the 
property of but a portion of the people, some of these 
people from the very day of their birth must be at a 
disadvantage, and some will have an enormous advantage. 
Those who have no rights in the land will be forced to 
sell their labor to the landholders for what they can get ; 
and, in fact, cannot live without the landlords' permission. 
Such a community must inevitably develop a class of 
masters and a class of serfs -a class possessing great 
wealth, and a class having nothing; and its political 
organization, no matter what its form, must become a 
virtual despotism. 

Our fundamental mistake is in treating land as private 
property. On this false basis modern civilization every- 
where rests, and hence, as material progress goes on, is 
everywhere developing such monstrous inequalities in 
condition as must ultimately destroy it. As without land 
man cannot exist; as his very physical substance, and all 
that he can acquire or make, must be drawn from the 
land, the ownership of the land of a country is necessarily 
the ownership of the people of that country -involving 
their industrial, social and political subjection. Here is 
the great reason why the labor-saving inventions, of which 
our century has been so strikingly prolific, have signally 
failed to improve the condition of laborers. Labor-saving 
inventions primarily increase the power of labor, and 
should, therefore, increase wages and improve the condition 
of the laboring-classes. But this only where land is free 
to labor; for labor cannot exert itself without land. No 
labor-saving inventions can enable us to make something 
out of nothing, or in any wise lessen our dependence upon 
land. They can merely add to the efficiency of labor in 
working up the raw materials drawn from land. There. 
fore, wherever land has been subjected to private owner. 
ship, the ultimate effect of labor-saving inventions, and of. 
all improved processes and discoveries, is to enable land- 
owners to demand, and labor to pay, more for the use of 
land. Land becomes more valuable, but the wages of 
labor do not increase; on the contrary, if there is any 
margin for possible reductions, they may be absolutely 
reduced. 

This we already see, and that in spite of the fact that a 
very important part of the effect of modern invention has 
been, by the improvement of transportation, to open up 
new land. What will be the effect of continued improvement 
in industrial processes when the land of this continent 
is all " fenced in," as in a few more years it will be, we 
may imagine if we consider what would have been the 
effect of labor-saving inventions upon Europe had no New 
World been opened. 
 
But it may be said that, in asserting that where land is 
private property the benefit of industrial improvements 
goes ultimately to landowners, I ignore facts, and attribute 
to one principle more importance than is its due, since it 
is clear that a great deal of the increased wealth arising 
from modern improvements has not gone to the owners 
of land, but to capitalists, manufacturers, speculators, 
railroad-owners, and the holders of other monopolies than 
that of land. It may be pointed out that the richest 
family in Europe are the Rothschilds, who are more loan- 
jobbers and bankers than landowners; that the richest in 
America are the Vanderbilts, and not the Astors ; that Jay 
Gould got his money, not by securing land, but by bulling 
and bearing the stock-market, by robbing people with 
hired lawyers and purchased judges and corrupted legislatures. 
I may be asked if I attach no importance to the 
jobbery and robbery of the tariff, under pretense of 
protecting American labor; " to the jugglery with the 
monetary system, from the wildcat State banks and 
national banking system down to the trade-dollar swindle ? 

In previous chapters I have given answers to all such 
objections; but to repeat in concise form, my reply is, that 
I do not ignore any of these things, but that they in no 
wise invalidate the self-evident principle that land being 
private property, the ultimate benefit of all improvements 
in production must go to the landowners. To say that 
if a man continues to play at rondo the table will ultimately 
get his money, is not to say that in the meantime 
he may not have his pocket picked. Let me illustrate: