An American political economist; born in Philadelphia, Sept. 2, 1839; died in New York, Oct. 29, 1897. His “Progress and Poverty” was published in 1879. Mr. George removed to New York in 1880. The following year “The Irish Land Question” was given to the world. In 1886 he was candidate of the United Labor Party for mayor of New York. He subsequently founded the Standard, a weekly newspaper. “Social Problems” appeared in 1884, and “Protection or Free Trade” in 1886. “The Perplexed Philosopher,” etc., followed. Posthumous work on political economy is announced for publication in 1898. He was candidate for Mayor of Greater New York at the time of his death.

Personal

  I noticed his large head and bright eyes, and at once compared them with a picture of Henry Clay that had been familiar to me from childhood, and thought the head before me was the finer of the two…. In the new building of the Post he had two editorial rooms, one of them an inner office, where he was supposed to withdraw from visitors. But at that time and always Henry George was the most social of men; he loved to know people, not to hear himself talk, but to listen to others, to learn from their daily experience, to argue with them when questions for argument were brought up, so that very seldom did he shut himself in the inner office, but wrote at the desk in the reception-room. In those days he wrote always with pen and ink on long narrow slips of paper, and almost invariably under greatest pressure. It was not until after the publication of “Progress and Poverty,” and indeed not for several years after moving to New York, that he used the typewriter for composition…. Ever and always Henry George maintained his sense of humor, and the recollection of that fact is more keen to his friends to-day in that he did not write humorous articles. He certainly could have done so, for his conversation was punctured with wit and pervaded by a most refined humor.

  Few can speak of Henry George’s personal charm of character and disposition with more confidence than I can. He and his family were the guests of my wife and myself for several weeks when he visited England for the first time. He was then at the height of his reputation. I have never seen or read of a man so little affected by sudden and astounding success. From first to last he remained the simple, unaffected, genuine good fellow which in himself he really was. In my own controversies with him, first in the “Nineteenth Century” and afterwards on the platform of St. James’s Hall, he exhibited the same charming temper that he did in private life…. Do what you would, to the Single Tax he returned and to the Single Tax he devoted himself. Beyond that and Free-trade he would not budge. His enthusiasm would not permit him to see the force of reason; his anxiety to be practical confined his mind to a single idea. That his work was done cannot be disputed. He stirred up thought by propagating error with as much success as any man that ever lived.

  I know of no American whose career, unfavored by accident or the help of others, is so impressive…. The Henry George of the past decade is the Henry George of New York. The diminutive figure—he is under five and a half feet and of less weight and smaller girth than many a boy of sixteen—is familiar to the people of Fort Hamilton, where he lives and has taken his walks, constitutionals without distinction, and heedless in the choice of roadway or sidewalk, ambles for fresh air and thought that excluded observation of external things. The fine head, the graying-reddish beard, the blue eyes looking absently out from under the thickest of brows and through large spectacles, the soft hat set on any way—when these have appeared at the door of an editorial-room to inquire for a friend or bring an article, the stranger journalist, unaware of the visitor’s identity, has mistaken him for a colporteur, a retired schoolmaster, an unrecognized poet, or anything meek and unworldly.

Progress and Poverty, 1879

  A noteworthy book that bears the traces of a master’s hand—which for freshness of thought, the steady march of its logic, wealth of illustration, strong grasp of economic abstractions, and facile handling of facts, no student of social problems can afford to pass by.

  It is possible to affirm without hesitation that the appearance of that one book formed a noteworthy epoch in the history of economic thought both in England and America. It is not simply that the treatise itself was an eloquent, impassioned plea for the confiscation of rent for the public good as a means of abolishing economic social evils, but rather that the march of industrial forces had opened a way for the operation of ideas new and strange to the great masses…. Henry George has rendered two distinct services to the cause of socialism. First, in the no-rent theory, or in other words, the confiscation of rent pro bono publico, he has furnished a rallying point for all discontented laborers; second, his book has served as an entering wedge for other still more radical and far-reaching measures. It is written in an easily understood, and even brilliant style, is published in cheap form, both in England and America, and in each country has attained a circulation, which for economic work is without parallel. Tens of thousands of laborers have read “Progress and Poverty,” who never before looked between the two covers of an economic book, and its conclusions are widely accepted articles in the workingman’s creed.

  So superb a work, so persuasively constructed, and so full of great, needed truth, that he has almost overwhelmed the very elect with one of the most glaring and disjointed non-sequiturs that ever broke itself in two with its own logic.

  With the exception of “The Wealth of Nations,” perhaps no book on political economy has been more widely read than Mr. George’s “Progress and Poverty.” In fact, it is really the first book on economics that was ever read to any considerable extent by the working classes. Nor is the reason for this difficult to understand. Unlike the ordinary treatises on political economy, Mr. George’s book is to the laborer the unmistakable voice of a friend. He cannot read a single chapter of it without feeling that whether Mr. George is right or wrong, in him the laborers have a friend in court. “Progress and Poverty” is as much a special effort to present their interests as the political economy of the Manchester school has been to present that of their masters. This feature, together with Mr. George’s fascinating style of writing, has made “Progress and Poverty” a most powerful means of directing public attention to the social problem. In this sense Mr. George may be said to have done an important work. But if “Progress and Poverty” is to be considered in the sense of a contribution to sound economic literature we shall be compelled to form a very different estimate of its value…. A little examination, however, will serve to show that Mr. George’s economic reasoning is no better than his facts. As to his theory of rent Mr. George is orthodox, and accepts Ricardo without question or qualification.

  The reader of “Progress and Poverty” is struck with the fact that the book contains no statements derived from painstaking inquiries into the statistics of land values and rents. The book is eloquent and effective, its author evidently an earnest and disinterested philanthropist. But his theories all relate to numbers of population, rates of wages, prices of food, amounts of rent, and the ratios of these numbers to one another. These are not a priori questions, but matters of statistics. There is not only no investigation of statistics in “Progress and Poverty,” but there is not even an attempt to make definite estimates, although there are occasional references to isolated data. If it should be found that the total ground-rent is an insignificant item compared with the total income of the nation, it would be necessary to conclude that Mr. George is mistaken in supposing that private property in land exercises a power to rob capital and labor. And such, indeed, must be our conclusion in whatever way we approach the study of the actual statistics.

  That it should be necessary, at this time of day, to set forth such elementary truths as these may well seem strange; but no one who consults that interesting museum of political delusions, “Progress and Poverty,” some of the treasures of which I have already brought to light, will doubt the fact, if he bestows proper attention upon the first book of that widely-read work…. The doctrine respecting the relation of capital and wages, which is thus opposed in “Progress and Poverty,” is that illustrated in the foregoing pages; the truth of which, I conceive, must be plain to anyone who has apprehended the very simple arguments by which I have endeavoured to demonstrate it. One conclusion or the other must be hopelessly wrong; and, even at the cost of going once more over some of the ground traversed in this and my last paper, I propose to show that the error lies with “Progress and Poverty;” in which work, so far as political science is concerned, the poverty is, to my eye, much more apparent than the progress.

General

  I have spoken to —— about your works, which he expects to print in full. I am anxious to have you popularized as fully as may be, for I know you must exert a powerful and beneficial effect upon thought. To get it into the head of the average man that his race and his creed are not everything is to melt away bigotry and prejudice and admit larger and nobler views.

  Never, perhaps, have communistic theories assumed a form more curious, or lent themselves to more fruitful processes of analysis, than in the writings of Mr. Henry George. These writings now include a volume on “Social Problems,” published recently. It represents the same ideas as those which inspire the work on “Progress and Poverty.” They are often expressed in almost the same words, but they exhibit some development and applications which are of high interest and importance…. Everything in America is on a gigantic scale, even its forms of villainy, and the villainy advocated by Mr. George is an illustration of this as striking as the Mammoth Caves of Kentucky, or the frauds of the celebrated “Tammany Ring” in New York. The world has never seen such a Preacher of Unrighteousness as Mr. Henry George. For he goes to the roots of things, and shows us how unfounded are the rules of probity, and what mere senseless superstitions are the obligations which have been only too long acknowledged.

  The treatment is more popular [“Social Problems”] than in “Progress and Poverty;” it is less laboured and controversial, and, it must be said, less sophistical. The book is marked by the same eloquence, the same sympathy with the claims of labour, and the same wide and often true insight into the great industrial movements of our time. In these qualities, and not in his theory of the land, lies the strength of Mr. George.

  Mr. George’s great merit is as an alarm-bell; for men must be awakened before they can see or think or act, however little they may approve the music after thought and action are at once in full play. He tells us little that is really new; but his old things, right or wrong, have taken the voice of the times and will have their audience.

  Since the mistakes of Moses were so triumphantly demolished by Col. Ingersoll, his example has been followed by numerous writers, who, possibly because they concluded that the Mosiac field has been sufficiently occupied, have devoted themselves to an equally triumphant demonstration of the mistakes of Henry George. Space could not be afforded for even an abstract of these brilliant productions. Crushed by the Duke of Argyll, refuted by Mr. Mallock, extinguished by Mayor Hewitt, undermined by Mr. Edward Atkinson, exploded by Mr. Harris, excommunicated by archbishops, consigned to eternal damnation by countless doctors of divinity, put outside the pale of the Constitution by numberless legal pundits, waved out of existence by a million Podsnaps, and finally annihilated by Mr. George Gunton, still Henry George’s theories seem to have a miraculous faculty of rising from the dead. For it is certain that his general doctrines are more widely believed in to-day than ever before; while the one practical measure which he advocates for present and immediate enactment is accepted by a vast number of intelligent men on both sides of the Atlantic.

  Henry George, the prophet of an industrial millennium, could claim all the signs of a fate-favored avatar. He was thoroughly in earnest; he had the courage and the eloquence of an enthusiastic belief in the earth-redeeming tendency of his gospel, and that gospel appealed strongly to the hopes of toil-burdened millions, the pariahs and step-children of modern civilization…. Like Voltaire, Henry George died amid a blaze of triumphs that probably shortened his life by several years, but the work of that life sufficed to insure the progress of his propaganda.

  No doubt it is easy to impute excessive influence to the mouthpiece of a rising popular sentiment. George, like other prophets, co-operated with the “spirit of the age.” But after this just allowance has been made, Henry George may be considered to have exercised a more directly powerful formative and educative influence over English radicalism of the last fifteen years than any other man.

  Henry George is the natural reasoner. He starts with the world of natural things and man. He moves from the simple to the complex, naturally. He appeals to the common sense of his readers. He is not engaged in showing his learning, his orthodoxy; he is seeking the simple solution which lies at the bottom of the problem. He wishes to enlighten, to convince, to do justice, and so a mighty power goes out from his writings. His aim is truth; his standard, justice…. I seem to hear his voice once more and see his face glow and lighten as in the days when his presence on the platform was a menace to every wrong, a terror to every tyranny, and the hope of every robbed and cheated man who faced him. He made the world better. He fought unremittingly till his slight material self gave way. Now here are his books—including the last and greatest of them all. They and the men he inspired must carry forward his work.

  He labored in an humble way at the printer’s case, after the example set by Jesus Christ at his carpenter’s bench. Presently a stress of hard times forced him to seek another field. He who so long had been thinking, thinking, thinking, was too humble to believe himself a prophet. He took up the pen by compulsion. He wielded it slowly and awkwardly. The eagle that was to soar to the highest empyrean had been forced to try his wings. He scarcely knew what they were, or what flight meant. With each stroke confidence grew. Presently he no longer sank. He could hold himself on the plain. Then he began to rise, to soar. Henry George the thinker came East and gave his first book to the world—which received it, as it has been the custom of the world to receive all great messages, including that of Christ himself, first in contemptuous silence and later on with ignominy…. The man who, living, was great before the Almighty God, became great before the peoples when dead.

  I have been acquainted with Henry George since the appearance of his “Social Problems.” I read them, and was struck by the correctness of his main idea, and by the unique clearness and power of his argument, which is unlike anything in scientific literature, and especially by the Christian spirit, which also stands alone in the literature of science, which pervades the book. After reading it I turned to his previous work, “Progress and Poverty,” and with a heightened appreciation of its author’s activity.

  For at least fifteen or sixteen years Henry George stood in the full glare of world-wide publicity, as a writer and speaker on some of the most controversial topics of our time. The book by which he became famous, “Progress and Poverty,” created as great a stir amongst social reformers as did the “Origin of Species” amongst scientists. Some of the most robust and active intellects in England, such as Huxley, Harrison, and the ubiquitous Duke of Argyll, thought him a foeman worthy of their steel, and for a season at least his theory of land-reform became the universal theme of discussion amongst political clubs and debating societies throughout the land…. Probably no man, working, as George did, single-handed, has in such a short space of time ever left so deep an impression upon the current thought and the legislative tendencies of the age in which he lived…. It was George who saw the land question in its true vital relation to the other burning questions which to-day agitate civilised society. It is his crowning merit that certain germs of doctrine, which but for him would have remained germs, have by his pen and tongue been ripened into vigorous life, and made part and parcel of the educated public opinion of our time.