Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
price that labour must pay for the opportunity to utilise its
power; and thus all the advantages gained by the march of progress
go to the owners of land, and wages do not increase ...[616]
Labour and capital are but different forms of the same thing--human
exertion. Capital is produced by labour; it is, in fact, but
labour impressed upon matter.... The use of capital in production
is, therefore, but a mode of labour.... Hence the principle that,
under circumstances which permit free competition, operates to
bring wages to a common standard and profits to a substantial
equality--the principle that men will seek to gratify their desires
with the least exertion--operates to establish and maintain this
equilibrium between wages and interest.... And this relation fixed,
it is evident that interest and wages must rise and fall together,
and that interest cannot be increased without increasing wages, nor
wages be lowered without depressing interest.[617]
There is no inherent antagonism between labor and capital, Henry George
was early convinced. The Marxians with their theory of a class war
were mistaken in their analysis. It is rent that is the true source of
social injustice, and the clash of interests in society lies between
the producer and the parasitic rent-collector. In every society the
appropriation of measured increment has enslaved the ownerless. In all
civilizations, from ancient Peru to modern Russia, it has subjected
the worker to exploitation. Helot, villein, serf, are only different
names for a common slavery, the profits of which go to the landlord.
In modern times the Industrial Revolution has changed the form of
serfdom, only to intensify and embitter it. The Manchester factory-hand
was in worse plight than the medieval villein after the Black Plague.
Dispossessed of his acres by the enclosure movement, he had been thrown
into the hoppers of industrialism and ground to pieces. He was helpless
in the hands of the masters, who with their monopoly of land and the
machine, in control of the common heritage of trade processes, raw
materials, transportation, credit, and the law-making and law-enforcing
machinery, were taking from labor an augmenting toll of its production.
Hence the close correlation between material progress and proletarian
poverty. Hence the logical outcome of the Industrial Revolution, when
it should have run its course, was the reduction of the worker to the
level of a slave, compared with whose material condition the status
of the southern bond-slave was enviable. The southern apologists of
slavery had been right; the negro on the plantation enjoyed advantages
denied to wage-labor under industrialism.[618]
Having thus analyzed the forces at work in modern society, and wedded
a flamboyant material progress to a slattern poverty, Henry George
proposed his sovereign remedy--the return to society of social values,
hitherto expropriated by means of the private ownership of land,
and the removal of the burden of indirect taxation from the back of
productive labor. The Ricardian theory of rent, interpreted in the
light of eighteenth-century _laissez faire_--of free competition, of
a beneficent natural law, of social justice--conducted to unforeseen
social issues. If labor and capital are individual, the fruits of both
should return to their producers. Society has no just claim on what
society has not produced, and the individual has no just claim to that
which his labor or capital has not produced. Render unto Caesar the
things that are Caesar’s, and to the individual citizen the things that
are his--such to Henry George was the sum of the law of distribution.
Land monopoly was a refined denial of natural rights. “The equal right
of all men to the use of the land is as clear as their equal right
to breathe the air--it is a right proclaimed by the fact of their
existence.”[619] Unearned increment was the shackles wherewith labor
was bound. In the name of social justice strike those shackles from the
limbs of men and progress would never again have its ears filled with
the wailings of poverty. The workman would once again sing at his work,
and the sunshine of well-being fall pleasantly on the land.
A brilliant thinker, with a passionate sympathy for the exploited of
earth, this knight-errant from out the newest West ardently believed
in the sufficiency of his social philosophy to all needs. In him the
French Revolutionary doctrine came to its most original expression
in America. No doubt, like his progenitors, he oversimplified the
problem. Society is more complex than he esteemed it; individual
motives are more complex. It is perilous to subordinate psychology
to abstract theory; the ideal of justice is always running afoul of
immediate and narrow interest. Later academic economists have dealt
sharply with Henry George, but what have they done to justify their
magisterial tone? The science of economics is still cousin-german to
philosophy in its fondness for spinning tenuous subtleties; it is still
system-ridden, still too much the apologist for things as they are.
From its servitude to a class Henry George essayed to deliver it. In
fastening upon monopoly as the prime source of social injustice, he
directed attention to the origins of exploitative capitalism. He did
more than any other man to spread through America a knowledge of the
law of economic determinism. He opened a rich vein and one that needs
further exploring. The suggestive principle of unearned increment calls
for further expansion to embrace other forms than rent, to fit it to
the needs of a complex society. What he seems not to have seen was the
wider range of economic determinism--that changes come only when the
existing order has become intolerable to great classes, and the grip of
use and wont is loosened by the rebellions born of exigent need. “For
ever the fat of the whole foundation hangeth to the priest’s beard,”
asserted a quaint Beggars’ Petition in appeal to Henry VIII against the
monasteries, and in that comment were the seeds of the Reformation.
When the beards are few to which the fat hangs, the time is ripe for
an upheaval. An arch-idealist, Henry George would hasten the change by
appeal to reason. Like Godwin and Tom Paine he believed that reason
will make its own way, forgetting that reason waits upon interest, and
the day of its freedom is long delayed. Yet if he was oversanguine, why
account that to his discredit?[620]
Footnotes
[586] See Gide and Rist, _A History of Economic Doctrines_, pp.
282-284, 327-331.
[587] _Miscellaneous Works_, Preface to _Harmony of Interests_.
[588] _Ibid._
[589] All told he published at his own print-shop some 3000 pages of
pamphlet material of his own writing.
[590] _Contraction or Expansion? Repudiation or Resumption? Letters
to the Hon. Hugh M’Culloch, Secretary of the Treasury_, Philadelphia,
1866, p. 20.
[591] _Ibid._, p. 22.
[592] Quoted in W. Elder, _Memoir of Henry C. Carey_, p. 13
(Philadelphia, 1880. With bibliography).
[593] _Shall We have Peace? Letters to President-elect Grant_, p. 39.
[594] _Contraction or Expansion? etc._, p. 20.
[595] _Land and its Rent_, p. 108.
[596] _Political Economy_, pp. 242, 348.
[597] _Quarterly Journal of Economics_, April, 1887. Quoted in Gide and
Rist, _A History of Economic Doctrine_, p. 551.
[598] _Ibid._, p. 549.
[599] For a critical examination see Gide and Rist, _A History of
Economic Doctrine_, pp. 551-558.
[600] _Political Economy_, pp. 251-258.
[601] _Land and its Rent_, Preface, p. vi.
[602] _Ibid._, pp. 181-182.
[603] _Political Economy_, p. 394.
[604] _Ibid._, p. 433.
[605] In his original plan Professor Parrington included a third
subsection on W. G. Sumner, but evidently decided against its
inclusion.--_Publisher._
[606] _Political Science_, Vol. I, pp. 23-25.
[607] _Ibid._ p. 216.
[608] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 141.
[609] _Communism and Socialism_, p. 232.
[610] _Political Science_, Vol. II, pp. 330-331.
[611] The discussion of Burgess was not completed by Professor
Parrington. At this point he planned a third section, “The New Ally:
the courts: the police power and the fourteenth amendment; the
injunction.” None of this section was written, but he has dealt with
these subjects _passim_.--_Publisher._
[612] George, _Life of Henry George_, pp. 216-217.
[613] _Ibid._, p. 223.
[614] _Ibid._, p. 277.
[615] Quoted by Wesley Clair Mitchell in _The Trend of Economics_,
edited by R. G. Tugwell, p. 5.
[616] _Progress and Poverty_, Book IV, Chapter 4.
[617] _Ibid._, Book III, Chapter 5.
[618] See _Ibid._, Book VII, Chapter 2.
[619] _Ibid._, Book VII, Chapter I.
[620] The discussion of Henry D. Lloyd, planned as the second
subsection, was not written.--_Publisher._
Chapter IV • The Beginnings of Criticism
For many thoughtful Americans the welter of frontier individualism was
a severe trial to their faith in American institutions. An ambitious
industrialism colliding with a shambling Jacksonian democracy was
forecasting consequences to government and to society that intelligent
men could not shut their eyes to. The America of Fisk and Gould, of
Boss Tweed and the _Crédit Mobilier_ scandal, was far from satisfying
the requirements of any rational civilization. After a hundred years
to have come to such heroes, to have bogged down in such filth, was an
outcome to the great experiment that one could not contemplate with
pride. It was no time to be silent. No people was ever saved by dumb
preachers. The present generation was answerable for the new evils that
were springing from the graves of the old, and intelligent Americans
must not lose their heads in the thick of the common hurly-burly. So
amidst the ruck and clamor of the times a tiny note of criticism was
lifted up, timid and uncertain at first, but growing more confident and
more strident as the decade grew older. It was not searching criticism.
Sooner or later it was pretty certain to run into a blind alley of
moral indignation, overlooking the major issues and leaving the vital
factors of the problem unconsidered. Yet such as it was--shallow and
feeble enough often to excite wonder in a later generation--it marks
the rise of a spirit of skepticism towards the blowsy doctrine of
manifest destiny that since the fifties had been blowing about the land.
The determining factors in the situation confronting criticism were
political and economic, and the immediate problem that pressed for
solution was the problem whether an undisciplined people, wedded to
an old-fashioned agrarian democracy, could cope with an ambitious
industrialism that was quite cynically buying and selling the political
state. To deal with that problem most of the critics were singularly
ill equipped. Two generations of constitutional debate, seasoned with
a dash of equalitarian dogma, had left them intellectually lean and
impoverished. They had forgotten the sober realism of the eighteenth
century that never overlooked the intimate ties between economics
and politics, and with no anchors down in the plebeian mud they were
likely to drift helplessly in the moral squalls they were always
blowing up. The more distinguished critics--those who commanded the
most serious attention--were in a particularly unfortunate situation,
for not only were they uninstructed idealists with no understanding
of _Realpolitik_, but they had been reared in the classical tradition
and their minds were saturated with a decadent aristocratic culture.
To many of them the present evils of America served only to quicken an
inherited skepticism of democracy. How can society expect to function
adequately, they asked, without capable and honest leadership; and