Page:Confessions of an Economic Heretic.djvu/33

 tenacity must not, however, be ignored. By concentrating upon a single form of unearned wealth it enables its adherents to evade and arrest the wider claims of Socialism. “A single-taxer” is free to take every economic advantage he may enjoy as capitalist, employer, investor, in dealing with weaker bargainers. While the landowner’s income is wholly unearned, his own business gains are the product of his skill, industry, foresight!

I was never a convinced single-taxer, for the early eighties ushered in more momentous issues in the exposure of poverty, by Charles Booth and his collaborators, and by the more sensational revelations of the other Booth’s In Darkest England. The growing sense of poverty with its physical and moral evils as a social disease, and not as an individual fault or misfortune, may be traced to these investigators. But they did not stand alone. They belonged to a wide-spread breakdown of what is termed the mid-Victorian complacency, and evoked other protests of a wider and more active character. Modern English Socialism dated from this period as an organized conscious movement, The Fabian Society with its intellectuals, the Social Democratic Society of Hyndman and its breakaway group under William Morris, expressed a varied protest, rationalistic, ethical, political, aesthetic against the sort of civilization that was emerging under mechanized capitalism. There was also a small but active group of Christian Socialists, persisting in the