Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/756

 the very poor would be bridged. Human powers, no longer the slaves of material needs, would have room to grow; human life, relieved of want and the fear of want, could expand indefinitely in grace and beauty. With time, however, this faith, if not shattered, has been weakened. Improvement has followed improvement, but it has not become easier to make a living; the difficulty rather increases. Wealth has shown no tendency to become diffused, but rather one to aggregate into comparatively few hands. In spite of all this wonderful advance, wages tend steadily to a minimum; and to the lowest class of society—the class that is just able to live—there is little promise of better things.

With the growth of industrial organization in complexity and variety, the increasing strife between employers and employed, the frequent recurrence of periods of business depression, which exhibit in an exaggerated form simply the ordinary conditions of industrial life, the question of the right relation of labor and capital to each other and to the industrial fabric presses with increasing strength for an answer. Employer and employed alike feel that there must be something amiss in an industrial system in which, with want unsatisfied, labor can find no employment and production no market; in which, with increase of productive power, poverty finds no abatement. And the importance of the question is in proportion to its persistence. Beside it all other questions sink into comparative insignificance. For all other progress is inextricably bound up with that of material welfare. It is idle to expect the growth of better conduct or of higher feelings in the man whom want stares in the face. Purer surroundings, better food, greater comforts, some relief from unremitting toil—these are the essential conditions of an improved life. Why poverty persists is the fundamental social question of our time, and must be of all times, until it receives a complete and satisfactory answer.

A thorough consideration has recently been made of this question, and a remarkable answer returned—an answer that finds the solution of the problem in a direction where most people would least expect to find it. In "Progress and Poverty" Mr. Henry George has made a careful and systematic inquiry into the conditions of the production and distribution of wealth, the relations of labor and capital, and has traced out the action of what he considers the cause of the continued association of poverty with advancing wealth. However unpalatable its conclusions to certain large classes of the community, this book must, from its clearness of statement, ingenuity of argument, its large human sympathy, and the broad and philosophic spirit with which the question is treated, claim the attention of all who realize the paramount importance of the subject and the value of a thoughtful contribution toward its elucidation.

Mr. George holds that the causes which determine the persistence of poverty are a part of those which produce progress, and not