Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/766

 wealth, and men generally have seen that the desire for consumption is not lessened. They have all felt that the difficulty lay rather with a choking of exchange. There has been a hitch somewhere by which production and consumption could not meet and satisfy each other. Looked at closely, an industrial crisis always reveals the fact that there has somewhere been a check to production. These producers stopping, their demand for the things they consume ceases, and the check is thus rapidly propagated throughout the entire industrial organization, cessation of demand resulting in cessation of supply, and this in turn manifesting itself in a new cessation of demand. It is not necessary that production be really less, but only less relatively. In an advancing community, the failure of production to increase proportionally would have the same effect as decreasing production in a stationary one. How, then, is this check in production brought about? If we trace it from one point to another, we shall ultimately find it in some obstacle which checks the expenditure of labor on land. The speculative advance in rent crowds down wages and interest to the point at which they will no longer consent to reproduce, production ceases, and the effects of this stoppage are propagated throughout the entire framework of industry. Deduction from the law of rent shows that unchecked rise in rent must show itself in an industrial crisis, and the facts, he holds, abundantly support the deduction. Production may be likened to a steam-engine and rent to its governor. A lightened load, an increased pressure, and the engine bounds forward with accelerating speed. But the power that drives the engine drives also the governor; the force that has doubled the speed is the force that must ultimately check it—the governor, overtaking the engine, throttles the power that gives it action. And so in endless repetition.

Here, then, is the explanation of the facts that mystify and perplex whoever considers them. Here, then, in the relation of rent to wages and interest is the primary cause of the failure of invention and discovery to benefit the workingman. Wages and interest steadily tend to a minimum, but the incontestable fact in material progress is the rise in land-values. The great machinery of modern industry does not benefit labor and capital, because it does benefit the landholder. So long as men can control the land which all must use, they can command all the fruits of labor above what is necessary to a bare living.

"Everywhere, in all times, among all peoples," says Mr. George, "the possession of land is the base of aristocracy, the foundation of great fortunes, the source of power. As said the Brahmans ages ago—'To whomsoever the soil at any time belongs, to him belong the fruits of it. White parasols and elephants made with pride are the flowers of a grant of land.'"

Mr. George does not think that he can be said to have advanced any theory, but that he has only pointed out the most obvious