Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/767

. Taking the accepted law of rent, he has only insisted that, where the whole produce is between three factors, the law that determines the share of one must necessarily give the share of the other two. He has only pointed out that, if rent takes all above a certain amount, wages and interest can't have more than this amount.

The fact that the laws of wages, interest, and rent must be mutually dependent, Mr. George thinks so evident, that he marvels that so many acute thinkers could have failed to grasp the proper relations. He is even tempted to believe that some have seen, but, seeing also the enormous consequences, have turned away, remembering that "a great truth to an age which has rejected and trampled on it is not a word of peace, but a sword!"

In finding the cause of the persistence of poverty in the continuous advance of rent, the remedy is at the same time found, and Mr. George does not hesitate to apply it. He would make land common property. He reviews all the remedies proposed and finds none save this sufficient. No alleviation would follow from a decrease of the expenses of government, as this would be equivalent to an increased production, of which the landholder would take all the gain. Education and habits of industry can increase the laborer's share in production to only a very limited extent. Such qualities are like speed in a horse—it is only available in so far as it exceeds that of its competitors. Better material condition, it is true, is usually associated with the possession of such qualities, but the condition is the cause of them and not they of the condition. Little, likewise, can be expected of combinations of workmen. They can, indeed, increase their wages by such means, and not at the expense of each other or of capital as is commonly supposed, but at the expense of rent; but they can do so in so small a degree that the effect is relatively unimportant. In any contest between employers and employed it is not a struggle between labor and capital, but between labor and the owners of land, and it must always be an unequal one. Such a contest is, moreover, a destructive one—a war which, like any other, lessens wealth. And the organization for such a war, as for any other, must be tyrannical. Contests of this sort are, therefore, destructive of the very things sought to be gained by them—"wealth and freedom."

The hopes of those who see in coöperation the instrument of industrial regeneration seem to Mr. George doomed to perpetual disappointment so long as land remains appropriated. If cooperation has any power at all, it is one analogous to an improved instrument of production, which can increase the amount produced, but can not augment the laborer's share in this amount. Governmental direction and interference can only, in the present state of industry, be mischievous and inefficient.

The remedy most counted on, by those who have seen, in a vague way, that there is some connection between industrial distress and land