Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/192

180 is a good deal further away from those farms than good society and the railroads are. But, according to the doctrine of those who are afflicted with George's peculiar land-fetichism, it should be already there.

It is probably true that Western farming is a better business than that which prevails in the East; but an anecdote is told of that which, if not literally true, is illustratively so for many who are engaged in farming. It does not, at any rate, overstate the gravity of the task which many persons assume who undertake to own the soil that George would sequester to the state. And this is the anecdote: A farmer in the West, who kept his business going until he nearly became bankrupt, was obliged finally to sell his farm to his chief creditor, who happened to be his faithful hired man. After a term of years the new owner found himself hopelessly in debt, and he proposed selling out to his hired man, who happened to be the previous owner, and who by this time was able to buy back his old farm! Whether this process of exchange continued to go on like that syllogism of Epimenides the Cretan, with no conclusion, I can not say. But when anything like it can happen once, how is a mere divisional share in the soil to mend or make over the world?

To return for a moment to the "unearned increment," the question one would like to ask is, why an increment on the value of land is any more wicked than it is upon a ton of coal or iron taken from the land? The title to a house or chair made of wood can not be good if the soil which produced the wood is held by spoliation. That which vitiates or annuls in one instance must in the others. The increment-reasoning, too, if it proves anything, proves too much. Is nothing earned in this world but mere wages? Is nothing due to foresight or perceiving what is likely to happen? Must profit all be resolved into day-wages from muscular effort solely? Are mind and thought and skill not to be considered factors which a man may use in the struggle for existence? Is the inventor, who is usually a poor toiler, to have no benefit from his wits? The sect of "labor" seems to say "No" to all these questions; and both it and the Georgeites, if they could have their way, would put us all on an express train toward barbarism and the Bedouin Arab, who is a George communist, and to the extinction of all that makes a civilized life possible.

The "unearned increment," it should be noted, is not a discovery of Henry George's. Mill and Spencer gave it a theoretical existence, but proposed no such drastic remedy for the ills supposed to flow from it as Henry George formulates and would apply. They saw that in London, where poverty is wide in extent and squalid in character beyond that of any other spot on