Page:Progress and Poverty.pdf/9

x abundance, should strong men vainly look for work? Why should women faint with hunger, and little children spend the morning of life in the treadmill of toil?

Was this intended in the order of things? No, he could not believe it. And suddenly there came to him— there in daylight, in the city street—a burning thought, a call, a vision. Every nerve quivered. And he made a vow that he would never rest until he had found the cause of, and, if he could, the remedy for, this deepening poverty amid advancing wealth.

Returning to San Francisco soon after his telegraphic news failure, and keeping his vow nurtured in his heart, Henry George perceived that land speculation locked up vast territories against labor. Everywhere he perceived an effort to “corner” land; an effort to get it and to hold it, not for use, but for a “rise.” Everywhere he perceived that this caused all who wished to use it to compete with each other for it; and he foresaw that as population grew the keener that competition would become. Those who had a monopoly of the land would practically own those who had to use the land.

Filled with these ideas, Henry George in 1871 sat down and in the course of four months wrote a little book under title of “Our Land and Land Policy.” In that small volume of forty-eight pages he advocated the destruction of land monopoly by shifting: all taxes from labor and the products of labor and concentrating them in one tax on the value of land, regardless of improvements. ‘A thousand copies of this small book were printed, but the author quickly perceived that really to command attention, the work would have to be done more thoroughly.

That more thorough work came something more than six years later. In August, 1877, the writing of “Progress and Poverty” was begun. It was the oak that grew out of the acorn of “Our Land and Land Policy.” The