Page:The Complete Works of Henry George Volume 3.djvu/143

 THE PEOPHET OF SAN FEANCISCO. 25

of widows which have een similarly lent are all equally to be the victims of repudiation. When we remember the enormous amount of the National Debts of Europe and of the American States, and the vast number of persons of all kinds and degrees of wealth whose property is invested in these "promises to pay," we can perhaps faintly imagine the ruin which would be caused by the gigantic fraud recommended by Mr. George. Take Eng- land alone. About seven hundred and fifty millions is the amount of her Public Debt. This great sum is held by about 181,721 persons, of whom the immense majority about 111,000 receive dividends amounting to 400 a year and under. Of these, again, by far the greater part enjoy incomes of less than 100 a year. And then the same principle is of course applicable to the debt of all public bodies ; those of the Municipalities alone, which are rapidly increasing, would now amount to something like one hundred and fifty millions more.

Everything in America is on a gigantic scale, even its forms of villainy, and the villainy advocated by Mr. George is an illustration of this as striking as the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky, or the frauds of the celebrated " Tammany Ring" in New York. The world has never seen such a Preacher of Unrighteousness as Mr. Henry George. For he goes to the roots of things, and shows us how unfounded are the rules of probity, and what mere senseless super- stitions are the obligations which have been only too long acknowledged. Let us hear him on National Debts, for it is an excellent specimen of his childish logic, and of his profligate conclusions :

The institution of public debts, like the institution of private property in land, rests upon the preposterous assumption that one generation may bind another generation. If a man were to come to me and say, "Here is a promissory note which your great-grand- father gave to my great-grandfather, and which you will oblige me

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