Page:The Complete Works of Henry George Volume 3.djvu/152

 34 PROPERTY IN LAND.

improvement of the soil. Moreover, I know that this outlay on my own part, and similar outlay on the part of my neighbors, so far from having power to absorb and concentrate in our hands all other forms of wealth, is unable to secure anything like the return which the same capital would have won and won easily in many other kinds of enterprise. I am in possession of authentic information that on one great estate in England the outlay on improvements purely agricultural has, for twenty-one years past, been at the rate of 35,000 a year, while including outlay on churches and schools, it has amounted in the last forty years to nearly 2,000,000 sterling. To such outlays landowners are incited very often, and to a great extent, by the mere love of seeing a happier land- scape and a more prosperous people. From much of the capital so invested they often seek no return at all, and from very little of it indeed do they ever get a high rate of interest. And yet the whole every farthing of it goes directly to the public advantage. Production is increased in full proportion, although the profit on that production is small to the owner. There has been grown more corn, more potatoes, more turnips; there has been produced more milk, more butter, more cheese, more beef, more mutton, more pork, more fowls and eggs, and all these articles in direct proportion to their abundance have been sold at lower prices to the people. When a man tells me, and argues on steps of logic which he boasts as irre- futable, that in all this I and others have been serving no interests but our own nay, more, that we have been but making "the poor poorer" than they were I know very well that, whether I can unravel his fallacies or not, he is talking the most arrant nonsense, and must have in his composition, however ingenious and however eloquent, a rich combination and a very large percentage of the fanatic and of the goose.

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