Page:The Complete Works of Henry George Volume 3.djvu/35

 A UNIVERSAL QUESTION. 27

with the English tenant-farmer, who is really a capitalist, but with the English agricultural laborer and the lowest class of factory operatives. Surely their condition is not so much better than that of the Irish peasant as to make a difference worth talking about. On the contrary, miser- able as is the condition of the Irish peasantry, sickening as are the stories of their suffering, I am inclined to think that for the worst instances of human degradation one must go to the reports that describe the condition of the laboring poor of England, rather than to the literature of Irish misery. For there are three things for which, in spite of their poverty and wretchedness and occasional famine, the very poorest of Irish peasants are by all accounts remarkable the physical vigor of their men, the purity of their women, and the strength of the family affections. This, to put it mildly, cannot be said of large classes of the laboring populations of England and Scot- land. In those rich manufacturing districts are classes stunted and deteriorated physically by want and unwhole- some employments; classes in which the idea of female virtue is all but lost, and the family affections all but trodden out.

But it is needless to compare sufferings and measure miseries. I merely wish to correct that impression which leads so many people to talk and write as though rent and land tenures related solely to agriculture and to agricul- tural communities. Nothing could be more erroneous. Land is necessary to all production, no matter what be its kind or form ; land is the standing-place, the workshop, the storehouse of labor ; it is to the human being the only means by which he can obtain access to the material universe or utilize its powers. Without land man cannot exist. To whom the ownership of land is given, to him is given the virtual ownership of the men who must live upon it. When this necessity is absolute, then does he

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