Page:The Complete Works of Henry George Volume 3.djvu/82

 74 THE LAND QUESTION.

the way. This we have not done ; this we do not do. Out in our new States may be seen the growth of a system of cultivation worse in its social effects than that which prevails in Ireland. In Ireland the laborer has some sort of a home, and enjoys some of the family affec- tions. In these great "wheat-manufacturing" districts the laborer is a nomad, his home is in his blankets, which he carries around with him. The soil bears wheat, crop after crop, till its fertility is gone. It does not bear chil- dren. These machine-worked "grain factories" of the great Republic of the New World are doing just what was done by the slave-worked latifundia of the Roman world. Here they prevent, where there they destroyed, " the crop of men." And in our large cities may we not see misery of the same kind as exists in Ireland ? If it is less in amount, is it not merely because our country is yet newer; because we have yet a wide territory and a sparse population conditions past which our progress is rapidly carrying us ? As for evictions, is it an unheard- of thing, even in New York, for families to be turned out of their homes because they cannot pay the rent? Are there not many acres in this country from which those who made homes have been driven by sheriffs' posses, and even by troops ? Do not a number of the Mussell Slough settlers lie in Santa Clara jail to-day because a great rail- road corporation set its envious eyes on soil which they had turned from desert into garden, and they in their madness tried to resist ejectment ?

And the men on the other side of the Atlantic who vainly imagine that they may settle the great question now pressing upon them by free trade in land, or tenant- right, or some mild device for establishing a peasant proprietary they may learn something about their own case if they will turn their eyes to us.

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