Page:The Complete Works of Henry George Volume 3.djvu/93

 THE CIVILIZATION THAT IS POSSIBLE. 85

where none stood before, or for making two blades of grass grow where there was but one. The waste of unem- ployed labor, of idle machinery, of those periodical depres- sions of industry almost as destructive as war. The waste entailed by poverty, and the vice and crime and thriftless- ness and drunkenness that spring from it; the waste entailed by that greed of gain that is its shadow, and which makes business in large part but a masked war; the waste entailed by the fret and worry about the mere physical necessities of existence, to which so many of us are condemned; the waste entailed by ignorance, by cramped and undeveloped faculties, by the turning of human beings into mere machines !

Think of these enormous wastes, and of the others which, like these, are due to the fundamental wrong which produces an unjust distribution of wealth and distorts the natural development of society, and you will begin to see what a higher, purer, richer civilization would be made possible by the simple measure that will assert natural rights. You will begin to see how, even if no one but the present landholders were to be considered, this would be the greatest boon that could be vouchsafed them by society, and that, for them to fight it, would be as if the dog with a tin kettle tied to his tail should snap at the hand that offered to free him. Even the greatest landholder! As for such landholders as our working farmers and homestead-owners, the slightest discussion would show them that they had everything to gain by the change. But even such landholders as the Duke of "Westminster and the Astors would be gainers.

For it is of the very nature of injustice that it really profits no one. When and where was slavery good for slaveholders? Did her cruelties in America, her expul- sions of Moors and Jews, her burnings of heretics, profit Spain? Has England gained by her injustice toward

�� �