CHAPTER II
AN EARLY HERESY
In my early approaches towards economic study it had struck me as odd that the private ownership of land and the receipt of its rent seemed a matter of no importance to our political economists. Failing to recognize that rent played any part as a cost of production, they simply accepted it as belonging to the order of nature, beneficial no doubt to its recipients, but not injurious to anybody else. Not until Henry George stirred the issue up to boiling-point in his Progress and Poverty did the inequity of private ownership of the earth get much attention, and even then it suffered the damage that comes from exaggeration and panaceic simplicity. For the contention that the whole gains of the Industrial Revolution were absorbed by private landowners was far less plausible in England than in America. The career of this doctrine is, indeed, an interesting testimony to the naïveté of the British mind. It never was accepted as a working-class creed. Its followers here were mostly middle-class townsmen affected by personal knowledge of local cases of land-increments. Little knots of such men, to whom the single-tax or other device for confiscation of land-values is the all-sufficient gospel of social reform, linger on into the present day. One aspect of this
