neous forces which progress tends to overcome. In support of this he points out certain facts which, though frequently noted, have received a different interpretation. "When the conditions," he says, "to which material progress everywhere tends are most fully realized—that is to say, where population is densest, wealth greatest, and the machinery of production and exchange most highly developed—we find the deepest poverty, the sharpest struggle for existence, and the most enforced idleness. It is to the newer countries—that is, to the countries where material progress is yet in its earlier stages—that laborers emigrate in search of higher wages, and capital flows in search of higher interest." It is here that, "though you will find an absence of wealth and all its concomitants, you will find no beggars. There is no luxury, but there is no destitution. No one makes an easy living, nor a very good living; but every one can make a living, and no one able and willing to work is oppressed by the fear of want." Such facts, Mr. George thinks, justify the belief that somewhere in the industrial fabric there must be a fundamental wrong a social maladjustment that with increasing force, as progress proceeds, tends to continue and. deepen poverty.
His inquiry, in which he has taken nothing for granted, but has examined anew all the doctrines of our current political economy, has led him to the conclusion that the primary cause of the low returns to labor and capital is to be found in the private ownership of the land of the earth, which is by right the common heritage of all. He rejects the common notion that there is an antagonism between labor and capital, and holds, on the contrary, that they are both robbed of their full earnings by the landholder. Labor can only produce wealth by having access to the materials it is to fashion, all of which are drawn from the earth, and by having such opportunities to occupy the land as its needs require. Whoever, then, can claim a right to the land can name the conditions upon which these materials can be obtained and this occupation allowed. Whoever commands the land commands the fruits of labor spent upon the land. Before labor can exert itself it must ask permission, and the price of this permission is the tax that, acting with accelerating power as civilization goes on, denies to labor and capital their rightful share in the wealth they have produced.
In claiming that private property in land is a wrong, Mr. George is not alone. He has with him the best thought of all times. Nearly every economist and social thinker of eminence who has made an investigation into the basis of property has found no warrant for the private ownership of land. They have all seen that a natural agent, which is necessary to human existence, and which can neither be increased nor decreased by human exertion, can by no process whatever become the rightful property of one man or any number of men, save all men. And most have seen that to finally settle on an equitable basis this question of the ownership of land will be, as Mr. Spencer
