larger book became “an inquiry into industrial depressions and of increase of want with increase of wealth, and pointed out the remedy.
The book was finished after a year and seven months of intense labor, and the undergoing of privations that caused the family to do without a parlor carpet, and which frequently forced the author to pawn his personal effects.
And when the last page was written, in the dead of night, when he was entirely alone, Henry George flung himself upon his knees and wept like a child. He had kept his vow. The rest was in the Master’s hands.
Then the manuscript was sent to New York to find a publisher. Some of the publishers there thought it visionary; some, revolutionary. Most of them thought it unsafe, and all thought that it would not sell, or at least sufficiently to repay the outlay. Works on political economy even by men of renown were notoriously not money-makers. What hope then for a work of this nature’ from an obscure man—unknown, and without prestige of any kind? At length, however, D. Appleton & Co. said. they would publish it if the author would bear the main cost, that of making the plates. There was nothing else for it, and so in order that the plate-making should be done under his own direction Henry George had the, type set in a friend’s printing-office in San Francisco, the author of the book setting the first two stickfuls himself, .
Before the, plates, made from this type, were shipped East, they were put upon a printing-press and an “Author's Proof Edition” of, five hundred copies was struck off. One of these copies Henry George sent to his venerable father in Philadelphia, eighty-one years old. At the same time the son wrote:
It is with deep feeling of gratitude to,Our Father in Heaven that I send you a printed copy of this book. I am grateful that
