The Single Tax Movement in The United States
by Arthur Nichols Young
Instructor in Economics and Social Institutions
in Princeton University
1916

Should you wish to read the footnotes, go to the pdf version, Single tax Movement.
(Chapter 1 – 4) — To be continued.

Chapter 1
Anticipations of Henry George’s Ideas

PREFACE
More than a generation has now elapsed since Henry George published Progress and Poverty, but hardly any effort has been made to describe the single tax movement or to appraise its significance. Substantially all of the literature devoted to the single tax question has been purely controversial. In the present volume the writer has undertaken to give a complete historical account of the single tax movement in the United States, together with a discussion of the tactics of the single taxers, their program, the present status of the movement, and its influence upon economic thought and upon fiscal and social reform.

A brief introductory survey of the chief anticipations of Henry George’s doctrines is presented in order to show the place of the movement in the history of economic thought. Then is traced the formulation of George’s economic ideas in the light of the economic environment amid which he spent the formative years of his life, the California of the two decades following the gold discovery of 1848. Next follows a description of the reception of Progress and Poverty in the eighties and of Henry George’s activities in the spreading of his gospel. Succeeding chapters describe the development of the single tax movement through the recent political campaigns undertaken with the aid of the Joseph Fels endowment. Finally there is a consideration of some general aspects of the movement, and an appraisal of its significance.

Collection of the material upon which this study is based has involved research in several parts of the country. The writer spent several weeks in and around San Francisco securing data regarding the economic background of Henry George’s life there, and had the opportunity of conferring with a number who had been intimately acquainted with him in the seventies. Important material was found in the Bancroft Library at the University of California and in the California State Library at Sacramento, particularly in the files of George’s San Francisco Evening Post (1871-75) and contemporary newspapers. The writer also in the years 1913-15 has personally visited several of the localities where the single tax movement has been most prominent, including Portland, Ore., Seattle and Everett, Wash., Chicago, 111., Cincinnati, Ohio, and New York City ; also in Canada, Victoria and Vancouver, B. C, and Edmonton, Alberta. Information regarding the movement in places not visited has been secured mainly through conferences and corre spondence with single taxers and others, from the propa ganda literature used, and from periodicals. Searches for material relating to the single tax movement have been carried on in the following university libraries : California, Leland Stanford, Jr., Minnesota, Wisconsin, Chicago, Co lumbia, and Princeton; in the public libraries of San Fran cisco, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Chicago, and New York; and in the John Crerar Library of Chicago and the Library of Congress, Washington, D. C. The writer has worked through the files of the chief single tax periodicals: The Standard, Justice, The National Single Taxer, The Single Tax Review, and The Public. He has had the opportunity of discussing various aspects of the movement and its program with a considerable number of those most active in the movement today.

For aid the writer is under obligation to many. Where possible, acknowledgment has been given in the footnotes. Special acknowledgment, however, is due to the following single taxers: Mr. Joseph Dana Miller, editor of the Single Tax Review, Mr. C. B. Fillebrown of Boston, Mr. Daniel Kiefer, chairman of the Joseph Fels Fund Commission, Mr. Louis F. Post of Washington, D. C., Mr. Harold Sudell of Philadelphia, Mr. John Z. White of Chicago, Mr. O. T. Erickson of Seattle, and Mr. C. E. Todd and Mr. F. W. Lynch of San Francisco; also to Mr. Benjamin C. Marsh of New York City, secretary of the Society to Lower Rents and Reduce Taxes on Homes. The writer also is under obligation to Mrs. Richmond Plant of Los Angeles for the gift of material collected by the late Richmond Plant; to Mr. H. I. Priestley, Assistant Curator of the Academy of Pacific Coast History, Berkeley; and to Professor C. C Plehn of the University of California.

For valued criticism the writer is grateful to his colleagues, Professors F. A. Fetter, E. W. Kemmerer, and W. M. Adriance, to Mr. W. W. Cumberland, and to Professor R. G. Cleland of Occidental College, Los Angeles. Professor Fetter has painstakingly read the entire manuscript, and the writer is especially grateful for the opportunity of discussing with him most of the points considered. Finally, the writer is indebted to his wife for invaluable aid rendered in many ways.

ARTHUR NICHOLS YOUNG. Princeton New Jersey April, 1916

Chapter 1
Anticipations of Henry George’s Ideas.

Introduction
Few movements of any sort bear such a striking relation to the life and work of a single individual as the single tax movement bears to the life and work of Henry George. Scarcely anything in the history of social reform movements is more remarkable than the spectacle of this un known California printer setting foot in New York City in 1880, poor in pocket, equipped solely with a book and the consciousness of a message, to become the founder of a new world-wide crusade against world-old evils. Like the founder of a new religion, Henry George believed that he had been called to be a prophet to his age. The task to which he set himself was to be the bearer of an economic revelation, to point the way to social salvation, to show the “great primary wrong” which causes a shadow to accompany our advancing civilization. He sent forth his gospel with unwavering faith that his message would find friends who would take “the cross of a new crusade”. That faith has been realized and to-day thousands of his disciples in all parts of the world are devoted to his memory and turn for the final solution of economic problems to Progress and Poverty.

In order to reach a clearer understanding of the place which Henry George’s single tax doctrines occupy in the history of economic thought, we shall consider in the present chapter the extent to which they were anticipated. A discussion of the anticipations, however, must be confined within limits. An attempt to consider the numerous manifestations of the idea to which land reformers of all times have appealed—that all men have a “God-given” or “natural” or “equal” right to the earth—would take us too far afield. Hardly any agrarian movement fails to exhibit some manifestation of this idea, which dates back at least to the time when the author of Ecclesiastes wrote that “the profit of the earth is for all”. We must confine ourselves to considering (i) some of the more specific anticipations of George’s characteristic doctrines, and (2) the relations between these doctrines and the doctrines of the leading economists, from the Physiocrats to Cairnes. We shall then examine the question of George’s originality, his knowledge of and dependence upon former writers while formulating the ideas which, first presented in 1871 in Our Land and Land Policy, were worked out more fully eight years later in Progress and Poverty. In the second chapter we shall consider the influence which the environmental conditions of early California exerted upon Henry George.

Anticipations by isolated writers, non-economists

Spinoza, the Dutch philosopher (1632-1677), in his Tractatus Politicus proposed that the rents of the soil, supplemented perhaps by the rents of houses, should defray the expenditures of the state.

“The fields, and the whole soil, and, if it can be managed, the houses should be public property, that is, the property of him who holds the right of the commonwealth: and let him let them at a yearly rent to the citizens, whether townsmen or countrymen, and with this exception let them all be free, or exempt from every kind of tax in time of peace. And of this rent a part is to be applied to the defences of the state, a part to the king’s private use.”

Marshall Vauban published in 1707 his Projet d’une Dixme Royale. His travels through France had given him an opportunity to see the poverty of the peasants, which he believed was due largely to heavy and unequal taxation. He proposed a reform of France’s tax system which some have regarded as entitling him to rank as “a pioneer of the single tax”.

The title of Vauban’s book, however, is misleading as regards his reform project. The dixme royale, or royal tithe, was not, as its name might indicate, a single income tax. It was a comprehensive proposal for simplifying the existing tax system, but yet far from a single tax proposal. It called for proportional taxes on the produce of land and on the revenue of wealth in general, but definitely proposed to continue (not without improvements in method, however) the raising of revenue from salt duties, and to retain certain other imposts.

It is better, therefore, to regard Vauban as a reformer who made an earnest and worthy plea for greater simplicity, justice, and uprightness in taxation, rather than as a pioneer advocate of the single tax.

Thomas Spence, of Newcastle-on-Tyne, advocated ideas strikingly like those of Henry George in a lecture before the Philosophical Society of Newcastle on the 8th of November, 1775, for the printing of which, wrote Spence, “the Society did the Author the honour to expel him”.

Spence believed in the natural right of all men to land, and his views on the effects of its private appropriation are suggestive of Progress and Poverty.

“For as all the rivers run into the sea, and yet the sea is not full, so let there be ever so many sources of wealth, let trade, foreign and domestic, open all their sluices, yet will no other but the landed interest be ultimately the better.”

Spence’s remedy was “to administer the landed estate of the nation as a joint-stock property, in parochial partner ships, by dividing the rent.”

“There are no tolls or taxes of any kind paid among them, by native or foreigner, but the aforesaid rent. The government, poor, roads, &c. &c. … are all maintained by the parishes with the rent: on which account all wares, manufactures, allowable trade, employments, or actions, are entirely duty-free.”

When all necessary expenditures of government have been met comes “the most pleasant part of the business to everyone”, the equal division of the surplus.

A contest between the Corporation of Newcastle and the freemen of the borough probably suggested to Spence his proposal. The Corporation had enclosed and leased a part of the common land, but were defeated in the law courts and obliged to allow the rent to the freemen as dividends.

The result of Spence’s advocacy of this proposal was that he was forced to remove to London. There he continued his propaganda and at one time gained a considerable following. But the government laid a heavy hand upon his agitation and the societies of his followers were suppressed.

William Ogilvie, Professor of Humanities in King’s College, Aberdeen, was another eighteenth century thinker who anticipated certain of Henry George’s ideas. In 1782 he published anonomously An Essay on the Right of Property in Land with respect to its Foundation in the Law of Nature. He believed that the equal right of all men to the earth was “a birthright which every citizen still retains”, and as a means for securing that right he proposed a “progressive agrarian law”, under which men were to be permitted to claim their birthright share from unoccupied lands, and those holding more than this share were gradually to be deprived of their surplus of land, retaining, however, the title to any improvements which they might have made.

Ogilvie’s ideas on taxation were somewhat vague, but he wrote in a footnote that he believed a land tax to be the most equitable form of tax. The landowner, he believed, enjoyed a revenue without performing a corresponding social service. He suggested a tax on barren lands to force the owner either to cultivate or dispose of them. Ogilvie was probably the first to suggest definitely a tax on the increment of land values. He wrote:

“A tax on all augmentation of rents, even to the extent of one half the increase, would be at once the most equitable, the most productive, the most easily collected, and the least liable to evasion of all possible taxes, and might with inconceivable advantage disencumber a great nation from all those injudicious imposts by which its commercial exchanges are retarded and restrained, and its domestic manufactures embarrassed.”

Thomas Paine’s pamphlet, Agrarian Justice opposed to Agrarian Law, and to Agrarian Monopoly, appeared in 1797. Paine distinguished, as did Henry George, between natural property and artificial property.

“There are two kinds of property. Firstly, natural property, or that which comes to us from the Creator of the universe,—such as the earth, air, water. Secondly, artificial or acquired property,—the invention of men.”

“Equality of natural property”, wrote Paine, “is the subject of this little essay.” Since the private appropriation of land “has dispossessed more than half the inhabitants of every nation of their natural inheritance,” justice demands an indemnification. This was best to be managed, Paine believed, by a tithe upon all inheritances to create a “National Fund”, which should give to each the sum of fifteen pounds sterling at the age of twenty-one and an annuity of ten pounds at the age of fifty.

Patrick Edward Dove, a Scotchman, was the most remarkable anticipator of Henry George. In 1850 he published anonymously The Theory of Human Progression, and Natural Probability of a Reign of Justice. This is a diffuse work largely taken up with philosophical and theological speculation; economic problems hardly seem to be the main issue. However, Dove referred to the land question as “the main question of England’s welfare.”

Dove stated the problem with all the vigorous fervor of Progress and Poverty.

“How comes it that, notwithstanding man’s vast achievements, his wonderful efforts of mechanical ingenuity, and the amazing productions of his skill, … a large portion of the population is reduced to pauperism? … To charge the poverty of man on God, is to blaspheme the Creator. . . . He has given enough, abundance, more than sufficient; and if man has not enough, we must look to the mode in which God’s gifts have been distributed.”

Dove diagnosed the cause of poverty as the denial of the natural right of all to the land of their birth, “the alienation of the soil from the state, and the consequent taxation of the industry of the country.

Dove believed that the actual division of the land, even if possible, would be futile as a remedy. The solution was to be found in “the division of its annual value or rent” which could best be done “by taking the whole of the taxes out of the rents of the soil, and thereby abolishing all other kinds of taxation whatever. If this were done “all industry would be absolutely emancipated from every burden, and every man would reap such natural reward as his skill, industry, or enterprise rendered legitimately his, according to the natural law of free competition.

Herbert Spencer, in his Social Statics, published in 1850, the same year as Dove’s work, gave the fullest exposition of the natural rights theory applied to land prior to Henry George’s writings. In chapter IX, The Right to the Use of the Earth, he declared that “equity … does not permit property in land”

“The right of each man to the use of the earth, limited only by the like rights of his fellow-men, is immediately deducible from the law of equal freedom. We see that the maintenance of this right necessarily forbids private property in land. On examination, all existing titles to such property turn out to be invalid.

Spencer believed that equal apportionment of the earth among its inhabitants and common property in land would be alike unfeasible. But the change could be effected with no serious disturbance of the existing order.

“The change required would be simply a change of landlords. Separate ownerships would merge into the joint-stock ownership of the public. Instead of being in the possession of individuals, the country would be held by the great corporate body—Society. Instead of leasing his acres from an isolated proprietor, the farmer would lease them from the nation. Instead of paying his rent to the agent of Sir John or his Grace, he would pay it to an agent or deputy-agent of the community. Stewards would be public officials instead of private ones; and tenancy the only land tenure.”

Spencer admitted that the question of compensation to present proprietors of land was complicated and difficult. But he declared that “the theory of the co-heirship of all men to the soil is consistent with the highest civilization, and … however difficult it may be to embody that theory in fact. Equity sternly commands it to be done.”

In the eighties, when discussion of Progress and Poverty was at its height, Spencer’s name was frequently coupled with George’s as an advocate of land nationalization. But Spencer had modified the views set forth in 1850 in Social Statics, and in 1892 he withdrew the original volume, issuing in its place Social Statics, abridged and revised, a book from which his radical utterances on the land question were omitted. For his retraction he was sharply criticized by George in A Perplexed Philosopher, published in 1892.

Anticipations by the socialists

Socialist writers before the time of Henry George had regarded private property in land, together with private property in other forms of wealth, as exploitative. Some had held that land ownership was peculiarly exploitative, because it infringed the natural right of all men to the earth, the heritage of the race. Proudhon gave forcible expression to this thought in his Qu’est-ce la Propriété? published in 1840, when he wrote: “Qui a fait la terre? Dieu. En ce cas, propriétaire, retire-toi !”

Likewise the socialists, desiring collective ownership of most forms of wealth, had regarded collective ownership of land as a fundamental plank in their program. The famous Communist Manifesto of 1848, written by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, has the following as first in the list of measures “pretty generally applicable” in “the most advanced countries”:

“Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.”

Some socialist writers had placed particular emphasis upon the abolition of private ownership of land. Among these were the Belgian socialist, Baron de Colins, a voluminous writer of the middle of the nineteenth century, and Francois Huet, a Christian socialist.

Anticipations by the German “Bodenreformers”

The first of the German Bodenreformers was Hermann Heinrich Gossen. In 1854 he proposed that the state should purchase all land and lease it to the highest bidders. The state could acquire land advantageously, he believed, because it would be able to borrow the purchase money at low rates of interest. If collective ownership of land were introduced, society instead of private individuals would get the advantage of any future increase in land values.

In 1871 August Theodor Stamm, in his Die Erlosung der darbenden Menschheit, presented views similar to those of Henry George. Stamm believed that private property in land was the cause of nearly all human ills. In its abolition was to be found the complete solution of the social problem. Collective ownership might be effected in several ways, but the best means, Stamm believed, was gradually to absorb the rent of land by increasing the land tax. Stamm differed from George, however, in holding that, since the original wrong of private appropriation of land was not that of the present but of previous generations, the rights of present owners should receive some consideration.

In 1879 Adolph Samter, in his Das Eigentum in seiner socialen Bedeutung, advocated land nationalization.

When, in 1879, Progress and Poverty was published, it was early translated into German and attracted considerable attention in Germany. The result of the discussion it aroused was the development of a group of Bodenreformers, who have worked assiduously for proposals similar to George’s. The leaders among the Bodenreformers have been Michael Flürscheim, Theodor Hertzka, and Adolph Damaschke.

Proposals similar to George’s single tax have not found much favor in Germany. But the Germans have taken the lead in taxing the “unearned increment” of land values.

Anticipations in movements for special taxation of land

Movements for special taxation of land together with exemption of improvements from taxation are met independently in several newly settled countries. It is not strange that settlers who improve their farms should resent the fact that the result of their labor is to add to the value of land held by non-improving or absentee speculators.

In Iowa in the thirties and forties there was a considerable movement for the exemption of improvements from taxation. The actual settlers felt that non-resident speculators and big landholders were bearing too little of the burdens of taxation. The outcome of the agitation against “land monopoly” was the passage of the act of January 14th, 1840, which made it the duty of the county assessor to assess real estate at “the actual value which such real estate would bear without the improvements thereupon.”

This law, however, was soon repealed as a majority of the legislature held it to be contrary to the Organic Law of the Territory.

But the repeal did not put a stop to the agitation. It continued after Iowa had been admitted to the Union in 1846. The advocates of exempting improvements urged that the existing system encouraged “land monopoly” and speculation, and discouraged improvements.

“These lands of the capitalists [held for speculation] are now being more valuable by the labor of the settler, whose improvements are increasing the same, and the fruits of whose industry under the present law, are taxed to support that very government, which protects these lands, and without which they would be measurably valueless. . . .

“Assessments on land for taxes should be levied and graduated according to the relative value and quality of the same, whether selected in the country or towns, and … the value of improvements on such lands or town lots should not be included in the assessments unless it should be for corporation purposes in towns.”

The agitation, however, did not result in further legislation.

Similar ideas were advocated by a Wisconsin tailor, Edwin Burgess, of Racine. In 1848 he wrote a letter from Racine which appeared in “Excursion No. 45, Clearance No. 3, of the Portland [Maine] Pleasure boat, J. Hacker, Owner, Master, and Crew, in which he said:

“I want now to say a few words on the best means of raising revenue or taxes so as to prevent land monopoly. I know not what are your views on the subject, but should like to have you inquire whether raising all the taxes off the land in proportion to its market value would not produce the greatest good to mankind with the least evil, of any means of raising revenue. Taxing personal property has a tendency to limit its use by increasing its price, and the consequent difficulty of obtaining it.”

In 1859-60 Burgess gave a more extensive presentation of these ideas in a series of eleven letters to the Racine Advocate, in which he urged that land should be taxed and improvements exempted. These letters aroused considerable discussion and some opposition. Burgess believed that his policy would force idle land into use, would encourage the production of wealth and increase opportunities for employment, and would do away with the evasion and fraud which accompany other taxes.

“Were all the taxes on the land, and the people’s land free, then the hitherto landless could soon build their own homes on their own land, and raise all they needed to consume or exchange, and no longer need the land, house, or capital of others; then rent, interest, and even usury would cease for want of poverty to sustain them, for the curse, land monopoly, being removed, the effect would cease with the cause. Thus would the happiness of mankind be immeasurably increased, and misery be proportionately diminished; then would earth be redeemed from the giant sin of land robbery, and the Paradise of the present or future be far above that of the past.”

In the seventies similar ideas were expressed in Australia. When Henry George was editing the San Francisco Post, a copy of a tract written by Robert Savage, of the “Land Tenure Reform League of Victoria,” came to his attention. He published an extract from it in an editorial in the Post, April 1 6th, 1874. The author of the tract declared that “the allocation of the rents of the soil to the nation is the only possible means by which a just distribution of the created wealth can be effected.”

The movement for the exemption of improvements in western Canada dates from 1874, in which year the town of Nanaimo, on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, received a special charter permitting the total exemption of improvements from taxation. Nanaimo has never taxed improvements.

Anticipations in the writings of the leading economists from the Physiocrats to Cairnes

Thus far we have considered anticipations of Henry George’s ideas apart from the theories of the economists. But since it was from the doctrines of the classical economists, particularly from their theory of rent, that George drew many of the materials to frame his theory of distribution, it will be worth our while to examine briefly their ideas of the social significance of the rent of land, its taxation, and private property in land. We shall consider first the French Physiocrats, who formed the first real “school” of economists.

A cardinal doctrine of the Physiocrats was that of the impôt unique, a single tax upon land, which was proposed to supplant the complex and burdensome taxes of the ancien regime. The impôt unique occupies a much more prominent place in the history of economic thought than do other anticipations of George’s doctrine. The term “single tax”, the commonly used designation of George’s doctrine, is a literal translation of impôt unique. So striking are the resemblances between these two single tax proposals that in 1886 Henry George, believing the Physiocrats to be his precursors, dedicated his Protection or Free Trade “to the memory of those illustrious Frenchmen of a century ago, Quesnay, Turgot, Mirabeau, Condorcet, DuPont and their fellows, who in the night of despotism foresaw the glories of the coming day”, and in Progress and Poverty (1879) he wrote: “Without knowing anything of Quesnay or his doctrines, I have reached the same practical conclusion.” But he candidly stated that, since he was only acquainted with the works of the Physiocrats at second hand, he was unable to say how far their peculiar doctrines resembled his.

Some of his followers and critics, however, have been less cautious, and, misled by a superficial similarity, have assumed an unwarranted degree of correspondence between the two doctrines. It is true that the concrete proposals were the same—to do away with all taxes except upon land. But even here there was an important difference. George proposed that the state should absorb by taxation the entire rental value of land, while the Physiocrats believed that the impôt unique should not take more than a third of the produit net of agriculture.

This quantitative difference, however, was not the main one, for the Physiocratic conception of the significance of the impôt unique was fundamentally different from George’s conception of his single tax. The Physiocrats urged their tax proposal, not because they saw a wrong in the private appropriation of the income from land, but because they believed that the produit net of agriculture was the sole source of increase in national wealth, the source from which all taxes, no matter how levied, must in the last analysis be paid. The Physiocrats, it is true, regarded all taxes excepting upon land as indirect, as do the single taxers. But from widely different reasons. The Physiocrats regarded other taxes as indirect because they believed that they were ultimately shifted to the produit net of agriculture, regardless of the manner in which they may have been levied. The single taxers, on the other hand, believe that all taxes other than those upon land are indirect because they are shifted so as to become burdens on industry, taxes on labor, and a hindrance to the production of wealth; taxes upon land, they believe, are not shifted, and do not restrict the production of wealth.

Furthermore the Physiocratic conception of the social effects of private property in land was directly opposite to that of present day single taxers. Far from seeing in this institution the fundamental cause of social injustice, the Physiocrats believed in it thoroughly. DuPont went so far as to say: “La proportion de l’impôt avec le produit net doit être telle que le sort du propriétaire foncier soit le meilleur possible et que leur état soit préférable a tout autre dans la société.”

One of the points of closest resemblance between George’s beliefs and those of these eighteenth century thinkers—a point which has often escaped attention—is to be found in the fact that each plan was proposed as the plan to usher in the “natural order”.

In Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations we find the germs of the idea that land rent is peculiarly an unearned and exploitative income.

“As soon as land becomes private property, the landlord demands a share of almost all the produce which the labourer can either raise, or collect from it. His rent makes the first deduction from the produce of the labour which is employed upon the land.”

The idea of land rent as an income which, altogether apart from any special activity of the land owner, tends to increase spontaneously with the progress of society, yielding to its recipients a relatively increasing share in the distribution of wealth, is also found in the Wealth of Nations. We read there:

“Every improvement in the circumstances of the society tends either directly or indirectly to raise the real rent of land, to increase the real wealth of the landlord, his power of purchasing the labour, or the produce of the labour of other people.

… The real value of the landlord’s share, his real com mand of the labour of other people, not only rises with the real value of the produce, but the proportion of his share to the whole produce rises with it.”

Adam Smith referred to the propriety of taxing the rent of land in a peculiar way.

“Both ground-rents and the ordinary rent of land are a species of revenue which the owner, in many cases, enjoys without any care or attention of his own. Though a part of this revenue should be taken from him in order to defray the expenses of the state, no discouragement will thereby be given to any sort of industry. … Ground-rents, and the ordinary rent of land, are therefore, perhaps, the species of revenue which can best bear to have a peculiar tax imposed upon them.

“Ground-rents seem in this respect a more proper subject of peculiar taxation than even the ordinary rent of land. … Ground-rents, so far as they exceed the ordinary rent of land, are altogether owing to the good government of the sovereign. … Nothing can be more reasonable than that a fund which owes its existence to the good government of the state should be taxed peculiarly, or should contribute something more than the greater part of other funds towards the support of that government.”

David Ricardo, whose theories of value and wages furnished the economic groundwork for Lasalle and Karl Marx, developed also the doctrine of rent which became the cardinal principle in the system of Henry George. It is one of the ironies of history that the theories of Ricardo, who was such a staunch exponent of the interests of the moneyed classes, should have been employed to justify radical attacks upon the economic interests of these classes. Professor H. S. Foxwell has well said that, whatever qualifications Ricardo may have made in his own mind upon his use of the term “labour”, “ninety-nine readers out of a hundred took him literally, and the main impression left by his book was that while wealth was almost exclusively due to labour, it was mainly absorbed by rent and other payments to the unproductive classes.”

“In a progressive country”, argued Ricardo, … “the landlord not only obtains a greater produce, but a larger share.” Hence, “the interest of the landlord is always opposed to the interest of every other class in the community. His situation is never so prosperous as when food is scarce and dear.” The difficulty of providing food for a growing population and the extension of the margin of cultivation to poorer lands assures to the landlord an indefinitely increasing income. His gains are anti-social, secured at the expense of the rest of the community.

Ricardo’s followers have persistently held up the rent of land as an anomalous income, an economic phenomenon of an exceptional and somewhat mysterious nature. They have represented it as an income pre-eminently not earned, a charge whose payment is in no way essential to continued production. Since the step is so short from this idea to the proposition that land rent should be intercepted from land owners for the benefit of the rest of society, who do contribute to production, the Ricardian economists must shoulder a considerable part of the responsibility for the single tax arguments. Cannan in his Theories of Production and Distribution wrote:

“The movement for ‘nationalizing’ land without compensation to present owners, on which Mr. Henry George and others have wasted immense energy, would probably never have been heard of, if the Ricardian economists had not represented rent as a sort of vampire which continually engrosses a larger and larger share of the produce, and if they had not failed to classify rent and interest together as two species of one genus.”

George’s doctrine that “rent or land value does not arise from the productiveness or utility of land,” that “it in no wise represents any help or advantage given to production, but simply the power of securing a part of the results of production,” looks remarkably like a corollary of the ordinary statements of the famous “law of rent”.

James Mill discussed land taxation much more fully than did Adam Smith or Ricardo. In his Political Economy, 1821, he suggested that in a new country the rent of land would be a source peculiarly adapted to defray the expenditures of the state without burdening anyone. But in old countries

“where land has … been converted into private property, without making rent in a peculiar manner answerable for the public expenses; where it has been bought and sold upon such terms, and the expectations of individuals have been adjusted to that order of things, rent of land could not be taken to supply exclusively the wants of the government without injustice.”

James Mill’s Political Economy is noteworthy in that it contains the earliest thorough consideration of the merits of a tax upon the “unearned increment” of land values. Much of the credit for the idea of taxing the increment of land values should be given to James Mill rather than, as is usual, to his more distinguished son. James Mill wrote in his Political Economy:

“This continual increase, arising from the circumstances of the community, and from nothing in which the land-holders themselves have any peculiar share, does seem a fund no less peculiarly fitted for appropriation to the purposes of the state, than the whole of the rent in a country where land had never been appropriated.”

John Stuart Mill, in his Political Economy, 1848, definitely proposed a tax on the future increment of land values. He urged that “the future increment of rent should be liable to special taxation; in doing which all injustice to the landlords would be obviated, if the present market price of their land were secured to them; since that includes the present value of all future expectations.” Mill was largely instrumental in founding the “Land Tenure Reform Association”, which, in 1870, commenced a definite program of propaganda for “the interception by taxation of the future unearned increase of the rent of land.”

Mill, in his Political Economy, definitely took the position that land ownership is less justifiable than the ownership of other wealth. “Landed property”, he said, “is felt, even by those most tenacious of its rights, to be a different thing from other property.”

“When the ‘sacredness of property’ is talked of, it should always be remembered, that any such sacredness does not be long in the same degree to landed property. No man made the land. It is the original inheritance of the whole species. Its appropriation is wholly a question of general expediency. When private property in land is not expedient, it is unjust. It is no hardship to anyone to be excluded from what others have produced: they were not bound to produce it for his use, and he loses nothing by not sharing in what otherwise would not have existed at all. But it is some hardship to be born into the world and to find all nature’s gifts previously en grossed, and no place left for the new-comer.”

J. E. Cairnes followed Mill in his views, taking the position that property in land was fundamentally different from other forms of property, since “no man made the land”. In his essay, Political Economy and Land, published in 1870 with reference to the Irish land question, he wrote:

“Sustained by some of the greatest names—I will say by every name of the first rank in Political Economy, from Turgot and Adam Smith to Mill—I hold that the land of a country presents conditions which separate it economically from the great mass of the other objects of wealth,—conditions which, if they do not absolutely and under all circumstances impose upon the State the obligation of controlling private enterprise in dealing with land, at least explain why this control is in certain stages of social progress indispensable.”

Conclusion

Summing up the results of our survey, we see that Henry George was anticipated in all the essential ideas of his economic and political philosophy: that the land, to which all men have equal natural rights, should not be engrossed by the few; that private property in land is peculiarly exploitative, and that private receipt of its income is a chief cause of poverty and misery; that, with the progress of society, this income tends to become larger both absolutely and relatively; and that land incomes should be liable to special treatment in taxation, even to being made the sole source of government support. Even in the relating of these ideas in a comprehensive system, Spence, Burgess, and, more completely, Dove anticipated him.

But to say that Henry George was anticipated on these points is far from saying that he was not original in his statements of them. Fortunately, we have his own full testimony regarding the extent of his indebtedness to others for the ideas which he first expressed in 1871 in his little book, Our Land and Land Policy, National and State. In 1874, while editing the San Francisco Post, he wrote editorially:

“So far as we know, we were the first upon the American continent or anywhere else, to enunciate the principle which will some day be an accepted axiom, that land is the only thing which should be taxed for purposes of revenue. And when we did, it was some time before we could find anyone else who thought the same way.”

The references to Malthus, Ricardo, and Mill in Our Land and Land Policy show that at this time George had some knowledge of their writings. But, according to Henry George, Jr., he undertook no very thorough study of the economists until engaged in writing Progress and Poverty.

Fifteen years later, when Progress and Poverty had become famous, Henry George was accused of having plagiarized from Patrick Edward Dove, and the charge was given some currency. In replying, George wrote:

“I had worked out the whole thing for myself without conscious aid that I can remember unless it might have been for the light I got from Bisset’s ‘Strength of Nations’ as to the economic character of the feudal system. When I published Our Land and Land Policy, I had not even heard of the Physiocrats and the impôt unique.”

And in his Political Economy, published posthumously, he stated that Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics was the only work of the kind that had come to his notice before the writing of Progress and Poverty.

Henry George unquestionably is to be ranked as one of the boldest and freshest thinkers on economic problems. He worked out a compact and unified theory of the distribution of wealth, making it his own by right of synthesis and emphasis. The fact that the skeleton of ideas contained in Progress and Poverty is to be discovered in Spence’s pamphlets and Dove’s wordy system has little more than historical significance. Dr. E. R. Taylor, Henry George’s friend, writing in the Single Tax Review, pointedly compared the precursors of Henry George to those Norse wanderers whose ships touched the American shores in the centuries before Columbus.

Henry George’s own words, written in reply to the charge of plagiarism, may be final in this connection:

“It is not necessary for me to defend Progress and Poverty from a charge of plagiarism. What that book has done is a sufficient answer.

“If it had been such a book as those it has rescued from forgetfulness, it would have shared their fate.”

It was not Progress and Poverty alone, however, but Progress and Poverty coupled with the energy and personality of its author, that gave rise to the single tax movement. No book sent forth unaided could have motivated such an intense movement for social reform. From the publication of Progress and Poverty in 1879 until the very hour of his death Henry George gave himself unsparingly to the spreading of the faith. Speaking and writing, he carried his message from one end of the United States to the other and even around the world.