MR. GEORGE'S PROPOSAL.
WE do not intend to use hard words about the Socialist lecturer, Mr. George. So far as observers can judge, he is as entirely sincere in his views as the men who periodi- cally worry the newspapers with plans for squaring the circle, and " demonstrations " that the world is a flat body. He is, too, as we understand, a man with a religious faith and a pas- sionate desire to relieve what he, unlike the greater teachers in all lands and ages, holds to be the greatest of evils,—pecuniary distress. He is, so far as appears, a man of fine nature, much power of expression, and unusual persuasiveness, who is wasting those gifts upon a dream as absurd as that of the old finan- ciers, who believed that by a proper application of compound interest, a sum of money could be made to increase of itself till it extinguished the National Debt. They thought that you could, somehow, get more hay out of a field than there was grass in it ; and Mr. George thinks that you can WE do not intend to use hard words about the Socialist lecturer, Mr. George. So far as observers can judge, he is as entirely sincere in his views as the men who periodi- cally worry the newspapers with plans for squaring the circle, and " demonstrations " that the world is a flat body. He is, too, as we understand, a man with a religious faith and a pas- sionate desire to relieve what he, unlike the greater teachers in all lands and ages, holds to be the greatest of evils,—pecuniary distress. He is, so far as appears, a man of fine nature, much power of expression, and unusual persuasiveness, who is wasting those gifts upon a dream as absurd as that of the old finan- ciers, who believed that by a proper application of compound interest, a sum of money could be made to increase of itself till it extinguished the National Debt. They thought that you could, somehow, get more hay out of a field than there was grass in it ; and Mr. George thinks that you can fill a State Treasury without taxation. The plan in his mind is so curious and so little known in England—though it was in operation in Madras for a century—that the very Reporters have blundered about it ; and it is simply im- possible to understand, from most of their accounts, what he means. The long report in the Daily News is, however, clear enough, if only the reader will not stop half-way ; and we will, as a preliminary, give the plan there detailed in briefer words. Mr. George would, to begin with, have the Legislature confiscate all land within the United Kingdom, including not only agricultural land, but all mines and forests, and specially all ground upon which cities or houses have been built. He would not, he is careful to observe, take the houses, for anything which a man creates is sacred property, and he creates a house or a railroad. But land he does not create—not even the Bedford Level, we presume—and therefore the community alone, as beneficiaries deriving from God, can without crime own land. Even leaseholding is wrong, for a lessee has a profit, which is part of the value of the soil, and therefore appertains to the community. Mr. George, therefore, claims all, without granting compensation of any kind. Compensa- tion he looks upon as at once absurd and impossible ; impossible, because it would leave no profit for the State ; absurd, because " when you expel a tyrant, you do not compensate him for his throne." Ownership is, in fact, in Mr. George's mind, burglary ; and he would reclaim all property in land, and would either, as he originally proposed, work all by the State, or, as he now in his lecture seems to prefer, would tax all up to the full amount payable by a yearly tenant. This tax would, he believes, though he acknowledges that he can nowhere find any accurate data for calculation, yield £200,000,000 a year ; and with this money he would pay all national expenses, and with the surplus would extinguish poverty, apparently by direct grants of cash. At all events, he would accept the charge of all orphans, and give every widow, beginning with Queen Victoria, an annuity of £100 a year 1 Then he thinks brotherly love would reign, and it is to
brotherly love that he appeals to justify confiscations which would, to begin with, instantly ruin all widows and orphans dependent on insurances. Insurance Offices hold most of the great mortgages, and as mortgages would be annulled by the seizure of rent, all Insurance Offices would be bankrupt at once. That, however, is a detail.
It is a little difficult for experienced men, who see that no such plan could be carried out without a civil war, which would either reduce the country to poverty or leave the pro- pertyholders victorious, to argue about a scheme so visibly dreamy. Mr. George, however, as the embodiment in the flesh of all the Socialist feeling in the air, has a certain influence with the poor, and it is worth while to show that his plan is hopelessly impracticable, and indeed, to speak plainly, nonsensical. Philanthropy does not alter arithmetic, and his object, even if he could attain it without universal ruin, is utterly beyond his reach. If the State did obtain by plunder £200,000,000 a year, it could do next to nothing to relieve the poverty of the nation. If taxes are abolished—to the ecstatic delight of all drunkards and rich men—so must rates be, which press so heavily on the poor; and the " national expenses," rates and taxes together, would ab- sorb £130,000,000 of the total. The balance of £70,000,000 a year would allow the Treasury to assign £10 a year to each household, or four shillings a week a house, or less than a shilling a week to each person, male and female. Does even Mr. George, with all his ignorance of England, think that this addition would extinguish poverty, or make life perceptibly so much happier as to compensate for the immediate ruin his confiscation would create ? If he does, he knows nothing about the matter, for any economist in Europe will tell him that the mere shock to credit from his Bill, the mere reduc- tion in the spending power of the rich, the mere flight of capitalists to safer lands, will of itself reduce wages by more than the sum he proposes to distribute. The Black Friday of 1866 reduced wages in the trades affected by more than five shillings a week, and Black Friday would be an imperceptible shaking compared with the cata- clysm which the disappearance of private property in land would produce. Every Insurance Office, every Bank, every tradesman supplying the rich would fail at once, and England would be reduced to a state of barter, not for twenty-four hours, but for months. Mr. George is evidently one of those men, so lamentably numerous, who the moment they begin thinking in millions lose their heads, and forget that nations include millions too, and that the sums which seem so huge in their eyes if distributed among whole populations yield a dividend expressible only in small silver. All he steals for the people is only half what the people spend on liquor and tobacco, and not half what they might save on them, without renouncing the reasonable use of those comforts or luxuries. Mr. George's surplus, if distributed, would do no good, whether distributed equally, or bestowed upon selected objects of charity. For ourselves, we fail to see why any toiling wife, half-maddened with the claims of her children, should surrender her share of the plunder to give £100 a year to her neighbour opposite, just because she is a widow, and probably much the richer for that fact. The scandal of equal distribution would be too great, the State in a month would be compelled to distribute according to necessities, and as the first causes of necessity are waste, idleness, and drink, the surplus rental of the country would be mainly expended on maintaining all wasteful persons, idle persons, and drunkards, in comparative comfort. Certainly, whatever its economic merits, the elder and sterner Gospel, " He that will not work, neither shall he eat," is a more moral gospel than this of Mr, George.
The surplus would do no good whatever, even from Mr. George's point of view, for it is not enough, and it would go to the wrong people ; but would there be this surplus ? We gravely doubt it. The State could, of course, steal the ground- rents, for a time, but we doiklat if it could the agricultural rents. Who is to pay them ? The tenants ? But then tenants from year to year would not make improvements, or making them, would agitate, as in Ireland, for perpetual re- ductions. They would apply Mr. George's own principle of the " sacredness " of property created by man against himself, and would say, very justly, that their property was sacred too ; that they, or they and their labourers, created the crop of the year, and that they would not be robbed of half of it, under the name of " rent." Why should they, any more than the man who produced carpets, or quartern loaves, or gin, all of whom are to live without deductions from their earnings ? The bootmaker would be paying wages, without deductions from his profits made by the State ; and why should the farmers' labourers be worse off than " cutters" and " closers," and the like ? There would be no answer to that contention, any more than to the con- tention of the builder that his house gave its special value to his plot of land ; and that as every man has "a right to a share in the soil," why should he be the one person to be robbed by an additional demand ? The cry of "No rent," or rather, " No special tax called rent," would become just, there would be a strike, and the State would have the alternatives of submitting, or commencing the reign of brotherly love by the wholesale eviction of all who knew how to cultivate the soil. Before long, the State would be com- pelled, as it has been in India, to compromise, by making its land-tax practically perpetual, and then would find either that the land was cultivated by myriads of poor farmers hating the State for its exactions ; or if the land were let in blocks, that landlordism had grown up again under a far more vicious form, a middleman being always more grasping than an owner. There is absolutely no hope in the scheme, unless reduced to an ordinary land-tax, which might, no doubt, reduce other taxa- tion, but which, as leaving private property in the soil intact, would be considered by Mr. George too despicable a com- promise to discuss.
But our Socialist friends will ask us—and we are quite con- scious how sincere many of them are, though a few might make a beginning by surrendering their own land to the Woods and Forests—if even confiscation gives no chance, where is the hope of ever extinguishing the poverty of the people? There is no hope, save in a development of their own habit of accumulation. What- ever the origin of the world, be it the work of God or the result of Evolution, this much at least is certain,—that man must till the soil, or starve ; that he can produce nothing, beyond a few fish, except from the soil ; and that the margin of production above his maintenance is, taking the whole world over, very small, so small that, were it all divided among the cultiva- tors, their position would be but slightly improved. Man, as a being, must work at least six hours a day at monotonous labour, merely to keep alive. That is the decree of a Power stronger than man, whether the power be sentient, as we and Mr. George believe, or only dead Circumstance ; and the effort to alter it is but waste of force. The mass of mankind were poor when the Pyramids were built, and will be poor when they have rotted ; and the true philanthropist is the man who so organises the world that poverty shall not involve misery, and not he who promises or strives for the impossibility that poverty shall cease to be.
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