California is a land of extremes--everything grows big and fast, especially ideas. No country ever saw such wealth and such poverty side by side. The mansions on Nob Hill were so grand that their magnificence discouraged the owners and abashed visitors; at receptions, a keg of beer on a sawbuck in the kitchen and champagne in a washtub, with ham sandwiches in a bushel basket, were all that could be assimilated. And yet past the high iron gates of these palaces prowled want--gaunt, hungry and menacing. Land was never so cheap nor so dear as it has been in California. We gave a railroad-company twenty-five thousand acres of land for every mile of track it built, and for years a dollar an acre was the ruling price at which you could buy to your limit. And yet there were at the same time little half-acres for which men pushed a hundred thousand dollars in gold-dust over the counter and then crowed about their bargain. Henry George studied economics at first hand. The dignified frappe which he received in way of honorarium for his university lecture had its advantages. People in San Francisco wanted to hear what the editor had to say as well as to read his utterances. He was invited to give the Fourth of July oration at the Grand Opera House--a very great compliment. Henry George was a reformer, and reformers have but one theme, and that theme is Liberty. We grow by expression. There is no doubt that the university lecture and the Fourth of July oration added cubits to the stature of Henry George. In these two addresses we find the kernel of his philosophy--a kernel that was to germinate into a mighty tree which would extend its welcoming shade to travelers for many a decade yet to come. * * * * * Like every other great book (or great man), "Progress and Poverty" was an accident--a providential accident. The book was ten years in the incubation. It began with a newspaper editorial in Eighteen Hundred Sixty-nine, and found form in a volume of five hundred pages in Eighteen Hundred Seventy-nine. The editorial merely called attention to the fact that California, in spite of her vast wealth, was peopled, for the most part, with people desperately poor; and that ground in the vicinity of any city, town or place of enterprise was held at so exorbitant a figure that the poor were actually enslaved by the men who owned the land. That is to say, the men who owned the land controlled the people who had to live on it, for man is a land animal, and can not live apart from land, any more than fishes can live at a distance from water. And moreover we tax for the improvements on land, thus really placing a penalty on enterprise. The article attracted attention, and opened the eyes of one man at least--and that was the man who wrote it. He had written better than he knew; and any writer who does not occasionally surprise himself does not write well.