Progress and Poverty, Volumes I and II: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of WealthGeorge, Henry
General
Progress and Poverty, Volumes I and II: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth
George, Henry
Economics; Single tax
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
in the older countries—that is to say, the countries where material
progress has reached later stages—that widespread destitution is
found in the midst of the greatest abundance. Go into one of the new
communities where Anglo-Saxon vigor is just beginning the race of
progress; where the machinery of production and exchange is yet rude
and inefficient; where the increment of wealth is not yet great enough
to enable any class to live in ease and luxury; where the best house is
but a cabin of logs or a cloth and paper shanty, and the richest man is
forced to daily work—and 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.
But just as such a community realizes the conditions which all
civilized communities are striving for, and advances in the scale
of material progress—just as closer settlement and a more intimate
connection with the rest of the world, and greater utilization of
labor-saving machinery, make possible greater economies in production
and exchange, and wealth in consequence increases, not merely in the
aggregate, but in proportion to population—so does poverty take a
darker aspect. Some get an infinitely better and easier living, but
others find it hard to get a living at all. The “tramp” comes with
the locomotive, and almshouses and prisons are as surely the marks
of “material progress” as are costly dwellings, rich warehouses, and
magnificent churches. Upon streets lighted with gas and patrolled by
uniformed policemen, beggars wait for the passer-by, and in the shadow
of college, and library, and museum, are gathering the more hideous
Huns and fiercer Vandals of whom Macaulay prophesied.
This fact—the great fact that poverty and all its concomitants show
themselves in communities just as they develop into the conditions
toward which material progress tends—proves that the social
difficulties existing wherever a certain stage of progress has been
reached, do not arise from local circumstances, but are, in some way or
another, engendered by progress itself.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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