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
Population still keeps on increasing, giving greater and greater
utility to the land, and more and more wealth to its owner. The town
has grown into a city—a St. Louis, a Chicago or a San Francisco—and
still it grows. Production is here carried on upon a great scale, with
the best machinery and the most favorable facilities; the division of
labor becomes extremely minute, wonderfully multiplying efficiency;
exchanges are of such volume and rapidity that they are made with the
minimum of friction and loss. Here is the heart, the brain, of the
vast social organism that has grown up from the germ of the first
settlement; here has developed one of the great ganglions of the human
world. Hither run all roads, hither set all currents, through all the
vast regions round about. Here, if you have anything to sell, is the
market; here, if you have anything to buy, is the largest and the
choicest stock. Here intellectual activity is gathered into a focus,
and here springs that stimulus which is born of the collision of mind
with mind. Here are the great libraries, the storehouses and granaries
of knowledge, the learned professors, the famous specialists. Here are
museums and art galleries, collections of philosophical apparatus, and
all things rare, and valuable, and best of their kind. Here come great
actors, and orators, and singers, from all over the world. Here, in
short, is a center of human life, in all its varied manifestations.
So enormous are the advantages which this land now offers for the
application of labor that instead of one man with a span of horses
scratching over acres, you may count in places thousands of workers to
the acre, working tier on tier, on floors raised one above the other,
five, six, seven and eight stories from the ground, while underneath
the surface of the earth engines are throbbing with pulsations that
exert the force of thousands of horses.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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