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
the showing that the results which he attributes to over-population
actually arise from other causes. Of all the cases cited, and pretty
much the whole globe is passed over in the survey, in which vice and
misery check increase by limiting marriages or shortening the term of
human life, there is not a single case in which the vice and misery can
be traced to an actual increase in the number of mouths over the power
of the accompanying hands to feed them; but in every case the vice and
misery are shown to spring either from unsocial ignorance and rapacity,
or from bad government, unjust laws or destructive warfare.
Nor what Malthus failed to show has any one since him shown. The globe
may be surveyed and history may be reviewed in vain for any instance
of a considerable country[20] in which poverty and want can be fairly
attributed to the pressure of an increasing population. Whatever be the
possible dangers involved in the power of human increase, they have
never yet appeared. Whatever may some time be, this never yet has been
the evil that has afflicted mankind. Population always tending to
overpass the limit of subsistence! How is it, then, that this globe of
ours, after all the thousands, and it is now thought millions, of years
that man has been upon the earth, is yet so thinly populated? How is
it, then, that so many of the hives of human life are now deserted—that
once cultivated fields are rank with jungle, and the wild beast licks
her cubs where once were busy haunts of men?
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