Henry GeorgeГенри Джордж

3. Our world is so ordered that a thousand people, working together, can produce many times more than the same thousand could produce working apart. This does not yet prove, however, that nine hundred and ninety-nine of them must become the slaves of one.

Henry George.

2. We must give deep attention to our public affairs; we must be ready to change our opinions, to give up old views, to take up new ones. We must cast off prejudices and reason with a perfectly free mind. A sailor who keeps setting the same sails regardless of changes in the wind will never reach his harbor.

Henry George.

3. Property in land, like property in slaves, differs in its very essence from property in things produced by labor.

Take from a man or from a people their money, goods, and cattle, and your robbery will end with your departure. The passage of time will not, of course, make your crime a good deed, but it will destroy its consequences. The crime quickly recedes into the distant past, along with the people who took part in it.

But take from a people their land, and your robbery will go on forever. It will be a new robbery for each new generation in the succession, for each new year, for each new day.

Henry George.

1. The passions roused by war, international hatred, reverence for military glory, and the thirst for victory or revenge stifle the people’s conscience, turn people’s goodwill toward one another into a base, senseless self-love called patriotism, kill the love of liberty, and bring people to submit to oppressors out of a savage wish to cut other people’s throats or out of fear that other people will cut theirs. The passions roused by war so pervert the religious feeling of people that the acknowledged teachers of Christianity bless, in the name of Christ, the instruments of murder and plunder, and offer up thanks to the God of peace for victories in which the earth is covered with mountains of mutilated corpses and grief fills the hearts of innocent people.

Henry George.

4. “Divide and rule” — this is the chief trick of all oppressors. Only by stirring up tribal enmity, international hatred, and local prejudices, only by setting some nations against others, can aristocracy and despotism establish and maintain themselves. Therefore whoever wants to free people must raise them above feelings of hatred; otherwise he will not reach his goal.

Henry George.

4. In the soil and in sunlight, in the vegetable and animal kingdoms, in mineral deposits and in the forces of nature, which we are only now beginning to use, lie inexhaustible riches from which people guided by reason could satisfy all their material needs. In nature there is no cause for poverty — not even for the poverty of the hunchbacked or the decrepit. For man is by his nature a social animal, and were it not for the brutalizing influence of chronic destitution, family love and social compassion would provide all that is needed for those who are not able to support themselves.

Henry George.

5. For the common life to be bettered, it is necessary that more and more reason and love be put into the management of public affairs, not by certain persons only, but by society as a whole. We cannot prudently leave our public affairs to statesmen. The people must think for themselves, for they alone can act.

Henry George.

6. However stable our civilization may seem to us, destructive forces are already developing within it. Not in deserts and forests, but in city slums and on the highroads, are being reared the barbarians who will do to our civilization what the Huns and Vandals did to the ancient one.

Henry George.

2. “Seek first of all the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all the rest will be added to you.” The first step toward a natural and healthy order of society always lies in securing to all people their natural, equal, and inalienable rights to the material world. To achieve this does not mean doing everything necessary, but it does mean making all the rest easier. And until this is achieved, nothing else will be of any use.

Henry George.

2. The Christian revelation was a teaching about the equality of men, about God being the Father and men being brothers. It struck at the very root of the terrible violence that was stifling the civilized world; it broke the chains of the slaves and destroyed the great injustice that enabled a handful of people to live in luxury at the expense of the masses and deprived working people of the products of their labor. That is why early Christianity was persecuted, and that is why, when it became clear that it could not be destroyed, the ruling classes accepted it and perverted it. In its triumph it ceased to be the true Christianity of the earliest times and became the servant of the rich.

After Henry George.

2. To throw a man into the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, telling him that he is free to go ashore, would be no greater mockery of him than to place him on land wholly seized as private property, telling him at the same time that he is a free man, free to work for himself and to enjoy his earnings.

Henry George.

4. Place one hundred men on an island from which there is no escape, and whether you make one of these men the absolute owner of the other ninety-nine, or the absolute owner of the soil of the island, will make no difference.

Henry George.

2. Since man can live only from the land and on the land, by making the land on which he must exist the property of another we shall enslave him as completely as by making his flesh and blood the property of another. And in the end, at a certain stage of social development, the slavery that follows from the seizure of land, because under it the relations between master and slave tend to be less direct and evident, becomes crueler and more corrupting than the slavery that makes men’s bodies property.

Henry George.

5. The tramp is the necessary complement of the millionaire.

Henry George.

2. In their discourses on the good of the working people, those in authority fall into a tone of condescending patronage. People who are conscious of the true dignity of labor are offended by this tone more than they could be offended by openly expressed contempt. In all their expressions of sympathy one hears the admission that poverty is the natural condition of the working people, into which they must sink wherever they are not graciously patronized. No one gives the least sign of thinking that landowners or capitalists need patronage. They, we are told, can take care of themselves; it is only the poor workers who must be patronized.

Henry George.

3. The protection of the masses has in all ages been a pretext for violence — the justification of monarchy, of aristocracy, and of privileges of every kind. But is there a single example in the history of the world when, whether under monarchical or under republican government, the protection of the working masses has not meant their oppression? The protection extended to the working people by those who held the lawmaking power in their hands has at best been only the protection that a man extends to cattle. He protects them so as to make use of their strength and their flesh afterward.

Henry George.

1. The essence of slavery is in empowering one man to obtain the labor of another without recompense. Private property in land does this as fully as chattel slavery. The slave owner must leave to the slave enough of his earnings to enable him to live. Are there not in so called free countries great bodies of workingmen who get no more?

Henry George.

3. “The poor you always have with you.” No words of Scripture have been twisted to such devilish ends as these very words. If, in spite of all our successes, we still have among us to this day poor people who, through no fault of their own, cannot rise into healthy and normal conditions of life, then this happens through our fault and to our shame. Anyone who looks around him will see that it is injustice alone — which takes natural advantages away from those who labor and deprives them of the fruits of their labors — that prevents us all from being rich.

Henry George.

2. Opposite the window at which I am writing, a huge bull is tethered by a ring passed through his nostrils. While cropping the grass he has wound his rope around a post, and now he stands like a prisoner, tormented by hunger in sight of rich grass, deprived even of the chance to toss his head to drive off the flies that bite his shoulders. Many times he has made vain efforts to free himself, but each time, after a plaintive bellow, he has fallen quiet, to suffer in silence.

This bull, possessed of mighty strength but lacking the sense to understand how he might free himself, suffering hunger in the midst of plenty and becoming the helpless victim of the feeblest creatures, seems to me a kind of emblem of the working classes.

In all countries the people whose labor creates an abundance of wealth struggle in poverty. While advancing civilization widens the horizon of thought and awakens new desires, these people sink, for the sake of satisfying their animal needs, to the level of a brute existence. Conscious of all the bitterness of the wrong, feeling in the depths of their souls that they were not made at all for so wretched a life, these people too at times fight and protest. But until they learn to connect effect with cause; until they understand how they are entangled and how they can free themselves — until then their efforts and protests will be as vain as the efforts and plaintive bellowing of the entangled bull — will be even more vain. I will go out of the room and drive the bull back, guiding him so that the rope unwinds, whereas no one will guide people to freedom. Until they begin to use the reason with which they are endowed, no one will help them, no one will make them free.

True power, under every possible form of government, is in reality always in the hands of the masses. And in reality it is not at all kings or aristocrats, not at all landowners or capitalists, who everywhere enslave the people. What enslaves them is their ignorance.

Henry George.

2. All our charitable institutions, all our penal laws, all our restrictions and prohibitions by which we try to prevent and suppress crime — what are they, at best, but the contrivances of a fool who, having loaded the whole burden into the basket on one side of a donkey, decided to help the unfortunate animal by piling as many stones into the basket on its other side?

Henry George.

3. The loathsome poverty that swarms in the very centers of our civilization, and the crimes, the depravity, and the rapacity it breeds, are the consequence of our land laws, which refuse to acknowledge the simple law of justice, a law so simple and clear that even the rudest of savages recognize it. What by its very nature is our birthright has been made the exclusive property of certain persons, and what by natural law ought to be a common fund, from which all our public needs would be met, we hand over to a few people so that they may rule over their fellow men. And so some gorge themselves while others starve, and more means are squandered than would be needed to keep everyone in luxury.

Henry George.

3. The rich and the poor are, as it were, the complement of each other. A class of rich men presupposes a class of paupers, and senseless luxury cannot but be bound up with a terrible want that forces those who have nothing to serve senseless luxury.

The rich are the robbers, the poor are the robbed. That is why Christ always showed sympathy for the poor and aversion to wealth. By his teaching, it is better to be robbed than to be a robber. In the kingdom of righteousness that he preached, the rich and the poor would be equally impossible.

Henry George.

5. A society made up of the very rich and the very poor easily becomes the prey of those who seize power into their own hands. The very poor have not spirit enough to offer resistance, and the very rich have too much at stake to be able to take risks.

Henry George.

6. Look, from the standpoint of an observer of nature, at the landless man, at a being that has the opportunity and the capacity to use the land, that is compelled by its needs to use it, and that is at the same time deprived of the right to the land. This is as unnatural as a bird without air or a fish without water.

Henry George.

7. Private property in land, which has never arisen from the natural relations of people, but has always, in history, been the consequence of seizure and plunder, appears so extreme an absurdity, so gross an injustice, so manifest a waste of productive forces, and so great an obstacle to the most advantageous use of natural wealth, so contrary to sound social policy, and so great a brake on the true betterment of the condition of humanity, that it is tolerated only because the majority of people never think about it and never hear people reason about it.

Henry George.

8. Of the two systems of slavery, at one and the same level of moral development, the system that turns people into property is without doubt more humane than the system that turns the land into private property. Where land is recognized as private property, people are worn out with toil and hunger, deprived of all the joys and charms of life, condemned to ignorance and a brutish existence, and driven to crime and suicide, as though without anyone’s will having a part in it, by force of what seems a fatal necessity, for which no one is answerable.

Henry George.

4. There are only three ways in which a man can acquire wealth: by labor, by begging, and by stealing. And if those who labor receive so little, it is only because too great a share falls to beggars and thieves.

Henry George.

1. One thing only we know beyond doubt: that death awaits us. “Like a swallow that has flown through a room is the life of man.” We come, we know not whence, and go, we know not whither. Impenetrable darkness behind, thick shadows ahead. When our time comes, what importance will it have for us that we ate tasty dishes or did not, wore soft raiment or did not, left a great fortune or none at all, reaped laurels or were despised, were thought learned or ignorant — compared with how we have used the talent entrusted to us by the master?

Henry George.

2. In the inclination to believe what we are told lie good and evil. It is just this inclination that makes the forward movement of society possible, and just this inclination that makes that forward movement so slow and painful: thanks to it, each generation receives without effort the knowledge that comes to it by inheritance, acquired by hard labor, and thanks to it, each generation finds itself enslaved by the mistakes and errors of its predecessors.

Henry George.

7. The majority of men do not think; the majority of men have to expend so much energy in the struggle to make a living that they do not have time to think. The majority of men accept, as a matter of course, whatever is. This is what makes the task of the social reformer so difficult, his path so hard. This is what brings upon those who first raise their voices in behalf of a great truth the sneers of the powerful and the curses of the rabble, ostracism and martyrdom, the robe of derision and the crown of thorns.

Henry George.