and bequeath and devise it. We may safely leave them the shell, if we take the kernel.”[1] (The italics are his.)
Curiously enough, he had possibly an important truth within the confines of that phrase, but it was distorted by his humanitarian desire to feed loaves and fishes to the multitude.
In Herbert Spencer’s judicial statement, involving compensation with an eye to equity; and in the fervid promises of the millennium at less than cost, made by Henry George and his followers, we have respectively the intelligent and ecstatic recognition of what has many of the aspects of an important principle, which has already been put forward:
The community has a vital interest in superficial land-area, or foothold, which is impossible to increase by human effort and is therefore the most unalterable and dominant factor of economic value.
Although it is essential to realize that foothold is not the only measurable factor of value, it is the only pledgeable factor. It is probable, therefore, that this principle will be more and more clearly defined and scrutinized with increase of population (the most feared yet most advantageous contribution to value) and decrease of individual opportunity through state, or state-sanctioned, absorption (the most dangerous and least apparent impairment of value). More than this, the principle is one which should be discussed with the utmost frankness and taken into practical consideration as speedily as possible, no matter how ardent and irrational some of the advocates of single-tax.
Henry George had good seed within his hand, but it was poorly winnowed and, unwittingly, he planted with it other seeds of very dubious origin. Curiously enough it would appear that it is the expected harvest from the less trustworthy seed that has excited most of the interest.
To plan generously for a continuous distribution of value, based on the least possible exertion of effort is quite outside the realm of practicalities. And yet Henry George saw the mischief done by our present system of taxation and set many
- ↑ “Progress & Poverty,” Henry George. Page 403. Doubleday Page & Co., New York.
