that it required a coalition of the two strongest political parties to prevent his election. He received 68,000 votes, against 90,000 for the coalition candidate. His death on the 29th of October 1897 was followed by one of the greatest demonstrations of popular feeling and general respect that ever attended the funeral of any strictly private citizen in American history. The fundamental doctrine of Henry George, the equal right of all men to the use of the earth, did not originate with him; but his clear statement of a method by which it could be enforced, without increasing state machinery, and indeed with a great simplification of government, gave it a new form. This method he named the Single Tax. His doctrine may be condensed as follows: The land of every country belongs of right to all the people of that country. This right cannot be alienated by one generation, so as to affect the title of the next, any more than men can sell their yet unborn children for slaves. Private ownership of land has no more foundation in morality or reason than private ownership of air or sunlight. But the private occupancy and use of land are right and indispensable. Any attempt to divide land into equal shares is impossible and undesirable. Land should be, and practically is now, divided for private use in parcels among those who will pay the highest price for the use of each parcel. This price is now paid to some persons annually, and it is called rent. By applying the rent of land, exclusive of all improvements, to the equal benefit of the whole community, absolute justice would be done to all. As rent is always more than sufficient to defray all necessary expenses of government, those expenses should be met by a tax upon rent alone, to be brought about by the gradual abolition of all other taxes. Landlords should be left in undisturbed possession and nominal ownership of the land, with a sufficient margin over the tax to induce them to collect their rents and pay the tax. They would thus be transformed into mere land agents. Obviously this would involve absolute free trade, since all taxes on imports, manufactures, successions, documents, personal property, buildings or improvements would disappear. Nothing made by man would be taxed at all. The right of private property in all things made by man would thus be absolute, for the owner of such things could not be divested of his property, without full compensation, even under the pretence of taxation. The idea of concentrating all taxes upon ground-rent has found followers in Great Britain, North America, Australia and New Zealand. In practical politics this doctrine is confined to the “Single Tax, Limited,” which proposes to defray only the needful public expenses from ground-rent, leaving the surplus, whatever it may be, in the undisturbed possession of land-owners.
The principal books by Henry George are: Progress and Poverty (1879), The Irish Land Question (1881), Social Problems (1884), Protection or Free Trade (1886), The Condition of Labor (1891), A Perplexed Philosopher (1892), Political Economy (1898). His son, Henry George (b. 1862), has written a Life (1900). For the Single Tax theory see Shearman’s Natural Taxation (1899). (T. G. S.)
GEORGE PISIDA [Georgios Pisides], Byzantine poet, born in
Pisidia, flourished during the 7th century A.D. Nothing is known
of him except that he was a deacon and chartophylax (keeper
of the records) of the church of St Sophia. His earliest work,
in three cantos (ἀκροάσεις), on the campaign of the emperor
Heraclius against the Persians, seems to be the work of an eyewitness.
This was followed by the Avarica, an account of a
futile attack on Constantinople by the Avars (626), said to have
been repulsed by the aid of the Virgin Mary; and by the Heraclias,
a general survey of the exploits of Heraclius both at home and
abroad down to the final overthrow of Chosroes in 627. George
Pisida was also the author of a didactic poem, Hexaëmeron or
Cosmourgia, upon the creation of the world; a treatise on the
vanity of life, after the manner of Ecclesiastes; a controversial
composition against Severus, bishop of Antioch; two short poems
upon the resurrection of Christ and on the recovery of the sacred
crucifix stolen by the Persians. The metre chiefly used is the
iambic. As a versifier Pisida is correct and even elegant; as a
chronicler of contemporary events he is exceedingly useful;
and later Byzantine writers enthusiastically compared him with,
and even preferred him to Euripides. Recent criticism, however,
characterizes his compositions as artificial and almost uniformly
dull.
Complete works in J. P. Migne, Patrologia Graeca, xcii.; see also De Georgii Pisidae apud Theophanem aliosque historicos reliquiis. (1900), by S. L. Sternbach, who has edited several new poems for the first time from a Paris MS. in Wiener Studien, xiii., xiv. (1891–1892); C. Krumbacher, Geschichte der byzantinischen Litteratur (1897); C. F. Bähr in Ersch and Gruber’s Allgemeine Encyklopädie.
GEORGE, LAKE, a lake in the E. part of New York, U.S.A.,
among the S.E. foothills of the Adirondack Mountains. It
extends from N.N.E. to S.S.W. about 34 m., and varies in width
from 2 to 4 m. It has a maximum depth of about 400 ft., and is
323 ft. above the sea and 227 ft. above Lake Champlain, into
which it has an outlet to the northward through a narrow channel
and over falls and rapids. The lake is fed chiefly by mountain
brooks and submerged springs; its bed is for the most part
covered with a clean sand; its clear water is coloured with
beautiful tints of blue and green; and its surface is studded with
about 220 islands and islets, all except nineteen of which belong
to the state and constitute a part of its forest reserve. Near the
head of the lake is Prospect Mountain, rising 1736 ft. above the
sea, while several miles farther down the shores is Black Mountain,
2661 ft. in height. Lake George has become a favourite summer
resort. Lake steamers ply between the village of Lake George
(formerly Caldwell) at the southern end of the lake and Baldwin,
whence there is rail connexion with Lake Champlain steamers.
Lake George was formed during the Glacial period by glacial drift which clogged a pre-existing valley. According to Prof. J. F. Kemp the valley occupied by Lake George was a low pass before the Glacial period; a dam of glacial drift at the southern end and of lacustrine clays at the northern end formed the lake which has submerged the pass, leaving higher parts as islands. Before the advent of the white man the lake was a part of the war-path over which the Iroquois Indians frequently made their way northward to attack the Algonquins and the Hurons, and during the struggle between the English and the French for supremacy in America, waterways being still the chief means of communication, it was of great strategic importance (see Champlain, Lake). Father Isaac Jogues, René Goupil and Guillaume Couture seem to have been the first white men to see the lake (on the 9th of August 1642) as they were being taken by their Iroquois captors from the St Lawrence to the towns of the Mohawks, and in 1646 Father Jogues, having undertaken a half-religious, half-political mission to the Mohawks, was again at the lake, to which, in allusion to his having reached it on the eve of Corpus Christi, he gave the name Lac Saint Sacrement. This name it bore until the summer of 1755, when General William Johnson renamed it Lake George in honour of King George II.
General Johnson was at this time in command of a force of colonists and Indians sent against the French at Crown Point on Lake Champlain. The expedition, however, had proceeded no farther than to the head of Lake George when Johnson was informed that a force of French and Indians under Baron Ludwig August Dieskau was pushing on from Crown Point to Fort Lyman (later Fort Edward), 14 m. to the S. of their encampment. Accordingly, on the morning of the 8th of September a detachment of 1000 colonials under Colonel Ephraim Williams (1715–1755) and 200 Indians under Hendrick, a Mohawk chief, was sent to aid Fort Lyman, but when about 3 m. S. of the lake this detachment fell into an ambuscade prepared for it by Dieskau and both Williams and Hendrick were killed. The survivors were pursued to their camp, and then followed on the same day the main battle of Lake George, in which 1000 colonials fighting at first behind a hastily prepared barricade defeated about 1400 French and Indians. Both commanders were wounded; Dieskau was captured; the French lost about 300; and the colonials nearly the same (including those who fell earlier in the day). Johnson now built on the lake shore, near the battlefield, a fort of gravel and logs and called it Fort William Henry (the site was occupied by the Fort William Henry Hotel till it was burned in 1909). In the meantime the French entrenched themselves at Ticonderoga at the foot of the lake. In March 1757 Fort William Henry successfully withstood an attack of 1600
