HOW THE BOOK CAME TO BE WRITTEN
In the Introduction to the Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition, Henry George, Jr. told interestingly, as follows, how “Progress and Poverty” came to be written:
Out of the open West came a young man of less than thirty to this great city of New York. He was small of stature and slight of build. His alma mater had been the forecastle and the printing-office. He was poor, unheralded, unknown. He came from a small city rising at the western golden portals of the country to set up here, for a struggling little newspaper there, a telegraphic news bureau, despite the opposition of the combined powerful press and telegraph monopolies, The struggle was too unequal. The young man was over- borne by the monopolies and his little paper crushed.
This man was Henry George and the time was 1869.
But though defeated, Henry George was not vanquished. Out of this struggle had come a thing that was to grow and grow until it, should fill the minds and hearts of multitudes and be as “an army with banners.”
For in the intervals of rest from his newspaper struggle in this city the young correspondent had musingly walked the streets. As he walked he was filled with wonder at the manifestations of vast wealth. Here, as nowhere that he had dreamed of, were private fortunes that rivaled the riches of the fabled Monte Cristo. But here, also, side by side with the palaces of the princely rich, was to be seen a poverty and degradation, a want and shame, such as made the young man from the open West sick at heart.
Why in a land so bountifully blest, with enough and more than enough for all, should there be such inequality of conditions? Such heaped wealth interlocked with
such deep and debasing want? Why, amid such super-
