took root, not in the slums and alleys of our cities--no
intellectual seed of any sort can germinate in the sickly, sunless
atmosphere of slums--but in the minds of people who had sufficient
leisure and education to think of other things than breadwinning. Henry
George proposed to abolish poverty by political action: that was the new
gospel which came from San Francisco in the early eighties. "Progress
and Poverty" was published in America in 1879, and its author visited
England at the end of 1881. Socialism hardly existed at that time in
English-speaking countries, but the early advocates of land taxation
were not then, as they usually are now, uncompromising individualists.
"Progress and Poverty" gave an extraordinary impetus to the political
thought of the time. It proposed to redress the wrongs suffered by the
working classes as a whole: the poverty it considered was the poverty of
the wage workers as a class, not the destitution of the unfortunate and
downtrodden individuals. It did not merely propose, like philanthropy
and the Poor Law, to relieve the acute suffering of the outcasts of
civilisation, those condemned to wretchedness by the incapacity, the
vice, the folly, or the sheer misfortune of themselves or their
relations. It suggested a method by which wealth would correspond
approximately with worth; by which the reward of labour would go to
those that laboured; the idleness alike of rich and poor would cease;
the abundant wealth created by modern industry would be distributed with
something like fairness and even equality, amongst those who contributed
to its production. Above all, this tremendous revolution was to be
accomplished by a political method, applicable by a majority of the
voters, and capable of being drafted as an Act of Parliament by any
competent lawyer.

To George belongs the extraordinary merit of recognising the right way
of social salvation. The Socialists of earlier days had proposed
segregated communities; the Co-operators had tried voluntary
associations; the Positivists advocated moral suasion; the Chartists
favoured force, physical or political; the Marxists talked revolution
and remembered the Paris Commune. George wrote in a land where the
people ruled themselves, not only in fact but also in name. The United
States in the seventies was not yet dominated by trusts and controlled
by millionaires. Indeed even now that domination and control, dangerous
and disastrous as it often is, c