Progress and Poverty by Henry George (most important books of all time txt) 📕

the anti-slavery agitators (Col. J. A. Collins) on a visit to England addressed a large audience in a Scotch manufacturing town, and wound up as he had been used to in the United States, by giving the ration which in the slave codes of some of the States fixed the minimum of maintenance for a slave. He quickly discovered that to many of his hearers it was an anticlimax. ↩

Principles of Political Economy, Book I, Chap. 3, Sec. 6. ↩

Social Statics, page 142. [It may be well to say in the new reprint of this book (1897) that this and all other references to Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics are from the edition of that book published by D. Appleton & Co., New York, with his consent, from 1864 to 1892. At that time Social Statics was repudiated, and a new edition under the name of Social Statics, Abridged and Revised, has taken its place. From this, all that the first Social Statics had said in denial of property in land has been eliminated, and it of course contains nothing here referred to. Mr. Spencer has also been driven by the persistent heckling of the English single tax men, who insisted on asking him the questions suggested in the first Social Statics, to bring out a small volume, entitled “Mr. Herbert Spencer on the Land Question,” in which are reprinted in parallel columns Chapter IX of Social Statics, with what he considers valid answers to himself as given in Justice, 1891. This has also been reprinted by D. Appleton & Co., and constitutes, I think, the very funniest answer to himself ever made by a man who claimed to be a philosopher.] ↩

The influence of the lawyers has been very marked in Europe, both on the continent and in Great Britain, in destroying all vestiges of the ancient tenure, and substituting the idea of the Roman law, exclusive ownership. ↩

Latifundia perdidere Italiam. —⁠Pliny ↩

Andrew Bisset, in The Strength of Nations, London, 1859, a suggestive work in which he calls the attention of the English people to this measure by which the land owners avoided the payment of their rent to the nation, disputes the statement of Blackstone that a knight’s service was but for 40 days, and says it was during necessity. ↩

The fixed rent under the lease to the Alaska Fur Company is $55,000 a year, with a payment of $2.62⁠–⁠½ on each skin, which on 100,000 skins, to which the take is limited, amounts to $262,500⁠—a total rent of $317,500. ↩

Following the habit of confounding the exclusive right granted by a patent and that granted by a copyright as recognitions of the right of labor to its intangible productions, I in this fell into error which I subsequently acknowledged and corrected in the Standard of June 23, 1888. The two things are not alike, but essentially different. The copyright is not a right to the exclusive use of a fact, an idea, or a combination, which by the natural law of property all are free to use; but only to the labor expended in the thing itself. It does not prevent anyone from using for himself the facts, the knowledge, the laws or combinations for a similar production, but only from using the identical form of the particular book or other production⁠—the actual labor which has in short been expended in producing it. It rests therefore upon the natural, moral right of each one to enjoy the products of his own exertion, and involves no interference with the similar right of anyone else to do likewise.

The patent, on the other hand, prohibits anyone from doing a similar thing, and involves, usually for a specified time, an interference with the equal liberty on which the right of ownership rests. The copyright is therefore in accordance with the moral law⁠—it gives to the man who has expended the intangible labor required to write a particular book or paint a picture security against the copying of that identical thing. The patent is in defiance of this natural right. It prohibits others from doing what has been already attempted. Everyone has a moral right to think what I think, or to perceive what I perceive, or to do what I do⁠—no matter whether he gets the hint from me or independently of me. Discovery can give no right of ownership, for whatever is discovered must have been already here to be discovered. If a man make a wheelbarrow, or a book, or a picture, he has a moral right to that particular wheelbarrow, or book, or picture, but no right to ask that others be prevented from making similar things. Such a prohibition, though given for the purpose of stimulating discovery and invention, really in the long run operates as a check upon them. ↩

Besides the enormous increase in the productive power of labor which would result from the better distribution of population, there would be also a similar economy in the productive power of land. The concentration of population in cities fed by the exhaustive cultivation of large, sparsely populated areas, results in a literal draining into the sea of the elements of fertility. How enormous this waste is may be seen from the calculations that have been made as to the sewage of our cities, and its practical result is to be seen in the diminishing productiveness of agriculture in large sections. In a great part of the United States we are steadily exhausting our lands. ↩

In semi-scientific or popularized form this may perhaps be seen in best, because frankest, expression in The Martyrdom of Man, by