HB 111 (sra.Q> The Crime of Poverty myf HENRY GEORGE Joseph Fels Fund Edition >. .'X'^ * \' " ^ i .^'"'y o 0^ -O ' ' . * s ^ .'\ >' V>^ .^ V^^' ■p < ^^^ . o s c '•n. v^^ CO % ;*«, . .'°^. .x-?-' ■«k. .-^ 4" ^'% o. O ' D « V ■* .U <* xO^^ o 0^ :r xO°<. ,0- cOJ-' ,^^ ^^^. ' ''^^ .^^- : 1^ 'c^o' ^':^v c^ -n^ nO°.. w „ , '^^ * " 1 » ° <- .'^' ■x*' , '-*v "C* ^^- - ,<>^^ ,s^' ^n ^0^ V ^' -"' " " '\0^ ^^'''-v ""c-. ' A-*-^ .^ ^ -»='^ The Crime of Poverty The Crime of Poverty BY HENRY GEORGE AN ADDRESS Delivered in the Opera House, Burlington, Iowa, April 1, 1885, under the auspices of Burlington Assembly, No. 3135, Knights of Labor, which afterwards distributed fifty thousand copies in tract form T. .£ JOSEPH PELS FUND OF AMERICA Cincinnali, Ohio By iui^ouaiiga F E8 Bo 1929 HE)!7I The Crime of Poverty LADIES AND GENTLEMEN : I propose to talk to J you tonight of the Crime of Poverty. I cannot, in a short time, hope to convince you of much ; but the thing of things I should like to show you is that poverty is a crime. I do not mean that it is a crime to be poor. Murder is a crime ; but it is not a crime to be murdered; and a man who is in poverty I look upon not as a criminal in himself so much as the victim of a crime for which others, as well, perhaps, as himself, are responsible. That poverty is a curse, the bitterest of curses, we all know. Carlyle was right when he said that the hell of which Englishmen were most afraid was the hell of poverty ; and this is true, not of Englishmen alone, but of people all over the civilized world, no matter what their nationality. It is to escape this hell that we strive and strain and struggle ; and work on oftentimes in blind habit long after the necessity for work is gone. The curse born of poverty is not confined to tlie poor alone; it runs through all classes, even to the very rich. They, too, suffer; they must suffer; for there cannot be suffering in a community from which any class can totally escape. The vice, the crime, the ignorance, the meanness, born of poverty, poison, so to speak, the very air which rich and poor alike must breathe. I walked down one of your streets this morning, and I saw three men going along with tlieir hands chained together. I knew for certain that those men were not 6 The Crime of Poverty. rich men; and, although I do not know the offense for which they were carried in chains through your streets, this, I think, I can safely say, that, if you trace it up you will find it in some way to spring from poverty. Nine- tenths of human misery, I think you will find, if you look, to be due to poverty. If a man chooses to be poor, he commits no crime in being poor, provided his poverty hurts no one but himself. If a man has others dependent upon him; if there are a wife and children whom it is his duty to support, then, if he voluntarily chooses pov- erty, it is a crime — aye, and I think that, in most cases, the men who have no one to support but themselves are men that are shirking their duty. A woman comes into the world for every man ; and for every man who lives a single life, caring only for himself, there is some woman who is deprived of her natural supporter. But while a man who chooses to be poor cannot be charged with crime, it is certainly a crime to force poverty on others. And it seems to me clear that the great majority of those who suffer from poverty are poor not from their own particular faults, but because of conditions imposed by society at large. Therefore, I hold that poverty is a crime — not an individual crime, but a social crime; a crime for which we all, poor as well as rich,, are re- sponsible. Two or three weeks ago I went one Sunday evening to the church of a famous Brooklyn preacher. Mr. Sankey was singing, and something like a revival was going on there. The clergyman told some anecdotes connected with the revival, and recounted some of the reasons why men failed to become Christians. One case The Crime of Poverty. 7 he mentioned struck me. He said he had noticed on the outskirts of the congregation, night after night, a man who listened intently, and who gradually moved forward. One night, the clergyman said, he went to him, saying, "My brother, are you not ready to become a Christian?" The man said, no he Avas not. He said it, not in a defiant tone, but in a sorrowful tone. The clergyman asked him why, whether he did not believe in the truths he had been hearing? Yes, he believed them all. Why, then, wouldn't he become a Christian? "Well," he said, "I can't join the church without giving up my business ; and it is necessary for the support of my wife and children. If I give that up, I don't know how in the world I can get along. I had a hard time before I found my present business, and I cannot afford to give it up. Yet, I can't become a Christian without giving it up." The clergyman asked, "Are you a rum-seller?" No, he was not a rum-seller. Well, the clergyman said, he didn't know what in the world the man could be ; it seemed to him that a rum-seller was the only man who does a business that would prevent his becoming a Christian; and he finally said, "What is your business?" The man said, "I sell soap." "Soap !" exclaimed the clergyman, "you sell soap ? How in the world does that prevent you becoming a Christian ?" "Well," the man said, "it is this way; the soap I sell is one of these patent soaps that are extensively advertised as enabling you to clean clothes very quickly ; as containing no deleterious compound whatever. Every cake of the soap I sell is wrapped in a paper on which is printed a- statement that it contains no injurious chemicals, whereas the truth of the matter is 8 The Crime of Poverty. that it does, and that though it will take the dirt out of the clothes pretty quickly, it will, in a little while, rot them completely out. I have to make my living in this way ; and I cannot feel that I can become a Christian if I sell that soap." The minister went on, describing how he labored unsuccessfully with that man, and finally wound up by saying, "He stuck to his soap, and lost his soul." But, if that man lost his soul, was it his fault alone? Whose fault is it that social conditions are such that men have to make that terrible choice between what con- science tells them is right, and the necessity of earning a living? I hold that it is the fault of society; that it is the fault of us all. Pestilence is a curse. The man who would bring cholera to this country, or the man who, having the power to prevent its coming here, would make no effort to do so, would be guilty of a crime. Poverty is worse than cholera ; poverty kills more people than pesti- lence, even in the best of times. Look at the death statistics of our cities ; see where the deaths come quick- est ; see where it is that little children die like flies — it is in the poorer quarters. And the man who looks with careless eyes upon the ravages of this pestilence, the man who does not set himself to stay and eradicate it, he, I say, is guilty of a crime. If poverty is appointed by the power which is above us all, then it is no crime ; but if poverty is unnecessary, then it is a crime for which society is responsible, and for which society must suffer. I hold, and I think no one who looks at the facts can fail to see, that poverty is utterly unnecessary. It is not by the decree of the Almighty, but it is because of our The Crime of Poverty. 9 own injustice, our own selfishness, our own ignorance, that this scourge, worse than any pestilence, ravages our civilization, bringing want and suflfering and degradation, destroying souls as well as bodies. Look over the world, in this hey-day of nineteenth century civilization. In every civilized country under the sun you will find men and women whose condition is worse than that of the savage; men and women and little children with whom the veriest savage could not aflford to exchange. Even in this new city of yours, with virgin soil around you, you have had this winter to institute a relief society. Your roads have been filled with tramps, fifteen, I am told, at one time taking shelter in a round-house here. As here, so everywhere, and poverty is deepest where wealth most abounds. What more unnatural than this ? There is nothing in nature like this poverty which today curses us. We see rapine in nature ; we see one species destroying another ; but as a general thing animals do not feed on their own kind; and, wherever we see one kind enjoying plenty, all individuals of that kind share it. No man, I think, ever sav^ a herd of buflFalo, of which a few were fat and the great majority lean. No man ever saw a flock of birds, of which two or three were swimming in grease, and the others all skin and bone. Nor in savage life is there anything like the poverty that festers in our civilization. In a rude state of society there are seasons of want, seasons when people starve; but they are seasons when the earth has refused to yield her increase, when the rain has not fallen from the heavens, or when the land has been swept by some foe — not when there is plenty ; and lo The Crime of Poverty. yet the peculiar characteristic of this modern poverty of ours is, that it is deepest where wealth most abounds. Why, today, while over the civilized world there is so much distress, so much want? what is the cry that goes up? What is the current explanation of the hard times? Over-production! There are so many clothes that men must go ragged ; so much coal that in the bitter winters people have to shiver ; such over-filled granaries that people actually die by starvation! Want due to over-production ! Was a greater absurdity ever uttered ? How can there be over-production till all have enough? It is not over-production, it is unjust distribution. Poverty necessary ! Why, think of the enormous powers that are latent in the human brain ! Think how invention enables us to do with the power of one man, what not long ago could not be done by the power of a thousand. Think that in England alone, the steam ma- chinery in operation is said to exert a productive force greater than the physical force of the population of the world, were they all adults. And yet we have only begun to invent and discover. We have not yet utilized all that has already been invented and discovered. And look at the powers of the earth. They have hardly been touched. In every direction as we look, new resources seem to open, Man's ability to produce vv^ealth seems almost infinite — we can set no bounds to it. Look at the power that is flowing by your city in the current of the Missis- sippi that might be set at work for you. So in every direction energy that we might utilize goes to waste; resources that we might draw upon are untouched. Yet men are delving and straining to satisfy mere animal wants ; women are working, working, working their lives The Crime of Poverty. ii away, and too frequently turning in despair from that hard struggle to cast away all that makes the charm of woman. If the animals can reason, what must they think of us? Look at one of those great ocean steamers plough- ing her way across the Atlantic, against wind, against wave, absolutely setting at defiance the utmost power of the elements. If the gulls that hover over her were thinking beings, could they imagine that the animal that could create such a structure as that could actually want for enough to eat? Yet, so it is. How many even of those of us who find life easiest are there who really live a rational life? Think of it, you who believe that there is only one life for man — what a fool at the very best is a man to pass his life in this struggle to merely live? And you who believe, as I believe, that this is not the last of man, that this is a life that opens but another life, think how nine-tenths, aye, I do not know but ninety-nine hundredths of all our vital powers are spent in a mere effort to get a living ; or to heap together that which we cannot by any possibility take away. Take the life of the average workingman. Is that the life for which the human brain was intended and the human heart was made? Look at the factories scattered through our country. They are little better than penitentiaries. I read in the New York papers a while ago that the girls at the Yonkers factories had struck. The papers said that the girls did not seem to know why they had struck, and intimated that it must be just for the fun of striking. Then came out the girls' side of the story, and it appeared that they had struck against the rules in force. They were fined if they spoke to one another, and they were fined still more heavily if they laughed. I a The Crime of Poverty. There was a heavy fine for being a minute late. I visited a lady in Philadelphia who had been a forewoman in various factories, and I asked her, "Is it possible that such rules are enforced?" She said it was so in Phila- delphia. There is a fine for speaking to your next neigh- bor, a fine for laughing; and she told me that the girls in one place v/here she was employed were fined ten cents a minute for being late, though many of them had to come for miles in winter storms. She told me of one poor girl who really worked hard one week and made $3.50, but the fines against her were $5.25. That seems ridiculous ; it is ridiculous, but it is pathetic, and it is shameful. But take the cases of those even who are compara- tively independent and well off. Here is a man working hour after hour, day after day, week after week, in doing one thing over and over again, and for v/hat? Just to live. He is working ten hours a day in order that he may sleep eight, and may have two or three hours for himself when he is tired out and all his faculties are exhausted. That is not a reasonable life; that is not a life for a being possessed of the powers that are in man, and I think every man must have felt it for himself. I know that when I first went to my trade I thought to myself that it was incredible that a man was created to work all day long just to live. I used to read the Scien- tific American, and as invention after invention was heralded in that paper, I used to think to myself that when I became a man it would not be necessary to work so hard. But, on the contrary, the struggle for existence has become more and more intense. People who want to prove the contrary get up masses of statistics to show that the condition of the working classes is improving. The Crime of Poverty. 13 Improvement that you have to take a statistical micro- scope to discover does not amount to anything. But there is no improvement. Improvement ! Why, according to the last report of the Michigan Bureau of Labor Statistics, as I read yes- terday in a Detroit paper, taking all the trades, including some of the very high priced ones, where the wages are from $6 to $7 a day, the average earnings amount to $1.77, and taking out waste time, to $1.40. Now when you consider how a man can live and bring up a family on $1.40 a day, even in Michigan, I do not think you will conclude that the condition of the working classes can have very much improved. Here is a broad general fact that is asserted by all who have investigated the question, by such men as Hallam, the historian, and Professor Thorold Rogers, who has made a study of the history of prices as they were five centuries ago. When all the productive arts were in the most primitive state, when the most prolific of our modern vegetables had not been introduced, when the breeds of cattle were small and poor, when there were hardly any roads, and transportation was exceed- ingly difficult, when all manufacturing was done by hand — in that rude time the condition of the laborers of England was far better than it is today. In those rude times no man need fear want save when actual famine came, and owing to the difficulties of transportation the plenty of one district could not relieve the scarcity of another. Save in such times no man need fear want. Pauperism, such as exists in modern times, was abso- lutely unknown. Every one, save the physically disabled, could make a living, and the poorest lived in rude plenty. 14 The Crime of Poverty. But, perhaps, the most astonishing fact brought to light by this investigation is that at that time, under those conditions, in those "dark ages," as we call them, the working day was only eight hours. While, with all our modern inventions and improvements, our working classes have been agitating and struggling in vain to get the working day reduced to eight hours. Do these facts show improvement? Why, in the rudest state of society, in the most primitive state of the arts, the labor of the natural bread-winner will suffice to provide a living for himself and for those who are de- pendent upon him. Amid all our inventions there are large bodies of men who cannot do this. What is the most astonishing thing in our civilization? Why, the most astonishing thing to those Sioux chiefs who were recently brought from the Far West and taken through our manufacturing cities in the East, was not the marvel- ous inventions that enabled machinery to act almost as if it had intellect; it was not the growth of our cities; it was not the speed with which the railway car whirled along ; it was not the telegraph or the telephone that most astonished them, but the fact that amid this marvelous development of productive power, they found little chil- dren at work. And astonishing that ought to be to us ; a most astounding thing ! Talk about improvement in the condition of the working classes, when the facts are that a larger and larger proportion of women and children are forced to toil. Why, I am told that, even here in your own city, there are children of thirteen and fourteen working in factories. In Detroit, according to the report of the Michigan Bureau of Labor Statistics, one-half of the The Crime of Poverty. 15 children of school age do not go to school. In New Jersey, the report made to the legislature discloses an amount of misery and ignorance that is appalling. Chil- dren are growing up there, compelled to monotonous toil when they ought to be at play; children who do not know how to play ; children who have been so long accustomed to work that they have become used to it ; children grow- ing up in such ignorance that they do not know what country New Jersey is in, that they never heard of George Washington, that some of them think Europe is in New York. Such facts are appalling ; they mean that the very foundations of the republic are being sapped. The dangerous man is not the inan who tries to excite discontent; the dangerous man is the man who says that all is as it ought to be. Such a state of things cannot continue ; such tendencies as we see at work here cannot go on without bringing at last an overwhelming crash. I say that all this poverty and the ignorance that flows from it is unnecessary; I say that there is no natural reason why we should not all be rich, in the sense, not of having more than each other, but in the sense of all having enough to completely satisfy all physical wants; of all having enough to get such an easy living that we could develop the better part of humanity. There is no reason why wealth should not be so abundant, that no one should think of such a thing as little children at work, or a woman compelled to a toil that nature never intended her to perform; wealth so abundant that there would be no cause for that harassing fear that sometimes paralyzes even those who are not considered "the poor," the fear that every man of us has probably felt, that if sickness should smite him, or if he should be taken 1 6 The Crime of Poverty. away, those whom he loves better than his hfe would become charges upon charity. "Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow ; they toil not, neither do they spin." I believe that in a really Christian community, in a society that honored not with the lips but with the act, the doctrines of Jesus, no one would have occasion to worry about physical needs any more than do the lilies of the field. There is enough and to spare. The trouble is that, in this mad struggle, we trample in the mire what has been provided in sufficiency for us all; trample it in the mire while we tear and rend each other. There is a cause for this poverty, and if you trace it down, you will find its root in a primary injustice. Look over the world today — poverty everywhere. The cause must be a common one. You cannot attribute it to the tariff, or to the form of government, or to this thing or to that in which nations differ; because, as deep poverty is common to them all, the cause that produces it must be a common cause. What is that common cause? There is one sufficient cause that is common to all nations; and that is, the appropriation as the property of some, of that natural element on which and from which, all must live. Take that fact I have spoken of, that appalling fact that, even now, it is harder to live than it was in the ages dark and rude five centuries ago — how do you explain it? There is no difficulty in finding the cause. Whoever reads the history of England, or the history of any other civilized nation (but I speak of the history of England because that is the history with which we are best acquainted) will see the reason. For century after century a Parliament composed of aristocrats and employers passed laws endeavoring to reduce wages, but The Crime of Poverty. 17 in vain. Men could not be crowded down to wages that gave a mere living because the bounty of nature was not wholly shut up from them ; because some remains of the recognition of tlie truth that all men have equal rights on the earth still existed ; because the land of that coun- try, that which was held in private possession, was only held on a tenure derived from the nation, and for a rent payable back to the nation. The church lands supported the expenses of public worship, of the maintenance of seminaries, and the care of the poor ; the crown lands defrayed the expenses of the civil list; and from a third portion of the lands, those held under military tenures, the army was provided for. There was no national debt in England at that time. They carried on wars for hundreds of years, but at the charge of the landowners. And, more important still, there remained everywhere, and you can see in every old English town their traces to this day, the common lands to which any of the neigh- borhood was free. It was as those lands were enclosed ; it was as the commons were gradually monopolized, as the church lands were made the prey of greedy courtiers, as the crown lands were given away as absolute property to the favorites of the king, as the military tenants shirked their rents, and laid the expenses they had agreed to defray upon the nation in taxation, that bore upon industry and upon thrift — it was then that poverty began to deepen, and the tramp appeared in England, just as today he is appearing in our new States. Now, think of it — is not land monopolization a suffi- cient reason for poverty? What is man? In the first place, he is an animal, a land animal, who cannot live without land. All that man produces comes from land, 1 8 The Crime of Poverty. all productive labor in the final analysis consists in work- ing up land ; or materials are drawn from land into such forms as fit them for the satisfaction of human wants and desires. Why, man's very body is drawn from the land. Children of the soil, we come from the land, and to the land we must return. Take away from man all that belongs to the land, and what have you but a dis- embodied spirit? Therefore, he who holds the land on which and from which another man must live, is that man's master; and the man is his slave. The man who holds the land on which I must live can command me to life or to death just as absolutely as though I were his chattel. Talk about abolishing slavery — ;we have not abolished slavery — we have only abolished one rude form of it, chattel slavery. There is a deeper and more insidious form, a more cursed form yet before us to abolish, in this industrial slavery that makes a man a virtual slave, while taunting him and mocking him with the name of freedom. Poverty ! want ! they will sting as much as the lash. Slavery ! God knows there are horrors enough in slavery; but there are deeper horrors in our civilized society today. Bad as chattel slavery was, it did not drive slave mothers to kill their children, yet you may read in official reports that the system of child insurance, which has taken root so strongly in England, and which is now spreading over our Eastern States, has perceptibly and largely increased the rate of child mortality! — What does that mean? Robinson Crusoe, as you know, when he rescued Friday from the cannibals, made him his slave. Friday had to serve Crusoe. But, supposing Crusoe had said, The Crime of Poverty. 19 "Oh, man and brother, I am very glad to see you, and I welcome you to this island, and you shall be a free and independent citizen, with just as much to say as I have — except that this island is mine — and, of course, as I can do as I please with my own property, you must not use it save upon my terms," Friday would have been just as much Crusoe's slave as though he had called him one. Friday was not a fish, he could not swim ofif through the sea; he was not a bird, and could not fly ofif through the air; if he lived at all, he had to live on that island. And if that island was Crusoe's, Crusoe was his master through life to death. A friend of mine, who believes as I do upon this question, was talking a while ago with another friend of mine who is a greenbacker, but who had not paid much attention to the land question. " Our greenbacker friend said, "Yes, yes, the land question is an important ques- tion; oh, I admit that the land question is a very im- portant question ; but then there are other important ques- tions. There is this question, and that question, and the other question; and there is the money question. The money question is a very important question; it is a more important question than the land question. You give me all the money, and you can take all the land." My friend said, "Well, suppose you had all the money in the world and I had all the land in the world, what would you do if I were to give you notice to quit?" Do you know that I do not think the average man realizes what land is? I know a little girl who has been going to school for some time, studying geography, and all that sort of tiling ; and one day she said to me : "Here 20 The Crime of Poverty, is something about the surface of the earth. I wonder what the surface of the earth looks like?" "Well," I said, "look out into the yard there. That is the surface of the earth." She said, "That the surface of the earth ? Our yard the surface of the earth? Why, I never thought of it !" That is very much the case not only with grown men, but with such wise beings as newspaper editors. They seem to think, when you talk of land, that you always refer to farms ; to think that the land question is a question that relates entirely to farmers, as though land had no other use than growing crops. Now, I should like to know how a man could even edit a news- paper without having the use of some land. He might swing himself by straps and go up in a balloon, but he could not even then get along without land. What sup- ports the balloon in the air? Land; the surface of the earth. Let the earth drop, and what would become of the balloon? The air that supports the balloon is sup- ported in turn by land. So it is with everything else men can do. Whether a man is working away three thousand feet under the surface of the earth, or whether he is working up in the top of one of those immense buildings they have in New York, whetlier he is ploughing the soil or sailing across the ocean, he is still using land. Land! Why, in owning a piece of ground, what do you own? The lawyers will tell you that you own from the center of the earth right up to heaven ; and, so far as all human purposes go, you do. In New York tliey are building houses thirteen and fourteen stories high. What are men, living in those upper stories, paying for ? There is a friend of mine who has an office in one of them, and he estimates that he pays by the cubic foot for air. Well, The Crime of Poverty. 21 the man who owns the surface of the land has the renting of the air up there, and would have if the buildings were carried up for miles. This land question is the bottom question. Man is a land animal. Suppose you want to build a house ; can you build it without a place to put it? What is it built of? Stone, or mortar, or wood, or iron — they all come from the earth. Think of any article of wealth you choose, any of those things which men struggle for, where do they come from? From the land. It is the bottom question. The land question is simply the labor question ; and when some men own that element from which all wealth must be drawn, and upon which all must live, then they have the power of living without work, and, therefore, those who do work get less of the products of work. Did you ever think of the utter absurdity and strange- ness of the fact that, all over the civilized world, the working classes are the poor classes? Go into any city in the world, and get into a cab, and ask the man to drive you to where the working people live; he won't take you to where the fine houses are ; he will take you, on the contrary, into the squalid quarters, tlie poorer quarters. Did you ever think how curious that is? Think for a moment how it would strike a rational being who had never been on the earth before, if such an intelli- gence could come down, and you were to explain to him how we live on earth, how houses, and food and clothing, and all the many things we need, are all produced by work, would he not think that the working people would be the people who lived in the finest houses and had most of everything that work produces? Yet, whether 22 The Crime of Poverty. you took him to London or Paris, or New York, or even to Burlington, he would find that those called working people were the people who lived in the poorest houses. All this is strange— just think of it. We naturally despise poverty; and it is reasonable that we should. I do not say— I distinctly repudiate it— that the people who are poor are poor always from their own fault, or even in most cases ; but it ought to be so. If any good man or woman had the power to create a world, it would be a sort of a world in which no one would be poor unless he was lazy or vicious. But that is just precisely the kind of a world that this is; that is just precisely the kind of a world that the Creator has made. Nature gives to labor, and to labor alone; there must be human work before any article of wealth can be produced; and, in a natural state of things, the man who toiled honestly and well would be the rich man, and he who did not work would be poor. We have so reversed the order of nature, that we are accustomed to think of a workingman as a poor man. And if you trace it out I believe you will see that the primary cause of this is that we compel those who work to pay others for permission to do so. You buy a coat, a horse, a house ; there you are paying the seller for labor exerted, for something that he has produced, or that he has got from the man who did produce it ; but when you pay a man for land, what are you paying him for ? You pay him for something that no man produced ; you pay him for something that was here before man was, or for a value that was created, not by him individually, but by the community of which you are a part. What is the reason that the land here, where we stand tonight, is worth more than it was twenty-five years ago ? What is The Crime of Poverty. 23 the reason that land in the center of New York, that once could be bought by the mile for a Jug of whiskey, is now worth so much that, though you were to cover it with gold, you would not have its value ? Is it not because of the increase of population? Take away that population, and where would the value of the land be? Look at it in any way you please. We talk about over-production. How can there be such a thing as over-production while people want? All these things that are said to be over-produced are desired by many people. Why do they not get them? They do not get them because they have not the means to buy them; not that they do not want them. Why have they not the means to buy them ? They earn too little. When great masses of men have to work for an average of $1.40 a day, it is no wonder that great quantities of goods cannot be sold. Now, why is it that men have to work for such low wages? Because, if they were to demand higher wages, there are plenty of unemployed men ready to step into their places. It is this mass of unemployed men who compel that fierce competition that drives wages down to the point of bare subsistence. Why is it that there are men who cannot get employment? Did you ever think what a strange thing it is that men cannot find employ- ment? Adam had no difficulty in finding employment; neither had Robinson Crusoe ; the finding of employment was the last thing that troubled them. If men cannot find an employer, why can they not employ themselves? Simply because they are shut out from the element on which human labor can alone be exerted; men are compelled to compete with each other 24 The Crime of Poverty. for the wages of an employer, because they have been robbed of the natural opportunities of employing them- selves; because they cannot find a piece of God's world on which to work without paying some other human creature for the privilege. I do not mean to say that, even after you had set right this fundamental injustice, there would not be many things to do ; but this I do mean to say, that our treatment of land lies at the bottom of all social questions. This I do mean to say, that, do what you please, reform as you may, you never can get rid of widespread poverty so long as the element on which, and from which, all men must live is made the private property of some men. It is utterly impossible. Reform government — get taxes down to the minimum — build railways ; institute co-operative stores; divide profits, if you choose, between employers and employed — and what will be the result? The result will be that land will increase in value — that will be the result — that and nothing else. Experience shows this. Do not all improvements simply increase the value of land — the price that some must pay others for the privi- lege of living? Consider the matter. I say it with all reverence, and merely say it because I wish to impress a truth upon your minds — it is utterly impossible, so long as His laws are what they are, that God Himself could relieve poverty — utterly impossible. Think of it, and you will see. Men pray to the Almighty to relieve poverty. But poverty comes not from God's laws — it is blasphemy of the worst kind to say that; it comes from man's injustice to his fellows. Supposing the Almighty were to hear the prayer, how could He carry out the request, so long as The Crime of Poverty. 25 His laws are what they are? Consider — the Almighty gives Lts nothing of the things that constitute wealth ; He merely gives us the raw material, which must be utilized by man to produce wealth. Does He not give us enough of that now? How could He relieve poverty even if He were to give us more? Supposing, in answer to these prayers, He were to increase the power of the sun, or the virtues of the soil? Supposing He were to make plants more prolific, or animals to produce after their kind more abundantly ? Who would get the benefit of it ? Take a country where land is completely monopo- lized, as it is in most of the civilized countries — who would get the benefit of it? Simply the landowners. And even if God, in answer to prayer, were to send down out of the heavens those things that men require, who would get the benefit? In the Old Testament we are told that, when the Israelites journeyed through the desert, they were hun- gered, and that God sent down out of the heavens — manna. There was enough for all of them, and they all took it and were relieved. But, supposing that desert had been held as private property, as the soil of Great Britain is held ; as the soil even of our new States is being held. Supposing that one of the Israelites had a square mile, and another one had twenty square miles, and another one had a hundred square miles, and the great majority of the Israelites did not have enough to set the soles of their feet upon, which they could call their own — what would become of the manna? What good would it have done to the majority? Not a whit. Though God had sent down manna enough for all, that manna would have been the property of the landholders; they would 26 The Crime of Poverty. have employed some of the others, perhaps, to gather it up in heaps for them, and would have sold it to the hungry brethren. Consider it: this purchase and sale of manna might have gone on until the majority of the Israelites had given up all they had, even to the clothes off their backs. What then ? Well, then they would not have had anything left with which to buy manna, and the consequence would have been that while they went hungry the manna would be lying in great heaps, and the landowners would be complaining about the over-produc- tion of manna. There would have been a great harvest of manna and hungry people, just precisely the phenom- enon that we see today. I cannot go over all the points I would like to; but I wish to call your attention to the utter absurdity of private property in land ! Why, consider it — the idea of a man selling the earth — the earth, our common mother. A man selling that which no man produced. A man passing title from one generation to another. Why, it is the most absurd thing in the world. Did you ever think of this ? What right has a dead man to land ? For whom was this earth created? It was created for the living, certainly not for the dead. Well, now, we treat it as though it was created for the dead. Where do our land titles come from? They come from men who, for the most part, have passed and gone. Here, in this new country, you get a little nearer the original source; but go to the Eastern States, and go over the Atlantic- There you may clearly see the power that comes from landownership. As I say, the man that owns the land is the master of those who must live on it. Here is a modern instance : The Crime of Poverty. 27 you who are familiar with the history of the Scottish Church know that in the forties there was a disruption in the church. You who have read Hugh Miller's work on The Cruise of the Betsey know something about it; how a great body, led by Dr. Chalmers, came out from the Established Church and said they would set up a Free Church. In the Established Church were a great many of the landowners. Some of them, like the Duke of Buccleuch, owning miles and miles of land on which no common Scotsman had a right to put his foot save by die Duke of Buccleuch's permission. These landowners refused not only to allow these Free Churchmen to have ground upon w^hich to erect a church, but they would not let them stand on their land and worship God. You who have read The Cruise of the Betsey know that it is the story of a clergyman who was obliged to make his home in a boat on the wild sea, because he was not allowed to have land enough to live on. In many places the people had to take the Sacrament with the tide coming to their knees — many a man lost his life worship- ping on the roads, in the rain and snow. They were not permitted to go on Mr. Landlord's land and worship God, and had to take to the roads. The Duke of Buccleuch stood out for seven years, compelling people to worship on the roads, until finally, relenting a little, he allowed them to do so in a gravel pit ; whereupon they passed a resolution of thanks to his Grace. But that is not what I wanted to tell you. The thing that struck me was this significant fact: as soon as the disruption occurred the Free Church, composed of a great many able men, at once sent a deputation to tlie 28 The Crime of Poverty. landlords to ask permission for Scotsmen to worship God in Scotland and in their own way. This deputation set out for London — they had to go to London, England, to get permission for Scotsmen to worship God in Scot- land and in their own native home ! But that is not the most absurd thing. In one place, when they were refused land upon which to stand and worship God, the late landowner had died and his estate was in the hands of the trustees, and the answer of the trustees was that, so far as they were concerned, they would exceedingly like to allow them to have a place to put up a church to worship, but they could not con- scientiously do it, because they knew that such a course would be very displeasing to the late Mr. Monaltie ! Now, this dead man had gone to heaven, let us hope; at any rate he had gone away from this world, but, lest it might displease him, men yet living could not worship God. Is it possible for absurdity to go any further? You may say that those Scottish people are a very absurd people, but they are not a whit more so than we are; I read only a little while ago of some Long Island fishermen who had been paying as rent for the privilege of fishing there, a certain part of the catch. They paid it because they believed that James II., a dead man centuries ago, a man who never put his foot in America, a king who was kicked off the English throne, had said they had to pay it, and they got up a committee, went to the county town and searched the records. They could not find anything in the records to show that James II. had ever ordered that they should give any of their fish to anybody, and so they refused to pay any longer. But The Crime of Poverty. 29 if they had found that James II. had really said they should, they would have gone on paying. Can anything be more absurd? There is a square in New York — Stuyvesant Square — it is locked up at six o'clock every evening, even on long summer evenings. Why is it locked up? Why are the children not allowed to play there ? Why, because old Mr. Stuyvesant, dead and gone I don't know how many years ago, so willed it. Now, can anything be more absurd? Yet, that is not any more absurd than our land titles. From whom do they come? Dead man after dead man. Suppose you get on the cars here going to Council Bluffs or Chicago. You find a passenger with his baggage strewn over the seats. You say, "Will you give me a seat, if you please, sir?" He replies, "No; I bought this seat." "Bought this seat ? From v/hom did you buy it ?" "I bought it from the man who got out at the last station." That is the way we manage this earth of ours. Is it not a self-evident truth, as Thomas Jefferson said, that "the land belongs in usufruct to the living," and that they who have died have left it, and have no power to say how it shall be disposed of ? Title to land ! Where can a man get any title which makes the earth his property? There is a sacred right to property — sacred because ordained by the laws of nature, that is to say, by the law of God, and necessary to social order and civiliza- tion. That is the right of property in things produced by labor; it rests on the right of a man to himself. That which a man produces, that is his against all the world, to give or to keep, to lend, to sell or to bequeath; but how 30 The Crime of Poverty. can he get such a right to land when it was here before he came? Individual claims to land rest only on appro- priation. I read in a recent number of the Nineteenth Century, possibly some of you have read it, an article by an ex-Prime Minister of AustraHa, in which there was a little story that attracted my attention. It was of a man named Galahard, who, in the early days, got up to the top of a high hill in one of the finest parts of Western Australia. He got up there, looked all round, and made his proclamation : "All the land that is in sight from the top of this hill I claim for myself : and all the land that is out of sight I claim for my son John." That story is of universal application. Land titles everywhere come from just such appropriation. Now, under certain circumstances, appropriation can give a right. You invite a company of gentlemen to dinner, and you say to them, "Be seated, gentlemen," and I get into this chair. Well, that seat, for the time being, is mine by the right of appropriation. It would be very ungentlemanly, it would be very wrong, for any of the other guests to come up and say, "Get out of that chair, I want to sit there !" But that right of possession, which is good so far as the chair is concerned for the time, does not give me a right to appropriate all there is on the table before me. Grant that a man has a right to appro- priate such natural elements as he can use, has he any right to appropriate more than he can use ? Has a guest, in such a case as I have supposed, a right to appropriate more than he needs, and make other people stand up? That is what is done. Why, look all over this country — look at this town or any other town. If men took only what they wanted The Crime of Poverty. 31 to use we should all have enough ; but they take what they do not want to use at all. Here are a lot of English- men coming over here and getting titles to our land in vast tracts ; what do they want with our land ? They do not want it at all ; it is not the land they want ; they have no use for American land. What they want is the income that they know they can in a little while get from it. Where does that income come from? It comes from labor, from the labor of American citizens. What we are selling to these people is our children, not land. Poverty? Can there be any doubt of its cause? Go into the old countries — go into western Ireland, into the Highlands of Scotland ; there are purely primitive com- unities. There you will find people as poor as poor can be — living year after year on oatmeal or on potatoes, and often going hungry. I could tell you many a pathetic story. Speaking to a Scottish physician who was telling me how this diet was inducing among these people a disease similar to that which from the same cause is ravaging Italy (the Pellagra), I said to him: "There is plenty of fish; why don't they catch fish? There is plenty of game. I know the laws are against it, but cannot they take it on the sly?" "That," he said, "never enters their heads. Why, if a man was even suspected of having a taste for trout or grouse he would have to leave at once." There is no difficulty in discovering what makes those people poor. They have no right to any- thing that nature gives them. All they can make above a living they must pay to the landlord. They not only have to pay for the land that they use, but they have to pay for the seaweed that comes ashore and for the turf 32 The Crime of Poverty. they dig from the bogs. They dare not improve, for any improvements they make are made an excuse for putting up the rent. These people who work hard, live in hovels, and the landlords, who do not work at all — oh! they live in luxury in London or Paris. If they have hunting boxes there, why, they are magnificent castles as com- pared with the hovels in which the men live who do the work. Is there any question as to the cause of the poverty there? Now, go into the cities, and what do you see? Why, you see even a lower depth of poverty; aye, if I would point out the worst evils of land monopoly I would not take you to Connemara ; I would not take you to Skye or Kintyre — I would take you to Dublin, or Glasgow or London. There is something worse than physical de- privation, something worse than starvation; and that is the degradation of the mind, the death of the soul. That is what you will find in those cities. Now, what is the cause of that? Why, it is plainly to be seen ; the people driven off the land in the country are driven into the slums of the cities. For every man that is driven off the land, the demand for the produce of the workmen of the cities is lessened; and the man himself, with his wife and children, is forced among those workmen to compete upon any terms for a bare living and force wages down. Get work he must or starve — get work he must, or do that which those people, so long as they maintain their manly feelings, dread more than death, go to the almshouse. That is the reason, here as in Great Britain, that the cities are overcrowded. Open the land that is locked up, that is held by dogs-in- The Crime of Poverty. 33 the-manger, who will not use it themselves and will not allow anybody else to use it, and you would see no more of tramps and hear no more of over-production. The utter absurdity of this thing of private property in land ! I defy anyone to show me any good from it, look where you please. Go out to the new lands, where my attention was first called to it, or go to the heart of the capital of the world — London. Everywhere, when your eyes are once opened, you will see its inequality and you will see its absurdity. You do not have to go farther than Burlington. You have here a most beautiful site for a city, but the city itself, as compared with what it might be, is a miserable, straggling town. A gentle- man showed me today a big hole alongside one of your streets. The place has been filled up all around it, and this hole is left. It is neither pretty nor useful. Why does that hole stay there? Well, it stays there because somebody claims it as his private property. There is a man, this gentleman told me, who wished to grade an- other lot, and wanted somewhere to put the dirt he took off it, and he offered to buy this hole so that he might fill it up. Now, it would have been a good thing for Burlington to have it filled up, a good thing for you all — your town would look better, and you yourselves would be in no danger of tumbling into it some dark night. Why, my friend pointed out to me another similar hole in which water had collected, and told me that two children had been drowned there. And he likewise told me that a drunken man some years ago had fallen into such a hole, and had brought a suit against the city which cost you taxpayers some $11,000. Clearly it is to the interests of you all to have that particular hole I am 34 The Crime of Poverty. talking of filled up. The man who wanted to fill it up offered the hole-owner $300. But the hole-owner refused the offer, and declares he will hold out until he can get $1,000; and, in the meanwhile, that unsightly and dan- gerous hole must remain. That is but an illustration of private property in land. You may see the same thing all over this country. See how injuriously in the agricultural districts this thing of private property in land affects the roads and the distances between the people. A man does not take what land he wants, what he can use; but he takes all he can get, and the consequence is that his next neighbor has to go further along, people are separated from each other ■further than they ought to be, to the increased difficulty of production, to the loss of neighborhood and compan- ionship. They have more roads to maintain than they can decently maintain ; they must do more work to get the same result, and life is in every way harder and drearier. When you come to the cities, it is just the other way. In the country the people are too much scattered ; in the great cities they are too crowded. Go to a city like New York, and there they are jammed together like sardines in a box, living family upon family, one above the other. It is an utterly unnatural and unwholesome life. How can you have anything like a home in a tene- ment of two or three rooms? How can children be brought up healthily with no place to play? Two or three weeks ago I read of a New York judge who fined two little boys five dollars for playing hop-scotch on the street — where else could they play? Private property in land had robbed them of all place to play. Even a tem- perance man, who had investigated the subject, said that The Crime of Poverty. 35 in his opinion the gin palaces of London were a positive good in this, that they enabled the people whose abodes were dark and squalid rooms to see a little brightness, and thus prevent them from going wholly mad. What is the reason for this overcrowding of cities? There is no natural reason. Take New York, one-half of its area is not built upon. Why, then, must people crowd together as they do there? Simply because of private ownership of land. There is plenty of room to build houses, and plenty of people who want to build houses, but before anybody can build a house a blackmail price must be paid to some dog-in-the-manger. It costs, in many cases, more to get vacant ground upon which to build a house than it does to build the house. And then what happens to the man who pays this blackmail and builds a house? Down comes the tax-gatherer and fines him for building the house. It is so all over the United States — the men who improve, the men who turn the prairie into farms, and the desert into gardens, the men who beautify your cities, are taxed and fined for having done these things. Now, nothing is clearer than that the people of New York want more houses ; and I think that even here in Burlington you could get along with more houses. Why, then, should you fine a man that builds one? Look all over this country — the bulk of the taxation rests upon the improver; the man who puts up a building or estab- lishes a factory, or cultivates a farm, he is taxed for it; and not merely taxed for it, but I think, in nine cases out of ten, the land which he uses, the bare land, is taxed more than the adjoining lot, or the adjoining 160 acres 36 The Crime of Poverty. that some speculator is holding as a mere dog-in-the- manger, not using it himself, and not allowing anybody else to use it. I am talking too long; but let me, in a few words, point out the way of getting rid of land monopoly, securing the right of all to the elements which are neces- sary for life. We could not divide the land. In a rude state of society, as among the ancient Hebrews, giving each family its lot, and making it inalienable, we might secure something like equality. But in a complex civil- ization that will not suffice. It is not, however, necessary to divide up the land. All that is necessary is to divide up the income that comes from the land. In that way we can sectire absolute equality; nor could the adoption of this principle involve any rude shock or violent change. It can be brought about gradually and easily by abolish- ing the taxes that now rest upon capital, labor, and im- provements, and raising all our public revenues by the taxation of land values ; and the longer you think of it the clearer you will see that in every possible way it will be a benefit. Now, supposing we should abolish all other taxes, direct and indirect, substituting for them a tax upon land values, what would be the effect ? In the first place, it would be to kill speculative values. It would be to remove from the newer parts of the country the bulk of the taxation, and put it on the richer parts. It would be to exempt the pioneer from taxation, and make the larger cities pay more of it. It would be to relieve energy and enterprise, capital and labor, from all those burdens that now bear upon them. What a start that would give to The Crime of Poverty. 37 production ! In the second place, we could, from the value of land, not merely pay all the present expenses of government, but we could do infinitely more. In the city of San Francisco, James Lick left a few blocks of ground to be used for public purposes there, and the rent amounts to so much, that out of it will be built the largest telescope in the world, large public baths, and other public buildings, and various costly monuments. If, instead of these few blocks, the whole value of the land upon which the city is built had accrued to San Fran- cisco, what could she not do ? So in this little town, where land values are very low as compared with such cities as Chicago and San Francisco, you could do many things for mutual benefit and public improvement did you appropriate to public purposes the land values that now go to individuals. You could have a great free library; you could have an art gallery; you could get yourselves a public park, a magnificent public park, too. You have here one of the finest natural sites for a beautiful town that I know of, and I have traveled much. You might make on this site a city that it would be a pleasure to live in. You will not, as you go now — oh! no! Why, the very fact that you have a magnificent view here will cause somebody to hold on all the more tightly to the land that commands this view, and charge higher prices for it. The State of New York wants to buy a strip of land so as to enable the people to see the Niagara, but what a price she must pay for it. Look at all the great cities ; in Philadelphia, for instance, in order to build their great city hall they had to block up the only two wide streets they had in the 38 The Crime of Poverty. city. Everywhere you go you may see how private property in land prevents pubUc as well as private improvement. But I have no time to enter further into details. I can only ask you to think upon this thing, and the more you will see its desirability. As an English friend of mine puts it, "No taxes and a pension for everybody;" and why should it not be ? To take land values for public purposes is not really to impose a tax, but to take for public purposes a value created by the community. And out of the fund which would thus accrue from the com- mon property, we might, without degradation to anybody, provide enough to actually secure from want all who were deprived of their natural protectors, or met with accident; or any man who should grow so old that he could not work. All prating that is heard from some quarters about its hurting the common people to give them what they do not work for is humbug. The truth is, that anything that injures self-respect, degrades, does harm ; but if you give it as a right, as something to which every citizen is entitled, it does not degrade. Charity schools do degrade the children that are sent to them, but public schools do not. But all such benefits as these, while great, would be incidental. The great thing would be that the reform I propose would tend to open opportunities to labor and enable men to provide employment for themselves. That is the great advantage. We should gain the enormous productive power that is going to waste all over the country, the power of idle hands that would gladly be at work. And that removed, then you would see wages begin to mount. It is not that everyone would turn The Crhne of Poverty. 39 farmer, or everyone build himself a house if he had an opportunity for doing so, but so many could, and would, as to relieve the pressure on the labor market and provide employment for all others. And as wages mounted to the higher levels then you would see the productive power increased. The country where wages are high is the country of greatest productive power. Where wages are highest there will invention be most active; there will labor be most intelligent ; there will be the greatest yield for the expenditure of exertion. The more you think of it the more clearly you will see what I say is true. I cannot hope to convince you in talking for an hour or two, but I shall be content if I shall put you upon inquiry. 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