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- Herausgeber: DigiCat
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Progress and Poverty," Henry George offers a groundbreaking exploration of the intricate relationship between economic growth and social inequality. Written in a compelling prose style that expertly blends political economy with moral philosophy, George critiques conventional economic theories and argues that progress should benefit all members of society. The book comprises two volumes, where George delves into the causes of poverty amidst material advancement, proposing his influential single tax on land value as a solution. His work serves as a salient reflection of the Gilded Age in America, a period marked by industrialization and stark wealth disparities, making it deeply relevant both historically and contextually. As a brilliant economist and social reformer, Henry George was profoundly influenced by the stark contrast between rapid wealth accumulation and widespread poverty he observed in post-Civil War America. His upbringing in a working-class family and later experiences as a land surveyor informed his understanding of land ownership and its implications for economic justice. Through personal hardship and a committed belief in the betterment of society, George penned this seminal work, aiming to ignite reform and galvanize social consciousness around economic equity. "Progress and Poverty" is a must-read for anyone interested in the intersections of economics, social justice, and public policy. Its timeless arguments resonate today, providing crucial insights into contemporary discussions on wealth distribution and economic reform. Readers will not only gain an understanding of the historical context but will also be equipped with philosophical and practical tools to critically engage with ongoing issues of inequality. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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Progress and Poverty, Volumes I and II
Table of Contents
Introduction
Why, amid swelling cities, expanding industry, and multiplying inventions, do wages stagnate, slums spread, and cycles of boom and bust return, and what structural force binds advance to privation, is the relentless question that animates Henry George’s Progress and Poverty, a work that seizes the paradox of modern growth—ever-greater production alongside enduring want—and pursues it past comforting explanations to the underlying mechanics of land, labor, and capital, seeking the point at which social improvement turns back upon itself and examining how a community’s gains can, through entrenched arrangements, be converted into hardship for many and unearned advantage for few, and why reform must begin from first principles rather than expedients.
First published in 1879, this treatise of political economy and social philosophy emerged from the intense industrialization and urbanization of the late nineteenth century. George writes as an American observer of rapidly changing cities and labor markets, yet his analysis ranges across nations grappling with similar transformations. Volumes I and II introduce the inquiry, define central terms, and establish the economic terrain on which his argument proceeds. The setting is the marketplace and the street as much as the study: factories, farms, railways, and speculative districts appear as evidence for a systemic investigation into how wealth is created, distributed, and claimed.
Rather than beginning with policy, George frames a sustained inquiry into causes, testing familiar doctrines about wages, capital, interest, and rent against observed facts and practical reasoning. The voice is lucid, insistent, and often vivid, moving from concrete examples to general principles with a determination to keep non-specialists in view. He argues from first definitions, builds step by step, and pauses to examine objections before advancing. The tone blends moral urgency with analytical patience, yielding a reading experience that is both polemical and pedagogical, inviting readers to reconstruct the economic world as a coherent structure rather than a tangle of incidents.
At the heart of these volumes are questions about distribution: why productivity gains can coincide with low wages, why rents rise in expanding cities, and how ownership claims shape the rewards of growth. George distinguishes the roles of land, labor, and capital, stressing the peculiar status of land as a prerequisite for all production. He explores how speculation in location and resource access can magnify inequality and destabilize enterprise. Ethical reflection interlaces the analysis, connecting economic arrangements to civic freedom and opportunity. The result is a framework that treats prosperity as a social architecture, not merely an accumulation of private success.
Part of the work’s endurance lies in its scope and method rather than any particular statistic or episode. By unifying moral reflection with an examination of everyday economic relations, George offers a way to see crises not as isolated misfortunes but as patterned outcomes. He aims to connect household experience to institutional rules, making abstract categories palpable without reducing them to anecdote. The argument’s architecture, attentive to both logic and lived realities, equips readers to ask durable questions about who gains from growth and why. That capacity for reframing problems continues to make the book a catalyst for serious civic thinking.
For contemporary readers, the book’s relevance is evident wherever housing costs outpace incomes, urban land appreciates faster than productive investment, or public revenue struggles to keep pace with infrastructure needs. George’s distinctions among land, labor, and capital illuminate policy questions about taxation, planning, and the commons, while his attention to speculation speaks to volatility across real estate and resource markets. Even when one contests his conclusions, the analytic lens clarifies how location, access, and legal titles distribute opportunity. The insistence on connecting efficiency with fairness challenges polarized debates, encouraging proposals that reconcile growth with broad participation in its gains.
Reading Volumes I and II today means entering an argument that begins with puzzles instead of programs, proceeds by clearing conceptual ground, and asks the reader to test each step against common sense and observation. The prose rewards unhurried attention, and the cumulative structure makes the later claims intelligible only after the earlier distinctions are grasped. Without foreclosing outcomes, these opening books map the forces George believes decisive, from the character of rent to the logic of value, and prepare the stage for proposals that follow. They offer, above all, a disciplined way to think about prosperity, justice, and shared space.
Synopsis
Henry George’s Progress and Poverty (1879) begins with a stark puzzle: how modern advances in production, technology, and trade coincide with entrenched poverty and recurring depressions. Across two volumes, George seeks a cause that is consistent with observed facts and classical economic principles, and a remedy that aligns with justice and social stability. He sets out methodically, defining wealth, capital, and land as distinct categories, and committing to follow the logic of production and distribution to their sources. The inquiry proceeds from description of symptoms to analysis of underlying laws, aiming to explain why progress elevates aggregate wealth yet fails to raise general well-being proportionately.
George first surveys prevailing doctrines to test whether they explain the paradox. He rejects the wages-fund theory, arguing that wages are not limited by a predetermined stock of capital but by what labor can produce at the prevailing opportunities. He distinguishes between wealth that is produced and reproducible, capital that aids further production, and land as the field and material of all labor. This taxonomy supports his contention that distribution cannot be understood by treating land as ordinary capital. He then examines interest and profits, maintaining that returns to capital depend on productive opportunities rather than on any arbitrary or historic fund.
Turning to population, George contests the view that poverty is driven chiefly by demographic pressure. He asserts that productive capacity expands with knowledge and organization, so that scarcity arises not inevitably from numbers but from institutional arrangements. He adopts and extends the classical law of rent, relating rent to differences between the best and marginal opportunities open to labor. As the margin of cultivation or access shifts, the share available to labor and capital changes. This framework allows him to trace how increases in productivity can, paradoxically, raise rents faster than wages, transferring gains from improvement to owners of superior locations.
George then connects this distributional mechanism to cycles of boom and stagnation. In advancing communities, he argues, speculative holding and private appropriation of rising land values impede access to natural opportunities. As land values climb, enterprises face higher fixed charges, and workers confront barriers to self-employment or settlement at the margin. The compression of the margin, not a deficiency of capital or a surplus of labor, explains falling wages and lingering unemployment amid abundance. Urban concentration magnifies these effects, because improvements in transport and industry capitalize into location values, which accrue as rent rather than as broadly shared gains.
From this diagnosis he derives a single, central remedy: to appropriate for public use the economic rent of land while leaving private ownership of improvements intact. By taxing the unimproved value of land and remitting taxes on labor, capital, and exchange, George contends that idle holding would cease to be profitable, the margin would expand, and wages would rise with productivity. Public revenue could be drawn from a fund created by social progress and natural advantages, without burdening production. He emphasizes that this proposal concerns site value, not buildings or machinery, and that it avoids bureaucratic management of land.
He addresses objections regarding capital flight, building activity, and interest, arguing that removing taxes on industry would stimulate investment while rent capture would not penalize production. He presents a moral claim that the earth is a common inheritance, while the products of labor rightly belong to individuals, seeking a path between collectivism and laissez-faire. Practical chapters consider transition questions, assessment of land values, and the interplay with tariffs and other fiscal measures. He maintains that charitable relief and regulatory tinkering cannot cure structural causes rooted in land monopoly, and that consistent application of the remedy would align equity and efficiency.
Progress and Poverty closes by linking economic policy to civic life, education, and the conditions of liberty, arguing that the distribution of the unearned increment shapes social outcomes as surely as nominal growth. While the work advances a distinct policy, its lasting import lies in the clarity of its central question and the coherence of its analysis of rent, wages, and interest. The two volumes invite readers to test premises against experience and to weigh institutional reforms by their effects on opportunity. As debates over inequality, housing, and taxation continue, George’s framework persists as a reference point for examining prosperity with justice.
Historical Context
Henry George’s Progress and Poverty (1879) emerged in the United States during the Gilded Age, a period of rapid industrialization and urban expansion after the Civil War. Steam power, railroads, and the telegraph knit national markets together, while cities like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco swelled with migrants and immigrants. Enormous private fortunes appeared beside crowded tenements and precarious labor. Corporate consolidation and railroad empires shaped commerce and politics, and debates over monopoly, corruption, and inequality intensified. George wrote amid this contrast, asking why material progress coincided with persistent poverty, and proposing a systemic explanation grounded in land, capital, and production.
Westward expansion formed a crucial backdrop. Federal policies such as the Homestead Act of 1862 and the Pacific Railway Acts transferred millions of acres into private hands, often through railroad grants and rapid land sales. Speculation in western lands and urban sites surged as gold- and silver-era booms drew settlers and capital to California. Henry George lived in San Francisco, where he worked as a printer, reporter, and editor of the San Francisco Daily Evening Post from 1871 to 1875. Observing rising ground rents, vacant lots held for gain, and the political sway of large landholders helped shape his focus on land as a social question.
The Long Depression that followed the Panic of 1873 framed George’s inquiry into recurring downturns. Railroad overbuilding, financial speculation, and tight money precipitated a severe contraction, with deflation and high unemployment persisting through much of the 1870s. The Great Railroad Strike of 1877, sparked by wage cuts, disrupted commerce across multiple states and drew federal troops to restore order. These crises raised doubts about prevailing economic doctrines and the capacity of laissez‑faire policies to deliver broad prosperity. George sought to explain why depressions recurred amid increasing productivity, positioning land ownership and the dynamics of rent at the center of the problem.
Progress and Poverty engages a century of political economy. Adam Smith’s analysis of markets, David Ricardo’s theory of rent, and Thomas Malthus’s population arguments framed debates about distribution and growth. By the 1870s, a “marginal” revolution in economics (Jevons, Menger, Walras) was reworking value theory, while John Stuart Mill had already questioned the wages‑fund doctrine. George drew on Ricardo’s rent to argue about how increases in productivity affect land values, but he rejected Malthusian explanations for poverty. Writing in a clear, polemical style for a broad public rather than specialists, he blended empirical observation with moral reasoning about property and progress.
Organized responses to inequality and market power were gathering force. The Knights of Labor, founded in 1869, expanded during the 1870s, advocating the eight‑hour day and cooperative enterprise. Farmers in the Midwest and West, mobilized through the Grange, campaigned against discriminatory railroad rates and grain‑elevator monopolies, and pressed for regulation. Abroad, the Irish “Land War” beginning in 1879 focused attention on landlordism and tenants’ rights, with American newspapers covering rent struggles and British land reform bills. These movements kept land tenure, monopoly, and fair distribution at the forefront of public debate, aligning with the questions George posed about the roots of poverty.
Rapid urban growth strained municipal governance and sharpened conflicts over space and labor. Machine politics and corruption scandals, such as those surrounding New York’s Tammany Hall in the early 1870s, fueled calls for reform. Immigration surged, altering city workforces and housing markets; in San Francisco, anti‑Chinese agitation culminated in mass “sand‑lot” rallies in 1877–1878 and a new state constitution in 1879. City budgets depended heavily on property taxes, and rising land values shaped decisions about streets, transit, and sanitation. The visible divergence between swelling urban ground rents and precarious wages underscored George’s emphasis on how control of valuable locations could organize social outcomes.
Contests over national economic policy were intense. Protectionist tariffs dominated Republican platforms, while Democrats and many reformers criticized duties that raised prices for consumers. Monetary debates pitted “hard‑money” advocates of the Specie Resumption Act of 1875 against Greenbackers who favored an expanded paper currency to alleviate deflation; resumption took effect in 1879. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court’s 1877 Munn v. Illinois decision upheld state regulation of grain warehouses, encouraging “Granger laws” that challenged private rate‑setting. George’s analysis addressed these policy fights but repositioned attention on the distributional effects of landownership, arguing that the capture of rising site values distorted production and wages.
Upon publication, Progress and Poverty found a mass audience in the United States and abroad, circulating through cheap editions, lecture tours, and reading clubs. It helped catalyze the Single Tax movement, which argued for capturing the unearned increment of land value for public purposes. Reformers, labor organizers, and some municipal officials drew on George’s proposals during early Progressive‑Era debates about urban planning, taxation, and public services. The work’s central claim—that modern poverty persisted not from scarcity but from institutions governing land—condensed widespread Gilded Age anxieties about monopoly and inequality into a programmatic critique, offering readers a moral and institutional lens on economic change.
Progress and Poverty, Volumes I and II
INTRODUCTORY.
THE PROBLEM.
INTRODUCTORY.
THE PROBLEM.
The present century has been marked by a prodigious increase in wealth-producing power. The utilization of steam and electricity, the introduction of improved processes and labor-saving machinery, the greater subdivision and grander scale of production, the wonderful facilitation of exchanges, have multiplied enormously the effectiveness of labor.
At the beginning of this marvelous era it was natural to expect, and it was expected, that labor-saving inventions would lighten the toil and improve the condition of the laborer; that the enormous increase in the power of producing wealth would make real poverty a thing of the past. Could a man of the last century—a Franklin or a Priestley[1]—have seen, in a vision of the future, the steamship taking the place of the sailing vessel, the railroad train of the wagon, the reaping machine of the scythe, the threshing machine of the flail; could he have heard the throb of the engines that in obedience to human will, and for the satisfaction of human desire, exert a power greater than that of all the men and all the beasts of burden of the earth combined; could he have seen the forest tree transformed into finished lumber—into doors, sashes, blinds, boxes or barrels, with hardly the touch of a human hand; the great workshops where boots and shoes are turned out by the case with less labor than the old-fashioned cobbler could have put on a sole; the factories where, under the eye of a girl, cotton becomes cloth faster than hundreds of stalwart weavers could have turned it out with their handlooms; could he have seen steam hammers shaping mammoth shafts and mighty anchors, and delicate machinery making tiny watches; the diamond drill cutting through the heart of the rocks, and coal oil sparing the whale; could he have realized the enormous saving of labor resulting from improved facilities of exchange and communication—sheep killed in Australia eaten fresh in England, and the order given by the London banker in the afternoon executed in San Francisco in the morning of the same day; could he have conceived of the hundred thousand improvements which these only suggest, what would he have inferred as to the social condition of mankind?
It would not have seemed like an inference; further than the vision went it would have seemed as though he saw; and his heart would have leaped and his nerves would have thrilled, as one who from a height beholds just ahead of the thirst-stricken caravan the living gleam of rustling woods and the glint of laughing waters. Plainly, in the sight of the imagination, he would have beheld these new forces elevating society from its very foundations, lifting the very poorest above the possibility of want, exempting the very lowest from anxiety for the material needs of life; he would have seen these slaves of the lamp of knowledge taking on themselves the traditional curse, these muscles of iron and sinews of steel making the poorest laborer’s life a holiday, in which every high quality and noble impulse could have scope to grow.
And out of these bounteous material conditions he would have seen arising, as necessary sequences, moral conditions realizing the golden age of which mankind have always dreamed. Youth no longer stunted and starved; age no longer harried by avarice; the child at play with the tiger; the man with the muck-rake drinking in the glory of the stars! Foul things fled, fierce things tame; discord turned to harmony! For how could there be greed where all had enough? How could the vice, the crime, the ignorance, the brutality, that spring from poverty and the fear of poverty, exist where poverty had vanished? Who should crouch where all were freemen; who oppress where all were peers?
More or less vague or clear, these have been the hopes, these the dreams born of the improvements which give this wonderful century its preëminence. They have sunk so deeply into the popular mind as radically to change the currents of thought, to recast creeds and displace the most fundamental conceptions. The haunting visions of higher possibilities have not merely gathered splendor and vividness, but their direction has changed—instead of seeing behind the faint tinges of an expiring sunset, all the glory of the daybreak has decked the skies before.
It is true that disappointment has followed disappointment, and that discovery upon discovery, and invention after invention, have neither lessened the toil of those who most need respite, nor brought plenty to the poor. But there have been so many things to which it seemed this failure could be laid, that up to our time the new faith has hardly weakened. We have better appreciated the difficulties to be overcome; but not the less trusted that the tendency of the times was to overcome them.
Now, however, we are coming into collision with facts which there can be no mistaking. From all parts of the civilized world come complaints of industrial depression; of labor condemned to involuntary idleness; of capital massed and wasting; of pecuniary distress among business men; of want and suffering and anxiety among the working classes. All the dull, deadening pain, all the keen, maddening anguish, that to great masses of men are involved in the words “hard times,” afflict the world to-day. This state of things, common to communities differing so widely in situation, in political institutions, in fiscal and financial systems, in density of population and in social organization, can hardly be accounted for by local causes. There is distress where large standing armies are maintained, but there is also distress where the standing armies are nominal; there is distress where protective tariffs stupidly and wastefully hamper trade, but there is also distress where trade is nearly free; there is distress where autocratic government yet prevails, but there is also distress where political power is wholly in the hands of the people; in countries where paper is money, and in countries where gold and silver are the only currency. Evidently, beneath all such things as these, we must infer a common cause.
That there is a common cause, and that it is either what we call material progress or something closely connected with material progress, becomes more than an inference when it is noted that the phenomena we class together and speak of as industrial depression are but intensifications of phenomena which always accompany material progress, and which show themselves more clearly and strongly as material progress goes on. Where the conditions to which material progress everywhere tends are most fully realized—that is to say, where population is densest, wealth greatest, and the machinery of production and exchange most highly developed—we find the deepest poverty, the sharpest struggle for existence, and the most of enforced idleness.
It is to the newer countries—that is, to the countries where material progress is yet in its earlier stages—that laborers emigrate in search of higher wages, and capital flows in search of higher interest. It is in the older countries—that is to say, the countries where material progress has reached later stages—that widespread destitution is found in the midst of the greatest abundance. Go into one of the new communities where Anglo-Saxon vigor is just beginning the race of progress; where the machinery of production and exchange is yet rude and inefficient; where the increment of wealth is not yet great enough to enable any class to live in ease and luxury; where the best house is but a cabin of logs or a cloth and paper shanty, and the richest man is forced to daily work—and though you will find an absence of wealth and all its concomitants, you will find no beggars. There is no luxury, but there is no destitution. No one makes an easy living, nor a very good living; but every one can make a living, and no one able and willing to work is oppressed by the fear of want.
But just as such a community realizes the conditions which all civilized communities are striving for, and advances in the scale of material progress—just as closer settlement and a more intimate connection with the rest of the world, and greater utilization of labor-saving machinery, make possible greater economies in production and exchange, and wealth in consequence increases, not merely in the aggregate, but in proportion to population—so does poverty take a darker aspect. Some get an infinitely better and easier living, but others find it hard to get a living at all. The “tramp” comes with the locomotive, and almshouses and prisons are as surely the marks of “material progress” as are costly dwellings, rich warehouses, and magnificent churches. Upon streets lighted with gas and patrolled by uniformed policemen, beggars wait for the passer-by, and in the shadow of college, and library, and museum, are gathering the more hideous Huns and fiercer Vandals of whom Macaulay prophesied.
This fact—the great fact that poverty and all its concomitants show themselves in communities just as they develop into the conditions toward which material progress tends—proves that the social difficulties existing wherever a certain stage of progress has been reached, do not arise from local circumstances, but are, in some way or another, engendered by progress itself.
And, unpleasant as it may be to admit it, it is at last becoming evident that the enormous increase in productive power which has marked the present century and is still going on with accelerating ratio, has no tendency to extirpate poverty or to lighten the burdens of those compelled to toil. It simply widens the gulf between Dives and Lazarus[2], and makes the struggle for existence more intense. The march of invention has clothed mankind with powers of which a century ago the boldest imagination could not have dreamed. But in factories where labor-saving machinery has reached its most wonderful development, little children are at work; wherever the new forces are anything like fully utilized, large classes are maintained by charity or live on the verge of recourse to it; amid the greatest accumulations of wealth, men die of starvation, and puny infants suckle dry breasts; while everywhere the greed of gain, the worship of wealth, shows the force of the fear of want. The promised land flies before us like the mirage. The fruits of the tree of knowledge turn as we grasp them to apples of Sodom that crumble at the touch.
It is true that wealth has been greatly increased, and that the average of comfort, leisure, and refinement has been raised; but these gains are not general. In them the lowest class do not share.[1] I do not mean that the condition of the lowest class has nowhere nor in anything been improved; but that there is nowhere any improvement which can be credited to increased productive power. I mean that the tendency of what we call material progress is in nowise to improve the condition of the lowest class in the essentials of healthy, happy human life. Nay, more, that it is still further to depress the condition of the lowest class. The new forces, elevating in their nature though they be, do not act upon the social fabric from underneath, as was for a long time hoped and believed, but strike it at a point intermediate between top and bottom. It is as though an immense wedge were being forced, not underneath society, but through society. Those who are above the point of separation are elevated, but those who are below are crushed down.
This depressing effect is not generally realized, for it is not apparent where there has long existed a class just able to live. Where the lowest class barely lives, as has been the case for a long time in many parts of Europe, it is impossible for it to get any lower, for the next lowest step is out of existence, and no tendency to further depression can readily show itself. But in the progress of new settlements to the conditions of older communities it may clearly be seen that material progress does not merely fail to relieve poverty—it actually produces it. In the United States it is clear that squalor and misery, and the vices and crimes that spring from them, everywhere increase as the village grows to the city, and the march of development brings the advantages of the improved methods of production and exchange. It is in the older and richer sections of the Union that pauperism and distress among the working classes are becoming most painfully apparent. If there is less deep poverty in San Francisco than in New York, is it not because San Francisco is yet behind New York in all that both cities are striving for? When San Francisco reaches the point where New York now is, who can doubt that there will also be ragged and barefooted children on her streets?
This association of poverty with progress is the great enigma of our times. It is the central fact from which spring industrial, social, and political difficulties that perplex the world, and with which statesmanship and philanthropy and education grapple in vain. From it come the clouds that overhang the future of the most progressive and self-reliant nations. It is the riddle which the Sphinx of Fate puts to our civilization, and which not to answer is to be destroyed. So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury and make sharper the contrast between the House of Have and the House of Want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent. The reaction must come. The tower leans from its foundations, and every new story but hastens the final catastrophe. To educate men who must be condemned to poverty, is but to make them restive; to base on a state of most glaring social inequality political institutions under which men are theoretically equal, is to stand a pyramid on its apex.
All-important as this question is, pressing itself from every quarter painfully upon attention, it has not yet received a solution which accounts for all the facts and points to any clear and simple remedy. This is shown by the widely varying attempts to account for the prevailing depression. They exhibit not merely a divergence between vulgar notions and scientific theories, but also show that the concurrence which should exist between those who avow the same general theories breaks up upon practical questions into an anarchy of opinion. Upon high economic authority we have been told that the prevailing depression is due to overconsumption; upon equally high authority, that it is due to overproduction; while the wastes of war, the extension of railroads, the attempts of workmen to keep up wages, the demonetization of silver, the issues of paper money, the increase of labor-saving machinery, the opening of shorter avenues to trade, etc., are separately pointed out as the cause, by writers of reputation.
And while professors thus disagree, the ideas that there is a necessary conflict between capital and labor, that machinery is an evil, that competition must be restrained and interest abolished, that wealth may be created by the issue of money, that it is the duty of government to furnish capital or to furnish work, are rapidly making way among the great body of the people, who keenly feel a hurt and are sharply conscious of a wrong. Such ideas, which bring great masses of men, the repositories of ultimate political power, under the leadership of charlatans and demagogues, are fraught with danger; but they cannot be successfully combated until political economy shall give some answer to the great question which shall be consistent with all her teachings, and which shall commend itself to the perceptions of the great masses of men.
It must be within the province of political economy to give such an answer. For political economy is not a set of dogmas. It is the explanation of a certain set of facts. It is the science which, in the sequence of certain phenomena, seeks to trace mutual relations and to identify cause and effect, just as the physical sciences seek to do in other sets of phenomena. It lays its foundations upon firm ground. The premises from which it makes its deductions are truths which have the highest sanction; axioms which we all recognize; upon which we safely base the reasoning and actions of everyday life, and which may be reduced to the metaphysical expression of the physical law that motion seeks the line of least resistance—viz., that men seek to gratify their desires with the least exertion. Proceeding from a basis thus assured, its processes, which consist simply in identification and separation, have the same certainty. In this sense it is as exact a science as geometry, which, from similar truths relative to space, obtains its conclusions by similar means, and its conclusions when valid should be as self-apparent. And although in the domain of political economy we cannot test our theories by artificially produced combinations or conditions, as may be done in some of the other sciences, yet we can apply tests no less conclusive, by comparing societies in which different conditions exist, or by, in imagination, separating, combining, adding or eliminating forces or factors of known direction.
I propose in the following pages to attempt to solve by the methods of political economy the great problem I have outlined. I propose to seek the law which associates poverty with progress, and increases want with advancing wealth; and I believe that in the explanation of this paradox we shall find the explanation of those recurring seasons of industrial and commercial paralysis which, viewed independently of their relations to more general phenomena, seem so inexplicable. Properly commenced and carefully pursued, such an investigation must yield a conclusion that will stand every test, and as truth, will correlate with all other truth. For in the sequence of phenomena there is no accident. Every effect has a cause, and every fact implies a preceding fact.
That political economy, as at present taught, does not explain the persistence of poverty amid advancing wealth in a manner which accords with the deep-seated perceptions of men; that the unquestionable truths which it does teach are unrelated and disjointed; that it has failed to make the progress in popular thought that truth, even when unpleasant, must make; that, on the contrary, after a century of cultivation, during which it has engrossed the attention of some of the most subtle and powerful intellects, it should be spurned by the statesman, scouted by the masses, and relegated in the opinion of many educated and thinking men to the rank of a pseudo-science in which nothing is fixed or can be fixed—must, it seems to me, be due not to any inability of the science when properly pursued, but to some false step in its premises, or overlooked factor in its estimates. And as such mistakes are generally concealed by the respect paid to authority, I propose in this inquiry to take nothing for granted, but to bring even accepted theories to the test of first principles, and should they not stand the test, freshly to interrogate facts in the endeavor to discover their law.
I propose to beg no question, to shrink from no conclusion, but to follow truth wherever it may lead. Upon us is the responsibility of seeking the law, for in the very heart of our civilization to-day women faint and little children moan. But what that law may prove to be is not our affair. If the conclusions that we reach run counter to our prejudices, let us not flinch; if they challenge institutions that have long been deemed wise and natural, let us not turn back.
BOOK I.WAGES AND CAPITAL.
CHAPTER I.—THE CURRENT DOCTRINE—ITS INSUFFICIENCY.
CHAPTER II.—THE MEANING OF THE TERMS.
CHAPTER III.—WAGES NOT DRAWN FROM CAPITAL, BUT PRODUCED BY THE LABOR.
CHAPTER IV.—THE MAINTENANCE OF LABORERS NOT DRAWN FROM CAPITAL.
CHAPTER V.—THE REAL FUNCTIONS OF CAPITAL.
He that is to follow philosophy must be a freeman in mind.—Ptolemy.
CHAPTER I.THE CURRENT DOCTRINE OF WAGES—ITS INSUFFICIENCY.
Reducing to its most compact form the problem we have set out to investigate, let us examine, step by step, the explanation which political economy, as now accepted by the best authority, gives of it.
The cause which produces poverty in the midst of advancing wealth is evidently the cause which exhibits itself in the tendency, everywhere recognized, of wages to a minimum. Let us, therefore, put our inquiry into this compact form:
Why, in spite of increase in productive power, do wages tend to a minimum which will give but a bare living?
The answer of the current political economy is, that wages are fixed by the ratio between the number of laborers and the amount of capital devoted to the employment of labor, and constantly tend to the lowest amount on which laborers will consent to live and reproduce, because the increase in the number of laborers tends naturally to follow and overtake any increase in capital. The increase of the divisor being thus held in check only by the possibilities of the quotient, the dividend may be increased to infinity without greater result.
In current thought this doctrine holds all but undisputed sway[1q]. It bears the indorsement of the very highest names among the cultivators of political economy, and though there have been attacks upon it, they are generally more formal than real.2 It is assumed by Buckle[3] as the basis of his generalizations of universal history. It is taught in all, or nearly all, the great English and American universities, and is laid down in text-books which aim at leading the masses to reason correctly upon practical affairs, while it seems to harmonize with the new philosophy, which, having in a few years all but conquered the scientific world, is now rapidly permeating the general mind.
Thus entrenched in the upper regions of thought, it is in cruder form even more firmly rooted in what may be styled the lower. What gives to the fallacies of protection such a tenacious hold, in spite of their evident inconsistencies and absurdities, is the idea that the sum to be distributed in wages is in each community a fixed one, which the competition of “foreign labor” must still further subdivide. The same idea underlies most of the theories which aim at the abolition of interest and the restriction of competition, as the means whereby the share of the laborer in the general wealth can be increased; and it crops out in every direction among those who are not thoughtful enough to have any theories, as may be seen in the columns of newspapers and the debates of legislative bodies.
And yet, widely accepted and deeply rooted as it is, it seems to me that this theory does not tally with obvious facts. For, if wages depend upon the ratio between the amount of labor seeking employment and the amount of capital devoted to its employment, the relative scarcity or abundance of one factor must mean the relative abundance or scarcity of the other. Thus, capital must be relatively abundant where wages are high, and relatively scarce where wages are low. Now, as the capital used in paying wages must largely consist of the capital constantly seeking investment, the current rate of interest must be the measure of its relative abundance or scarcity. So, if it be true that wages depend upon the ratio between the amount of labor seeking employment and the capital devoted to its employment, then high wages, the mark of the relative scarcity of labor, must be accompanied by low interest, the mark of the relative abundance of capital, and reversely, low wages must be accompanied by high interest.
This is not the fact, but the contrary. Eliminating from interest the element of insurance, and regarding only interest proper, or the return for the use of capital, is it not a general truth that interest is high where and when wages are high, and low where and when wages are low? Both wages and interest have been higher in the United States than in England, in the Pacific than in the Atlantic States. Is it not a notorious fact that where labor flows for higher wages, capital also flows for higher interest? Is it not true that wherever there has been a general rise or fall in wages there has been at the same time a similar rise or fall in interest? In California, for instance, when wages were higher than anywhere else in the world, so also was interest higher. Wages and interest have in California gone down together. When common wages were $5 a day, the ordinary bank rate of interest was twenty-four per cent. per annum. Now that common wages are $2 or $2.50 a day, the ordinary bank rate is from ten to twelve per cent.
Now, this broad, general fact, that wages are higher in new countries, where capital is relatively scarce, than in old countries, where capital is relatively abundant, is too glaring to be ignored. And although very lightly touched upon, it is noticed by the expounders of the current political economy. The manner in which it is noticed proves what I say, that it is utterly inconsistent with the accepted theory of wages. For in explaining it such writers as Mill, Fawcett, and Price virtually give up the theory of wages upon which, in the same treatises, they formally insist. Though they declare that wages are fixed by the ratio between capital and laborers, they explain the higher wages and interest of new countries by the greater relative production of wealth. I shall hereafter show that this is not the fact, but that, on the contrary, the production of wealth is relatively larger in old and densely populated countries than in new and sparsely populated countries. But at present I merely wish to point out the inconsistency. For to say that the higher wages of new countries are due to greater proportionate production, is clearly to make the ratio with production, and not the ratio with capital, the determinator of wages.
Though this inconsistency does not seem to have been perceived by the class of writers to whom I refer, it has been noticed by one of the most logical of the expounders of the current political economy. Professor Cairnes3 endeavors in a very ingenious way to reconcile the fact with the theory, by assuming that in new countries, where industry is generally directed to the production of food and what in manufactures is called raw material, a much larger proportion of the capital used in production is devoted to the payment of wages than in older countries where a greater part must be expended in machinery and material, and thus, in the new country, though capital is scarcer, and interest is higher, the amount determined to the payment of wages is really larger, and wages are also higher. For instance, of $100,000 devoted in an old country to manufactures, $80,000 would probably be expended for buildings, machinery and the purchase of materials, leaving but $20,000 to be paid out in wages; whereas in a new country, of $30,000 devoted to agriculture, etc., not more than $5,000 would be required for tools, etc., leaving $25,000 to be distributed in wages. In this way it is explained that the wage fund may be comparatively large where capital is comparatively scarce, and high wages and high interest accompany each other.
In what follows I think I shall be able to show that this explanation is based upon a total misapprehension of the relations of labor to capital—a fundamental error as to the fund from which wages are drawn; but at present it is necessary only to point out that the connection in the fluctuation of wages and interest in the same countries and in the same branches of industry cannot thus be explained. In those alternations known as “good times” and “hard times” a brisk demand for labor and good wages is always accompanied by a brisk demand for capital and stiff rates of interest. While, when laborers cannot find employment and wages droop, there is always an accumulation of capital seeking investment at low rates.4 The present depression has been no less marked by want of employment and distress among the working classes than by the accumulation of unemployed capital in all the great centers, and by nominal rates of interest on undoubted security. Thus, under conditions which admit of no explanation consistent with the current theory, do we find high interest coinciding with high wages, and low interest with low wages—capital seemingly scarce when labor is scarce, and abundant when labor is abundant.
All these well known facts, which coincide with each other, point to a relation between wages and interest, but it is to a relation of conjunction, not of opposition. Evidently they are utterly inconsistent with the theory that wages are determined by the ratio between labor and capital, or any part of capital.
How, then, it will be asked, could such a theory arise? How is it that it has been accepted by a succession of economists, from the time of Adam Smith to the present day?
If we examine the reasoning by which in current treatises this theory of wages is supported, we see at once that it is not an induction from observed facts, but a deduction from a previously assumed theory—viz., that wages are drawn from capital. It being assumed that capital is the source of wages, it necessarily follows that the gross amount of wages must be limited by the amount of capital devoted to the employment of labor, and hence that the amount individual laborers can receive must be determined by the ratio between their number and the amount of capital existing for their recompense.5 This reasoning is valid, but the conclusion, as we have seen, does not correspond with the facts. The fault, therefore, must be in the premises. Let us see.
I am aware that the theorem that wages are drawn from capital is one of the most fundamental and apparently best settled of current political economy, and that it has been accepted as axiomatic by all the great thinkers who have devoted their powers to the elucidation of the science. Nevertheless, I think it can be demonstrated to be a fundamental error—the fruitful parent of a long series of errors, which vitiate most important practical conclusions. This demonstration I am about to attempt. It is necessary that it should be clear and conclusive, for a doctrine upon which so much important reasoning is based, which is supported by such a weight of authority, which is so plausible in itself, and is so liable to recur in different forms, cannot be safely brushed aside in a paragraph.
The proposition I shall endeavor to prove, is:
That wages, instead of being drawn from capital, are in reality drawn from the product of the labor for which they are paid.6
Now, inasmuch as the current theory that wages are drawn from capital also holds that capital is reimbursed from production, this at first glance may seem a distinction without a difference—a mere change in terminology, to discuss which would be but to add to those unprofitable disputes that render so much that has been written upon politico-economic subjects as barren and worthless as the controversies of the various learned societies about the true reading of the inscription on the stone that Mr. Pickwick found. But that it is much more than a formal distinction will be apparent when it is considered that upon the difference between the two propositions are built up all the current theories as to the relations of capital and labor; that from it are deduced doctrines that, themselves regarded as axiomatic, bound, direct, and govern the ablest minds in the discussion of the most momentous questions. For, upon the assumption that wages are drawn directly from capital, and not from the product of the labor, is based, not only the doctrine that wages depend upon the ratio between capital and labor, but the doctrine that industry is limited by capital—that capital must be accumulated before labor is employed, and labor cannot be employed except as capital is accumulated; the doctrine that every increase of capital gives or is capable of giving additional employment to industry; the doctrine that the conversion of circulating capital into fixed capital lessens the fund applicable to the maintenance of labor; the doctrine that more laborers can be employed at low than at high wages; the doctrine that capital applied to agriculture will maintain more laborers than if applied to manufactures; the doctrine that profits are high or low as wages are low or high, or that they depend upon the cost of the subsistence of laborers; together with such paradoxes as that a demand for commodities is not a demand for labor, or that certain commodities may be increased in cost by a reduction in wages or diminished in cost by an increase in wages.
In short, all the teachings of the current political economy, in the widest and most important part of its domain, are based more or less directly upon the assumption that labor is maintained and paid out of existing capital before the product which constitutes the ultimate object is secured. If it be shown that this is an error, and that on the contrary the maintenance and payment of labor do not even temporarily trench on capital, but are directly drawn from the product of the labor, then all this vast superstructure is left without support and must fall. And so likewise must fall the vulgar theories which also have their base in the belief that the sum to be distributed in wages is a fixed one, the individual shares in which must necessarily be decreased by an increase in the number of laborers.
The difference between the current theory and the one I advance is, in fact, similar to that between the mercantile theory of international exchanges and that with which Adam Smith supplanted it. Between the theory that commerce is the exchange of commodities for money, and the theory that it is the exchange of commodities for commodities, there may seem no real difference when it is remembered that the adherents of the mercantile theory did not assume that money had any other use than as it could be exchanged for commodities. Yet, in the practical application of these two theories, there arises all the difference between rigid governmental protection and free trade.
If I have said enough to show the reader the ultimate importance of the reasoning through which I am about to ask him to follow me, it will not be necessary to apologize in advance either for simplicity or prolixity. In arraigning a doctrine of such importance—a doctrine supported by such a weight of authority, it is necessary to be both clear and thorough.
Were it not for this I should be tempted to dismiss with a sentence the assumption that wages are drawn from capital. For all the vast superstructure which the current political economy builds upon this doctrine is in truth based upon a foundation which has been merely taken for granted, without the slightest attempt to distinguish the apparent from the real. Because wages are generally paid in money, and in many of the operations of production are paid before the product is fully completed, or can be utilized, it is inferred that wages are drawn from pre-existing capital, and, therefore, that industry is limited by capital—that is to say that labor cannot be employed until capital has been accumulated, and can only be employed to the extent that capital has been accumulated.
Yet in the very treatises in which the limitation of industry by capital is laid down without reservation and made the basis for the most important reasonings and elaborate theories, we are told that capital is stored-up or accumulated labor—“that part of wealth which is saved to assist future production.” If we substitute for the word “capital” this definition of the word, the proposition carries its own refutation, for that labor cannot be employed until the results of labor are saved becomes too absurd for discussion.
Should we, however, with this reductio ad absurdum, attempt to close the argument, we should probably be met with the explanation, not that the first laborers were supplied by Providence with the capital necessary to set them to work, but that the proposition merely refers to a state of society in which production has become a complex operation.
But the fundamental truth, that in all economic reasoning must be firmly grasped, and never let go, is that society in its most highly developed form is but an elaboration of society in its rudest beginnings, and that principles obvious in the simpler relations of men are merely disguised and not abrogated or reversed by the more intricate relations that result from the division of labor and the use of complex tools and methods. The steam grist mill, with its complicated machinery exhibiting every diversity of motion, is simply what the rude stone mortar dug up from an ancient river bed was in its day—an instrument for grinding corn. And every man engaged in it, whether tossing wood into the furnace, running the engine, dressing stones, printing sacks or keeping books, is really devoting his labor to the same purpose that the pre-historic savage did when he used his mortar—the preparation of grain for human food.
And so, if we reduce to their lowest terms all the complex operations of modern production, we see that each individual who takes part in this infinitely subdivided and intricate network of production and exchange is really doing what the primeval man did when he climbed the trees for fruit or followed the receding tide for shellfish—endeavoring to obtain from nature by the exertion of his powers the satisfaction of his desires. If we keep this firmly in mind, if we look upon production as a whole—as the co-operation of all embraced in any of its great groups to satisfy the various desires of each, we plainly see that the reward each obtains for his exertions comes as truly and as directly from nature as the result of that exertion, as did that of the first man.
To illustrate: In the simplest state of which we can conceive, each man digs his own bait and catches his own fish. The advantages of the division of labor soon become apparent, and one digs bait while the others fish. Yet evidently the one who digs bait is in reality doing as much toward the catching of fish as any of those who actually take the fish. So when the advantages of canoes are discovered, and instead of all going a-fishing, one stays behind and makes and repairs canoes, the canoe-maker is in reality devoting his labor to the taking of fish as much as the actual fishermen, and the fish which he eats at night when the fishermen come home are as truly the product of his labor as of theirs. And thus when the division of labor is fairly inaugurated, and instead of each attempting to satisfy all of his wants by direct resort to nature, one fishes, another hunts, a third picks berries, a fourth gathers fruit, a fifth makes tools, a sixth builds huts, and a seventh prepares clothing—each one is to the extent he exchanges the direct product of his own labor for the direct product of the labor of others really applying his own labor to the production of the things he uses—is in effect satisfying his particular desires by the exertion of his particular powers; that is to say, what he receives he in reality produces. If he digs roots and exchanges them for venison, he is in effect as truly the procurer of the venison as though he had gone in chase of the deer and left the huntsman to dig his own roots. The common expression, “I made so and so,” signifying “I earned so and so,” or “I earned money with which I purchased so and so,” is, economically speaking, not metaphorically but literally true. Earning is making.
Now, if we follow these principles, obvious enough in a simpler state of society, through the complexities of the state we call civilized, we shall see clearly that in every case in which labor is exchanged for commodities, production really precedes enjoyment; that wages are the earnings—that is to say, the makings of labor—not the advances of capital, and that the laborer who receives his wages in money (coined or printed, it may be, before his labor commenced) really receives in return for the addition his labor has made to the general stock of wealth, a draft upon that general stock, which he may utilize in any particular form of wealth that will best satisfy his desires; and that neither the money, which is but the draft, nor the particular form of wealth which he uses it to call for, represents advances of capital for his maintenance, but on the contrary represents the wealth, or a portion of the wealth, his labor has already added to the general stock.
Keeping these principles in view we see that the draughtsman, who, shut up in some dingy office on the banks of the Thames, is drawing the plans for a great marine engine, is in reality devoting his labor to the production of bread and meat as truly as though he were garnering the grain in California or swinging a lariat on a La Plata pampa; that he is as truly making his own clothing as though he were shearing sheep in Australia or weaving cloth in Paisley, and just as effectually producing the claret he drinks at dinner as though he gathered the grapes on the banks of the Garonne. The miner who, two thousand feet under ground in the heart of the Comstock[4], is digging out silver ore, is, in effect, by virtue of a thousand exchanges, harvesting crops in valleys five thousand feet nearer the earth’s center; chasing the whale through Arctic icefields; plucking tobacco leaves in Virginia; picking coffee berries in Honduras; cutting sugar cane on the Hawaiian Islands; gathering cotton in Georgia or weaving it in Manchester or Lowell; making quaint wooden toys for his children in the Hartz Mountains; or plucking amid the green and gold of Los Angeles orchards the oranges which, when his shift is relieved, he will take home to his sick wife. The wages which he receives on Saturday night at the mouth of the shaft, what are they but the certificate to all the world that he has done these things—the primary exchange in the long series which transmutes his labor into the things he has really been laboring for?
