What Government, for example, would ever venture to propose to a nation to endow its acknowledged greatest inventors, greatest scientists, greatest chemists, greatest electricians, or what not, on any terms; even when they are doing out of their own pockets the work which has made and will go on making the fortune of the nation? There is no such Government. Millions spent in doles to the incapables, the derelicts, the unthrifty, and the casuals, without a sigh; millions more on the education of the millions whose combined heads no education will enable to turn out a product equal to that of half-a-dozen really great minds; but for these latter the maxim of Governments which the public applauds and supports, - and none more than the capitalists and workmen, - is 'Starve them well; it will do them good; and will make them, like milch cows, yield all the more for us to exploit! '

Of Henry George little need be said. He added nothing of value to the Science, nor did he take any step towards its reconstruction. In the main lines of his doctrine, he was, like Marx, saturated both with the methods and the doctrines of the reigning orthodox Economy. His symbol was the old statical one of the divided stick, whereby when profits rose wages were bound to fall; and with him also it was impossible for the rent of land to enter into the price of its products; and although he was largely instrumental in getting rid of the nightmare of Population with which Malthus had affrighted the world, he affrighted it with a parallel bogey of his own in his doctrine of Rent, which, curiously enough, depended, had he had penetration enough to see it, for all the validity it ever had, on that very doctrine of Population which he had himself ' whittled ' away to a mere shadow! For it had always been admitted by the orthodox Economists that if you could only arrest Population, the capitalists and wage-earners would have the landlords at their mercy, inasmuch as the lessened demand for food and clothing would create a less demand on the resources of the soil.

But George, like all men of ability but with limited culture and confined outlook, became obsessed with the idea that Rent was about to swallow up the rest of the economic world, profits and wages alike; and that men's very existence, whether as capitalists or workmen, was to be as much at the mercy of the landlords, as in Eastern lands their heads are at the nod of Sultans and Rajahs. And although the rents of the world were hedged about with as many compensatory limitations to prevent them from growing into the sky, as its populations, on which these rents depended, were from increasing until they filled up the landscape and left no further standing room, George could see no rift in the pall of darkness which encompassed the law of Rent, and no loophole of escape from it; although, as we have said, it could only be a danger just so long as that Law of Population which he had exhausted his ingenuity in 'spiriting' away, remained. And yet, had he only paused for a moment to look around him, he would have seen that compensations like those which he so clearly saw limited the law of Population, were already in existence to remove his fear of the Law of Rent. For at that very time, the railway magnates of America and the great Trusts that sprang from them, were beginning to get their coils around the necks of the fanners and landowners; and had George lived until to-day he would have seen his landlords who were to swallow all, themselves led to the slaughter, and skinned and stripped to the bone by these same Trusts, now in their full bloom and maturity - proving to us again how impotent and false all so-called Laws of Distribution are when divorced from Power, and its resulting exploitations, however or by what means soever attained.

Not that the differential rents of Land are of no effect, any more than the differential rents from superior machinery and other instruments of production; but the one is no more a bugbear than the other. Land itself without machinery and transport, would be as cheap to-day as when the Red Indians roamed over it; in the same way as the machinery and transport would be useless without the resources of the land. But it had apparently never even dawned on George that there was such a thing as a rent got without labour from the possession of a superior invention, process, or machine, precisely as was the case with the possession of a piece of superior land, or of land in a superior position for business purposes, as in the centre of a great city; and not seeing this, he imagined that on the 'margin' between Capital and Labour, the defection of a few petty masters to the ranks of labour or of a few labourers to the ranks of petty capitalists, like the defection of a few stragglers and camp-followers from an army to its opponents, was sufficient to keep the balance between Capital and Labour so even that neither could get any advantage over the other; and that therefore the profits of Capital and the wages of Labour would by this self-acting and self-adjusting process, always be equalized.

He did not see that these petty masters or men would be as much the slaves of the great Trusts, across whatever boundaries of territory, country, or occupation, they wandered, as the petty chieftains of all Indian tribes whatever are of their Great Chiefs. He did not see, in a word, that the law of combination concealed in his fabled 'freedom of contract,' is always as operative as free competition when it sees its chance; and so he reduced his whole scheme to fatuity. For although he had a mania for clapping conceptions of abstract Justice drawn from what he figured to be 'God's own law,' on every economic situation as it arose, as if they were postage stamps bearing the head of a king, he yet with an elaborate ingenuity of wrong-headedness which to-day must seem almost farcical, poured the 'terrors of the law' on the heads of the landlords alone, allowing all the Rockfellers, the Beef Trust and Cotton Corner magnates to escape! Not that there was a trace of insincerity in his nature, or that any derogation is to be made from his moral ideal which was as pure and noble as that of Mill, only that having struck on his compact little theory of the passage of the smaller capitalists across the border to the ranks of workmen, and of these in turn to the ranks of the capitalists, he believed that it proved, in opposition to Karl Marx, that no capitalists or Trusts, however colossal their gains, could ever really 'exploit' either their own particular workmen or the world in general.