“A VINDICATION OF GEORGE”

Grey River Argus, 6 April 1943, Page 2

“A VINDICATION OF GEORGE”

This is the title of an article by Mr Justice O'Regan, appear, ng in the December number of The Catholic World” (New- York) published by the Paulist Fathers. The article, was written apropos of a friendly, but rather non-committal, review oi Henry George’s teaching, appearing ■ in the February (1941) number by Father Fichter, S.J., of St. Marys College, Kansas. The author comments that Henry George has been misrepresented badly and that Catholic publicists have been among the chief transgressors, but he acclaims Father Fichter's contribution a- a hopeful indication of better things. “Progress and Poverty” he describes as a magnificent vindication of the natural law, and he considers it a significant coincidence that Dr. Nulty, the Bishop of Meath, in a Letter addressed to the Clergy and Laity of his diocese in 1881, practically epitomised the book, though at the time he wrote the Letter he had never heard of it or the author. As for the critics who call George a Socialist, he replies that, with the Stoics of old, “we say that ev® l / man is committed primarily to his own care. We maintain, further, however, that every man has a natural right to equality of opportunity to enable him to carry out his task. That we maintain the doctrine of natural rights in itself suffices surely<to show that we are not Socialists.” The Socialists scout the idea of natural rights, because they are avowed materialists m whose view the State is absolute Gronlund, sometimes ■ called the Marx of America, I quotes with approval in “The Co-operative Commonwealth the doc.trine of Hegel that it is only in virtue of his ■: being a member of a well-organised state that the individual has any rights at all I “In the denial of natural rights proceeds the writer, “the Socialists are in agreement with our scientists Who proclaim pontifically ‘the struggle for existence.’ Malthus, he characterises as a pretentious imposter, and Darwin tells us that his doctrine of the struggle for existence is the doctrine of Malthus applied to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms. George throws the gauntlet down to the Darwinians, pointing out that both the jay-hawk and the man eat chicken, but the more lay-hawks the fewer chickens, while the more men the more chickens. Both the seal and the man eat salmon, but when a seal eats a salmon there is one less, and were seals to increase past a certain point salmon • must diminish; while by placing the spawn of the salmon under favourable conditions man can so increase the number of salmon as to more than make up for all he may take. Hence there can be no analogy between the lower forms of life and man. The essential characteristic of human society is co-operation, and, as Adam Smith pointed out before him, George realises that there is a natural order in human society, that natural laws are infinitely wise and beneficent, and that the ills afflicting us are due solely to man’s failure to conform to nature. “The marvellous fact about human -society is that it exists without any man taking thought, and its mysterious and unfailing efficiency arises from the specialisation of function incidental to the division of labour. To illustrate: I am writing this article in the Supreme Court Buildings at Auckland, New Zealand. I shall presently enclose it in a frail envelope and write thereon the > address, really my instructions to the many people whose duty it will be in the course of its transit to obey. In due course it will reach the Editor of “The Catholic World.” The liner in which with thousands of other letters it wilT be conveyed across the ocean is manned by people I can never know. Yet they will do their work as thoroughly as though I had specially employed them... Words cannot describe the tenderness with which the mother rocks the cradle to induce her babe to sleep, but the en-gine-driver of the railway train or the man who steers an ocean liner is not less careful about the passengers who eat, sleep and live their lives on board though he knows them not ...This is the co-operation that makes civilisation possible—that which Adam Smith calls ‘the natural course of things,’ but which Bastiat calls a miracle. Thus there is much to admire in human society. We must admire the perfect efficacy with which men work for each other yet without any man taking thought.” But if there is no struggle for existence how are we to explain the facts of every-day life How explain the paradox of poverty amid abundance ? George supplied the answer more than sixty years ago in “Progress and Poverty.” People are workless because they are disinherited. A few grow richer while the masses grow poorer because the community value of land—“the common fund whence common want should be met”—is misappropriated by a few. It is this great primary wrong which leaves strong men starving and powerless in the midst of abundance; it is this which crowds human beings into hideous slums; it is this which makes the masses poorer as the community grows richer; it is this which constitutes the social problem pressing everywhere for solution. “Place the unemployed of any community on unoccupied territory, Crusoe’s island, for example, and, although they would be stripped of many of the conveniences of civilised life-—electric

light, paved streets, cheap tram service, etc., they would make a living.” By way of illustration the author cites the case of the wreck of the “Dundonald” on the Auckland Islands in 1907. “Cold and hungry, the survivors struggled ashore on the bleakest island of the group, well named Disappointment Island. A year later they were rescued and brought to New Zealand all well. They had to construct mud huts, to catch seabirds, seals and fish. They had a hard struggle, but they survived because they had free access to nature. They had no unemployment relief, no social insurance, but they paid no rent, and by applying their labour to the wild, forbidding earth, they produced food. In a modern city they would have starved unless they had been relieved by charity.” The remedy prescribed by George is clear, practicable and efficacious. By the lawful use of the taxing powei* he would divert the rent of land into the public treasury at the same time cancelling all other taxes falling on the produce of labour. This would ensure the constant utilisation of land, making it impossible for rich men to monopolise it and withhold it from use, and thus there would be no unemployed, no overcrowding, no slums, and the functions of government would become enormously simplified since the cost of valuing the land for the purposes of taxation would remain constant whether we collected a fraction of its value or the whole. Dealing with the question historically, Mr Justice O’Regan calls it a universal fact that originally men treat land as common property. The outstanding example is afforded by the Mosaic legislation under which lan-- 4 was redistributed every fiftieth year, called the Year of Jubilee. That precept did not apply to land within any walled city, but even there the man who sold his land had a year within which to cancel his bargain. This is the legislation the purpose of which, according to St. Thomas- Aquinas, was to promote something like equality as between man and man, and St. Thomas further lays it down

that, although the ceremonial precepts of Ihe Old Law are obsolete, the judicial precepts are still valid. This does not mean that the common right to land should be secured nowadays by periodical subdivision, but the spirit of the Mosaic Law would be applied v-itf perfect equity by the collection of the community value of land and its application to the common good. Further, the author proceeds that there was a school of thinkers in pre-Revolution-ary France called the Physiocrats, at the head of whom were Quesnay and Turgot, .who advocated the abolition of all taxes except the impot unique or single tax on the rental value oi land, a proposal which Mirabeau described as equivalent in utility to the invention of printing or the substitution of money for barter. Turgot who became Minister of Finance to Louis XVI., attempted to apply the principle, but his proposal aroused such opoosition from the beneficiaries of untaxed privilege that he was dismissed from office. ‘Then came the Revolution with its era of destruction ano bloodshed until, m sheer desperation, the nation sought safetv in the despotism of Napoleon. Dealing with the genesis ot the land system as we have it to-day, the author quotes Thorold Rogers who, in “Six Centuries of Work ana Wages”, shows that the fifteenth century was the golden age of the working men in England. First, there were immense areas of common land to which the people had access under rules deeply rooted in Christian tradition. Then there was the land owned by religious congregations—it was one-third of England in the reign of Henry VIII. These monastic lands were really trust property in 'that there were no poor rates, because the religious congregations maintained all the aged and indigent, while attached to many of the monasteries were hospitals. The common right to land was further secured in that the lay lords, and sometimes the religious houses, bore the entire cost of war. Thus it was that the Hundred Years’ War and the Wars of the Roses were paid for without loans or indirect taxes. Thorold Rogers assures us, further, that the religious houses Were considerate landlords, and their studied regard for the rights of the tenants had a steadying influence on the lay lords. No wonder H. M. Hyndman, Socialist and Rationalist, declares that “the Church of our ancestors was not the organised fraud which prejudiced historians would have us believe.” . .

The first step in the disinheriting of the people’ of England was the Reformation. Monasteries were ruthi lessly destroyed and hospitals closed and their lands handed over to the pimps and panderers who became the forebears of “our own nobility.” The nol le art of nursing was lost until Florence Nightingale rediscovered it, and as theft ano robbery were capital offences, it is no matter for surprise that 72,000 persons suffered the death penalty in the reign of Henry VIII. 'The destruction of the monasteries left the poor unprovided for, and I thus many of them were driven by | hunger to crime and the gallows, i Poor laws began in the 43rd. year of I Elizabeth, but in Catholic England I they were unnecessary and unknown. 'The final work cf ponular expropriation was earned out by the Parliament of Cromwell, the alleged vindicator of English liberty, when in 1645 a series of resolutions was adopted favouring the abolition of feudal dues on land. These later on were embodied in a statute, and by the small majority of two, feudal obligations were abolished and in- , direct taxation substituted. Finally, |in the reign of the Georges mainly, I came innumerable Enclosure Acts by which the common lands were stolen from the people. Such is the historical explanation for the scourge of land monopoly as it exists to-day in civilised society. Henry George’s 1 proposal in effect is to restore us to our Catholic heritage.” Accordingly the author expresses pleasure at Father Fichter’s assurance that the Henry George School of Social Scii ence in New York includes a sur- ■ prising number of Catholics, and he iis confident that in due time there I will arise in the Church bishops and I clergy who will procmin the gospel :of economic truth cs did Bishop Nulty and Father McGlynn. Mr Justice O'Regan’s article has been reprinted by the New York “Freeman," in which there appears also a commendatory notice of the ; author.