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of  rent,  and  it  offered  to  any  landowner,  w^ho  might  prefer  to
relinquish  his  land,  its  full  selling  value.  This  would  still  be
advantageous  to  the  nation,  “  since  an  individual  never  gives,
in  present  money,  for  a  remote  profit,  anything  like  what  that
profit  is  worth  to  the  State,  which  is  immortal.”  *  Whatever
may  be  thought  of  the  practicability  of  this  proposal,  it  is  not
nearly  so  open  to  the  charge  of  injustice  as  most  of  the  schemes
of  land  nationalization  which  are  propounded  to-day.  All  that
can  be  said  against  it  is,  that  unearned  increment  is  not  a
peculiarity  of  property  in  land  ;  it  occurs,  for  instance,  in  rail-'
  way  shares,  which  often  increase  in  value  solely  “  through  the
growth  of  population  and  wealth.”  We  hear  little,  however,
about  this  particular  proposal  to-day,  partly  because  far  more
drastic  measures  are  being  pressed  upon  our  attention,  and
partly,  perhaps,  because  agricultural  land  in  England  has
recently  been  falling  in  value—receiving,  in  fact,  an  unearned
decrement—and  its  early  recovery  is  a  matter  of  doubt.
The  publication  of  “  Progress  and  Poverty,”  early  in  1881,
gave  a  great  impetus  to  the  land  nationalization  movement.
Its  author,  Henry  George,f  was  born  at  Philadelphia,  on  the
2nd  of  September,  1839,  of  American  parents.  His  father
was  desirous  of  giving  him  a  thorough  education,  but  the  lad
was  self-willed  and  preferred  to  study  in  his  own  way.  “  They
teach  nothing  at  the  Academy  that  I  don’t  know  or  think  I
know  already,”  he  said,  and  accordingly  he  was  not  sent  to
school  after  his  twelfth  year.  When  he  was  sixteen  he  went  as
cabin  boy  in  a  sailing-ship  to  India,  because  “  he  had  read  so
much  about  that  unhappy  country  ”  and  wished  to  investigate  for
himself  the  state  of  affairs  there.  For  some  years  he  led  a  roving
life  without  any  settled  employment  In  1858  he  worked  his
way  on  a  merchant-vessel  to  San  Francisco,  and  spent  the  next
three  years  in  unsuccessful  mining  enterprises.  Finally,  in  1861,
he  settled  down  in  San  Francisco,  where  he  was  successively
*  See  J.  S.  Mill’s  papers  on  Land  Tenure  in  the  fourth  volume  of  his
“Dissertations  and  Discussions.”
t  I  have  gleaned  most  of  these  biographical  facts  from  a  recently
published  sketch  of  Mr.  George’s  life  by  Mr.  Henry  Rose,  editor  of  the
//«//  Express.
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