and training them for the ranks of the skilled, the managerial, and the entrepreneur class. This tends to reduce the supply of ignorant laborers and increase the supply of educated workers. If the system of popular education continues to improve, if greater and greater restrictions are placed upon the importation of unskilled labor and a higher standard of living is acquired by our own unskilled laborers, the combined results of these three changes will tend to make unskilled labor scarce and hard to find and to make jobs abundant and easy to find, thus giving the unskilled laborer the advantage not only of retaining his liberty of contract but of prospering under it. If we carry out our educational policy to its logical limit and train not only skilled laborers but also managers and employers, and at the same time create a more rational standard of living and better moral conditions among these classes, the combined results of these two policies (that is, training men for the high positions and encouraging larger families among them) will so increase the numbers of the managerial class as to take away their present advantage in the bargaining process. By following this general process throughout all ranks of society we may expect in a short time so to even up the advantages of bargaining as to give us something approximating equality without substituting compulsion for freedom.

Thrift and the laborer. The encouragement of thrift will tend in the same direction and will accelerate the process of putting unskilled labor in a position to prosper under freedom. It is through thrift that capital accumulates. When capital becomes so abundant that the average owner of capital has great difficulty in finding an opportunity to use it, he will have to be content with a smaller share in the products of industry.

The encouragement of productive enterprise, the frank acknowledgment of our obligation to the man who shows the ability to plan a new enterprise and, what is vastly more important, to make it actually succeed, will do a great deal to expand the opportunities for those of us who do not possess that kind of ability. The more such men we can develop in our midst,

the more our industries will expand and the more opportunities for remunerative employment there will be for the rest of us.

Poverty easily curable under freedom. We need not have poverty in our midst a generation longer than we want it. By setting to work deliberately to balance up our population, making ignorance and lack of skill to disappear, and making technical training and constructive talent to increase, we can, in a short space of time, make low wages and poverty a thing of the past. What is even better, we can do this and still leave everyone a free man. This is the gospel of the new, or constructive, liberalism which is destined to bring relief—if not to this nation, at least to some nation which has the wisdom to adopt itand which, when adopted, will keep that nation in the position of leadership among all the nations of the earth.

A LIBERALIST'S PROGRAM FOR THE COMPLETE ABOLITION OF POVERTY 1

I. LEGISLATIVE PROGRAM

A. For the redistribution of unearned wealth

1. By increased taxation of land values

2. By a graduated inheritance tax

3. By control of monopoly prices

B. For the redistribution of human talent

1. By increasing the supply of the higher, or scarcer, forms of talent (a) By vocational education, especially for the training of busi

ness men

(b) By cutting off incomes which support capable men in idle

ness

2. By decreasing the supply of the lower, or more abundant, forms

of labor power

(a) By the restriction of immigration

(b) By the restriction of marriage

(1) By the elimination of defectives

(2) By the requirement of a minimum standard income

(c) By a minimum-wage law

(d) By fixing building standards for dwellings

1 Compare the author's work entitled "Essays in Social Justice," chap. xiv. Harvard University Press, 1915.

C. For the increase of material equipment

1. By increasing the available supply of land through reclamation

(a) Of "cut-over" land

(b) Of stony land

(c) Of swamp land

(d) Of arid land

II. NONLEGISLATIVE PROGRAM

A. For raising the standard of living among the laboring classes

1. The educator as the rationalizer of standards

2. Thrift and the standard of living

3. Industrial coöperation as a means of business and social education B. For creating sound public opinion and moral standards among the capable; for example:

I. The ambition of the family-builder

2. The idea that leisure is disgraceful

3. The idea that the productive life is the religious and moral life

4. The idea that wealth is tools rather than a means of gratification 5. The idea that the possession of wealth confers no license for luxury or leisure

6. The idea that government is a means, not an end

7. Professional standards among business men

C. For discouraging vicious and demoralizing developments of public opinion; for example:

1. The cult of incompetence and self-pity

2. The gospel of covetousness or the jealousy of success

3. The idea that the capitalization of verbosity is constructive business

COLLATERAL READING

ON SOCIALISM

BRASOL, BORIS. Socialism versus Civilization. New York, 1920. (A frankly hostile criticism by one who saw much of European socialism from the inside.) ELY, RICHARD T. French and German Socialism. New York, 1911. (Excellent for its historical and biographical material.)

LEROSSIGNOL, J. E. Orthodox Socialism. New York, 1907. (Probably the best critical review of the leading doctrines of Karl Marx.)

RAE, JOHN. Contemporary Socialism. London, 1891. (Probably the fullest single account of modern socialist movements.)

SKELTON, O. D. Socialism. Boston, 1911. (An excellent critical examination of the theories and claims of socialism.)

ON COMMUNISM

HINDS, W. A. American Communities. Chicago, 1908. (The most upto-date account of American communistic experiments.)

NORDHOFF, CHARLES. The Communistic Societies of the United States. New York, 1875. (Somewhat out of date, but sympathetically written.)

NOYES, J. H. History of American Socialisms. Philadelphia, 1870. (A sympathetic account by the founder of the Oneida Community.)

ON THE INFLUENCE OF GOVERNMENT

MILL, JOHN STUART. Principles of Political Economy, Bk. V, chaps. viii, ix, x, and xi. New York, 1893.

ON ANARCHISM

STIRNER, MAX (Johann KaspaR SCHMIDT). The Ego and his Own. London, 1915. (The most thoroughgoing advocacy of the idea which Nietzsche made popular under the name of the superman.)

TOLSTOY, LEO. The Slavery of our Times. New York, 1900. (Emotional rather than analytical.)

ON THE SINGLE TAX

FILLEBROWN, C. B. A Single Tax Catechism. Boston, 1913.
GEORGE, HENRY. Progress and Poverty. New York, 1914.

INDEX