just, and wicked. That abuses of the rights of property ought to be restrained, and that a limit might be, and perhaps ought to be, fixed to the quantity of land that any one man or family may engross, may be admitted; but the suggestion that society may repudiate its own titles, without compensation, under the subterfuge that the present generation cannot be bound by the past, is one which so evidently upright a person as our author could never have made if he had not been carried out of himself by the imagination that he had discovered the source of all social evil. Would that he had! With fifty years of moderate economy we could buy back our concessions, and, thereafter, there would be no more poverty or wickedness upon earth! But, alas! his supposed cause (the rise of real estate before a panic) is not a cause, but a concurrent effect of quite another cause. THE LAWS OF WAGES. But if our examination of "Progress and Poverty" shows that we must abandon the belief in the discovery by our author of a panacea for all social evils, it shows, on the other hand, that we may dismiss his fears of wages tending to a minimum, and of rent devouring the whole annual product. So long as this annual product increases, wages also must increase; and there appears to be no reason to apprehend that they will not increase for a long period unless the people, misled by fallacious advice, should abandon the protective policy and permit the recipients of rent and of profits, and the non-productive classes, who are supported out of rent and profits, to send abroad for the greater part of their commodities. So long as the men who get their ten or twenty or thirty or more dollars a day from fees, salaries, or profits, are content to buy their commodities from the men who get their dollar and a half, or two dollars, or three dollars a day, so long (until, at all events, population presses on the means of subsistence) will the annual product, and the consequent remuneration to every kind of labor, continue to augment. The progress will not be continuous, but in waves; and during the retrocessions there will be severe distress among all classes who have not laid by something for the "rainy day." How these periods of depression may be shortened and made less frequent is worthy of the profound study of the intelligent and philanthropic; and, meanwhile, it is some consolation to see clearly that such periods are by no means mere aggravations of a general course of economic deterioration, as Mr. George supposes, but that they are, on the contrary, only temporary pauses in a general course of economic improvement. And now, having performed the disagreeable task of picking flaws in "Progress and Poverty," let us gratefully admit, once more, that it is a brilliant book, glowing with a noble philanthropy, courage, and self-devotion. All that we have read in fable, or history, or the records of science, is brought again to mind in admirable sentences, and there is much of most interesting and suggestive thought and speculation. If political economy could all be strained out, there would remain a volume which every critic would applaud, and which the general reader would turn to again and again as a source of improvement and pleasure. As it is, the book is well suited to fascinate and mislead the inexperienced, the impatient, the many who judge by the heart rather than by the head, and all those who, in seeking an imaginary right, are willing to commit a certain and irretrievable wrong. University Press: John Wilson & Son, Cambridge. |