Progress and Poverty by Henry George (most important books of all time txt) 📕

Malthus’ other works, though written after he became famous, made no mark, and are treated with contempt even by those who find in the Essay a great discovery. The Encyclopædia Britannica, for instance, though fully accepting the Malthusian theory, says of Malthus’ Political Economy: “It is very ill arranged, and is in no respect either a practical or a scientific exposition of the subject. It is in great part occupied with an examination of parts of Mr. Ricardo’s peculiar doctrines, and with an inquiry into the nature and causes of value. Nothing, however, can be more unsatisfactory than these discussions. In truth Mr. Malthus never had any clear or accurate perception of Mr. Ricardo’s theories, or of the principles which determine the value in exchange of different articles.” ↩

I say considerable country, because there may be small islands, such as Pitcairn’s Island, cut off from communication with the rest of the world and consequently from the exchanges which are necessary to the improved modes of production resorted to as population becomes dense, which may seem to offer examples in point. A moment’s reflection, however, will show that these exceptional cases are not in point. ↩

As may be seen from the map in H. H. Bancroft’s Native Races, the State of Vera Cruz is not one of those parts of Mexico noticeable for its antiquities. Yet Hugo Fink, of Cordova, writing to the Smithsonian Institute (Reports 1870), says there is hardly a foot in the whole State in which by excavation either a broken obsidian knife or a broken piece of pottery is not found; that the whole country is intersected with parallel lines of stones intended to keep the earth from washing away in the rainy season, which show that even the very poorest land was put into requisition, and that it is impossible to resist the conclusion that the ancient population was at least as dense as it is at present in the most populous districts of Europe. ↩

I take these figures from the Smithsonian Report for 1873, leaving out decimals. MM. Behm and Wagner put the population of China at 446,500,000, though there are some who contend that it does not exceed 150,000,000. They put the population of Hither India at 206,225,580, giving 132.39 to the square mile; of Ceylon at 2,405,287 or 97.36 to the square mile; of Further India at 21,018,062, or 27.94 to the square mile. They estimate the population of the world at 1,377,000,000, an average of 26.64 to the square mile. ↩

History of Civilization. Vol. I., Chap. 2. In this chapter Buckle has collected a great deal of evidence of the oppression and degradation of the people of India from the most remote times, a condition which, blinded by the Malthusian doctrine, he has accepted and made the cornerstone of his theory of the development of civilization, he attributes to the ease with which food can there be produced. ↩

Indian Recreations. By Rev. Wm. Tennant. London, 1804. Vol. I., Sec. XXXIX. ↩

Miss Nightingale (“The People of India”, in Nineteenth Century for August, 1878) gives instances, which she says represent millions of cases, of the state of peonage to which the cultivators of Southern India have been reduced through the facilities afforded by the Civil Courts to the frauds and oppressions of money lenders and minor native officials. “Our Civil Courts are regarded as institutions for enabling the rich to grind the faces of the poor, and many are fain to seek a refuge from their jurisdiction within native territory,” says Sir David Wedderburn, in an article on “Protected Princes in India,” in a previous (July) number of the same magazine, in which he also gives a native State, where taxation is comparatively light, as an instance of the most prosperous population of India. ↩

See articles in Nineteenth Century for October, 1878, and March, 1879. ↩

Prof. Fawcett, in a recent article on the Proposed Loans to India, calls attentions to such items as £1,200 for outfit and passage of a member of the Governor General’s Council; £2,450 for outfit and passage of Bishops of Calcutta and Bombay. ↩

Florence Nightingale says 100 percent is common, and even then the cultivator is robbed in ways which she illustrates. It is hardly necessary to say that these rates, like those of the pawnbroker, are not interest in the economic sense of the term. ↩

The seat of recent famine in China was not the most thickly settled districts. ↩

Principles of Political Economy, Book I., Chap. XIII., Sec. 2. ↩

The rate up to 1860 was 35 percent each decade. ↩

In speaking of the value of land I use and shall use the words as referring to the value of the bare land. When I wish to speak of the value of land and improvements I shall use those words. ↩

I do not mean to say that the accepted law of rent has never been disputed. In all the nonsense that in the present disjointed condition of the science has been printed as political economy, it would be hard to find anything that has not been disputed. But I mean to say that it has the sanction of all economic writers who are really to be regarded as authority. As John Stuart Mill says (Book II., Chap. XVI.), “there are few persons who