Charles Marshall Lungren

“ The essence of the doctrine of Malthus is, that the power of producing wealth does not keep pace with population—that in a dense population the power of producing wealth is proportionately less than in a sparse one. It may be objected that "the power of producing wealth" should read "the power of producing food." But, so long as the whole earth can supply enough food for the whole of its inhabitants, the power of producing wealth in any community is equivalent to the power of producing food, because, in consequence of a multitude of exchanges, wealth commands food. ”

“ Of the effect of his remedy upon the material, social, and moral welfare of society Mr, George is very hopeful. Under its action he sees production bounding forward with giant strides; the great agencies, which man has called into being to help him subdue the earth, no longer of doubtful good. By the power of these "slaves of the lamp of knowledge" he sees wealth increased on every hand, and distributed to each according to his labor. He sees these great forces elevating society from its very foundations. ”

“ It is to the newer countries—that is, to the countries where material progress is yet in its earlier stages—that laborers emigrate in search of higher wages, and capital flows in search of higher interest." It is here that, "though you will find an absence of wealth and all its concomitants, you will find no beggars. There is no luxury, but there is no destitution. No one makes an easy living, nor a very good living; but every one can make a living, and no one able and willing to work is oppressed by the fear of want." ”

“ The worship of wealth is but the expression of the fear of want. All men struggle to place themselves above want and the possibility of it. What men struggle for they admire, and to win the admiration and approbation of their fellows, if not the strongest, is at least one of the strongest, passions of human nature. With the passing away of this fear of want, however, will come a declining admiration of wealth, self-seeking diminish, seeking the good of others increase. And there need be no fear that, with declining need to devote his powers to getting subsistence, man will stagnate. ”

“ THE most obvious fact in the industrial life of to-day is the enormous increase of productive power over that of any previous period. Steam and electricity have transformed civilization, endowed us with vaster powers, and altered profoundly the conditions of life. Things that could not have been done at all, things that could only have been done slowly and laboriously by unaided human exertion, have been done with swiftness, exactness, and certainty by the agencies created by human thought and skill. ”

“ Labor creates wealth, and it is not until this wealth is created that labor receives its wages. The stock of capital on hand is never diminished by having to be paid for labor, but labor, as it goes along, creates the stock from which it is paid. Of the facts out of agreement with the wage-fund theory one of the most obvious is, that wages and interest do not vary inversely. By the theory, wages should be high where capital is abundant, and low where capital is scarce. ”

“ They can, indeed, increase their wages by such means, and not at the expense of each other or of capital as is commonly supposed, but at the expense of rent; but they can do so in so small a degree that the effect is relatively unimportant. In any contest between employers and employed it is not a struggle between labor and capital, but between labor and the owners of land, and it must always be an unequal one. Such a contest is, moreover, a destructive one—a war which, like any other, lessens wealth. ”

“ Here, then, in the relation of rent to wages and interest is the primary cause of the failure of invention and discovery to benefit the workingman. Wages and interest steadily tend to a minimum, but the incontestable fact in material progress is the rise in land-values. The great machinery of modern industry does not benefit labor and capital, because it does benefit the landholder. So long as men can control the land which all must use, they can command all the fruits of labor above what is necessary to a bare living. ”

“ By the law of rent, all the produce resulting from this increased effectiveness of labor and ease of exchange—that is, more than what the same labor and capital could procure on land free to them—goes to the landholder. Population, then, as it becomes dense, enormously increases rent.
And the increase of improvements in the arts affects rent in the same way. All labor-saving machines can affect production in one of two ways. Production may remain the same, and a certain amount of labor be set free, or the same amount of labor may be used, and production be increased. ”

“ In a primitive state of society, or in any of those simple occupations where a man works for himself, without calling in the use of capital, the whole result of his labor constitutes his return—his wages. The man who picks berries, hunts, or fishes, evidently has the berries picked, the game obtained, and the fish caught as the reward of his exertion. The wages of any number of laborers would be the whole amount produced, and the share of each would be proportional to the amount his labor contributed to the general stock of produce. ”

“ He rejects the common notion that there is an antagonism between labor and capital, and holds, on the contrary, that they are both robbed of their full earnings by the landholder. Labor can only produce wealth by having access to the materials it is to fashion, all of which are drawn from the earth, and by having such opportunities to occupy the land as its needs require. ”

“ Deduction from the law of rent shows that unchecked rise in rent must show itself in an industrial crisis, and the facts, he holds, abundantly support the deduction. Production may be likened to a steam-engine and rent to its governor. A lightened load, an increased pressure, and the engine bounds forward with accelerating speed. But the power that drives the engine drives also the governor; the force that has doubled the speed is the force that must ultimately check it—the governor, overtaking the engine, throttles the power that gives it action. ”

“ Youth no longer stunted and starved; age no longer harried by avarice; the child at play with the tiger; the man with the muck-rake drinking in the glory of the stars! Foul things fled, fierce things tame, discord turned to harmony! For how could there be greed where all had enough? How could the vice, the crime, the ignorance, the brutality, that spring from poverty and the fear of poverty, exist where poverty had vanished? Who should crouch where all were freemen; who oppress where all were peers? ”

“ Whoever commands the land commands the fruits of labor spent upon the land. Before labor can exert itself it must ask permission, and the price of this permission is the tax that, acting with accelerating power as civilization goes on, denies to labor and capital their rightful share in the wealth they have produced. ”

“ If the value of land increases proportionally, all the increased production will be swallowed up by rent, and wages and interest remain as before. If the value of land increases in greater ratio than productive power, rent will swallow up even more than the increase; and, while the produce of labor and capital will be much larger, wages and interest will fall. It is only when the value of land fails to increase as rapidly as productive power that wages and interest can increase with the increase in productive power. ”

“ Men would no longer seek vainly for the opportunities to labor. Competition would no longer be one-sided. "Into the labor market would have entered the greatest of all competitors for the employment of labor, a competitor whose demand can not be satisfied until want is satisfied—the demand of labor itself." All raised above want and the fear of want, human life would expand in new directions and under the impulse of new ideals. ”

“ If they were paid the market price for the land, industry would not be relieved, as the tax would remain in the form of interest on the purchase-money. Such an arrangement would, of course, prevent the further tax upon industry caused by the future increase of rent, but still the main burden would remain. Injustice, Mr. George thinks, has and can have no vested rights. If it be a wrong to deprive the landowners of their land without compensation, it is a greater wrong to take from industry to pay them for a value that industry has alone created. ”

“ George allows the effect that increasing population would have in increasing rent by lowering the margin of cultivation, he yet thinks that this is not the main way in which it affects rent. As population increases in any community, certain land—land at the center of trade and production—acquires new powers, an increased productiveness. Labor spent on this land can produce results not only vastly greater than it could on land beyond the boundaries of this population, but results that it could not produce at all beyond those boundaries. ”

“ George is not alone. He has with him the best thought of all times. Nearly every economist and social thinker of eminence who has made an investigation into the basis of property has found no warrant for the private ownership of land. They have all seen that a natural agent, which is necessary to human existence, and which can neither be increased nor decreased by human exertion, can by no process whatever become the rightful property of one man or any number of men, save all men. ”

“ The whole world really lives from hand to mouth. Let the entire production of any great city be stopped for a day, and it would become evident how entirely men are dependent upon present production. The worker, therefore, on any prolonged enterprise does not draw his subsistence from past labor. He simply draws from the present amount of wealth a certain part in one form after he has added to present wealth a certain amount in another form. "The series of exchanges which unite production and consumption may be likened," says Mr. George, "to a curved pipe filled with water. ”

“ The fact that the laws of wages, interest, and rent must be mutually dependent, Mr. George thinks so evident, that he marvels that so many acute thinkers could have failed to grasp the proper relations. He is even tempted to believe that some have seen, but, seeing also the enormous consequences, have turned away, remembering that "a great truth to an age which has rejected and trampled on it is not a word of peace, but a sword!" ”

“ The constant tendency is to an equation between interest and wages, so that the return to capital and labor will be the same for the same work done. Labor and capital, therefore, would divide up between them the entire produce resulting from their union, each having a share proportionate to its contribution to the whole. But they are not permitted to make such division. A third party claims a share—the landholder.
If one man owned all the land that was open to capital and labor, he would have absolute control over the produce of these agents. ”

“ Land can not be so divided, and even if it could, it is against those tendencies that are born of and grow with civilization. Machinery applied to agriculture makes cultivation on a large scale more economical than on a small one, and such holdings would interfere with the most advantageous occupancy of the land. The plan, however, has the cardinal objection that, unless every member of a community was a holder of land of equal productiveness, it would not abolish rent, and would therefore have no tendency toward an equitable division of the produce. ”

“ In an advancing community, the failure of production to increase proportionally would have the same effect as decreasing production in a stationary one. How, then, is this check in production brought about? If we trace it from one point to another, we shall ultimately find it in some obstacle which checks the expenditure of labor on land. The speculative advance in rent crowds down wages and interest to the point at which they will no longer consent to reproduce, production ceases, and the effects of this stoppage are propagated throughout the entire framework of industry. ”

“ To make exchange perfect there must constantly be great stores of goods in warehouses, ships, and railroad trains—goods held to supply the market, and goods on their way to market. To make labor effective, there must be many and various tools, factories, engines—all sorts of machinery. These tools and these goods in the hands of the producer are capital. ”

“ We no longer feel that it would be useless to invent railroads because of the immense capital needed to build them.
With this increase of wealth and productive power great ameliorations have been expected. It has been the guiding and dominant faith of this era of remarkable material progress that these new agencies would steadily tend to lift all classes to a plane of greater material comfort. With productive power outrunning consuming power, there would be enough for all. ”

“ But it is doubtful if such a machine would, after all, be the most satisfactory solution of the problem of a domestic motor. The final solution, there is reason to believe, is to be found, not in a heat-engine of any kind, but in a machine that will simply apply, in a convenient form and economical way, a power already furnished. Of such a nature is the water-wheel, which, for simplicity of construction, ease of handling, high efficiency, and small first cost, is unapproached by anything at present, and will probably never be surpassed by any future device. ”

“ While in large manufacturing only two machines—the water-wheel and the steam-engine—can be used, for the purpose of these small powers the range is much greater. Wind and water, steam, hot air, gas, and electricity, are all suitable and are all to a greater or less degree available. I propose in these papers simply to make a brief description of some of the more promising and successful machines now on the market, and give such information regarding the sizes in which they are made, cost of working, and prices, as will be of value to the householder and others having use for such a power. ”

“ A government, when undertaking a work of years, does not collect a stock sufficient to support the laborers until the completion of the work, but it appropriates the subsistence necessary from present and future production, taking it in the form of taxation. No part of the world really lives on past production—that is, out of the savings of past labor. ”

“ Machinery, dividing labor to an almost infinite degree, has multiplied its effectiveness manifold. The railroad and the telegraph, bringing men into closer and more intimate relations, have incalculably facilitated exchange. As a result of this greatly enhanced power of production, the accumulation of wealth has gone on at an unexampled rate. Enterprises, however great, need no longer fail for lack of the requisite capital. ”