Henry George

“ It crowds families of eight and ten into a single squalid room. It makes lads who might be useful men candidates for prisons and penitentiaries. It sends greed and all evil passions prowling through society as a hard winter drives the wolves to the abodes of men. It darkens faith in the human soul, and across the reflection of a just and merciful Creator draws the veil of a hard, and blind, and cruel fate.
It is not merely a robbery in the past; it is a robbery in the present - a robbery that deprives of their birthright the infants that are now coming into the world. ”

“ Further speculative advance of rent would cease, and in the future the people at large would gain the difference between the increase of rent and the amount at which that increase was estimated in fixing the present value of land, in which, of course, prospective as well as present value is an element. But it would leave, for all the future, one class in possession of the enormous advantage that they now have over others. ”

“ That such a man as John Stuart Mill should have attached so much importance to the compensation of landowners as to have urged the confiscation merely of the future increase in rent, is only explainable by his acquiescence in the doctrines that wages are drawn from capital and that population constantly tends to press upon subsistence. ”

“ The Landowners the same maxims of justice that have been formulated by landowners into law, and are applied every day in English and American courts to disputes between man and man, we should not only not think of giving the landholders any compensation for the land, but should take all the improvements and whatever else they might have as well. ”

“ Thus it is held that if we abolish private property in land, justice requires that we should fully compensate those who now possess it, as the British government, in abolishing the purchase and sale of military commissions, felt itself bound to compensate those who held commissions which they had purchased in the belief that they could sell them again ”

“ Chapter XXI Claim of landowners to compensation It is impossible for anyone to study Political Economy, or to think at all upon the production and distribution of wealth, without seeing that property in land differs from property in things of human production. ”

“ Just in proportion as the interests of the landholders are conserved, just in that proportion must general interests and general rights be disregarded, and if landholders are to lose nothing of their special privileges, the people at large can gain nothing. ”

“ Try the case of the landholders by the maxims of the common law by which the rights of man and man are determined. The common law we are told is the perfection of reason, and certainly the landowners cannot complain of its decision, for it has been built up by and for landowners. ”

“ The consideration that seems to cause hesitation is the idea that having permitted land to be treated as private property for so long, we should in abolishing it be doing a wrong to those who have been suffered to base their calculations upon its permanence ”

“ Attention is in general called away from the truth, as a lecturer on moral philosophy in a slave-holding community might call away attention from too close a consideration of the natural rights of men ”

“ To say nothing of the practical difficulties that such cumbrous plans involve, the extension of the functions of government they would require and the corruption they would beget, their inherent and essential defect lies in the impossibility of bridging over by any compromise the radical difference between wrong and right. ”