Henry George

“ If we trace out the laws that govern human life in society, we find that in the largest as in the smallest community they are the same. We find that what seem at first sight like divergences and exceptions are but manifestations of the same principles. And we find that everywhere we can trace the social law, it runs into and conforms with the moral law; that in the life of a community, justice infallibly brings its reward and injustice its punishment. ”

“ How they call, and call, and call, till the heart swells that hears them! Strong soul and high endeavour, the world needs them now. Beauty still lies imprisoned, and iron wheels go over the good and true and beautiful that might spring from human lives. ”

“ By a fundamental law of our minds - the law, in fact, upon which Political Economy relies in all her deductions - we cannot conceive of a means without an end, a contrivance without an object. Unless man himself may rise to or bring forth something higher, his existence is unintelligible. ”

“ Human progress is not the improvement of human nature. The advances in which civilization consists are not secured in the constitution of man, but in the constitution of society. They are thus not fixed and permanent, but may at any time be lost - nay, are constantly tending to be lost. ”

“ The laws that Political Economy discovers, like the facts and relations of physical nature, harmonize with what seems to be the law of mental development - not a necessary and involuntary progress, but a progress in which the human will is an initiatory force. But in life, as we are cognizant of it, mental development can go but a little way. The mind hardly begins to awake ere the bodily powers decline. ”

“ These doctrines, which have been generally accepted as approved truth, do what (except as scientific interpretations have been coloured by them) the extensions of physical science do not do - they reduce the individual to insignificance; they destroy the idea that there can be in the ordering of the universe any regard for his existence, or any recognition of what we call moral qualities.
It is difficult to reconcile the idea of human immortality with the idea that nature wastes men by constantly bringing them into being where there is no room for them. ”

“ The great fact that science in all its branches shows is the universality of law. Wherever he can trace it, whether in the fall of an apple or in the revolution of binary suns, the astronomer sees the working of the same law, operating in the minutest divisions in which we may distinguish space as it operates in the immeasurable distances with which his science deals. ”

“ Whether it be a Humboldt or a Herschel, a Moses who looks from Pisgah, a Joshua who leads the host, or one of those sweet and patient souls who in narrow circles live radiant lives, there seems, if mind and character here developed can go no farther, a purposelessness inconsistent with what we can see of the linked sequence of the universe. ”

“ And the idea that man mentally and physically is the result of slow modifications perpetuated by heredity irresistibly suggests the idea that it is the race life and not the individual life that is the object of human existence. ”

“ For properly understood, the laws that govern the production and distribution of wealth show that the want and injustice of the present social state are not necessary. On the contrary, they show that a social state is possible in which poverty would be unknown and all the better qualities and higher powers of human nature would have opportunity for full development. ”

“ And further than this, when we see that social development is governed neither by a special providence nor by a merciless fate, but by law at once unchangeable and beneficent; when we see that human will is the great factor, and that taking men in the aggregate their condition is as they make it; when we see that economic law and moral law are essentially one, and that the truth that the intellect grasps after toilsome effort is but that which the moral reaches by a quick intuition ”

“ It grows with intellectual growth, and perhaps none really feel it more than those who have begun to see how great is the universe and how infinite are the vistas that every advance in knowledge opens before us - vistas that would require nothing short of eternity to explore. ”

“ Those countless millions like ourselves, who on this earth of ours have passed and still are passing, with their joys and sorrows, their toil and their striving, their aspirations and their fears, their strong perceptions of things deeper than sense, their common feelings that form the basis even of the most divergent creeds - their little lives do not seem so much like meaningless waste. ”

“ For a man who, seeing the want and misery, the ignorance and brutishness caused by unjust social institutions, sets himself to right them in so far as he has strength, there is disappointment and bitterness. ”

“ Thus the nightmare which is banishing from the modern world the belief in a future life is destroyed. It is not that all difficulties are removed - for turn which way we may, we come to what we cannot comprehend ”

“ But the bitterest thought - and it sometimes comes to the best and bravest - is that of the hopelessness of the effort, the futility of the sacrifice. To how few of those who sow the seed is it given to see it grow, or even with certainty to know that it will grow. ”

“ It is impossible to reconcile the idea of an intelligent and beneficent Creator with the belief that the wretchedness and degradation that are the lot of such a large proportion of human kind result from His enactments. ”

“ But in the mental atmosphere of our times, to the great majority of men on whom mere creeds have lost their hold, it seems impossible to look on this yearning save as a vain and childish hope that arises from man's egotism, having not the slightest ground or warrant but on the contrary seeming inconsistent with positive knowledge. ”

“ So strong is this metaphysical necessity that those who deny to the individual anything more than this life are compelled to transfer the idea of perfectibility to the race. But as we have seen (and the argument could have been made much more complete) there is nothing whatever to show any essential race improvement. ”

“ It becomes only dimly conscious of the vast fields before it, and only begins to learn and use its strength, to recognize relations and extend its sympathies, when, with the death of the body, it passes away. ”

“ That they have, and that here and now, everyone who has felt their exaltation knows. But sometimes the clouds sweep down. It is sad, sad reading, the lives of the men who would have done something for their fellows. ”