Emile de Lavelaye was quite correct in attributing significance to the publication of “Progress and Poverty,” though the seed sown by Henry George took root, not in the slums and alleys of our cities—­no intellectual seed of any sort can germinate in the sickly, sunless atmosphere of slums—­but in the minds of people who had sufficient leisure and education to think of other things than breadwinning.  Henry George proposed to abolish poverty by political action:  that was the new gospel which came from San Francisco in the early eighties.  “Progress and Poverty” was published in America in 1879, and its author visited England at the end of 1881.  Socialism hardly existed at that time in English-speaking countries, but the early advocates of land taxation were not then, as they usually are now, uncompromising individualists.  “Progress and Poverty” gave an extraordinary impetus to the political thought of the time.  It proposed to redress the wrongs suffered by the working classes as a whole:  the poverty it considered was the poverty of the wage workers as a class, not the destitution of the unfortunate and downtrodden individuals.  It did not merely propose, like philanthropy and the Poor Law, to relieve the acute suffering of the outcasts of civilisation, those condemned to wretchedness by the incapacity, the vice, the folly, or the sheer misfortune of themselves or their relations.  It suggested a method by which wealth would correspond approximately with worth; by which the reward of labour would go to those that laboured; the idleness alike of rich and poor would cease; the abundant wealth created by modern industry would be distributed with something like fairness and even equality, amongst those who contributed to its production.  Above all, this tremendous revolution was to be accomplished by a political method, applicable by a majority of the voters, and capable of being drafted as an Act of Parliament by any competent lawyer.

To George belongs the extraordinary merit of recognising the right way of social salvation.  The Socialists of earlier days had proposed segregated communities; the Co-operators had tried voluntary associations; the Positivists advocated moral suasion; the Chartists favoured force, physical or political; the Marxists talked revolution and remembered the Paris Commune.  George wrote in a land where the people ruled themselves, not only in fact but also in name.  The United States in the seventies was not yet dominated by trusts and controlled by millionaires.  Indeed even now that domination and control, dangerous and disastrous as it often is, could not withstand for a moment any widespread uprising of the popular will.  Anyway, George recognised that in the Western States political institutions could be moulded to suit the will of the electorate; he believed that the majority desired to seek their own well-being and this could not fail to be also the well-being of the community as a whole.  From Henry George I think it may be taken that the early Fabians learned to associate the new gospel with the old political method.