But when we came to consider the plan proposed by George we quickly saw that it would not carry us far.  Land may be the source of all wealth to the mind of a settler in a new country.  To those whose working day was passed in Threadneedle Street and Lombard Street, on the floor of the Stock Exchange, and in the Bank of England, land appears to bear no relation at all to wealth, and the allegation that the whole surplus of production goes automatically to the landowners is obviously untrue.  George’s political economy was old-fashioned or absurd; and his solution of the problem of poverty could not withstand the simplest criticism.  Taxation to extinction of the rent of English land would only affect a small fraction of England’s wealth.

There was another remedy in the field.  Socialism was talked about in the reviews:  some of us knew that an obscure Socialist movement was stirring into life in London.  And above all John Stuart Mill had spoken very respectfully of Socialism in his “Political Economy,” which then held unchallenged supremacy as an exposition of the science.  If, he wrote, “the choice were to be made between Communism[1] with all its chances, and the present state of society with all its sufferings and injustices, if the institution of private property necessarily carried with it as a consequence that the produce of labour should be apportioned as we now see it almost in inverse proportion to labour, the largest portions to those who have never worked at all, the next largest to those whose work is almost nominal, and so in descending scale, the remuneration dwindling as the work grows harder and more disagreeable until the most fatiguing and exhausting bodily labour cannot count with certainty on being able to earn even the necessities of life; if this or Communism were the alternative, all the difficulties, great or small, of Communism would be but as dust in the balance."[2] And again in the next paragraph:  “We are too ignorant, either of what individual agency in its best form or Socialism in its best form can accomplish, to be qualified to decide which of the two will be the ultimate form of human society.”

More than thirty years had passed since this had been written, and whilst the evils of private property, so vividly depicted by Mill, showed no signs of mitigation, the remedies he anticipated had made no substantial progress.  The co-operation of the Rochdale Pioneers had proved a magnificent success, but its sphere of operations was now clearly seen to be confined within narrow limits.  Profit-sharing then as now was a sickly plant barely kept alive by the laborious efforts of benevolent professors.  Mill’s indictment of the capitalist system, in regard to its effects on social life, was so powerful, his treatment of the primitive socialism and communism of his day so sympathetic, that it is surprising how little it prepared the way for the reception of the new ideas.  But to some of his readers, at any rate, it suggested that there was an alternative to the capitalistic system, and that Socialism or Communism was worthy of examination.[3]