Henry George’s ideas and methods are easy of comprehension.  The land was made by God for every human creature that was born into the world, and therefore to confine the ownership of land to the few is wrong.  If a man wants a piece of land, he ought to pay the rest of the community for the enjoyment of it.  This payment or rent should be the only tax paid into the Treasury of the State.  Taxation on men’s own property (the produce of their own labour) should be done away with, and a rent graduated according to the site-value of the land should be substituted.  Monopolies would cease without violently and unjustly disturbing society with confiscation and redistribution.  No one would keep land idle if he were taxed according to its value to the community, and not according to the use to which he individually wished to put it.  A man would then readily obtain possession of land, and could turn it to account and develop it without being taxed on his own industry.  All human beings would thus become free in their lives and in their labour.  They would no longer be forced to toil at demoralising work for low wages; they would be independent producers instead of earning a living by providing luxuries for the rich, who had enslaved them by monopolising the land.  The single tax thus created would ultimately overthrow the present “civilisation” which is chiefly built up on wage-slavery.

Tolstoy gave his whole-hearted adhesion to this doctrine, predicting a day of enlightenment when men would no longer tolerate a form of slavery which he considered as revolting as that which had so recently been abolished.  Some long conversations with Henry George, while he was on a visit to Yasnaya Polyana, gave additional strength to Tolstoy’s conviction that in these theories lay the elements essential to the transformation and rejuvenation of human nature, going far towards the levelling of social inequalities.  But to inoculate the landed proprietors of Russia as a class with those theories was a task which even his genius could not hope to accomplish.

He recognised the necessity of proceeding from the particular to the general, and that the perfecting of human institutions was impossible without a corresponding perfection in the individual.  To this end therefore the remainder of his life was dedicated.  He had always held in aversion what he termed external epidemic influences:  he now endeavoured to free himself not only from all current conventions, but from every association which he had formerly cherished.  Self-analysis and general observation had taught him that men are sensual beings, and that sensualism must die for want of food if it were not for sex instincts, if it were not for Art, and especially for Music.  This view of life he forcibly expressed in the “Kreutzer Sonata,” in which Woman and Music, the two magnets of his youth, were impeached as powers of evil.  Already, in “War and Peace” and in “Anna Karenina,” his descriptions of female charms