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The logic of Henry George’s book and its literary style are so insistent that it has been studied closely by economists of note in every country on the globe. Its argument has never been answered, and those who have sought to combat it have rested their case on the assertion that Henry George was a theorist and a dreamer, and so far as practical affairs were concerned was a failure. With equal logic we might brand the Christian religion as a failure because its founder was not a personal success, either in his social status or as a political leader.

Gradually the thinking men of the world, the statesmen and the doers, are beholding the fact that mankind is an organism, and that a country is only as rich as its poorest citizen; that an athlete with Bright’s disease is not worth as much to humanity as a small, lively and healthy boy of ten with cheek of tan and freckles to spare. Health comes from right living, and living without useful effort is only existence.

People living on the pavement or in sky-scrapers soon degenerate.

Man can not thrive apart from land. Abject poverty is found only in great cities, where population is huddled like worms in a knot.

The highest average of intelligence, happiness and prosperity is found in villages, where each family owns its home, and the renter is the rare exception.

The word “renter” we used Out West as a term of contempt. The ownership of an acre of land gives a sense of security which religion can not bestow. God’s acre, with vegetables, fruits, flowers, a cow and poultry, places a family beyond the reach of famine, even if not of avarice. Moreover, this single acre means sound sleep, good digestion and resultant good thoughts, all from digging in the dirt and mixing with the elements. “All wealth comes from the soil,” says Adam Smith, and he might have added, man himself comes from the soil and is brother to the trees and the flowers. Men can no more live apart from land than can the grass. The ownership of a very small plot of ground steadies life, lends ballast to existence, and is a bond given to society for good behavior.

“I am no longer an anarchist–I have bought a lot and am building a house,” a Russian refugee advised his restless colleagues at home, when they wrote, asking him for quotations on dynamite.

It is obvious and easy to say that the people who make city slums possible do not want to own houses and would not live upon land and improve it, if they could.

The worst about this statement is that it is true. They are so sunken in fear, superstition and indifference that they lack the squirrel’s thrift in providing a home and laying in a stock of provisions; they are even without the ground-hog’s ambition to burrow. They are too sodden to know what they are missing, and are lacking in the imagination which pictures a better condition.

They are like those pigmy bondsmen who work in the cotton-mills of the South–yellow, gaunt, too dead to weep, too hopeless to laugh, too pained to feel.

From these creatures and creators of slums it is absurd to talk of gratitude for the offer of betterment. People who expect gratitude do not deserve it. Neither can the slumsters by force be placed on land and be expected to till it. A generation, at least, will be required to work a change, and this change will come through educating the children–through the kindergarten and the kindergarten methods–and most of all through school-gardens. The so-called “back districts” are fast being annihilated, for quick transportation is bringing city and country close together. The time is coming, and shortly, too, when a fare of one cent a mile will be the universal rule, and a mile a minute will not be regarded as an unusual speed.