< Page:Tolstoy - A Great Iniquity.djvu
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A GREAT INIQUITY.

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of human wants and desires. Why, man's very body is drawn from the land. Children of the soil, we come from the land, and to the land we must return. Take away from man all that belongs to the land, and what

have you but a disembodied spirit? Therefore he who holds the land on which and from which another man must live is that man's master, and the man is his slave. The man who holds the land on which I must live can command me to life or to death just as absolutely as though I were his chattel. Talk about abolishing slavery—we have not abolished slavery; we have only abolished one rude form of it, chattel slavery. There is a deeper and more insidious form, a more cursed form yet before us, to abolish, in this industrial slavery that makes a man a virtual slave, while taunting him and mocking him in the name of freedom."[1]

Did you ever think," says Henry George in another part of the same speech, "of the utter absurdity and strangeness of the fact that all over the civilised world the working classes are the poor classes? Think for a moment how it would strike a rational being who had never been on the earth before if such an intelligence could come down, and you were to explain to him how we live on earth, how houses and food and clothing and all the many things we need were all produced by work, would he not think that the working people would be the people who lived in the finest houses and had most of everything that work produces? Yet, whether you took him to London or Paris or New York, or even to Burlington, he would find that those called the working people

were the people who lived in the poorest houses."[2]

(The same thing, I would add, takes place in a yet greater degree in the country. Idle people live in luxurious palaces, in spacious and fine abodes. The workers live in dark and dirty hovels.)

"All this is strange—just think of it. We naturally despise poverty, and it is reasonable that we should . . . . Nature gives to labour, and to labour alone; there must be human work before any article of wealth can be produced; and in the natural state of things the man who toiled honestly and well would be the rich man, and he who did not work would be poor. We have so reversed the order of Nature that we are accustomed to think of
  1. ↑ The Works of Henry George, Vol. IX., p. 199.
  2. ↑ Ibid., Vol. IX., p. 202.
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