the light of pure reason; the anarchy of competition must be brought to
an end; mankind should recognise that order, good sense, science, and,
he added, religion freed from superstition, could turn the world into a
place where all might live together in comfort and happiness.

Positivism proposed to attain its Utopia by moralising the capitalists,
and herein it showed no advance on Christianity, which for nineteen
centuries had in vain preached social obligation to the rich. The new
creed could not succeed where the old, with all its tremendous
sanctions, had completely failed. We wanted something fresh, some new
method of dealing with the inequalities of wealth.

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