Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2190

Pencil notes for a letter by Heath on a notepad

No date

 

 

 

For many years I pondered the philosophy and the program of Henry George before I discovered their disharmony and the incongruity between them. I made much effort to reconcile them for I had for many years great emotional bias in favor of all that he wrote and I carefully refrained from presenting him in any but the most favorable light, hoping that others of his adherents might join me in seeking to separate the gold from the dross and thus establish a sounder unity and agreement among ourselves and causing his proper light to shine undimmed, acceptable to mankind. I found his “law of human progress, freedom in association” — his philosophy of freedom set out in Progress & Poverty with great rhetorical brilliancy but with no specific or logical connection with his main thesis that property in land must be destroyed. Not even did he logically associate his sound theory of ground rent as the natural providence for public services with his highly generalized philosophy of freedom. From the beginning he proceeded rather as an overwrought reformer with a hatchet — a political tool. Unlike other reformers of his day and of industrial communities, he did not condemn all property, only property in land, almost the only kind of property that in California towered above the depth of his poverty in the 1870s when he wrote. His philosophy of freedom came rather as an afterthought, rather as an oratorical embellishment of his emotional and illogical hatchet work. But the whole work is so ingeniously persuasive and fervidly appealing and so little is known of the essential social function and historic role of the institution he attacked there has not to this day been published any adequate refutation of it. To do so one must make new discovery and acquire new knowledge dispassionately in the dim field where he so emotionally _____________.

 

My good friend, I know you as a cool and careful thinker. That is why I am sending you copy of a drastic review of Progress & Poverty on which I have worked intermittently and only occasionally over several years. I hope it will interest you not merely for the shadows its dispels but above all for its illumination — for the light in which it exposes some of the rational order, beauty and benevolence in which the social order is evolving towards the creative divinity and ultimate immortality of mankind.

 

 I want to get this off to you some days before leaving here for an Easter weekend with two grandsons at Harvard and Andover, thinking I might have some talk with you about it. However, I still hope I may see you and renew an acquaintance that I have always valued far more than my limitations as a correspondent must indicate to you.

 Sincerely yours,

 

    S. H.