Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1281

Carbon of a letter from Heath to Benjamin W. Burger, 150 Nassau Street, 21 New York, New York

November 5, 1939

Dear Mr. Burger:

Many thanks for the Sterling pamphlet of 1894 giving the controversy between Henry George and several defenders of Herbert Spencer. I have read it with much interest and attention, and am returning it herewith as you request.

None of these writers discuss in any way the merits of the question of Private Property in Land. It is all absolutely ad hominum and therefore of no interest beyond the personal.

Neither Spencer nor George seemed to have any conception of property in land as playing any functional part in the operations of an organized community. Both interpreted the institution in terms of individual rights and not in terms of the social process or function, namely, voluntary exchange. Both seem to have thought that society was held together by the passive fact of men acknowledging and respecting each other’s individual ‘rights.’ Both subscribed to the “law of equal freedom,” the mere statement of a negative attitude of non-aggression, which, though essential to social relationships, is not in itself any social relationship at all in a positive sense. A social relationship, to be positive and veritable, must be a process, something that is performed between and among men, and not a mere condition of let-alone or non-aggression. The social process is exchange, voluntary exchange, and where this process is not being performed` there can be no such thing as a social institution, not even such as the family or tribe, beyond the scheme of relationships within which the members consciously or otherwise perform services for one another.

     Spencer appears never to have had any clear conception of any of this. His negative analysis of private property in land in Social Statics completely ignores it, as does Henry George in practically all that he has to say about private property in land. Both of these men on the basis of their insufficient assumptions, came to an absolute condemnation of property in land, and both in part repudiated it, without knowing precisely upon what grounds they were doing so. George held that the institution should be preserved nominally and in form and also that there was a function for it to perform, a function at least sufficiently important and necessary that it should be recompensed to the amount of a percentage of the rents. But in most of his polemics against property in land George completely ignored his own reservations and limitations and proposed the same absolute abolishment of the institution as Spencer long before him had done. But Spencer gave no further attention to the Question for many years nor until the fulminations of George prompted him to a qualified and not very adequate repudiation of his early argument and its uncompromising conclusions. The fact is, both men came to take a modified and qualified position, but George’s highly moralistic temper prevented him from perceiving his own equivocal position. His neglect of his own practical qualification of his general position — so much so as to obscure it even to the present day — and his uncompromising absolutist crusade against the institution of property in land arrayed the more sober thought of Spencer and of the scientific and academic world and most of the theological world almost solidly against him.

     Thinking of land ownership as an obstacle instead of the actual means whereby voluntary rent could be enormously enhanced and canalized into all community services and needs, George misled himself to attack that institution instead of trying to analyze it and seeking to clarify its social potentialities. Spencer and his friends, being in no distinctly better intellectual position, had no better meat to put their controversial teeth into than the very highly personalized attack against Spencer, his character and motives, that George made in his volume entitled A Perplexed Philosopher. Spencer was too much the logician to defend his original position after he found himself perhaps intuitively withdrawn from it, although George was too much the moralist to content himself with any less than absolute denunciation of property in land albeit he had himself given it at least a partial validation. It was this crude moralizing instead of analyzing of the institution that brought on all the conflict with the Pope that Mr. Bell in his recent volume on McGlynn has so vividly and so tragically made to live again. Again it is the irony of fate that this very human institution, property in land, should be abused as the battle ground between professed and professional lovers and servants of mankind while it remained for that cold economist, Richard T. Ely, to be the first to attribute to it a positive utility and foreshadow its social mission. In 1922 he wrote, “In fact, the place and function of the land owner is rarely considered in a discussion of tenancy.” And again, “in an ideal system of land ownership there will be an endeavor to create in the land owner a feeling that land ownership carries with it a social mission.”

Harold Cox on Land Nationalism is an excellent historical review, quite learned in style and substance, with highly labored but only negative arguments against Henry George, but nothing analytical or original about it. John Orr’s book is much more vital and original. I hope you will tell Mr. McNally how I recommend it and give him also my best wishes when you see him.

                                 Very sincerely,