Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1182

Carbon of letter to Herbert M. Garn, Director of Education, Henry George School of Social Science, New York City.

June 7, 1936

Dear Mr. Garn:

I am much pleased to have your letter of June 5th thanking me for my efforts to be of service to the Henry George School. I am proud that I have been, in one way or another a support of the School from its first beginning and that I was able to aid and encourage this noble project of Oscar Geiger from the time that it was first proposed.

After many years of relative neglect and lack of progress, there are now many evidences that the basic philosophy of Henry George — the philosophy of absolute freedom of exchange — must _________ the foundation of all the social advance and improvement that the near or distant future can achieve.

The vanity and the futility of more and more economic restrictions to offset the distress already caused by governmental restrictions is a lesson that is bound to be learned, even in the rough and costly school of failure and experience. Meantime, it can be the high mission of the Henry George Schools to send out broad beams of light and inspiration — to teach despairing men that God and nature have endowed the present existing structures of society, under freedom, with all the loveliness and beauty of the most rapturous social dreams. And it may be also their mission, as visioned by Henry George, to extend and make further application of his all-dissolving principles of liberty and freedom in fields and directions that he made no attempt to explore. Like all the wise and great, he knew that every truth, every conquest and triumph of the mind, is not merely a jewel to be cherished but also a sure foundation on which to build. The world must be taught that the taxation of wealth is a social and a socialistic poison; that ground rent is the only just and proper payment for governmental services according to their market value, and that they must be used, one hundred per cent, to defray the costs of the public services that create it.

It is with much regret that I find myself unable to attend the School dinner on the eleventh. Before I learned that the dinner date had been changed from the twelfth to the eleventh I engaged myself to the head of the Social Science Department of the Somerville, N.J., High School and the president of the American Association of University Women of that place for a Thursday evening discussion of the Philosophy of Henry George.

I shall be happy if you will read this letter (with the exception, perhaps, of the first paragraph) at the School dinner and convey to all present my profound conviction and my congratulations that, under the inspiration of Henry George, each and every one of us may become a herald of the social dawn.

Sincerely yours,