Henry George was an American political economist and journalist. Here are excerpts from a speech he delivered in the Opera House, Burlington, Iowa, on April 1st, 1885. He was speaking to the Knights of Labor, an American labor federation, active in the late 19th century.
I propose to talk to you tonight of the crime of poverty. I cannot, in a short time, hope to convince you of much; but the thing of things I should like to show you is that poverty is a crime.
I do not mean that it’s a crime to be poor. Murder is a crime; but it is not a crime to be murdered; and a man who is in poverty. I look upon, not as a criminal in himself, so much as the victim of a crime for which others, as well perhaps as himself, are responsible…
If a man chooses to be poor, he commits no crime in being poor…
…it is certainly a crime to force poverty on others. And it seems to me clear that the great majority of those who suffer from poverty are poor, not from their own particular faults, but because of conditions imposed by society at large. Therefore, I hold that poverty is a crime, not an individual crime, but a social crime, a crime for which we all are responsible…
…there is no natural reason why we should not all be rich in the sense, not of having more than each other, but in the sense of all having enough to completely satisfy all physical wants; of all having enough to get such an easy living that we could develop the better part of humanity.
There is enough and to spare. The trouble is that in this mad struggle, we trample in the mire what has been provided insufficiency for us all; trample it in the mire while we tear and rend each other…
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 Burlington, he would find that those called the working people were the people who live in the poorest houses…
Did you ever think of the utter absurdity and strangeness of the fact that, all over the civilized world, the working classes are the poor classes? Go into any city in the world and get into a cab and ask the man to drive you where the working people live. He won’t take you to where the fine houses are. He will take you on the contrary into the squalled quarters, the poorer quarters. Did you ever think how curious that is?
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