HENRY GEORGE MOSES Henry George was born in Philadelphia in 1839. He began to work for his living as a boy of fourteen on a ship bound for the Far East. He was in Victoria, British Columbia, when the gold excitement was at its height and afterwards worked in San Francisco in a printing office and in other employments. In 1861, together with other printers, he started a daily paper, The Evening Journal. This did not prosper and Henry George became a reporter and won a reputation through his attacks on the monopolies of the railroads and express companies. He was attracted to the land problem by the rapid rise in values in California and a study of this question led to his most important work, "Progress and Poverty," expounding the doctrine of the single tax. This book had an immense popularity in England as well as in the United States and as a result Henry George gave many lectures in both countries. He was defeated as a candidate for Mayor in New York in 1886 after a vigorous campaign. He was again a candidate in 1907 but died a few days before the election. "Progress and Poverty" is one of the notable books of the century, and Henry George won wide fame as a lecturer and campaign speaker. The following address was delivered in Glasgow, Scotland, December 28, 1884, and was repeated in New York City in 1887. THERE is in modern thought a tendency to look upon the prominent characters of history as resultants rather than as initiatory forces. As in an earlier stage the irresistible disposition was to personification, so now it is to reverse this process, and to resolve into myths mighty figures long enshrined by tradition. Yet, if we try to trace to their sources movements whose perpetuated impulses eddy and play in the currents of our times, we at last reach the individual. It is true that "in stitutions make men" but it is also true that "in the beginnings men made institutions." In a well-known passage Macaulay has described the impression made upon the imagination by the antiquity of that church, which, surviving dynasties and empires, carries the mind back to a time when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the Pantheon and camelopard and tiger bounded in the Flavian amphitheater. But there still exists among us observances-transmitted in unbroken succession from father to son -that go back to a yet more remote past. Each recurring year brings a day on which, in every land, there are men who, gathering about them their families, and attired as if for a journey, eat with solemnity a hurried meal. Before the walls of Rome were traced, before Homer sang, this feast was kept, and the event to which it points was even then centuries old. That event signals the entrance upon the historic stage of a people on many accounts remarkable—a people who, though they never founded a great empire nor built a great metropolis, have exercised upon a large portion of mankind an influence, widespread, potent, and continuous; a people who have for nearly two thousand years been without country or organized nationality, yet have preserved their identity and faith through all vicissitudes of time and fortune-who have been overthrown, crushed, scattered; who have been ground, as it were, to very dust, and flung to the four winds of heaven; yet who, though thrones have fallen, and empires have perished, and creeds have changed and living tongues have become dead, still exist with a vitality seemingly unimpaireda people who unite the strangest contradictions; whose annals now blaze with glory, now sound the depth of shame and woe. The advent of such a people marks an epoch in the history of the world. But it is not of that advent so much as of the central and colossal figure around which its traditions cluster that I propose to speak. Three great religions place the leader of the Exodus upon the highest plane they allot to man. To Christendom and to Islam, as well as to Judaism, Moses is the mouth-piece and lawgiver of the Most High; the medium, clothed with supernatural powers, through which the Divine Will has spoken. Yet this very exaltation, by raising him above comparison, may prevent the real grandeur of the man from being seen. It is amid his brethren that Saul stands taller and fairer. On the other hand, the latest school of Biblical criticism asserts that the books and legislation attributed to Moses are really the product of an age subsequent to that of the prophets. Yet to this Moses, looming vague and dim, of whom they can tell us almost nothing, they, too, attribute the beginning of that growth which flowered after centuries in the humanities of Jewish law, and in the sublime conception of one God, universal and eternal, the Almighty Father; and again, higher still and fairer, culminated in that guiding star of spiritual light which rested over the stable of Bethlehem in Judea. But whether wont to look on Moses in this way or in that, it may be sometimes worth our while to take the point of view in which all shades of belief or disbelief may find common ground, and accepting the main features of Hebrew record and tradition, consider them in the light of history as we know it, and of human nature as it shows itself to-day. Here is a case in which sacred history may be treated as we treat profane history without any shock to religious feeling. Nor can the keenest criticism resolve Moses into a myth. The fact of the Exodus presupposes such a leader. To lead into freedom a people long crushed by tyranny; to discipline and order such a mighty host; to harden them into fighting men, before whom warlike tribes quailed and walled cities went down; to repress discontent and jealousy and mutiny; to combat reactions and reversions; to turn the quick, fierce flame of enthusiasm to the service of a steady purpose, require some towering character-a character blending in highest expression the qualities of politician, patriot, philosopher, and statesman. - Such a character in rough but strong outline the tradition shows us the union of the wisdom of the Egyptians with the unselfish devotion of the meekest of men. From first to last, in every glimpse we get, this character is consistent with itself and with the mighty work which is its monument. It is the character of a great mind, hemmed in by conditions and limita tions, and working with such forces and materials as were at hand-accomplishing, yet failing. Behind grand deeds a grander thought. Behind high performance the still nobler ideal. Egypt was the mold of the Hebrew nation-the matrix, so to speak, in which a single family, or, at most, a small tribe grew to a people as numerous as the American people at the time of the Declaration of Independence. For four centuries, according to Hebrew tradition-that is to say, for a period longer than America has been known to Europe, this growing people, coming a patriarchal family from a roving, pastoral life, had been under dominance of a highly developed and ancient civilization—a civilization whose fixity is symbolized by monuments that rival in endurance the everlasting hills-a civilization so ancient that the Pyramids, as we now know, were hoary with centuries ere Abraham looked upon them. No matter how clearly the descendants of the kinsmen who came into Egypt at the invitation of the boy-slave become prime minister, maintained the distinction of race, and the traditions of a freer life, they must have been powerfully affected by such a civilization; and just as the Hebrews of to-day are Polish in Poland, German in Germany, and American in the United States, so, but far more clearly and strongly, the Hebrews of the Exodus must have been essentially Egyptians. It is not remarkable, therefore, that the ancient Hebrew institutions show in so many points the influence of Egyptian ideas and customs. What is remarkable is the dissimilarity. To the unreflecting, nothing may seem more natural than that a people, in turning their backs upon a land where they had been long oppressed, should discard its ideas and institutions. But the student of history, the observer of politics, knows that nothing is more unnatural. Habits of thought are even more tyrannous than habits of body. They make for the masses of men a mental atmosphere out of which they can no more rise than out of the physical atmosphere. A people long used to despotism may rebel against a tyrant; they may break his statutes and repeal his laws, cover with odium that which he loved, and honor that which he hated; but they will hasten to set up another tyrant in his place. A people used to superstition may embrace a purer faith, but it will be only to degrade it to their old ideas. A people used to persecution may flee from it, but only to persecute in their turn when they get power. For "institutions make men." And when amid a people used to institutions of one kind, we see suddenly arise institutions of an opposite kind, we know that behind them must be that active, that initiative force-the men who in the beginnings make institutions. This is what occurs in the Exodus. The striking differences between Egyptian and Hebrew polity are not of form but of essence. The tendency of the one is to subordination and oppression; of the other to individual freedom. Strangest of recorded births! From out the strongest and most splendid despotism of antiquity comes the freest republic. From between the paws of the rock-hewn Sphinx rises the genius of human liberty, and the trumpets of the Exodus throb with the defiant proclamation of the rights of men. Consider what Egypt was. The very grandeur of her monuments, that after the lapse, not of centuries but of millenniums, seem to say to us, as the Egyptian priest said to the boastful Greeks, "Ye are children!" testify to the enslavement of the people are the enduring witnesses of a social organization that rested on the masses an immovable weight. That narrow Nile valley, the cradle of the arts and sciences, the scene, perhaps, of the greatest triumphs of the human mind, is also the scene of its most abject enslavement. In the long centuries of its splendor, its lord, secure in the possession of irresistible temporal power, and securer still in the awful sanctions of a mystical religion, was as a god on earth, to cover whose poor carcass with a tomb befitting his state hundreds of thousands toiled away their lives. For the classes who came next to him were all the sensuous delights of a most luxurious civilization, and high intellectual pleasures which the mysteries of the temple hid from vulgar profanation. But for the millions who constituted the base of the social pyramid there was but the lash to stimulate their toil, and the worship of beasts to satisfy the yearnings of the soul. From time immemorial to the present day the lot of the Egyptian peasant |