The condition of labour; an open letter to Pope Leo XIII

Henry George was an American political economist; was born in Philadelphia, September 2, 1839, died in New York, October 29, 1897.He attended the public schools until 1853, when he went into a counting-room, and then to sea, learning something of printing in the meanwhile. In 1858 he reached California, where he worked t the case again until 1866, when he became a reporter and afterward editor of various papers, among them the Sun Francisco Times and Post. In August, 1880, he removed to New York. He spent a year in England and Ireland, in 1881 and 1832, where he was twice under arrest as a "suspect,? but was released upon his identity being established.Mr. George is chiefly known through his addresses and books upon economic questions, in which he attributed the evils of society to the treatment of land as subject to full individual ownership, and contends that while the possession of land should be left to the individual, it should be subject to the payment to the community of land values proper, or economic rent. This doctrine, now known as The Single Tax, aims at abolishing all taxes for raising revenues except a tax levied on the value of land irrespective of improvements.He has published Our Land and Land Policy (1871); Progress and Poverty (1879); Irish Land Question (1881); Social Problems (I 883); Property in Land, a controversy with the Duke of Argyll (1884); Protection or Free Trade (1886); The Condition of Labor, an Open Letter to Pope Leo XIII. (1891).… (more)