The Phrenological Doctrines of Dr. Gall.
THEIR PAST AND PRESENT STATUS.
Science ought to emancipate mankind from the control of the animal instincts, and in the purely physical and mathematical sciences it does. In mathematics, dynamics, optics, acoustics, astronomy, electricity, engineering, and mechanics, the dictates of pure intellect are seldom interfered with by any blind impulse, attraction, or prejudice. But it is very different in the realm of opinion—in matters in which reason should be supreme, with as absolute authority as number and form have in mathematics.
A thousand can measure and calculate, and can obey implicitly in thought the mathematical laws, for one that can reason and obey implicitly the dictates of pure reason. If an error is made in the construction of a bridge, erection of a house, or financial report of a bank, thousands may at once detect the error, and by clear exposition compel its recognition. But in matters of opinion controlled by reason, there is no such ready detection and recognition of error, even by the best educated classes. The realm of opinion is ever in chaos. Contradictory opinions are ever clashing; no supreme arbiter is known; no law of reason, like the laws of mathematics, comes in to dissipate error and delusion.
Why is this? Anthropology replies that reason is as positive, clear, and imperative as mathematical principles, but that men have not been educated to exercise and to obey the faculty of reason, as they have been to measure and to count. In matters of opinion, feeling and impulse are allowed to dominate over reason, and to hug the delusions which reason would dispel. We have no educational system, no college, in which the art of reasoning is properly taught, although the shallow pedantry of Aristotelian logic has assumed to teach the art of reasoning. The faculties themselves of our colleges do not understand or practice the true art of reasoning, for if they did, they would harmonize in opinion as mathematicians harmonize in calculations, and would lead the onward march of mind continually, making or accepting discoveries of the highest importance, instead of standing, as they do, impregnable castles of ancient error in matters of opinion, though moderately progressive in physical science.
It is for these reasons that popular opinions and opinions of universities are of little value. Everything else but reason dominates them. The gift of a founder, the decree of a king, parliament, or pope, the decision of some ancient conclave of the superstitious and ignorant, or the imperious will of some interested body of lords, plutocrats, monks, or political usurpers, establishes the mould in which opinions are cast; and the soft brains of inexperienced and unreflective youth are easily compressed into the form of the established mould, and from that deformed condition they seldom or never entirely recover true symmetry. Never taught to reason deeply or accurately, they yield to the sympathetic mesmeric control of social opinions and impulses, without looking to their origin, Hence the lamentable fact that in matters of opinion or philosophy, as in social amusements and fashions, the animal instinct of gregariousness rules, and men move in masses like herds of sheep or buffaloes.
These considerations prepare us to appreciate justly the value of former and contemporary opinions in reference to the science of the brain.
The mystery that surrounded its anatomy was dispelled by Dr. Gall, and modern scientists have been building upon the foundation laid by him. It is not necessary now to dwell upon his protracted and careful study of the comparative development of the brain in men and animals. Suffice it to say no naturalist was ever more diligent, fearless, and successful, in the study of nature; and the conclusive evidence of his success is the fact that no student of nature who travelled after his footsteps has failed to see what he saw, and recognize Gall as a grand, original teacher.
Why is it, then, that the reputation of Gall and his discoveries of mental organs in the brain has been so fluctuating? Why have the discoveries that came forward with so imposing a prestige at the beginning of this century so entirely lost that prestige in the colleges in sixty years, that the writings of Gall and his disciples are generally neglected? Vague, unscientific speculations have taken their place; the colleges and literati are groping in darkness, and, like plants in a cellar which reach out to the dim windows, they look anxiously for the information that may come from laboratories and anatomical halls, where animals by thousands are tortured to find the sources of physical functions, forgetful of the fact that the human brain is a psychic organ, and that a whole century of such investigations would leave the grand problems of conscious life and character in primeval darkness!
Have they no respect for the labors and honorable observations of clear-headed scientists fifty to eighty years ago? Were the anatomists Reil and Loder deceived when they testified to Gall’s wonderful discoveries in anatomy? Were Andral, Broussais, Corvsart, and others, who stood at the head of the medical profession in France, deceived when they were followers of Gall? Was Dr. Vimont deceived when the study of the animal kingdom converted him from an opponent to a supporter of Gall? Were Elliotson and Solly of London, the Combes of Scotland, Macartney of Ireland, and a full score of others in the highest ranks of medical science deceived in giving their testimony that the anatomy of the brain, its development in the healthy, its amply recorded pathology, revealed in hospitals, and its phenomena in the insane asylums and prisons, supported the doctrines of Gall?
They were not deceived, and they were not blind. They were observers. Their successors, sinking into the agnosticism of pseudoscience, have thus sunk because they have abandoned the methods of science to adopt the methods of ignorant partisanship. They have not studied the comparative development of the brain in connection with character, and therefore they know little or nothing of it. They are not competent as observers of development, because they have never attempted to become acquainted with it. Even so eminent a writer as the late Prof. W. B. Carpenter shows by his writings, which are a monument of laborious erudition, that he did not understand so simple a matter as the external form of the cranium belonging to the development of the cerebellum.
Cranioscopy, the study of the brain and its proportional development through the cranium, which is the method by which Gall made his discoveries, is a lost art in the medical profession, and I doubt if there is a single professor in any American or European medical college to-day, who has a competent knowledge of it. The art of cranioscopy requires as its basis a correct knowledge of the anatomy of the brain and skull, a correct knowledge of the localities of all the cerebral organs, and a practical skill in determining their development with accuracy. A variation of one eighth of an inch in development will change the destiny of the individual, and incorrect conceptions of the growth of the brain and the natural irregularities of the cranium would vitiate the conclusions of the observers. A somewhat famous but unscientific practitioner of phrenology gave a good illustration of this by mistaking a rugged development of the lambdoid suture for an enormous organ of combativeness, and ascribing to the gentleman a terrific, pugnacious energy which was the very opposite of his true character.
The sciolism of popular phrenology, scantily supplied with anatomical knowledge, and but little better supplied with clear psychic conceptions, is incapable of commending the science to the esteem of critical observers, and of course incapable of sustaining its reputation against the overwhelming opposition of medical colleges. Thus rejected or at least neglected in the universities, which supply its place with worthless metaphysics, and unsustained before the public,—for the tone of literature is controlled by the universities,—it is not strange that the grand discoveries of Gall are neglected as they are to-day.
The objections to Gall’s discoveries which have been considered sufficient, have generally been the offspring of ignorance and superficial thinking. Thousands of physicians have been misled by professors of anatomy thoroughly ignorant of the subject, who have shown to their own ignorant satisfaction how impossible it was to judge of the development of the brain through the skull. The attacks upon phrenology have been generally remarkable for their logical feebleness. Any one well acquainted with the science and the phenomena in nature, could have made a much more effective attack,—an attack which would have appeared entirely unanswerable; but no such attack has been made.
There has been, however, one valid objection to the discoveries of Gall, which has done much to discredit the whole system. He ascribed to the entire cerebellum the sexual function alone, in doing which he disregarded the facts developed by vivisection. Ample observation has shown his error. The cerebellum is the physiological as the cerebrum is the psychic brain, and a defined central portion of the cerebellum at the median line does exercise, in connection with the summit of the spinal cord, the sexual functions. This has been fully established by pathology, as well as by my own experiments. In this matter Gall is certainly entitled to the credit of approximating the truth, the function being located within the territory assigned it.
The fundamental doctrine, however, which Gall has the immortal honor of establishing, is that the cerebrum is not a homogeneous unitary organ, but a mass of distinct organs, as distinct as the sensitive and motor columns of the spinal cord, and exercising different mental functions. Whatever errors of detail he may have fallen into cannot obscure the glory of the pioneer in the anatomy and psychology of the brain. His anatomical doctrines have stood the test of time; they are established; and his psychic doctrines are as near an approach to absolute truth as ever was made by a pioneer in a wilderness of mystery. Gall himself, with the just self-respect which belongs to a sincere and fearless seeker of scientific truth, expressed his attitude as follows, at the close of the sixth volume of his works:—
“These views of the qualities and faculties of man are not the fruit of subtile reasonings. They bear not the impress of the age in which they originate, and will not wear out with it. They are the result of numberless observations, and will be immutable and eternal like the facts that have been observed, and the fundamental powers which those facts force us to admit. They are not only founded on principles deduced from individual facts, but are confirmed by each individual fact in particular, and will forever come off triumphant from every test to which they may be submitted, whether of analysis or synthesis. If the reasonings of metaphysicians are ever discarded, this philosophy of the human qualities and faculties will be the foundation of all philosophy in time to come.”
These are the words of a grand-souled philosopher, who knew that he was speaking the truth, and forcing, as if at the point of the bayonet, a great, new truth upon the stolidity of the colleges. The simple truth of fibrous structure in the brain, now known to every tyro in anatomy, was contested in the days of Gall and Spurzheim, and had to be enforced by public dissection in an Edinburgh amphitheatre. With the same unreasoning stolidity the doctrine of the multiplicity of organs in the brain was shunned, evaded, or denied, though it would seem idiotic for any physiologist to assume such a position (by suppressing his own common sense) when the aim of all modern investigations of the brain is to discover different functions in different parts.
The great doctrine of the multiplicity of cerebral organs, introduced by Gall, could not be suppressed or ignored among those who investigate the brain in any manner. All modern investigators tacitly recognize it, for none could so stultify themselves as to assume the brain to be a homogeneous unit in either structure or functions, while seeking to discover the peculiar functions of each part. Thus his fundamental ideas are adopted by his opponents, and step by step they will be compelled to admit his general correctness, and his grand services as the pioneer in the highest department of science, the most prolific in important results to mankind. “Every honest and erudite anatomist,” says Sir Samuel Solly in his standard work on the anatomy of the brain, “must acknowledge that we are indebted mainly to Gall and Spurzheim for the improvements which have been made in our mode of studying the brain. For my own part, I most cheerfully acknowledge that the interest which I derived from the lectures of Dr. Spurzheim at St. Thomas’ Hospital about the years 1822 and 1823, has been the inciting cause of all the labor which for above twenty years I have at intervals devoted to this subject.”
The organ of language, his first discovery, located at the junction of the front and middle lobes, has been the first to receive the general recognition of the medical profession, because it is easy to recognize its failures in disease, and the morbid condition of its organ.
Its general recognition by physiologists now is not usually accompanied by any reference to Gall as its discoverer. They are probably not aware that he located it correctly, because he referred so much to its external sign in the prominence of the eyes. This prominence of the eyes indicates development of the brain at the back of their sockets. The external marking of organs is to indicate where they lie and in what direction their development produces exterior projection. The junction of the front and middle lobes, including the so-called “island of Reil” (who was a pupil of Gall, and spoke of him as the most wonderful of anatomists), has its most direct external indication at the outer angle of the eye. That is the location which has been given the organ by my experiments, which were made without reference to anatomy, without even a thought of it, for I consider such experiments the supreme authority in physiology, and do not stop to inquire whether any previous knowledge supports them or not.
Dr. Gall had the true idea, for although he spoke of the general prominence of the eye as the indication, he also recognized the development as extending in the direction in which I have located it. He regarded the organ of language as a convolution lying on the super-orbital plate, behind the position of the eyeball. This convolution is comparatively defective in animals generally, but more developed in birds of superior vocal powers. In addition to this, he observed the growth extending into the temples, where the front and middle lobes unite. “A great diameter in this direction,” he says, “is always a favorable augury for the memory of words. I have seen persons who with an ordinary conformation of the eyes yet learned by heart with great facility. But in these cases the diameter from one temple to the other is ordinarily very considerable, and sometimes even the inferior part of the temples is projecting, which attests a great development of the adjacent cerebral parts.”
Thus it is evident that he recognized the structure behind the external angle of the eye as an important part of the organ of language.
The interior portion of the convolution is the more intellectual portion of the organ, while the exterior portion is that which holds the closest relation to the fibres of the corpora striata in the middle lobe, and may therefore most properly be called the organ of language or of speech, the impairment of which produces aphasia, or loss of speech. This is the form which has chiefly attracted the attention of the medical profession, as it very often accompanies paralytic affections from disease of the corpora striata.
Evidently Gall arrived at the correct location, and he illustrates the discovery by referring to a great number of authors and scientists whose development he observed. His most decisive fact is the case of a patient who lost the memory of names entirely, but not the power of speech, by a thrust from a foil, which penetrated through the face, the posterior inner part of the front lobe, at its junction with the middle lobe, thus wounding the internal part of the organ of language, but not reaching the outer posterior part, at the island of Reil, to which pathologists have given their chief attention.
Evidently Gall had the correct idea, and should have been duly credited by the pathologists who have verified his discovery.
In verifying this discovery by excitement of the organs, I find the centre of language behind the external angle of the eye, on each side of which, toward the nose and toward the temples, are analogous functions which might, if we did not analyze closely, be included with it, as portions of the organ of language.
The discoveries of Gall, though no longer sustained by colleges or phrenological societies, have never lost their hold upon the students who follow his teachings and study nature. A few phrenological writers and lecturers maintain the interest among those they reach, but our standard literature generally ignores the doctrines, and forgets the name of Gall. Yet the eclipse is not total. It will pass away as this century ends, and the fame of the great pioneer in science will be immortal, for it rests not on any wave of eighteenth century opinion, but is based on that which is “immutable and eternal.”
Yet so thoroughly has the present generation of physicians been misled by the colleges into ignorance of the labors of Gall, that although they know the location of the faculty of language is now beyond doubt, they do not think of the discoverer or understand his discoveries, but vaguely suppose that Ferrier, Jackson, Fritsch, Hitzig, and others have entirely superseded Gall by their inferences from experiments on the brains of animals. In this how greatly are they deceived! All that modern vivisectors have done has utterly failed to disturb the cerebral science derived from cranial observation by Gall and myself, and from direct experiment by myself. On the contrary, the immense labor of their researches serves only to add new illustrations and facts corroborating and co-operating with what was previously ascertained, as will be fully shown when “Cerebral Psychology” shall be published.
It was once supposed that the intellectual functions of the front lobe were entirely refuted by discoveries which proved the front lobe the source of muscular impulses. More thorough experimenting dissipated this illusion. Ferrier reported that after a partial ablation of the front lobes in intelligent monkeys, “instead of, as before, being actively interested in their surroundings and curiously prying into all that came within the field of their observation, they remained apathetic or dull, or dozed off to sleep, responding only to the sensations or impressions of the moment, or varying their listlessness with restless and purposeless wanderings to and fro. They had lost to all appearance the faculty of attentive and intelligent observation.” This is precisely what the true cerebral psychology indicates. The imaginary muscular powers were not at all detected, for the section of the front lobe had no influence on the muscular system.
The science of Gall was a science of facts relevant to great principles. The science of his opponents was a science of irrelevant facts, revealing no philosophy. Students of nature adhered to Gall; students of books and adherents of authority neglected him. Of this there is no better illustration than the great collection of De Ville in London, of which the following account is given in the admirable treatise on phrenology (of 637 pages) by Dr. James P. Browne of Edinburgh.
“How wide and various are the channels through which the phrenologist derives his facts. In society, whichever way he turns, they are constantly being presented for his contemplation. Besides there is not a city or town of any note that does not contain a collection of authentic casts of well-known persons; and up to the year 1853, the gallery of Mr. De Ville, in London, contained the largest and most valuable phrenological collection in the world of casts and skulls of men and women remarkable for the greatness of their talents, or the peculiarities of their dispositions; including above three hundred busts, both antique and modern, of the most renowned men the world has ever seen. The whole number amounted at least to three thousand. About two thousand skulls of animals of every denomination were also to be found there. There could be seen the form of head which accompanied the poetical instincts and high moral aspirations of the poor peasant boy, John Clare; and how strikingly dissimilar it was in its most marked characteristics to the head of George Stevenson, one of the most original of mechanical geniuses. Both were self-taught, but one was intensely active, the other cogitative. The mind of Clare was constantly engaged in poetical musings upon the moral affections, their pains and their pleasures; that of Stevenson was drawn by an inherent impulse to physical objects, and perseveringly devoted to the discovery of such mechanical combinations of them as might be of lasting benefit to society. There might be pointed out the cause of the difference of style which characterized the oratory of Mansfield and Erskine, of Canning and of Brougham: and that which constituted the elements of mind and their combinations, which raised Edmund Burke, as a prescient statesman, to a height such as neither Pitt, nor Fox, nor even Chatham was capable of reaching. There might be seen in Banks’s fine bust of him, the cause why Warren Hastings, though he was endowed with many good qualities which endeared him to his friends, was, nevertheless, covetous, self-willed, domineering, unjust, and, in some instances, pitiless, as Governor-General of India. What a contrast to this did the bust of the Marquis of Wellesley, by Nollekens, present. Not only did it indicate that the disposition of that distinguished statesman was unimbued with the slightest tincture of hypocrisy, avarice, or the love of self-willed domination, but, on the contrary, it was phrenologically symbolic of an instinctive carelessness in regard to his own pecuniary interests, a disposition which in his case, perhaps, amounted to a fault, and which his intellect, capacious of great things, and comparatively heedless of whatever is little, was ill-calculated to redress. There might be seen in Behnes Burlowe’s bust of Macintosh indications of the vastness of his intellect, and the unobtrusive gentleness of his disposition; whilst Chantrey’s exquisite bust of Lord Castlereagh afforded marked indications of his having been endowed with courage the most heroic, unalloyed by the slightest tinge of complexional fear, and with an intellect well balanced, devising, and industrious, but certainly narrow in its range as compared with that of Sir. J. Macintosh. There, too, might be seen the true physical indications of the imperturbable coolness of Castlereagh, and of the sensitiveness and warm susceptibility of Canning.
“Amongst the skulls of birds how readily could the practised observer distinguish the skull of the tuneful, melodious canary from that of the chirping, inharmonious sparrow. Nor could he fail to mark the constant difference between the form of the head of a song thrush and that of the jackdaw; or to discern how the cuckoo’s head is hollow where the organ of the love of offspring is located, whilst the same part presents a striking protuberance in the partridge. In the dolphin, the porpoise, the seal, and many other animals, the male could there be distinguished from the female by the form of the back part of the skull, where the same organ lies. Nor could any one fail to mark the form of head that is the invariable, and evidently indispensable, concomitant of the ferocious and sanguinary temper of the tiger, as well as the strong contrast which it presents to the skull of the wild but gentle gazelle. How superior also the elevated brain of the poodle dog, when compared with that of the indocile, snarling cur! Thus in animals of the same species the most marked disparity of form is easily discernible, on comparing the skulls of such as are docile and gentle, with those of the dull and intractable. The elevation of the one and the depression of the other are obvious.
“In an ethnological point of view that collection was very valuable. What a striking contrast was presented there by the rounded form of the skull of the fierce, indomitable American Indian, who is so averse to intercourse with strangers, and the rather narrow, elongated head of the indolent negro, who is devoted to social enjoyments. How wide was the difference between the head of the Sandwich Islander or of the Tahitian and that of the Australian or the Tasmanian. How much superior to either of them were the heads of the civilized Incas of Peru, which had not been submitted to the distorting process of artificial compression. Neither could the wide disparity between the Maori and the Gentoo escape the notice of the most careless observer. And how immeasurably inferior in form were they all to the noble head which is the issue of the mingling of the Celtic, Saxon, and Norman races (imbued with an infusion of old Roman, blood), such as it is found to be in these islands, and in the United States.
“Perhaps it may not be considered out of place if I relate a circumstance of considerable interest to those who make it a point to make strict inquiry as to the amount of knowledge which certain races are capable of imbibing.
“Some twenty years ago and more, when the great anatomist, Tiedemann, was in London, he paid a visit to De Ville’s Phrenological Museum. I saw him as he entered the place. He was erect and tall, with an air somewhat stately, yet perfectly unassuming. His head was not so remarkable for great size as for its fine symmetry, and the organs of the moral and intellectual portions of it were in a rare degree harmoniously blended. It was the characteristic head of a curious, indefatigable, conscientious inquirer into the arcana of physical things—one who was not given to indulge in unprofitable, visionary speculations. His visit to De Ville being strictly private, there was no opportunity afforded me of hearing his remarks. But, afterwards, it was told me by De Ville himself, that Tiedemann supposed (and in this he resembled all other opponents of phrenology) that because he had tested the capacity of a great many negro and European skulls, by filling them with millet seed, and found that, on an an average, those of the Africans were scarcely inferior in size to the skulls of Europeans—that from that fact he thought it probable that the negro, if placed in advantageous circumstances, ought to be capable of exhibiting powers of mind equal to the European.
“But when the humble, self-educated follower of Gall demonstrated to this celebrated physiologist and anatomist that the forehead of the negro is usually much smaller than that of the European, and that, moreover, its form, with few exceptions, is irregular and ill-balanced; and when he showed that the size of the negro skull in the basilar portion, where the organs of the affections (which we possess in common with the lower animals) lie, was, in proportion to the upper and anterior parts, which are the seats of the moral and intellectual faculties, larger in the negro than in the European—when De Ville showed, by many instances, that this is always and infallibly the case (with the exception of the heads of criminals), Tiedemann raised his hands and said, ‘The labor of years is now, I clearly see, of no use to me; and I must destroy many valuable things bearing upon this theme.’ Thus, by following the true mode of investigating this department of natural history, was an uneducated man, of good talents, enabled to correct a mistake in anatomy and physiology committed by one of the ablest anatomists that Europe has given birth to.
“For the long term of twenty-two years the writer of this treatise took every opportunity, afforded him by the kindness of its generous owner, to study the contents of this rare collection; and, after having studied it with assiduous care, he is bound to say that out of the hundred thousand facts which it contained, not one could be pointed out that did not testify to the never-failing agreement of particular parts or organs of the brain, with certain independent, elementary faculties, according to the laws discovered by Gall.
“It is with the view of demonstrating the stability and unchangeableness of those laws that the composition of this treatise has been undertaken; in order to excite in its regard such a degree of attention as will tend to awaken it from the state of inauspicious somnolency in which it has for some years lain prostrate. But, strongly impressed with a conviction of the importance of the subject, and fully alive to the difficulty of treating it, the writer cannot help being crossed by fears for the success of this attempt. Relying, however, upon the solidity of the foundation upon which his subject rests, and surveying the vast store of accumulated materials which have, for more than thirty years, been constantly passing through his hands, and the facts which are now strewn before him in whatever society he may be placed, he would fain hope that even his humble abilities will enable him to make such a selection of incontrovertible facts as will place beyond a doubt the possibility of determining the innate talents and dispositions of any one by making a skilful survey of the head; and, should he succeed in merely raising a more general spirit of active inquiry in regard to the nature of the evidence adduced, and the deductions drawn from it by phrenologists, than at present exists, he will have reaped a fair reward for his efforts, for he has long been thoroughly convinced that a strict and faithful examination of the facts which bear upon the case is alone requisite for converting the incredulous scoffer into the zealous advocate.”
Having thus vindicated the claims of the great pioneer in philosophy, our next issue will show the limitations of his discoveries, and give an outline of the new and all-comprehensive Anthropology.
Therapeutic Sarcognomy.—The publication of this work has been laid aside to introduce the Journal of Man. It will appear during the present year, but not in a cheap abridged form as first proposed. It will be an improved edition.
The Great Land Question.
AGITATED BY HENRY GEORGE, MICHAEL DAVITT, PROF. WALLACE, DR. EADON AND REFORMATORY SOCIETIES IN GREAT BRITAIN AND GERMANY.
They who in the fearless pursuit of truth attain ideas for which the age is not prepared are recognized as Utopians. The dullards who have not the desire, and therefore have not the capacity to seek new truth, languidly regard as dreamers the men who talk of things so foreign to their own habits. The more dogmatic class, inspired by the dogmatism of the colleges, array themselves in scorn to repel new thought. But, fortunately, as men die they fail to transmit all of their bigotry to posterity, and new men come in with new ideas.
In that new world of thought to which anthropology belongs, the basis of social order is understood, and I felt it my duty in 1847 to present the law of justice in relation to “The Land and the People,” with very little hope that the doctrine presented would ever become in my own lifetime a basis of political action, since other ideas equally true and equally demonstrable have to bide their time. But the toilers who suffer from the lack of employment have furnished an eager audience to the land reformers, and the great land question is destined to agitate the nations for a century to come. The Boston Globe recently called attention to the original presentation of this subject at Cincinnati, in the following editorial:—
“There seems to be a notion prevalent that the ideas advocated by Mr. George are novel. But they are not. They once more illustrate the familiar fact that there is nothing new under the sun. Much the same doctrines were urged here in America at least forty years ago, and were the subject of comment in the papers of the day.
“Dr. J. R. Buchanan, now of Boston, presented the case at Cincinnati in 1847 much as it is now put by Mr. George and Mr. Davitt. The Memphis Appeal of September 23 of that year, gave an elaborate review of Dr. Buchanan’s essay, in which it said:
“‘The Land and the People’ is the title of a well-written pamphlet from the pen of Dr. J. R. Buchanan of Cincinnati, formerly known to our citizens as an able and accomplished lecturer on the science of neurology. It is quite plain from the production in question that the doctor has not confined himself to the study of the physiological system, of which we believe he is the author, but has evidently thought deeply upon other subjects vitally concerning the well being and progress of society. Whatever may be thought of the positions of this pamphlet, we cannot deny to it the merit of great beauty of style and force of logic. The whole argument is based upon the proposition that the earth is the original gift of God to man, and as such belongs of right to the human race in general, and not to the individuals of the race separately. The author insists that the land is not the product of man’s labor any more than air, sunshine, or water, and that originally this gift of God ought to have been left as free as those lighter, but indispensable elements must ever be, from their very nature. The artificial and unnatural laws which have sprung up and become fastened upon society have thrown immense obstacles in the way of the bare perception of this great truth, as the doctor deems it, besides at the same time interposing barriers almost insurmountable to its reception and adoption into the framework of government. It is insisted, however, that these obstacles may be overcome, and the rights of the people restored to them, without any injustice to the present proprietors of land, and without any convulsions in the great elements of society.
“Dr. Buchanan explained in his essay, as Mr. George does in his works now, that he did not mean to annul the existing titles to land. ‘Far from it,’ Dr. Buchanan said. ‘Such a scheme would be a miserable climax of folly and injustice, fit only to render the great principle equally odious and ridiculous.’ The doctor insisted that he proposed to ‘maintain in legislation the broad principle that the nation owns the soil, and that this ownership is paramount to all individual claims,’ and from this fundamental proposition as a corner-stone the superstructure was to be built up. The present proprietors of the soil were not to be disturbed in their possession, and the government was not to interfere in the details of agriculture, renting and leasing estates, determining possession, etc. But the owners were to be considered as the tenants of the nation, paying rent to it for the benefit of the people at large. This rent was to be extremely small at first, estimated upon the value of the soil alone, without the improvements, that being the original gift of nature, free to all. It was to be increased, however, in the course of two generations, until a rent of about 5 per cent should have been exacted from all the tenants of the nation—that is, from all who occupied any portion of the soil. The rent thus raised—a vast revenue—was to be applied to the establishment of free colleges, free schools, free libraries, and other institutions calculated to improve and benefit the citizen.
“This is the doctrine, substantially, as put forth at the present time by Mr. George, and by so many persons supposed to be entirely new. Again we remark that ‘there is nothing new under the sun.’”
This subject will be taken up hereafter in the Journal of Man. Its progress as a policy will be noted, its writers reviewed, and the dictates of dispassionate science presented. It is too late to intercept the folly and crime that have surrendered the rights of the people in the American continent, but not too late to begin reclamation of our lost sovereignty.
We shall have ample discussions of this subject. Mr. George has given us “Progress and Poverty” (cloth, $1.00; paper, 20 cents); “Social Problems,” at the same price; “The Land Question” (paper, 10 cents); “Property in Land” (paper, 15 cents); “Protection or Free Trade” (cloth, $1.50). At Baltimore a volume has been issued as one of the Johns Hopkins University studies in political and historical science, written by Shosuke Sato, Ph. D., Special Commissioner of the Colonial Department of Japan. N. Murray is the publishing agent, and the price in paper is $1.00. This work is a “History of the Land Question in the United States,” and describes the formation of the public domain by purchase and cession, and the entire administration of the land system of the United States. The land laws of early times and of other countries are stated in the introduction. Another very instructive work recently issued is entitled, “Labor, Land, and Law; a Search for the Missing Wealth of the Working Poor,” by William A. Phillips; published by Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York. Mr. Phillips has been a member of Congress from Kansas, and his work is an extensive view of the land question in other countries as well as the United States.
In the near future this must be the burning question of politics and statesmanship, as it is at present in Great Britain. The agitations in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales have long been on the verge of bloody conflict, and a Land League has been formed in Germany at Berlin, of which Dr. A. Theodor Stamm is president, having for its object the transfer of land ownership from individuals to the State. A newspaper at Berlin is devoted to its objects.
A few facts show how inevitable the conflict that is coming, while the agricultural classes of all Europe are being driven by American competition deeper and deeper into poverty and inability to pay rent, which can never be again what it has been. The New York Evening Post very justly says: “The truth is, we are witnessing in Ireland the gradual disappearance of rent. The land is no longer able to support anybody but the actual cultivator. To make this process peaceful, and as far as possible harmless to all parties, ought to be the chief concern of the Government.” Landlordism in Great Britain has small claims upon our sympathy, for the great body of the land is held by titles which have no other basis than the robbery of old by military power. According to John Bright, in England and Wales one hundred persons own 4,000,000 acres; in Scotland twelve persons own 4,346,000 acres, and seventy persons own the half of Scotland; nine tenths of all the land in Scotland belongs to 1,700 persons, the rest of the population having only one tenth. In Ireland less than 800 persons own half of all the land, and 330 persons own two thirds of all the land in Scotland; 402 members of the House of Lords hold 14,240,912 acres, with a rental of $56,865,637.
It is no wonder that the tenants of the Duke of Argyle have risen against the police that enforce the landlord’s claims, and that the Welsh resistance against tithes has impoverished the Welsh clergy.
The Irish agitation has a just basis, which was well stated by the Boston Herald as follows:—
“The assertion has been frequently made that rents have increased more in England than in Ireland; but one of the ablest English statisticians, a man who can hardly be accused of partiality toward Ireland, has recently pointed out that while in the forty years from 1842 to 1882 the rents in England increased on an average 15 percent, the rents in Ireland in the same period increased on an average 20 per cent, and this, too, in a country where farming has been carried on on a low scale of culture, where the landlord has done practically nothing for his tenant, and where the results of the harvest are more uncertain than in England. It is the constant desire that the Irish landlords have shown in the past to get the last pound of flesh and the last drop of blood out of their tenants that is the cause of the present detestation in which they are held by the latter.”
In the United States the public domain has been criminally surrendered to monopoly. Commissioner Sparks speaks in his reports of the “widespread, persistent land robbery.” The fences of land robbers have been removed from 2,700,000 acres, and over 5,000,000 will probably be redeemed. In fifteen years, 179,000,000 of acres have been given by Congress to various railroad corporations, a larger territory than the empire of Germany. Before these wrongs were consummated, nearly forty years ago, I called a public meeting in the Cincinnati court house, which protested against this surrender of the people’s domain. The present agitation will probably bring it to an end. In the Congressional debates last June Mr. Eustis said “the railroad men had made fortunes as mushrooms grow in the night; a coterie of such men had enriched themselves at the expense of the people of the United States. They did not observe equity, honesty, or good faith, and only came here to assert their legal rights and to defy the authority and power of Congress and the people of the United States to deal with them. The great question to-day was whether the government was superior to the corporations, or the corporations superior to the government. The corporations had exhibited shameless and unpardonable oppression and extortion, as well as effrontery in their dealing with the people and the Government of the United States.” “Our people and our country,” said the speaker, “were only able to stand the drafts thus made on their liberties because they were yet young and strong and vigorous.” Mr. Eustis advocated the forfeiture of every acre of land that had not been earned according to the strict limitations and conditions imposed in the grant.
In the house of Representatives, December 11, 1886, Mr. Payson of Illinois, on behalf of the Committee on Public Lands, called up the bill declaring a forfeiture of the Ontonagon and Brule River land grant. In detailing the circumstances of the grant Mr. Payson declared that from the organization of the Ontonagon and Brule River Company no step had ever been taken by it which did not indicate that that organization had been purely speculative and effected for the purpose of getting land from the General Government. It had been an attempt at bare-faced robbery from its inception down to the present time. Referring to the statement made by persons interested in the road, that it had been accepted by commissioners and reported upon as having been built in first-class style, he asserted that miles of the road had no other ballast than ice and snow, which, melting in spring, left the rails held in suspension eight inches above the ground. In support of his assertion, he produced photographs of various sections of the road and commented upon them, much to the amusement of the House. A bridge, as depicted by the photograph, he declared to be humped like a camel and backed like a whale. A section of a mile in length showed but one railroad tie; while a 250-foot cut was shown as being filled with logs and brush. The bill was passed without division. It forfeits 384,600 acres.
The march of monopoly must be arrested in the United States and Mexico. A New England company has obtained from Mexico eighteen millions of acres in lower California. All over the world the curse of land monopoly flourishes undisturbed. The natural result of landlordism everywhere is already foreshadowed in this country by the example of William Scully in Illinois. The Chicago Tribune one year ago devoted four columns to the career of Scully, a resident of London, who owns large tracts of American land, and has introduced the Irish landlord system in managing his American property. The Tribune said:—
“Scully is one of the chief figures among the alien proprietors of American soil, and has introduced the meanest features of the worst forms of Irish landlordism on his estates in this country. He has acquired in the neighborhood of 90,000 acres of land in Illinois alone, at a merely nominal figure—50 cents to $1 per acre, as a rule. His career as an Irish landlord was a history of oppression and extortion, that was appropriately finished by a bloody encounter with his tenants. He was tried and acquitted on the charge of double murder, but became so unpopular that in 1850 he sold most of his Irish property, and has since devoted himself to building up a landlord system in Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, and other States. He made entries of the public domain through the medium of the land warrants issued to Mexican war soldiers, which he purchased at the rate of 50 cents per acre. In Logan County, Ill., alone, he has 40,000 to 45,000 acres. It is the almost universal testimony that Scully’s rule in that county has reduced 250 tenants and their families to a condition approaching serfdom. Furthermore, Scully pays no taxes, the tenants signing ironclad agreements to assume the same, but they are required to pay to Scully’s agents the tax money at the same time as the rentals—the 1st of January of each year; whereas, the agent need not turn over the taxes to the county treasurer until about June 10 following. It is suggested that Scully probably makes a handsome percentage on the tax money remaining in his hands for five months. It is also shown that a great deal of this alien’s land entirely escapes taxation, thus increasing the burden on other property holders; that he takes the most extraordinary precautions to secure his rent, executing a cast iron lease, with provisions that mortgage the tenant’s all, scarcely allowing his soul to escape, and making it compulsory for small grain to be sold immediately after harvest, no matter what may be the condition of the market; that grain dealers are notified not to buy of the tenants until Scully’s rent is paid; in short, that Scully has founded a land system so exacting that it is only paralleled in Ireland, and rules his tenantry so despotically that few can be induced to tell the story of their wrongs, justly feeling that it would involve ruin to them.”
Much sympathy has been excited by the reports of cruel evictions in Ireland, to gratify the merciless avarice of landlords, and for the justice of these reports we need not depend on Irish testimony alone. American travellers have told enough, and the London Standard of Jan. 18 says: “Some of this winter’s evictions have been inhuman spectacles, fit only for a barbarous country and a barbarous age.”
There is nothing intrinsically wrong in the relation of landlord and tenant, which should excite a prejudice against the landlord; on the contrary, many landlords have been a blessing to the communities in which they lived; but our land system is a conspicuous part of a grandly false social system based on pure selfishness, which makes all men jealous competitors, and destroys the spirit of fraternity.
Our social system tends ever to make the rich richer and the poor poorer, and the struggle in Ireland is but the forerunner of a movement that will extend around the globe. Is there no remedy for the evils? Indeed there is! Sixty years of thought have made me familiar with the evils and the remedies. Some of the remedies are coming to the front at present. All will in time be presented in the Journal of Man.
Land reform is but one of the great measures that progress demands. The first and greatest is a PERFECT EDUCATION for all, moral and industrial. The second is SPIRITUAL RELIGION. The third is JUSTICE TO WOMAN. The fourth, which is JUSTICE IN LEGISLATION, includes land reform, financial reform, and many other reforms. The fifth is INDUSTRIAL CO-OPERATION. The sixth is TEMPERANCE.
The first reform includes all the others. The second would ultimately bring all things right, and so would the third in a longer lapse of time.
Anthropology is the intellectual guidance into all reforms, and therefore should precede all. Hence it is the leading theme of this Journal.