The following passage leaves no doubt that Mr. Post is correct, and at the same time shows in the clearest way how the two policies of reform were interwoven in Henry George's mind:—
"Government could take up itself the transmission of messages by telegraph, as well as by mail, of building and operating railroads, as well as of the opening and maintaining common roads. With the present functions so simplified and reduced, functions such as these could be assumed without danger or strain, and would be under the supervision of public attention, which is now distracted. There would be a great and increasing surplus revenue from the taxation of land values for material progress, which would go on with great accelerated rapidity, would tend constantly to increase rent. This revenue arising from the common property would be applied to the common benefit, as were the revenues of Sparta. We might not establish public tables—they would be unnecessary, but we could establish public baths, museums, libraries, gardens, lecture rooms, music and dancing halls, theaters, universities, technical schools, shooting galleries, playgrounds, gymnasiums, etc. Heat, light, and motive power, as well as water, might be conducted through our streets at public expense; our roads be lined with fruit trees; discoveries and inventors rewarded, scientific investigation supported; in a thousand ways the public revenues made to foster efforts for the public benefit. We should reach the ideal of the Socialist, but not through government repression. Government would change its character, and would become the administration of a great coöperative society. It would become merely the agency by which the common property was administered for the common benefit." (Italics mine.)[28]
But the "State Socialist" and the Individualist reformer, who are often combined in one person, as in the case of Henry George, differ sharply from Socialists of the Socialist movement in aiming at a society, which, however widely government action is to be extended, is after all to remain a society of small capitalists.
Professor Edward A. Ross very aptly sums up the reformer's objections to the anti-capitalist Socialists. Capitalism must be "divested of its perversions," the privately owned monopolies and their political machines, primarily for the purpose of strengthening it against Socialism. "Individualism should make haste to clean the hull of the old ship for the coming great battle with the opponents of private capital...."[29] The reformers, as a rule, like Professor Ross, consciously stand for a new form of private capitalism, to be built up with the aid of the State. This is the avowed attitude of the larger part of the "progressives," "radicals," and "insurgents" of the day.
The new reform programs, however radical, are aimed at regenerating capitalism. The most radical of all, that of the single taxers, who plan not only that the state shall be the sole landlord, but that the railways and the mines shall be nationalized and other public utilities municipalized, do not deny that they want to put a new life into private capitalism, and to stimulate commercial competition in the remaining fields of industry. Mr. Frederick C. Howe, for instance, predicts a revival of capitalistic enterprise, after these measures are enacted, and even looks forward to the indefinite continuation of the struggle between capital and labor.[30]
FOOTNOTES:
[9] The Socialist Review (London), April, 1909.
[10] The New Age (London), Nov. 4, 1909.
[11] Edward Bernstein, "Evolutionary Socialism," p. 154.