Ireland's New Saviour.

We admit that the spectacle of reformers fighting each other is not a very flattering one. While the great army of oppressors remains as numerous and audacious that our limited space permits us hardly to touch the outposts in details, it is no very enviable duty to have to turn our scanty ammunition upon the thin ranks of reformers. Sentimentally speaking, the slender forces to which the poverty and ostracism of liberals restrict them ought all to be directed against the flanks of the enemy.

Yet, howsoever good the intentions of a fellow-reformer, he is liable to become a greater misfortune to progress, if his premises and methods are radically wrong, than a whole brigade of the enemy outside our camp. The author of "Progress and Poverty" is said to be a man of no airs, — quiet, plain, unpretending, modest, democratic, — a veritable man grown out of the common people. He has shown the title-labelled numskulls of colleges and other monopolizing haunts of authoritative wisdom that a workingman can write a book which, in spite of their contempt, exictes the wonders and interest of thinkers all over the world.

Mr. George's pen-picture of the "persistence of poverty" amidst ever-increasing wealth and plenty does him immense credit as a literary giant, and his book, in demolishing the Malthusian humbug and setting the old school of economic quacks aright on many important points, is worthy of all the admiration which his friends have bestowed upon it.

Against Mr. George as a man, and against the many able and original points in his book, we have nought to say. But against Mr. George as a writer totally ignorant of the vital problems of Liberty, which overshadows all merely economic considerations, we have something very serious to say, and shall say it without stint. That he would willfully side with despotism it would be ungenerous to surmise, and that man of his acute powers of thinking should season his whole thought with the very essence of tyranny can only be accounted for on the score of absolute ignorance of the governmental problem.

Upon looking into the nature Mr. George discovers that she everywhere furnishes increase not measured by labor. Two men start in to cultivate soil. They have equal capacity, and devote exactly the same labor, each to his  field. But one field, being by nature far less fertile than the other, simply furnishes the bare necessities of life to the cultivator, while the other furnishes a surplus. This margin, represents the varying productiveness of different portions of soil, says Mr. George, makes rent possible and natural, and persons wishing to purchase opportunities to secure nature's will be willing to pay rent in proportion to the ratio of increase which the soil is furnishing to the existing holders. Rent, then, is natural and just.

By an analogous process of reasoning Mr. George justified interest, profits, and the whole range of usury, and proceeds to explain the laws which govern their adjustment. Had his work been confined solely to the chapters on usury, it would have simply been a poor rehash of sophistries which were demolished centuries ago and which the masterly hand of Proudhon scattered into everlasting chaos beyond the shadow of resurrection.

But the master strike of George is left for the last. Usury is just. Nature pays usury. Paraphrased into the "Irish World's" theological terminology: "Our beneficent Creator gave it to all His children as their inalienable inheritance." Since, then, nature gave usury to all men, and since rent represents land-usury, George would let landlordism execute its useful functions; but, when the landlords have gathered up the harvest of land-usury, he would send that sublime bully, the State, among them to confiscate it and distribute it among the whole people. There shall be no "hold the harvest" for them.

It is utterly astonishing, however, that Mr. George fails to see that, by the same reasoning, he is morally bound not to stop with rent, but to pursue the governmental raid into the banks, and confiscate their money-usury. Nor must he stop even there. He must go into the market-places, stores, and manufactories, and confiscate their surplus earnings. Yea, by the inevitable logic of his system the government is bound to seize upon the pay of all wage-laborers and confiscate the margin of increase corresponding to that which represents rent. In short, the enormity of the which Mr. George lays out is only exceeded by its ridiculousness and utter atrocity.

All this insane bosh has its source in ignorance of the rational domain of yours and mine, which is at the bottom of the economic problem. If a piece of land belongs to a man in natural equity because he personally cultivates and occupies it, then the increase which it affords through his labor is his as against all the world. If, on his own merits and independent of governmental coercion, his fellow-men choose to tolerate him in the ownership of land which he does not cultivate and occupy, the rent they may pay him is his, and no combination of men outside of him, under any pretext, have a right to confiscate what his fellow-men have freely and voluntarily given him. The fact is, however, that, in natural equity, his fellow-men would not tolerate it, and rent would become impossible. The State alone creates rent by fortifying the landlord in his ownership of what he does not occupy and improve.  Mr. George's State is a double damnation to Liberty, since it first justifies the theft and supplies its machinery and then confiscates the very increase which it has declared unnatural and just. The fact is that the writer is a governmental socialist, and, along with the rest of those deluded into dangerous foes of Liberty, has taken exactly the moral ground of the Dark Ages in assuming that the Socialistic State can do no wrong, even though it wantonly violate its own standard of justice as applied to individuals: for, with the Socialists, as with the old school Statocrats, individuals have no right which their despotic governmental bully, the Socialistic State, is bound to respect.

Twenty of editions of Liberty would not cover one-half of the ridiculous and abominable absurdities which gather at every step around the logic of Henry George's Book. That this dangerous craze should have seized upon so steadfast and sturdy a foe of usury as Patrick Ford should serve as a reminder to the friends of Liberty that, however gentle, modest, and devoted Mr. George may be as a man, it is their imperative duty to fight down his influence in dead earnest at every opportunity. If this insinuating craze is able to capture such papers as the "Irish World" and the New York "Sun" and "Truth," its power for evil is incalculable. The "Sun" and "Truth" are comparatively little consequence, but we earnestly hope that Patrick Ford will ponder long and well before fatally committing the "Irish World" to a system whose logic, carried for its natural outcome, would not only neutralize that journal's splendid work in the past, but would build up a despotism compared with which all that Ireland has ever suffered sinks into insignificance. We are curious to hear how George's New Ireland will look after his prescriptions are sent to the "Irish World," but more curious to know whether Patrick Ford can be seduced into throwing overboard his wits and trimmings his sails for this economic gulf of perdition.