Henry George

Henry George (Генри Джордж) was an American political economist. His Progress and Poverty (1879) argued that private ownership of land is the cause of poverty amid advancing wealth, and proposed a tax on the value of land in place of other taxes; his movement called it the single tax. The Great Sin (1905) quotes him at length; the term “single tax” does not appear in it.

Chapter IX says: “…the method of solving the land question has been worked out by Henry George to such a degree of perfection that, under the existing state order and with compulsory taxes, it is impossible to devise any other better, more just, practical and peaceful solution.”¹

Read in Nikolaev’s translation

On 16 April 1905 the diary records a wish to write “about Henry George, whom I read in Nikolaev’s version and am delighted with again”.² The PSS commentary traces the essay’s George quotations to Sergei Nikolaev’s Russian translation, Selected Speeches and Articles of Henry George (Posrednik, Moscow, 1904).³ The 1905 English, A Great Iniquity, gives George’s own English for these passages rather than translating the Russian back.

In the essay

Chapter II quotes him at length. One sentence: “We talk of the abolition of slavery, but we have not abolished slavery, we have abolished only its cruder form: personal slavery.”⁴

Chapter III describes how his teaching was received. Parnell, Toynbee, Gladstone and Herbert Spencer turned against it, Spencer buying up the old editions of his Statics; Oxford students demonstrated at his lecture; the Catholic party, orthodox political economy and the socialists were hostile. But the chief weapon was “silence”, “employed against George to this day”.⁵

Chapter IX gives the endorsement above, made “under the existing state order and with compulsory taxes”. What chapter VIII asks for is “only the consciousness of their sin by all the men who commit it or take part in it, and the desire to be rid of it”.⁶

Faith in his words

The essay ends by quoting him: “The ground is plowed, the seed is sown, a good tree will grow up. It is still so small, but the eyes of him who believes already see it.”⁷ The 1905 English has George’s own wording: “only the eye of faith can see it”.⁸ The next sentence: “And I think that Henry George is right, that the loosing of the sin of landed property is near.”⁹

Standing

George was read from the mid-1880s, and the engagement continued after his death in 1897: To the Working People (1902), the 1906 prefaces to Nikolaev’s translations, and a diary record of a dream-conversation with him as late as 1909 (Wenzer 1997; Lebrun 1956).

Open questions

• Wikidata QID, life dates, and birthplace need an authority file.
• The PSS commentary names the 1904 Posrednik edition as the source of the George quotations; the quotations are still to be checked against its pages.
• George’s own English for the passages the essay quotes, to collate against both the Russian and the 1905 English, as a translation-layer note rather than a correction.

Dive provenance

• 1905-the-great-sin (2026-06-30) — George in the essay (E3, E5, E12, E21); the conditional chapter IX clause; the reception by silence. Enriched 2026-07-11 from the reader’s annotation A2 (George’s own faith language); converted to the footnote style 2026-10-02.