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Henry George ridiculed the Malthusian explanation of poverty, and offered an all-sufficient explanation of his own, which is, substantially, that poverty exists, on the one hand, because the landlord receives in rent so large a share of the annual product; on the other, because private property in land encourages the withholding of natural resources from use, the owners waiting to obtain an unearned increment. Since the owner of land receives wealth without labor to an increasing extent with the development of society, there must be an increasing number of those who labor but receive little or nothing.

Opposed to both these explanations of the existence of poverty is that of the socialists, who follow for the most part Karl Marx's analysis of capitalistic production. Reduced to a sentence by Dr. Aveling, this explanation of poverty may be stated by saying that labor is "paid for, but not paid." The consumer pays enough for the product to remunerate the laborer, but the capitalist retains all except what will barely suffice to keep the laborer alive.

No one who has studied carefully modern industrial society can doubt that each one of these causes may produce a very considerable amount of destitution. But no one of them, nor all three of them together, can be taken as an adequate explanation of the existence of poverty. Professor Seligman states their fundamental defects in the following paragraph: --

"Modern poverty is bound up with the facts of modem economic life, and modern economic life is a complex product. To select any characteristic feature of the present industrial system and to single it out as responsible for poverty is naive, but worthless. The Malthusian seizes upon redundant population, the communist upon private property, the socialist upon property in means of production, the single taxer upon property in land, the cooperator upon competition, the anarchist upon government, the anti-optionist upon speculation, the currency reformer upon metallic money, and so on. They all forget that widespread poverty has existed in the absence of each one of these alleged causes. Density of population, private property, competition, government, speculation, and money have each been absent at various stages of history without exempting society from the curse of poverty. Each stage has had a poverty of its own. The causes of poverty are as complex as the causes of civilization and the growth of wealth itself." (28)

The explanations of poverty offered by theology are equally unsatisfactory. Ministers frequently inform us that all poverty comes primarily from vice and immorality, -- "Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you." They quote David as saying, "I have been young, and now am old; yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread." The temperance lecturer specializes upon the preacher's theory, and assures us that ninety-nine per cent of all poverty comes from the abuse of intoxicants. The propagandist of the White Cross League tells us that it is undoubtedly the abuse of the sexual nature that leads to most of the social degradation and consequent poverty of our times. These different students of social science, if such they may be called, all say that what men need to make them prosperous is moral reformation or spiritual regeneration.

To illustrate the complexity of the conditions of poverty more concretely: Suppose a second Robinson Crusoe on a desert island under exactly the same material conditions as the friend of our childhood; suppose he spent his time in distilling some kind of liquor, and subsequently getting drunk; suppose he allowed his mind to wander in dreamy and enervating revery upon debasing subjects; suppose that in consequence of these habits he neglected his work, did not plant his crops at the right time, and failed to catch fish when they were plentiful. Manifestly he would become poor and miserable, might become diseased from having insufficient food, and finally die in abject want. Poverty in such a suppositious case could not be traced to the fact that an employer had cheated the laborer of wages honestly earned, or to the fact that a landlord had robbed him by exacting rent, nor could it be traced to an excessive increase of population. Moreover, if Crusoe No. 2 had simply lacked judgment or skill, he might have become poor, although thoroughly pious and moral. If he had built a canoe that would not float, or a cave that crumbled in and injured him, or constructed a summer-house that he did not need, or had not the ingenuity to devise tools for his varied purposes, he might have failed to secure the necessaries of life, and have died in miserable destitution.

Now, if all these various causes are conceivably operative in the case of an isolated person, it is manifest that in actual industrial society as now organized, where the individual suffers not only from his own mistakes and defects, but also from the mistakes and defects of a large number of other people, the causes of destitution must be indefinitely numerous and complicated; and the man who says that he has found one all-embracing cause discredits himself as promptly as the physician who should announce that he had found a single universal and all-sufficient explanation of bodily disease.