The Genesis of the Depressed Classes.--So complex a problem, it might be
said at once, cannot manifestly have a simple explanation, yet this has
been the mistake of many social thinkers of the past. They have sought
some single simple explanation of human misery, and particularly in its
form of economic distress or poverty. Malthus, as we have already seen,
attributed all human misery to the fact that population tends to
increase more rapidly than food supply, and that it is the pressure of
population upon food which sufficiently explains poverty in human
society. Karl Marx offered an equally sweeping explanation when he
attributed all poverty to the fact that labor is not paid a sufficient
wage; that the capitalist appropriates an unjust share of the product of
labor, leaving to the laborer just enough to maintain existence and
reproduce. Henry George in the same spirit, in his _Progress and
Poverty_, attributed all poverty to one cause,--the landlord's
appropriation of the unearned increment in land values.
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