Note 7 — Chapter IV

We of the United States take credit for having abolished slavery. Passing the question of how much credit the majority of us are entitled to for the abolition of Negro slavery, it remains true that we have only abolished one form of slavery—and that a primitive form which had been abolished in the greater portion of the country by social development, and that, notwithstanding its race character gave it peculiar tenacity, would in time have been abolished in the same way in other parts of the country. We have not really abolished slavery; we have retained it in its most insidious and widespread form—in the form which applies to whites as to blacks. So far from having abolished slavery, it is extending and intensifying, and we made no scruple of setting into it our own children—the citizens of the Republic yet to be. For what else are we doing in selling the land on which future citizens must live, if they are to live at all.—Henry George, Social Problems, p. 209.