A NEW TYPE OF PHILANTHROPIST
Howe, Frederic C.
A NEW TYPE OF PHILANTHROPIST Joseph Fels, "Millionaire Agitator", is Spending his Money and Using his Brains in a Practica Way to Bring About Equality of Opportunity and the Abolition of...
...They were both living by the sweat of other men's brows...
...that he had made his fortune out of business, and he startled the conservative gathering by saying that the Duke of Westminster, who owns a great part of London, was a monopolist too...
...He has done this because he is a radical...
...For Guild hall is the assembly place of the Wall Street of England...
...He spoke of it as one might speak of any other legislative proposal...
...All this is in addition to the fortune which he is spending in America and England in other ways...
...For poverty is not diminished...
...Joseph Fels believes that poverty, which we everywhere see by the side of great wealth, that want alongside of plenty, is due to the monopoly of the land and the resources of nature...
...The world has produced many men who have dedicated their lives to social reform...
...This rent is all paid by labor in some form or other...
...This land is held for the purpose of speculation...
...America should be the cheapest place in the world to live...
...Not for philanthropy but for the purpose of making philanthropy superfluous...
...Under existing circumstances, he says this is but trying to bail out the ocean with a sieve...
...And not content with one country, Joseph Fels has made the whole world his workshop and all people his helpers...
...not its patching by charity organization societies, but its abolition," was the amazing suggestion of an American business man at a banquet of his fellow business and professional men in New York City during the winter of 1908...
...And just as modern hygiene traces these diseases to their source in swamps, impure water and unsanitary surroundings, so Joseph Fels traces poverty to wrong social conditions, conations which can be cured by law, just as they have been created by law...
...Not relieved, but cured...
...He talked again about the abolition of poverty...
...A NEW TYPE OF PHILANTHROPIST Joseph Fels, "Millionaire Agitator", is Spending his Money and Using his Brains in a Practica Way to Bring About Equality of Opportunity and the Abolition of Poverty By FREDERIC C. HOWE **fflhe ABOLITION of I poverty...
...Abolish Poverty"-Says Fels JOSEPH FELS is a Jew...
...It was only that the community should provide by law for the enjoyment by all of the members of the land values which their settlement in Palestine should call into existence...
...They were both in the same boat...
...In this he was not unlike other philanthropists...
...Quite as novel as a meeting of the unemployed in Guild Hall...
...I knew the speaker by this time...
...The dedication of a great fortune to the promotion of such revolutionary suggestions is out of all harmony with our ideas of rich men...
...The idea that poverty can be banished from the face of the earth is even more novel...
...Not its relief I by doles and soup kitM chens...
...For there is land enough in America for ten times as many people as now live in this country...
...He is spending that fortune in England and in America, in Australia and in Denmark, in Germany and in Belgium...
...For the same reason that Garrison and Wendell Phillips were interested in slavery...
...He was in deadly earnest...
...He is at work fifteen hours a day on his philanthropies—philanthropies whose aim is the abolition of poverty, vice and crime through the creation of jobs, by taxing land into use...
...It was to teach Christianity to the Gentiles...
...Some months after this, I attended a meeting of the unemployed in London...
...He has amassed a great fortune from the manufacture of soap...
...It was Joseph Fels of Philadelphia and London, one of the founders of the Fels Naptha Soap Company, but what is far more important, the founder of a new idea in philanthr3py...
...To him, an American, is largely due the organization of the land reformers in Great Britain and the concentration of the forces of social reform upon the taxation of land values, an issue which has precipitated the fiercest fight that Great Britain has seen since the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846...
...Joseph Fels is really trying to make poverty as unnecessary as yellow fever, the small-pox or the cholera...
...It has given us many men who have bequeathed their fortunes to some generous charity...
...It is a sign of the changing social order when men will abandon the traditions of their class and give their time and their fortune for the discovery and the abolition of the causes which lie back of the present unequal distribution of wealth...
...And also because he wants the Independent Labor Party to stand for the taxation of land values, which is the name the English have adopted for the Single Tax...
...He has guaranteed $5,000 a year to the countries of Canada, New Zealand, New South Wales, Switzerland and Denmark...
...He has offered to make it five times that sum if a like amount is raised in this country by others...
...He is not even attempting to relieve the wreckage of modern industry, which the mill and the factory, the city and the slum, are casting upon the shores of society...
...He has also supported the suffragette movement, as well as a dozen other agitations...
...My neighbor at the table informed me that the speaker was giving his fortune without stint or limit...
...There are unlimited resources calling upon labor to develop them...
...But he affixed one condition...
...It was incredible to most of his hearers...
...Yet the man meant it...
...In addition to this, 200,000,000 acres of America are in the hands of less than 50,000 persons and corporations...
...Land Monopoly the Cause of Poverty WHAT are the motives of this man...
...For the same reason that Tolstoy is dedicating the last years of his life to the land question in Russia...
...Yet in many ways it is the most expensive...
...The idea was startling to all...
...A Millionaire Agitator THERE is something novel in a millionaire agitator...
...It is merely made less obvious...
...It would home 20,000,000 people in comfort...
...It is constantly increasing in amount, due to the growth of population...
...He did not suggest that the land should bt held in common, but only the spec ulative increase in value, the "un earned increment" which should come into existence by the building of the New Zion...
...It is one of the last places on earth to expect to find such a meeting...
...Like hiss people, he is a cosmopolite...
...the idea that poverty can be cured...
...From what I heard in England, I think it is not too much to say that the land taxes in the British budget, over which the Tory dukes and the House of Lords are so furiously fuming, are largely the result of the tireless energy and the financial aid which has been given by Joseph Fels to the various organizations which united in forcing that question upon the liberal party...
...He has done the same thing in the United States...
...He told his hearers he was a monopolist...
...The land rent alone of our cities, amounts to approximately $250 a year for every family of five...
...A man at my elbow suggested that he had often wondered what was the mission of the modern Jew...
...At the close of the meeting, the American business man I had heard in New York, arose to speak...
...It was held in Guild hall, the beautiful old Gothic assembly hall of the merchant guilds, which have ruled the city corporation of London for ten centuries...
...He has organized meetings of the unemployed...
...The Old Order Changeth" JOSEPH FELS, millionaire soap manufacturer, has offered $25,000 a year for five years as the nucleus of a fund for the propagation of the Single Tax in America...
...He offered Israel Zangwill up to one-half his fortune for the colonization of the Jewish people in Palestine...
...Joseph Fels has backed the Independent Labor party in Great Britain...
...Here the Lord Mayor's banquet is held, one of the state shows of London...
...He has promoted the Vacant Land Cultivation Society in England...
...But it is appropriated by the individuals who happen to own it...
...These resources opened up to use through taxation would give employment to many times our present population...
...But the condition was not a severe one...
...But he is building no hospitals, asylums, or libraries...
...But they are held by speculators and monopolists...
...Why is a millionaire manufacturer interested in the land question and the Single Tax, in every quarter of the globe...
...And now he knew...
Vol. 1 • January 1910 • No. 52
