of progress had made possible a higher wave and each civilization passed the torch to a greater civilization," it was never the old civilization that built in this way on the foundations of its past but a "fresh race coming from a lower level." One advance did not lead smoothly and continuously to the next. "Over and over again, art has declined, learning sunk, power waned, population become sparse, until the people who had built great temples and mighty cities, turned rivers and pierced mountains, cultivated the earth like a garden and introduced the utmost refinement into the minute affairs of life ... lost even the memory of what their ancestors had done, and regarded the surviving fragments of their grandeur as the work of ... the mighty race before the flood."

When civilizations died, much "hard won progress" died with them; only a small part of it was transmitted to their conquerors. The earth was "the tomb of the dead empires, no less than of dead men." Growth and decay were not merely the general rule but the "universal rule. " Any theory of history therefore had to account for "retrogression as well as for progression," and George proceeded to argue that specialization and the accumulation of wealth steadily widened the gap between the rulers and the ruled; that advanced civilizations accordingly had to devote more and more of their resources to the maintenance of an idle ruling class; that they finally collapsed, top-heavy, under their own weight; and that inequality and mass poverty, in short—the inevitable accompaniment of civilization, as George maintained in the famous title of his treatise, which called attention to the organic unity of poverty and progress— furnished the key that unlocked the "law" of advance and decline.

Naive and unsophisticated? Progress and Poverty was "ahistorical," it seems to me, only in its last-minute assurance that reforms prompted by an understanding of the "law of human progress," available for the first time now that George himself had explained it, would save modern civilization from the fate of its predecessors. In his analysis of the central issue—whether industrial societies would find a way to arrest the growth of inequality—George showed himself far more astute than his critics, who minimized the difficulties in achieving a more equitable distribution of wealth. He did not subscribe either to the right-wing illusion that prosperity would somehow trickle down to the masses or to the left-wing illusion—common to Marxism, to Edward Bellamy's "Nationalism," and to the several varieties of social democratic reformism—that the concen

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