Darwin fallen among political economists.

OWARDS THE END of his life Charles Darwin received an enthusiastic recommendation that he read Henry George’s recently published book, Progress and Poverty. It came from the co-discoverer of the theory of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace, who had increasingly immersed himself in the writings of political economists. George’s spectacularly successful book proved to his and many other people’s satisfaction that private property in land was the underlying cause of the coincidence of progress and poverty. It is clear from Darwin’s response that, while he recognized that private landownership posed problems requiring solution, he could not share Wallace’s enthusiasm for political economy: “. . . I feel pretty sure that Mr George’s book will only make my mind worse confounded than it is at present.” 2 This was not a sign of late-life weariness. Seven years earlier Darwin had given a similar response to another devotee of the science, Karl Marx, when he found himself the embarrassed recipient of a copy of the second German edition of Das Kapital: “I thank you for the honour which you have done me by sending me your great work on