First edition. A perhaps ill-conceived attack on Herbert Spencer, considering that at the time, as the author freely admits, the British philosopher, ‘of all his contemporaries, [held] the foremost place in the intellectual world, and through a wider circle than any man living, and perhaps than any man of our century’. Immensely popular in his own right, George, the famous propagator of Georgism (in which all members of society would share the value of land) was naturally opposed to Spencer’s belief in the rights of private property. This criticism takes George from the very start of Spencer’s career with Social Statics (1850) right up to the contemporary time, with Justice (1892). The attack turns more personal when George goes after Spencer’s evolutionary theories, arguing that he is in fact not aligned to the ideas of that equally popular, transatlantic figure, Alfred Russell Wallace.