Politics & Power Quote by Alfred Russel Wallace

A scientist invoking Henry George is doing more than borrowing a slogan; Wallace is smuggling a theory of causation into moral outrage. The line turns “social evil” into a symptom, not a mystery. Poverty, slums, crime, public health breakdowns - these aren’t framed as unfortunate byproducts of modern life or personal failure. They’re presented as downstream effects of “political wrong,” the kind embedded in laws, property regimes, and state power. That’s an unusually blunt move for someone best known for natural selection: he’s applying systems thinking to society, insisting that the environment isn’t just ecological, it’s legislative.

The rhetorical trick is the phrase “at the back.” It implies the hidden machinery behind what polite society prefers to treat as inevitable or natural. Wallace isn’t asking for more charity or better morals; he’s pointing a finger at the rulebook. By aligning with George - famous for arguing that private land monopoly and rent extraction distort everything - Wallace signals a specific diagnosis: inequality is engineered. “Great” repeats twice, escalating scale and blame. Big suffering requires big culpability, and that culpability lives where decisions get formalized.

Context matters: late Victorian Britain is a laboratory of industrial wealth and mass precarity, with reform debates over land, labor, and suffrage. Wallace, often read as an empiricist, here speaks like a dissident. The subtext is a rebuke to reformers who treat social problems as technical glitches. He’s saying the evidence already points to the source, and it’s political - which means it can be changed, and that someone is benefiting from not changing it.