Your use, in so many passages of your Encyclical, of
the inclusive term “property” or
“private” property, of which in morals
nothing can be either affirmed or denied, makes your
meaning, if we take isolated sentences, in many places
ambiguous. But reading it as a whole, there can be no
doubt of your intention that private property in land
shall be understood when you speak merely of private
property. With this interpretation, I find that the
reasons you urge for private property in land are eight.
Let us consider them in order of presentation. You
urge:
1. That what is bought with rightful property is
rightful property. (RN, paragraph 5) ...
2. That private property in land proceeds from
man’s gift of reason. (RN, paragraphs 6-7.)
...
3. That private property in land deprives no one of the
use of land. (RN, paragraph 8.) ...
4. That Industry expended on land gives ownership in the
land itself. (RN, paragraphs 9-10.) ...
5. That private property in land has the support of the
common opinion of mankind, and has conduced to peace and
tranquillity, and that it is sanctioned by Divine Law.
(RN, paragraph 11.) ...
6. That fathers should provide for their children and
that private property in land is necessary to enable them
to do so. (RN, paragraphs 14-17.) ...
7. That the private ownership of land stimulates
industry, increases wealth, and attaches men to the soil
and to their country. (RN, paragraph 51.) ...
8. That the right to possess private property in land is
from nature, not from man; that the state has no right to
abolish it, and that to take the value of landownership
in taxation would be unjust and cruel to the private
owner. (RN, paragraph 51.) ...
3. That private property in land deprives no
one of the use of land. (8.)
Your own statement that land is the inexhaustible
storehouse that God owes to man must have aroused in your
Holiness’s mind an uneasy questioning of its
appropriation as private property, for, as though to
reassure yourself, you proceed to argue that its
ownership by some will not injure others. You say in
substance, that even though divided among private owners
the earth does not cease to minister to the needs of all,
since those who do not possess the soil can by selling
their labor obtain in payment the produce of the
land.
Suppose that to your Holiness as a judge of morals one
should put this case of conscience:
I am one of several children to whom our father
left a field abundant for our support. As he assigned
no part of it to any one of us in particular, leaving
the limits of our separate possession to be fixed by
ourselves, I being the eldest took the whole field in
exclusive ownership. But in doing so I have not
deprived my brothers of their support from it, for I
have let them work for me on it, paying them from the
produce as much wages as I would have had to pay
strangers. Is there any reason why my conscience should
not be clear?
What would be your answer? Would you not tell him that
he was in mortal sin, and that his excuse added to his
guilt? Would you not call on him to make restitution and
to do penance?
Or, suppose that as a temporal prince your Holiness
were ruler of a rainless land, such as Egypt, where there
were no springs or brooks, their want being supplied by a
bountiful river like the Nile. Supposing that having sent
a number of your subjects to make fruitful this land,
bidding them do justly and prosper, you were told that
some of them had set up a claim of ownership in the
river, refusing the others a drop of water, except as
they bought it of them; and that thus they had become
rich without work, while the others, though working hard,
were so impoverished by paying for water as to be hardly
able to exist?
Would not your indignation wax hot when this was
told?
Suppose that then the river-owners should send to you
and thus excuse their action:
The river, though divided among private owners,
ceases not thereby to minister to the needs of all, for
there is no one who drinks who does not drink of the
water of the river. Those who do not possess the water
of the river contribute their labor to get it; so that
it may be truly said that all water is supplied either
from one’s own river, or from some laborious
industry which is paid for either in the water, or in
that which is exchanged for the water.
Would the indignation of your Holiness be abated?
Would it not wax fiercer yet for the insult to your
intelligence of this excuse?
I do not need more formally to show your Holiness that
between utterly depriving a man of God’s gifts and
depriving him of God’s gifts unless he will buy
them, is merely the difference between the robber who
leaves his victim to die and the robber who puts him to
ransom. But I would like to point out how your statement
that “the earth, though divided among private
owners, ceases not thereby to minister to the needs of
all” overlooks the largest facts.
From your palace of the Vatican the eye may rest on
the expanse of the Campagna, where the pious toil of
religious congregations and the efforts of the state are
only now beginning to make it possible for men to live.
Once that expanse was tilled by thriving husbandmen and
dotted with smiling hamlets. What for centuries has
condemned it to desertion? History tells us. It was
private property in land; the growth of the great estates
of which Pliny saw that ancient Italy was perishing; the
cause that, by bringing failure to the crop of men, let
in the Goths and Vandals, gave Roman Britain to the
worship of Odin and Thor, and in what were once the rich
and populous provinces of the East shivered the thinned
ranks and palsied arms of the legions on the simitars of
Mohammedan hordes, and in the sepulcher of our Lord and
in the Church of St. Sophia trampled the cross to rear
the crescent!
If you will go to Scotland, you may see great tracts
that under the Gaelic tenure, which recognized the right
of each to a foothold in the soil, bred sturdy men, but
that now, under the recognition of private property in
land, are given up to wild animals. If you go to Ireland,
your Bishops will show you, on lands where now only
beasts graze, the traces of hamlets that, when they were
young priests, were filled with honest, kindly, religious
people.*
* Let any one who wishes visit this diocese and see
with his own eyes the vast and boundless extent of the
fairest land in Europe that has been ruthlessly
depopulated since the commencement of the present
century, and which is now abandoned to a loneliness and
solitude more depressing than that of the prairie or
the wilderness. Thus has this land system actually
exercised the power of life and death on a vast scale,
for which there is no parallel even in the dark records
of slavery. — Bishop Nulty’s Letter to the
Clergy and Laity of the Diocese of Meath.
If you will come to the United States, you
will find in a land wide enough and rich enough to
support in comfort the whole population of Europe, the
growth of a sentiment that looks with evil eye on
immigration, because the artificial scarcity that results
from private property in land makes it seem as if there
is not room enough and work enough for those already
here.
Or go to the Antipodes, and in Australia, as in
England, you may see that private property in land is
operating to leave the land barren and to crowd the bulk
of the population into great cities. Go wherever you
please where the forces loosed by modern invention are
beginning to be felt and you may see that private
property in land is the curse, denounced by the prophet,
that prompts men to lay field to field till they
“alone dwell in the midst of the earth.
To the mere materialist this is sin and shame. Shall
we to whom this world is God’s world — we who
hold that man is called to this life only as a prelude to
a higher life — shall we defend it? ...
But worse perhaps than all else is the way in which
this substituting of vague injunctions to charity for the
clear-cut demands of justice opens an easy means for the
professed teachers of the Christian religion of all
branches and communions to placate Mammon while
persuading themselves that they are serving God. Had the
English clergy not subordinated the teaching of justice
to the teaching of charity — to go no further in
illustrating a principle of which the whole history of
Christendom from Constantine’s time to our own is
witness — the Tudor tyranny would never have
arisen, and the separation of the church been averted;
had the clergy of France never substituted charity for
justice, the monstrous iniquities of the ancient
régime would never have brought the horrors of the
Great Revolution; and in my own country had those who
should have preached justice not satisfied themselves
with preaching kindness, chattel slavery could never have
demanded the holocaust of our civil war.
No, your Holiness; as faith without works is dead, as
men cannot give to God his due while denying to their
fellows the rights be gave them, so charity unsupported
by justice can do nothing to solve the problem of the
existing condition of labor. Though the rich were to
“bestow all their goods to feed the poor and give
their bodies to be burned,” poverty would continue
while property in land continues.
Take the case of the rich man today who is honestly
desirous of devoting his wealth to the improvement of the
condition of labor. What can he do?
- Bestow his wealth on those who need it? He may help
some who deserve it, but will not improve general
conditions. And against the good he may do will be the
danger of doing harm.
- Build churches? Under the shadow of churches
poverty festers and the vice that is born of it
breeds.
- Build schools and colleges? Save as it may lead men
to see the iniquity of private property in land,
increased education can effect nothing for mere
laborers, for as education is diffused the wages of
education sink.
- Establish hospitals? Why, already it seems to
laborers that there are too many seeking work, and to
save and prolong life is to add to the pressure.
- Build model tenements? Unless he cheapens
house accommodations he but drives further the class he
would benefit, and as he cheapens house accommodations
he brings more to seek employment and cheapens
wages.
- Institute laboratories, scientific schools,
workshops for physical experiments? He but stimulates
invention and discovery, the very forces that, acting
on a society based on private property in land, are
crushing labor as between the upper and the nether
millstone.
- Promote emigration from places where wages
are low to places where they are somewhat higher? If he
does, even those whom he at first helps to emigrate
will soon turn on him to demand that such emigration
shall be stopped as reducing their wages.
- Give away what land he may have, or refuse to take
rent for it, or let it at lower rents than the market
price? He will simply make new landowners or partial
landowners; he may make some individuals the richer,
but he will do nothing to improve the general condition
of labor.
- Or, bethinking himself of those public-spirited
citizens of classic times who spent great sums in
improving their native cities, shall he try to beautify
the city of his birth or adoption? Let him widen and
straighten narrow and crooked streets, let him build
parks and erect fountains, let him open tramways and
bring in railroads, or in any way make beautiful and
attractive his chosen city, and what will be the
result? Must it not be that those who appropriate
God’s bounty will take his also? Will it not be
that the value of land will go up, and that the net
result of his benefactions will be an increase of rents
and a bounty to landowners? Why, even the mere
announcement that he is going to do such things will
start speculation and send up the value of land by
leaps and bounds.
What, then, can the rich man do to improve the
condition of labor?
He can do nothing at all except to use his strength
for the abolition of the great primary wrong that robs
men of their birthright. The justice of God laughs at the
attempts of men to substitute anything else for it. ...
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