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? ...
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. (11.)
Even were it true that the common opinion of mankind
has sanctioned private property in land, this would no
more prove its justice than the once universal practice
of the known world would have proved the justice of
slavery.
But it is not true. Examination will show that
wherever we can trace them the first perceptions of
mankind have always recognized the equality of right to
land, and that when individual possession became
necessary to secure the right of ownership in things
produced by labor some method of securing equality,
sufficient in the existing state of social development,
was adopted. Thus, among some peoples, land used for
cultivation was periodically divided, land used for
pasturage and wood being held in common. Among others,
every family was permitted to hold what land it needed
for a dwelling and for cultivation, but the moment that
such use and cultivation stopped any one else could step
in and take it on like tenure. Of the same nature were
the land laws of the Mosaic code. The land, first fairly
divided among the people, was made inalienable by the
provision of the jubilee, under which, if sold, it
reverted every fiftieth year to the children of its
original possessors.
Private property in land as we know it, the attaching
to land of the same right of ownership that justly
attaches to the products of labor, has never grown up
anywhere save by usurpation or force. Like slavery, it is
the result of war. It comes to us of the modern world
from your ancestors, the Romans, whose civilization it
corrupted and whose empire it destroyed.
It made with the freer spirit of the northern peoples
the combination of the feudal system, in which, though
subordination was substituted for equality, there was
still a rough recognition of the principle of common
rights in land. A fief was a trust, and to enjoyment was
annexed some obligation. The sovereign, the
representative of the whole people, was the only owner of
land. Of him, immediately or mediately, held tenants,
whose possession involved duties or payments, which,
though rudely and imperfectly, embodied the idea that we
would carry out in the single tax, of taking land values
for public uses. The crown lands maintained the sovereign
and the civil list; the church lands defrayed the cost of
public worship and instruction, of the relief of the
sick, the destitute and the wayworn; while the military
tenures provided for public defense and bore the costs of
war. A fourth and very large portion of the land remained
in common, the people of the neighborhood being free to
pasture it, cut wood on it, or put it to other common
uses.
In this partial yet substantial recognition of common
rights to land is to be found the reason why, in a time
when the industrial arts were rude, wars frequent, and
the great discoveries and inventions of our time
unthought of, the condition of the laborer was devoid of
that grinding poverty which despite our marvelous
advances now exists. Speaking of England, the highest
authority on such subjects, the late Professor Therold
Rogers, declares that in the thirteenth century there was
no class so poor, so helpless, so pressed and degraded as
are millions of Englishmen in our boasted nineteenth
century; and that, save in times of actual famine, there
was no laborer so poor as to fear that his wife and
children might come to want even were he taken from them.
Dark and rude in many respects as they were, these were
the times when the cathedrals and churches and religious
houses whose ruins yet excite our admiration were built;
the times when England had no national debt, no poor law,
no standing army, no hereditary paupers, no thousands and
thousands of human beings rising in the morning without
knowing where they might lay their heads at night.
With the decay of the feudal system, the system of
private property in land that had destroyed Rome was
extended. As to England, it may briefly be said that the
crown lands were for the most part given away to
favorites; that the church lands were parceled among his
courtiers by Henry VIII., and in Scotland grasped by the
nobles; that the military dues were finally remitted in
the seventeenth century, and taxation on consumption
substituted; and that by a process beginning with the
Tudors and extending to our own time all but a mere
fraction of the commons were inclosed by the greater
landowners; while the same private ownership of land was
extended over Ireland and the Scottish Highlands, partly
by the sword and partly by bribery of the chiefs. Even
the military dues, had they been commuted, not remitted,
would today have more than sufficed to pay all public
expenses without one penny of other taxation.
Of the New World, whose institutions but continue
those of Europe, it is only necessary to say that to the
parceling out of land in great tracts is due the
backwardness and turbulence of Spanish America; that to
the large plantations of the Southern States of the Union
was due the persistence of slavery there, and that the
more northern settlements showed the earlier English
feeling, land being fairly well divided and the attempts
to establish manorial estates coming to little or
nothing. In this lies the secret of the more vigorous
growth of the Northern States. But the idea that land was
to be treated as private property had been thoroughly
established in English thought before the colonial period
ended, and it has been so treated by the United States
and by the several States. And though land was at first
sold cheaply, and then given to actual settlers, it was
also sold in large quantities to speculators, given away
in great tracts for railroads and other purposes, until
now the public domain of the United States, which a
generation ago seemed illimitable, has practically gone.
And this, as the experience of other countries shows, is
the natural result in a growing community of making land
private property. When the possession of land means the
gain of unearned wealth, the strong and unscrupulous will
secure it. But when, as we propose, economic rent, the
“unearned increment of wealth,” is taken by
the state for the use of the community, then land will
pass into the hands of users and remain there, since no
matter how great its value, its possession will be
profitable only to users.
As to private property in land having conduced to the
peace and tranquillity of human life, it is not necessary
more than to allude to the notorious fact that the
struggle for land has been the prolific source of wars
and of lawsuits, while it is the poverty engendered by
private property in land that makes the prison and the
workhouse the unfailing attributes of what we call
Christian civilization.
Your Holiness intimates that the Divine Law gives its
sanction to the private ownership of land, quoting from
Deuteronomy, “Thou shalt not covet thy
neighbor’s wife, nor his house, nor his field, nor
his man-servant, nor his maid-servant, nor his ox, nor
his ass, nor anything which is his.”
If, as your Holiness conveys, this inclusion of the
words, “nor his field,” is to be taken as
sanctioning private property in land as it exists today,
then, but with far greater force, must the words,
“his man-servant, nor his maid-servant,” be
taken to sanction chattel slavery; for it is evident from
other provisions of the same code that these terms
referred both to bondsmen for a term of years and to
perpetual slaves. But the word “field”
involves the idea of use and improvement, to which the
right of possession and ownership does attach without
recognition of property in the land itself. And that this
reference to the “field” is not a sanction of
private property in land as it exists today is proved by
the fact that the Mosaic code expressly denied such
unqualified ownership in land, and with the declaration,
“the land also shall not be sold forever, because
it is mine, and you are strangers and sojourners with
me,” provided for its reversion every fiftieth
year; thus, in a way adapted to the primitive industrial
conditions of the time, securing to all of the chosen
people a foothold in the soil.
Nowhere in fact throughout the Scriptures can the
slightest justification be found for the attaching to
land of the same right of property that justly attaches
to the things produced by labor. Everywhere is it treated
as the free bounty of God, “the land which the Lord
thy God giveth thee.” ...
7. That the private ownership of land
stimulates industry, increases wealth, and attaches men
to the soil and to their country. (51.)
The idea, as expressed by Arthur Young, that
“the magic of property turns barren sands to
gold” springs from the confusion of ownership with
possession, of which I have before spoken, that
attributes to private property in land what is due to
security of the products of labor. It is needless for me
again to point out that the change we propose, the
taxation for public uses of land values, or economic
rent, and the abolition of other taxes, would give to the
user of land far greater security for the fruits of his
labor than the present system and far greater permanence
of possession. Nor is it necessary further to show how it
would give homes to those who are now homeless and bind
men to their country. For under it every one who wanted a
piece of land for a home or for productive use could get
it without purchase price and hold it even without tax,
since the tax we propose would not fall on all land, nor
even on all land in use, but only on land better than the
poorest land in use, and is in reality not a tax at all,
but merely a return to the state for the use of a
valuable privilege. And even those who from circumstances
or occupation did not wish to make permanent use of land
would still have an equal interest with all others in the
land of their country and in the general prosperity.
But I should like your Holiness to consider how
utterly unnatural is the condition of the masses in the
richest and most progressive of Christian countries; how
large bodies of them live in habitations in which a rich
man would not ask his dog to dwell; how the great
majority have no homes from which they are not liable on
the slightest misfortune to be evicted; how numbers have
no homes at all, but must seek what shelter chance or
charity offers. I should like to ask your Holiness to
consider how the great majority of men in such countries
have no interest whatever in what they are taught to call
their native land, for which they are told that on
occasions it is their duty to fight or to die. What
right, for instance, have the majority of your countrymen
in the land of their birth? Can they live in Italy
outside of a prison or a poorhouse except as they buy the
privilege from some of the exclusive owners of Italy?
Cannot an Englishman, an American, an Arab or a Japanese
do as much? May not what was said centuries ago by
Tiberius Gracchus be said today: “Men of Rome! you
are called the lords of the world, yet have no right to a
square foot of its soil! The wild beasts have their dens,
but the soldiers of Italy have only water and
air!”
What is true of Italy is true of the civilized world
— is becoming increasingly true. It is the
inevitable effect as civilization progresses of private
property in land.
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