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.) ...
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.” ...
Nowhere do these differences between wealth and
poverty coincide with differences in individual powers
and aptitudes. The real difference between rich
and poor is the difference between those who hold the
tollgates and those who pay toll; between
tribute-receivers and tribute-yielders.
In what way does nature justify such a difference? In
the numberless varieties of animated nature we find some
species that are evidently intended to live on other
species. But their relations are always marked by
unmistakable differences in size, shape or organs. To man
has been given dominion over all the other living things
that tenant the earth. But is not this mastery indicated
even in externals, so that no one can fail on sight to
distinguish between a man and one of the inferior
animals? Our American apologists for slavery used to
contend that the black skin and woolly hair of the negro
indicated the intent of nature that the black should
serve the white; but the difference that you assume to be
natural is between men of the same race. What
difference does nature show between such men as would
indicate her intent that one should live idly yet be
rich, and the other should work hard yet be
poor? If I could bring you from the United
States a man who has $200,000,000, and one who is glad to
work for a few dollars a week, and place them side by
side in your antechamber, would you be able to tell which
was which, even were you to call in the most skilled
anatomist? Is it not clear that God in no way
countenances or condones the division of rich and poor
that exists today, or in any way permits it, except as
having given them free will he permits men to choose
either good or evil, and to avoid heaven if they prefer
hell. For is it not clear that the division of
men into the classes rich and poor has invariably its
origin in force and fraud; invariably involves violation
of the moral law; and is really a division into those who
get the profits of robbery and those who are robbed;
those who hold in exclusive possession what God made for
all, and those who are deprived of his bounty?
Did not Christ in all his utterances and parables show
that the gross difference between rich and poor is
opposed to God’s law? Would he have condemned the
rich so strongly as he did, if the class distinction
between rich and poor did not involve injustice —
was not opposed to God’s intent? ... read the whole
letter
OR let him go to Edinburgh, the "modern Athens," of
which Scotsmen speak with pride, and in buildings from
whose roofs a bowman might strike the spires of twenty
churches he will find human beings living as he would not
keep his meanest dog. Let him toil up the stairs of one
of those monstrous buildings, let him enter one of those
"dark houses," let him close the door, and in the
blackness think what life must be in such a place. Then
let him try the reduction to iniquity. And if he go to
that good charity (but, alas! how futile is Charity
without Justice!) where little children are kept while
their mothers are at work, and children are fed who would
otherwise go hungry, he may see infants whose limbs are
shrunken from want of nourishment. Perhaps they may tell
him, as they told me, of that little girl, barefooted,
ragged, and hungry, who, when they gave her bread, raised
her eyes and clasped her hands, and thanked our Father in
Heaven for His bounty to her. They who told me that never
dreamed, I think, of its terrible meaning. But I ask the
Duke of Argyll, did that little child, thankful for that
poor dole, get what our Father provided for her? Is He so
niggard? If not, what is it, who is it, that stands,
between such children and our Father's bounty? If it be
an institution, is it not our duty to God and to our
neighbor to rest not till we destroy it? If it be a man,
were it not better for him that a millstone were hanged
about his neck and he were cast into the depths of the
sea? — The Reduction to Iniquity (a reply to the
Duke of Argyll), The Nineteenth Century, July, 1884
WE are so accustomed to poverty that even in the most
advanced countries we regard it as the natural lot of the
great masses of the people; that we take it as a matter
of course that even in our highest civilization large
classes should want the necessaries of healthful life,
and the vast majority should only get a poor and pinched
living by the hardest toil. There are professors of
political economy who teach that this condition of things
is the result of social laws of which it is idle to
complain! There are ministers of religion who preach that
this is the condition which an all-wise, all-powerful
Creator intended for His children! If an architect were
to build a theater so that not more than one-tenth of the
audience could see and hear, we should call him a bungler
and a botcher. If a man were to give a feast and provide
so little food that nine-tenths of his guests must go
away hungry, we should call him a fool, or worse. Yet so
accustomed are we to poverty, that even the preachers of
what passes for Christianity tell us that the great
Architect of the Universe, to whose infinite skill all
nature testifies, has made such a botch job of this world
that the vast majority of the human creatures whom He has
called into it are condemned by the conditions he has
imposed to want, suffering, and brutalizing toil that
gives no opportunity for the development of mental powers
— must pass their lives in a hard struggle to
merely live! — Social Problems ... go to "Gems from
George"