Or, to state the same thing in another way: Land being
necessary to life and labor, its owners will be able, in
return for permission to use it, to obtain from mere
laborers all that labor can produce, save enough to
enable such of them to maintain life as are wanted by the
landowners and their dependents.
Thus, where private property in land has
divided society into a landowning class and a landless
class, there is no possible invention or improvement,
whether it be industrial, social or moral, which, so long
as it does not affect the ownership of land, can prevent
poverty or relieve the general conditions of mere
laborers. For whether the effect of any
invention or improvement be to increase what
labor can produce or to decrease what is required to
support the laborer, it can, so soon as it becomes
general, result only in increasing the income of the
owners of land, without at all benefiting the mere
laborers. In no event can those possessed of the mere
ordinary power to labor, a power utterly useless without
the means necessary to labor, keep more of their earnings
than enough to enable them to live.
How true this is we may see in the facts of today. In
our own time invention and discovery have
enormously increased the productive power of labor, and
at the same time greatly reduced the cost of many things
necessary to the support of the laborer. Have these
improvements anywhere raised the earnings of the mere
laborer? Have not their benefits mainly gone to the
owners of land — enormously increased land
values?
I say mainly, for some part of the benefit has gone to
the cost of monstrous standing armies and warlike
preparations; to the payment of interest on great public
debts; and, largely disguised as interest on fictitious
capital, to the owners of monopolies other than that of
land. But improvements that would do away with these
wastes would not benefit labor; they would simply
increase the profits of landowners. Were standing armies
and all their incidents abolished, were all monopolies
other than that of land done away with, were governments
to become models of economy, were the profits of
speculators, of middlemen, of all sorts of exchangers
saved, were every one to become so strictly honest that
no policemen, no courts, no prisons, no precautions
against dishonesty would be needed — the result
would not differ from that which has followed the
increase of productive power.
Nay, would not these very blessings bring starvation
to many of those who now manage to live? Is it not true
that if there were proposed today, what all Christian men
ought to pray for, the complete disbandment of all the
armies of Europe, the greatest fears would be aroused for
the consequences of throwing on the labor-market so many
unemployed laborers?
The explanation of this and of similar paradoxes that
in our time perplex on every side may be easily seen.
The effect of all inventions and improvements
that increase productive power, that save waste and
economize effort, is to lessen the labor required for a
given result, and thus to save labor, so that we speak of
them as labor-saving inventions or improvements.
Now, in a natural state of society where the rights of
all to the use of the earth are acknowledged,
labor-saving improvements might go to the very utmost
that can be imagined without lessening the demand for
men, since in such natural conditions the demand for men
lies in their own enjoyment of life and the strong
instincts that the Creator has implanted in the human
breast. But in that unnatural state of society where the
masses of men are disinherited of all but the power to
labor when opportunity to labor is given them by others,
there the demand for them becomes simply the demand for
their services by those who hold this opportunity, and
man himself becomes a commodity. Hence, although the
natural effect of labor-saving improvement is to increase
wages, yet in the unnatural condition which private
ownership of the land begets, the effect, even of such
moral improvements as the disbandment of armies and the
saving of the labor that vice entails, is, by lessening
the commercial demand, to lower wages and reduce mere
laborers to starvation or pauperism. If labor-saving
inventions and improvements could be carried to the very
abolition of the necessity for labor, what would be the
result? Would it not be that landowners could then get
all the wealth that the land was capable of producing,
and would have no need at all for laborers, who must then
either starve or live as pensioners on the bounty of the
landowners?
Thus, so long as private property in land continues
— so long as some men are treated as owners of the
earth and other men can live on it only by their
sufferance — human wisdom can devise no means by
which the evils of our present condition may be avoided.
...
See how fully and how beautifully Christ’s life
on earth illustrated this law. Entering our earthly life
in the weakness of infancy, as it is appointed that all
should enter it, he lovingly took what in the natural
order is lovingly rendered, the sustenance, secured by
labor, that one generation owes to its immediate
successors. Arrived at maturity, he earned his own
subsistence by that common labor in which the majority of
men must and do earn it. Then passing to a higher —
to the very highest — sphere of labor, he earned
his subsistence by the teaching of moral and spiritual
truths, receiving its material wages in the
love-offerings of grateful hearers, and not refusing the
costly spikenard with which Mary anointed his feet. So,
when he chose his disciples, he did not go to landowners
or other monopolists who live on the labor of others, but
to common laboring-men. And when he called them to a
higher sphere of labor and sent them out to teach moral
and spiritual truths, he told them to take, without
condescension on the one hand or sense of degradation on
the other, the loving return for such labor, saying to
them that “the laborer is worthy of his
hire,” thus showing, what we hold, that all labor
does not consist in what is called manual labor, but that
whoever helps to add to the material, intellectual, moral
or spiritual fullness of life is also a laborer.*
* Nor should it be forgotten that the
investigator, the philosopher, the teacher, the artist,
the poet, the priest, though not engaged in the
production of wealth, are not only engaged in the
production of utilities and satisfactions to which the
production of wealth is only a means, but by acquiring
and diffusing knowledge, stimulating mental powers and
elevating the moral sense, may greatly increase the
ability to produce wealth. For man does not live by
bread alone. . . . He who by any exertion of mind or
body adds to the aggregate of enjoyable wealth,
increases the sum of human knowledge, or gives to human
life higher elevation or greater fullness — he
is, in the large meaning of the words, a
“producer,” a “working-man,” a
“laborer,” and is honestly earning honest
wages. But he who without doing aught to make mankind
richer, wiser, better, happier, lives on the toil of
others — he, no matter by what name of honor he
may be called, or how lustily the priests of Mammon may
swing their censers before him, is in the last analysis
but a beggar-man or a thief. — Protection or Free
Trade, pp. 74-75.
In assuming that laborers, even ordinary manual
laborers, are naturally poor, you ignore the fact that
labor is the producer of wealth, and attribute to the
natural law of the Creator an injustice that comes from
man’s impious violation of his benevolent
intention. In the rudest stage of the arts it is
possible, where justice prevails, for all well men to
earn a living. With the labor-saving appliances of our
time, it should be possible for all to earn much
more. And so, in saying that poverty is no
disgrace, you convey an unreasonable implication. For
poverty ought to be a disgrace, since in a condition of
social justice, it would, where unsought from religious
motives or unimposed by unavoidable misfortune, imply
recklessness or laziness. ... read the whole
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