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.)
1. That what is bought with rightful
property is rightful property. (5.)
Clearly, purchase and sale cannot give, but can only
transfer ownership. Property that in itself has no moral
sanction does not obtain moral sanction by passing from
seller to buyer.
If right reason does not make the slave the property
of the slave-hunter it does not make him the property of
the slave-buyer. Yet your reasoning as to private
property in land would as well justify property in
slaves. To show this it is only needful to change in your
argument the word land to the word slave. It would then
read:
It is surely undeniable that, when a man engages in
remunerative labor, the very reason and motive of his
work is to obtain property, and to hold it as his own
private possession.
If one man hires out to another his strength or his
industry, he does this for the purpose of receiving in
return what is necessary for food and living; he thereby
expressly proposes to acquire a full and legal right, not
only to the remuneration, but also to the disposal of
that remuneration as he pleases.
Thus, if he lives sparingly, saves money, and invests
his savings, for greater security, in a slave, the slave
in such a case is only his wages in another form; and
consequently, a working-man’s slave thus purchased
should be as completely at his own disposal as the wages
he receives for his labor.
Nor in turning your argument for private property in
land into an argument for private property in men am I
doing a new thing. In my own country, in my own time,
this very argument, that purchase gave ownership, was the
common defense of slavery. It was made by statesmen, by
jurists, by clergymen, by bishops; it was accepted over
the whole country by the great mass of the people. By it
was justified the separation of wives from husbands, of
children from parents, the compelling of labor, the
appropriation of its fruits, the buying and selling of
Christians by Christians. In language almost identical
with yours it was asked, “Here is a poor man who
has worked hard, lived sparingly, and invested his
savings in a few slaves. Would you rob him of his
earnings by liberating those slaves?” Or it was
said: “Here is a poor widow; all her husband has
been able to leave her is a few negroes, the earnings of
his hard toil. Would you rob the widow and the orphan by
freeing these negroes?” And because of this
perversion of reason, this confounding of unjust property
rights with just property rights, this acceptance of
man’s law as though it were God’s law, there
came on our nation a judgment of fire and blood.
The error of our people in thinking that what in
itself was not rightfully property could become rightful
property by purchase and sale is the same error into
which your Holiness falls. It is not merely formally the
same; it is essentially the same. Private property in
land, no less than private property in slaves, is a
violation of the true rights of property. They are
different forms of the same robbery; twin devices by
which the perverted ingenuity of man has sought to enable
the strong and the cunning to escape God’s
requirement of labor by forcing it on others.
What difference does it make whether I merely own the
land on which another man must live or own the man
himself? Am I not in the one case as much his master as
in the other? Can I not compel him to work for me? Can I
not take to myself as much of the fruits of his labor; as
fully dictate his actions? Have I not over him the power
of life and death?
For to deprive a man of land is as certainly to kill
him as to deprive him of blood by opening his veins, or
of air by tightening a halter around his neck.
The essence of slavery is in empowering one man to
obtain the labor of another without recompense. Private
property in land does this as fully as chattel slavery.
The slave-owner must leave to the slave enough of his
earnings to enable him to live. Are there not in
so-called free countries great bodies of working-men who
get no more? How much more of the fruits of their toil do
the agricultural laborers of Italy and England get than
did the slaves of our Southern States? Did not private
property in land permit the landowner of Europe in ruder
times to demand the jus primae noctis? Does not
the same last outrage exist today in diffused form in the
immorality born of monstrous wealth on the one hand and
ghastly poverty on the other?
In what did the slavery of Russia consist but in
giving to the master land on which the serf was forced to
live? When an Ivan or a Catherine enriched their
favorites with the labor of others they did not give men,
they gave land. And when the appropriation of
land has gone so far that no free land remains to which
the landless man may turn, then without further violence
the more insidious form of labor robbery involved in
private property in land takes the place of chattel
slavery, because more economical and convenient. For
under it the slave does not have to be caught or held, or
to be fed when not needed. He comes of himself, begging
the privilege of serving, and when no longer wanted can
be discharged. The lash is unnecessary; hunger is as
efficacious. This is why the Norman conquerors
of England and the English conquerors of Ireland did not
divide up the people, but divided the land. This is why
European slave-ships took their cargoes to the New World,
not to Europe.
Slavery is not yet abolished. Though in all Christian
countries its ruder form has now gone, it still exists in
the heart of our civilization in more insidious form, and
is increasing. There is work to be done for the glory of
God and the liberty of man by other soldiers of the cross
than those warrior monks whom, with the blessing of your
Holiness, Cardinal Lavigerie is sending into the Sahara.
Yet, your Encyclical employs in defense of one form of
slavery the same fallacies that the apologists for
chattel slavery used in defense of the other!
The Arabs are not wanting in acumen. Your Encyclical
reaches far. What shall your warrior monks say, if when
at the muzzle of their rifles they demand of some Arab
slave-merchant his miserable caravan, he shall declare
that he bought them with his savings, and producing a
copy of your Encyclical, shall prove by your reasoning
that his slaves are consequently “only his wages in
another form,” and ask if they who bear your
blessing and own your authority propose to “deprive
him of the liberty of disposing of his wages and thus of
all hope and possibility of increasing his stock and
bettering his condition in life”?
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